Snapes on a Plane!

This is the funniest picture I have seen recently.

Middlebury Shines

Endub had a great visit at Middlebury. The students were smart, engaged, witty, and cheerful. The college is rich and has wonderful resources. The classes were great -- she stayed to ask questions, and was answered well. The Admissions guy liked her humorous art. And the campus was Vermont-in-autumn gorgeous.

Application to follow.

Haverford Nixed

The Endub has made one decision: Haverford is not for her. It is a pretty place, she liked the classes she visited, and her host was very nice. However, the students she met were hard put to explain why they thought Haverford was great, or who it would be great for. The group went over to Bryn Mawr to watch a game and stayed for dinner. They praised Bryn Mawr food, Bryn Mawr dorms, and most of the students in her group were actually majoring at Bryn Mawr.

As a Swarthmorean, I have natural antipathies to "the other place." Nonetheless, I was prepared to like Haverford if she did. But she didn't.

On the Road with Endub

I am taking daughter #2 on a college trip this week. Dispatches from the road as internet connections permit. First stop: Haverford.

Privilege Exercise

Tonight we ran an exercise based on Peggy McIntosh's famous article "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack." We had about 100 Centre students in the gym, lined up should-to-shoulder and holding hands. Then we read a series of statements, such as "if you grew up in a house with more than 50 books, take a step forward," and "if you have ever thought that the police stopped or questioned you because of your race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, take a step back." After a few questions, most students were no longer close enough together to hold hands. After 50 questions, they were spread out across the gym. I was working with a very helpful student who had much experience with this kind of exercise through the National Conference for Community and Justice. We adapted some of the questions to the Centre environment.

When the students were spread out into clear strata, we divided them into four groups, based on where the natural breaks seemed to fall. The top and bottom group were a little smaller than the two middle groups. The four groups then went into different corners to talk about how the exercise felt. We then gathered them all into one large group to share experiences.

This was a fine exercise. The top group felt guilty, and surprised that they were the most privileged - but also grateful to their parents and grandparents. The bottom group felt somewhat good about the obstacles they had overcome. On the other hand, they were the most reluctant to speak in the larger group. When I pointed this out, one of the most forthright said that she had a half-conscious feeling that her insights were not as valid as the more privileged and at home.

One of the best insights of the night for me was that the top group got there not so much by how often they stepped forward, but by how rarely they stepped back.

Preoperational Egocentrism? You Be the Judge

My sister was chaperoning a field trip of kindergarteners. On the bus on the way back the boys were playing "I Spy," including this hilarious gem:

"I spy something green."
"Your sneaker?"
"No . . . "
"Your other sneaker?"
"Yes!"

Piaget says that from two to seven kids usually show "preoperational" forms of reasoning. One of the most childish logical lapses of little kids, from an adult perspective, is egocentrism - that is, the kid's belief that everyone sees things the same way the child does. I have seen film of a wonderful experiment in which two kids are looking at an identical array of oddly shaped objects, but they can't see one another. One child is then supposed to describe one of the objects, so the other one can pick out the identical object. An adult doing this experiment might say "I am looking at the red ball," which would be readily understood by another adult looking at an array that included one red ball. A little kid, on the other hand, is likely to say "I am looking at this one." The other child might reply "So am I!" - though each is looking at a different object, with no idea what the other means.

So, is the above exchange an example of preoperational egocentrism in kindergarten boys, or an ingeniously subtle way to play "I Spy?"

No Efficient Number of Divorces

Stevenson and Wolfers continue with their assessment of marriage and divorce up to the point where economists and marriage advocates part company. S & W allow that married people are happier, healthier, and richer, but withhold judgment whether marriage is cause or effect. They ask

even if we isolate factors that create more or less divorce, these insights would only yield policy recommendations if coupled with an understanding of whether we currently have an efficient number of divorces, too many, or too few.

The concept of an "efficient number of divorces" is distasteful, at least, to marriage advocates. Even if we allow that sometimes divorce is the least of the available evils, it is still an evil. In thinking about the efficient number of divorces, Stevenson and Wolfers raise the analogy with the "churn" in the labor market. However, leaving a job can be a matter of indifference to the worker, as well as to the analyst looking down from on high. Not so, I think, with leaving a marriage.

Marriage changes people more than any other voluntary institution. Marriage and divorce are not just arrangements for material advantage. Every marriage carries the hope of building up husband, wife, their children, even their whole lineage. Every divorce is a social loss because it dashes that hope. Economists don't count the social costs of dashed hopes for personal and social upbuilding. But we can.

U.S. Marriage Rate Lowest Ever -- But Still Above Europe

Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers have an interesting working paper on the "driving force" in marriage and divorce changes. Stevenson and Wolfers are the Wharton School professors who cleared up the puzzle about the erroneous Census Bureau report that most marriages don't reach their silver anniversary.

One finding that they put in stark relief is that the marriage rate in the United States is at the lowest point in recorded history. Indeed, the marriage rate peaked in 1972, and has been dropping ever since. Americans still couple at high rates, but many of them are cohabiting rather than marrying. Most cohabiters think they will marry -- but they don't.

On the other hand, "Americans marry, divorce, and remarry at rates higher than in most other countries with comparable income levels." Compared to Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden, Americans are more likely to marry and more likely to believe in marriage. For example, only 10% of Americans think marriage is an out-dated institution, versus a quarter of Britons and a third of the French.

Of course, they are facing a demographic crisis of falling birthrates, and we aren't.

National Center for Marriage Research

The Department of Health and Human Services has created the first federal marriage research center at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Sociology professors Wendy Manning and Susan Brown will direct the center. Manning and Brown already direct the Center for Family and Demographic Research at Bowling Green. They are each experts on cohabitation. This is a hopeful development. I am looking forward to their conferences and research reports beginning a year or two from now.

Census Error on Divorce, Part Two

Betsey Stevenson, the Wharton professor whose critique of the erroneous Census report on divorce I noted yesterday, has provided a helpful clarification of why every marriage cohort is wrong in the Census table. The original report made the provocative claim that most marriages made in the late '70s did not make their silver anniversary. Stevenson and her colleague Justin Wolfers pointed that, actually, most did make it. The Bureau had done their tally before 25 years had elapsed.

I noted that all cohorts showed an unexpected 5% leap in divorce from 1999 to 2004. Prof. Stevenson elaborated in a gracious response to my query:

The problem is that for every group there is a fraction (about 10%) who haven't had a chance to make it to the last anniversary assessed by the census. The 2004 survey was conducted from July to September 2004, and hence it is impossible for around one-in-ten of those surveyed to have reached the last assessed anniversary. For instance, a couple who married in October 1994 were counted as part of the 1990-94 marriage cohort, but even if they stayed together forever, they could not have reached their tenth anniversary by the survey date. Thus the percent in that cohort reaching the 10th anniversary was understated. This problem affects all of the numbers along the diagonal--these numbers reflect only the percent of couples in a group that have celebrated that anniversary. Those not "making it" can be divorced, dead, or simply still waiting for their anniversary to roll around.

Stevenson and Wolfers will be releasing a more thorough critique soon. I plan to report on it when it appears.

The Census Bureau is More Than a Little Wrong on Divorce

The Census Bureau recent released an alarming report that most marriages from the late '70s on did not make it to their 25th anniversary. More careful examination by Justin Wolpers and Betsey Stevenson of the Wharton School reveal an elementary error. The Bureau was including marriages made in the latter half of 1979, but counted their longevity from mid-2004 -- before 25 years had actually elapsed. When those last few marriages were included, most of the late '70s marriages -- 53% -- did indeed celebrate their silver anniversary.

There is some further wrong, though. It was not just the Baby Boomers who showed a high divorce rate. Every generation of marriages showed a sizable jump in divorces in the five years preceding 2004 over the five-year period just before that. For example, for men married between 1975 and 1979, 5.6% divorces in the five years between 1995 and 1999, yet the Census Bureau shows nearly twice as many, 10.1%, divorced between 1999 and 2004. The late '70s were a bad era for marriage, but the marriage cohorts around this one, from the early '60s to the late '80s, show nearly identical huge leaps.

It is possible that divorce became much more likely for everyone in the early '00s. What this looks like to me, though, is that the Census Bureau changed the way it measured some aspect of divorce, causing an apparent leap in the divorce rate, without a real change in the underlying facts. More as this story develops.

Bad Motivational Posters (But Funny)

From aGits.

7-Year Marriage Limit is a Political Stunt

Gabriele Pauli of the German Christian Social Union party has proposed that marriages expire after 7 years unless legally renewed. Officially, Pauli is running for leadership of the conservative Catholic party. She had no chance of being elected, even though she did help bring down the previous leader. The twice-divorced politician is prone to stunts with the adolescent ambition of "shaking things up." This is another stunt. This idea is like the proposal made by famous feminist sociologist Jesse Bernard, after her own divorce, that marriages be five-year renewal contracts. That didn't go anywhere either. The whole idea misses the point: marriage is the most transformative relationship that you can choose to enter just because it is permanent and total. And children need permanent parents, not adjunct grown-ups on temporary contracts.

FDA, Lacking All Sense of Proportion, Bars Foreign Sperm

The Food and Drug Administration has banned the importation of sperm from 30 countries where there were some cases of mad cow disease. Now the sperm banks are running dry. I am not so concerned about the sperm banks. I do think it is a bad idea to take away everyone's choices due to an infinitesimal risk to a few. This is the bad side of the nanny state. It would be reasonable to require sperm banks to inform their customers of the risk. I am sure their lawyers would want all customers to sign armor-clad waivers. But still, this is a risk that people could decide for themselves.

Longest Divorce Case Puts All the Kids in Therapy

Peter and Nancy Tauck are my nominees for today's "worst person in the world" (as seen on Countdown). At the end of their record-setting 86 day divorce trial, which cost $13 million to prosecute, Nancy had falsely charged Peter with sexually molesting their small children. The investigation of the sexual molestation charge so messed up the kids that they are now in therapy. Both parents have been ordered to Alcoholics Anonymous. Nancy is allowed only a ten-minute daily phone call with the kids, which will be monitored. And she only gets $33,333 a month in alimony.

The Democratic Center Beats the Netroots

David Brooks has a fine column today on why the Democratic candidates who appeal to the liberal professionals and their bloggers ultimately lose to more centrist candidates who appeal to the more numerous regular middle class. This year, that means Edwards and Obama will likely give way to Clinton.

I am a professional and a blogger. I have stickers for Edwards and Obama on my minivan. But I think it is a good thing that my party is likely to nominate a solid candidate, like Senator Clinton, who can actually appeal to the center and win the election. The primaries are by no means settled, and many things can happen between now and the decisive Kentucky primary next May (ok, I am probably dreaming on that last point). I like our whole team, and will support the nominee. The other sticker I have on my van is for General Wesley Clark, who I would still vote for as I did last time. Realistically, I would like to see Gen. Clark as Secretary of State.

The point is, though, that the center really does lead where it counts. At the Gruntled Center, that looks like a good thing.

Why Should God Bless America?

At a conservative Christian Value Voters conference a church choir sang "Why Should God Bless America?," a parody of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." The new version asks why God should bless us when we deny that he exists by banning public school prayer and legalizing abortion. The Values Voters received it with thunderous applause.

Steven Benen of the liberal Talking Points Memo (linked above) imagines that a liberal parody of "God Bless America" would draw the ire of conservatives for messing with an American classic.

There is, though, a liberal answer to "God Bless America" - not a parody, but an alternative vision of God's relation to the United States. This alternative, Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land," was originally titled "God Blessed America for Me."

I embrace both Irving Berlin's and Woody Guthrie's vision of what America owes God, and thank them for writing two of the three greatest hymns of our civil religion (the third being "America the Beautiful.")

My gripe with "Why Should God Bless America?" is that its theology is backwards. The Values Voters expect God to bless America if we would just choose to follow a few rules. This view of God is too small, too tit-for-tat, while their idea of human goodness is way too optimistic for this Calvinist. Irving Berlin, by contrast, is asking God to stand beside America and guide America because we are not capable, without providential assistance, of choosing the right path.

The Values Voters want God to sign a contract with America. The grand old hymn asks, in grateful supplication, for God's blessing and help.

World's Tallest Elvis Tribute Artist is Coming!

Here is small town excitement at its most sublime. An ad in our local paper, the Advocate-Messenger, proclaims "Attention ELVIS fans:" A local paint store is sponsoring a show to commemorate that important event in the civil religion, the anniversary of the King's death (30 years! Where did the time go?) In addition to featuring Paul Staley, World's Tallest Elvis Tribute Artist, the show features a special guest whose claim to fame is that he is the 2-Time Winner of the Elvisfest of the Bluegrass.

Only ten bucks. Such a deal.

40-somethings Are Still Married, Barely

The Census Bureau just came out with its scary report that most marriages contracted in the late '70s did not make it to their 25th anniversary. Mrs. G. and I, who married in the early '80s did, thank the Lord, but we know ours is not the universal experience. My age group, the 40-somethings, seems to be the tipping point. In 2004, among all men 40 - 49 years old, 52.8% were in their first marriage; among women of the same age, 49.7%. This averages out to just over half of all Americans in their 40s are in the first marriages. Odds are that it won't still be a majority in our 50s.

Summers Rejected Again

Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard, was hounded from office for suggesting that one of the reasons that women don't make up half of those at the top of science and engineering is that women don't make up half of those at the top of the math ability spectrum. Summers was invited to speak to the University of California regents recently. The faculty got up in arms, and got 150 signatures in a couple of days. Maureen Stanton, organizer of the petition drive, said "I was appalled that someone articulating that point of view would be invited by the regents," Stanton said.

This is why people despise political correctness. I think Summers is right. Even if you don't agree, the issue is an important empirical question, which can be addressed empirically. That is what universities are for. Perhaps the University of California regents could look into that. But no, they had no more spine than the Harvard trustees. They rescinded the invitation.

Marriage Beats Class, Eventually

George Vaillant has drawn some conclusions from his long-running study of aging men:

Among his most striking findings was that social class seemed to diminish in importance as the men grew older, while factors such as quality of marriage and coping mechanisms played more important roles in predicting happiness and success.

"American Girls" and Their Dads

Mrs. G. did all the work on this one.

As I wrote yesterday, Mattel has introduced a new doll in the American Girl line. Julie, from 1974, is the child of divorce. Each American Girl comes with books introducing her life and describing her distinctive adventures. What happens when we compare how Julie and the other girls relate to their fathers?

Amazon makes it easy to “look inside” the first few pages of books. In historical order, try these experiences.

---

Felicity Merriman pushed open the door to her father’s store and took a deep breath. She loved the smell of coffee beans and chocolate, of pine soap, spice tea, and apples. No place in the world smelled as good as her father’s store.

“Good day, Mistress Merriman!” said her father. He smiled and bowed.

Felicity grinned. Her father always pretended she was a fine lady customer when she came into his store. “Good day, Mr. Merriman,” she answered. She liked to pretend to.

---

Josefina shaded her eyes. Even from this far away, she could see Papa. He sat very straight and tall on his horse. He was talking to the workers in the cornfield near the stream. The rancho had belonged to Papa’s family for more than one hundred years. All those years, Papa’s family had cared for the animals and the land. It was not an easy life. Every one had to work hard. Some years there was plenty of rain so that the crops grew and the animals were healthy. Some years there was not enough rain. Then the soil was dry and the animals went thirsty. But through good time and bad the rancho went on. It provided everything Josefina and her family needed to live. It gave them food, clothing, and shelter. Josefina loved the rancho. It was her home. She believed that it was the most beautiful place in all of New Mexico and all of the world.

---

Addy Walker woke up late on a summer’s night to hear her parents whispering. She thought no more of their quiet voices than of the soft chirping of the crickets in the woods just beyond the little cabin. Often she awoke to her parents’ whispering. Addy liked the sound. It made her feel safe, knowing her mother and father were close by.

---

Papa’s black wool jacket flapped like a gull’s wings as he crossed the deck. “There’s a storm coming,” Papa said. “It could be dangerous. The coast is rocky here, and the wind is getting stronger.” Papa lifted Kirsten out of the coiled rope. Then he pulled Marta out too. “Come below where we’ll be safe,” he said.

---

“Jessie, did you know my mother and father?” Samantha asked.

Jessie spoke gently. “You know I didn’t, child. That accident in the boat happened when you were just five. You know I didn’t come to work for your grandmother till you were seven.”

Samantha had known that. Asking had really been wishing. She touched the locket pinned to her dress. Inside the small gold heart was a picture of her mother and father. She would have loved to hear Jessie talk about them. When Jessie told stories, she made everything sound like magic. Jessie would have made Samantha’s parents seem like a princess.

---

Sometimes, now that Dad was gone to the war, Molly would climb into the plaid chair and sniff it because that vanilla pipe smell made her feel so safe and happy, just as if Dad were home.

Molly remembered the fun they had at the table when Dad was home. He teased Jill and made her blush. He swapped jokes with Ricky and told riddles to Brad, Molly’s younger brother. And he always said, “Gosh and golly, olly Molly, what have you done today?” Suddenly everything Molly had done-whether it was winning a running race or using a multiplication bee—was interesting and important, wonderful or not so bad after all.

---

“Remember when we built that fort out of clay we dug up from the garden? And we dressed up our Liddle Kiddles in old time clothes.”

“I remember,” sighed Ivy. The room turned middle-of-the-night quiet. Julie and Ivy couldn’t look at teach other.

“I can’t believe you’re moving,” said Ivy, flashing her dark eyes at Julie.

It’s only a few miles away, across town,” said Julie. “It’s not like I’m moving to Mars.

“I won’t be able to blink lights at you from across the street anymore to say good night,” said Ivy.

“But we can call each other up,” Julie pointed out. “And you’ll see me on the weekends when I come visit my dad.” There was that lump again. She felt it every time she thought of being without Dad. She thought she’d gotten used to the idea of her parents being divorced, but now that she wouldn’t be living with Dad any more, suddenly it wasn’t just an idea. It was real.

---

So, for the first hundred years of the stories, girls start their stories by delighting in their fathers’ nearness. Then the one orphan is allowed to mourn, and the soldier’s daughter is allowed to pine. And then the child of divorce gets to protect her friend by hiding her grief out of sight.

Isn’t that an amazing triumph of individual liberation?

New From Mattel: Happy Divorce Girl

My girls had American Girl dolls -- Addy and Kirsten, respectively, for those who know and love the idea. American Girl was born just a couple of years before they were, and the first dolls were just the thing needful when they were ready for dolls. American Girl dolls are fully formed historical characters, with a whole backstory and books to fill in the historical narrative. One of the features that my wife and I, schooled in '70s feminism, most treasured was that each girl had some money of her own.

A few years ago Mattel bought American Girl. They did maintain the old characters, and developed them in coherent ways, but we worried that the American Girls would be Barbie-ized. My own kids aged out of dolls, so I have not kept up carefully. Lately, though, Mattel has brought out a new American Girl doll, Julie Albright, set in 1974. The crucial distinction that Julie has from previous dolls is that her parents are divorced. This is how Mattel describes her:

For Julie Albright, life after her parents’ divorce holds as many ups and downs as the hilly streets of San Francisco. Julie misses her old bedroom, her pet rabbit, her best friend, Ivy—and most of all, having her whole family together.
But Julie begins to see that change also brings new possibilities. By taking charge of her new life, she learns to believe in herself—and that love can hold a family together even when they live apart.

Ah, the "happy talk" divorce of the mid-1970s, when parents had to be free, and kids were expected to just suck it up. Divorce was not treated as a disaster that ended their childhood, but a change that brings new possibilities. You can buy Julie's school locker, complete with Brady Bunch poster (the happy blended family) and a "Hang in there, Baby" poster showing a kitten literally at the end of its rope.

Perhaps the later Julie books in the AG series can include Julie Torn Between Two Worlds and The Unexpected Legacy of Julie's Parents' Divorce When Julie Tries Dating.

"The Lives of Others" Not a Road to Damascus Moment

I commend to you the excellent new film, "The Lives of Others," by Florian Henckel von Donnsermarck. The central drama is the moral struggle within an East German secret policeman as he spies on a prominent playwright and his actress girlfriend. The policeman is a true believer in the East German state -- and the playwright is a hopeful socialist, "our only non-subversive writer who is read in the West," as another secret policeman describes him. The Stasi (State Security) man comes to see that his surveillance is just a tool of corruption and petty politics. The playwright, too, is driven to an act of covert rebellion against the police state. Their lives become deeply entangled. I'll not say more about the conclusion.

There is a lovely moment early on when a little boy asks the secret policeman if he is really a Stasi agent.
"Do you know what the Stasi is?"
"Yes. My dad says they are the bad men who put people in prison."
The audience knows this is a dangerous moment for the little boy's family.
"What is the name of ..." the policeman begins. And then he pauses. The actor - East German theater star Ulrich Mühe, who had his own large Stasi file in real life - shows the moral struggle going on inside the Stasi man using only his face.
"What is the name of your ... ball."
"You're silly. Balls don't have names."
The man lets it go.

In an interview included with the DVD, von Donnersmarck says that he wanted to show the policeman's moral struggle as slowly evolving, "not a Damascus moment." He remains the same tidy, quiet, almost compulsive man that he always was, even while his morals are changing. Von Donnersmarck, who spent some of the time writing the screenplay at the Cistercian abbey run by his uncle, said he didn't want his man to go from a gray bureaucrat to a hedonistic bohemian, like the artists he was watching. People don't change from Saul to Paul, the director said, unless there is divine intervention. "The Lives of Others" is about the moral changes we can come to make and choose for ourselves.

College Won't Recognize Fraternity Because it Excludes Women

This sounds like an Onion story, but it is true. The appeals court was shocked, shocked! to discover that fraternities excluded women. Oh, no, politically incorrect! The College of Staten Island are the monkeys in this case, but the same thing could happen many places.

Glamour on Faludi

Susan Faludi has a new book, The Terror Dream, arguing that 9/11 elevated manly men at the expense of strong and accomplished women. This is an interesting thesis, which makes me want to have a look at the book.

I heard about the book because a student gave me the review of it from Glamour. The review is one page, half of which it taken up with pictures of actresses with wedding dresses and babies.

What was striking to me was which piece of Faludi's argument the magazine chose to focus on. Their summary of her argument is this:

The 2001 attacks, she claims, made American feel vulnerable and created a longing for the good old days of 'manly men. As a result ...
Female heroes were ignored ...
Women vanished from TV talk shows ...
Grieving widows became the feminine ideal ...
June Cleaver replaced Carrie Bradshaw ...
The national 'bump watch' began.

The core argument, even as summarized by the magazine itself, seems to focus on the exclusion of strong and powerful women from public discourse. The element that Glamour focused on, though, is "Did 9/11 make us marriage- and baby-obsessed." Most of the evidence that the magazine cites is based on fictional characters in televisions shows, and to a lesser extent on the celebrities who portray them.

Now, Glamour does not pretend to be a serious policy journal, and I will not criticize them for having a simple review. I am glad they note serious issues at all, amidst their primary concern with, as they clearly state, glamor. I think the Glamour review is symptomatic of a powerful tendency in pop culture to turn all discussions of real politics into discussions of pop culture itself.

Get Warren Jeffs the Right Way

The Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints is a scary cult, and Warren Jeffs is about as scary a cult leader as you will find. He rules over their compound in Colorado City, Arizona, with an iron hand. The FLDS control every institution in town, and drive out anyone who doesn't conform to their views, such as no short sleeves in public, or Jeffs' order that all dogs in town be killed. Like most polygynous sects, the old men drive many of the young men out of town, so the old men can have all the women.

Most people were willing to tolerate the FLDS's polygamy with adult women. What has really turned the public and the law against them are the forced marriages of young girls. Warren Jeffs' trial begins today for ordering a 14-year-old girl to marry her 19-year-old cousin against her will. People who have fled the group say that forced marriages for young girls are common.

What's wrong with this trial is the charge. Jeffs is charged with being an accomplice to rape for ordering an underage girl to marry, and presumably have sex with, a man who was a legal adult. This charge stretches rape law beyond the plausible. The prosecutors might lose, and Jeffs would slip away. Worse, they might win. If counseling people to marry, or return to a marriage, which presumably would include sex, could be legally construed as assisting rape, then anyone offering marital advice could be liable for prosecution. Unlikely, to be sure, but liable.

It is very hard to prosecute cult leaders. They tell adults to do crazy things, but it is the other people who actually do them. Unlike, say, a gang leader, they do not threaten to beat up their subordinates, or their families, or take all their money, or other dangers that secular law can recognize. The promises and threats that a cult leader can wield are beyond the law -- and should be. If Jeffs really did commit a crime, such as raping a four-year-old boy as one man has charged, by all means throw the book at him. But don't twist the law to get him just any way.

What is more effective against cults is ridicule. Jeffs was arrested in Las Vegas in a red Escalade, with wigs, sunglasses, 15 cell phones, and more than $50,000 in cash. Not exactly the actions of God's Annointed. Definitely fails the WWJD test.

Happy Russian "Conception Day"

Russia, like most developed countries, is facing a demographic crisis of not nearly enough babies to replace their current population. The governor of Ulyanovsk, Sergei Morozov, had a bright idea to do something about it: give everyone the day off, so they can go home and conceive. Under the wonderful euphemism "Family Contact Day," today has been set aside for making babies who would be born 9 months from now, June 12 -- Russia Day. To promote the "Give Birth to a Patriot on Russia Day" campaign, the Ulyanovsk government has set up exhibits and even a traveling "agit-train" full of helpful gynecologists and psychologists, a reminder of the old Bolshevik agit-trains.

I wish them well, and hope everyone in Ulyanosk has patriotic fun today. Happy Conception Day.

Married, High-Earning People Apologize More

The Pearl Outlet.com noticed that more people were buying pearls to apologize. (Male people, mostly likely, Mrs. G. notes.) So they commissioned Zogby International to conduct a poll, asking people if they would apologize in three different cases: when they were to blame, when they were partly to blame, and when they were not to blame. In each case, married people were twice as likely to apologize to their spouses than unmarrieds were to their girl- and boyfriends.

Even more interesting, your likelihood of apologizing directly correlates with how much you make. Among people who made more than $100,000 per year, 92% said they would apologize if they were in the wrong, versus only 52% of those earning under $25,000, with proportionate results for the paygrades in between. When those same people thought they were blameless, the high earners would still apologize 22% of the time, versus 13% of the lowest earners.

The report of the poll leaves many blanks - especially whether there are sex differences in apologizing, and whether there is a difference between apologizing to your spouse and apologizing in a business or social situation. Still, a fascinating, and unusually strong correlation.

Sex Scandals Among the Powerful Are Worse

Michael Currie Schaffer makes a good point in The New Republic about the current wave of Republican vs. Democratic sex scandals. The Republican senators having sex with prostitutes or picking up guys in the men's room are sleazy. They deserve their humiliation, though, mostly because they are hypocrites. The Democratic mayors and governors who have extramarital affairs with other powerful people -- political aides, tv reporters, union officials -- are more dangerous because these affairs are more likely to lead to secret deals, payoffs, and conflicts of interest.

When two powerful people are married to one another, the public has some notice of the potential for conflicts of interest, and can keep an eye on them. In the case of elected officials, there are often legal safeguards against doing public business with the spouses of government officials. When the affairs are secret, though, the damage to the public can be hidden, too.

Extramarital affairs are sleazy any way you cut it. When both parties are power players, though, the sleaze is made worse by the corruption that is likely to follow.

The Largest Congregation Led By a Woman?

The Religious Research Association, a fine organization of denominational datawonks (of which I am a member), had an interesting exchange recently trying to find the largest mainline congregation headed by a woman pastor. The results (so far):

Rev. Jo Gayle Hudson, Cathedral of Hope, in Dallas, has an attendance of 1500+ and membership of 4500+. This is now a United Church of Christ congregation, but began as a Metropolitan Community Church. Indeed, it was probably the leading MCC congregation. This also explains how there is a UCC – that is, Congregationalist – congregation with the very un-Congregationalist name of "Cathedral." The MCC, a homosexual-oriented Pentecostal denomination, is not mainline, but the UCC is.

The next largest woman-led UCC congregation (the largest with a direct Congregationalist history) is Community Church UCC, Vero Beach, FL, led by Rev. Casey Garrett Baggott. It has a worship attendance of 1612 and membership of 2080.

In the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, The Rev. Deanna M Wildermuth is Senior Pastor of Sharon Lutheran Church in Grand Forks, ND with a reported baptized membership of 4,781 and average attendance of 907.

In the Presbyterian Church (USA), my denomination, the largest church with a senior solo pastor is First Presbyterian Church in Lake Forest, IL. This church had 1,762 members and an average worship attendance of 478. In addition, First Presbyterian Church in Boulder,CO, with 2,204 in membership and 1,614 in attendance, has a female co-pastor.

A Southern Baptist added that, though the SBC is not mainline and is nearly universally opposed to calling women as senior pastors, First Baptist in Decatur, Georgia recently called Julie Pennington-Russell as senior pastor. Last year the church reported 2,671 members with 483 in average worship attendance.

What of the Episcopalians, America's ruling class denomination of old? I find it amusing that the Episcopal entry in this parlor game did not count membership size, but used a different scale:
"I DOUBT THAT THEY ARE LARGER, BUT ST JAMES IN NYC IS PROBABLY THE SECOND RICHEST (NEXT TO TRINITY .WALL STREET). IT HAS A WOMAN RECTOR."

Trilby Takes A Side

My wonderful son, Trilby, only takes sides to support the underdog. We are not a sports-oriented family, so side-taking in a physical sense doesn't come up very often.

Last evening it was past five and he hadn't turned up from school. I called around to his friends' houses, and eventually it came out that he had joined a group of other middle schoolers preparing for the big Friday night football game. The lads were painting themselves blue and white for the game pitting the Danville Admirals against our cross-town rival, the Boyle County Rebels. To his own surprise, Trilby was going to join in the revelry. When I eventually got him on the phone, he asked that we bring his eponymous trilby hat to complete his ensemble. Endub (daughter #2) and I went to the game ourselves, in part to engage in the charming small-town ritual, and in part to enjoy the spectacle of The Boy Who Does Not Take Sides with his face painted.

He conducted himself with suitable decorum through the game, and enjoyed himself with his friends. Endub says she observed some mild flirtation: a girl stole his hat, obviously wishing to be pursued; he caught up with her, rested his hand on her head, and said in a low voice, "I am inflicting massive pain." I believe she giggled.

We won a close game. At the end of the evening, Trilby, the sociologist's son, said that painting himself with the guys did create a bond among them. He added, "I still don't take sides, but just for this hour ADMIRALS RULE!"

A wonderful insight into a fine developing character.

MADD Logic: Ban Teen Driving

I support Choose Responsibility, a national effort to create a drinking license for 18 to 20 year olds. I live among college students. About a third of them don't drink alcohol at all, which I applaud. The majority, though, begin drinking underage. The rule we have set for ourselves today is that we adults forbid ourselves to teach students anything about responsible drinking before we turn them loose at 21. The result is a serious problem with binge drinking and regular drunkenness even among students who we know are smart and teachable. I think it would be better to try to teach young people how one can drink responsibly.

The main opponent of Choose Responsibility is Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). Like all sensible people, I am against drunk driving. I feel safe in saying that all Choose Responsibility signatories are against drunk driving. What we differ on is which method will best reduce drunk driving (by anyone), and which method will best reduce teen drunkenness. I think the current method, formally forbidding teen drinking, has proven ineffective on both counts.

One of the arguments that MADD makes is that the mandatory 21 drinking age has saved 17 thousand teenagers who, statistically, would otherwise have died in drunk driving accidents. This is probably true. You know how we could save even more lives? Forbid teen driving altogether. Teenagers are much more dangerous drivers than adults are, especially teen boys. We could save many lives by forbidding them from driving. Is anyone ready for that national experiment? I'm not.

Yes, teen drinking is dangerous, more dangerous than drinking by adults is. But teen anything is more dangerous than the adult practice of the same thing, because teens take bigger risks and have less judgment about what is risky. In every other sphere we try to combat teen risk taking through education. I believe we should do the same with drinking.

When Breastfeeders Attack!

A local Applebees restaurant in Nicholasville, KY, asked Brooke Ryan to cover up when she breastfed her baby. Now they wish they hadn't. Ryan organized a "nurse-in" on the sidewalk in front of that Applebees. The web carried the story everywhere, and now 60 Applebees in 30 states may get the full La Leche this weekend.

Applebees has said they will send blankets to all of their restaurants for breastfeeding, and have proclaimed that they are 100% pro-baby, pro-family, and pro-breast.

I think they should go a step further. I think they should print breastfeeding blankets with the Applebees logo with their new slogan, "A Neighborhood Milk Bar and Grill." They could give away special logo nursing bras -- Applebras. And baby slings, too -- Appleboughs. The possibilities are endless.

Don't mess with moms.

Will Birth-Dearth States Not Risk War?

James Kurth raises the interesting possibility that the nations with below-replacement birth rates -- not only the industrialized nations, but also China -- will not want to risk their precious only children as cannon fodder in major land wars. Such a policy would, obviously, have its up side if it reduced the chance of war. On the other hand, there are times when a credible military, and the will to use it, are necessary for defense.

It is certainly true that the total birthrates of Western nations are below replacement, often well below. But these birthrates have not been spread evenly to produce a majority of one-child families. Rather, we have a rising number of women with no children, averaged in with the two or three child families of the middle class, and the three or four child families of the poor and immigrants.

Kurth rightly says that the "liberal professionals and professional liberals" are particularly unlikely to have large families. However, they are also particularly unlikely to send their children to war, no matter how many they have. The war-making class and the war-fighting class are as separated as they ever have been, thanks to the all-volunteer force. Short of a large draft, things will stay that way.

Demographic contraction will have a significant effect on how big a force we could muster in a large war. But I don't think the trend toward few children in the educated classes will translate into any greater reluctance to make war at all. Chelsea Clinton and the Bush twins were the precious result of their parents' only birth, but it did not make their commander-in-chief fathers any less likely to commit the country to war. Those kids weren't going to serve, anyway.

Religion Under Liberalism Does Not Quite Equal Secularism

Stanley Fish has a piece in the New York Times entitled "Liberalism and Secularism: One and the Same." He argues that liberalism

"is a form of political organization that is militantly secular and incapable, by definition, of seeing the strong claim of religion – the claim to be in possession of a truth all should acknowledge – as anything but an expression of unreasonableness and irrationality."

Fish says that the liberal state will tolerate all religions -- all religions, that is, that are themselves tolerant. He is right about this. From this Fish concludes that

"The liberal order does not extinguish religions; it just eviscerates them, unless they are the religions that display the same respect for the public-private distinction that liberalism depends on and enforces."

Here I think he makes a mistake. Most American faiths have made their peace with the liberal state, but they also have a wing, at least, that believes that their own faith is, indeed, true. Such democratic faiths refrain from triumphalism and intolerance not because they don't believe their creeds to be true, but because they believe that intolerance is an ineffective way to spread the faith. In a market society, good market competitors win, while crusading warriors lose. Most versions of Christianity, in particular, have been chastened by the disasters of the religious wars and their own experiences of intolerance, both on the giving and the receiving end. I believe that Calvinism has the best-developed theory of why a chastened, self-critical, fair-competition faith is the most insightful basis for evangelism in a fallen world.

Faith within liberal society need not be eviscerated, just because it is humble.

Zen My Pimpmobile

My nominee for the next step in reality television.

Because less is more ...

Anglo-Protestant America

"The principal theme of this book is the continuing centrality of Anglo-Protestant culture to American national identity." With this claim, Samuel Huntington throws down the gauntlet in Who Are We?, his study of American national culture. Huntington distinguishes between Anglo-Protestant culture and the "American Creed," the Jeffersonian virtues in the Declaration of Independence. He argues that the Creed, while great and central to American identity, is too thin to build a nation on. In fact, he argues that any ideology is too thin for a nation to cohere around -- a problem that drove all the communist nations to return to the nationalism they had originally despised.

Huntington is clear to say that American individuals do not all have to be Protestants. It is the culture as a whole, not the faith of each individual, that shapes the collective identity. I am inclined to agree with him on both points -- that ideology is not enough, and that the distinctives of American culture are rooted in the peculiar tension of the English-speaking Calvinist and Arminian church cultures.

Age vs. Life Course

I teach students the "sociological triad" of race, class, and gender. I have come to add a second triad: age, religion, and region. These factors almost always matter in understanding any social phenomenon.

Later in the term I will have students write their own four-generation sociological narrative, from their grandparents to their (hypothetical) children. I want them to think of their family story in terms of these six standard social forces. In the spirit of leading by example, I wrote such an account of my own family, and gave it to the class to read.

The hardest factor to apply to my narrative was age. At any given moment, age matters quite a bit in shaping one's social circumstances. Over time, especially over generations, though, we move through the various ages, if we are favored with a long life. How to represent the effect of age in an over-time story?

I was seized with a sudden inspiration: how often did the members of my family go through various rites of passage at the customary age? This proved to be a fruitful measure of age-normalcy (or not) for the whole lineage, not just of one or another individual in it. I think this customary-age idea could be turned into a standardized measure of whole family lines.

Positive Inequality

I have assigned a good article, "The Rise and Fall of Narratives of Benign Inequality," the lead essay by David Grusky and Szonja Szelenyi in their fine Inequality Reader. They start with functionalist arguments made in the 1940s and 1950s that inequality serves a social purpose. They review several arguments that inequality is benign because it is declining. Then they outline some of the more recent arguments that inequality is bad in ways previously unexplored, such as in creating terrorism or environmental degradation.

Yet they never really take up the challenge of the functionalist argument. What Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore argued in their famous article of 1945, for example, is that inequality serves a positive good. Society needs to get people with rare talents and/or training into hard, socially useful jobs. Therefore, it is good for society if such positions carry more rewards. Hence, inequality is functional for all. The later studies that Grusky and Szelenyi consider are not arguments for the social necessity of inequality, but empirical studies of declining inequality. Since income inequality did not flatten out, as the Kuznets curve predicted, and has been rising lately in the age of Bill Gates, those optimistic studies of a generation ago seem naive.

Yet empirical studies of the rise and fall of actual inequality, especially of something so elastic as income, or wealth, does not address the main point raised by Davis and Moore: is inequality, in some form and to some degree, ultimately beneficial for all?

From Minnesota

Classes began this morning. In my Social Structure class I allowed that we would be studying the main social forces that sociologists believe shape the social structure, especially race, class, and gender. In the spirit of full disclosure, I told them that I had become convinced that there are deep, complementary differences between men and women, which are likely to shape all social structures. Afterwards, a student came to see me, not sure her views would really be compatible with the premises of the course. She put the potential conflict with wonderful, and revealing, delicacy. "I'm from Minnesota, and so are my parents. We moved to the South when I was little, but my family is not really from here."

I assured her that the class would be empirical throughout, and that she was welcome to argue with the evidence and the discourse of the class to her heart's content. She is staying.

On Vacation -- See You in a Week!

Teen Anecdote, With Cats

Endub took the cats to the vet for rabies shots, worm meds, etc. I helped her load two cats into one carrier, which the kitties were not too happy about. Trilby, who is being a young teen boy in an excellent way, agreed to help her take them. The carrier was too heavy for either of the kids to carry alone, so they calmly each took an end and carried it out to the van. I gave Endub a blank check. My only worry about the trip was her backing the van out without hitting the garage. When she had successfully negotiated that turn, Mrs. G and I were congratulating ourselves on having such competent, helpful kids.

Then the phone rang. It was Endub. She was at the end of the driveway. "How do I get there?" she asked.

Still, wonderful kids.

Sworn Virgins of Albania

I am posting on this story mostly because it is fascinating. In the mountains of northern Albania there is a centuries-old custom that if a woman takes an oath of perpetual virginity, she may have all the freedom, authority, and respect of a man.

This is a good illustration of the idea that gender is a social construct -- a liberal's idea, put to conservative use. It reminds me of anthropologist Mary Douglas' argument (in Purity and Danger) that we make systems of categories to help us sort out the world. There will always be a few anomalies, though, which are dangerous to the purity of the system. So we usually build in some escape valves, to allow anomalies to be socially constructed into a new category that doesn't violate the rules.

Some proponents of social construction want to take this idea as license to do away with all social categories. I don't think that is a livable solution. Recognizing that there are limits to our necessary category systems, though, lets us use them while still being humble about how absolute the categories are. There will always be anomalies. If they are not actually dangerous to society, we can find a place for them, too.

Safe Neighborhoods vs. Resegregation

(This is the beginning of a good idea. Maybe I will back it up and write a famous article someday. Here is my first cut.)

Part of the hidden work of protecting their families that dads do is to move their families to safer neighborhoods. Couple-headed families usually have more than twice the income of single-mom families, and can afford better neighborhoods. Fathers provide direct protection for their own households. Fathers also usually contribute to everyone's safety in their own neighborhoods in a way that families in fatherless neighborhoods rarely do.

Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton won the big sociology prize a few years ago for American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. They argued that American cities were resegregating, especially by separating African-Americans from other Americans in neighborhoods that were increasingly black. Massey and Denton attribute this to racism.

One of the ways that African-American families are distinctive from other racial-ethnic groups in this country is that black children are much less likely to grow up with their married father in their home.

Putting these two ideas together:

Fatherless families tend to end up concentrated in the least expensive neighborhoods; and

Fatherless neighborhoods tend to become the most violent; and

African-American families are the most likely to be fatherless and live in fatherless neighborhoods; so

One of the main underlying factors in the increased racial concentration of African-Americans is really an increased fatherless concentration of African-Americans.

Marriage Makes You Happy, But Some Would Still Rather Be Unrestricted

Swiss economist Bruno Frey conducted a massive study of whether marriage makes people happy, or whether happier people get married. To his surprise, he found that marriage really does make people happier.

What struck me in the news accounts of his lectures on this study was a side point. The woman with whom he lives, also a professor, still does not want to get married. She "doesn't think it contributes anything additional and is only putting restrictions on you."

I have argued before that marriage as a social institution does make most people happier even when it just concerns a young couple. Marriage really comes into its own, though, to protect children. It is also a helpful structure for couples who are not so young. Marriage is best when making something that lasts is more important to you than keeping your options open.

Prof. Frey's non-wife's response, though, raises an interesting question: would you forgo happiness in order to avoid restrictions?

Heartwarming Viagra Ad

I hold no brief for Viagra as a product, and most of the ads, from Bob Dole's onward, have been kind of creepy. There is a new one, though, of a bunch of middle-aged guys jamming at a roadhouse about how much they love their wives. The chorus? "Viiiiiiiiva Viagra," done with a big Elvis flourish. They then get in their cars and scamper home.

That is surprisingly charming.

Two Ways to Play the Privilege Game

A friend who works for the NCCJ - now the National Conference for Community and Justice, formerly the National Conference of Christians and Jews - told me of an exercise that they run at their summer youth camp, Anytown. All the campers hold hands in a long line, standing side by side. The leader then reads items from a list of privileges and disadvantages. If you grew up in a house with more than 50 books, take a step forward. If your mother is a college graduate, take three steps forward. If you grew up with only one parent, take three steps back. And so on.

Kids at Anytown soon find that it is hard keep holding hands with their friends, with some moving way ahead, while others stay still or even fall back. The ones who move the furthest down the field can see graphically what an advantage their privileges have given them, privileges that most did not realize they had. For kids who choose to go to an NCCJ leadership camp, this experience fills them with a desire to work together to lift everyone for the sake of community and justice.

Another friend was telling me that his daughter had done this exercise as part of orientation at a fancy northeastern prep school. I don't think he said they were holding hands. The leaders, who had been brought in to teach this very privileged group about privilege, had added some options appropriate to that setting. "If your mom is a college graduate" got most of the kids to go three steps forward, though some of the kids on the biggest scholarships did not. But then they started adding some unusual instructions - if there is a building on this campus named for your family, take ten steps forward. The particular child who marched down the field at that instruction was so far ahead of the others that the instructors gave him a chair to sit in on the field.

What was different at the prep school from the justice camp was that many of the students came to see the privilege game as a competition to see how many privileges they could add up. My friend's daughter got the intended point. Many of her classmates, though, looked forward to each new set of privilege steps as a way to catch up to the lucky dog sitting in the chair downfield.

One-Hour Presbyteries

Suppose each congregation in a presbytery were no more than one hour from every other church in the presbytery. (This principle could apply in other polities, too, even among congregational polities.) This would be small enough that all the ministers and elder cadres could have steady, organic relations with one another. This is closer to the way presbyteries used to be organized. In some places, especially in the west, this rule might not be practical. Still, I think a one-hour dispersion rule would be a good rule of thumb for the Presbyterian Church.

I am working on a document about rebuilding the Presbyterian establishment. In the draft, I argued that the Executive or General Presbyters, the ongoing staff person of the presbytery, is a natural advisor to the General Assembly. The EP, though, is not a constitutional officer. The constitutional officers -- the offices every presbytery has to have someone fill -- are the stated clerk and the moderator. I also believe the stated clerks are natural advisors to the General Assembly. The moderator usually serves for only a year, so does not have quite the breadth of experience that the stated clerks and EPs have.

A reader of my presbyterian establishment draft commented that EPs are a recent invention. In order to assure that most presbyteries had the resources to afford a permanent paid staff member, the presbyteries were made much larger. In much of the country presbyteries today far exceed the one-hour rule.

If going to one-hour presbyteries meant doing without EPs in most places, so be it. I think it is more important to the life, connection, and solidarity of the church that the local ministers and elder cadres know one another.

Sarah Lawrence Surprise

We were talking to a friend about daughter Endub's search for the right college. She wants a place that is intense and serious about study, but lighthearted and friendly in tone. Our friend suggested that the distinctive teaching pattern of Sarah Lawrence College might suit Endub very well. So, since we were in the Northeast anyway, we made a quick trip to Bronxville, NY.

At Sarah Lawrence, students take three year-long seminars. That is the full load. The seminars are capped at 15 students. Students and professors interview one another in the registration period to make sure that they have a real match with one another, since they are commiting quite a bit of their teaching and learning time to each other. Then, on top of the seminar, each student meets individually with the professor to work on an intensive project that is related in some way, or at least inspired in some sense, by the seminar topic. This individual project lets students go deep on something of interest to them. Endub really liked that part.

On the other hand, the nice young people who acted as tour guides had to admit that the stereotypes about Sarah Lawrence students were not, um, convivial and fun. One emblem of the campus are the ubiquitous black squirrels. There is even a campus eatery named for them. The campus joke is that Sarah Lawrence students are like the squirrels: contentious, aggressive, and always dressed in black.

The jury is out, but she remains intrigued.

Why We Need to Hear Everyone

Diverse groups can reach good decisions, but only if they can bring that diversity to bear. James Surowiecki tells the cautionary tale of how NASA failed to listen to its own internal warnings about the shuttle Columbia while it was in the air, and before it blew up on re-entry, because its groups were run by the boss, who only asked for the information she has already decided she wanted to hear. (She reminded our family of the officious toady Delores Umbridge in the Harry Potter stories.) The group had the right diversity of experience available, but shut it off. It may seem bogus, but going around the room and soliciting dissent really is useful to the whole group. Sometimes it even saves lives.

Diversity and Judgment

James Surowiecki's argument about the remarkable Wisdom of Crowds depends on the crowds being diverse. The kind of diversity that matters is that the members have a variety of experiences. That way, the errors made by some individuals with certain kinds of experiences are cancelled out by the errors of other kinds of individuals with different kinds of experiences. The result, by Providence I think, is likely to be more accurate than the judgment of any one group -- even the experts.

The diversity that counts is a diversity of experience. Crowds that merely look different, but think alike, don't count.

The Wisdom of Crowds

We are reading a fascinating study, James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. He makes the counter-intuitive argument that if you pool the judgments of a diverse crowd, you will get an average answer that is likely to be good. In fact, it is likely to be better than the judgment of experts, and better than the judgment of any one member of the crowd.

To take a famous kind of puzzle, if you ask a crowd to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar, a few individuals in the group will be close to the right answer -- but the crowd as a whole is likely to be closer. Moreover, if you repeat the process with different sizes and shapes of the jars, the good individual guessers from the first jar are not likely to be the best individual guessers of the later jars -- but the crowd is likely to be close to right every time.

This is mysterious and interesting for anyone, but is especially intriguing for a sociologist. More as Surowiecki's argument unfolds.

Theory Camp Reflections

Theory Camp was a good idea. Rather than working with one student all summer on a research project, I spent two weeks with five students working through one substantial book, Randall Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies. This is a great fat book, about 1000 pages altogether, and we were zipping through parts of it to read it all in two weeks. Still, for a group to set aside that amount of time to work through one idea is a rich experience.

We ate together outside of camp at the beginning, in the end, and several times in the middle, to talk about all manner of things. The core task, though, was to read an assigned hunk of Collins each night, then discuss it for two and a half hours each morning. Naturally, we met the the coffee house. I enjoyed the buzz of life around us as we talked, but then enjoying the buzz of life is one of the things that makes people become sociologists in the first place.

Collins' theory, as I have been detailing in recent posts, is that the greatest moments of creativity come when a small number of competing networks gather around a common problem and push one another to argue through to a richer solution. He says that for this competition to be fruitful, there need to be a minimum of three, and a maximum of about six positions gathered around the "attention space." It occured to me several times as the six of us gathered around the table, with Collins' fat volume in the center, that we were enacting this idea in miniature. Except that we weren't really competing. And we didn't have fully differentiated arguments, much less networks, backing us up.

Still, the students brought their thoughtful selves to the discussion. We each had done enough different substantial things to bring a body of experience to think with to the table. We didn't have shouting matches like some that we read about -- Centre is not that kind of place. But we did seriously bring our somewhat varied experiences to bear on understanding and using Collins' rich argument.

At our last celebratory meal we thought about what should be added to theory camp in the future. The biggest idea that came through was that each participants should write a "main point" statement to bring to each session. This might be simply the main point that they took away from that night's reading, or the main idea they had thought of while reading it of how to use that day's concepts. As usual, Centre students rose to the challenge, and thought of ways that the project can be made more challenging.

I am looking forward to theory camp next year. The likely book: Jeffrey Alexander's The Civil Sphere.

Are Abstraction and Reflexivity Bad for Scriptural Faith?

Randall Collins concludes The Sociology of Philosophies with a strong pattern: the general trend of intellectual creativity is toward greater abstraction and greater reflexivity. Abstraction is the more familiar concept - the intellectuals considering a problem think of it in more general and encompassing terms. Reflexivity means that the way a problem is organized now is increasingly shaped by the way previous intellectuals have reshaped the problem in the past.

A few days ago I blogged about the coincidence of philosophical Idealism and the secularization of universities. A helpful reader pointed out, correctly, that I left the impression that Idealism was not really a response to intellectual problems of predecessor philosophies, but was caused by the structural conditions of secularization. This would not be correct. Idealism is a serious philosophical position with much to recommend it. It is true, though, that most idealisms (and not just the Christian-related ones) abstract from the specific scriptures and historical precedents that gave rise to them.

Collins suggests that instead the philosophy of scripture and traditional practice is often developed reluctantly by scriptural traditionalists. They are forced to become intellectuals about the faith because rationalist believers in their own tradition force them to in reaction. The very people who most believe the particulars of sacred scripture and faithful practice are obliged to defend those particulars in abstract terms. Over time, these abstract defenses of particularity become reflexive -- they shape how new generations of believers understand what scripture and tradition mean.

Collins is more concerned with the development of (secular) philosophy than he is of the religious faiths from which most philosophies are developed. It seems to me, though, that the logic of his argument means that the competitive process of intellectual creativity would tend to undermine traditional faith, even when the intellectuals are creating a defense of that faith.

2 Fun Facts About Philosophers

... courtesy of The Sociology of Philosophies:

Bertrand Russell's godfather was John Stuart Mill

Jean Paul Sartre's cousin was Albert Schweitzer.

Idealism is the Cover Under Which Secularists Took the Universities

Randall Collins spends a significant section of The Sociology of Philosophies on why Idealism appeared where and when it did. The philosophical lineage of Kant and Hegel argues against materialism in terms that sound like a defense of the reality of God and the spiritual vision of traditional religion. Yet really, says Collins, Idealism is at best a halfway house, keeping the terms of spirit, while removing the hard-to-digest revelation and historical particularity of religion.

Collins' sociological insight is that Idealism became the dominant philosophy in universities at the very moment when they were being secularized, cutting loose from either direct church control, as in the United States, or from state church control, as in Germany and England. This holds true despite the fact that each of these countries secularized their universities in different generations -- it is not simply the zeitgeist talking. Collins' most impressive evidence is that philosophers in Japanese universities invented a Buddhist-sounding Idealism at just the moment that those institutions were separating from Buddhist control.

And within another generation, all these dominant Idealisms had been displaced by more thorough-going secularist philosophies.

Science is a Small-Numbers Operation, After All

One of the useful structural ideas in Randall Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies is the Law of Small Numbers. He argues that creative intellectual life works when a limited number of networks, representing different positions, gather around a common problem and compete with one another to solve it. He says the minimum number of positions is three, and the maximum is six or seven, eight at the outside. The minimum number comes from the initial claim - "this is a problem worthy of serious attention, and here is our proposed solution" - which, if successful, draws a contrary view; the argument between the two almost inevitably draws a "plague on both your houses" third position. The maximum number of positions is a little vaguer, but seems to be about the limit of the number of competing solutions to a problem that participants can keep track of.

Science today, what Collins calls "rapid-discovery science," seems to be composed of thousands of creative groups pushing along a research frontier, not a small number arguing over a problem for a long time. At first glance, then, science would seem to abrogate the law of small numbers.

If we take a finer-grained look at science as a human enterprise, though, we see that it is composed of many nodes of small numbers gathered around a problem. Moreover, argues Collins, the scientific revolution was really three different revolutions working together. First came a revolution in mathematics, which was driven by developing many new mathematical notations that turned into a technology of discovery. Then began a revolution in scientific equipment, driven more by tinkerers than philosophers, which also turned into a technology of discovery. Only then could there be scientists who use both kinds of technology to attack problems. At that point, they create an attention space organized around a small number of positions competing as fast as they can to both make crucial discoveries and to interpret them convincingly.

The difference between science and philosophy is that science, armed with these efficient technologies of discovery, moves much faster in creating little problems and solving them. This is Kuhnian normal science. Where philosophers might spend decades, whole careers, even generations arguing the same problem, scientists working on a hot topic compete to a solution, solve it, and move on to a new competition. Scientific problems that don't get solved quickly get pushed to the side, where fewer networks will keep working on them; hot problems are not so much the most important ones, as the ones that promise a reachable solution soon.

From a distance and from the outside, science appears to be a vast moving research frontier carried on by millions. Up close, though, science proceeds by many small-numbers competitions gathered around specific problems.

The Starting Configuration of Monotheistic Intellectual Life

Randall Collins argues that intellectual life depends on competing networks who oppose one another across a common set of problems. The Western faiths -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- tend to start (and restart, and restart) their intellectual arguments in the same configuration. All three faiths begin with a faith in one God, and an overlapping set of texts about God. Rituals develop, standard prayers get established, practices of daily life get a religious gloss, and everyday ethics grow up in the life of the community of believers. In other words, a viable life of faith can grow up without intellectual reflection on how, exactly, God's universe works. I expect that most of the believers in most faiths around the world and through the ages are happy to just do it, without a full intellectual account of how and why.

Some people, though, have the intellectual itch. They want to know how and why. They want to have an intellectually deeper and, to them, more satisfying faith. And they want to make a name and a living from arguing about it. So they begin to reason about the faith.

Collins details what happens next. It is hard to create the conditions for sustained intellectual life. If, though, conditions are ripe, intellectuals of one position get the attention of other intellectuals who take an opposing position, which in turn draws in at least one other network of thinkers arguing for yet another position. This argument also typically draws a reaction to the whole business of intellectualizing faith that says "a plague on all your houses." Thus, the opening configuration of intellectual life.

In The Sociology of Philosophies Collins goes on to name each of these four positions in the opening configuration of Western theology.

The rational faith position comes first. They argue that the rules of reason apply to God, too, so we can reason about what God and God's actions can be like based on reason, even if some particular points can only be supplied by revelation.

The rational faith position provokes the traditional scripturalists to offer a reasoned defense of why God is not limited by human reason.

The argument between the rationalists and the traditionalists creates a market for a third party to import classical philosophy -- in the case of all the Biblical faiths, Greek philosophy.

These three parties could be a stable configuration for an intellectual argument. Almost inevitably, though, mystics criticize the whole idea of reaching God through intellectual argument; ironically, by criticizing the intellectuals, the mystics are drawn into the intellectual argument willy-nilly.

The argument may branch out into many further positions from there, and the power of one group or another within the argument may wax or wane, depending on how well they argue. Moreover, it is difficult to sustain the right external conditions for a focused intellectual argument over generations, so the whole project may collapse for a time. Still, the opening configuration -- rationalists, provoking traditionalists, importers, provoking mystics -- is likely to be repeated at the start of each new round on intellectual creativity.

I Have Joined an Underwear Cult

I was looking for interesting boxer shorts online. By interesting I mean the kind that will make my kids say "Daaaaad!" when they see the laundry. I found quite a variety of colorful boxers, but they appear to have been made by slave labor in China.

Then I found City Boxers. They promised American-made boxers constructed from durable fabric. The patterns won't make the kids roll their eyes, and they do cost more, but City Boxers seemed a good thing to try. So I ordered a few. They asked for quite a few details of style, materials, cut, and size. It was kind of like ordering a latte at a fancy coffeehouse.

The first email thanked me for my order, but needed to explain the drill to me. They want me to be Completely Satisfied -- so they won't make all that I ordered. Hmm. Instead, they will make me one to try out. They suggest I wear it to do all kinds of things, wash it a few times, and make sure it is what I Really Want. And they will start making the test pair as soon as I confirm that I am ready to take that big step. I was a little slow in responding (I was forwarding the email to my friends), so they wrote again. I quickly confirmed that, yes, indeed, I would like a pair of their excellent underpants. They set to work.

In a day, I got another email:

On Tuesday, July 24, 2007, batch number XXXXXXXXX was created. Your boxer short selections are a part of this particular batch. Batches are a group of many orders that will be created before we move on to subsequent batches. As of this emailing, we have completed 98.48 percent** of this batch.

There are 8 steps in creating our excellent boxers (see specifics at the bottom of this email). Here is the status of your order.

1 pair of 'Burgundy' Boxers
Style Number: 6093
Size: [censored]
Inseam: Standard, 4-Inch
Waistband: Plush Inside-Exposed
Fastener: Button
Pocket: No Pocket
Step 1: Completed (25 Jul)
Step 2: Completed (26 Jul)
Step 3: Completed (26 Jul)
Step 4: Completed (26 Jul)
Step 5: Completed (26 Jul)
Step 6: Completed (26 Jul)
Step 7: Completed (26 Jul)


We appreciate your boxer short order and your patience in allowing us the time necessary to create excellence. We are a bit slower than other boxer short companies, but we do want your shorts to be the very best you have ever worn.

Gary Lindquist
City Boxers
gary@cityboxers.com

** Your boxers are a member of the batch listed in the title of this email. We must complete the entire batch before your boxers, and the other boxers in this batch, are inspected, bagged, packaged and then shipped to you. This figure notes how far we are along on the entire cutting and sewing process for this batch.


BOXER SHORT CONSTRUCTION PROCESS

Step 1: Marking and Cutting. Each pair we create is marked with chalk and then precision cut individually. As a part of step 1, a waistband length is cut to a precise length based on the waist measurement you ordered. If your boxer shorts appear too large upon opening the package, this would be due to the stiffness of the fabric you chose. After washing, the boxers will contract down to the appropriate size. Some fabrics will not contract, or will contract very little, due to the initial softness of the fabric. (Average 5 minutes per pair.)
Step 2: Side Seam. A french seam is run down the outside of each leg. French seams are far superior to serge seams. They are much more durable and are without a doubt more comfortable. (Average 3 minutes per pair.)
Step 3: Waistband Material Attachment. A single-needle sewing machine is used to sew the waistband to each side of the front above the spot where the fly will eventually be. Ends of the waistband material are nicely hidden for a clean, professional look. (Average 5 minutes per pair.)
Step 4: Waistband Gathering. A four-needle sewing machine is used to gather the waistband around the top of the boxer short. At the end of this process a size label is adding in the middle of the back. (Average 3 minutes per pair.)
Step 5: Fly Area. A single-needle sewing machine is used to meticulously sew the stitching around the fly area. The reason our boxers last so long is our attention to detail in creating our designs. (Average 5 minutes per pair.)
Step 6: Crotch Seam. A double-needle, French stitch sewing machine is used to sew the crotch seam. (Average 3 minutes per pair.)
Step 7: Fastener and Logo Label. The boxers are finished around the fly area with this step. A button, or snap, is added to the middle of the fly, if applicable. The spot above the fly is sewn together and then our logo label is attached. (Average 4 minutes per pair.)
Step 8: Cutting and Hemming. A straight line from crotch seam to leg seam is cut and then the legs are hemmed. These extraordinary boxers are finished. Now they are carded, bagged, vacuum packed, and are readied for shipment. (Average 5 minutes per pair.)

As you can see, it takes about 33 minutes to complete a single pair of boxer shorts.

I eagerly await the arrival of my undies, though I know I am not worthy.

Is Multiculturalism Ethnocentric?

Randall Collins works through the developments of philosophy in Asia before turning to the post-Greek West in order to show that the same principles, and even the same contents, run through the sociology of all philosophies. He makes the strong claim that there is not an essential East nor and essential West, in philosophy or otherwise. In fact, he claims that treating other cultures as having an enduring essence is just as ethnocentric as thinking that one's own culture does. Multiculturalism, he argues, has become politically correct, but it is just ethnocentrism at one remove.

I am still chewing on this one, but I incline to agree. Your thoughts?

Official Endorsement is Bad for Intellectuals

Randall Collins, in The Sociology of Philosophies, argues that networks, not individual geniuses, make intellectual creativity. High creativity is rare because it is hard to assemble all the right material conditions for a network of intellectuals to have the leisure, the proximity, and the right kind of problem to generate several competing schools of thought.

You might think that one way to solve this problem would be to have patrons take care of all the material concerns to free the intellectuals to think, argue, and write. It turns out, though, that it also takes the right kind of patron, because it is natural for the patron to look askance at any intellectual developments that would undermine that patron's position. This is true whether the patrons are are rich families, religious authorities, or, especially, the state.

The best circumstances for intellectuals come when they are supported by the small gifts of the many, rather than the exclusive, but string-laden patronage of the few. When intellectual institutions are beholden to a powerful sponsor, they turn their brains and their competitive arguments to the politics of keeping and improving their places, rather than the intellectual problem of improving their ideas.

The Law of Small Numbers

One of the most important and least explained points in Randall Collins' theory in The Sociology of Philosophies is the "law of small numbers." He argues that intellectual development takes place in an argument among a small number of intellectual networks. Almost always, he says, these arguments will resolve into three to six or so positions.

Why three is the minimum I sort of understand. For every position X, there is an opposing anti-X waiting to be filled. Moreover, Collins cleverly sees that in most historical intellectual arguments, there is also a "pox on both your houses" position, which tends to draw people who pose paradoxes, relativize all positions, and often promote distinctive lifestyles.

The upper limit of "about six" or "six to eight" is a little harder to see. My best guess is that that is about the limit of different positions that we can keep track of in opposition to our own. Above that, we tend to think of the various smaller sects as variations on one of the more dominant themes.

Collins keeps reminding us that it takes at least three generations to really get the measure of whether a school of thought has been creative or not. I can well believe that it is almost impossible to maintain an argument of more than eight distinct positions for three generations.

The law of small numbers is a useful, testable idea about how intellectual arguments are carried out.

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.