Modern Social Imaginaries 1

I am working my way through Charles Taylor's Modern Social Imaginaries. I am thinking of using this book in my Macrosociological Theory class. Early in the book, Taylor illuminates one of the great problems in teaching social theory: it is an intellectual's way of looking at the world. Most people do not live their lives thinking about the theory underlying even their own actions, much less the order of society as a whole.

Thus, Taylor proposes the idea of a "social imaginary." Ordinary people do not think in terms of theory, but they do think. They do things for reasons that make sense of their world. Moreover, what they try to do is limited by what they imagine will be an effective way to act. A social imaginary is a shared notion of how the world works and what actions make sense in it. Doing those actions, if they tend to work, makes the whole imaginary seem more true, more legitimate.

In teaching social theory I am initiating students into the small circle of social theorists, at least for a time. Yet they - we - are already participants in the social imaginary that we theorize about and with.

Taylor says that one thing that is distinctive and important about modern social imaginaries is that they do incorporate some elements of explicit social theory. The great modern revolutions, especially the American and the French, enacted theoretical ideas that had been debated and thought through by intellectuals in discourse with other educated participants in making social life. Thereafter, the social imaginary included some theories about individuals, equality, and liberty.

When we are studying social theories, one of the important ideas we will need to keep in mind is Taylor's theory of the not-quite-theoretical social imaginary.

Half of Kids are First-Borns

The other day I noted that a fifth of older Gen X women had no children. To complete the set, I made a rough calculation, based on Census data, of the proportion of their children in each birth order position. For women 40 to 44 in 2006, their children were distributed thus.

Onlies: 21.1%
Firsts (besides onlies): 32.1
Seconds: 32.1
Thirds: 10.5
Fourths: 2.8
Fifths and beyond: .8

What Would a Presbyterian Establishment Do Right Now?

I have been promoting rebuilding an authoritative (not authoritarian) establishment for the Presbyterian Church. The current votes in the church illustrate why we need such a thing.

The church has several amendments to the constitution before it for presbytery votes. One is the perennial attempt to remove the requirement that officers of the church be married or chaste in singleness. We keep voting on this because we have no establishment that can work out a settlement, behind the scenes and within the constitution, that will allow for the normal historic variation within the church on just how strictly each presbytery must subscribe to the constitution.

The other vote before the church has gotten much less attention than the sex amendment, but is more important in the long run. This is the proposal to adopt a new Book of Order. The proposed new book would be a general framework that could be adapted by the different presbyteries. If we adopted this new understanding of what the constitutional rules of order are for, we would not have to convulse the whole church every couple of years with a sex fight.

The Presbyterian Establishment, insofar as we have one, should come out strongly for this new kind of Book of Order. If we understood the constitution as a constitution, rather than as a rulebook, the Establishment could better function as an establishment within each presbytery, and across the whole church.

In Real Life, Awesome

My niece, a first-grader, uttered this dispatch from the cutting edge of youth lingo:

"Awesome. Really awesome. Seriously awesome. In real life, awesome."

Pronatalist Payroll Tax Policy

Philip Longman writes about the scary possibilities of the coming population decline. He and New America Foundation colleague David Gray have been working on a "new social contract." At the root such a contract they propose policies and cultural changes to assure that there is a new generation to have a social contract with.

One of the reasons population decline is scary is that in the future there won't be enough workers to support the retirement and medical entitlements of retired workers. Longman and Gray, therefore, propose that the payroll tax for parents be reduced by a third for each child while the kids are under 18. Parents of three children would pay no payroll tax while raising those future workers. Employers would keep putting in their share, though, and come retirement, the parents would get their full benefit from a grateful nation/economy. Longman and Gray propose to make this full benefit contingent on the kids graduating from high school, which is coming to be a minimum credential for workers.

This proposal seems to me to be sensible. The solution and the problem are tied together rationally. The policy would be simple to figure out and do. And policies that support the next generation of workers are not only good for the economy, they are good for all the family values of the nation.

15% of a Rich Nation Are Not Religious

The latest edition of the American Religious Identification Survey has found that 15% of Americans are not religious. This is up slightly from the 2001 survey, but is almost double the result found in 1990.

Educated people are less likely to be religious. Some think that religion is primarily a way of explaining the world, and educated people have learned another explanation. However, educated people are also more likely to be well off in every way - in their finances, their relationships, their psychic security. I think religious faith, for adults, is not primarily cognitive. It is not an explanation or set of ideas. Theology is for intellectuals. For most people, God is a source of confidence that their lives mean something, and a source of comfort that they are cared for in good times and, especially in bad.

When educated, secure people suffer serious setbacks, they often see that their cognitive idea of religion is not enough. For some this means a crisis away from faith. For others, like many of the no-religion people I meet, their crisis can be toward a real appreciation of the emotional roots of faith.

It is harder for rich, secure people to be religious. If you think you are doing well, are secure in your position, and that you got there by your own efforts, it is hard to feel gratitude to God. When bad things happen, it is easier for people to see how much we rely on the protecting hand of Providence.

Rich, secure, educated people who are religious typically do not think they achieved their lives on their own. The feel blessed and are grateful for their blessing which they do not deserve.

1/5th of Older Gen X Women are Childless

The rule of thumb is that about 87% of the women in a population will have children. In the United States and other industrialized nations the percentage has fallen below that as we move from the first wave of Baby Boomers, born in the 1940s, to the first wave of Gen Xers, born in the 1960s. By the time they were 44, the usual end of a woman's fertile years, about 86% of older Boomer women had children. For older Gen Xers, the number is 81%.

Put another way, almost a fifth of older Gen X women, the "Atari wave" as opposed to the "Nintendo wave" of the '70s, will have no children. Gen Xers are more likely to be educated, and to have more education, than their predecessors. All those years of schooling and career starting eat into baby time. This catches many forty-something women by surprise. Also, as the most divorced-upon generation, the Xers were much slower to marry and have kids than their predecessors were, for fear of screwing their kids up.

It is too early to know the completed fertility of the Millennials, or even the later wave of Xers. If the increasing numbers of weddings by young Millennials that I get invited to are any indication, though, the rising generation of fertile women may reverse the trend of their "lost generation" predecessors.

Old Dads Risk Dumber Kids

Australian psychiatrist John J. McGrath and colleagues found that children of older fathers were likely to have lower IQs than children of younger fathers. Their kids were also more likely to be schizophrenic or autistic.

The children of 50 year old fathers had average IQs 6 points lower than the children of 20 year old fathers. That is half a standard deviation - a pretty substantial difference.

A woman has all her eggs at birth. They run the risk of wearing out and breaking down, which is one of the reasons that children of older mothers are more likely to have some birth defects. However, the children of older mothers did not score any lower on the intelligence measures in this study.

Sperm, on the other hand, and made continuously. It was thought that this prevented the kind of breakdown with age that eggs show. McGrath and colleagues, though, point out that there are many more steps in the copying process to produce sperm in older fathers. The sperm of 20-year-old men are the result of about 150 cell divisions; those of 50-year-old men, 840. Each division provides a new opportunity for mutation and error.

The Peculiar Religious Obliviousness of "Kings"

NBC's new series "Kings" was advertised as a "what if" story of a king arising in a place that looked remarkably like America after a major war. This looked like a large-scale epic, beautifully shot, with Ian McShane in the leading role. The capitol, rebuilt from the rubble, looked like the proposed Freedom Tower to be built on the World Trade Center site. The Gruntleds tuned in, looking for a modern political allegory, and wondering who thought monarchy was the answer.

To our surprise, the story is built directly out of the story of King Saul and King David. McShane's "King Silas" leads Shiloh in a war with Gath. Young David Shepherd single-handedly defeats Gath's Goliath (tank) while rescuing the king's son, Jack. The story does not shy away from God - King Silas takes his mission from a divine sign. Young David is annointed by a preacher named Samuel(s).

And yet, after a valiant hour, we gave up. The show is well done - good acting, decent dialogue, really nice photography. But I just couldn't forget the Biblical story in order to get into this story - not after the show went to such great lengths to remind us of the biblical story. This wasn't, as the official website contends, "a contemporary re-telling of the timeless tale of David and Goliath." This is the story of David and Saul - but without God as the central character.

The Bible is a rich field of story and image, the most fertile bed of the imagination of the West. I have no problem with allegories and analogies drawn from Biblical models. But it seems to me a perverse misreading of the Bible to treat its stories as if they were themselves allegories of politics in religious dress.

I was once in a group of earnest young people wrestling with how to understand the mystical experience of God. One young man, not really in sympathy with the project, said it would be easy to find out: just go into the desert and fast for forty days. If you had a mystical experience, then it was real. This was such a perversely backwards way of understanding mysticism that we were left speechless. If you go into the desert and fast, but are not earnestly seeking God, you are not recreating the absolutely vital core of the desert mystics' experience.

The story of David and Saul is the most poignant story in the Bible of trying to serve God while wielding earthly power. If you tell the story of Saul and David but they are not earnestly seeking to fulfill the vocation God gave them, you have missed the vital core of the David and Saul (not David and Goliath) story.

Facebook Protestant Award

Last week, as I was recovering from surgery, I remarked a particularly happy milestone with this status update on Facebook:

"[Gruntled] says no painkillers + coffee = clearer head, better work ethic"

To which a very Catholic friend replied:

"if that fb update were to enter a contest for the most protestant update ever, it would win."

Men's and Women's Different Sexual Peaks Not a Tragedy, But a Complement

In class I mentioned the well-known stereotype that men reach their sexual peak in their early 20s, whereas women reach their sexual peak in their mid-30s. Afterwards I realized that I did not really know the research behind this claim, nor what, exactly, "sexual peak" means.

Alicia Barr, Angela Bryan, and Douglas Kenrick did research at Arizona State on whether people think men peak in their early 20s and women in their mid-30s. They do. And what most people seem to have in mind for "peak" is a little different for men and women. For men, sexual peak means their peak of desire; for women, their peak of satisfaction. When they asked when men and women peaked in sexual desire, satisfaction, and frequency (of intercourse), men were still thought to peak earlier than women on each dimension, though they were pretty close together, of necessity, on frequency.

Alfred Kinsey's plaint that this difference was a tragedy. Some have even suggested that it would be good to change our mating system to bring older women together with younger men, matching peak to peak. This is what might called the "cougar strategy."

Barr and colleagues, though, speculated on why this difference might have evolved. Men prefer young women who are at their most fertile. Women favor older men when they have the most resources. Different sexual peaks would counteract these opposing desires with a balancing sexual motivation.

If young men with few resources most desire young women, they will compete harder for them, wooing them with ambition and commitment. The young women, prudently, are not so swayed by sexual desire that they do not choose wisely among their suitors. If women in their mid-30s, by contrast, are heading to the end of their childbearing years just as their male counterparts -- their husbands, for most women -- are becoming most successful, they will compete better to hold their mate's attraction with more satisfying sex. For both men and women, the shifting balance of passion and prudence across the childbearing years strengthens marriage.

Contrasting sexual peaks is an instance of the marvelous complementarity of marriage.

Making Marriage Ordinary is the Best Role Model of All

Merlene Davis writes a column for the Lexington, KY Herald-Leader. She writes homey, sensible pieces about her husband and children, jobs and schools, their local neighborhood, and sometimes about larger issues. Most papers have a middle-aged mom writing a similar column. I like her column and read it regularly. Davis is black, so often takes an explicitly African-American take on these universal themes.

In today's column Davis has a nice piece about the quiet 25th anniversary celebration she had with her husband recently. She notes that there are many public benefits to marriage. Communities in which marriages are the norm are safer, richer, happier, and more giving. Married people are richer and healthier, too. But the main reason she is married is because she loves her husband, and likes him, too. The feeling, she says, is mutual. The public benefits are gravy.

These micro and macro benefits of marriage are universally true. She says the Davises don't deserve any particular notice for making it to 25 years. Their parents and couples in that generation routinely enjoyed mariages twice that long and then some.

What struck me most in Merlene Davis' column was her modest assessment of how she contributed to the public good:

Through it all, I've never considered us to be examples for younger couples. We are rather run-of-the-mill. Most of our friends, black and white, are ancient, and most have been married much longer than we have.

Davis notes, though, that black America passed a tipping point in the past generation. Marriage is not the norm for most black Americans. This is not true of any other ethnic group. She praises the upcoming annual Black Marriage Day. She and her husband should be role models, encouraging young African-Americans, including their own children, to aim for marriage. And the best role modeling is to make a community where marriage is a normal, "run-of-the-mill" institution that regular people join in. For themselves and for the public good.

The Gender Gap Only Matters If it Hurts Society as a Whole, Over Generations

There is a well-known gender gap in the average pay of men and women. Likewise, there is a gap in the proportion of men and women at the top of most occupations.

People whose main conviction is for equality look at the gender gap and see something bad because men and women aren't the same.

People whose main conviction is for liberty look at the gender gap and see something potentially good because men and women get to choose what they want.

Most of these gaps come from the differences between married fathers and married mothers. Married men respond to parenthood by working more and seeking more money, status, and power. Married women respond to parenthood by working less and trading money, status, and power for greater time to raise their children.

From the perspective of the good of society as a whole, both equality and liberty are means to a greater end. Neither equality nor liberty are ends in themselves. In order for there to be society at all, there have to be children. Having some educated women choose to have children and invest themselves in them is a good thing for society.

On Mental Fogginess

I have felt too mentally foggy since surgery last week to write the blog. Last night I stop taking painkillers. This morning I had caffeine for the first time in almost a week. I feel much clearer right now.

On the other hand, I thought several emails that I wrote over the past few days, including some written from the hospital, were competent -- until the recipients had to ask for clarification of some words that were clearly not the right ones. So I decided I better not try to grade until I could get external validation that my brain was truly up to speed.

When I told my father-in-law the above, he told me of a time he had twisted his back and was on serious pain medication for a week. He did his job through the week - but found afterwards he had no memory of anything he had done.

His conclusion was the punchline of my thought on this subject: "To think that some people take drugs on purpose." Amen.

I don't understand why people would want to have an altered consciousness. I am not talking about medicine that helps give you a normal, focused mind. I am talking about wanting to be high or drunk. I just don't get it.

In many ways I am a regular guy. (More ways than my family will assent to, I maintain). But I know from the long history of alcohol and high-inducing plants found in every culture I have ever heard of, that most people do like an escape (I guess) from this reality. And the well-off seem as likely to seek this escape as the miserable, at least in moderation. I don't condemn this. Jesus made wine - it can't be all bad. But in this particular I am an outlier, in the tail of the distribution.

I don't like to be mentally foggy. I like this reality, seen clearly.

Out of Action for a Bit

I am going in for non-scary surgery this morning. [OK, Mrs. will only allow that it is not very scary.] This will knock me out for a few days.

I am working on a nifty post about the science of the idea that men and women have different "sexual peaks." Stay tuned.

Scratch Beginnings is Not About Race (Surprisingly)

Adam Shepard is white - I know this from his picture on the cover of Scratch Beginnings. Some of the people he lives with in the shelter and works with at the moving company in Charleston, SC, are black. I think. There are clues in the biographies and dialogues he gives us that suggest as much. So does the sheer demography of Charleston. If there is a hero in the book, it is Derrick, the best mover in the company who becomes Shepard's partner and landlord. Several context clues suggest strongly that Derrick is black.

Yet it is a remarkable fact about this book and the world it illuminates that race never intrudes in the story. The men in the shelter and on the several jobs Shepard has seem to be of many hues and ethnicities, but that is not central to their story. And it is not possible that a college-educated Southern white boy did not notice race or did not think about whether it matters. My guess is that Shepard was determined not to make race one of his standards for measuring people. When he was writing his story, his race did not seem to be central to how others were measuring him. I believe he must have made a conscious decision not to tell readers the race of the people he met because it was not really important to the story he was telling.

I take this as a measure of progress. Adam Shepard is of a new generation. Survey research suggests that Millennials think that ethnic variety is a good thing, and race just doesn't tell you much about what another person is like. If this means the rising generation is less obsessed with race than the retiring generation has been, then we are indeed making progress.

Scratch Beginnings Shows the Continuing Power of Privilege

Yesterday I wrote about Adam Shepard's experiment in Scratch Beginnings to work his way up from nothing to something by hard work and careful thrift. He succeeded, which is the main point of his book and a valuable lesson to keep testing.

Shepard also had several advantages that many of the other guys in the homeless shelter did not. He was young, healthy, and educated. He did not come into the shelter with addictions, a criminal record, or children to care for. He was a native English speaker. These are all privileges. Shepard did not ignore the advantages he had. Rather, he was making a case that attitude, work, and prudence can still produce success. He also believes, though of course could not prove with this one-case experiment, that attitude, work, and prudence could overcome the disadvantages that many of the other guys had.

Shepard bolsters his case with some valuable lessons he learned from the people he met in the shelter and on the job. Chapter 7 is entitled "Job Hunting 101 with Professor Phil Coleman." Coleman was one of the "resident nutcases at the shelter that no one paid much attention to." But he did give Shepard a valuable lesson in how to get hired:

You gotta go down to these managers and be like, 'Look here, homeboy. You need me. I'm the best worker you're gonna find, so hire me or not.'

Shepard accepted this as a solid point. He did go on to get a real job by persistently selling himself as a good worker. Shepard also knew the even more important follow-up point:

And after I had a job, it was just a matter of disciplining myself enough to keep that job and save the money that I needed to achieve my financial goals.

This second point was one that, sadly, Professor Coleman never managed to take in, which was why he had had 50 jobs but was still a regular at the homeless shelter.

Scratch Beginnings Shows the Continuing Power of Hard Work

Adam Shepard read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed in college. As an experiment, she tried to live on minimum wage, and found it nearly impossible to feed, clothe, and, especially, house herself on minimum wage. Shepard wondered if it would really be so hard to work up from nothing, if you were disciplined and not self-destructive. Putting his money where his mouth was, he took the clothes on his back and $25 to Charleston (chosen at random). He tells his story in Scratch Beginnings.

He found a homeless shelter the first night. He took every job he could find. He managed his money very carefully. He didn't smoke, drink, or buy lottery tickets - the specific ways his sheltermates wasted their little extra money.

Most importantly, he learned that he was never going to get a regular job by filling out want ads when he lived at a homeless shelter. Instead, he took himself to an employer who caught his eye - a moving company, but it could have been any of dozens of blue collar jobs - and made a determined pitch that he was a hard worker who could be relied on. They took a chance on him. He wasn't a great mover, but he learned. He worked civilly with the other movers, especially the good ones. And he just kept showing up reliably, taking harder jobs as they were offered.

Shepard gave himself one year to have himself housed with next month's rent ready (Ehrenreich's standard) plus have a working vehicle and $2,500 in the bank. Through hard work and diligence, he met those goals within 8 months. He also made friends, and learned to respect the guys at the bottom who kept working honestly.

Adam Shepard gives a good answer to Barbara Ehrenreich's main claim that the bottom rung jobs are not enough to sustain a worker.

Can Gen-X Bring Outcomes Assessment to the Church?

My fellow Presbyterian-poker Michael Kruse has a good post, "Budgets Are Not Moral Documents." He takes issues with evangelical Left leader Jim Wallis, who has famously argued that budgets are, indeed, moral documents. Wallis' contention is that you tell what an organization values by what it spends on. I think this is partly true. But Kruse makes the important point that what really matters to the world is not what you spent money on, but what effect your spending, and your work, has.

The church, and the non-profit world in general, are just pervaded with the idea that what matters is what we put in to achieving our goals, not what we get out of our money and work. Kruse is a church reformer trying to get the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to pay more attention to the effects of its spending than their good intentions (or worse, to their job protection intentions). Mrs. G. is an education reformer trying to redirect the attention of public schools in a parallel way. Higher education, where I labor, is beset by ranking systems that measure inputs, like endowments size and spending per pupil, and not outcomes - what students learn and what kind of people they become as a result.

I have written about the broad difference in mindset between Baby Boomers and Generation X. I don't know where Kruse fits in this narrative. I do know that Wallis is a classic Boomer. I am on the cusp between the two generations, so I daily notice the difference. Boomers are often content to be judged by the morality of their rhetoric. Xers are more likely to eschew rhetoric and Just Do It.

One of the great achievements of Gen X as they now come to power could be to shift the practice of institutions from talking a good game to doing what it takes to actually improve achievement.

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.