Michelle Obama Decided To Make the Adjustment

An excerpt from Barack and Michelle: Portrait of An American Marriage by Christopher Andersen has been published in the New York Post As he was building his political career and she had the main responsibility for raising their two daughters, while working herself, Michelle Obama came close to walking away. She wanted more sharing of family responsibilities. He said he was building for all of their futures.

The turning point is described here:

But there was no question that they were a couple and a team. In time, Michelle made the conscious decision that, in fact, she would be the one to adjust to the circumstances he created - and not vice versa.

"This was the epiphany," she said. "What I figured out was that I was pushing to make Barack be something I wanted him to be for me. ... I was depending on him to make me happy. Except it didn't have anything to do with him. I needed support. I didn't necessarily need it from Barack."

Michelle decided to approach the problems in her marriage the way she would approach the problems she faced daily at work. "I had to change," she said. "So how do I stop being mad at him and start problem-solving, and cobble together the resources? I also had to admit that I needed space and I needed time. And the more time that I could get to myself, the less stress I felt."

Michelle Obama made the decision that many women make. The situation is complicated by the fact that they both thought he could change the world in important ways. Still, in most of the cases that I know of, she is the one to make the adjustments to make the family work. There are a few cases that I know of of very high achieving women whose careers depended on husbands who made big career sacrifices. The Thatchers are the best case I can think of.

What happens if one of them doesn't make the adjustment? I think in 99 cases out a 100, neither of them reaches the heights in public life that one of them might have reached. Most parents will judge this worth it. But I think that is a real choice that couples with the potential for stratospheric achievement have to make - one of them has to be the main family makers. And, in my estimate, in at least 8 couples out of 10, she will be the one who chooses to make the adjustment. Not forced. But chooses, all things considered.

Civil Union Commission Rejects Civil Unions, Wimps Out On the Hard Part

The Special Committee to Study Civil Unions and Issues of Marriage of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has just issued its draft report. They spend 30 pages reviewing the issues of marriage and homosexuality familiar to anyone who has been involved with this issue.

In the end, they come to two conclusions:

First, we should stay in covenant relationship with one another in the church despite our disagreements [my paraphrase]. Second, quoting the report,

We find that the compromise suggestion of civil unions/domestic partnerships offers no true solution to the struggle around same-gendered partnerships. Civil unions/domestic partnerships provide neither the state-sanctioned benefits nor the societal acceptance that marriage (expanded or not) offers.

The review of the debate that the committee offers is not bad. The conclusion that we should stay and work with one another, rather than call each other names and leave, is worth saying again. The conclusion that civil unions will not work is a substantive conclusion.

BUT what the committee leaves the church with is this:
You have two hard painful options.
We reject the compromise that is on the table.
We do not choose either option.
We offer no other compromises.
Good luck.

Structured Structure

I have been writing about Bourdieu lately, which means that I have to type phrases like "a structured structure and a structuring structure" often.

I noticed a peculiar, deep-in-the-word-geek-woods pleasure: typing the word structure is fun. It makes an interesting circular pattern in the left hand, especially in the index finger.

If you like that sort of thing, try it a few times. Structure structure structured structuring structure. Oh, and structuration (but that is Giddens and not as much fun to type).

If this is not your kind of thing, just move on. Nothing to see here. (structure structure structure).

No, Secularism Is Not Saving Marriage

Oliver Thomas' religion column in USA Today, "Is secularism saving marriage," is mostly wrongheaded.

Thomas' premise is that marriage should have disappeared in postmodern America, since it is so confining and patriarchal and permanent. Marriage seems to be coming back. How do we explain this mystery, Thomas asks? It must be that men have learned to be more egalitarian and intimate from secular society. Secularism helps people delay marriage without delaying sex, which is healthy. Thus, secularism is saving marriage from religion.

No. Religious people have longer and stronger marriages. Grownups of all kinds, religious and otherwise, know that the greatest social value of marriage is not the intimacy it fosters between adults, but the permanent team it creates between them to raise children. Religious marriages are, on average, more intimate and more mutual. Religious people are more likely to get married in their mid-twenties, the optimal time, rather than delaying for their careers until they are so set in their single ways that it is hard to make a permanent team. The secular emphasis on getting my individual way in all things undermines marriage.

Permissive Families Breed Spontaneous Kids, Authoritarian Families Breed Directed Kids

Some parents are highly supportive of their children, some are highly challenging, some are both, and some are neither. This nifty four-fold division was used by Kevin Rathunde, continuing work of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, to look at how much some talented high school students were involved in their school-related activities. They had students wear pagers through a school week, beeping them several times a day to record what they were doing and how they felt about it.

The researchers were looking for highly engaging "flow" experiences. The students' responses were turned into a -.4 to +.4 scale, with the boring experiences at the -.4 end and the flow experiences at the +.4 end. They also had separate averages for the students' spontaneous activities and their directed activities

Rathunde then compared the average responses of the kids from each of the four kinds of families. The kids from the high support/high challenge families reported the highest average score - almost .35 - for both spontaneous and directed activities. The kids from the other three kinds of families all had average scores at or below zero for both kinds of activities.

What is most interesting to me, though, are the differences in the latter three families in which kinds of school-related activities, spontaneous or directed, went with which kinds of families. Kids from low support/low challenge families reported average scores a little below zero on both spontaneous and directed activities. This is a far cry from the high/high group, but, on the whole, they net out higher than the remaining two. These kids are on their own as far as their families go, so they make their own way with middlin' results.

Kids from high support/low challenge families (what Diana Baumrind, in a similar scheme, calls permissive families) are more satisfied with their spontaneous activities than their directed ones - about -.1 vs -.3. The low support/high challenge families (Baumrind's authoritarians) report the reverse: much higher satisfaction with directed activities (0) than spontaneous (-.4). This mixed finding from the mixed families is in the direction that I expected. I was surprised, though, at how much the permissive kids liked spontaneity and how much the authoritarian kids like direction.

The Global Problem of the Color Line

We have been reading W.E.B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk in our social theory class. Du Bois famously said, at the dawn of the previous century, "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”

I had not fully realized until this reading that he did not just mean that the color line is the main problem of the twentieth century in the United States, but rather, that this is the global problem of the century.

Later in the book he writes “the characteristic of our age is the contact of European civilization with the world's undeveloped peoples.” When we think about the world in 1900, almost the entire globe was directly ruled by European countries or their colonial heirs. The Europeans and their transplants operated on an explicitly racial theory which held that the white race(s) developed the world. The "undeveloped" peoples were those on the other side of the color line globally.

In the second half of the twentieth century Du Bois' prophecy came true with striking clarity all over the world. We are still working through the aftermath of ending racist and imperialist theories that justified European domination. The problem of the color line is far from over in the global clash of civilizations. But the theory that justified the color line has been subverted.

What Dad's Job is Like Matters More to Kids Than What Mom's Job is Like

I am working with students on the 500 Families study, which surveyed middle-class, dual-career couples on work-family balance. One paper from this study, by Ariel Kalil, Judith Levine, and Kathleen Ziol-Guest, looked at what might make teen boys and girls want to have jobs like their mothers' and fathers' jobs. How much the jobs paid, and how much the parents talked about their work with their kids were not significant factors in whether teens wanted jobs like their parents'. And boys and girls were not very different from one another in their response to their parents, though girls were somewhat more likely to want a job like mom's. For both boys and girls, dad's job seemed more attractive.

Teens, like everyone else, are more attracted to jobs with complex work and freedom to do it. Quite a few of the mothers and fathers in the study had work like that. The surprising finding was this:

When fathers hold jobs that are substantively complex and when they report having higher levels of autonomy at work, adolescents express a greater interest in having a job like their fathers’. Interestingly, these relationships do not apply to interest in having a job like their mothers’.

The authors are not sure why teens are differently attracted to their parents' work in this way, and neither am I. Here is my guess, though. For most mothers, motherhood is the most salient part of their identity to children (and probably to the mothers themselves); mom's job is important, but secondary. For fathers, though, their work is very salient to their being fathers, because how they support their family is a vital part of their identity as fathers. The kids pick up on this, so the qualities of their fathers' jobs are more salient to the children than are the qualities of their mothers' jobs.

Marriage Makes Women More Conservative; Motherhood Makes Them More Liberal

Marriage makes men and women more conservative. Fatherhood also makes men more conservative. But political scientists Steven Greene and Laurel Elder found that mothers were more liberal than non-mothers on war questions. This is true even though those same women are likely to have been more conservative than single women when they first got married.

Far from producing "Security Moms" who vote for the most hawkish candidates to protect their babies, mothers seem to desire to avoid war and protect their own babies from fighting them.

(I thank Steven Greene for generously sharing this paper with me.)

Ditch the Lectionary

My church uses the Common Lectionary, a selection of readings from the Bible that work through the whole text, pretty much, every three years. Each week we have an Old Testament selection, a New Testament selection from the gospels, and a New Testament selection from the other NT books. The pastor normally incorporates one of these selections into the sermon.

I appreciate the intent of the lectionary. Using a lectionary makes certain that the preacher will not just stick to a few favorite texts, but will have to read, and perhaps preach on, the entire Bible.

Still, as a way of actually teaching the Bible, I think the lectionary is a failure. Three unconnected snippets each week are too short and too many to follow. Since, in my experience, it is a rare preacher who tries to integrate all three each week, most of the readings are not developed at all. And even if the preacher does follow one section - the gospel, most likely - for several weeks, it is very hard to hold on to the thread of preaching. Usually, the sequences of sermons are not connected with one another, and often only loosely connected with the text.

I think we would be better off preaching the Word the way the Reformers did: work through a book, or a theme, thoroughly. This does not mean that today's events and concerns could not be incorporated - on the contrary, nearly all of the Bible ties readily to today. But I, as a listener and student, would rather hear one sustained argument for a season that really explicated and connected a text.

The lectionary, it seems to me, makes most of our Scripture reading in the service into a magical act of just saying the words and hoping they have some effect.

Reboot Universe

A delightful prank.

Birth Order Advantages of Chattering Parents.

“The best environment to grow up in is basically two parents who are chattering away at you with fancy words.”

So says Frank Sulloway, author of Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. Sulloway was quoted in a New York Times story, "Birth Order: Fun to Debate, But How Important?" which I thought mostly missed the point of Sulloway's study.

Sulloway says that there is not a specific character that goes with each birth order position. Rather, the dynamic rule is "first born gets first choice." Normally the first born will gravitate to the things the parents value most, will get the most parental conversation, will seek to work hard, do well in school, and succeed in life, because that is the simplest path to eminence. The later-borns then have to find a different niche, especially when the kids are young and all at home. But if the first-born does not choose that niche, it is available for the second, and so on.

Sulloway cites a recent study of birth order using Norwegian military data. That study found that first borns have a modest but real 3-point IQ advantage over second borns. Sulloway's conclusion from this is the wonderful quote above.

Background, Education, and Effort Matter in About the Right Proportions

In the Social Structure class we are working through the classic studies of social mobility (for SOC nerds that is Blau and Duncan, as modified by Jencks). They look at which factors in your background help predict your likely socioeconomic status (SES).

The basic finding is roughly this:

The class of your family, plus the way that class shapes your schooling, predicts a fifth to a quarter of your ultimate SES.

Your own education predicts another fifth to a quarter.

The other 50 or 60% is due to other factors - including your own effort in getting, keeping, and improving in a job.

As we talked about it, it seemed to me that this is an ethically satisfying distribution. As a parent, I am glad that my efforts to help my children be cultivated and successful do matter. As a teacher I am glad that education adds a sizable hunks to my students' ultimate success. And as a citizen I am glad that there is such ample scope for personal effort to make the biggest difference in one's achievement.

Darwinist Dating Should Not Be A Template, But a Cautionary Tale

Kay Hymowitz has another fine piece on mate selection in City Journal, "Dating in a Time of Darwinism." She gives their due to single men who have been burned and become jaded about dating. They try to be nice guys, but get dumped for bad boys. They try to be chivalrous, but get attacked as sexist. Or try to be egalitarian, and get scorned as inconsiderate. So some men turn to a brutal Darwinian calculus that they will be more successful in their sexual conquests if they are more callous to women. As women's biological clock ticks louder, men can get away with even less consideration. And the saddest part is that many of them are right.

Hymowitz rightly notes that what a Darwinian approach to sexual relations misses the fact that human beings can be cultivated and civilized past their merely biological desires. This goes for women just as much as it does for men. There is a short-term sexual advantage to men in being jerks. Today there are more women with the freedom to do the same. But they are both still being jerks.

What strikes me about this sad state of affairs, which might affect as many as a fifth of single young men and women, is that it is so short-sighted. Most people do want to marry and have kids and stay that way. Nearly all of the pleasure-seeking young women of the New Girl Order harbor the desire for real marriage and a family, and most of the single young men now studying up to be Pick-Up Artists will want that, too.

The smart young men and women, like most of the students I teach, can figure out that if they want something eventually, they will be better off is they start seeking it now. The happiest group of grownups are likely to have married in their mid-twenties and gotten on with a solid, building-up life.

If You Are Ready to Marry in Your Mid-20s, You Will Be No Happier if You Wait

This is the conclusion of a paper by University of Texas sociologist Norval Glenn and colleagues. One of them, Jeremy Uecker, presented the paper at the American Sociological Association meeting in San Francisco. I attended that session.

The Texans cautiously conclude that "it would be premature to conclude that the optimal time for first marriage for most persons is ages 22-25." The bottom line, though, is this:

However, the findings do suggest that most persons have little or nothing to gain in the way of marital success by deliberately postponing marriage beyond the mid twenties.

Lawless Courts Undermine The Legitimacy of the Law

I believe this rule applies to the courts and the law of all kinds of institutions. This Sunday I have in mind the Permanent Judicial Commission of the Presbytery of Boston in their ruling on Rev. Jean Southard performing a same-sex marriage in First Presbyterian Church of Waltham.

Everyone agrees on the facts. Jean Southard, a Presbyterian minister, did perform the usual wedding service in a normal church, joining two women. Everyone involved called it a marriage, both in the civil and in the religious sense. Yet the church's Directory of Worship clearly says that Presbyterian ministers and Presbyterian churches can only assist in the marriage of a man and a woman.

Southard's defense was that the language of the Directory is "merely descriptive" and reflects outdated social conditions. The Boston PJC bought this argument. Or rather, as part of their desire to overturn church law, which has been reaffirmed by the votes of the whole church several times and recently, the judicial commission legislated for the church. Worse, as the dissent of two members of the commission strongly protested, the majority of the commission is ruling that the church law should be determined by the lead of the state law.

The Southard decision follows on the Orwellian reasoning of General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission last spring in the Spahr case. Rev. Jane Spahr had also performed a same-sex marriage (actually two, just to be sure) in order to create a test case. The GA PJC ruled that since the Directory says a marriage can only be between a man and a woman, the thing that Spahr performed, which all present regarded as a marriage, couldn't really be a violation of the Directory since it didn't involve a man and a woman. Case closed.

Such games undermine the whole church. Wrong, wrong.

Eccentric Grownup

I think I need a shirt that says that.

Crisis Pregnancy Centers Support Adoption. People Who Don't Like That Should Start Their Own.

Kathryn Joyce has an article, "Shotgun Adoption" in The Nation that criticizes "crisis pregnancy centers" as a plot to coerce pregnant single women to give up their babies for adoption by conservative Christian parents.

There have been abuses by crisis pregnancy centers. That is wrong and should be treated by the appropriate authorities. But this article goes way beyond legitimate abuses to posit a conspiracy. This is unfair and unbalanced left-wing paranoia. Which I oppose exactly as much as I oppose unfair and unbalanced right-wing paranoia.

Christian crisis pregnancy centers (CPC) try to talk women out of abortion. That is their open and stated purpose. No one has to go to them if they don't want to hear that message. Most Christian crisis pregnancy centers promote the idea that children do best when raised by their two married parents. This is true, as I have often argued on this blog. The best outcome, from the CPC's perspective, would be for the pregnant woman and the father of the child to marry, raise their child together, and join the church. Again, this is all open, above-board, and no one has to listen. Of course, few of the women who come to CPCs are already married, in the church, and ready to raise their child - if they were, they wouldn't be having a crisis.

So the next two options are either that the woman would raise the child herself, or that she would give the child to a married couple who dearly want a child of their own and have the commitment, resources, and desire to raise that child in a stable and loving home. Most Christian CPCs think the latter option is better than the former. Two parents in a stable home beat one mom in crisis. There is solid sociological support for this judgment. Still, the issue could be argued either way. Christian CPCs promote adoption by a married couple as best for the child.

For women who agree with this conclusion, the Christian CPC offers to house, feed, care for, and cover all the medical expenses of the woman as she grows her baby and goes through the process of handing her baby over to the adoptive couple. This handover is painful for most women. That is why such a pregnancy creates a crisis in the first place. If it weren't hard, CPCs would be necessary. Many people, including those not directly involved in the adoption, give charitably to support all of this care to give the best ending to what could be a terrible crisis.

People who believe that the child would be better off raised by a single mother can form their own Crisis Pregnancy Centers. They can offer to house, feed, nurture, and cover all the medical expenses of pregnant women who will then go home with their babies. I can see this as honorable work. I think Kathryn Joyce should be the first to volunteer her house and her bank account to the cause. There could be such things as Secular Single-Mom Support Centers. But I am not holding my breath.

Marriage vs. Alzheimer's

A Finnish study, reported in the British Medical Journal, reports that

Being widowed from mid-life onwards was associated with the highest risk of cognitive impairment later in life with a highly significant odds ratio of 7.67 for Alzheimer’s disease

Living without a partner for other reasons was also related to impaired cognitive functioning much later in life

They theorize that married people have someone to talk to in old age, which helps fend off Alzheimer's.

Cancer + Separation = 1/3 Lower Survival Rate

The BBC is reporting on a study by Gwen Sprehn and colleagues at Indiana University on the effect of marital status on surviving cancer. They found, as other research has, that married people are more likely to survive than unmarried people. The new element in this study is that those who are separating are the worst off.

The usual understanding of why married people live longer is that they have someone to care for them and to live for. I think what this research adds is that separating is positively harmful to your health. You don't just lose the benefit of marriage, you add a killing stress.

Married - 63% survival after five years and 58% at 10-year mark
Never-married - 57% and 52%
Divorced - 52% and 46%
Widowed - 47% and 41%
Separated - 45% and 37%

2/3rds Cohabit, 2/3rds of Them Slide Into It Without A Plan

This is the new finding of Scott Stanley and his colleagues. He has been doing follow-up research on the early '90s finding that married couples who cohabited first are more likely to divorce than marrieds who waited to live together. The nuance that the first study found was that people who were engaged when they cohabited end up like marrieds who waited to live together. It is the other kind, the ones who drifted into living together, who are more likely to drift in to marriage and drift out again.

The new finding in Stanley's latest study is how a big a proportion of cohabiters slide into living together without a future plan of marriage. This means that almost half of all couples cohabit without a definite marriage plan. This is a sizable group putting itself at risk willy-nilly.

Sex and Fear, Part 2

Yesterday I noted that men fear more what their wives fear. In thinking further about this idea, I made a connection back to something I learned from Steven Stosny last year: we get angry not to protect ourselves, but to protect our loved ones. In fact, responding to things that threaten us with anger is often more dangerous than if we ran away. We have to get angry in order to stay and fight, even if it endangers ourselves. Why would be do that? To protect our loved ones.

I usually take the world's shocks philosophically, or with sadness. The things that make me mad are more likely to be threats to my family, and by extension, my community. The same applies, I realize, to the things I fear in an emotional way. I can work around dangers to myself calmly, if they can be avoided. But I can feel fear for my children far away, because I can't work around the things that might endanger them. I have to rely on their good sense and safety-making social structures.

That men would feel fear for their loved ones more than for themselves is a corollary of the socially healthy tendency of men to protect women and children. But it also means that fearful men are more likely to damage others if they think that doing so is a righteous way to protect their loved ones.

Sex and Fear

I have been having a discussion with a friend about what we should fear from the government. I am afraid of torture, suspending habeas corpus, declaring citizens "enemy combatants," warrantless wiretaps, secret prisons, and failing to enforce securities regulations that threaten the world economy. He is worried about government health care and the car company and bank bailouts as communism, which might force armed resistance to the state. I am not here raising the merits of these fears.

Instead, I was struck by a point that he made in a recent conversation. His wife was much more worried about these things than he was. As I thought about it, several of the women in my life are more worried about the things I fear than I am.

So I had this thought. Moms worry about dangers to their families. That is part of the job. And daughters who are preparing to be moms one day can do a fair job of worrying, too. Dads protect moms and daughters. They fear things that are actually threats to their families and, by extension, their communities. Dads also worry about things that their wives are worried about because their wives are worried. If mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.

This is the rough thought I am working on. Much of the emotion in the various cultures of fear are driven by the good impulse of men protecting women.

Nerd Injury

Mrs. G. hurt herself. She pulled a muscle inserting a formula into 14,000 cells in an Excel spreadsheet of education data.

How the Theory Syllabus Turned Out

This summer I completely redid the Macrosociological Theory syllabus. It is very hard to make a satisfactory social theory syllabus. Social theory is mostly an informed reflection on history and philosophy. This has usually meant that I have to backfill lots of history and philosophy before we can begin the theory sequence proper. After years of good but not spectacular classes, I am trying a different tactic.

I think half of what a good undergraduate course should do is make students culturally literate about the big ideas and big authors of a field. This does not always add up to a fully integrated exposition. This time with the theory class I am going for maximal cultural literacy, even at the cost of much thematic unity. This is the Greatest Hits version. I wanted books that change people's lives. My rule of thumb was that I wanted books that had their own Wikipedia page. We are reading an author a week. This can, of course, only be an introduction to their complex thought. At the end of the term I want each student to pick one of these works to go back to and write something deeper with it.

Here are the texts, which we will read in chronological order, for Macrosociological Theory:

Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845)

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)

Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)

Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (1893)

W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

Max Weber, “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism” (1906)

Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation” (1918)

Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” (1919)

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944)

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of the Great American Cities (1961)

Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970)

Pierre Bourdieu & Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1970)

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975)

Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (1975)

Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983)

James Surowieki, The Wisdom of Crowds (2004)

How Should One Respond to Ignorant Opinions Without Snark?

Snark is the lifeblood of the blogosphere. But at the Gruntled Center we promote gratitude, cheerfulness, contentment - or at least resolute civility. I really do want to find common ground with people I disagree with. And that depends on some common body of facts on which we agree, as well as opinions about them over which we might still disagree.

Other people in the public sphere, though, are met with more than differing opinions. They are met every day with angry people asserting as facts things that are just not so.

When Senator McCain, during the presidential campaign, was confronted by a woman who asserted that Barack Obama was a Muslim, he gently corrected her. She was nonplussed, but did not fight him; she was there as a McCain supporter.

By contrast, Democratic Congressman Barney Frank was confronted at a town hall meeting by a woman who accused him of supporting "this Nazi policy" - by which I think she meant the false belief that the health care proposal before Congress would force old people to accept euthanasia. Congressman Frank asked her "what planet do you normally reside on?" This was fine snark and drew a big laugh, but is clearly an ineffective way to promote civil conversation with people who are determinedly wrong.

Because people do not thank you when you point out that they have their facts all wrong. They just get mad.

Recently, Republican Congressman Bob Inglis reported that at a town-hall meeting in suburban Simpsonville, SC, a man stood up and told Congress to "keep your government hands off my Medicare." The Congressman "had to politely explain that, 'Actually, sir, your health care is being provided by the government,' " Inglis recalled. "But he wasn't having any of it."

He wasn't having any of it. How should one respond helpfully, without arrogance or condescension, in a way that actually reaches people, when they are just flat wrong?

A recent poll by Public Policy Polling tried to find out just what the "birthers" who doubt President Obama's citizenship actually believe. A quarter of the people polled did not believe that Pres. Obama was a citizen. Of that 25%, 6% - a quarter of all the birthers - knew that Obama was born in Hawaii, but did not think Hawaii was part of the United States.

I have not met a birther, or someone who believes that there will be "death panels," or someone who says "keep your government hands off my Medicare." But it is only a matter of time. (In fact, this post may bring a few out). Truly, I would welcome helpful suggestions.

A Centrist Lesson From Ted Kennedy

Senator Edward Kennedy died last night. He was a great liberal leader in the nation. He was also a great legislator. The practice of making legislation tends to make people act like centrists. If they do not reach across the aisle, they can make great speeches, but rarely pass anything important.

Ted Kennedy's great passion was health care for everyone in America. Early in his career he had a chance to work with President Nixon to pass national health insurance legislation. Kennedy held out for his favored plan, and health insurance for all Americans failed. Kennedy long regretted that he sacrificed the goal for ideological purity.

Centrist legislation always requires compromise with the other side. But it actually accomplishes some good things. This is true for liberals and conservatives. It is also true for centrists, who have to accept attacks on centrism from ideologues as the price for actually accomplishing something.

Ted Kennedy learned that to achieve any legislative goal, you have to plan on incremental changes over a long time. This is how we came to have Medicare, Medicaid, veteran's hospitals, Children's Health Insurance Plans in every state, universal vaccinations, smoking restrictions, drinking restrictions, clean food, air, and water regulations, seat belt laws, noise pollution laws - the hundred and one programs to make everyone's health better and their health costs shared more evenly. And we still have the most elaborate variety and highest quality of fancy health care in the world, though one could not call that a system. All of this was achieved in centrist increments. Some on the right denounce this a creeping socialism, and some on the left denounce it as Big Brother, but few of them actually want to give up the benefits of better health and better health care.

Centrists owe a great debt to Ted Kennedy for his long-term commitment to incremental achievements for a larger social goal.

Capon Springs

My family has its annual reunion at lovely Capon Springs and Farms in West Virginia this week, as we have since the '60s.

See you in a week!

"I Get That All the Time" - Nice Marriage Song

From Due West:

Due West

More CMT Music

More CMT Music Videos

Waiting Out "I Don't Love You; I Never Did"

Laura Munson has an excellent "Modern Love" column in the New York Times. I can't get the link to work, so I am pasting the whole thing in, below.

The main point is that the author calmly outlasted her husband's out-of-the-blue "I don't love you" claim. She saw that his problem was not really with her, but with his own feelings of failure, mostly as a provider. She and the children gave him some space within the marriage and within their home for as long as he needed it. Read on for the inspiring outcome.

Modern Love
Those Aren't Fighting Words, Dear
By LAURA A. MUNSON
July 31, 2009

LET'S say you have what you believe to be a healthy marriage. You're still friends and lovers after spending more than half of your lives together. The dreams you set out to achieve in your 20s - gazing into each other's eyes in candlelit city bistros when you were single and skinny - have for the most part come true.

Two decades later you have the 20 acres of land, the farmhouse, the children, the dogs and horses. You're the parents you said you would be, full of love and guidance. You've done it all: Disneyland, camping, Hawaii, Mexico, city living, stargazing.

Sure, you have your marital issues, but on the whole you feel so self-satisfied about how things have worked out that you would never, in your wildest nightmares, think you would hear these words from your husband one fine summer day: "I don't love you anymore. I'm not sure I ever did. I'm moving out. The kids will understand. They'll want me to be happy."

But wait. This isn't the divorce story you think it is. Neither is it a begging-him-to-stay story. It's a story about hearing your husband say "I don't love you anymore" and deciding not to believe him. And what can happen as a result.

Here's a visual: Child throws a temper tantrum. Tries to hit his mother. But the mother doesn't hit back, lecture or punish. Instead, she ducks. Then she tries to go about her business as if the tantrum isn't happening. She doesn't "reward" the tantrum. She simply doesn't take the tantrum personally because, after all, it's not about her.

Let me be clear: I'm not saying my husband was throwing a child's tantrum. No. He was in the grip of something else - a profound and far more troubling meltdown that comes not in childhood but in midlife, when we perceive that our personal trajectory is no longer arcing reliably upward as it once did. But I decided to respond the same way I'd responded to my children's tantrums. And I kept responding to it that way. For four months.

"I don't love you anymore. I'm not sure I ever did."

His words came at me like a speeding fist, like a sucker punch, yet somehow in that moment I was able to duck. And once I recovered and composed myself, I managed to say, "I don't buy it." Because I didn't.

He drew back in surprise. Apparently he'd expected me to burst into tears, to rage at him, to threaten him with a custody battle. Or beg him to change his mind.

So he turned mean. "I don't like what you've become."

Gut-wrenching pause. How could he say such a thing? That's when I really wanted to fight. To rage. To cry. But I didn't.

Instead, a shroud of calm enveloped me, and I repeated those words: "I don't buy it."

You see, I'd recently committed to a non-negotiable understanding with myself. I'd committed to "The End of Suffering." I'd finally managed to exile the voices in my head that told me my personal happiness was only as good as my outward success, rooted in things that were often outside my control. I'd seen the insanity of that equation and decided to take responsibility for my own happiness. And I mean all of it.

My husband hadn't yet come to this understanding with himself. He had enjoyed many years of hard work, and its rewards had supported our family of four all along. But his new endeavor hadn't been going so well, and his ability to be the breadwinner was in rapid decline. He'd been miserable about this, felt useless, was losing himself emotionally and letting himself go physically. And now he wanted out of our marriage; to be done with our family.

But I wasn't buying it.

I said: "It's not age-appropriate to expect children to be concerned with their parents' happiness. Not unless you want to create co-dependents who'll spend their lives in bad relationships and therapy. There are times in every relationship when the parties involved need a break. What can we do to give you the distance you need, without hurting the family?"

"Huh?" he said.

"Go trekking in Nepal. Build a yurt in the back meadow. Turn the garage studio into a man-cave. Get that drum set you've always wanted. Anything but hurting the children and me with a reckless move like the one you're talking about."

Then I repeated my line, "What can we do to give you the distance you need, without hurting the family?"

"Huh?"

"How can we have a responsible distance?"

"I don't want distance," he said. "I want to move out."

My mind raced. Was it another woman? Drugs? Unconscionable secrets? But I stopped myself. I would not suffer.

Instead, I went to my desk, Googled "responsible separation" and came up with a list. It included things like: Who's allowed to use what credit cards? Who are the children allowed to see you with in town? Who's allowed keys to what?

I looked through the list and passed it on to him.

His response: "Keys? We don't even have keys to our house."

I remained stoic. I could see pain in his eyes. Pain I recognized.

"Oh, I see what you're doing," he said. "You're going to make me go into therapy. You're not going to let me move out. You're going to use the kids against me."

"I never said that. I just asked: What can we do to give you the distance you need ... "

"Stop saying that!"

Well, he didn't move out.

Instead, he spent the summer being unreliable. He stopped coming home at his usual six o'clock. He would stay out late and not call. He blew off our entire Fourth of July - the parade, the barbecue, the fireworks - to go to someone else's party. When he was at home, he was distant. He wouldn't look me in the eye. He didn't even wish me "Happy Birthday."

But I didn't play into it. I walked my line. I told the kids: "Daddy's having a hard time as adults often do. But we're a family, no matter what." I was not going to suffer. And neither were they.

MY trusted friends were irate on my behalf. "How can you just stand by and accept this behavior? Kick him out! Get a lawyer!"

I walked my line with them, too. This man was hurting, yet his problem wasn't mine to solve. In fact, I needed to get out of his way so he could solve it.

I know what you're thinking: I'm a pushover. I'm weak and scared and would put up with anything to keep the family together. I'm probably one of those women who would endure physical abuse. But I can assure you, I'm not. I load 1,500-pound horses into trailers and gallop through the high country of Montana all summer. I went through Pitocin-induced natural childbirth. And a Caesarean section without follow-up drugs. I am handy with a chain saw.

I simply had come to understand that I was not at the root of my husband's problem. He was. If he could turn his problem into a marital fight, he could make it about us. I needed to get out of the way so that wouldn't happen.

Privately, I decided to give him time. Six months.

I had good days, and I had bad days. On the good days, I took the high road. I ignored his lashing out, his merciless jabs. On bad days, I would fester in the August sun while the kids ran through sprinklers, raging at him in my mind. But I never wavered. Although it may sound ridiculous to say "Don't take it personally" when your husband tells you he no longer loves you,
sometimes that's exactly what you have to do.

Instead of issuing ultimatums, yelling, crying or begging, I presented him with options. I created a summer of fun for our family and welcomed him to share in it, or not - it was up to him. If he chose not to come along, we would miss him, but we would be just fine, thank you very much. And we were.

And, yeah, you can bet I wanted to sit him down and persuade him to stay. To love me. To fight for what we've created. You can bet I wanted to.

But I didn't.

I barbecued. Made lemonade. Set the table for four. Loved him from afar.

And one day, there he was, home from work early, mowing the lawn. A man doesn't mow his lawn if he's going to leave it. Not this man. Then he fixed a door that had been broken for eight years. He made a comment about our front porch needing paint. Our front porch. He mentioned needing wood for next winter. The future. Little by little, he started talking about the
future.

It was Thanksgiving dinner that sealed it. My husband bowed his head humbly and said, "I'm thankful for my family."

He was back.

And I saw what had been missing: pride. He'd lost pride in himself. Maybe that's what happens when our egos take a hit in midlife and we realize we're not as young and golden anymore.

When life's knocked us around. And our childhood myths reveal themselves to be just that. The truth feels like the biggest sucker-punch of them all: it's not a spouse or land or a job or money that brings us happiness. Those achievements, those relationships, can enhance our happiness, yes, but happiness has to start from within. Relying on any other equation can be
lethal.

My husband had become lost in the myth. But he found his way out. We've since had the hard conversations. In fact, he encouraged me to write about our ordeal. To help other couples who arrive at this juncture in life. People who feel scared and stuck. Who believe their temporary feelings are permanent. Who see an easy out, and think they can escape.

My husband tried to strike a deal. Blame me for his pain. Unload his feelings of personal disgrace onto me.

But I ducked. And I waited. And it worked.

The ASA is Instructive and Alienating

Final reflections on the American Sociological Association meeting.

I always learn things at the ASA. I can't say that I have ever enjoyed it, though.

I find it alienating. The conference is overwhelmingly for researchers, either professors or graduate students. This time there seemed to be even fewer people from small colleges than in the past. Conversations about teaching at the ASA tend to be as much about how to avoid doing it as about how best to do it.

I also find the assumed leftism and assumed secularity wearing. Not oppressive, just a constant reminder that I am guest in someone else's ideology.

Still, there are many smart people presenting empirical research about interesting things. And for people fully integrated into the ASA there are all kinds of research, job, and social networks formed there. I have a network of friends made elsewhere who I like to meet at the conference, including a growing list of former students. But I am do research slowly, as a teacher must, so I am rarely in a position to jump in to ongoing projects.

Still, the ASA is not really meant for my kind. I am happy to let an interval of years go by between visits.

Cosmopolitanization

Dispatches from the American Sociological Association meeting.

In the last session on the last day of the meeting they brought out the big guns. Ulrich Beck had been invited to come from Germany for his first ASA to give a thematic address (fancy session in the big ballroom). Saskia Sassen and Myra Marx Feree, no lightweights, gave the responses.

Beck is best known for arguing that we now live in "risk societies" in which we anticipate catastrophes, such as global warming and terrorism. Now he is developing the notion that globalization is turning the various risk societies of the world into a larger, transnational unit. He does not think humanity is realizing the high-brow ideal of cosmopolitanism. Rather, he thinks there are many low-level processes that are producing a practical cosmopolitanization.

This is an interesting idea, especially because it leads to more practical kinds of empirical sociological study than the search for cosmopolitans does.

After the back and forth with the panelists and the audience, it became clear that Beck had the ongoing experience of creating a transnational Europe out of the many formerly feuding nations as his model of practical cosmopolitanization. I think he is right about Europe. I don't know how well it translates to anywhere else yet.

Still, worth staying to the end for.

National Curriculum and School Achievement

Dispatches from the American Sociological Association meeting.

Stephanie Arnett, a fine young sociologist at Tulane (and a Centre graduate) reported that tracking in school increases the difference in achievement between richer and poorer kids. This is not a surprise. But she also found, in her massive 29-country comparison of school policy and students' achievement, that having a national curriculum significantly closes the gap in achievement between richer and poorer kids.

The idea of a national curriculum is so foreign to Americans that we don't even test for what it might do. We do, however, have the bases for a state curriculum in some states, such as Kentucky. We have been working in Kentucky to lift everyone's achievement on the core curriculum. We have also been working to close the gap between richer and poorer kids. Using the former as a tool to achieve the latter is a structural force I had not fully appreciated before.

In the Church of Gender

From the American Sociological Association meeting in San Francisco.

I have been attending sessions about work and family balance. The people who do the research and the people in the audience, most of whom are also doing similar research, tend overwhelmingly to be mothers. I went to a packed house session in which one of the women on the panel said she was glad to see more than a smattering of men. I counted 5 out of about 80.

One very interesting panel was an "author meets critics" session for Pamela Stone's Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Are Heading Home. She studied highly educated moms in high-powered careers who left or scaled back those careers and spent more time raising their kids. Stone started her research before Lisa Belkin's New York Times article, famous in family research circles, started a media discussion about the "Opt-Out Revolution." By the time Stone was ready to publish, though, the moment was ripe for a sociological study to go beyond the journalism.

The thesis on the "opt out" side is that many women choose to suspend or give up high-powered careers to put that same energy into raising their children. The counter-thesis of this session was that women really wanted to stay in high-powered, time-demanding careers, but the inflexible structures of work and the unwillingness of husbands to scale back their demanding careers forced these women off the CEO track.

The first critic set the tone. This is not really an author meets critics session, she said, but author meets admirers. And she pronounced the litany:
gender differences are socially constructed;
Men and women want high-powered, demanding careers equally;
Women do not approach parenting differently than men;
The differences we see are not due to choice but social structure (and sometimes male selfishness).

Each speaker in turn recited the litany. Yet the empirical material they recounted, from their own research, from what their students told them, from their own experience as mothers, and even from the material in Stone's book, started to tell another story. Yes, social structure matters. Yes it is hard to manage parenting and a demanding job. But many of the women did, in fact, want to be home raising their kids more than they wanted to give all their time to the job. And few of the men they were married to felt the same way, though they supported their wives' choices either way. There probably isn't an opt-out revolution, but for women whose families make enough to let them scale back work for kids, many want to. They want to raise their kids themselves and not hire other people to do it. They do believe in "intensive mothering." Some of them don't even feel torn about it, but rather think that raising their kids is a good use of their fancy education and experience.

This evidence was dealt with in a revealing way: women who thought they were choosing motherhood over career because they wanted to were really just socialized to think that. And men who thought think they are being good fathers and husbands by working more to support their families, they have just been socialized wrong, too.

License Plate + Car Make Wit

My witty cousin used to drive a LIFEZA Cabriolet.

I am staying with her and just saw her new license-plate-plus-car-make: MINDOVR Miata.

A Secular Age 10

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

Taylor ends the book with "Conversions." This was a little disconcerting, as we expected him to offer a more programmatic statement of how to deal with the dilemmas of transcendence and immanence in modernity. Instead he took a few "itineraries" of changed lives as models. In particular, he takes Charles Péguy and Gerard Manley Hopkins as cases. These were not familiar cases to the students, so they did not leap out as helpful models. Nonetheless, Taylor drew a useful story from their lives.

I came to see why he ended with the lives of converts. He made a crucial point at the outset of the book that most people choose their position on the transcendence/immanence (or supernatural/natural) spectrum not because they were convinced by a rational argument, but because they were impressed with some one's or some group's way of living out their convictions. In the end, then, what he needs to show us are the narratives of exemplary people, rather than a philosophical program. And the great advantage of converts' narratives is that they choose one way versus another for a reason. And intellectual converts are most useful of all as examples because they choose one path versus another for a reason that they can articulate, write down, and pass on to others.

Taylor's position - a high-brow orthodox Catholicism - is a sophisticated one, making its way between the horns of several hoary dilemmas. The pool of sophisticated, high-brow, orthodox Catholic converts who left helpful written records of their personal itinerary is rather select. Taylor gives us the best-known people he could find, even if few students know who they are.

A Secular Age 9

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

Taylor offers a succinct critique of Unitarianism, as it was originally developed (it is a little different now):

We take the crucifixion out of Christ’s story, turning him into a teacher.
BUT then his sacrifice is meaningless, which is worse.

A Secular Age 8

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

Charles Taylor spends much of the book considering the opposition between transcendental and immanent worldviews, which mostly boils down to Christianity vs. secular humanism. One of the most interesting points he makes is that we tend to choose these worldviews not because we are convinced by arguments for one side or the other. Instead, we are drawn to these positions for ethical reasons - what kind of life would I lead if I adopted one view or the other? What kind of life do people live who have already adopted one view or the other? We look at the narrative that each position would make in our lives. Then we consider arguments. And often we convince ourselves that the arguments were the reason we adopted the worldview in the first place.

One major story that atheists tell for being atheists is that "science disproves God." Really, though, Taylor argues, it is the moral authority of exclusive (atheistic) humanism that makes people think that they were made atheists by science. Science, by its very premises, could neither prove nor disprove God. The appealing atheist story is a narrative of coming of age, becoming mature.

A Secular Age 7

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

Taylor says that the early modern era created several spheres for popular action separate from the state: the economy, the public sphere, and the sovereign people. The more recent turn of events since the 1960s, which some call post-modern, has introduced a "fourth structure of simultaneity": the space of fashion. He describes this space as an example of the fourth structure, but he does not give any other examples, so I am not sure what else goes in this category.

In any case, he says the the space of fashion is "a horizontal, simultaneous mutual presence, which is not that of common action, but rather of mutual display. It matters to each one of us as we act that the others are there, as witness of what we are doing, and thus co-determiners of the meaning of our action.” (481)

All four of these structure are arenas for determining the popular will. They are also powerful forces in shaping the popular will. The sovereign people vote with their votes; the public sphere votes in opinion polls; the people in the market vote with their wallets. In the space of fashion the many individual acts of mutual regard and influence, of making and reading and reacting to personal style, vote in what is fashionable.

What makes this new arena of the social imaginary different is that style and expression are made at a very low level, at the level of individuals or close to it. Taylor thinks that the economy, public sphere, and popular sovereignty were products of the era of mass mobilization. The space of fashion, on the other hand, is a product of the current era of personal authenticity.

A Secular Age 6

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

Charles Taylor has a fine discussion of the incoherence of materialist ethics.

“There seems to be a strange inference here, caricatured by Solovyov: ‘Man descends from the apes, therefore we must love each other.’” (596)

A Secular Age - Transformed!

We have been reading A Secular Age in Theory Camp this week. One of our number noted that an important theme of the book is how one age was transformed into something quite different. So he got us all Transformers stickers to annotate our books with.

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.