Angry Camels

This is the funniest thing I saw all week:

Guest Couple

Today Mrs. G. and I were the guest couple in my family life class. This is an annual exercise, and is always fun. This time I suggested a few topics that we should be sure to hit on, and divided up which of us would talk about which. I wrote the topics out on an index card, going back and forth between us. This worked very well. Our discussion flowed, and we stopped ourselves in time to let students ask questions for half the class time.

One of the questions was whether we argued, or whether we had been married so long that we had already worked out those problems. Of course we do argue, and said so. I noted, as I have argued in class before, that marriage does not really change your basic nature, but you can develop work-arounds for the points at which husband and wife clash. Mrs. G. then pointed out that the index card itself was one such work-around. For the last couple of years she has had so many interesting stories to tell that we ran out of Q & A time. Having the topics listed on the card was a way in which we (I) worked out how we (she) would talk to make our (mostly my, but also her) class work better.

I had not really thought about the index card as a work around, but she is entirely correct. And because we have spent years metacommunicating about how to work around communication glitches and conflicts, this technique worked without creating strife.

Lap Dancers Show That Estrus is Not So Hidden

Geoffrey Miller, Joshua M. Tybur, Brent D. Jordan of the University of New Mexico have done a wonderful study to see whether human beings can tell when a woman is ovulating. Unlike most animals, people have "hidden estrus." One good consequence is that men pay attention to their mates all the time, whereas in other primates females only get attention when they are "in heat." However, human beings may be able to tell when a woman is ovulating in more subtle, even subconscious, ways.

Miller and colleagues asked eighteen lap dancers to keep track of their menstrual periods, work shifts, and tip earnings for 60 days - more than 5300 lap dances. The researchers noted differences between women who were on the pill and those who were not.

The result:
Average tips during ovulation = $335 per shift
Halfway through (luteal phase) = $260
During menstruation = $185

Women on the pill, by contrast, showed no ovulation peak for tips.

[Thanks to reader Brittany for the study]

Women's Circular Business Plan

Last night Rebecca Kousky spoke at Centre College about her non-profit business, NEST. NEST makes microloans to women in poor countries to make traditional crafts. They pay back the loans with products, which NEST sells online and through craft stores. Kousky started this project at 24, fresh out of social work school - in other words, with no formal preparation for what she was getting in to.

What was most interesting to me was her description of her "business plan." She said that all of her male advisors insisted she write up a business plan, write up a financial model, then go to investors. She found herself unable to do that. Instead, she took all kinds of people to her favorite coffee house and told them her whole plan, including the whole process of how the idea grew out of her life. From these conversations she got ideas, business contacts, investors, and lots of relationships that form the real foundation of NEST today. It was only when she was applying for a grant months after she had gotten the business under way that she was able to write down what her plan was - in retrospect.

Kousky is conscious of being young and a woman. She has noticed how this makes a difference in how she can connect with the women they give loans to, to the in-country intermediaries that they work through, and with the many women on her staff and board. She sees her naturally developing "circular flow" business model as a more female alternative to the linear business model that she was counseled to use.

NEST is a case study, not a proof. It is still young, only in its third year, and is only one case. Still, Kousky's account of building a business based on relationships that flow into opportunities does match what I have read elsewhere about how women tend to think of their "careers" in general.

The Sexual Non-Paradox: Women Don't Have to Choose Like Men

Throughout The Sexual Paradox Susan Pinker addressed the economists' "gender paradox": as women's economic choices and achievements increase, they diverge more from men. Progressive opinion expected that we would come closer to a 50/50 division of all money and power positions by now. They thought women would, on average, make the same as men. But reality is not heading that way. Some aging liberationists think that sex discrimination must be the main cause.

Susan Pinker, and many others, are documenting that women do not make the same economic choices as men -- and that is fine. Moreover, she concludes, “Devaluing women’s preferences is an unintended aspect of expecting the sexes to be exactly the same.” The gender paradox is a paradox only if you deny sex differences. If we see that men and women, as a group, are different from one another and make different choices, then there is no paradox.

Men Are More ADHD, But Are Less Handicapped By It

Susan Pinker reports that more boys than girls are diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. This I knew. I did not know, though, that about twice as many boys get this diagnosis in North America as in Europe - 10% vs. 5%. Pinker says the Europeans regarded the idea of a disorder called "hyperactivity" as an American fad, though they are changing their minds and catching up to us.

One of the things I like best about The Sexual Paradox is that Pinker follows up on the boys she treated years ago to find out what they did as men with their various disorders. She found that many hyperactive boys found ways to turn their vice into a virtue by making their work more efficient. She tells the story of the man who invented e-tickets because he was so ADHD that he kept losing his paper tickets.

Men are more likely to find ways to work around handicaps and deficits if they see them as a competitive challenge. ADHD is more of a problem in school than in the world of work. Girls do better in school in part because they are less likely to be hyperactive, as well as being more socially compliant. In the work world, though, Pinker suggests, hyperactive boys are more likely than hyperactive girls to compete to succeed.

Most Men Don't Believe in a Personal God; Most Women Do

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has been parsing its U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. They found that more than 2/3rds of Americans absolutely believe in God or a universal spirit. Women believe more than men, 77% to 65%. 2/3rds of this group of believers, or about 1/2 of all Americans, absolutely believe in a personal God. The female/male breakdown here crosses the 50% threshold. Of all American women, 58% report an absolutely certain belief in a personal God. Of American men, only 45% agree.

Pew report that women have stronger religious faith and practice across the board, not just on this item. In general, though, women prefer personal relationships to abstract concepts. This, I think, is the heart of the dispute between Carol Gilligan and Lawrence Kohlberg about whether loyalty to people or loyalty to abstract concepts represents the highest level of morality.

I do not read the Pew data as showing that most men are not really religious. I read it as showing that men and women differ somewhat in how they conceive of God and therefore of what they have religious faith in.

The Bigger the Backpack, the Brighter the Babe

Faithful reader Mark came up with three aphorisms about the clues that women's appearance can give men about the potential relationship they might have, such as "the thicker the makeup, the thicker the drama."

Faithful reader Rebecca came up with three excellent replies:

The baggier the sweat pants, the bigger the hugs.
The bigger the backpack, the brighter the babe.
The flatter the footwear, the funner [sic] the date.

Men Like Competing More

One of the reasons men make more is that they like competing more than women do. In particular, men like tournament competition, with clear winners and losers, much more than women do. In adult life, the clearest way to mark winning is with higher pay. Men are more willing to negotiate for pay; women not only don't like to negotiate, they don't like to be negotiated with. One of the reasons for this is that women are more likely to think that they are imposters - see yesterday's post. Women compete for intimate relationships, but they do not like anyone to lose completely - that is, to be utterly excluded.

My favorite piece of evidence that Susan Pinker cites is a study of what happens when boys and girls run alone, compared to when they run with others. Alone, boys and girls run at the same speed. When boys are running with someone else, especially another boy, they run faster. When girls run with someone else, especially another girl, they will slow down to keep pace with the other.

Women Think They Are Imposters

Women are more likely to think that their success is a fluke. Even if they have sustained success, they are more likely to think it is a fluke. When they fail at something, women are more likely to think it is due to their own failings. Women are more than twice as likely to get depressed over their failures - indeed, Susan Pinker calls the connection between women feeling like an imposter and getting depressed "the other problem with no name."

Men are more prone to overestimate their own skills. They are more likely to bluff, and take on responsibilities they are not really ready for. When they fail, they are likely to blame other people or outside conditions.

Reality is still reality, and offers a real bottom line of whether we succeed or not. However, men and women still draw different conclusions from the verdict that reality renders.

Men are more likely to see failures as investments from which they can learn, and to regard challenges ahead as something they can probably overcome. Because of the way women regard their own talents, even their own achievements, they are likely to aim lower than men. This has a cumulative effect. Imposter syndrome, as Pinker calls it, is one of the factors that means there are fewer women at the top of our power hierarchies than there are men.

Most Women Are Happier With a Balanced Life Than With an Absorbing Career

Susan Pinker's book is called The Sexual Paradox as a play on the economists' idea of a "gender paradox": compared to men, women earn less and have lower status, but are happier with their work. But this is only a paradox if you assess the value of your job on its own, not in relation to the rest of your life. Career-oriented women and men are likely to rate their jobs that way. As I noted yesterday, Catherine Hakim estimates that about 20% of women are primarily career-oriented. By contrast, about 55% of men are primarily career-oriented.

Thus the paradox: career-oriented male economists - that is, most economists - are puzzled that women don't count happiness the same career-oriented way that most men do. And some women are like most men. But most women are not like most men. There is only a paradox if you assume that men and women are the same.

Most Women Do Not Follow Planned Careers

One of the most useful ideas that Susan Pinker reports in The Sexual Paradox comes from Catherine Hakim's work on the distribution of women's preferences. Hakim calculates that about 20% of women are career-centered and 20% are home-centered. The 60% in the middle are "adaptive," trying to have it all, tacking between two poles. Hakim’s Preference Theory: not all women want the same thing, and only 20% want what men want.

This also means that in general, women are less likely to have a career plan than men. In particular, women’s plans are more likely to change after children than men’s. Men like to tell the story of their careers as their following a plan, overcoming obstacles. Women are more likely to describe their lives are a natural flow of one event into another, many of the turns not planned but not bad.

Babies Are More Addictive Than Crack

“the nurturing relationship is so rewarding to mothers that when given the choice, new mother rats choose newborn pups over cocaine. Before they had babies or once their pups were older, female rats definitely preferred the drugs.”

Susan Pinker, The Sexual Paradox (174)

However, if women get addicted to crack before they have kids, it disrupts their motherhood brain paths.

Presbyterian Property Rules Are Clear: Accept Them, and Get On With It

I had the honor of speaking in the convocation in Pittsburgh Presbytery this week, "Our Freedom of Religion at Risk: A Presbyterian Crisis." The meeting grew out of disputes in Pittsburgh Presbytery and elsewhere over dissenting congregations trying to leave the denomination with their property. Joe Small gave the big-picture opening address about our church's unity being based on communion. Euan Cameron talked about the British background to our denomination's history of union and dissent. This led directly to my part, to talk about the Adopting Act of 1729, which lets potential officers of the church explain their "scruples" about aspects of the church's constitution.

The most practical addresses were given by two lawyers, Mark Tammen and Jeff Tindall. They demonstrated that the legal standard of who owns church property is crystal-clear: the Presbyterian Church (USA) does. Many presbyteries, with Pittsburgh in the lead, are developing a process for negotiating with congregations that want to leave. In general, the dissenters who are willing to negotiate have gotten a good deal. Some of them, though, want the fight about the denomination's orthodoxy more than they want the property. In some cases, they bring in the civil courts to judge the case. The civil courts, for very good reasons, do not want to get into a religious dispute.

The denomination is getting better at working out ways for dissenting congregations to leave decently and order - if they want to. This convocation gives a clear account of the issues for those who want resolution more than drama.

Geek Mating and Aspergers Kids

Susan Pinker, in The Sexual Paradox, shows that there is evidence that math ability and the single-mindedness of Asperger's syndrome are both heritable. She speculates that the computer industry, which has been a haven for both kinds of people, brings together men and women with these traits as never before. Perhaps one of the reasons that there are many more cases of Asperger's reported now that before is because people inclined to produce Aspergery kids are more likely to find and marry one another than they used to.

This puts me in mind of one of the most interesting things I have read this year. This extract is from an essay in Best Australian Essays 2008 from a mom who appreciates her son's math-savant autism, and wonders if her mathematician parents made her kids a higher risk.

“When my parents talked about mathematics they often stood in the kitchen. Or rather, my mother moved around preparing dinner, and my father bounced up and down on a small square of floor in front of the most useful cupboard. As they talked about quadratic equations or topological vector spaces, my mother would gently push my father to one side so that she could reach inside the cupboard, and after she closed the cupboard, he would hop back in front of it. If he was only mildly excited or interested, he would just do this hop, balancing first on his right foot and then moving back to the left again. If the conversation was going well, my father would occasionally tap his forehead with the back of his right hand. When things heated up, he would add a left-hand slap to the back of his head just before the right hand hit the forehead, creating a kind of chain reaction. As the dinner neared preparation, there would be a flurry of activity in that kitchen, my mother stirring pots and lifting things out of the oven (she was feeding seven every night), and my father bouncing and hopping, slapping and tapping. Just when the conversation and the dinner were reaching a head, my mother would dash out into the passage and ring an old cow’s bell she’d picked up in Switzerland, and one of us kids would dart into the kitchen, dodging wordlessly between my parents to collect the cutlery to lay the dining-room table. A few minutes later, the bell would go again, signaling time to eat and a temporary end to the mathematical dialogue.” (136)

“Reaching One Thousand,” by Rachel Robertson

Empathy is a Great Strength in Women - But it Costs Money

Women, as a rule, are more empathetic than men. This is a robust finding, which even researchers who didn't believe it -- didn't want to believe it -- have been convinced by. It is a very good thing for human beings, especially for mothers dealing with children who can't explain themselves very well. Empathy helps you read other people's emotions and understand their motives.

High-powered careers are stressful. They take long hours, often require frequent travel and even household moves, and usually entail continuous competition with other people. Mothers in high-powered careers are likely to feel the stress that their jobs cause to other people - especially their children. Mothers' empathy is a very good thing. But it does mean that mothers are more likely to find their family's pain more painful than fathers do. They are also more likely to feel more stress themselves, which they transfer to others in their families. Feeling others' distress is not just social conditioning, it is a biological strength of women.

The cost of empathy, though, is that women are more likely to leave high-stress jobs if they can for the benefit of their families. They calculate that the greater money, power, and status that they and their families might get is not worth the greater distress to the family. This hurts them more than it does men. It is not that men are oblivious, it is that men are generally built differently. They don't feel as much stress, so they don't pass on as much stress. For them, a stressful job is a gift to their families, which they endure for the good of others. For women, a stressful job is a cost to their families, which they leave for the good of others if they can.

As a result, empathetic women are less likely to be found in the most stressful jobs -- which also tend to be the highest paying and highest status jobs. Empathy is a great good for human society. But it can cost money.

Women Leave Math and Science for a More Meaningful Life

There are many women who start math and science careers - almost as many as men. There are many programs designed to draw women to math and science careers, including paying them more, providing mentors, providing family support, giving faster promotions, and giving high status. Many women at the highest levels of math and science in the younger generations report that the men in their lives, colleagues as well as family, are very supportive of their careers. The world has changed for women in math and science.

Yet women also leave math and science careers 2.8 times more than men do. Women in math and science are 13 times more likely to leave the workforce altogether. They are not leaving for higher-paying jobs -- they have the highest-paying jobs already. And women are more likely than men to leave math and science careers even if they do not have children.

Susan Pinker reports that even women who are very good at math and science are likely to leave good jobs because they want to do work that they find more meaningful. And the more freedom that women have to choose, the more likely they are to leave demanding math and science careers to work with people, for a more immediate social good, and part time.

Women in general are likely to use financial freedom to work less, but on things they value more. Men, by contrast, are more likely to seek higher pay and more responsibility for their own sake. Creating a male-model career path for women has not resulted in women pursuing those careers like men. With ability, money, and freedom, women pursue careers more like women.

Boys are More Likely to Be Dyslexic, But Are More Likely to Make Good, Anyway

One of Susan Pinker's themes in The Sexual Paradox is that boys are more fragile than girls from conception to old age. However, Pinker has been in clinical psychological practice long enough to see some of her patients turn from fragile boys to successful men. They still have the handicaps they had, but they have developed work-arounds. The key is the single-mindedness that men are also more likely to show than are women.

Boys are at least twice as likely as girls to be dyslexic. Girls do better than boys in school anyway; dyslexic boys find themselves doubly behind in school. Yet dyslexic boys often find other ways to succeed. The building trades are full of dyslexic men who are good with spatial relations, a skill that favors men. Pinker's example is a young man who was doing well as a chef. A big-time kitchen is a highly competitive, aggressive, hands-on, and visual place -- all male skills that can compensate for trouble reading.

Dyslexic girls do better in school than dyslexic boys, though worse than other students without reading problems. They are likely to go the other route in working around reading, by emphasizing talking, empathy, and the people skills that women are generally better at.

The bottom line, as Pinker reports it, is that dyslexic men make more as adults than dyslexic women, even though the women did better in school. In fact, the dyslexic men worked so hard that they made more, on average, than women without reading problems.

Men and Women Are the Same in the Middle, But Men Are More Extreme

Susan Pinker, in The Sexual Paradox, reports that men's and women's IQ curves have the same middle, but the tails of the men's curve are longer - on both sides. There are more men at the highest levels, and more at the lowest. This is how both of these things can be true: men and women have the same average intelligence, and there are many more men at the highest levels of math achievement.

There are other reasons why there would be more men at the top levels of public achievement, especially in power hierarchies. Pinker treats them in the book, and I will talk about them in the next few posts. But it helps to keep some perspective on what else this means. There are also fewer women at the bottom levels of public achievement. Pinker quotes the ever-colorful Camille Paglia: “There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.”

Lincoln/Darwin: Providential Gifts or Survivors of Struggle?

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born two hundred years ago this week, within hours of one another. They are both, in my estimation, great men who made essential acts at a crucial moment in history. Lincoln saved the American union and refounded the country. Darwin showed how billions of micro-competitions in the whole integrated living world produce the great macro-outcomes that we see in lineages, species, and the entire ecology.

Some Darwinists today think that Darwin's insight requires that we believe that there are only material forces shaping these competitions. We evolve, but we don't progress. We change through time, but not in a meaningful way. Nature "selects," but there is no Providence guiding the selection. By this logic, the great intellectual achievement of Darwin and Darwinism itself is ultimately meaningless; it is just another change, not better or worse than any other idea with social consequences.

Lincoln, on the other hand, believed that Providence had a plan for the world. He was a humble man, and did not think that he was forcing Providence to follow his plan. On the contrary, Lincoln thought the American nation had a destiny, in which he was but one humble worker in it.

In the great competition to produce scientific theories, someone would have come up with some kind of evolutionary synthesis eventually. Wallace almost did, which spurred Darwin to publish the work he had in a drawer for years. In the great competition of politics, someone will get elected president. The election of 1860 produced a very rich crop of men with great gifts - and great flaws - who came close to winning. If the Democrats had not split, surely their nominee, Douglas or Breckenridge, would have been president that year. Lincoln's rivals within the Republican Party likewise had many serious contenders to win the election. It is part of Lincoln's genius that he not only prevailed in that competition, but then united many of his rivals for the worse competition, the civil war, that followed.

Perhaps Darwin and Lincoln were just the guys who happened to win the particular competition of their day. If not them, then someone else; if someone else, then history takes some other turn. And if we take materialist views seriously, those other turns of history would have been just as meaningful, and meaningless, as the history we turned out to have.

But as for me and my house, I believe the Lincoln -- and Darwin too -- were helped to become the right people for their time in history by the Providence that ultimately superintends nations and species, with and sometimes the despite the choices we make in our micro-competitions.

Stud, Dud, Thud.

Anthropologist Richard Bribiescas, after studying the effects of testosterone in both promoting reproduction and early death, offered this summary of the ages of man.

(From Susan Pinker's The Sexual Paradox).

The More Choice Women Have, the More They Diverge From Men

“The richer the country, the more likely women and men choose different types of jobs.”

This is the very interesting finding reported by Susan Pinker in The Sexual Paradox. She is specifically studying the problem that got Laurence Summers into so much undeserved trouble: why are there many fewer women than men at the highest levels of math, science, and engineering? Her answer: when given the choice, women with high aptitude for math, science, and engineering are more likely than similarly gifted men to choose something else.

In fact, Pinker argues, it is not that the women are discriminated against or diverted, where men are not. Rather, women with high math aptitude are also likely to have high verbal aptitude and high empathy, whereas math-minded men are not. It is the men who are channeled into science and engineering because they do not have as many other choices. The women, given the choice, are more likely to take their math skill to clinical medicine. They want to do work with people that makes more of a difference in people's lives.

The countries with the highest rates of women in science and engineering are not the ones in which women are most free, but in poor and authoritarian countries where math-competent women are pushed into science and engineering by families that want them to have higher salaries, and states that want more scientists and engineers.

Secret Identity of Successful Women

For the next few posts I will be working through Susan Pinker's The Sexual Paradox.

Pinker is a clinical psychologist. She has worked mostly with boys with problems. She is also a second-wave feminist who knew many highly promising girls. The central theme of this work is that second-wave feminism erred in expecting liberated women to achieve - to want to achieve - the same kinds of things at the same rate as men. Pinker wants to argue that neither sex should be taken as the model for the other; they each have their distinct tendencies, vices, and virtues.

Pinker has been a psychologist long enough to see how many of the children she worked with turned out as adults. Her very interesting finding is that the boys with difficulties often found ways to be successful adults nonetheless; at the same time, many of the girls with great promise chose paths that did not lead them to run the public world.

One small finding that Pinker notes on the way caught my eye. All of the women that she talked to, even the most successful in their public and private lives, wanted her to use pseudonyms for them, and hide all identifying details of their stories. None of the men wanted pseudonyms, even though many had very troubled beginnings.

I am not sure what to make of this exactly. I think, though, that even the most successful women worry that people will not like them "if they knew the truth." Men, on the other hand, expect to pay their dues and make mistakes while climbing the ladder, so are less troubled by whatever past they have.

Marriage Beats DNA

The Kentucky legislature is considering a bill that would give adulterous fathers paternal rights over the children of their adultery, even if the mother is married. The law, by contrast, assumes that all children born to a married woman are children of the marriage. In the past it might be difficult to prove paternity; now, DNA tests can tell us with assurance who the biological father is.

Nonetheless, I think the law is still right. If a married couple want to raise her child as theirs, they should. Marriage is a social institution of the highest value, especially for raising children. In all generations children who are cuckoos in the nest have nonetheless been raised successfully by parents who knew the score. If a man wants to have paternal rights, he should marry the mother of his child. If she is already married, society has already settled the question of who should have first claim on raising the child.

A Honey-Colored Cafe for the Obama Crowd

Eve Fairbanks has an interesting field note in the New Republic on the hot new Washington hangout for the Obama left. Busboys and Poets is a café in the black bourgeois section of D.C. It draws anti-war types of all ethnicities. Since the coming of the new Democratic administration it has drawn some of the left edge of those in power. It is probably important that the owner and presiding force is an Iraqi, who comes from outside the often poisonous racial politics of the District.

What struck me about this story, as a student of third places in general and coffee houses in particular, is that Busboys and Poets seems to have achieved what most third places only dream of: to be genuinely integrated. It is notoriously difficult to create a black coffee house. I have been to only one, which serves the Fisk University community. Black third places tend to be either churches or bars, with little overlap. Busboys and Poets is not a pure coffee house, but a café - it not only serves more food than a normal coffee house does, but also alcohol.

Still, Busboys and Poets provides such a model of the best of integrated America that even the Bush State Department brought foreigners there, rather than to the preppy bars in Georgetown favored by the young Bushies. Come on, honey-colored nation. Have a mocha.

Teaser on the Kissing Study

Wendy Hill of Lafayette College has released a preliminary study of the hormonal effects of kissing. She found that kissing reduces the stress hormone cortisol in men and women. And it raises the bonding hormone oxytocin - but only in men.

She promises a follow-up report of a bigger study soon.

God of Earth and Altar

Today in church we sang my favorite hymn, G. K. Chesterton's "God of Earth and Altar."

O God of earth and altar,
bow down and hear our cry,
our earthly rulers falter,
our people drift and die;
the walls of gold entomb us,
the swords of scorn divide,
take not thy thunder from us,
but take away our pride.

From all that terror teaches,
from lies of tongue and pen,
from all the easy speeches
that comfort cruel men,
from sale and profanation
of honor, and the sword,
from sleep and from damnation,
deliver us, good Lord!

Tie in a living tether
the prince and priest and thrall,
bind all our lives together,
smite us and save us all;
in ire and exultation
aflame with faith, and free,
lift up a living nation,
a single sword to thee.

This has always struck me as a very Neibuhrian hymn, though of course Chesterton was a very convincing Catholic apologist. This is a hymn against worldly pride. It is a hymn for work.

Something I noticed this time: this is a hymn against sleep. I had not really put "sleep" and "damnation" together. I am still in favor of sleep as a good gift of God. But I do agree with Chesterton about work: doing things is what I like to do...

The Thicker the Make-up, the Thicker the Drama

This is the third women-watching aphorism from Mark Mallman.

Planned Parents Do Not Lose Their Happy Marriage

Researchers have found for some time that marital satisfaction drops when the kids are born. Couples need to have a strong marriage to survive the family crisis of having a baby. Nearly all marriages that do handle the crisis are stronger and ultimately happier for it. The great majority of parents find their own lives more meaningful for having kids.

Philip and Carolyn Cowan, longtime family researchers at Berkeley, recently parsed what happens to marital happiness for different kinds of parents. Couples who did not plan to have kids, were ambivalent about it, or disagreed about having children were less happy than they had been before. The account for almost all of the overall drop in marital satisfaction that married couples as a whole report when they have kids.

By contrast, parents who planned to have kids or who welcomed a somewhat surprising conception remained happy, and sometimes got happier, when they had a baby.

Cheaters

The blogger Audacious Epigone had an interesting post on who commits adultery, based on the General Social Survey. The strongest variables he (?) could find were religious belief and political ideology. Taking just the ends of the spectrum, atheists were half again as likely to cheat as strong believers. Among men, the ratio is 30% to 20%; among women, 17% to 12%.

The gap was not quite as big between liberals and conservatives, but the former were about a third more likely to cheat than the latter. Among men the ratio is 26% to 19%; among women, 17% to 11%.

It is possible that the causation runs both ways. Cheating may lead people to become atheists and liberals. You can't really tell with GSS data. I have noticed in studies of pastors that those who end up divorced are also likely to become more liberal, whereas conservatives stay married (or marrieds stay conservative).

The direction of causation needs a longitudinal study.

I have read, though cannot tell from this survey, that secular conservatives -- that is, libertarians -- are the most likely to cheat, which makes sense ideologically.

Single Mothers and the Second Child

Emily Bazelon has an interesting long article in the New York Times magazine about single mothers by choice. One new feature of this now-familiar story is the number of middle class single mothers who have a second child in order to round out the family. As is usual in such articles, the increases are reported as big percentages, rather than in absolute numbers, which are still very small.

Not surprisingly, you can find groups of middle class women with adopted kids and sperm donor kids who are doing OK. Nor is it surprising that they tend to work together, to support one another. Moms of all kinds work together. Single mothers of every class need more help, so naturally they are more likely to seek one another out. Middle class mothers seek out other middle class mothers for many reasons, most of them good. This story was about single mothers who were never married to the fathers of their children, but this part of the story would be the same if it were about divorced women. Moreover, these single moms don't just rely on one another. Many in the story live near, or with, their parents, and depend on their siblings, neighbors, and friends.

No one can raise children alone. Married couples have the huge advantage of having someone to share the task with, but even they have to rely on "the village" many times. This problem is squared for single mothers, who draw even more on collective resources.

The implicit task of an article like this in the Times and other center-left venues is to show that this kind of family arrangement is "good enough." Bazelon does a good job in showing that it can be good enough, especially with helpful parents and money to hire babysitters and au pairs.

The implicit question of such an article, even in a center-left source, is whether raising children this way is "just as good as" a competent marriage. Bazelon does not push the issue. Nor does she need to: good enough is good enough. Still, I think it would require a great deal of ideology to look at these families and see an ideal that they would want their own children to reproduce.

Married parents are still best for kids.

Time for Some Regulation in the Fertility Business

A woman with no money, no husband, and an obsession with children has 14 children by in vitro fertilization - the last 8 all in one go. The fertility industry only asks medical questions - can her body do it? - but sees ethics as someone else's job. Now that the fertility business actually works, it needs a serious ethical code, and even more serious enforcement. They should do it themselves. If not, the state should help them achieve the necessary clarity about their responsibilities.

Three Good Things George W. Bush Did

I was not a fan of George W. Bush. I worked actively for his opponent in 2000 and 2004. If I had been asked by a pollster "do you approve of the job Pres. Bush is doing as president," I would have said No during 415 out of the 416 weeks of his presidency. However, I believe in giving credit where it is due. So now that the Bush 43 administration is entirely over, let me name three things I think he did right. I do so, in part, to encourage readers to offer their alternative estimates.

1. Faith-based initiatives. John DiIulio, the first director of Pres. Bush' Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, says rightly that George Bush deserves credit for making government-religious organization partnerships a viable option. Religious organizations have always served the public. Government in America has always had partnerships with church-sponsored agencies. Since the Second World War, though, government has been very circumspect about tax money being used for a clearly religious purpose. If a church taught people to read, for example, they could get government money; if they taught people to read the Bible and believe it, they could not.

Some problems, though, respond best to life-changing faith. Getting addicts to change their lives is very hard, and nothing works all the time. Still, approaches that get people to rely on a "higher power" have the best track record. Many people in social services had come to recognize this fact in the 1980s and '90s, even secular activists. If the government was serious about changing the lives of the most troubled and dangerous people, they needed to let God in, and pay the expenses. George W. Bush was the man who turned this once-taboo idea into a real government program. Indeed, Pres. Obama embraced the idea early and enthusiastically, though he plans to expand it beyond Pres. Bush's initiative. Faith-based programs are now part of the bipartisan base of government.

2. Fighting AIDS in Africa. This is a faith-based initiative, and much more. Frankly, I have been surprised that Pres. Bush made this commitment early, stuck to it, and put some real money inton it. It doesn't fit with the rest of the foreign policy of his administration. It produces no immediate benefit for the interests of the U.S. government or major U.S. businesses. I think this one comes right from Pres. Bush's heart.

3. The week of September 11, 2001. The high point of the Bush presidency. He rallied the country. He said clearly that Islam was not the enemy, and opposed all efforts to demonize Muslims here or abroad. An imam was included in the national prayer service for the first time. He went to Ground Zero and praised the emergency responders. The world stood with the U.S. as never before.

By the second week, though, he had ceded control of the U.S. response to others. They took the opportunity to make a war on the wrong enemy, suspend civil liberties, alienate almost all the nations of the world, involve us in torture, run up the debt, and in general destroy the achievements of the previous two administrations. Which is why, when all is said and done, W. will rank among the bottom ten presidents.

But there were at least three notable achievements of the George W. Bush administration, for which I wish to give him credit.

The Shorter the Skirt, The Shorter the Shorter the Relationship

Another insight from my friend Mark Mallman, to join the earlier field sociology note on what high heels reveal.

Intellectuals Seek the Plot of Life

What I like best about Steve Fuller's The Intellectual is that he thinks intellectuals are those best seeking the meaning of life. Mere academics are content to speak accurately within the limits of their methods. Philosophers of all kinds have become content to make distinctions that might help us speak accurately. The intellectual, though, is after not just the truth, but the whole truth. When we reach the limits of where method can take us, the intellectual is not afraid to use imagination. Intellectuals are as critical as any other thinker -- maybe more -- but they are willing to risk a judgment about what is true.

Fuller offers no account of why intellectuals believe life is meaningful. And surely there are thoughtful materialists and nihilists who would appear to be both intellectuals and believers that life is meaningless. Indeed, though Fuller describes himself as a secular leftist and accepts Darwinian materialism as science, he rejects it as the whole truth: “The true intellectual fights hard against this dissipation of meaning in life.”

I strive to be an intellectual who uses all sorts of knowledge to understand the plot and meaning of existence. For that reason I gravitate to most of Fuller's account of the intellectual. But on intellectual grounds, I don't think he fully makes the case that my quest, and his, define the intellectual's task.

The Intellectual Vigilant

The ice storm has suspended normal business in Kentucky, so I am improving the time by thinking about Steve Fuller's The Intellectual.

Fuller's book carries this interesting second title on its cover: "The positive power of negative thinking." He argues that intellectuals seek truth by the path of criticism of all established ideas, including a ruthless self-criticism. Intellectuals make their special contribution to society by taking seriously the charge usually attributed to Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” Intellectuals see the evil consequences that can, willy-nilly, come from the normal working of the status quo. The more we know, and the more we think through how social systems work, the more responsibility we have for the outcome. This is why intellectuals are not just scholars, but engaged in shaping public life.

To be an intellectual, Fuller argues, is to vigilant. And what we are to be most vigilant about are the effects of ideas on social life. Intellectuals have to believe in the power of people working together to enact ideas. This is why they also have a tendency to be a bit paranoid, and even to accept conspiracy theories. People working together to make the world better is a kind of good conspiracy. People working together to make their lives better at the expense of the world is a bad conspiracy. And people working together with unintended consequences for the world is what intellectuals train themselves to see.

Intellectuals are vigilant about the power of ideas to shape the world, and in eternal argument with other intellectuals about what those consequences might be.

Sibling Rivalry Among Britain's Children

This is the last of my posts about the course on Australian National Identity, and the most tentative.

I have been thinking about the relations among the four or five nations of the "white commonwealth" as a sibling rivalry. In Sulloway's theory, siblings are competing for parental attention. First-born gets first choice. First-born usually takes the path of being most like the parents, leaving other ways of being distinctive to the later-borns, and the path of exceptionalism to the last. However, if the first chooses not to be like the parents, then that role is available for the laters, especially the second.

The USA is eldest. We chose to rebel. Canada, the second, is the most dutiful. Australia, the third, yearns to be like the eldest, but is not so rebellious. New Zealand, the fourth, is defined as the dutiful in relation to the third, whose attention it is always trying to get. South Africa is the wild child.

Let me take this speculation to a further length. The Hanover kings were famous for their terrible relations with their fathers, the previous king. Each of the Georges rebelled against the previous George.

USA rebelling against England :: George IV rebelling against George III.

9289 Down, 75 To Go

We made it from Sydney to Louisville. We have been stopped, however, by an ice storm. We have to hole up for the night, hoping that we can complete the last 75 miles of our journey tomorrow. If it melts.

The Longest Monday

Through the miracle of time zones, this was the week with two Mondays. We started off in Sydney Monday morning, left Fiji Monday night -- and an hour later started Monday morning again. We got to Los Angeles by midday Monday, at which point the class scattered. My son and I stopped for the night in Los Angeles, hoping to come in the Kentucky at a sensible time.

Which may be eaten by an ice storm.

Still, a week with two Mondays starts off with challenges.

Australia Day Reflections

As we are packing up to go back to the States, Australians are preparing for Australia Day. Australians are ambivalent about Australia Day. It is hard not to see this ambivalence as a metaphor for Australian national identity as a whole.

On January 26, 1788 the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Harbour. These were the convicts and their keepers who started Australia. These were the Europeans who displaced the Aborigines.

For a long time, Australians were ambivalent about the "convict stain" and thus reluctant to treat the First Fleet as the founders of the nation. As I read it, this ambivalence about the convict past lasted exactly as long as Australia thought of itself as primarily British -- that is, until the mid-1960s. Since then, multi-generation Aussies are proud to claim a convict ancestor -- and are not likely to think of themselves as British in the same measure. Australia Day has grown as a national holiday in conjunction with this change in sentiment about national origins.

For aboriginal rights activists (of whatever ethnic origin) January 26 is "invasion day." Just yesterday Mick Dodson, an aboriginal activist, was named Australian of the Year, an announcement timed to coincide with Australia Day. Dodson said he was pleased with the honor, and proud to be an Australian -- but he objected to Australia Day as a holiday.

Australia Day is most popular, I think, as the long weekend holiday that ends summer. There is a commercial on television now. A concerned teacher meets with a boy and his father. The teacher reads from the boy's essay on what Australia Day means: "Australia Day means more time for cricket." The boy smiles, hopefully. The teacher frowns at the boy, then looks meaningfully at the father, as if to say "teach him the true meaning of our national holiday." The father nods, knowing his duty. As they leave the school, the father says to the son "You should have mentioned the tennis, too."

I think Australia Day will be revamped, over the coming generation, as a patriotic holiday. ANZAC Day will remain the core ceremony of the civil religion here for the foreseeable future. But Australia also needs a forward-looking, celebratory national holiday in its civil religion calendar, to balance the somber, sacrifice-honoring holiday of the ANZACs. The key problem, I think, will be figuring out how to include Aborigines -- which, as I have previously remarked, is only the touchiest issue of all in Australian national identity. Still, the nation needs its holidays if it is to be a nation as an imagined community. And Australia Day is an excellent foundation for a national holiday.

Besides, it is a great time to have an end-of-summer celebration.

Sydney Has the Harbor ...

and Melbourne has everything else.

This is what a Melburnian told us in our first hour in Australia. We have heard variants on it since in Melbourne. Sydneysiders, by contrast, look on Melbourne as quaint and economically "dead" (as a businessman told us).

Yesterday my son and I walked for hours around just a little corner of the Sydney Harbor foreshore. This was the bit, though, with the Royal Botanical Garden, the Opera House, and the Harbor Bridge. It is true: Melbourne, with its huge, orderly bay, has nothing like the shorefront here. And, of course, there is more to Sydney than the harbor. We have just begun to explore the interior neighborhoods. The central business district does have the vibrancy of big money. Sydney is older, and that extra 50 years of pioneer history matters in giving depth to the town. The Asian parts are notably bigger and more varied than Asian Melbourne.

The Sydney-Melbourne rivalry will probably last as long as Australia does. There will be no settling it. The competition is good for the country.

But for the Gruntleds, Melbourne appealed more to our sense of order and intellect.

(Let the rival comments begin).

American Emmigrant

We met with an American who became an Australian citizen. He is an international businessman who works all over the world. Much of his work has an Australian connection, but often he is working with clients in, say, Japan, doing a deal with Brazil. They don't really care where he is based.

He became an Australian citizen because he and his family like it here, and wanted to have roots somewhere. He did not, as I had thought, marry an Aussie, but brought his family here.

It struck me later that he is the first American that I know personally who became a citizen of another country just because he wanted to. He didn't grow up in the other country, marry a local, or have a political beef with the United States government. He just chose another country.

Many people all over the world know people from who have chosen to be Americans. Centre College, deep in the American heartland, has quite a few immigrants on the faculty, on the staff, and in the student body.

It is the rare American, though, who knows an emigrant from the United States. It is so rare that it comes as a shock that someone would actually fully shift allegiance from the United States to another nation.

We study abroad to broaden our horizons. Meeting a US emigrant was an unexpected, but useful, kind of broadening for everyone in the class.

President Obama in Sydney

At 4 a.m., local time, President Obama was sworn in. My son and I set our alarm to get up and watch, as did many of the students in the class. For the Gruntleds, this was an exhilarating moment.

At 1 p.m., local time, the class all assembled at the Manning Bar in the student union of the University of Sydney. This is deep vacation time in Australia, the equivalent of the week before Labor Day in the U.S. Nonetheless, the U.S. Studies Centre of the Uni of Sydney sponsored a rebroadcast of the Inauguration. The bar theater, which held several hundred, was standing room only.

Before the big event the Centre showed the short films they had received in a contest about the U.S. election. These were mostly funny, generally pro-Obama, and pretty well done. The winner, a film about the author's obsession with the election, won him and a friend a trip to Washington for the festivities.

The crowd then watched attentively from the swearing-in of Vice-President Biden through the departure of former president Bush in the helicopter. The mood in the room ranged from pleased to elated. The greatest applause came when Pres. Obama completed the oath and when he was introduced by Sen. Feinstein as the 44th President of the United States. When the U.S. national anthem played, about dozen Americans stood, hand on heart.

When we asked a well-informed Australian political figure what the country thought about the U.S. election, he offered that Obama probably could have been elected Prime Minister of Australia. I am sure there are anti-Obama Australians, but we have yet to meet one. Even avowed members of the coalition of conservative parties here, the Liberals and Nationals, who were strongly connected with Pres. Bush, seem pleased with Obama's election. Or if not pleased, then relieved.

The third loudest applause of the afternoon at the University of Sydney: when President Bush's helicopter flew away.

Australian Open

I spent Monday at the Australian Open tennis tournament. Everyone has told us that sports, especially international sports, are very important to Australian identity. The Australian Open is one of the biggest annual sporting events that Australia puts on for the world.

I particularly enjoyed a tough match between a 16-year-old Aussie and a somewhat older Italian. The Aussie supporters were there in force. They produced the distinctive Australian sports cheer, a call-and-response. A fan wearing a big Australian flag started, with the crowd answering:
"Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!"
"Oi, Oi, Oi!
"Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!"
"Oi, Oi, Oi!
"Aussie!"
"Oi!"
"Aussie!"
"Oi!"
"Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!"
"Oi, Oi, Oi!

Oh yes: the Aussie's name was Bernard Tomic. Come on, melting pot.

Gaza Protest

Today we went to a protest of Israel's invasion of Gaza. Several thousand protesters gathered in front of the Victoria State Library to listen to speeches and hand out leaflets for other protests. Then the crowd marched several blocks to the Egyptian consulate for more speeches, and finished up at the Parliament building for a few more speeches.

The tenor of the speeches was that Israel was an imperialist oppressor. The secular speeches were strongly anti-Israel, and the master of ceremonies went so far as to denounce the two-state solution and praise Palestinian resistance. The liberal church people were the ones who called for peace and restraint on both sides. And the only person who denounced the Hamas rocket attacks on Israel as well as Israel's attacks on Gaza was the Mufti of Australia and New Zealand. He was ill, so his speech was read by another. The line criticizing Israel's attacks brought cheers. The line condemning Hamas' attacks was met with silence.

The United States came in for a bit of bashing, but it was secondary. There were many signs that went beyond the radicalism of the speakers, including quite a few that equated Zionism and Nazism.

I will post pictures later.

Seadevil Mating

This is one of the most interesting things I have read recently. It is not very Australian, but I did read it in Best Australian Essays 2008.

“…consider the black seadevil. It’s a somber, grapefruit-sized globe of a fish – seemingly all fangs and gape – with a ‘fishing rod’ affixed between its eyes whose luminescent bait jerks above the trap-like mouth. Clearly, food is a priority for this creature, for it can swallow a victim nearly as large as itself. But this is only half the story, for this description pertains solely to the female: the male is a minnow-like being content to feed on specks in the sea – until, that is, he encounters his sexual partner.

The first time that a male black seadevil meets his larger mate, he bites her and never lets go. Over time, his veins and arteries grow together with hers, until he becomes a foetus-like dependent who receives from his mate’s blood all the food, oxygen and hormones he requires to exist. The cost of this utter dependence is a loss of function in all of his organs except his testicles, but even these, it seems, are stimulated to action solely at the pleasure of the engulfing female. When she has had her way with him, the male seadevil simply vanishes, having been completely absorbed and dissipated into the flesh of his paramour, leaving her free to seek another mate. Not even Dante imagined such a fate.”

“Where Wonder Awaits Us,” by Tim Flannery

"Ashamed to Be Australian"

We have heard several Australians say that there is one ongoing government policy that makes them ashamed: the treatment of asylum seekers.

Immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers used to find a very open door in Australia. When the Vietnamese "boat people" came in the 1980s, they were held for a few weeks for medical checks and paperwork before entering Australian society.

In 2001 the Norwegian ship Tampa picked up Afghan refugees rescued from a sinking vessel. The Australian government refused to let them land in Australia. The Howard government then won an election based, in part, on fear of large numbers of refugees flooding Australia. The processing centers for refugees and asylum seekers turned into concentration camps patrolled by armed guards. The weeks of health checks and paperwork turned into years of isolation.

It is likely that the new Rudd government will undo some of the policies of their predecessors. It has already started to do so on the touchiest issue, the treatment of aborigines. Indeed, since Prime Minister Rudd issued the "Apology" to the aboriginal peoples, there is a sense among most Australians we have met that problem is heading toward a solution. The wounds caused by the stolen generation, massacres, and general ill-treatment are starting to heal.

Not so with the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees. To be sure, there must be many Australians, especially Liberal/National voters, who support to tight controls on refugees. But for the people we talked to, including some Liberals, the asylum-seeker policy is the one great source of national shame.

Australian vs. American Democracy

We had a fascinating conversation with John Hirst, an eminent historian, and Sally Warhaft, editor of The Monthly, about Australia's system of compulsory voting. Australian elections are held on Saturday and are easy to get to. All eligible voters are required to vote. If they don't, they must either get their excuse approved or pay a fine. This system is very unusual in the world. Belgium is the only other high-income country to have it, and the other countries don't enforce the rule. I have been surprised that we have encountered so little discussion of it, one way or the other. It is just accepted here as the way it is.

We agreed that the United States is not likely to ever adopt such a system. For us, democracy means that each individual has a choice, including the choice not to participate. We were also assured that Australia is not likely to drop their system. For them, democracy means that each individual has a voice, so must have (and use) a place at the table.

Joe's Awesome Day

The students had the day off, so I organized an Awesome Day for my son, who is 14. He has been doing the same work as the college students, and been dragged to many an event by dad that would not have been his first choice. He has remained game throughout. So today was his day.

We started last night. A downtown Melbourne movie theater offers all the usual movies - plus "Bollywood." Which actual Bollywood feature they are offering seems to be secondary to the sheer fact that the genre is represented. We went to "Ghajini," a revenge story that turned on short-term memory loss, like "Memento." In the middle of this dark story, though, was a romance between two very handsome leads, with singing, dancing, fantasy sequences, bright colors, but not so much as a kiss. The whole thing last more than three hours, including an intermission. It let out at midnight. There were a dozen Indians, mostly couples, and us. We had a blast.

Today we went to see the State Library of Victoria, a wonderful old rotunda library, like the British Museum reading room. It has a fine exhibit of Melbourne and Victoria history, the highlight of which is the weird home-made armor that the notorious bushranger Ned Kelly wore when he had his final shoot-out with the police in the 1880s.

For lunch we had kangaroo, wallaby, crocodile, and a somewhat less exotic squid. Joe liked the crocodile best.

The highlight of the day was Eureka Tower. This is a residential skyscraper, the tallest residence in the Southern hemisphere (which means it beats another one in Queensland, though that one cheats with a higher antenna). On the top floor there is a great observation deck, including a very breezing outdoor section. Today was clear and hot, so we enjoyed the view and the breeze. The best part, though, is The Edge. This is a cube, about twelve feet on a side, glass on each face including the floor. When you enter, the glass is milky. The whole cube is then extended out past the side of the building. Suddenly, accompanied by scary noises, the cloudiness clears, and you are looking 88 stories straight down. And up, and all around. It is pretty impressive. Joe and I were photographed standing on glass, with the earth visible far below us. He will use the picture to scare his sisters.

"She'll Be All Right"

Today we met with representatives of American businesses. I will not identify them, in case doing so would bring them some grief. They reported an interesting difference between American and Australian business cultures.

Americans take for granted that customer service is necessary to do your job correctly, and for you business to succeed. Likewise, Americans expect managers and professionals to push to improve the business -- coming up with good ideas is a valued way to contribute to the whole and to get ahead personally.

Australian managers and professionals, on the other hand, are told that "tall poppies get cut down." Pushing innovations and improvements is not regarded as contributing to the company, but as arrogant self-promotion. Likewise, Australian workers (and students, we also heard) think that if you have a job or a place, you are entitled to full pay or promotion for it, no matter how well (or poorly) you do the job.

Australian workers, in other words, satisfice. They do not push for the optimal solution, they take the first adequate one. Rather than seeking excellence, at the cost of conflict, an Australian is more likely to accept the status quo on the grounds that "she'll be all right."

National Identity Matters Most When You Are Abroad

One of my main reasons for choosing "Australian National Identity" as the subject of our course here comes from Centre College's extensive experience with study abroad: when they study out of the country, our students discover that they are Americans. (Except the international students, of course, who already had a parallel experience by coming to Centre). Americans probably do proclaim their Americanness to one another more than the citizens of most nations do. Still, there are dozens of distinctive expectations that we have at home without knowing it. These American expectations and assumptions come out by contrast in another society.

Today we had a stellar day with a group of sociologists at LaTrobe University here in Melbourne. Kerreen Reiger had organized a day with her colleagues, most notably Peter Beilharz, Karl Smith, and Sue Turnbull. They helped us reflect on Australianness. They also confirmed that their students think even less about their national identity at home than Americans do -- but discover that they are Australians when they are abroad. Several of the professors, likewise, reported that they only had reason to describe themselves as Australian when abroad.

I don't think this fact means that national identity does not matter at home. I think it just means that national identity is most salient when compared to other national identities.

Advance, Australia Furry

The Australian national anthem is "Advance, Australia Fair."

The two animals on the Australian seal are the red kangaroo and the emu.

They were chosen, in part, because they cannot go backwards. They can only advance.

Koalas in the Trees

Today we drove the Great Ocean Road. We were fortunate to see a bunch of koalas in the trees along the road. I will add a picture tomorrow.

Radical Christians Are Not Radically Australian

I am teaching a Centre College class on Australian National Identity in Australia this month.

Today we visited with a fine Christian ministry, Urban Neighbors of Hope. They work in poor and immigrant suburbs east of Melbourne. Their main task is to live the gospel of love with those who need it most. I had not realized that they were a project of the Church of Christ, a cousin to the American denomination of the same name. What was even more surprising for a church with such a Protestant heritage, UNOH has a semi-monastic initiation structure, vow, and commitment. They do allow, even encourage, marriage, which makes a huge difference in how a monastic life plays out. They require, though, that both members of a married couple join the community, or not at all.

UNOH produces community for people who want to live a life of radical Christian commitment. There are small Christian communities like it all over the world. This community was started by an Australian, but he and his family now run the international version of UNOH from a Bangkok slum.

It has been hard for almost every Australian we have met to explain what is distinctive about Australian national identity. I think it was particularly hard for the people in UNOH because their vision of Christianity transcends national identity as much as they can.

The Touchiest Australian Issue: How the Aborigines Were Treated

I am teaching a Centre College class on Australian National Identity in Australia this month.

A central front in the Australian culture war is over the "stolen generations" of aboriginal children who were taken from their families and raised in mission schools, fostered out, or adopted out. Conservatives have contested whether the policy was really bad, as well as whether it was really as extensive as liberal scholars and ideologues have contended.

The initial aim of the policy was to take "half-caste" children, to use the 19th century term. The justification for the policy was that mixed-race children were not accepted in aboriginal communities. The schools and foster placements were designed to help them assimilate to mainstream (white) society. The policy was not, at least officially, directed toward children of aboriginal couples.

Today we took a fine "aboriginal heritage tour" sponsored by the Royal Botanical Garden in Melbourne. Our guide, Brian, talked primarily about the many uses aborigines made of the plants in the garden. He started us off, though, with his own story. "I am a member of the stolen generation" he began. He said that he, his brother, and his sister were taken from their mother when he was two. He was adopted by a white Melbourne family. He did not see his siblings for 30 years.

However the policy to remove some children from aborigine mothers may have been conceived, it sure feels like their lives were stolen to some of those children, now grown to adulthood.

Australia Was British Until the 1960s

I am teaching a Centre College class on Australian National Identity in Australia this month.

It has been very hard for the Australians we have read and talked to to say with confidence when "Australia" begins. Part of the difficulty is that the political dates are not the emotional ones. 1788, when the First Fleet landed, is commemorated as Australia Day. Yet the fleet came to establish a convict colony -- not something that Australians want to celebrate, even today. 1901 is when the federated Commonwealth began, but the New Year's Day anniversary was just the bureaucrats' deadline to acknowledge a sense of unity that either already existed, or had not yet been achieved. Gallipoli, the World War One battle in which Australian troops fought bravely but futilely, is the emotional birthday of Australia, but is not politically significant.

What has been coming clear to me is that Australians thought of themselves as British into the 1960s. World War II caused a rude awakening to the fact that Britain could not protect Australia -- and worse, would not if it cost much. America would thereafter come to be a more important military ally. In the 1960s Australia started incorporating Aborigines fully in the national conception of who made up the Australian nation; it was only in 1967 that a referendum passed to include Aborigines in the national census. It was Britain that gradually weaned Australia from being an overseas part of Britain. The last straw, according to David Malouf, was when Britain joined the Common Market - turning toward Europe and thus turning away from Australia.

As David Malouf said in his Quarterly Essay on Australia's British heritage, "Being tumbled out of the nest was the making of us."

"Immigrants" as Pre-Australians

I am teaching a Centre College class on Australian National Identity in Australia this month.

Today we went to Melbourne's fine Immigration Museum, located in the former Customs House. We talked with Georgie Meyer, the director of public programs who led our tour and answered our questions, about who the museum served. Most of the local adults who visit are from British and other European descent. The more recent immigrants, from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, are very unlikely to come on their own.

What I take from this is that the social category "immigrant" is a status between "newcomer" and "old stock descendant." Groups thought of a original settlers are founders, not immigrants (Samuel Huntington says as much, talking about the U.S.). On the other end are groups in which the original immigrant generation is still alive. They don't go to the Immigration Museum to hear their story, they go to the [ethnic] Cultural Center to live their story.

Immigrant is not just a temporal status, though. An immigrant group is assimilated into the "pre-Australian" path. They are part of a larger category, defined not by where they came from, but by what they are about to become. Recent migrants might go back home. Immigrants, on the other hand, can be seen, in retrospect, to be here to stay. Immigrants are migrants turning into Australians.

This insight applies to the United States, and other settler societies, as well.

The Convict Stain

I am teaching a Centre College class on Australian National Identity in Australia this month.

We took a tour of Melbourne today. Our able tour guide, a proud Melburnian, emphasized that Melbourne, unlike Sydney and most of the other Australian cities, was not founded by convicts but free settlers. He even allowed that other colonies, later states, in Australia thought Melbourne and Victoria, the state of which it is the capital, were a bit snooty because they did not have the "convict stain."

In fact, though, convicts were sent to Melbourne from its settlement in 1836, often as the indentured servants of free settlers or as indentured laborers in surveying parties. From 1845 to 1849 convicts were sent directly to Melbourne as "Exiles" who had the freedom on the colony, but were not permitted to return to England until their term was served.

Richard Hughes wrote his great book on the convict foundations of Australia, The Fatal Shore, because growing up in Australia the convict past was ignored. The convict stain still lived, though expressed more by silence and ignorance than by cover-up and shame.

Our guide appears to have been raised in the pre-1960s era when the convict past was simply not discussed. It was fascinating to see that the shadow of the convict stain lives on.

The Bushman and the Farmer

I am teaching a Centre College class on Australian National Identity in Australia this month.

In 1958 Australian historian Russel Ward published The Australian Legend. He argued that the bushman -- the men who worked in the Australian bush at whatever was to be done, mostly on sheep stations -- loom large as icons in the Australian national identity. Ward's book was a landmark in Australia's thinking of its own national identity. The easy-going, egalitarian, earthy, matey bushman has been read as the foundation of a society of similar virtues. Ward's thesis has been controversial for 50 years, but it is still a powerful starting point for thinking of the Australian-ness of Australians.

Ward explicitly compares the Australian frontier legend with the American version, as articulated by Frederick Jackson Turner. There are similar types in the two frontiers, the cowboy having much in common with the bushman. Still, Ward concludes that the American emphasis on the independent yeoman farmer led to American individualism. The Australian outback, though, was just drier and harsher than the American plains. Instead of family farms, Australian agriculture rested on sheep stations controlled by rich owners. The bushman is an employee. The distinctive virtue that bushman developed in those more difficult geographic and economic circumstances is that distinctive Australian virtue of "mateship." Ward sees this as the foundation of Australia's greater collectivism, when compared with American individualism.

Ward makes a rich argument, which I think holds up in its main points.

Burkas at St. Kilda's.

I am teaching a Centre College class on Australian National Identity in Australia this month.

For our first full day in Australia, I took everyone to the beach. This was fun for the students, and had the practical effect of beating jet lag. Our bodies spent the day adjusting internally to the Australian sun clock, and they were so tired afterwards they went to bed at a reasonable time (I think - I do not enquire to closely).

St. Kilda's is an human-scaled beach town just down the tram from central Melbourne. We were advised to get off at the Luna Park stop. We puzzled at the name until we saw the front gate of the amusement park of that name, a four story clown's head. We walked through the clowns' gigantic mouth into an old-fashioned amusement park, with bumper cars, rocking "ships," and a big old roller-coaster running the perimeter. The one oddity of the rides was the "hellarious" haunted house, featuring evil clowns.

Every world city features wonderful cross-cultural mixes. Australians with Japanese tattoos, Americans with Aussie Rules Football team shirts, a Japanese girl with an "I don't give a chuck" tee-shirt that showed a Chuck Taylor sneaker. My favorite sighting of the day came within Luna Park. Muslim mother and daughter, Pakistani at a guess. Daughter in modest Muslim apparel - covered head, arms, legs. Mother in full burka, only her eyes showing. Both laughing, heading to the rides. And both wearing Crocs - pink for daughter, purple for mom.

Go calmly mixing world.

Happy New Year From Fiji - Tomorrow

I am teaching a Centre College class on Australian National Identity in Australia this month.

We are in Fiji on a day-long layover on our way to Melbourne. We left Los Angeles on New Year's Eve (we watched the ball drop in Times Square on streaming video on a student laptop, then blew noisemakers while we waited at the gate). When we arrived it was already the Second (thanks to the International Date Line).

I was going to store our luggage and force sociology on the students by taking cabs to a Hindu Temple and the one-block main street. For ten hours.

Wiser heads prevailed, though, and through the help of Margaret Travel Agency in Nadi airport - that is, by Margaret herself - we instead bought three rooms for the 22 of us at a modest beach resort. We stored the luggage, got to shower and swim in the ocean and the pool, eat a leisurely lunch, and head back to the last leg of the flight refreshed.

I recommend this plan to all.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and I Write to You From Australia in the New Year!

The Gruntled Center will take its annual Christmas vacation for the rest of the year.

I hope you enjoy your Christmas week, however you spend it.

If You Are Reading This, Your Odds of Lasting Marriage Are Better Than Even

Divorce360.org has a divorce calculator that lets you calculate the odds of your marriage ending in divorce. The basic finding is that college graduates who did not marry very young have good odds of their marriages lasting. Different generations have different odds, which are built in to the calculator.

Based on old general data on who reads blogs, and anecdotal but very current information on who reads this blog, I would say confidently that the Gruntled Center audience is in the good end of the distribution of lasting marriages. Nothing is guaranteed, of course, but your odds are good. So relax and enjoy.

Thinking About a World Without Newspapers

The Gruntleds are heavy news consumers. We listen to National Professors Radio -- I mean, National Public Radio -- each morning. A normal evening in our house has everyone on a laptop reading some kind of news, with cable news in the background, leading into fake news on TV. We have among us dozens of news and semi-news blogs on RSS feed. Mrs. G. has the BBC website as her homepage (I, of course, have Centre College :-) ). Many a blog starts with the New York Times.com or CNN.com or BBC.com. And we subscribe to two daily newspapers, which I read religiously. If news were cut off, we would be in big trouble.

But if newspapers disappeared, our life would barely change.

It is clear that newspapers are in big trouble everywhere. Recently I read some speculation that one consequence of the current recession might be to decimate newspapers as an industry, shrinking down to the very big and the very local.

On the whole I can see more benefits than costs to converting news delivery to electronic forms. They are easier to search, quote, save, and link together.

My only concern is that there is not enough money in online news to support reporters, especially local reporters. Local news may become entirely a part-time "mom job" carried by stringers. We already have the example of the California paper that is written entirely by part-timers in India, reworking public sources. National news may become a subset of cable news. I dearly hope that subscription models of national news sources might work, but I can't think of any right now that I feel a need to subscribe to. Television is profitable because it includes ads in the one information stream it offers at a time, but television is a very bad medium for news.

We do need news, and that means news that pays. We don't need newspapers.

The Coffee House Test of a Crunchy Suburb

David Brooks introduces the useful concept of the "crunchy suburb" in On Paradise Road. This is an inner suburb of a big city. It has more of the people he called "bobos" (bourgeois bohemians) in an earlier book. Among suburbs, it is likely to have more professionals, better schools, and more sophisticated consumer goods.

We are in Mt. Lebanon, a Pittsburgh suburb where my sister is hosting Christmas this year. It meets these criteria. Mt. Lebanon has, I think, been more corporate and Republican in the past, but is shifting in the professional and Democratic direction that many good-schools inner suburbs are.

Danville, KY, is too much of a small town to have such nuances among the various sections of town. The coffee houses are in the middle of town and serve everyone from all the neighborhoods and "suburbs." We needed to come to a larger city to see a crunchy suburb in action.

We are sitting in a coffee house in Mt. Lebanon. It filled up just after school drop-off. Mrs. G. suggested that this is a measure of a crunchy suburb. The first necessity of a weekday morning is to get the kids to school. The second necessity is espresso.

Rick Warren is a Centrist Choice

Rick Warren is a leading voice in the next generation of evangelical Protestants engaging the world. I thought it was a great idea that Warren was the one Barack Obama and John McCain went to together to reach an evangelical audience that might not pay attention to worldly politics at all. Warren could have taken the enormous success of the Saddleback Church and A Purpose-Driven Life and rested on it. Instead, he, his wife, and his church have reached out into addressing the problems of the worst-off people in the whole world. This is a great thing for evangelicalism.

As to his rejection of homosexual practice (not homosexual people), that is what Southern Baptists do, that is how they read the Bible, that is the official position of the denomination. And so do most evangelicals, who make up thirty to forty percent of Americans. Rejecting a third of the electorate out of hand always gets liberals and Democrats in trouble.

President-elect Obama wants to bridge the gap and reduce the polarization in the nation. That is what he has said all along. That is part of what we elected him for. Choosing Rick Warren, with whom he does not agree on all worldly issues but does agree on the crucial question of who is the president's savior, is a good step in bringing all Americans together.

Catholic Dogs vs. Presbyterian Dogma

Funny Videos

OK, this is a prank. It is a good one, though, down to the misspelling of Catholicism.

Cohabitation Makes You FAT

Women who cohabit tend to gain weight because they start eating the junk their boyfriends favor. Married women, by contrast, make healthier meals for their families, which is one of the main reasons that husbands have longer and healthier lives than unmarried men do.

Involved Fathers Stay; Involved Husband-Fathers Stay More

Lisa Belkin in the New York Times is reporting a very interesting study from Natasha Cabrera at the University of Maryland on what makes unmarried fathers stay. Cabrera and colleagues found that the more involved the father was with the pregnancy and birth of his child, the more likely he was to still be there three years later -- if he had moved in with the mom. It did not make a big difference if they also got married in this period. Cabrera concludes that what matters is the father's "personal involvement" in the mother's and child's future, not the "paperwork."

I draw a somewhat different conclusion. The data for this study comes from the "Fragile Families" study, so they have already been selected for their weak connection to marriage. These are couples who get pregnant outside of marriage, and do not marry because they are pregnant. Some marry well after the birth of the child, and many don't marry at all. This is the subculture with the weakest understanding of marriage as a social institution to begin with. They do not see how marriage can help them strengthen their relationship in the first place, before children. They see marriage as a seal, even a reward, for an already strong relationship. This is one of the reasons that marriages in this subculture are rare and weak to begin with.

Cabrera's conclusion, that marriage is just paperwork, is not fully true for the anti-marriage subculture she is studying, and is less and less true the further you get from fragile families and move toward solid middle-class marriage subcultures.

The Census Bureau Gives Up on Black Marriage

The exciting headline in the New York Times is "Two-Parent Black Families Showing Gains." The percent of black kids living with two parents leaped up from an abysmal 35% in 2004 to a somewhat less abysmal 39.5% in 2007. This is a surprising -- nay, improbably large -- gain in so short a time. The comparable white figure is 77%.

Now, I think there probably is a small but very encouraging uptick in the middle-class black kids living with their married parents. Call this the Obama end of the spectrum.

But this big improvement is, alas, partly a statistical trick. In 2007, the Census Bureau decided to call "parents" any man or woman they lived with. The Bureau stopped counting whether the couple was married or not or even whether they were the biological parents of the child. This change fudges the numbers of kids with married parents for all groups. It is particularly bad for African American kids, though, because they are most likely to live with unmarried parents.

On Humbly Requesting that the Church's Natural Leaders Serve the Church, Despite the Aggro

I received a comment on yesterday's post from Alex, who I know speaks for many:

Perhaps if the PC(USA) got rid of its "affirmative action" policies o the 60s era, the "tall steeple pastors" would feel more welcome to serve as part of the leadership of the denomination. But my question is: Why would a tall steeple pastor like Vic Pentz WANT to serve as a leader in the denomination on the national level? Churches like Peachtree Pres, quite frankly, don't need the structures/organization that the PCUSA provides, because they already have the available personnel, money, resources, capital etc to do their own programming exactly the way they want to without help from the Presbytery/Synod/GA.

I agree completely.

The big successful churches, who produce most of the growth and carry out most of the local programs of the denomination, need the Presbyterian Church (USA) less than other congregations do. But the denomination needs them. The pastors of tall steeple churches are not the best pastors in the church -- fine pastors are found in all kinds of congregations, and each kind of congregation needs a different kind of pastor. My point is that the denomination needs tall steeple pastors, and their equivalents among the Ruling Elders, to bring their leadership and expertize to help run the denominational structures, too.

So how do we get tall steeple pastors and leading elders to want to invest their precious time and energy in leading the PC(USA)? We honor their leadership. In sociological terms, we pay them in status. We thank them for the wise work they have done, and ask them, nicely, to take on further tasks for the larger church even though that takes them away from their main job, which is running a major local congregation.

The successful leaders of our major congregations, both ministers and elders, are the core of that great collective resource of the church, its Establishment. Of course there are ministers and elders who are not in tall steeple churches who should be in that Establishment, too. We should honor them and ask them nicely to serve the whole denomination, even though they, too, have more pressing local matters to attend to.

The big difference is that we used to honor the people we wanted to be our Establishment because we knew they had better things to do. Now we treat them with suspicion. Not surprisingly, they skip the denominational structure and go about the business of being church. Sometimes, in frustration, they create parallel denomination-like structures so that they can get on with it already, without all the politics and aggravation.

We need to honor the Establishment precisely because being the Establishment is a costly sacrifice.

Pentz and the Presbyterian Establishment

The Witherspoon Society has posted a response to my essay on Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment from Rev. Vic Pentz, pastor of Peachtree Presbyterian Church. Peachtree is the largest congregation in the Presbyterian Church (USA). Pentz had, it appears, been asked to sign a petition critical of the idea of rebuilding an establishment. He declined to sign. Witherspoon draws the conclusion that Pentz, and by extension other large-church pastors, "has more important things to do" than be part of an establishment.

I believe that is the wrong conclusion to draw from Pentz' response. Here is what he wrote in response to the anti-establishment petition:

"I am pretty confident that I speak for many other large church pastors in saying that when it comes to deciding whether to commit time and energy to the pressing concerns and sheer joys of ministry, or to fight for the reins of the PCUSA, there is no contest.

Everyone can relax.

We’re out in the world with our congregations joining God in the work of the Kingdom."

Vic Pentz does not say that the Presbyterian Church does not need an establishment. He does not say that he does not want to be part of the church's establishment. He does not say that pastors and elders of the denomination's leading congregations have no concern with leading the church's work.

That is why Vic Pentz helped found the Presbyterian Global Fellowship, an organization of tall steeple churches doing part of the job of the denomination. PGF is based in Peachtree Presbyterian Church.

Vic Pentz says he doesn't have time to fight for the reins of the PCUSA. He and churches like his are already doing the work that the PCUSA should be doing. If the existing power structure of the PC(USA) supported rebuilding an establishment of authoritative leaders (authoritative, not authoritarian), then Pentz and other dynamic Teaching Elders and Ruling Elders wouldn't have to fight to run help run the denomination -- they would be asked to.

The Witherspoon Establishment vs. The Presbyterian Establishment

I thank the Witherspoon Society, the Presbyterian Church (USA)'s venerable liberal activist group, for posting a critique of my Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment. A distinguished group of professors, lions of the Sixties struggles that created the current affirmative-action model of church authority, defend the status quo. In so doing they bring out several misconceptions about my argument. As one young blogger wrote, "I'm not sure what the 'Witherspoon Society' is, but I can only hope that one day I write something that gets that many teachers cranky enough to sign something like that..."

They want to fight the old war; I am ready to move on to the new one.

The "PCUSA Professors' Response" reads my argument as nostalgia for sacramental authority of the clergy. They cite the stirring Biblical claim that in Christ "there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female" (Gal. 3:28) as proof of the need for structures in the church to represent different demographic groups. The cite Neibuhr to argue that we are prone to distort all human structures with our pride and sin, including structures that were meant for good. Most importantly, they believe that “The challenge for the PCUSA in the 21st century is to figure out how to further the work of reconciliation in a world with different social realities and challenges than the world of the 20th century.”

My point exactly. The affirmative action model championed by these activist professors in their youth is outdated now. Demographic representation rules were meant to foster a consciousness that diversity is good. They worked. Now those required structures perpetuate judging people's fitness for church leadership by their race, sex, and age. Galatians 3:28 is a call for the church to get beyond the world's obsessions with ethnicity, class, and sex -- not permanently institutionalize them in the church. What we need is not nostalgia for the structures of two generations ago, but a clear focus on spiritual service to Jesus Christ and his Great Commission. We should make every effort to try to draw into the burdens of church leadership people from all backgrounds who love and competently serve the church.

The church will always face internal competition, sometimes even conflict. What has gotten us through as a supernatural institution is our commitment to Christ and Scripture, and generous help from the Holy Spirit. What has gotten us through as a human institution is a body of leaders, both Teaching Elders and Ruling Elders, who have learned great practical wisdom about how to run Presbyterian institutions. When those leaders work together for the good of the church, we honor them as the Establishment who can be relied on in crisis. The church faces crises today, as we did in the past, and we will have to rely on our leaders in the future as much as we had to in the past.