A Secular Age 5

From the Theory Camp discussion of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.

At the halfway point of Theory Camp we came to a really big issue. Taylor writes that what we experience now is:

“the sense that all order, all meaning comes from us. We encounter no echo outside. In the world read this way, as so many of our contemporaries live it, the natural/supernatural distinction is no mere intellectual abstraction. A race of humans has arisen which has managed to experience its world entirely as immanent. In some respects, we may judge this achievement as a victory for darkness, but it is a remarkable achievement nonetheless.” (376)

Several of us saw the sociological reality that many people act as if their world is entirely immanent, with no reference beyond this world. Taylor's larger philosophical point, though, was eye-opening. To really grasp that there is a "race of humans" (though I think it is a class) who believe that all meaning comes from themselves, and who experience the world as entirely immanent because they believe that this world is all there is - was scary. "That's just crazy" said Scott* (possibly not his real name).

A very mind-expanding day. Worth the price of admission. And coffee.

A Secular Age 4

From the Theory Camp discussion of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.

Charles Taylor treats Reform - the larger movement that includes the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and their precursors - as the social movement that ultimately and without intending to produced today's secular subculture. His argument is surefooted and dense. At one point, though, he makes this remarkable admission:

“a very long-lasting bent in European culture towards Reform, in the widest sense … [is] the attempt by elites to make over society, and the life and practices of non-elites, so as to conform to what the elites identify as higher standards. This is a remarkable fact. I don’t pretend to have an explanation for it.” (242)

His main point is that the religious mission to fully Christianize the masses had a secondary goal of civilizing them. The irony is that civilizing, which was to be a secondary benefit of evangelizing and conversion, came to displace evangelizing as the primary goal. And this is doubly true of all the many subsequent social reform movements, which are still largely carried about by religiously motivated elites.

I have been puzzling over the "remarkable fact" for which he has no explanation. I put this question to the Theory Camp this morning. "Scott" (not her real name) offered that the elites might want to reform the masses in the elites' own image as an exercise of power. Scott apologized for offering so cynical an explanation. We then discussed the various "hermeneutics of suspicion" as a distinctively modern way of understanding - and undermining - seemingly well-meant actions.

I am disinclined to a cynical view. To be sure, every social movement is tinged with pride and self-assertion. Still, I think that the many movements to lift up the poor, marginal, and even self-destructive are primarily motivated by a good desire to help. They may be misguided, soft-headed, and produce unintended consequences. But the motivation is, on the whole, good. And the fact that a segment of the elite is moved to help the worse off is a basic fact about our society.

Taylor says that the great ethical issue for a secular society is whether this movement toward mutual benefit can really be produced by secularity itself, or whether it is parasitical on a prior religious culture, and draws mostly from religious people today. My observation is that people who stick with good works for the badly off are mostly religious people. In principle a sustained good works movement of secularists could be possible. But I don't think it likely. When secularists want the poor helped, they make the state do it, and tax everyone to pay for it. A move which produces more unintended bad consequences than good works that voluntarily come from the (religious) heart.

A Secular Age 3

From the Theory Camp discussion of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.

A great achievement of modern civilization is that the social elite do not spend their time making war on one another. Instead, they make business on one another.

Charles Taylor says that one of the great achievements of our modern moral order is creating "the economy" as an autonomous sphere, which has become the central arena of action for our ruling class. This is the last step in the long social process of taming the feudal nobility.

The nobles were independent military actors through the wars of religion. The revulsion against those wars created the idea of religious toleration and moved religion out of the state and into the new "civil sphere." A side effect was to reign in the nobility to royal power, and to expand the elite to include the non-military gentry. The warrior elite and the gentry elite were both domesticated as educated, civil, advisors and agents of royal power. The English elite broadened to include economic functions, both through the state and through their own business. The English pattern became a model for other national elites.

America, which was born without a warrior caste, or even with nobles, so takes for granted that the ruling class is a business class that this seems like common sense. It is good, therefore, to step back and celebrate the civilizing of the warrior class.

A Secular Age 2

From the Theory Camp discussion of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.

Charles Taylor rehearses the argument that all structure needs some outlet of anti-structure. In the pre-modern "enchanted" world, order exists in tension with disorder, and both need one another. Order is a world of power and inequality, even if it conduces to human flourishing; disordering the world’s order in the name of human solidarity - as in the medieval Carnivale - reminds us of the transcendent which unites and equalizes us.

When, in the modern world, we lost the sense that structure needs its complement of anti-structure, we laid the foundation for secularizing the public sphere. This way also leads to totalitarianism. He sees the French Revolution as the beginning of the eclipse of anti-structure. The revolutionary regime made festivals, as communist regimes do. But these celebratory totalitarian festivals are so dull that they fall with the regime.

Modern liberal societies recognize the need for complementary anti-structures in the division of powers. Pluralist liberalism allows a wide realm of anti-structure in the negative liberty of the private domain. The “public spheres of private life” – art, music, literature, thought, religion – create the voluntary public that complements the obligatory public of the state.

“All structures need to be limited, if not suspended. Yet we can’t do without structure altogether. We need to tack back and forth between codes and their limitation, seeking the better society, without ever falling into the illusion that we might leap out of this tension of opposites into pure anti-structure, which could reign alone, a purified non-code, forever.” (54)

The latter was the ‘60s revolutionaries’ error.

I see the force of this argument intellectually, but resist it in every other way. I have a dread of disorder, and do not see chaos as appealing at all. I would not go so far as to impose order on the unwilling, but I do think their lives would be better, and social life would be better, if everyone lived an orderly life.

Taylor reads the Reformation, as I do, as bringing the ordered life of the monastery out into the world, into the lives of all Christians. Taylor thinks the Reformers were unrealistic in thinking that the masses could sustain that level of order. I believe Taylor is correct. Which brings me to this question: Did the monasteries and convents also need bouts of anti-structure to renew their commitment to order? Or can some people, a small minority no doubt, maintain structure indefinitely without anti-structure?

A Secular Age 1

From the Theory Camp discussion of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.

Each year I run a two-week Theory Camp in which I sit down with a handful of students to work through a hard social theory book. Charles Taylor, a philosopher at McGill, has expanded his 1999 Gifford Lectures to a suitable fat book. We began our discussion today. I will blog as we work though it.

The usual way we talk about secularization is either about how religious institutions have been removed from the state and the public sphere, or about how religious belief has declined and unbelief expanded. Taylor says these are both true. He wants to consider a different sense of secularization that is broader and deeper.

People from all eras and civilizations report experiences of the "fullness" of existence - a connection between their lives and a deeper, richer existence. Fullness gives us a sense that our lives are meaningful, and meaningfully connected to a larger existence. The great religions of the world have articulated how this fullness is connected with a transcendent being, or at least a transcendent plane of existence.

Taylor says that the modern age has developed a third kind of secularization: whole communities now exist that believe fullness is possible without God or reference to a transcendent plane. To be sure, these communities are minorities even in their home societies in the North Atlantic world, and are tiny minorities on the planet as a whole. Nonetheless, Taylor is making sense of a social world that is common to most academic and many other highly educated people.

My interest as a sociologist in Taylor's notion of secularized communities is in finding their distinctive class location.

Arresting the Cat

My sister reports that my nephew, who is 7, "got a disturbing police office kit with handcuffs, sunglasses, and a pistol. Tried to arrest the cat. Not sure what the charge was but
'loitering' comes to mind."

Mrs. G. suggested "Driving While Feline."

Why Are There So Many Family Values Sex Scandals Now?

Most of the people drawn to marriage promotion and family values politics just want to improve marriage and family values. Some people who make a public name for themselves as family values politicians, though, were drawn to the movement to fight their own temptations. They were concerned about sexual morality in the first place because they knew the desires they were suppressing in themselves.

The Republican Party hitched its wagon to the "family values" star a generation ago. When sexual orientation became a major political issue, that, too, became part of the sexual purity package that Republicans used to differentiate themselves from Democrats. Opposing homosexuality and excoriating adultery became almost obligatory for new Republican politicians. Some of the people drawn to the movement at that time had demons they were fighting in themselves. Some of them got elected.

And now the chickens are coming home to roost. There are so many family values Republicans in office with affairs and, more rarely, homosexual encounters in their past that there is a new family values sex scandal almost every week. This week's affair, by State Sen. Paul Stanley over an affair with an intern, follows sex scandals of Mark Sanford and John Ensign and Larry Craig and Mark Foley .... And, no doubt, more to come.

Black Marriage Promotion is a Great Thing

CNN's series "Black in America 2" tonight featured Nisa Muhammad, the promoter of Black Marriage Day. I honor her hands on work in boot camps all over the country to help black couples make or keep good marriages. Black Marriage Day is a worthwhile publicity stunt to push the discussion. African Americans have the lowest marriage rate of any ethnic group in the country.

I learned from the show that Muhammad was motivated by a story that is all too familiar for African Americans today. Her own parents divorced. She married, had five kids, and then divorced herself. She started her black marriage crusade as a single mother. Since then she has married, though she and her husband live in different cities. Muhammad is on the road much of the time.

The next Black Marriage Day is March 28, 2010. The difficulties that African Americans face are a national problem for all Americans. I believe that the low black marriage rate, especially for parents, is the single most important source of the gap between African Americans and other Americans. I think it is particularly important for white people to study and understand black marriage. We will include Black Marriage Day in our family class next spring.

The Highest Status Group in the World

"The Elders are an independent group of eminent global leaders, brought together by Nelson Mandela, who offer their collective influence and experience to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity."

And who does Nelson Mandela call together to make the world better, using nothing but their personal charisma and the bully pulpit?

The Elders

• Kofi Annan
• Ela Bhatt
• Lakhdar Brahimi
• Gro Brundtland
• Fernando H Cardoso
• Jimmy Carter
• Graça Machel
• Mary Robinson
• Desmond Tutu
• Muhammad Yunus

Honorary Elders

• Nelson Mandela
• Aung San Suu Kyi

Top that, anyone.

Country Club Vs. Coffee House, By Party

From the Centre College Alumni Survey.

I asked "Is there a place, besides home or work, where you regularly spend time socializing?" This is a test of the "third place" idea, derived from the work of Ray Oldenberg.

I have noticed that coffee houses have a strong tendency to be left of center and Democratic. I don't think there is a distinctly Republican third place, but my guess is that the country club comes closest.

In the alumni survey, 138 said they socialized at the country club, while 164 socialized at the coffee house, out of about 1400 respondents. There was a 10% overlap between the two groups. The party ratio between the two third places:

Country club: Republican 54%, Democrat 30%
Coffee house: Republican 17%, Democrat 65%

(By the way, of the overlap group, 2/3rds are Democrats.)

Moon Landing

We were on the big family vacation of my childhood, a camping trip from Pennsylvania to Montana. That night we were listening to the car radio as we pulled into a campsite in North Dakota. Riveted. I was 9.

Neil Armstrong stepped on to the moon. And blew his big line.

Today's Perfect Irony: Big Brother (Amazon) Vanishes Your 1984

Amazon sells many copies of 1984. If you buy a book from them, and they change their mind about it, too bad for them. It is your property. That is what "property" means.

Recently Amazon created another nifty way to sell books, in the highly useful Kindle electronic book platform. They have sold many copies of 1984 in the Kindle form, as they have in other book forms. This week, though, Amazon stole back all the copies of 1984 that it had sold on Kindle.

Amazon is Big Brother. They should be ashamed of themselves. And this kind of anti-thought and anti-property theft will kill Kindle. I was going to get one. Now I will not, until they disable the "Amazon can steal all your stuff whenever it wants to" feature.

No WMD in Iraqi Sociology

Sociologists are ever vigilant for WMD - Weber, Marx, and Durkheim. A recent search of Iraqi sociology departments has revealed that they have no WMD.

Only Allah.

[Note to the humor impaired: this is a joke.]

C Street House is a Bad Frat

Centre College is favored with many fraternities for such a small school. There are good frats and bad frats.

A good frat lifts the brothers up to a higher standard. The weaker students are helped by the stronger ones. The less moral are helped by the more moral. The philanthropic work of the whole chapter helps each member develop the habits of being civic minded. All fraternities profess high ideals. When the organization actually works to help each other live up to those ideals, the result is very good for the men and for society.

A bad frat comes to think that "brotherhood" means that you back the play of the biggest fool in the house. If the Bluto of the house yells "Hey, y'all, let's go ... [do something stupid]" they all rise as one to do it to. If Otter sneaks his latest conquest back into the house, the other guys don't try to talk him out of it - they organize the cover-up.

The C Street House in Washington was born as a remarkable experiment in organizing poweful Christian men. Several members of Congress share a house, which also serves as their pastoral counseling and mutual accountability group. It has been in the news lately because several sex scandals by its members have been exposed all at once.

An example of C Street functioning as a good fraternity was when Sen. Coburn forced Sen. Ensign to write a letter to his mistress apologizing for using her for his [Ensign's] own pleasure. Coburn did not also see the sin in the political corruption of that affair - putting his mistress' son on the payroll, and the later payoffs and hush money to the mistress and her husband after Ensign fired them. Nonetheless, it was a start. The fact that Ensign resumed the affair immediately is not Coburn's fault, or C Street's. Some people are too corrupt to be helped even by their chosen accountability group.

It is hard to know whether C Street was being good or bad in Gov. Mark Sanford's sex scandal. Sanford said he "sought counsel" from C Street, which clearly didn't work. Sanford lived in the C Street house when he was in Congress.

Now another family-values Republican Congressman has been caught in a sex scandal. Chip Pickering, when he was a Congressman from Mississippi and living in the C Street house, had an affair that is now at the heart of his wife's divorce suit. The accountability group was obviously ineffective in stopping that affair. Worse, some of "wrongful conduct" between Pickering and his mistress supposedly took place in the C Street house. Pickering's mistress then put him on the company payroll to lobby his old buddies in Congress. This is more than just a failure of the C Streeters to be good Christian men of power. This is complicity in wickedness, corruption, and stupidity.

C Street House has become a bad frat.

Time Mostly Right on Marriage

Caitlin Flanagan has a sensible cover story in Time magazine about marriage. The moral pivot of her argument is this:

America's obsession with high-profile marriage flameouts — the Gosselins and the Sanfords and the Edwardses — reflects a collective ambivalence toward the institution: our wish that we could land ourselves in a lasting union, mixed with our feeling of vindication, or even relief, when a standard bearer for the "traditional family" fails to pull it off.

She goes on to argue, rightly, that marriage is not primarily about the adults' happiness, but about raising children.

I believe that Flanagan is right about the ambivalence that many people feel about marriage. I don't want to agree with her, but I have to admit that she is right. I don't want to agree because ambivalence kills.

So I see an additional conclusion to draw: people who promote marriage, like me, should school ourselves against feeling any sense of vindication when the marriages of family values hypocrites fail. It is just sad. These failures hurt the good cause. Feelings of Schadenfruede may be unavoidable, but we should not revel in it.

Most Centre Alumni Think of Themselves as Professionals

From the Centre College Alumni Survey.

I ended the survey with some experimental questions. Here is the first.

Sociologists try to come up with names for the different social status groups that most people fall in to. No one set of groups or names covers everyone equally well. These names are often based on your occupation. Based on your understanding of what you do and where you fit in American society, which names best describe your social group? Check those that apply best. 1200 out of 1400 alumni answered, often with overlapping answers.

63% Professional
18% Knowledge industry
14% Upper management
13% Middle management
13% Small business
12% Creative class
11% Entrepreneur
9% Home parent
3% Artisan
3% Skilled trade
3% Leisure class
2% Worker

Centre Alumni Help Out in Their Communities

From the Centre College Alumni Survey.

Half the alumni "regularly participate in local organizations, such as Rotary, garden club, community theater, Boy Scouts, recreational sports." About a third of those participating listed formal service organizations first, with youth support close behind, and religious organizations third.

In answer to the "third place" question - that is, "Is there a place, besides home or work, where you regularly spend time socializing?" two-thirds named at least one place. Among the most popular locations, with many overlaps, were: restaurants, named by 32%; athletic fields and gyms, 19%; parks 12%; coffee houses 12%; and country clubs 10%.

Centre Alumni Lean Democratic

From the Centre College Alumni Survey.

95% said they vote every election, or nearly. Only 9 individuals said they never vote.

About a third of the alumni said that their experience at Centre made their political views more liberal, while about an eighth said they were made more conservative by their college experience. Today, the alumni describe their political views this way:

30% Strong Democrat
20% Lean Democratic
14% Independent (including libertarian)
20% Lean Republican
16% Strong Republican

Young Earth Creationism as Innumeracy

Almost half of Americans believe that the entire universe was created within the past 10,000 years.

I am a centrist on creationism, as on most issues. I am with the 38% who believe that God has superintended evolution over millions of years. I think the "young earth" view is completely implausible.

So why do so many people believe in young earth creation? I believe it is because most people have no sense of history beyond their own grandparents, or perhaps their great-grandparents. Beyond that, all time seems equally distant. 1 thousand years, 10 thousand years, 10 million years, 10 billion years -- to a huge plurality of people, these are all just different ways of saying "a long time ago."

To be sure, there are some well-educated people who believe in young earth creationism. For them, their primary commitment is to the Bible; moreover, they are committed to a particular theory of Biblical interpretation. Young earth theories are a loyalty test to their more important intellectual commitment to their view of Scripture.

For the mass of people, the other 44.99 of the 45% of Americans who profess a young earth view, the important thing is that God is in charge. How many years God has been in charge is a quibble. What matters is that God has been in charge for all of the years that there have been. How many that is doesn't matter in any way that affects them.

When most people check the box on the poll marked "God created the world pretty much in its present form within the last 10,000 years" they don't really mean 10,000 years as opposed to 10 million or 10 billion. They mean "God created the world and I don't care what number you use."

Young earth creationism reflects innumeracy. But it reflects a deeper commitment to God's sovereignty.

Freedom From Worry About Health Coverage is a Blessing That Everyone Should Have

My wife is in the hospital. Everything will be OK. Gallstones are the culprit, with pain from the secondary consequences of those unhappy minerals.

We have health insurance, First World medicine, and a community that rose up to help. We have only had to deal with the actual medical problem.

Many other people have to worry about whether they can afford health care. This is just wrong.

Universal health coverage now.

Post-Centre Religion

From the Centre College Alumni Survey.

Almost half of the alumni report that religion is very important in their lives, while a fifth take the opposite position.
46% Very important
21% Somewhat important
14% Slightly important
19% Not important

When asked which religion, they said:
52% Protestant
14% Roman Catholic
11% Christian, no denomination
<1% Jewish
2% Other religion
10% Spiritual, not religious
9% No religion

Those Protestants specifying a denomination (345 total) broke out this way:
25% Presbyterian
21% Methodist
20% Episcopalian
14% Baptist
8% Christian Church/Disciples of Christ
8% Evangelical or Pentecostal denomination
4% Lutheran

How Many Books do Centre Alumni Have?

From the Centre College Alumni Survey.

I asked "About how many books are there in your house right now?"
5% Under 50
21% 50 - 200
35% 201 - 500
22% 501 - 1,000
10% 1,001 - 2,000
7% More than 2,000

It is hard to find a national average number of books per household. A health survey in New York among a cross-section of households - people who had a baby in the local hospital in a certain time period - found the top of the range of average number of books per household was 25.

From the Centre College Alumni Survey.

When asked to list their most important source of news, the alumni said:

10% Local television
8% Network television
13% Cable television
19% Local newspaper
8% National newspaper
17% Radio
23% Websites
(Less that 1 percent said that they did not follow the news).

I am particularly impressed at how many list websites as their primary news source. This is surely a big change from even five years ago.

Following Sports as a Pious Ritual of Civic Loyalty

From the Centre College Alumni Survey

I asked if there were any sports teams (professional, college, or other) that the respondents followed closely. 60% of all respondents named at least one team.

The leader by far was University of Kentucky basketball. 34% said they followed some UK team - by far the largest first choice category. Another 11% followed University of Louisville teams. Besides UK and U of L (and the 2% of Centre Colonels die-hards), college teams drew another 18%. Altogether, college teams drew the first loyalty of 2/3rds of those who followed sports.

Professional football, the next largest category, drew only 15%, professional baseball 8%, and professional basketball barely registered at 1%.

As I noted yesterday, half the Centre alumni live in Kentucky and adjacent states. There are no major league teams in any sport in Kentucky, and the Cincinnati professional teams draw the first loyalty of only 5% of the alumni. I read this strong loyalty of Centre alumni to Kentucky college teams as a way of participating in the emotional bonds of the community. As the great sociologist Emile Durkheim noted, our fundamental ties to society are emotional before they are rational. In Kentucky, following UK or U of L teams, especially the mens' basketball teams, is a pious act of belonging in the civil religion.

"How 'bout them Cats (or Cards)?" is part of the litany of building up the community that most Centre Colonels are part of.

Low Dispersion of Alumni

This is another in a series of findings from the Centre College Alumni Survey.

About 40% of the alumni live in Kentucky. About 60% of current students come from Kentucky, and this has been true for some time.

I am glad that Centre College serves the commonwealth so well, both in educating its children and in providing educated citizens. I think, though, that our ambition to be a more national college would be enhanced if our alumni were spread around the country a bit more.

I can think of three good reasons the alumni stick so close to home. First, Kentucky is a nice place to live, and many have family there. This is especially helpful when they start families of their own.

Second, the Old Colonels network is famously helpful. It is densest, and can be most helpful, in Kentucky.

Third, about two thirds of the graduates get further education, and most of them do so from a small number of nearby universities. I believe this is the single biggest factor in why the alumni settle so close to the college (relatively speaking).

The lesson I take from this is that we should be more conscious of encouraging our graduates to go further afield - and to more nationally weighty universities - for their graduate work. This would naturally take some of them into broader networks of professional life.

Most Old People Find Their Lives Turned Out Better Than They Expected

The Pew Research Center has produced a fine study of aging. It has several fascinating comparisons of what young people think makes you old with what older people think makes you old.

The line that stood out to me, though, is the Gruntled Finding of the Week:

Nearly half (45%) of adults ages 75 and older say their life has turned out better than they expected, while just 5% say it has turned out worse

Among all older adults, happiness varies very little by age, gender or race.

Happy Independence Day, Fellow Creatures.

We
hold these
truths
to be self-evident, that all men are
created
equal

Generational Growth of Legacies.

An interesting finding from the Centre alumni survey:

29% of the respondents claimed a relative who had attended Centre. Of them, roughly:
10% claimed a relative in the grandparent generation
20% claimed a relative in the parent generation (including aunts and uncles)
30% claimed a relative in the respondents own generation (siblings or cousins)

Alumni Survey

I have begun to post the results of the Centre College alumni survey on a new website, https://sites.google.com/a/centre.edu/centre-alumni-survey/

Your comments are most welcome.

What to Do With Engineers?

This is always a problem in the professions and "knowledge class" discussion. Engineers apply a body of knowledge to problems in a way that can not readily be routinized. This is the starting point for considering a profession. Yet they are often the outliers in other cultural measures of professionals.

Alvin Gouldner, in The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class made a distinction between "intellectuals" and the "technical intelligentsia." They differ in the kinds of knowledge they use. They are both part of the "new class" - what later came to be called the "knowledge class" - because they both make their living from knowledge that is essential to running the economic system. That is the Marxist part of Gouldner's determination of a class. They are also both part of the knowledge class because they rise to the defense of knowledge and reason when they are under attack. When the thugs burn books, the engineers join the barricades. When rationality, or even science, are under attack, engineers and cultural specialists stand shoulder to shoulder.

I think what unifies all professions is that the body of knowledge they must apply is vast, so applying the right bit of knowledge requires judgment. What unifies most professions is that they apply knowledge to people, and people are infinitely various. A vast body of knowledge applied to varied people makes for lots of judgments. Engineers apply a vast body of knowledge, too. This requires judgment. But for the most part, the problems they apply that knowledge to are not people. That makes their knowledge work different in kind from that of most other professionals.

Nonetheless, I am counting engineers as professionals.

Dividing the Professionals

I am working on a survey of the Centre College alumni. One of the models that I am using is Joseph Soares' The Power of Privilege, which includes surveys of Yale and Wake Forest alumni. He divided the professionals from everyone else among the top income group as part of a test of class reproduction in elite colleges.

Dividing out which occupations are professions and which are not is a tough job these days. As Andrew Abbott demonstrated in the excellent The System of Professions, occupations compete with one another to claim professional status. New jobs invent official credentials in order to professionalize.

I try to stick to the classic professions: clergy, military (officers), doctors, lawyers. The teaching profession derives from the clergy. Librarians do, too. The hard decisions were about bankers, finance types, and computer tech jobs. I see them as derived from manufacturers and merchants.

I will test this clustering against other theories to see if it is illuminating.

Fertility Tourism

European countries have different restrictions on fertility treatments. This has created a market in shopping countries for better fertility deals. The National Health Service in Britain, for example, has many restrictions on in-vitro fertilization treatment, including a low total that donors can be paid for eggs (about $400). Other countries pay more, so eggs are more available. Infertile British women over 40, therefore, are likely to go to countries with a larger supply, such as the Czech Republic (where donors get $750 per egg) or Spain ($1250 per egg), for IVF treatment.

Anyone going to Reno for a divorce?

Civil Religion Music Pantheon

Michael Jackson is being inducted into the musical pantheon of American civil religion. As I mentioned yesterday, I don't care much for his songs. This puts me out of step with some of my peers (Jackson is my age).

Actually, I have a similar reaction to Elvis. Elvis was a big star for the generation before me, so it is not considered as much of an oddity that I am not a big Elvis fan. I actually appreciate Elvis more to sing along with than I do most popular performers, because he sings in my range. Most male lead singers are too high for me.

Frank Sinatra occupies a similar position for the generation before Elvis. There are moods when Sinatra is just the right background, but I rarely embrace the sentiment of the song. And "The Lady is a Tramp" is as offensive as any rap song when you listen to the words.

Among the living, I think Bob Dylan is the most likely future inductee, as a writer, despite his terrible singing. I think Leonard Cohen is worth a look on the same grounds; perhaps he will make the Canadian pantheon. There was an interesting discussion on the excellent website Booker Rising on whether Jay-Z has succeeded to that place of honor with Jackson's passing.

My vote, though, goes to Bruce Springsteen. For my demographic, he is shaping in the way that an icon should be. I think he is sane enough to age well. 20 years after his peak as the biggest performer in the world, events called on him to write the best 9/11 album. I expect there will be hard times in the future for which he may produce another Rising.

I have thought about teaching a course on the class significance of iconic performers called "The King, The Boss, and the Chairman of the Board." Perhaps the self-styled King of Pop deserves a day - maybe a week - in that class, too.

Michael Jackson is Not My Music

In the flurry of Michael Jackson stuff this week, I posted as a Facebook status that I was "impressed that Michael Jackson's death was so engrossing to the world that Google thought it was under attack. I still don't care for his music."

I have been surprised at the incredulous responses that the last admission has brought - especially from people younger than me. I think the Jackson 5 stuff is part of the pleasant Motown background music. His solo stuff, not so much. I thought the politics of "Bad" were interesting, but not the song. I thought the politics of "Billie Jean" sketchy. For the rest - I guess I was never in his target demographic.

So, who is Michael Jackson for?

Vindication of Adolescent Romance

The current New York Times Review of Books carries a lead review of Cristina Nehring's A Vindication of Love. It is a defense of passionate romance against boring marriage.

Against Nehring I argue that marriage is a social institution that is first about raising children. A good marriage depends on the relationship of husband and wife, of course, and they will be happier if they are passionately attached to one another. Most married couples are.

It is typical of adolescents to think that marriage is primarily about them. Actually, it is typical of adolescents to think that everything is about them. The view that what makes marriage great is the stormy passion might be forgiven in a 15 year old. It is harder to credit in a grown up mom - well, older woman with a baby - like Nehring.

This vindication of "love" has more in common with Twilight than with good marriage and family life.

This Week's Family Values Hypocrite Scandal ...

is not as bad as last week's.

Mark Sanford's adultery is as awful as John Ensign's. And it does bring the pro-marriage movement that I embrace into disrepute.

But Mark Sanford did not engage in the same kind of criticism of other people's sexual morals as Ensign did. Thus, the hypocrisy is not as great.

Jon and Kate Put Show Before Family

I am not a regular viewer of "Jon and Kate Plus 8," but my students are. For anyone in the family business the tale of how a couple copes with eight kids and keeps their marriage together is an interesting topic. Putting all the daily challenges on television couldn't help but multiply the difficulties.

As it turns out, they are not going to keep the marriage together. They justify their separation for the usual wrong reason - the kids will be happier if we are happier.

What is saddest in this whole sad episode is that when Jon and Kate were faced with the choice of keeping their marriage or keeping the television show, they chose the television show. As Kate said, "the show must go on."

I am not an expert in what sells on TV, but I expect that the appeal of this show depended on showing the couple coping. No couple, no show. I think this will be the last season of "Jon +/- Kate Mess Up 8."

Classification Schemes of Class Classification Schemes: A Request for Help

I apologize for a long post today. The detail matters for the question I am asking you.

I am studying the different fractions of the college-going class.

I post all of this to ask your help in thinking about how, exactly, to classify all the occupations I have collected. I want to be able to test whether there really are differences in the way of life of the "corporate management" fraction and the "knowledge professional" fraction of the college-educated class. I use these terms not to presume the answer to the question I am asking, but to give you an idea of the distinction I am after.

As part of this research, I have surveyed some of the alumni in the Centre College. I asked them for their specific occupational descriptions (my example was "sociology professor at a small college"). I also know their household income, highest education level, the specific college (obviously) and graduate school they attended, and the same for their spouses. In an experimental question, I also asked them to place themselves using the categories Upper management, Middle management, Professional, Knowledge industry, Creative class, Entrepreneur, Artisan, Worker, Homemaker, Leisure.

I am drawing upon the previous work of Joseph Soares, Pierre Bourdieu, Michele Lamont, and Richard Florida. Soares made my immediate model for this survey. Bourdieu produced the larger theory I am testing. Lamont is the best effort to apply Bourdieu. Florida is an alternative theory.

Below is a summary of their four classification schemes, then the author’s examples.

Soares: Professional, top 10% of income vs. Non-professional, top 10% of income
Florida: Super-Creative Core vs. Creative Professionals
Bourdieu: Dominated fraction, dominant class vs. Dominant fraction, dominant class
Lamont: Cultural and social specialists in the public, nonprofit, private sectors (including profit-related occupations in the public and non-profit sectors) vs. Profit-related occupations, private sector (both salaried and self-employed).

Below are some details and examples.

Joseph Soares, in Power and Privilege, was obliged to use the fairly rough "professional/not" categories in the National Educational Longitudinal Survey. His studies of Yale and Wake Forest alumni are my immediate models for this study.

Richard Florida, in The Rise of the Creative Class (69ff), contrasts the "Super-Creative Core" -
Scientists and engineers; University professors; Poets and novelists; Artists; Entertainers; Actors; Designers and architects; Non-fiction writers; Editors; Cultural figures; Think-tank researchers; Analysts; Other opinion makers - who are “producing new forms or designs that are readily transferable and widely useful” with the "Creative Professionals" - High-tech sector; Financial services; Legal profession; Health-care profession; Business management; Technicians (borderline) - who “engage in creative problem solving, drawing on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems.”

Pierre Bourdieu, in Distinction (Appendix 1) contrasts a (dominant) class fraction made of Commercial and Industrial employers with another (dominated) class fraction made of Public-sector executives; Engineers; Private-sector executives; Professions; Secondary teachers; Higher-education teachers; Artistic producers.

Michele Lamont, in Money, Morals, and Manners, separates her upper-middle class sample thus:

Cultural and social specialists, public and nonprofit sectors
Public school administrator; Academic administrator; Earth science teacher; Minister; Museum curator; Artist; Science teacher; Social work professor; Theology professor; Recreation professional; Civil servant; Computer specialist

Cultural and social specialists, private sector, profit-related occupations, public and non-profit sectors
Applied science researcher; Human resources consultant; Psychologist; Hospital administrator; Statistics researcher; Computer researcher; Economist; Labor arbitrator

Profit-related occupations, private sector (salaried)
Investment advisor; Chief financial officer; Banker; Insurance company v.p.; Plant facility manager; Corporate attorney; Computer specialist; Marketing executive; Computer software developer

Profit-related occupations, private sector (self-employed)
Lawyer; Portfolio manager; Computer consultant; Realtor; Custom house broker; Wholesale distributor; Proprietary broadcasting company; Proprietary car leasing company.

In Lamont, the first two make one fraction, the second, another.

Do Women Actually Respect Domesticated Men?

My post last week on Sandra Tsing Loh's divorce has led to a lively exchange about women who say they want sensitive, housework-sharing men - but then leave them for more masculine "bad boys." This comment from an anonymous responder lays out the issue nicely:

As a guy growing up with many sisters who believed that women should be in corporate america, pulling down work equivalent to the male jobs of the 70's, I was taught that what women found sexy was a man who was sensitive and could cook.

My first marriage of 7 years ended in divorce (no kids thankfully) when she decided I wasn't "sexy enough" anymore. She *thought* she wanted a sensitive man, but she truly desired the manly man - she wanted to be submissive at home.

Spent many years being single, dating, trying to find another woman who was like my first wife. Found many, but noticed a similar pattern - women who said they wanted the sensitive man really still wanted the "bad boy". They would joke about it, but in truth, I think they really did mean it. Last few years of being single I decided to switch roles and do the more "traditional" male role. Found out that I attracted essentially the same population of women as before, but was given a lot more leeway to not be the cook or the domestic god. Am now three years into my second marriage and it seems to be working a lot better, even though I feel sometimes guilty for going against the advice that my mother and sisters told me when I was younger.

BTW, two sisters are having similar complaints about their domesticated husbands. One of them wonders if he's actually a repressed homosexual.

My guess about what is going on here: these women don't think these nice, helpful, sensitive, equal guys could protect them in a pinch.

And egalitarian feminism (vs. the difference feminism that I subscribe to) produces a cloud of ideology which makes it difficult for such women and men to know what they actually want.

I Am Hopeful About Iran Because the Regime Is Religious

This is a risky post to make, because it could be overtaken by events even as I write it.

Nonetheless, I am hopeful that the rulers of Iran will not stomach a stolen election and attacks on peaceful protesters because they believe that God will judge their actions. This is no guarantee of decency, of course - some of their fellow pious Muslims, of a quite different stripe, commit suicide attacks every day in the name of the same God.

Nonetheless, when I compare the protests in Iran today with those in China in 1989, I am more hopeful. I expected the Chinese Communist regime to attack the protesters. Power in this world is the only thing that really matters to them. The ayatollahs in Iran, on the other hand, hold themselves to a higher standard. Some of the religious authorities have criticized the government for attacking the protesters and resisting a clean election result. I have heard that some of these religious authorities have a higher religious status than the supreme leader Khameni, though he is a cleric, too.

Nothing is determined, and there is no way to tell ahead of time how a crisis will be resolved. All I can say is that I see signs for hope in this crisis.

Pittsburgh Rocks

This is the funniest thing I have read this week. It was sent by my sister in Pittsburgh about her first-grade daughter.

[My niece's] reaction to the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team winning the Stanley Cup (with pauses):

"Pittsburgh rocks. My baby head. Off."

Racial "Weathering" and Family Stress

Arline Geronimus argues that African Americans age faster than white people in America due to racism and stress. This has many important consequences - one of which is that waiting until their 20s to have children may not actually be healthier for black women and children, as is normally true for the American population as a whole.

Geronimus blames the faster "weathering" of African Americans on stress. She blames racism as the main source of differential stress. I think this is a plausible way of accounting for the fact that African Americans as a group are much less healthy than other Americans at the same age.

I would add, though, that there is another source of stress that is distinctively high for African Americans: the stress of single parenthood. Black Americans are especially likely to engage in the most stressful kind of single parenthood, the kind that results from never having married in the first place.

Geronimus has taken much heat for her views on racial weathering from stress. If we are looking at sources of stress, though, some are more self-inflicted than others - and thus can be addressed more directly by those enduring the stress.

Family Values Hypocrites Should Resign

Rep. Barney Frank had an affair with a prostitute. He did not resign. I don't think he needed to because he did not try to justify what the other guy did, and because he had not made a big deal about sexual morality before that. His district has re-elected him many times since.

Sen. David Vitter had sex with a prostitute. He should have resigned. He had made a big deal about sexual morality before that - and still does, with no show of shame. He thinks the only thing he did wrong was getting caught.

The latest family values warrior caught with his pants down is Sen. John Ensign. He had an affair with a campaign staffer whose husband worked for him. He seems to have gotten their son a job, too. He only admitted the affair after he was blackmailed. Ensign was a particularly egregious hypocrite. In addition to being a family values culture warrior in general, he had specifically called on his Senate colleague Larry Craig to resign during his sex scandal. And Ensign called on Pres. Clinton to resign during his sex scandal.

It is getting to the point that if public officials makes a big deal about marriage, family, and sexual honor, it is easy to assume that they are sleazy.

Sandra Tsing Loh's Divorce

Sandra Tsing Loh is a writer for The Atlantic Monthly who usually covers domestic life. In the current issue she brings us up to date on her marital history.

She hated her father and wished her parents would divorce. She married a decent guy, had two girls, and they made a busy and solvent upper-middle-class home. Then in her mid-40s she had an affair. After therapy she decided she just didn't want to work at saving her marriage. She used this month's column to announce her divorce.

She then drew what she thinks is the logical conclusion from her story and that of some of perpetually dissatisfied friends: we should abolish marriage. More: human beings were never really meant for marriage, anyway. She cites Andrew Cherlin's review of the high U.S. divorce rate, which I wrote about recently, as evidence. Yet what Cherlin shows is that Americans have a higher divorce rate than other countries because we have a higher marriage rate to begin with - because we believe in marriage the most.

Sandra Tsing Loh's divorce is sad for her and her husband, and tragic for her children. It is not evidence that human beings were not meant for marriage.

Classes are Honorable

Egalitarians don't like to acknowledge the reality of classes because they think that their middle class life is the good kind of life. They believe that noting the existence and different cultures of other social classes is necessarily to make invidious distinctions.

However, if we believe in the nobility of labor and of useful leisure we can talk about classes without assuming them to be moral hierarchies.

Education Rationalizes the Status Structure, Mostly

Wittgenstein has a wonderful metaphor of language as like an old city. The oldest parts are crooked, winding, organic. On top of and growing around old bits are the new, modern, rationalized parts.

I think the social structure is like that, too. There is an old, crooked organic structure based on an honor/shame culture. We see it especially at the top, with its residue in Old Money. And we see it at the bottom, where gangs and slums reproduce honor/shame warrior bands wherever bourgeois order is ineffective.

On top of this old organic structure, though, a modern, rationalized grid has been laid. The main mechanism of rationalizing the social structure is the educational system. And the main tool for creating social closure differentiating one stratum from another are educational credentials.

Undermining Elders

One of the problems I addresses in Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment is that the church has created structures to undermine the authority of pastoral leaders. I spent this week with the summer conference of the Synod of the Trinity in Pennsylvania. In our conversations on this subject, I realized that the church had also created structures to undermine the authority of elder leaders.

The session that governs a local congregation is composed of elders, and is moderated by the pastor. Prior to the reforms of "the Sixties," a small group of elders might serve for many years. Now elders normally serve for a three-year term, are off for a year, then serve another three-year term. And that is it. Though elders are ordained for life, just as ministers are, their formal service is normally limited to one stint. The same holds for deacons, who serve on a separate board. In most Presbyterian congregations, more than half of the members have been ordained as deacons or elders.

When they go off the session, the governing experience that they learned mostly goes with them. Moreover, the elders who are sent by a local congregation as official representatives (commissioners) to the presbytery, the regional governing body, are chosen from the session. This means that the governing experience that the Presbyterian Church can bring to its central governing body, the presbytery, is also only short-term.

It would be bad to have only a small group serve on the session and presbytery for years and years. No one advocates that. But by requiring rotation of elders, and rarely recalling elders with past service, the Presbyterian Church (USA) undermines the other half of its possible Establishment.

The Coffee House: Where Strangers Become Acquaintances

Tonight I am giving a talk at The Phillips Emporium, an independent coffee house in the college town of Bloomsburg, PA. The subject of the talk at the coffee house is - the coffee house. This is a minor example of what sociologists mean by reflexivity. Modern institutions depend more and more on feedback about how they are working to do the next round of work and improvement. Coffee houses, as venues of critical thought, have always been self-critical. Pamphlets promoting, attacking, and analyzing coffee houses have been issued since the glory days of the coffee house in the 17th century.

It is probably not surprising that coffee house intellectuals get together in a coffee house to talk about coffee houses as a place to be intellectual. But coffee houses have also always served as places of business - and not just the business of selling coffee. Intellectuals do not usually focus on this element of coffee house life. Businesses that grew out of coffee houses, such as the stock exchange, have developed more exclusive places of conversation, most notably the private club. Still, new business ideas are born in coffee houses all the time, and low-level business, especially in the arts, is conducted in coffee houses to this day.

The coffee house is the best place to bring people together for clear-headed talk.

Du Bois Was More Prescient Than I Thought

I am re-reading W.E.B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk for my social theory class.

In that book, published at the dawn of the previous century, he famously argues that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." I had read this argument before as Du Bois correctly discerning the long hard civil rights struggle in the United States.

What I had not appreciated until this reading was that he clearly meant the entire global question of the interaction of the white and non-white races. He had in mind European colonialism just as much as American race relations.

In making my social theory class I am trying to pick pre-eminently transformative books. One good test is whether the book itself, and not just the author, has its own Wikipedia page.

The Souls of Black Folk was prescient not just about civil rights in America, but about colonialism and post-colonialism all over the world.

How Much Kids Cost at the Top and Bottom of the Income Scale

Marcia Carlson and Tim Smeeding reported at the Furstenberg Conference that parents in the top fifth of income spend about five times as much on their children as do parents in the bottom quintile of income.

At first glance this seems like common sense - parents with more money to spend will spend more on their kids. But the fact that children could be raised for less shows that richer parents are choosing to invest more in their children. The concerted cultivation that middle class parents normally engage in for their kids costs much more than the natural growth childrearing of the poor and working class families.

Women of All Classes Want the Same Number of Children, But Miss the Mark in Different Directions

At the Furstenberg Conference, Philip Morgan reported that women of all classes start out wanting about the same number of children - on average, a little over two. However, women with less than a high school education end up with more children than they wanted, while more educated women end up with slightly fewer than they intended. The least educated women end up with .25 kids too many, while the college graduates end up with .6 kids too few.

All Grown Up at 18

The Furstenberg Conference consisted mostly of demographers reporting on big numbers. One exception was Annette Lareau, who followed up on the children in her ethnographic study, Unequal Childhoods. She had found that working class and poor parents fed, clothed, sheltered their kids, made sure they went to school - then let them pick what they did with their time. She called this the "natural growth" approach. Middle class parents, by contrast, mobilized all the resources they could to develop the individual talents of each child, a method she called "concerted cultivation."

When she revisited the children as they got into their twenties, she found the next step of the two patterns of childrearing. At 18 the working class and poor kids were on their own. Even if they thought the kids were making mistakes, their parents did not think it was their place to step in. The middle class parents, on the other hand, continued to be deeply involved in helping their kids organize their lives, often in ways that were invisible to the children. These are the "helicopter parents," hovering over their children, who have become well known to college administrators.

Which contributed to a further difference. Both sets of parents knew that their children would be better off going to college. Most of the middle class kids got there, with parental help. Most of the working class and poor kids did not, even when they tried. The parents did not think they could, or should, push their kids to push through the inevitable roadblocks of college life. At 18, their kids were all grown up.

All Classes Want the Same Number of Kids

Paula England reported at the Furstenberg Conference on her new study of class differences in having children. She found that girls from all classes want the same number of children - on average, a little over two. However, by 16 there is already a negative correlation between sexual activity and income/GPA. That is, the poorer girls, who are also likely to be the girls doing worse in school, have sex more often than the richer girls, who are also doing better in school and are on the college track.

Eventually, the dropout girls have four times the unintended pregnancies that the college-track girls do. It is not that unintended pregnancies derail some girls from the college track - the causation runs the other way. Girls who start out poorer are likely to be "sloppy and inconsistent" in using birth control, whereas the middle class, college-track girls are not. Moreover, England reported, this class gradient in birth control goes back at least to the 1920s.

Legislation Not Court Decisions: Religious Protections

Religious opponents of same-sex marriage worry that if (probably when) same-sex marriage or civil unions become legal, people like them will be prosecuted. This is not far-fetched. "Hate speech" laws could easily be used to prosecute speech, even sermons against gay unions, as they have already been abroad. Religious charities have already stopped placing all adoptions because the state threatened them for not placing children with homosexual couples.

The first few states to legalize same-sex marriage did so by court decisions. These are blunt instruments. They invalidated existing laws without doing the necessary political work to deal with the unintended consequences of the court decision. Now, though, several states are taking the better path, making this major political change through the proper political means, the legislature. When states debate laws, they hear from all kinds of people who would be affected. The states that have passed same-sex marriage laws were able to put in protections for religious groups. Legislative debate, and laws that actually make it through the political process, are better protection for everyone.

Alternative Baby Faces

A wonderful image from "Texts from Last Night":

Whenever I'm sad I just imagine if babies were born with mustaches...

Modern Hunting and Gathering

A side thought from the Furstenberg conference.

Kevin Roy reported that among the working poor, men make more per hour, but are less stably employed than are women.

This sounds just like the relationship between hunters and gatherers.

Welfare Dads

At the Furstenberg conference, Kathryn Edin reported on a new study of poor, unmarried fathers. This is the counterpart to her work in Promises I Can Keep on poor teen mothers.

In the teen welfare mom and dad "courtship story," there is barely any courtship - and what there is begins after the baby is born. The couple meets, "get's together," has a baby, and then, if he is still around, begins to know one another. The men describe their relations with the mothers of their children, as well as their child's birth, passively. The emotional high point of the relationship is the birth of the child. The mothers are usually excited about the baby, and normally become emotionally attached right away. The fathers often also fall in love - with the baby.

Poor men and women are usually mistrustful of one another, even if they theoretically are a couple and have a child together. The women don't expect the men to provide for the child, and the men fear that they will be dumped if they don't provide. Edin found that the men would often do things to accelerate the breakup - fooling with other women or getting arrested - so she would no longer expect anything of him.

The most interesting, but sad, thing that Edin found was that these poor fathers never expected to be able to keep the love or respect of the mothers of their children. “They are confident," Edin said, that "they can be good dads because all that good fathering takes is love, not money.”

The Losing Game of Multiple Partner Fertility

One of the major issues at the Furstenberg conference was "multiple partner fertility" - that is, women who have children by different men.

Sarah McLanahan reported that when poor single mothers move from man to man, they are usually trading up, if only marginally. They have a child with the new man to give them a stronger reason to stay together.

However, McLanahan also reported, the more children women have with different men, the less help they get from the extended kin network of any of the fathers of their children.

Family Instability Hurts Boys in School

Sarah McLanahan reported from her continuing study of "fragile families" at the Furstenberg conference. She had some interesting new things to say about the effects of family instability - especially boyfriends passing in and out of the household.

One major effect is that instability increases the mother's mental health problems, especially depression and anxiety.

Another major finding is that instability hurts boys more than girls.

This led me to a thought about why girls out-perform boys in school, when the reverse used to be true: girls may be passing boys because instability hurts boys more, and family instability is increasing.

Working Class Women Are the Most Likely to Live with Multiple Partners

At the Furstenberg conference Andrew Cherlin made a case for studying working class family patterns separately from the middle class and the poor. He doesn't want to use class terms, so instead he treated high school graduates, GED holders, and two-year Associates degree holders as collectively the middle group of his analysis.

Cherlin found that women who live with multiple partners -- whether married or cohabiting -- are more likely to come from this working class/middle education group. College educated women are more likely to marry, and more likely to stay married. Poor women are less likely to live with, and especially unlikely to marry, the men they are connected with, even if they have children with them.

Bad things happen to kids each time someone significant comes or goes from their household. Working class kids are even more likely to suffer these disruptions than poor kids are. This is interesting and not obvious.

Nerd Humor: The Stata Lesson

At the end of the conference honoring family sociologist Frank Furstenberg, two of his former students offered a film tribute. The form of their tribute, though, was a mock fulfillment of a long-standing promise they had made to Furstenberg to teach him the statistical analysis program Stata.

On the screen they had the graphic for "Stata Lesson One." The problem for the lesson: "Does Frank Furstenberg still matter?" As you might imagine, this was a bouquet of a presentation, but underneath the mock serious tone was an actually serious analysis.

They plotted Furstenberg's 40 years of publications and the abundance of citations of his work by others. Then, just to be sure that he wasn't resting on his laurels "while publishing junk," they plotted the citations of his recent articles. All three graphs were impressive. Where the trend line showed a small decline over the decades, the voiceover helpfully pointed out that the confidence intervals were just wide enough that the real trend could be slightly upward.

Stat humor went over big with this crowd. Very nicely done.

What Fathering Needs

I am attending a conference at the University of Pennsylvania honoring family sociologist Frank Furstenberg. I will post some good points as they come up.

Kathryn Edin, co-author of Promises I Can Keep, about which I have blogged several times, is working on a new study about the fathers of the teen moms she studied in that book. She found that the men wanted to be attached to their children, even if they didn't have much of a relationship with the mothers. These poor men mistrust women, who think they are valued only for their resources. They do want to be fathers to their children, though:

“They are confident they can be good dads because all that good fathering takes is love, not money.”

Women On the Supreme Court Used to Have More of "It All"

Sylvia Ann Hewlett has documented the difficulties that very high achieving women have in "having it all" - marriage, children, and high-powered career. Hewlett's main finding is that women who do have it all are likely to have married young and traded off career steps with their husbands. However, there has been a paradoxical effect of opening more opportunities in public life to women since the 1970s. Women who seek the top careers are likely to put off marriage and children in favor of launching their careers first - and later run out of time.

Mrs. G. asks us to consider the case of women on the Supreme Court:

Ruth Bader Ginsburg married in 1954 and has two children with well established careers.

Sandra Day O’Connor married in 1952 and has three sons.

Sonia Sotomayor is divorced without children.

"I think there’s a codicil about women having it all, over a lifetime," she wrote to me. "If they thought in the 1950s that there was no chance of ever hitting the Supremes" they would marry, have kids, and pursue whatever career was open to them. However, "it didn’t work in the '70s and after for women who thought there was a chance of" making the Supreme Court, so they "gave up other things to go for the gold."

Alumni Survey 1: Advanced Degrees

I have been surveying the portion of Centre College alumni who graduated between 40 and 15 years ago. I focus on them because I am interested in how the parents' education, occupation, and cultural interests shape the children's educational choices. I have heard from about a quarter of those I surveyed - nearly 1400 respondents.

The first interesting finding is of how many of the graduates went on to get further degrees after college.

About a third of each entering class wants to be doctors. Another quarter express an interest in law.

Among the alumni, about 6% end up doctors or dentists, with another couple of percent getting other medical degrees.

About 14% end up as lawyers - which has been Centre's largest single occupational category since the colege's beginning nearly 200 years ago.

The business degree emerges as the second largest category, with 9% holding the MBA and another couple of percent having other professional certifications.

Teachers make up another 5% or so.

More than a quarter of the Centre alumni earned a masters degree.

All together about two-thirds of the Centre alumni in the prime of their working years hold some kind of advanced degree.

Army Successfully Fights Divorce

Here is some decent marriage news for Memorial Day. The Army, faced with an increasing divorce rate as the war has gone on, instituted a "Strong Bonds" program to help military couples learn to communicate better before they had a problem. As a result, the Army's divorce rate dropped from 2006 to 2007, and seems to be holding steady.

Still, in a survey of soldiers in Iraq in 2006, 20% said their spouses had contemplated divorce. War and deployment is unusually hard on families.

Showing the Religious Flow

Michael Bell made a fantastic chart of religious mobility, based on Pew Religion Forum data. It is lovely to ponder.

Sociology Requires Judgment

Students of my dear colleague Sarah made a tee shirt to celebrate her tenure, her impending baby, and sociology itself. (Click on the picture to read the shirts.)

Love Entangles Us - at a Distance

This goes in my The World is Wonderfully Weird file:

The Love Study takes people in love, separates them in sealed rooms, shows pictures of the beloved to one, and measures the physical state of the other. Results:

After running 36 couples through this test, the researchers found that when one person focused his thoughts on his partner, the partner's blood flow and perspiration dramatically changed within two seconds. The odds of this happening by chance were 1 in 11,000. Three dozen double blind, randomized studies by such institutions as the University of Washington and the University of Edinburgh have reported similar results.

These results drive physicists nuts. They can't explain them, they just are certain that it couldn't really happen.

I don't know why these results happen. I just think the world is wonderfully weird.

I do know that when my wife heard this story on National Public Radio, she sent thoughts to me 150 miles away. I suddenly felt moved to email her about what I was doing. Happily odd.

Underground Railroad Museum

The Underground Railroad Freedom Center is not quite in Kentucky, so is not technically part of my Kentucky 50 by 50 project. Nonetheless, I had a day in Cincinnati and had wanted to see the museum, so Providence made today the day.

The Underground Railroad museum is a new, high-profile project of the Great and the Good of Cincinnati. It is located at the foot of the Roebling Bridge, a city landmark on the Ohio River. Its neighbors are the new football stadium on the west, and the new baseball park on the east. It is nicely done. It has a few splashy items - films and audios narrated by Vanessa Williams, Angela Bassett, and Oprah Winfrey, the keys to John Brown's cell, and the centerpiece, a rebuilt slave pen rescued from Kentucky. The core historical section on slavery, abolition, and the underground railroad, are pretty substantial. The arty bits - the animated films, commissioned art, dramatic recitations - are all well done.

The Underground Railroad Freedom Center is a cause museum. Slavery, not the underground railroad as such, is the cause. The abolitionists, escaped slaves, even Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey are heroes. The slave masters, slave catchers, pro-slavery politicians, and fellow-travelers are the bad guys. Wicked, slaveholding Kentucky, visible through the picture windows, is the symbol of the evil land.

Surprisingly, the actual story of the underground railroad gets a little lost in the telling. They have a fine section on the heroic doings of Parker and Rankin in Ripley, OH, a black-and-white team who helped many across the river to freedom. The rest of the underground railroad story, though, is told in a vague way. Cincinnati is refered to as the hub of the underground railroad, but no Cincinnati sites are dealt with in any detail. There is much more told about the overland route of slaves heading south from Kentucky over the Natchez trace than there is about the ex-slaves heading in the opposite direction. Partly this is because the slave trade is better documented than the clandestine flights from slavery. Nonetheless, I was surprised that the museum did not tell more of the what is known about the entire underground railroad story.

The big theme of the museum is freedom in general. The specific kind of freedom served up, though, is that of African Americans. And fair enough. A worthwhile expedition.

Our Unmarried Births Are At Euro Levels But Our Welfare State is Not

The U.S. unmarried birth rate leaped up to 40% recently, from less than half that in 1980. This keeps pace with large rises in unmarried births in European countries.

In Europe, though, the state gives money and services to couples. In the U.S., many more of those unwed mothers are married to Uncle Sam.

We need marriage more than Europeans do. If we have the same percentage of kids of unmarrieds that they do, our kids will be worse off.

More Daughters Means More Liberal

A British study by Andrew Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee found that the more daughters you have, the more likely you are to vote for left-of-center parties. The reverse happens with sons.

Specifically: " For each daughter, holding family size constant, a parent is approximately 2 percentage points more likely to vote left."

Nathan Silver at fivethirtyeight.com has the link to the full study.

(I thank the mother of our two daughters and one son, all good Democrats, for finding this.)

Why Humans Are Built for Sperm Wars

A woman in Houston has given birth to twins who were conceived by different fathers.


Most of the sperm that men produce are not designed to fertilize an egg, but to fight a war against sperm from other men. Nearly ever time that sperm from two men are in a woman's vaginal canal at the same time, only one can win. Not this time.

The Abortion Center Holds, Again

There has been a buzz this week about a new Gallup finding that, for the first time, most Americans call themselves "pro-life" rather than "pro-choice," 51% to 42%. Yet when we look at the underlying trends of when, if ever, they think abortion should be allowed, the long-term trend shows almost no change. About a quarter of Americans think abortion should be legal under any circumstances, and a quarter think it should be illegal under any circumstances. In the middle are the half that think abortion should be legal under some circumstances.

What has changed this year is that a couple of percent of centrists have decided that their position is better described as pro-life than pro-choice.

I think we should remember that this choice is about what the law should allow, not what is a good idea to do. There are many centrist positions that think the law should permit choices that are almost always a bad idea, just because of that "almost." If you had only two choices, would you call that pro-life, or pro-choice?

Leah Sears for Supreme Court

This Slate compilation is meant to embarrass potential Supreme Court nominees. However, Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Sears rose in my estimation for her forthright promotion of marriage, even compared to her own divorce and remarriage.

The Growing Gap in the White Out-of-Wedlock Birthrate

Charles Murray reports on the Enterprise Blog about the large gap in the illegitimate birth rates between the top and bottom classes.

[Mrs. G. doesn't like the term "illegitimate birth" on the grounds that no child is illegitimate. This is true. So I will use the cumbersome "out-of-wedlock" - though it seems like a euphemism piled on a euphemism for bastardy. But that perfectly useful term has been co-opted for other uses. Continue.]

Murray compares the top tenth and bottom tenth (overclass and underclass, in his terms) of white women born at the end of the Baby Boom and the beginning of Gen-X. The top fraction, college graduates with family incomes over $100,000, had an out-of-wedlock birthrate barely over 1%. The bottom fraction, with less than high school education making under $20,000 per year, had nearly half of their kids (44.5%) unmarried. Murray sees this gap as confirmation of the point he and Richard Herrnstein made in The Bell Curve that there is a growing gap in all aspects of life between the top and bottom classes.

And, Murray says, that was then, when the white out-of-wedlock birthrate was only 11%. Murray estimates that the current white underclass has an out-of-wedlock birthrate of perhaps 70%, while the comparable figure for the overclass can't be higher than 5%.

Industrious Revolutions Make Hardworking Households

I am working through C. A. Bayly's The Birth of the Modern World. The most interesting idea that he has introduced me to so far is that before there could be an Industrial Revolution, there had to be an "industrious revolution." This concept comes from Jan de Vries' helpfully named article from the Journal of Economic History, "The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution." De Vries argues that households in Britain and the Netherlands started working harder in the early 1700s at making things, and buying things that others had made.

To any follower of Max Weber, this sure sounds like the Protestant ethic brought to the level of the household. The people became industrious first, which created the right culture to receive - and foment - the "wave of gadgets" that the subsequent Industrial Revolution made and put to use.

De Vries goes on to suggest that now we are in a second industrious revolution as the average middle class household has all its members over about 15 in the labor force. I have to think about whether these two developments are really parallel.

Still, I think the idea of a cultural industrious revolution in (Protestant) households coming first and creating the market for a structural industrial revolution is a rich and helpful idea.

Marriage-Go-Round Conclusion: Engaging the Fight

Andrew Cherlin concludes The Marriage-Go-Round with this claim:

“I would agree that, at its best, the two parent family is hard to beat for child rearing. Stable, low-conflict families with two biological or adoptive parents provide better environments for children, on average, than do other living arrangements. The problem is that most people see marriage in a different light these days. They view it as a private relationship centered on the needs of adults for love and companionship. The postmodern, relationship-based view of marriage has carried the day.” (193)

I disagree.

Some people accept and promote the relationship-centered view of marriage. More people accept and promote the conjugal view of marriage, which sees marriage a society's main institution for raising children - which in turn gives most people their primary project in life. There are many people in the middle. They accept both views - marriage is to make the couple happy and marriage is to raise kids - without really thinking about the potential conflict.

What we have, then, is a competition between a small left and a larger right for the hearts and minds of the majority in the middle. This competition goes on in many venues. The legal fights over divorce, adoption, same-sex marriage, and the coming fight over polygamy are the most public face of this competition, but not the most important. The most important arena for the competition over the meaning of marriage comes within each marriage, and each couple who are considering marriage.

I think this is a fair fight.

Marriage-Go-Round 4: Instability Hurts Kids

Andrew Cherlin's main point in The Marriage-Go-Round is that Americans should slow down in starting relationships, so that we will not be as likely to end them. Children are hurt each time adults come and go from their households.

One of the most interesting empirical points Cherlin makes comes from a study he did with Paula Fomby. They found that “for each partner who had entered or left the household, the odds that the adolescent had stolen something, skipped school, gotten drunk, or done something similar rose by 12 percent” (191). He is most of them still didn’t do these things, but the risk increases, and some kids succumb to the danger.

Marriage-Go-Round 3: The M Factor

The M factor in American life is that we move a great deal. Andrew Cherlin thinks that this much movement may contribute to why our marriages and cohabitations break up so much. He cites Robert Baller and Kelly Richardson’s county-level data showing a strong correlation between moving, divorce, and suicide. I agree with Cherlin's view that American internal migration reflects more a search for economic opportunity than a general cultural "restlessness."

Americans move more than Europeans do, pulling up roots and starting anew. We don't think of moving from state to state as "migration," since it is all done within the U.S. The United States is so much larger than any European country, though, that even if they had the same level of internal migration that we do, it would disrupt their families less.

A few years ago I had in my family class a German woman who was in Kentucky as an au pair for an American family. At the end of the term I asked her to compare German and American families. One striking thing that she had noticed was that in both places, people she knew reported that their cousins lived far away; however, in Germany "far away" was an hour's drive, while in the U.S. "far away" meant an eight-hour drive.

Regular Churchgoers Support Torture the Most. This is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

The Pew Forum found that half of regular churchgoers think that torture is often or sometimes justified. 60% of evangelicals agree.

Torture expert Darius Rejali found that people who are likely to support or commit torture are loyal to institutions. If the leaders of the institution say torture is necessary, the institutional loyalists are likely to accept that.

Much of my own research has shown that the core of most churches are institutional loyalists. They are the people most likely to be regular churchgoers.

Therefore, the leaders of the church, especially the evangelical church, need to say loud and clear that torture is wrong, un-Christian, un-American, and good loyal church goers should not torture.

Scissors

I am not sure where this came from, but I like it.

Marriage-Go-Round 2: American Marriages vs. Euro Kids

Andrew Cherlin contrasts U.S. and European approaches to marriage. One strong finding is that the U.S. is much more concerned about marriage, while the Europeans have more regulations on reproduction.

The intense debates that we have about the nature of marriage, including homosexual marriage and polygamy, are just not repeated with the same intensity in Europe. Many European nations have adopted same-sex marriage or civil union laws. Indeed, their civil union laws have turned into a whole "marriage lite" category that is mostly used by heterosexuals. Polygamists have begun to use European civil union laws to validate their unions, as well.

On the other hand, European law is more oriented toward children. Many European countries provide money for child expenses, day care, and maternity and paternity leave - a fact often mentioned in U.S. family policy debates. What is less well known is that most European legal codes are much more restrictive than American law about "assisted reproductive technology" - sperm banks, in vitro fertilization, and the whole panoply of high-tech baby making. American states, by constrast, regulate the fertility industry very lightly. There is not likely to be a European "octomom."

I read this difference a little differently than Cherlin does. I think we emphasize marriage because it is the most reliable, most individualized, and most portable institution for raising children. The more parents raise kids, the less society has to. Europeans, on the other hand, rely on the state more for many functions, including quite a bit of child rearing. Thus, the state regulates who can make children more closely, since the state will do more of the raising. But the Europeans care less about who marries whom because they don't rely on married couples to do most of the raising of the next generation - if there is one.