The QUESTIONS in the Pew Religion Survey

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life just released the result of a survey on religious knowledge among American adults. As with most surveys of the knowledge of American adults, the results were pretty sad. The headline finding is that atheists and agnostics know more about religion than religious people do. This is not so surprising to me - atheists and agnostics tend to be more educated than the average believer about everything.

If you are like me, you perhaps wanted to try you own religious knowledge against this survey. As a public service, I have extracted all the questions from the survey. Pew does not provide an answer key, but I expect Gruntled Center readers will do pretty well. I think I got all of them, so ask me.

PEW FORUM ON RELIGION & PUBLIC LIFE

2010 RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONNAIRE

When does the Jewish Sabbath begin? Does it begin on…?

1 Friday

2 Saturday

3 Sunday

Is Ramadan…?

1 The Hindu festival of lights

2 A Jewish day of atonement

3 The Islamic holy month

Do you happen to know which of these is the king of gods in ancient Greek mythology?

1 Zeus

2 Mars

3 Apollo

Do you happen to know the name of the holy book of Islam?

Which of these religions aims at nirvana, the state of being free from suffering?

1 Islam

2 Buddhism

3 Hinduism

In which religion are Vishnu and Shiva central figures?

1 Islam

2 Hinduism

3 Taoism

Is an atheist someone who believes in God, someone who does NOT believe in God, or someone who is unsure whether God exists?

And is an agnostic someone who believes in God, someone who does

NOT believe in God, or someone who is unsure whether God exists?

What is the first book of the Bible?

Will you tell me the names of the first four books of the New Testament of the Bible, that is the Four Gospels?

Where, according to the Bible, was Jesus born?

1 Bethlehem

2 Jericho

3 Jerusalem

4 Nazareth

When was the Mormon religion founded?

1 Before the year 1200 A.D

2 Between 1200 and 1800

3 Sometime after 1800

The Book of Mormon tells the story of Jesus Christ appearing to people in what area of the world?

1 The Americas

2 Middle East

3 Asia

Which of the following best describes Catholic teaching about the bread and wine used for communion?

1 The bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ, or

2 The bread and wine are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ

Which of these religious groups traditionally teaches that salvation comes through faith alone?

1 Only Protestants

2 Only Catholics

3 Both (Protestants) and (Catholics)

4 Neither (Protestants) nor (Catholics)

Please tell me which of the following is NOT one of the Ten Commandments:

1 Do not commit adultery

2 Do unto others as you would have them do unto you

3 Do not steal

4 Keep the Sabbath holy

Which Bible figure is most closely associated with remaining obedient to God despite suffering?

Is it …?

1 Job

2 Elijah

3 Moses

4 Abraham

Which Bible figure is most closely associated with leading the exodus from Egypt?

Is it …?

1 Job

2 Elijah

3 Moses

4 Abraham

Which Bible figure is most closely associated with willingness to sacrifice his son for God?

Is it …?

1 Job

2 Elijah

3 Moses

4 Abraham

Would you tell me if Mother Theresa was …?

1 Catholic

2 Jewish

3 Buddhist

4 Mormon

5 Hindu

Would you tell me if the Dalia Lama is …?

1 Catholic

2 Jewish

3 Buddhist

4 Mormon

5 Hindu

Would you tell me if Joseph Smith was …?

1 Catholic

2 Jewish

3 Buddhist

4 Mormon

5 Hindu

Would you tell me if Maimonides was … ?

1 Catholic

2 Jewish

3 Buddhist

4 Mormon

5 Hindu

Which of the following statements best describes what the U.S. Constitution says about religion?

1 Christianity should be given special emphasis by the government

2 The government shall neither establish a religion nor interfere with the practice of religion, or

3 The Constitution does not say anything one way or the other about religion

According to rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, is a public school teacher permitted to lead a class in prayer, or not?

According to rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, is a public school teacher permitted to read from the Bible as an example of literature, or not?

According to rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, is a public school teacher permitted to offer a class comparing the world’s religions, or not?

Do you happen to know what religion most people in India consider themselves? Is that…?

1 Buddhist

2 Hindu

3 Muslim

4 Christian

Do you happen to know what religion most people in Indonesia consider themselves? Is that…?

1 Buddhist

2 Hindu

3 Muslim

4 Christian

Do you happen to know what religion most people in Pakistan consider themselves? Is that…?

1 Buddhist

2 Hindu

3 Muslim

4 Christian

What was the name of the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant

Reformation?

1 Martin Luther

2 Thomas Aquinas

3 John Wesley

Which of these people developed the theory of evolution by natural selection?

1 Charles Darwin

2 Sigmund Freud

3 Clarence Darrow

And which of these court trials focused on whether evolution could be taught in public schools?

1 The Scopes trial

2 The Salem witch trials

3 Brown versus Board of Education

Which one of these preachers participated in the period of religious activity known as the First Great Awakening?

1 Jonathan Edwards

2 Charles Finney

3 Billy Graham

Wealth is More Unequal Than People Think - But That is Not So Bad

Wealth is hugely unequally distributed. Most people think it is reasonable that the richest fraction hold a disproportionate share of the wealth. However, most people underestimate just how disproportionate that distribution really is.

The top fifth of households in the U.S. control ____% of all the wealth in the country.

What number did you think of immediately?

Most people think the number is about 60%

Most people think it should be about 30%

But the actual number is 85%.

I do not think an unequal distribution of wealth is itself a bad thing. Moreover, the richer the society, the more wealth there is for the top group to have. And this report by quintiles is a little misleading - it is the gigantic wealth holdings by the top tenth of one percent of households where the huge disparities lie.

The top 20% of households includes many upper-middle-class families who worked up to significant earnings, from which they save. The main reason that the middle class has so little wealth is that they save so little of what they earn. The poor will never have much wealth, even if they do earn enough to live. But we could have a much more equal distribution of wealth between the just-below-the-top and the middle.

The paper, "Building a Better America - One Wealth Quintile at a Time," by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, is available here.

I Want You to Stop Being Afraid

A fine poster by Al Haug.

My sentiments exactly.

Married Couples Dance Ministry

The name itself makes me happy. The video of any long-married couples dancing together is charming. To have a whole group of long-married black couples dancing together, cheered on by their church, is delightful in a larger context.

Grateful for the Health Care Reforms That Start Today

Some provisions of the health care reform act go into effect today.

Lifetime limits on coverage end. Insurance companies can no longer drop coverage without due process. You can't be refused insurance because of a pre-existing condition. Sick kids cannot simply be dropped. And one change that affects the Gruntleds directly is that children can stay on their parents' policies until they are 26, instead of 19. For the class for whom college is the norm, and further study is extremely likely, the years from 19 to 26 mostly mean no income to pay for insurance. This change is a real boon to our kind, and to all young people in a recession.

The health care reform was long overdue. It is not perfect - no bill that can pass Congress ever will be - but it contains many good improvements. Including those that start today.

Happy Nations Give More Than Merely Rich Nations

The Charities Aid Foundation did a world-wide survey of giving. The main finding:

CAF found that the link between happiness and giving is stronger than the link between wealth and giving.

A secondary finding is that the heirs of the British empire lead the world in charity. Here is the top of the list in the 153-nation study.

World Giving Index	Country	% of population who have given money	% of population who have given time	% of population who have helped a stranger	Wellbeing score out of 10
1	Australia	70%	38%	64%	7.3
1	New Zealand	68%	41%	63%	7.4
3	Canada	64%	35%	68%	7.5
3	Ireland	72%	35%	60%	7.0
5	Switzerland	71%	34%	60%	7.5
5	USA	60%	39%	65%	7.2
7	Netherlands	77%	39%	46%	7.6
8	United Kingdom	73%	29%	58%	5.6

Office Romance: Good for Married Knowledge Workers, Bad for Cheating Corporate Types?

Bloomberg.com has an interesting article by Spencer Morgan on how lawsuits are driving down office romance. Faced with ex-lovers filing retaliation suits, and co-workers of the boss' lover charging favoritism, some companies are establishing, and enforcing, no-fraternization policies.

On the other hand, other companies think that couples who work together are a good thing. They are more engaged in the company and are less likely to miss work.

Two things struck me about this article.

First, the author made no distinction between marriage, and the courtship that leads to marriage, on the one hand, and adulterous affairs on the other. I expect that married co-workers are good for a business, whereas cheating co-workers are very bad for office functioning.

Second, the list of companies that were in favor of office couples has a strong knowledge-class tilt: National Public Radio, Princeton Review, Pixar, and Southwest Airlines.

Where Should We Study Religion in Kentucky?

I will be teaching my "Sociology of American Religion" course in our intensive Centre Term in January. This term is designed for field trips.

Last time we went to:

Southeast Christian Church (largest in the state)
Presbyterian Center (denominational headquarters)
Gethsemani Abbey (Trappist monastery most famous as the home of Thomas Merton)
Sisters of Loretto Motherhouse
Both synagogues in Lexington
The Creation Museum.

In addition, we met with informed Mormons and Muslims who came to our class. An eminent Hindu leader was honored during Founders Day, which we incorporated into class. We looked into the Buddhist retreat center at Furnace Mountain, but January was not an excellent time to visit.

All of these places and people are great.

There are also several other great places and people within a three-hour drive (about the limit of a day trip).

Some that I am thinking about:
Covington Cathedral
St. Stephen's Church, Louisville (largest black congregation in the state)
The Louisville synagogues (including an Orthodox synagogue, not found in Lexington)
Lexington Universal Academy (Islamic school)
Southern Baptist Seminary
Asbury Theological Seminary

I am open to suggestions.

Yawning Is Contagious - But Less So for Autistic Kids

Yawning is a socially contagious action. A study comparing autistic kids and typical kids found that the autistic kids were much less likely to yawn in response to videos of people yawning. This suggests that responsive yawning is a kind of empathy.

Elizabeth Warren, Knowledge Class Hero, Gets a Big Job

Elizabeth Warren has been asked by President Obama to help start the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This is only fitting: she thought it up in the first place.

The knowledge class has a critical, even alienated side. This is only one side of the story, though, and not even half. Most members of the knowledge class work within existing social institutions to make them work better for the common good. They tend to be earnest, a bit nerdy, not stylish, but, to my mind, wholesome in trying to use their smarts for all. They are not only trying to understand the big picture in some depth, but trying to make it better, too.

If you wanted a name and a face for that branch of the knowledge class, I nominate Elizabeth Warren.

State Prison Population Declines for the First Time in 40 Years

This is a little bit of good news. The total prison population went up last year, because there are more federal prisoners.

The boom in prisoners comes mostly from imprisoning drug dealers. I am all for imprisoning people who commit crimes, and drug dealers, as a group are vile.

Still, I think we should legalize marijuana and tax it heavily. In fact, I would be happy to dedicate the pot tax to fighting the really bad drugs - there seems a certain poetic justice in that. If we extract marijuana from the war on drugs, we can devote our prisons to the worse criminals.

Accommodating the Genderless Exceptions

Newsweek has an article about a possible "genderless" future, in which "no gender" would be one of the choices.

I am OK with legally acknowledging that some rare individuals do not have a clear sex or gender. And I think it is only civil to accommodate such people in social life in nearly every situation. The condition is so uncommon that I do not think we should build an entire third-gender infrastructure.

I do think it is a mistake to claim that gender is "assigned" for most people. For the vast majority of people, gender and sex are the same. We do not have to mentally disconnect the two in all cases just because they are not clearly connected in a few rare cases.

Marriage Would Help the Working Class Move Up

The growing class gap is between the married middle class and the cohabiting working class and poor people. One of the reasons the bottom half of the class structure is getting less likely to marry is that they think you already have to be steadily middle class first. Brad Wilcox and Andrew Cherlin present the latest numbers in a useful Wall Street Journal article.

The future success stories among the poor and working class who grow into the middle class will, I am confident, be mostly told by those who make the commitment to marriage (and religion) the foundation of their lives. With that strong foundation, building, saving, and investing in the family is easier and safer.

The best thing we can do for the working poor and working class is to promote the idea that a permanent commitment to marriage (and not just to your spouse) will help you make a richer and more secure life for yourself and your children.

Double Income Goes for Better School Districts

Robert H. Frank, in Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class, reports this study from knowledge-class hero Elizabeth Warren:

As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi have shown, ... most of the extra income earned by families as a result of the move to two-earner couples was consumed by higher housing prices as these families sought to buy homes in safer neighborhoods with better schools. (66)

Buying for better schools is a rational knowledge-class investment, and safer neighborhoods is a rational choice for every class.

If the cheaper places to live can make their schools better, then smart, able couples will move there. This would have the double benefit to the families of getting better schools for less, and allowing the couple (mostly the mothers) to cut back on work and invest the time in a happier life for the whole family.

Civility Triumph: Qur'an Not Burned

International Burn a Koran Day fizzled.

I am grateful to the imam who went to talk calmly with the pastor. And the pastor for calling it off.

Go civility (the hard way).

Reality Tuesday

Reality Tuesday Coffeehouse and Donuts is in Park Hills, Kentucky. The mocha is good, and the cheesecakes are rated the best in the Cincinnati area.

The name comes from a Tuesday night Bible study that the owners were involved in when they decided to jump in to the coffee business. They are Protestants, and the immediate neighborhood is home to Covington Catholic High School and Notre Dame Academy, so the whole place has a strong pan-Christian vibe.

Reality Tuesday is a happy, homey place that I commend to all friends of coffee houses.

The Gospel of Wealth and the American Establishment

David Brooks has a nifty column on the critique of our material excess. It is not surprising when greens and lefties make this critique, but Brooks is citing David Platt, a Southern Baptist megachurch pastor, who says the evangelical church is as guilty of pursuing material wealth, and even, in effect, worshiping it. Platt says we have to choose God or mammon.

Brooks rightly notes, though, that Americans, including American evangelicals, have a counter tradition of disciplining wealth. The Gospel of Wealth that he refers to is not the "health and wealth" gospel that some pentecostal churches preach, that God will reward your faith with riches. Quite the opposite. Rather, the Gospel of Wealth is that the rich - which includes most Americans, compared to the rest of the world - have a religious obligation to use our wealth for the common good. Wealth, though a huge temptation, is not bad in itself. It does impose great obligations.

The Gospel of Wealth was developed by the original Establishment of this country, the Protestant Establishment that E. Digby Baltzell wrote about. Wealth, health, privileges of all kinds are gifts of Providence, as well as connected in mysterious ways to our own work. As gifts, they come with religious responsibilities.

How Men of Different Races Describe Themselves to Potential Dates

OkCupid is a data site run by statisticians. Their reports are a gold mine for people interested in mate selection.

Their current report analyzes the terms people use in their profiles to describe themselves. Based on more than half a million participants, divided by their self-described race, the data cupids found this interesting trend in how men describe themselves to a prospective date:

Black men say I am cool - a very common choice (#2 out of the top 50).
Asian men say they are simple. This includes Indians and Middle Eastern men as well as East Asians (#2).
Latinos say they are funny guys (#25).


White men are much less likely to offer an overall self-description. The closest item in the top 50 profile items, coming in at #38, is I'm a country boy.

I don't have a deep analysis of what this means, and would welcome your thoughts. I have some guesses that are somewhat informed by the actual marriage patterns of each group, but I know I could be way off.

Cool: fun to spend time with, but doesn't demand commitment.
Simple: does not want an emotionally complicated relationship, just commitment.
Funny: will pay attention to you and not be overbearing.
Country boy: masculine and simple; hasn't had to give much thought to what kind of man, because white men have the privilege of thinking of themselves as just normal guys.

Decent Religious Americans in Gainesville Gather for Peace Against the Qur'an Burning

Trinity United Methodist Church in Gainesville, Florida, and the Gainesville Interfaith Forum will be hosting a Gathering for Peace, Understanding, and Hope on September 10.

Mainline Christian churches join together all the time with Jews, Muslims, and Hindus, as in this interfaith forum for peace and tolerance.

Why, then, do I note this particular gathering? Because Trinity United Methodist Church is right next door to the Dove World Outreach Center, a pentecostal church that is planning to burn the Qur'an on September 11.

I truly hope, as a church elder, that the Dove church changes its mind.

Even if it does not, though, I am glad the good people of Gainesville, through the Interfaith Forum, will be coming together in a gentle counter-demonstration of American decency and tolerance.

Similar Spouses Stay Married

A new study by Mikhila Humbad and colleagues at Michigan State tested whether spouses converged in their basic personality over a long marriage.

They don't.

This is not really so surprising, though. Our basic personality characteristics are one of the most stable parts of us. We may come to look and sound more like our spouses as we come to imitate one another's facial expressions and speech. But personality mostly stays put.

What this study really shows, I think, is that people with enduring marriages were similar in values, and complementary in personality, to begin with. The researchers note that they do not have many recently married couples in their study - not surprising, since they were piggybacking on the long-running Minnesota Twin Study to find their couples.

I would expect that couples with dissimilar values and non-complementary personalities would be less likely to make lasting marriages.

But neither the couples in the real study, nor the couples in the hypothetical study, would be likely to show much personality change.

American Tolerance Tradition Triumphs Over Know Nothings

Nicholas Kristoff has a fine column arguing that that fear of the Ground Zero mosque, and other expressions of Islamic life in the United States, is not driven by sheer bigotry. Rather, it is driven by the desire of well-meaning people to protect the nation from what they imagine are unassimilable aliens and the possible physical and moral danger they might bring. Like the anti-Catholic Know Nothing movement of the nineteenth century, this impulse is not new in American history. But Kristoff offers a hopeful answer:

But we have a more glorious tradition intertwined in American history as well, one of tolerance, amity and religious freedom. Each time, this has ultimately prevailed over the Know Nothing impulse.

Most Americans are Tolerant of Mosques, Even Now

The good news is that most Americans are tolerant of mosques even in the middle of the "Ground Zero mosque" controversy.

A Pew poll in late August asked which of these two statements you agreed with more:

"Muslims should have the same rights as other groups to build houses of worship in local communities"

OR

"Local communities should be able to prohibit the construction of mosques if they do not want them."

62% agreed with the first statement, versus only 25% with the second.

I Need to Want Less

I thank Good, the most gruntled of magazines, for pointing me to Erin Hanson's project, "Need to Want Less."

I think this is a wonderful personal discipline, and a real help in simplifying your own life.

I think wanting less is a likely path to happiness. I am more confident that it is, at least indirectly, a path to meaningfulness, because it helps you weed out the unnecessary things in your own life.

Single Young Women Earn More Than Men

Single, childless, young women earn more than comparable men.

This is good: it shows that more education and more persistent work reap better pay.

This is also good because it helps chip away at the myth the women, on average, earn less than men because of sex discrimination.

Women earn less than men, on average, because women who are not single, childless, and young tend to make choices that trade earning for control of their time for family life and for doing only work that they want to do.

Exploring the Happy Society

Five years ago today I began The Gruntled Center: Faith and Family for Centrists.

Today, to celebrate that anniversary and to mark the broader path I want to chart, I am changing the subtitle of the blog. Hereafter I will post to The Gruntled Center: Exploring the Happy Society.

I am developing a new course, "The Happy Society," which will explore the philosophical and empirical roots of happiness in the institutions of society, and in society as a whole. I think the core dynamic of what makes for happiness and unhappiness in social life as a whole is trust versus fear.

As part of this class, as well as for my continuing teaching on family life, I envision a book on Happy Families. This book would explore the seeming paradox that having children usually diminishes a couple's happiness in their marriage, but at the same time gives them the greatest sense of meaningful accomplishment.

I think the relationship between happiness and meaningfulness is the deepest and hardest puzzle that we will explore in studying the happy society.

I welcome your participation in the adventure.

Spreading Fear is Bad for Democracy

A comment on my post of yesterday offers this version of diplomacy:

Suppose we told the Iranian Mullahs that they are an evil, backward, dangerous, ignorant bunch of theocrats, and that nothing will help that unhappy land until they are gone. Suppose we told them we were going to do everything in our power, short of war, to consign them to the dustbin of history where they belong. That has my vote for candor. But perhaps it is not in our interest to say so?

I tend to think that, at least with adversaries, a little studied ambiguity is often the best. If the bad guys think you might just be crazy enough to send them all to where they get the 72 virgins, or whatever, maybe they will behave themselves.

I believe this whole approach to our adversaries - both the candid and the ambiguous versions - makes the world worse, and does not serve the interests of the United States or, in this case, the Iranian people. Striking fear in others makes them worse, makes them less rational, less open to persuasion about where their true interests lie. And it does the same to us, too. Moreover, approaching the leadership of another nation as children who we have to make behave - who we have a right to make behave - makes even the most reasonable people in that nation reject us for our arrogance. We would feel the same way if other nations treated our leaders that way, even when strongly oppose our own leaders.

In the particular case of Iran, I am very hopeful about the future of democracy in Iran - more so than in just about any other Muslim nation except Turkey. Iran has an elected government and a constitution that, on paper, vests power in that elected government. They have plenty of pragmatists who want to have peace and get on with business, as every government does. Right now they have a group of unelected religious authorities who overrule that elected government, and keep its most strident and dangerous party in power. Yet, as the stolen election showed, there are already cracks in the religious establishment.

How can we promote the rule of law in Iran? How can we get the religious authorities to back off and let the electoral process proceed? I believe we are more likely to strengthen the moderate elements in Iran, and throughout the Muslim world, by being reasonable, by finding common ground wherever we can, by communicating to the Muslim world that Americans are not their enemies. This will be a rocky process, and will be strongly resisted by religiously pugnacious elements (in both countries). Making Iranians, in power and out, believe that we are crazy and should be feared strengthens the worst elements there and makes peace and freedom less likely.

Which Things Should America Apologize For?

I recently wrote about my puzzlement at what those attending the "Restoring Honor" rally thought had dishonored America. In response, "Whit" cited President Obama's "apology tour." The so-called apology tour is a good example of my puzzlement about what it is that Glenn Beck and followers are afraid of.

Human Events magazine, no friend of President Obama's, listed what they thought were the top ten "apologies" made by the president. The president said that the United States has, at times, acted unilaterally and arrogantly in relation to Europe and Latin America. This seems to me obviously true. This does not constitute apologizing to thugs, as Whit contended. Likewise, his offer to "communicate with the Muslim world" is a good thing, and allowing that we have not been perfect is also obviously true.

All of the apologies listed by Human Events sound to me true and helpful in establishing just and sensible relations with the rest of the world.

What I do think hurt America's honor were torture, imprisonment without charge or counsel, and unilateral force without even attempting to work with our allies. The Bush administration took the huge good will that the United States had around the world after 9/11, and turned it into shame by these practices.

And then, incomprehensibly, President Bush could not think of a single mistake his administration had made.

Every person and every government makes mistakes. Acting arrogantly destroys just relations with others, even our allies. Trying to talk to opponents is a necessary foundation for reducing conflict and for any chance of helping them improve. Admitting your mistakes, even admitting that you are capable of mistakes, is moral, true, and just common sense.

Privilege is a Knowledge Problem

Some people have privilege. This obviously hurts those who do not have that privilege.

Privilege also hurts the privileged. The greatest privilege is not knowing that you are privileged, so that you don't notice or think about your (our) comparative unearned advantage. Privilege can make the privilege incurious. This produces a kind of parochialism.

When I teach college students about their degrees of relative privilege, the most privileged sometimes feel angry, but most of them feel guilty. And don't know what to do next. Many consciousness-raising approaches to teaching about privilege stop there. Some are even glad to provoke feelings of guilt.

I think a better approach to teaching about privilege is to treat it as a knowledge problem. Curiosity cures unacknowledged privilege. Being curious about people who are not like you is the best path to living justly with others, and serving others as our privilege makes us able.

Glenn Beck's Puzzling Civil Religion Rally

Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial yesterday was a civil religion rally. It was a pageant of American patriotism and generic Christianity, treating the two as identical. The heart of the event was an awards show for a few people Beck liked, with a fund-raiser for a military charity added on. Beck's own speech, coming about two hours into the rally, yearned for new heroes, new George Washingtons, to step forward and do ... something.

The great puzzle of "Restoring Honor" came from trying to figure out what Beck and his audience thought was threatening America's honor. A careful listener would hear several references to "wallowing in the scars" of American history, one section against those who "spread fear," and a single reference to leaving our children with large debts. Beck had to deny that he was spreading fear - by his account, he was just telling the truth about a threat that loomed like the iceberg before the Titanic.

But what iceberg Beck thinks he sees is a mystery.

I thought that there might be an unspoken subtext that everyone present knew but thought it too politically incorrect to say. One of my Facebook respondents thought that what drove the rally was a nativist fear of them, led by an alien brown president. I do not think that is what drove this rally. The crowd was, indeed, almost completely white, but the performers very pointedly were not. Beck made much of the fact that the date and place for his rally were the same as for Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, which was genuinely cheered by the crowd.

Another correspondent suggested what I think is a more plausible explanation: archetypes of Good versus Evil, of heroes and villains, that makes fantasy books, graphic novels, movies, and video games so popular. Beck's sermons were celebrations of America's goodness and heroes coupled with a call for ordinary people in his audience to be heroes today. He not only did not specify what the heroes should fight against, he repeatedly rejected "wallowing in the scars" - that is, thinking and talking about what had been wrong with America - as the very source of evil.

There was nothing wrong with what was said and celebrated at the "Restoring Honor" rally. The content was so vague, though, that I don't think many would turn out for a repeat performance.

Bob Sexton, Knowledge Class Leader

Bob Sexton, the Executive Director of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, died yesterday. Mrs. G. has worked with and for the Prichard Committee since we arrived in Kentucky 20 years ago. Bob was a fixed star in our firmament.

The "knowledge class" is the class that makes its living from the control of knowledge necessary to run the social system. The term has fallen out of favor, but the class still exists and does vital work for society. As a professor I am classic representative of the type. But as a teacher I am also one step removed from running the institutions directly.

Bob Sexton was a general of the knowledge class. He tried to see the biggest picture of the knowledge needed to run the social system. He helped found or run a whole infrastructure to train, keep, and mobilize smart people for the good of the Commonwealth: the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington; the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center; the New Opportunity School for Women; Kentucky's Governor's Scholars Program; the Kentucky Center for Public Issues.

The Prichard Committee is Bob Sexton's main legacy. It was born of a one-off blue ribbon commission that the Kentucky legislature created to make a report about improving higher education. They concluded that the best way to improve higher education in Kentucky was to improve lower education. And then the commission refused to die. Under Ed Prichard, from whom the Committee later took its name, and Bob Sexton, the Prichard Committee created a grass-roots movement to push for education reform. Behind the scenes, Bob worked with political leaders to pass the Kentucky Education Reform Act, the country's leading root-and-branch education reform initiative.

A few years ago my senior seminar focused on the knowledge class. We took a field trip to meet with Bob Sexton to talk about building a "creative class" in Kentucky, far from the natural settings for such a class.

Bob Sexton saw the big picture of how and why to build education for all classes. In doing so he exemplified the highest duty and deepest achievement of the knowledge class in service to society as a whole.

Capon Springs and Farms

... is a wonderful place for a family reunion and vacation.

See you in a week!

Giddens - How We Remake the Social Structure Daily

Anthony Giddens is an almost impenetrably abstract social theorist. But he is really smart, so my theory class will slog through his The Constitution of Society.

A running problem in social theory is that from the macro perspective, society seems to reproduce its main social structures. Yet from the micro perspective, we seem free to choose how we act.

Giddens offers the interesting idea that it is in the ritual interactions of day-to-day life that we reproduce the social structure.

White Privilege is Not the Same as Racism

Today at Centre we are using Beverley Tatum's "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?" in a discussion of white privilege. This is a useful book, especially for this point.

Tatum offers a definition of racism based on social structures: a system of advantage based on race. She contrasts this with a definition of racism based on individual prejudices.

Tatum then goes on to say that only whites can be racist. While people of every group may have individual prejudices about different races, only white people in this country reap a systematic advantage from their race.

I think there is one thing right, and two things wrong with Tatum's definition of racism.

What is right is that the structural advantage - the privilege - that some people receive because of their race is a real fact about society, which empowers some people and limits others regardless of their individual qualities. The main kind of racial privilege in our society is white privilege. That makes it an important topic for sociology to teach, and for a college to constantly think about.

The first thing that is wrong with Tatum's definition of racism, though, is that it is simply not true that white people are the only group to enjoy a structural advantage in America based on race. American society is complex, and racial judgments figure in to all kinds of group opportunities, including the entire complex of affirmative action. White privilege is the main racial privilege in American society today, but it is not the only one.

The second thing that is wrong with Tatum's definition of racism is that a structural advantage is not an "ism." A structural advantage is a fact, an objective privilege. Racism would be an ideology justifying that fact. To take a closely related distinction that I have worked on a great deal, diversity is a fact; pluralism is an ideology justifying that fact.

White privilege is a real structural fact. The greatest privilege of the privileged is not realizing that they (we) are privileged; the advantage is just a fact. The point of exercises like the one we are doing at Centre College today is to make everyone aware of the fact of white privilege so that we can justly evaluate, in this case, potential students at the college. But acknowledging the fact of structural advantage does not entail justifying it, does not require us to say that whites deserve our privilege.

Do We Need Ds?

Mt. Olive school district in New Jersey has abolished the grade of D. At first I thought this was an instance of grade inflation, or self-esteem inflation. As I read their reasons, though, I am not sure what to think.

The district thought some students were calculating what they needed to just scrape by, and doing the minimum. This is undoubtedly true. The school figured that if they raised the minimum, those kids would raise their level of work, too. This is also probably true.

I learned some years ago a scale of what grades mean that I have found helpful.
A = Demonstrates excellence
B = Demonstrates competence
C = Suggests competence [this is the heart of the system]
D = Suggests incompetence
E, F, U = Demonstrates incompetence

In my classes, the difference between a D and a C is almost always a matter of working harder, not of having sufficient brainpower. When I spell out how I interpret a C vs. a D, this often gets the slackers to work a bit harder.

Still, I am sure that if the next step below "suggests competence" was "demonstrates incompetence," those same students would work harder still.

Do perhaps we do not need the D.

I would welcome your thoughts.

Well-Planned: Summoned as Male: Female?

David Brooks has an interesting column comparing the "well-planned life" with the "summoned life." In the former, people figure out what their priorities are and adjust their plans to reach those priorities. In the latter, people make large commitments without a life plan, then adapt to what each new context requires.

Brooks' point is that the well-planned life is very American, whereas the summoned life is more common in other nations.

It seems to me clear that the well-planned life is a more characteristically male way of thinking about life, whereas the summoned life is more characteristically female.

Brooks concludes "they are both probably useful for a person trying to live a well-considered life." It is hard for me to see how he envisions one person living by both standards, but I can sort of discern it. It is easier for me to see how a family might give full justice to the wisdom of both views, especially if the married couple at the core of the family embrace each in a complementary way.

Ground Zero Mosque - Yes

I think having a mosque near Ground Zero is as normal and American as having any of the churches, synagogues, or other places of worship that are already there.

To have a Muslim center that is explicitly aimed at promoting peace and understanding between Muslims and others is a particularly good thing.

I don't really think any of this really needs saying. Alas, it does. So, as a Christian and a patriot, yes, please, build a dialogue-oriented mosque near the former World Trade Center site.

Marceaux

On a silly Saturday, I just can't beat "Basil Marceaux dot com." He is the comic relief winner of this summer's political season.

Of all the amazing things he offers voters, this is the one that I keep chewing on:


VOTE FOR ME AND IF I WIN I WILL IMMUNE YOU FROM ALL STATE CRIMES FOR THE REST OF YOU LIFE!

Sandel 10: Obligations of Solidarity are Only Trumped By Higher Obligations of Solidarity

My Theory Camp has been wrestling with Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent and Justice. Here is the best new idea I have had from reading these books:

If I have obligations of solidarity within an institution, I can choose to leave the institution, but only to serve a higher obligation.

Under a liberal theory, I can unchoose a practice if I simply no longer wish to do it. Since all the ends I pursue are ones I have chosen, there is no higher standard or obligation than my choosing it. However there are some institutions that require their members to have obligations of solidarity to one another if they are to function. Choosing that kind of institution means that I have also chosen to be obliged to remain in solidarity with the others in the institution because it does harm to those others if I simply quit.

In practice, we might leave the choice up to individuals to decide if the other obligation was, indeed, higher. In that case, from the outside, liberal quitting and solidarity quitting might look the same. However, from the inside, my motive, and my calculation, would be quite different. I would need to be able to justify to myself that I was leaving one obligation for a higher one. It would not be sufficient to quit an obligatory solidarity just because I feel like it, or because I don’t feel what I used to, or because it doesn’t meet my needs any more.

Allowing people to choose to solidary institutions for a higher obligation would let us reconcile the obligation with the reality of freedom.

Sandel 9: Marriage as an Obligation of Solidarity

The crucial idea that Michael Sandel works toward at the end of Justice is that we have obligations that extend beyond the ends we have chosen: we have obligations of solidarity. Communitarians, like Sandel, argue that we have obligations to our several communities because we are members of them, shaped by them, sharing their lives.

His most powerful case, I think, is our obligations of patriotism. We have a strong obligation to our country. I can imagine circumstances in which someone would have to renounce that obligation to serve another, higher obligation. But the cases in which people actually do renounce their citizenship on principle are extraordinarily rare.

I think marriage is a solidarity that we choose. When we choose it, though, it creates an obligation of solidarity that is like our obligation to our country. It is a deep, enduring obligation. It can, in principle, be cast off, but only for the rarest and most compelling of reasons.

Sandel 8: Fear is the Basis of the Neutral State

Michael Sandel, in Justice, contrasts Aristotle's view that the end of politics is to form good citizens, with the modern idea that the state should be neutral about which ends citizens choose to seek.

In Democracy's Discontent, Sandel showed that when American democracy was established, the state was more Aristotelian than neutral. In fact, the ancient philosophers thought democracy would be a terrible form of government, because most people could not be formed into decent enough citizens to use their democratic powers rightly. The founders of the American republic knew that, and deliberately created institutions to form Americans into worthy democratic citizens. The idea that the state should not try to form citizens, but just provide a neutral framework for their self-seeking, is a recent idea. The jury is still out on whether it can work.

I have been trying to imagine who benefits from the idea of the neutral state. The arguments for it usually rely on the fears of minorities that they will forced to conform to the majority's ends.

I think fear is an impossible basis for a stable society. If American democracy is to endure, it has to renew trust that the state, along with the other institutions of society, can rightly help form citizens toward a common understanding of the good.

Sandel 7: Was the Social Contract Ever Meant to be Taken Literally?

In Michael Sandel's Justice, he gives a wonderfully clear account of Kant's and Rawls' social philosophy. In placing Kant's views of the social order Sandel reviews the whole tradition of social contract theories. Sandel then shows how Rawls ingeniously solves the problem of the historical implausibility of an actual social contract by turning the whole metaphor into a thought experiment. We do not have to believe that there ever was an actual social contract, Rawls argues - we can imagine ourselves in an "original position" as generic human beings without particular qualities to see what kind of social contract we would make in such circumstances.

I was surprised at how much space Sandel gave to the argument about whether there was an historical social contract, and if so whether a contract made by our social predecessors could really bind us. This book grows out of his long and rich experience teaching about justice to Harvard undergraduates. Do those smart kids really think that Hobbes, or Rousseau, or Mill thought that society was born in an actual gathering in the woods?

I assume from the fact that Sandel takes the time to explain how the idea of a social contract works without entailing an historical contract-making that this is an important issue to his students. My best guess is that what they are concerned about is not the historicity of the event. Rather, they believe that if they or their predecessors did not consent to society, then they are not bound by it. No agreement, no contract.

Sandel 6: Libertarianism is About Allodialism

My Theory Camp worked through Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent last week. This week we are reading his Justice.

Sandel's chapter on libertarianism is entitled "Do we own ourselves?" I have long thought that libertarians have a very restricted and peculiar idea of liberty. Sandel helps me see that what is really wrong is with their conception of the self. Libertarianism is a distinctively modern idea of the self because it is based on a distinctively modern idea of property.

Pre-modern property was based on shared ownership, rather than a sole right to do anything to your property. This is the difference between feudal property - the basic idea behind feudalism - and modern allodial property. Allodialism is the idea that if you own something, you own all the rights to it and can do anything you want to your property, including destroy it.

We can kind of accept the allodial idea when we are talking about replaceable objects. Allodialism gets to be iffy when we apply it to unique objects, like art or land. Allodialism shows itself to be a completely inadequate idea of what property is when we apply it to non-objects - slaves, babies, and ourselves. The core problem with libertarian ethics is that it makes people reduce their notion of their self to that of an object that they own, with no meaning or destiny of its own.

More on Denominations

Last Sunday I wrote about how denominationalism and civil religion are complements.

My friend Barry Ensign-George asked, quite reasonably, for some elaboration. He particularly wanted some explication of my claim that denominationalism "really can only be fully embraced by people who do not think the differences between denominations matter." Fair enough.

My focus was on religion as a basis of social integration. This is why I contended that civil religion is the necessary complement of denominationalism. To be a denomination is, of necessity, to be part of a larger whole, and to accept the equal legitimacy of the other parts. This is most clearly so when talking about different denominations of the same religion, as with the Presbyterian Church and the Catholic Church. We have also extended this idea to include the equal legitimacy of different religions, as among Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist religious institutions.

To accept that other denominations are legitimate religious institutions does not mean that we think all denominations teach the same thing, or that the differences are not significant to some extent. But to be a denominationalist - to be a citizen in a denominational society - is to accept that the differences among the denominations are less important than their common embrace of the concept or doctrine of denominationalism. Denominations are tolerant; they tolerate other denominations. Religious institutions that do not accept the principle of denominationalism put themselves at odds with the whole culture. If they act upon that rejection against other religious institutions in a physical way by, say, burning heretics or blowing up infidels, they put themselves outside the civil order religiously.

The main argument I was making in the previous post is that a mere belief in denominationalism is not enough of a religious faith to hold a society together. Therefore, civil societies also need some kind of positive cult (in the Durkheimian sense) - some active beliefs and rituals shared with other citizens as citizens. This is where the civil religion comes in, and why it is necessary.

Presbyterians, such as Barry and myself, can be good Presbyterians and good citizens because we accept denominationalism. We can hold that the Presbyterian understanding of the faith is correct - as long as we also accept the legitimacy of other denominations in our society.

Sound Historical Reasoning about Marco Polo

My sister, in an exchange with my inventive nephew, who is eight:

Da Neice asked why the call and response game was called "Marco Polo." I
was about to answer ("I don't know,") when Da Nephew jumped in.

"It's because when they were exploring North America -- "

"China!" I said.

"I mean, Africa -- "

"China!!" I said.

"They had an Indian guide -- "

"Seriously, you're thinking of Lewis and Clark!" I said.

"They would get separated and Polo would yell 'Marco' and Marco would
yell 'Polo,' and then they could find each other," he finished
confidently.

"You make me crazy," I said.

Sandel 5: We Need Enchanted Political Life

Michael Sandel concludes Democracy's Discontent with the claim that “A politics that brackets morality and religion too completely soon generates its own disenchantment.” If public life has no higher purpose, we lose heart in it. It becomes a tool for corruption.

Conservatives have tried to fight this disenchantment by promoting individual virtue. This would have a social effect in two ways: we would all benefit if there were no corrupt individuals, and the project of promoting virtues is shared. The problem of today's theory of government is that the state is trying to be neutral about citizen's ideas of what makes for virtuous individuals.

Liberals have tried to fight this disenchantment by fighting the economic inequalities that stand in the way of solidarity among all citizens. Making people less unequal is clearly a social project, but it is negative, in the sense that it is removing an obstacle to solidarity without providing a common goal to be solidary about.

The early American republic did have enchanted - that is, purpose-driven - public life. We had the project of creating a democratic society out of people who had been trained to be subjects rather than citizens. That was a great project. But it has largely run its course in the world. Most states, even the most brutal tyrannies, at least pretend to be democratic.

Sandel says that when we got too diverse to ignore our different moral and religious values, we switched the goal of public life to trying to create a voluntary state that was neutral about all other goals. Sandel is right that this is not a goal big enough and positive enough to enchant our public life.

Sandel 4: Common Consumption is a Lame National Identity

Michael Sandel, in Democracy's Discontent, says that the Progressives, faced with the problem of creating common identity in an America that had become too massive for civic participation, proposed to focus on Americans as consumers.

While I am grateful for federal laws ensuring clean food, I don't think making a national identity out of our common consumption is enough. In Theory Camp this morning we talked about how common it is for young people to wear brand names on the outside of their clothes as a way of making a common identity. But consumption, even very common consumption, is too thin to make a national identity. Brand loyalty just does not replace democratic participation.

Sandel 3: Employees Are Also Free Citizens

Michael Sandel, in Democracy's Discontent, reviews the argument among the Founding Fathers over political economy. The New Englanders wanted to develop American manufacturing and merchant capacity. The Virginians wanted farmers, and feared cities. Both thought that free, democratic citizens needed to stand on their own feet economically.

Both classes of Founders were imagining the owners of these enterprises as the true citizens. The irony is that factories and stores depend on employees, and the farms that the Virginians actually ran depended on slaves, as well as employed farm hands. Employees were not seen as truly free; they were like slaves because they depended on another to live.

When slavery was abolished, and the great mass of Americans became employees, this eighteenth century argument became totally outdated. Yet we have not really resolved the question of what economic assets you need to be a free participating citizen.

Instead, Sandel usefully points out, we have redefined freedom from participating in government to choosing how to live. In other words, we have re-imagined freedom from a kind of production to a kind of consumption.

Sandel 2: The Altered Marriage Contract

Michael Sandel, in Democracy's Discontent, describes the Supreme Court's change of philosophy from the state trying to form individuals into a particular kind of good citizen, to the state trying to uphold neutral procedures by which all kinds of citizens could do what they want.

Sandel then outlines the way in which this procedural view spread from Court judgments to other government actions, and then to how private citizens treat one another. A crucial moment in this spread was the invention of no-fault divorce laws. Prior to no-fault, the state had an explicit interest in marriage and therefore supported the party who wanted to keep the marriage together. No-fault law changed from a right to stay married if you upheld your part of the marriage bargain, to a right to divorce if you no longer wished to uphold your part of the marriage bargain.

Sandel 1: Amoral Politics Breeds Disenchantment

My annual Theory Camp has begun. This year we are studying two books by Michael Sandel. This week we will work through Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy.

Sandel says America was built on a republican tradition that understood freedom to mean the ability to participate in governing a democratic society. However, as America grew and became more diverse, we lost a sense of common values that we wanted all citizens to share. Since the Second World War, therefore, we developed a new public philosophy, "procedural liberalism," which taught that freedom was the right to do what we wanted, free from participating in democratic governance. We avoid conflict over different moral and religious views by bracketing them out of state action.

Sandel says the problem with this merely procedural view is that it is too thin to make citizenship out of. When politics brackets out morals it breeds disenchantment.

Sociology normally sees disenchantment as a religious problem. Sandel rightly sees that when we keep moral and religious meaning out of political life, we disenchant more than just the state. We sap the sense of meaning out of public life as a whole.

Denominationalism and Civil Religion Are the Complementary Halves of Modern Social Theology

The idea of a denomination is a brilliant achievement of American society. It is a distinctively modern idea - that varieties of the same religion, and even different religions, can freely compete within society.

There are two problems with this competition.

One is that it is not really a neutral standard, but really can only be fully embraced by people who do not think the differences between denominations matter. In other words, the denominational theory of religion works best for people who don't really believe in any denomination's religion.

The other problem is that the doctrine of denominational competition is not enough of a religious view to hold society together.

Modern societies have developed another distinctive religious view: civil religion. Civil religion was, originally, a religion of the (anti-Christian) state. The idea has broadened to mean the shared faith and symbols of the nation. Still, civil religion is most coherent as a cult that venerates the nation through the state, through patriotic myths, practices, and doctrines.

I had not fully appreciated before how much the ideas of denominationalism and civil religion go together. Really, they are two sides of the same coin. Denominationalism allows the old religions to live together in mutual toleration, if not respect. The price they pay is that each must accept an equal place within the new religion of the nation and its state.

This is an ingenious solution to the problem of religion in modern society. But it does require important modifications to all pre-modern faiths.

God and Milk

‎"God has a sense of humor. Trust me, every day you will do something to make Him snort milk out His nose."

(Attributed to John McManny)

What, Exactly, Are Schools For in the Good Society?

I have been working on a grant proposal to create a course on "The Good Society." I want to build up from the small institutions to the large, focusing on the process of making well-ordered and virtuous lives, institutions, and societies. Yes, I know, there are many arguments to be had about what constitutes good. That is a somewhat interesting part of the making process.

My subject today, though, is the unexpected puzzle I ran in to in making up the core ladder of institutions came in the middle. At the starting point, we have families and religious institutions. At the end we have the economy and the state.

In the middle my first instinct was to put schools. This, I think, is the keystone of the arch of the liberal view of society. But I am following Tocqueville as my guide, and he would put something else at the keystone: voluntary associations. And that is what I am inclined to go with, a theoretical and empirical consideration of Tocqueville and Robert Putnam on the state of voluntary associations in civil society.

Which leaves me with a puzzle: how to think about schools? On the left, they are agents of the state or, more cynically, of the market. On the right, they are expressions of the family and the religious institution. I can't, at this moment, see what independent foundation schools rest on, what distinctive good they serve. And I say this as a teacher, married to an education reformer, with three kids in school.

Schumpeter Tweaks Intellectuals

Joseph Schumpeter keeps up a running critique of intellectuals in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. One of my favorites is this one:

Syndicalism “really appeals to the workman’s instincts – and not, like Marxism, to the intellectual’s idea of what the workman’s instincts ought to be – by promising what he can understand, viz., the conquest of the shop he works in, conquest by physical violence, ultimately by the general strike.”

Schumpeter's Social Molecules are Families

Joseph Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, offers a rich idea of both social mobility and the place of family lineages in social structure:

it can be shown in all cases, first, that human molecules rise and fall within the class into which they are born, in a manner which fits the hypothesis that they do so because of their relative aptitudes; and it can also be shown, second, that they rise and fall across the boundary lines of their class in the same manner. This rise and fall into higher and lower classes as a rule takes more than one generation. These molecules are therefore families rather than individuals.

Schumpeter's Profound Point: The Bourgeois Family is What Profit Was For

Joseph Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, argues that capitalism is undermining the bourgeois home and the bourgeois family. Many others have argued the same.

He further notes something important that I had not noticed before: the bourgeois home and family were a mainspring of the profit motive. The capitalist worked hard for a profit. And what did he do with that profit? He used it to support his home, his family, and his posterity.

If we stop having homes and families, as many "new girl order" women and "child-man" men have done, we stop having a deep reason to save, invest, or even to pursue profit in the first place.

Reproduction of Mothering, End

I got halfway through Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering, and gave up.

Reading the metaphysics of Freudian psychoanalysis is like reading the witch lore of the Trobriand Islanders. I respect it as a rich and intricate culture, but I don't think it actually describes the world I live in.

In my Macrosociological Theory syllabus, I am going to swap it out for The Feminine Mystique.

Reproduction of Mothering 1

I am working through Nancy Chodorow's feminist classic The Reproduction of Mothering for my social theory class. She is trying to come up with an account of how girls learn to be mothers from the way they are mothered. She is trying to discover a psychoanalytic cause for girls wanting to mother.

To get there, she rejects a social-learning account as too simplistic, and a biological account as inconclusive.

Chodorow is trying to establish that women do not have to be mothers, and mothering - the primary nurturing of children - does not have to be done by women. I think she, and the brand of feminism she represents, has won this argument.

However, I was puzzled by the way that she dismissed the biological basis for connecting mothers and mothering. She allowed that there was a strong connection between female hormones and nurturing, and male hormones and aggression. This does not entail that only mothers can mother, but it seems to me to support that argument that women as a group are more prepared by their biology for nurturing, especially nurturing little ones. I believe biological research has moved on quite a bit since this book was published in 1978, supporting the idea that men and women do differ in profound ways that affect how they rear children.

I will read the rest of her argument with an open mind. I think her premise, though, that mothering is not much rooted in biology, is shaky.

Not Built for Vacations

Mrs. G. and I have been taking a vacation. This is only the fourth time since child #1 was born more than two decades ago that we have tried a just-the-two-of-us vacation.

Last Sunday we dropped child #3 off at camp. We have spent much of a week since then visiting Annapolis, dipping our toes in the ocean, traipsing Williamsburg, enjoying Charlottesville. We have visited lovely places, talked to locals, eaten good food, and, of course, enjoyed an array of independent coffee houses.

We have also fit in some visits with relatives, some professional conversations, and spent some hours each day reading and writing, assisted by the internet. This morning we sit in a fine local coffee house, Calvino's, in Charlottesville. I like Charlottesville. I realize, though, that I really appreciate it because, amidst the lovely, I have some work to do here. Just sitting in Charlottesville, or any place, would be enervating to me.

Mrs. G and I work every day. But I don't think we are workaholics. I think we do not need to draw a big distinction between work and the rest of life - especially not between work and play - because our work is not alienated - we do not simply sell it to another. We are very blessed in having such work. We also made a choice not to take the path where more of our work would be alienated, even if it paid more. Mrs. G is a Yale lawyer - she could have taken the path to quite high-paying, but alienated, work.

We are doubly blessed that our family life and our work are well integrated. This is also partly choice, and partly providence.

Work/life balance and alienated labor are two of the most important personal issues that sociologists have worked on in the past two generations. We are blessed to suffer from neither.

Which means that for the Gruntleds, the concept of a vacation does not really work.

Nationalizing Williamsburg

Mrs. G and I have been visiting Colonial Williamsburg and its neighbor, the College of William and Mary.

I think of the Old Dominion, home of the First Families of Virginia, as worshiping all of its ancestors. I now see, though, that much of the retrieval of colonial Virginia has been a twentieth-century project to give Virginia a usable past that is not confined to the Confederacy. Doing so required re-envisioning early Virginia as part of national history - and getting nationalists from the Empire State involved in paying for it.

The capital of the Virginia colony had a Governor's Palace at the center, with an approaching green. On the street perpendicular to this axis grew up a place for representatives of the citizens to meet, and a school for gentlemen. When the seat of government was moved to Richmond in 1780, Williamsburg became a backwater. The College of William and Mary, after a brave beginning, foundered. By the end of the Civil War the notable colonial buildings of Williamsburg were ruins. The town grew over the old stuff. The Lost Cause became the only history that mattered.

For Williamsburg the change began with Rev. W.A.R. Goodwin, rector of Bruton Parish Church at the end of the 19th century. Bruton Parish Church is the Episcopal - and before that, Anglican - church that served the colonial capital. It is located at the corner where the long axis from legislature to school intersects the short axis from the governor's palace. Goodwin was a Virginian and the son of a Confederate veteran. But he also was the priest of a national church. In his first stint at Bruton Parish, and as a teacher at William and Mary, he rebuilt the church. Then he served a church in New York. When he came back to Bruton Parish and to William and Mary, he saw the further decay of the old historical structures of the Old Dominion, the history before the Confederacy. This moved him to undertake a more ambitious plan of restoration.

To rebuild colonial Williamsburg, Goodwin did not get help from Virginia money, from the tobacco magnates and government contractors. He turned to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller with a vision of reviving Williamsburg as a national treasure. The William and Mary professor also cleverly got the "Christopher Wren building," the shell of the founding building of the college, included in Rockefeller's vision of "Colonial Williamsburg." The Rockefellers quietly bought up most of the old part of town. When they announced their intention to restore the colonial city in 1928, there was more consternation than delight. More than 700 buildings were demolished. The three major public buildings were largely gone - they had to be rebuilt from drawings and verbal descriptions. Colonial Williamsburg was not so much restored as re-invented.

A key moment in the drama came when the Yankees wanted to move the Confederate monument from the Palace Green in front of the colonial Governor's Palace. That led the locals to sue. This incident, it seems to me, reveals the core dynamic of what was at stake in reclaiming colonial Williamsburg for the nation.

Corporate Style Is Reassuring

Do you find brand names reassuring, or oppressive?

I have been thinking about the cultural difference between the two ends of the educated middle class, which I call for short-hand the corporate class and the knowledge class.

Like other members of the knowledge class, I favor independent over corporate in most things. I write this from an independent coffee house, which I would always pick over, say, Starbucks. As I travel and see the same national and international brands everywhere, I often think of the quip "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chain stores."

And yet most people like corporate brands - otherwise they wouldn't be the dominant form.

I was thinking of this as I toured the U.S. Naval Academy. The military needs to be uniform and highly organized for good functional reasons. Yet the U.S. Navy is also a brand. It is a brand that is reassuring - as the very best militarily, of course, but also as reliable and orderly.

As I came out of the Naval Academy I saw a bumper sticker for a large state university. I realized the appeal is similar - Large State U is a well-known, reliable brand. If you go there, you get a decent education. Beyond that, though, you get to belong to the alumni association. You are part of a reliable brand.

I have a hypothesis, which I have not yet tested empirically. I think the core of the corporate class style appeals to the average white collar employees of large corporations, who are also alumni of large name universities, and patrons of large consumer brands. What they have in common is that they are likely to be new to the middle class. The brand name everything is reassuring of your middle-class status.

The knowledge class style, by contrast, appeals to groups who are more senior in the middle class, who have an unshakable, unreflective security in their own middle-class status.

I do not offer either as superior. I do notice that the two styles seem to appeal to different kinds of people. I am trying to figure out what makes the two groups different.

City Dock Coffee

The City Dock Coffee House is a treasure of a third place in Annapolis, MD.

This morning I enjoyed talking to the regulars, gathered around the bench marked "Sen. John Astle's 'down the hill office.'" The coffee house, on the dock in Annapolis, is a few blocks from the state capitol. The regulars told me of the long-standing group, gathered around the local state senator and noted storyteller. They get together daily to solve the world's problems. The old guys, led by Chuck, were jolly and joshing. Unusually, the regulars also included some women, who the men introduced as the brains of the group.

The owner, Grover Gedney, sat on the high stools with me for a time. He helpfully described the business, which has grown into a local institution. They supply coffee to the Naval Academy and the Governor's Office, as well as many local restaurants. And as coffeemen and coffeewomen have done for centuries, he paused to greet the regulars as they came in, and welcome the arriving staff.

City Dock Coffee is a classic third place that keeps its identity in the middle of a heavy tourist destination. May it thrive.

Presbyterian Losses and Gay Ordination

The General Assembly confirmed that after 43 straight years of declining membership, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is now less than half the size it was at its peak in 1967. The pace of losses has actually picked up in the last few years, as entire conservative congregations have left, in addition to the normal negative ratio of new members to deaths.

This General Assembly also passed another attempt to change church rules to say that, contrary to what the Bible appears to say, homosexual practice is not a sin, or at least not enough of a sin to prevent ordination. The last three times such a proposal was passed by the General Assembly and sent to the church as a whole for a vote, it failed.

I do not know whether the liberalizing measure will pass this time. I do know that each time the General Assembly attempts to liberalize the constitution this way, more conservatives give up on the PC(USA) and leave.

At some point, so many conservatives will have left that the liberal constitutional amendment will pass.

I don't think this victory will stabilize the denomination, though. Liberals are pretty bad and having and holding kids in the church, and even worse at evangelizing. Whichever way this particular fight turns out, the Presbyterian Church (USA) is likely to keep dwindling.

Busboys and Poets

I previously posted on a story about Busboys and Poets, a coffee house and café in Washington, D.C. that was, I had read, a genuinely racially and ethnically mixed third place.

I am writing from there now, and can testify that it is as lively as I had read. Visually, it is clearly very mixed. I can't tell how much of a third place it is - I can't tell the regulars from the visitors. It is, though, very cosmopolitan. The spirit of Langston Hughes presides. Indeed, the shop takes its name from a title given to Hughes by Vachel Lindsay.

The Gruntleds are using it as a base for visiting with our DC friends all afternoon. This should be good.

Who Likes McMansions?

Whole subdivisions of McMansions - starter castles, Hummer houses, garage Mahals - have been built over the last generation.

One of the side effects of my research on the "knowledge class" is that they seem allergic to this kind of house. Indeed, it is undoubtedly knowledge class types who invented the the term McMansion, and mostly use it pejoratively.

Yet clearly, they must be popular with a significant section of the upper middle class, or they wouldn't have been built or bought in large enough numbers to need such a pop sociology name.

So I ask readers, from your experience, what are the social characteristics of people who prefer and enjoy living in neighborhoods of houses with "a floor area over 3,000 square feet (280 m²), ceilings 9-10 feet high, a two-story portico, a front door hall with a chandelier hanging from 16-20 feet, two or more garages, several bedrooms and bathrooms, and lavish interiors." I would particularly value first-hand accounts from such happy homeowners; if you know such, please pass this query on.