Premarital Sex 4: Drinking

Regnerus and Uecker found a pretty straightforward connection between drinking and casual sex:

“One in three women who drink almost every day reports having had sex with someone the first time they met, a number even higher than their male counterparts (at 29 percent).” (91)

“drinking does have a strong, linear, and enduring connection to the formation of casual sexual relationships: the more alcohol, the greater the likelihood of sex.” (280, n. 11)

Their research shows that young women who were sexually abused or strongly pressured into sex in high school or younger are more prone to casual sex or to sex at the beginning of what they hope will be a relationship. We know from other research that fatherless girls are more likely to turn to sex earlier and with older men.

A running theme of Premarital Sex in America is that emerging adults follow a small number of standard "scripts" about sex that shape what they think is normal. I think that some young women follow a script that says that casual sex is a quick way to get men to pay attention to them (which is true). But they also experience that casual sex and broken relationships hurt them, even if they try to tell themselves that it shouldn't.

Putting these facts together, I think young women who follow the casual sex script, even though it hurts them, use alcohol to self-medicate against the pain that their script - their lives - are causing them. Drunkenness provides a socially understandable excuse and fuzzes their memory of what happened.

Premarital Sex 3: Who Has Sex the Most?

Yesterday we looked at which unmarried young adults were likely to be virgins. Today we look at the opposite end of the spectrum in the same group.

Regnerus and Uecker start with a bit of bracing realism: “Men report more sexual partners than women do. Period. Everywhere.” This is not a false stereotype, nor a construct of our culture. How is this mathematically possible? Because some women have sex with many men.

They present the figures on how many sex partners these young adults, 18 - 23, have had, broken out by sex, ethnicity, education level, religiosity, parents' marital status, drinking habits, risk-taking habits, and other characteristics. Since real people are combinations of these categories, they also make a list of some common combinations. They then ask, what proportion of this group has had five or more sex partners?

The lowest category was not surprising to me:

Hispanic women who have gone to college, attend Mass, and have married parents: 0.6%

The second highest category was not a big surprise, either:

Black men, not in college, who first had sex before 16, and like risks: 58%

The highest category - the group most likely to have had five or more sex partners before age 23 - did surprise me:

White women who drink regularly and have had an abortion: 73%

Premarital Sex 2: Who Are the Virgins?

Regenerus and Uecker estimate that at 18, the threshold of emerging adulthood, 1/3 are still virgins. Who are most likely to be virgins?

• In college
• Religious
• Not prone to getting drunk
• Do not think of themselves as popular

Some subgroups that are especially likely to choose to delay sex:

• Asian men
• Regular churchgoers - men more than women
• Politically conservative women

The role of physical attractiveness is interesting in predicting sexual activity. In their interviews, the Texas team rated the physical attractiveness of their subjects, as well as asking the subjects to rate themselves. The actual physical attractiveness of the young adults they talked to was not correlated with whether they were virgins or not. However, people who thought they were attractive - regardless of what the interviewer thought - were more likely to be sexually active.

The basic fact of sexual attraction is that any willing woman can find a man for sex, especially among young adults. What needs to be explained, then, is why some choose not to. Young adults who are still virgins have a reason and a support structure that helps them stick to their choice.

The main reason is they want to finish their education, and sometimes get their careers launched, first. College students, and especially Asian men in school, are particularly moved by this reason.

The main support structure is a religious community. This is a complex matter, though: evangelical Protestants are more likely to have sex than mainline Protestants. Regnerus and Uecker argue that evangelicalism is such a relational, pro-marriage, pro-family culture that it makes sex more likely - in part because it also supports marriage and family life if they do get pregnant. Episcopalians and Presbyterians were more likely to be virgins: they were more likely to have education and career plans that would be derailed by early pregnancy.

Premarital Sex 1: They Don't Expect Sex to Lead to Marriage

This week I will be blogging on Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker's Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think About Marrying. This is a fine, large empirical study that will be the standard work on this question for some time.

They are looking at "emerging adults," 18 - 23, who rushed through their adolescence, only to be in a holding pattern before full adulthood until their mid or even late '20s. Nearly all of them want to marry, but they connect marriage with having a job and being ready for kids - which is not where they are yet. On the other hand, they do not connect sex with either marriage or children. Instead, sex is something that women see as a natural part of a romantic relationship, even if it doesn't lead to marriage. Men don't even insist on the romantic relationship as a setting for sex, though they accept that rule if women insist on it. As a result, 84% of the unmarried emerging adults are not virgins, and most of them have sex fairly regularly.

Premarital sex is certainly not new. What is new, Regnerus and Uecker conclude, is that it is no longer connected in the minds of young adults with marriage, at least not to the person you are in a relationship with now. That, they say, is a sea change in our sexual scripts.

The Sort of Thing That Gives Christianity A Good Name

This is a real spirit lifter:

Egyptian Christians formed a massive human shield to protect their Muslim countrymen as they prayed during the violent protests.

Skin Graft Gun is an Exhilarating Good Thing

The long, painful, and dangerous process of skin grafts seems to have taken a giant leap forward. This is such a "wow!" story that it worth a whole day of hopefulness.

A World of Democratic States

The Muslim world is the major ideological holdout against democracy.

To be sure, there are still a few "Communist" states that justify one-party rule with a veneer of ideology. Yet nearly all of them have become market capitalist states in fact. I think it is only a matter of time - short time - before the middle classes being created by capitalism in those places demand a say in the government.

There are also military dictatorships and naked kleptocracies. This will always be true, I think - sometimes gangs get into power.

And there will always be organized criminal gangs in the poorest places, fighting with the legitimate authorities for control.

But since the end of the Cold War there has been only one large bloc of states that ideologically resist, if not reject, the idea of democracy - the Muslim states from Morocco to Indonesia. Turkey has been a Muslim nation with a democratic state for a long time, but it did so at the cost of a fierce secularism. Several Muslim nations have had elections, but they have had a very hard time holding two free elections on schedule, in a row.

Yet it is clear to me that there is a large core of pro-democracy Muslims in every Muslim nation, concentrated in the sectors that are connected to the world economy. If the wave of pro-democracy movements sweeping the Muslim world right now were to bear fruit in several states at once, the back would be broken of Islamic ideological resistance to democracy.

If the Muslim world became predominantly democratic, there is not now another serious anti-democratic ideology capable of creating a bloc of states. There would still be islands of tyranny, and there would still be plenty for democratic states to argue about, both internally and with each other. But we can imagine a world, within this generation, of democratic states.

Nurturing the Fragile Flower of Muslim Democracy

A great good thing may be happening in the world. Massive movements against dictatorship and for democracy have broken out in Egypt and Tunisia. Anti-dictator protesters are in the street in Yemen. Polite crowds pushing for parliamentary monarchy are on the move in Jordan. Massive street protests for free elections were suppressed recently in Iran, but the sentiment has not been crushed. The one great example of democracy in a Muslim nation, Turkey, has seen a Muslim party come to power without destroying democracy or the secular state.

The most encouraging thing to me about these movements is that they are led by local leaders of civil society organizations, who have grown up in uneasy independence from the state. There are, of course, dangerous people, secular and religious, who want to exploit this unrest. People just like them are in power now. But the crowds in the streets have been surprisingly disciplined. They seem focused on getting the bad regime out, and creating a legitimately elected regime in its place. What happens after that is up to the course of normal politics.

The second most encouraging thing to me has been the restraint and quiet positive nudges from the world powers. The U.S. and European governments seem to be helping the democracy movement, as much by staying out the way as by not propping up the dictators. The Russians, Japanese, and Indians seem not to be making things worse. The Chinese have been hiding the pro-democracy story from their people, not surprisingly, but so far have made no openly disruptive moves.

If there were a wave of democratic movements in the Muslim heartland the world would be a better place.

The Lesson of Vietnam and Middle Eastern Democracy

Elections were scheduled for 1956 in north and south Vietnam to create a government for a unified state. When it became clear that the Communist Party would win the election in the north, the strongman in the south refused to participate. He was backed up by the U.S. government. Instead, prime minister Diem rigged a referendum, in which he "won" 98.2% of the vote, and declared a separate state in the South. Thereafter, the U.S. backed an illegitimate government, which we later helped overthrow in an even less legitimate coup. After 20 years and millions dead, we finally gave up.

The Vietnamese Communists were, indeed, communists. They would have created a centrally controlled economy, and limited political freedom, no matter what we did. However, they were nationalists first, fighting what they regarded as a war of national liberation against the French. Ho Chi Minh, the nationalist, Communist leader, appealed to the United States for help, and quoted the Declaration of Independence.

I believe that if we had supported democracy, Vietnam would have held elections in 1956. If we had spent our political capital promoting democracy, instead of merely anti-communism, we might have pushed for free elections, commitment to future free elections, and protections for religious groups that feared persecution. Ho would likely have won. He would have made a communist, or at least a socialist, state. BUT if we had supported democracy, and honored the results of the election even if our opponents won, the whole disastrous Vietnam war could have been avoided. Vietnam would be, at least, the kind of market socialism that it is today, without the decades of catastrophe in between.

If the United States supports democracy even when our opponents win, we will serve our interests, and the good of other nations, better than we do when we accept dictatorship in the name of stability and short-term gain.

If all the Middle Eastern dictatorships held free elections, some of them would be won by anti-American groups. But if we support the legitimacy of democratically elected governments over and over again, their periods of anti-Americanism will be shorter and less violent. Indeed, if we supported democracy consistently, there would be much less anti-Americanism to begin with.

Democratic Dominoes in the Middle East

I am very hopeful about the possibility of a good "domino effect" producing a series of democratic states in the Middle East. Egypt is the most hopeful, with Tunisia close behind. Yemen is imaginable, though a long shot. The new nation of South Sudan, or whatever it will be called, is likely to at least to attempt to begin as a democracy.

Some friends to my right politically are worried that people in that region are not culturally ready for democracy, and fear that removing useful dictators will create a power vacuum for something worse. This is, of course, a real possibility, as Somalia shows. Nonetheless, I am very hopeful about a democratic movement that begins in massive, peaceful street protests, supported by a varied (and competing) set of opposition groups.

Other people on the news have been worried that free elections might bring to power people we do not like. Liz Cheney, who supported the Palestinian elections in 2006, now thinks they were a mistake because they brought to power a group she does not like. I think this position is based on a legitimate fear, but also on a basic misunderstanding of democracy. There is no contradiction in a democratic nation electing a government that opposes other democratic nations, including opposing the United States. Indeed, if the U.S. has supported a dictatorship that prevented democracy, we should expect that the first free government would be anti-American.

Democratic governments, though, tend to moderate over time and to get along with others. This does not even take very long; the knowledge that another election is coming soon moderates extremists now. In general, democracy is good for peace, freedom, and prosperity. The people tend not to elect governments that keep repressing them. The people tend not to elect governments that make big wars which require popular sacrifice and interfere with trade. If there were a wave of democratic revolutions in the Middle East, it is likely that some of the first governments would be anti-American, and some would be more strongly Muslim (these are not at all the same thing). Even so, I believe the U.S. should support the democracy movements in the Middle East, and in all Muslim lands. This will create more moderate states that are less repressive of their own people, less threatening to Israel and the West, and better partners to the U.S.

The Young Are Embracing "Mixed Race"

The New York Times has a nifty story about the younger generation choosing to identify more as "mixed race." I think the Census Bureau made a sensible decision in 2000 to allow people to choose combinations from broad array of races and ethnicities. The current younger generation embraces it.

I think, though, that two generations from now, most of the "races" that we now talk about will be archaic. And America will never have a "minority majority," but will have absorbed most third-generation-plus Americans into the great American ethnicity.

Does Jesus Require Us to Carry Guns

A Georgia church and the organization GeorgiaCarry.org filed suit against a law prohibiting carry guns in a church. The GeorgiaCarry.org president offered this argument against the law, which is a new one to me:

Stone wrote in a filing that his “motivation to carry a firearm as a matter of habit derives from one of my Lord's last recorded statements at the ‘last supper,’ that ‘whoever has no sword is to sell his coat and buy one ... I believe that this injunction requires me to obtain, keep and carry a firearm wherever I happen to be.”

Ayn Rand Goes on Medicare

Ayn Rand's brand of libertarianism has always puzzled me. I don't think her vision of utterly independent individuals, only a few of whom are competent and forever under siege by the parasites, is at all like real human life. Even more puzzling, I don't understand why many people find it an attractive vision of life, rather than a dystopian nightmare. Last year I read Atlas Shrugged to gain some insight into the Randians. One of my libertarian churchmates, who had been shaped by the book in his youth, was eager to hear how it affected me, hoping I would join the movement. I told him it was the most preposterous story I ever read. Moreover, her view is so scornful of church - any church - that I didn't see how he as a Christian could reconcile the two.

Rand was particularly scornful of government programs that taxed everyone to help citizens when they are in need, like Social Security and Medicare.

I was particularly interested to learn, therefore, that the recently published memoir of people who knew Ayn Rand, 100 Voices, reveals that she herself went on Medicare. She did not admit this, and went on excoriating the "parasites" who did. Rand, a chain smoker, needed medical help late in life. She allowed her lawyers to quietly apply for the help under her real name, Ann O'Connor.

Rand was entitled to the help of Medicare. She had paid into it as other workers in the commonwealth of the nation did. She was entitled to is as a citizen who was ill and needed help. Rand accepted Medicare. But apparently the reality of her own need did not affect her ideology that people should not be in need.

Obama Assessment, Year Two: Overall

I think any Democrat could have been elected president in 2008. That person would have faced extraordinary challenges, the worst of which were leftovers. Any Democrat would have come in with some version of the Democratic agenda. We have the "mommy party" aims of equalizing opportunity and providing a basic safety net, and the "knowledge party" agenda of education, new technology, new energy sources, and transparency. Any new Democratic president would have had 18 months to fix the inherited mess and to pass the most important new initiatives. After that, the continuing economic mess, even if it was getting better, would still be so bad that the Democratic Party would lose seats in the midterm election, and probably lose a house of Congress. All of this seemed clear (to me, anyway) in January of 2008.

I believe we got a better-than-ordinary Democrat in Barack Obama. I think he understood the challenge before him in the same outline that I did.

He hit the ground running, attacking the economic collapse as soon as he was able. I think he did a pretty good job. The decisions to save some "banks" and let others collapse had already been made. The bailout for AIG, the remaining "banks," and the car companies had already been made. The decision to have some kind of massive stimulus had already been made. Given that, I think the administration did a reasonably good job. The car company bailout has been managed pretty well. Cash-for-clunkers, even if it made no big economic dent, was worth trying, and did restore a sense of hope that the government was working on the economic problem. Also, it improved the fuel economy of the country's automobile fleet (that is what made a "clunker" worth trading up).

Obama also had a problem of winding down the wrong war, and pursuing the right one. This has been done about as well as could be expected.

At the same time, I am glad he had the nerve to spend most of his political capital on universal health care. From fifty years of debate and resistance by the companies that benefit from the old system, anyone could see this was going to be a huge fight. The opposition party was unusually united and oppositional, and some members of the president's own party were unusually opportunistic. Nonetheless, I give Obama great credit for succeeding. He had the nerve to go ahead with a new initiative despite the many fires he also had to put out, and he had the wisdom to put almost everything else on hold until that job was done.

If he had done nothing else but prevent a great depression and get universal health care, Barack Obama's first Congress would be counted a success. That he had quite a few other successes, and the most successful lame duck session in half a century, is a happy bonus.

Obama has done some things that I am disappointed about. I would have been tougher on the investment banks and AIG - at the least, they should not have been allowed to give those ridiculous bonuses until they had paid back the bailout. I think he should have cleared out all of our political prisoners - charged them, put them on trial, and gotten it over with. This would have meant revealing the torture, violations of human rights conventions, violations of our own laws, and the other ways in which we botched the prosecutions of possible enemies. This would have been painful and extraordinarily embarrassing to the United States, but the worst would be over by now. We help our enemies when we act like them; when we prolong the offense and cover it up, this only makes the problem worse.

I am a centrist and a Christian realist. I think President Obama is, too. He is probably a bit to the left of me, but he is also realist enough to know that the electorate is a bit to the right of him. He also does not act alone - the chief executive is partner to the legislature, both of whom are constrained by the judiciary. I think President Obama's chief partner in the House of Representatives, Speaker Pelosi, was a very effective leader; Senator Reid - not so much. The judiciary was mostly its usual sensible self, except for the significant mischief of the Citizens United decision. In the new Congress, the president will face a persistent opponent in the new Speaker, and a competent obstructionist in the Senate's minority leader. President Obama's second Congress will probably be less successful than his first. On the other hand, the lame-duck session showed that the president's long and lonely pursuit of bipartisanship is starting to bear fruit.

I look forward to the next two years. I believe things will be even better in President Obama's second term.

Obama Assessment, Year Two: Big Achievements

President Obama has had a series of significant achievements, with an especially strong rally in the lame duck session. I will list just a few of my favorites.

The nuclear weapons treaty with Russia is probably the greatest substantive achievement, and the culmination of Obama's major concern when he was in the Senate.

The repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell - and his call, in the State of the Union Address this week, for the return of ROTC to all the colleges and professional schools which have long excluded the military because of the DADT policy.

Streamlining and expanding financial aid for college students.

Health care for 911 first responders - why the opposition party opposed it in the first place is a mystery.

I think extending the Bush tax cuts for nearly all Americans is a good idea. I think it would have been better if the tax cuts for the top 2% had not been extended - that would have been a good $500 billion start on reducing the deficit. Nonetheless, if that was the price the President had to pay for his other successes, so be it. In two years, when the economy is stronger - and the deficit will still be pretty large - we can let the top tax cuts expire.

President Obama has begun to achieve the modest beginning of bipartisanship. This despite the very sad decision of the Republican leadership to obstruct Obama and the Democratic Party merely for the sake of opposing. My senior senator, Mitch McConnell, is the worst offender, having declared that the top agenda of the Republican Party is making Obama a one-term president. I hope we will see much more bipartisanship in the new Congress.

There are many more. I would be interested in your favorites.

Obama Assessment, Year Two: Health Care

Universal health care will be the signal achievement of the first Obama administration. Long after the recession is gone and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are over, all Americans will be able to afford basic health care.

I am confident the net effect will be to reduce health care costs, as we eliminate the overhead costs of preventing some people from getting care, and of forcing other people to use emergency rooms for basic medicine. As we integrate the health care system better, standardizing reporting, records, and electronic information, we should make the whole system much more efficient. Indeed, we should be able to make it a true health care system for the first time.

The health care law as we have it has many problems, most of them inflicted by legislators protecting specific home-state or big-donor industries. The government will improve the law for decades to come. Right now the Republican leadership is making a show of repealing universal health care, but this is more theater than substance. Universal health care is overwhelmingly popular, and they know that it will become more so as Americans come to count on it as much as they do on Social Security and public schools. The act will cost more in the short run, as millions of people are included in regular (not just emergency) health insurance, but the Republicans know it will starting saving money soon - that is why they specifically exempted health care repeal from their requirement that all new bills reduce the deficit.

The United States has the best health care for those who can afford it, but a truly terrible health care system. We have started on the long road to fixing that problem.

Obama Assessment, Year Two: Wars

A year ago I praised President Obama for winding down the wrong war in Iraq and pursuing the right war against Al Qaeda. A year later, he has made further progress in winding down the Iraq war. We should have nearly all American troops out of direct fighting by the end of this year, and will start reducing the gigantic cost of that war.

Al Qaeda was driven out of Afghanistan. They are pursuing their best defense, namely, hiding in terrain that is only partly controlled by our vital ally Pakistan. They know that a full-scale invasion of Pakistan would strengthen our enemies. We know it, too. Thus, we have been pursuing a very delicate war against Al Qaeda and their allies the Taliban. We probably cannot drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan. It is their country, even if most Afghans do not want them back in power. We can, though, defeat, capture, and kill Al Qaeda.

I am still very disappointed that Guantanamo and Bagram Airfield and other even more secret prisons still remain. There are secrets we have not been told, and cannot be told, about what goes on there. For my part, I think our torture of the prisoners has so screwed up any hope of prosecuting them that we are stuck with them for a long time.

Still, in war we are making things better, and not making things worse.

Obama Assessment, Year Two

A year ago I made a series of posts on the first year of the Obama administration. Now, as he enters his second year, it is time for a second assessment.

The most urgent task the Obama administration inherited was to save the American and world economy, which was collapsing at the end of the Bush administration. The economy is one of the most complex of all social institutions. No one person or organization can control it. President Bush initiated the bailout of specific large companies, leaving the government in temporary control of several of them. President Obama continued those bailouts, though with a bit more regulation, especially of the stockbrokers turned "investment banks" that had produced the crisis in the first place.

The bailouts worked. Much of the money authorized for bailouts was not actually spent, and most of the loans that were made have already been paid back. In particular, we saved half the auto industry, which is an essential pillar of our economy. In the end, we might even make money.

The recession stopped getting worse, and has slowly been getting better. The most recent consensus of economists is that the next couple of years might see enough growth to recover most of the lost jobs, as well as the lost profits that are already improving.

The administration has also been trying to invest in new industries to establish the foundation for our future economy. They have been particularly interested in alternatives to oil as an energy source, and in making up for the big slowdown in new drug development. Naturally, the large companies that benefit from the current energy and drug markets, and their representatives in the legislature, have opposed these new investments. Nonetheless, I am hopeful that the economy of, say, twenty years from now will rest on investments in alternatives that we make now, both by government and by business.

I believe the economy is the single most important issue determining how people vote - most especially, whether they feel secure in their own economic future. I expect that by 2012 the economy will be sufficiently improved that Democrats will have a big year, and President Obama will probably be re-elected.

Creation Museum: No Death, No Birth

Yesterday I wrote about why young-earth creationists do not accept creation followed by long eons of development. Our host offered the explanation that old-earth creation would entail that death was part of God's design for the universe - a view they reject.

It occurs to me that one implication of this view is that there would also have been no birth in paradise. No babies, no children, no growing up. Not for people, nor for animals.

That is a hard teaching for a sentimental dad like me. And I think it is hard to reconcile with how the promise of children is described in Genesis. Childbirth is to be painful as a result of sin. But children are not a penalty of sin. Children are a gift.

Creation Museum Visit, 2011

Every few years I teach "The Sociology of American Religion," which includes a trip to the Creation Museum near Petersburg, Kentucky. Dr. David Menton, a retired medical school professor who is one of the scientific advisors to the museum, graciously met with the class and answered many questions.

One question that had been on my mind since our last visit was this: many mainline Christians agree with the Creation Museum that God created the universe and that life evolved within the different kinds of animals. What they do not accept, though, is that all of this happened within the last 10,000 years, nor that the Bible requires us to read it as having a chronology from Adam to now of only six thousand years. There are many old-earth creationists, who are not that far from the museum's young-earth creationists. I asked Dr. Menton what was objectionable in an old-earth creationist view? He offered that if the earth was millions of years old, then death had to have been part of the design of creation, with new life replacing old. The museum's view is that death came to humans and animals (though not, I infer, plants) with Adam's sin. Without sin, Adam and Eve and all the animals created with them would have lived forever, without successors.

This was a detail of the young-earth creationist view I had not encountered before.

Beth Prather, a student in the class, took several fine pictures. The "7 C's" is the basic understanding of history taught by the Creation Museum. "Creation's Orchard" and my own (bad) picture of the development of the horse shows what the museum means by "development within kinds" - micro-evolution, in contrast to the "Evolutionist's Tree" macro-evolution from one spark of life to all living things. The final picture is Beth on a humorous treat at the end of the museum.

Sick Privilege at Duke

Caitlin Flanagan has a very sad essay in the Atlantic, "The Hazards of Duke." She follows a pathetic young woman who, as a fake "senior thesis" prior to her graduation from that university last spring, sent out a slide show rating all of her drunken, violent sexual experiences with Duke athletes.

This combination of arrogant, sexually exploitative men and needy, self-destructive women can be found at any college. It is the standard stuff of the guaranteed-to-horrify-parents websites, such as Texts From Last Night and TotalFratMove. Flanagan thinks Duke collects, even glorifies, this bad combination more than other schools do. I cannot comment on that.

I did find this essay helpful in thinking about what is wrong with privilege. Privilege as a social structure is not something that privileged individuals can simply overcome or wish away. But when privileged people do not realize their privilege, but instead believe themselves to have earned and be entitled to all of their advantages, then the social sickness grows. And few people are most privileged than moneyed, white, male, athletes at elite schools who have women begging them for sexual exploitation.

Can anyone add to this list? I think it is helpful to define the pole of privilege, to start dealing with it with curiosity, gratitude, and humility.

Pushing Kids Toward Individual vs. Social Excellence

David Brooks has an interesting reply to Amy Chua's "Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother." Chua wrote that she pushes her kids hard to master skills such as mathematical calculation and musical performance, harder than other American mothers do. Brooks notes that there has been some fussing against her for being too hard on her kids. He, by contrast, is critical because she does not push her kids enough to learn the harder, social skills.

The book read by all first-year students at Centre this year was John Pomfret's Chinese Lessons. Pomfret first studied in China in the early 1980s. His fellows students remembered the worst days of the communist terror of the Cultural Revolution, and the long gray years of forced collective action afterwards. Pomfret was surprised to find that Chinese people were not inclined to do things collectively - they were much more individualistic than the supposedly individualist Americans, whenever the government let them be.

Putting these two stories together, I see Chua's fascinating piece differently than I did at first. I read her willingness to push her children to strenuous individual achievement as a feature of being closer to the immigrant generation than most Americans are. Now, though, I think Chua's particular kind of achievement push is more Chinese-American than it is just immigrant. She pushes her kids to individual effort, where other upper-middle class American parents push their kids to team achievement.

And the great ecology of America benefits from both kinds of skills, and both kinds of parental pressure.

Orphans as Practice Babies

Sociological Images has a short account of how college home economics departments used to train students on "practice babies" drawn from local orphanages. They note that this kind of training fell out of fashion after baby experts became convinced that infants suffered if they were not attached to one particular person. After 1969 the use of practice babies died out.

It occurs to me that another reason for the disappearance of a large number of institutionalized infants for use in schooling at about that time is that after Roe v. Wade in 1973, the bottom fell out of the "orphan" market.

The Best Way to Continue Dr. King's Dream: Close the Marriage Gap

Several friends on Facebook have been posting an argument made by GOOD, one of my favorite websites and magazines. The post is entitled "In Honor of Dr. King: Let's Solve the Worst Crisis Facing Black Children Since Slavery." The crisis that the author, Liz Dwyer, has in mind is the education gap.

I respectfully disagree. I think the gap that lies behind all the other black/white gaps in America is the marriage gap. African Americans have the lowest rate of marriage of any ethnic group in the U.S. 70% of black kids are born out of wedlock - by far the highest percentage of any ethnic group. If African Americans had the same marriage rate as other Americans, most of the racial gap would disappear.

The Sabbath as an Argument for Young-Earth Creationism

This week my "Sociology of Religion" class visited an Orthodox synagogue. When asked by the students about the age of creation, the rabbi promptly said "5770 years." (His son gently corrected him: "5771".)

This exchange prompted a student to ask one of her Orthodox friends how, exactly, he was taught the young-earth view growing up. He said that his parents relied on the Bible - as Christian young-earth creationists do, as well. However, this Orthodox Jewish family made a somewhat different argument than the Christian arguments that I have met with. They cited God's gift of the sabbath as evidence that the seven days of creation are normal, 24-hour days. God worked for a normal week, and then rested a normal day. Thus, when we are commanded to work six days but honor the sabbath, both weeks are of the same kind.

A sabbath-based argument strikes me as a distinctively Jewish way of making the case for young-earth creationism.

Adam the Prophet

My "Sociology of American Religion" class had an excellent visit to our local Muslim school yesterday. The principal, Dr. Jitmoud, very helpfully explained the basics of Islam. He said something that I had heard before, but then gave it a further application I had not appreciated.

By the Muslim account, Adam is the first prophet of God (Allah), a witness to the Creator. In saying that Adam is the first prophet of God, Islamic thought thus reasons that Islam is the oldest religion. This also then makes sense of the claim that all people are really Muslims, most of whom need to be encouraged to return to the original religion. And this, in turn, helps account for why they are so hard on people who convert from Islam to other faiths.

The Power Denominations: Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Jews

Steve Prothero has just release his analysis of the 112th Congress. He notes that three denominations are vastly overrepresented there. Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Jews together make up just 5.9% of the population. However, they make up nearly a quarter of the Congress, at 23.4%.

These three denominations are not merely the best educated and richest denominations, which we should always expect to be over-represented in the halls of power. These three traditions also have the best developed theories - along with Congregationalists and Catholics - of how to wield power. They develop in their members a stronger sense that they should take on the burden of responsibility for the common good.

It is fascinating to see that Jews have displaced Congregationalists among the Big Three power denominations. I think this a very good sign about the state of American pluralism.

Smiling Young People Are 1/5th as Likely to Divorce

Matthew Hertenstein and colleagues found this interesting result:

If you didn't smile for photographs early in life, your marriage is five times more likely to end in divorce than if you smiled intensely in early photographs.

This is probably because optimists smile more, and optimists are more likely to have successful marriages.

Marriage is the Upward Mobility Path You Most Control

Doyle McManus has a fine op-ed in the Los Angeles Times summarizing the three main elements of upward mobility for the poor, as summarized by Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution:

"If young people do three things — graduate from high school, get a job, and get married and wait until they're 21 before having a baby — they have an almost 75% chance of making it into the middle class."

McManus reasonably focuses on the big things government, business, and other social institutions can do to improve the chances of upward mobility for poor people. Creating jobs and improving the quality of schools is beyond what most people can affect individually.

The main tool that people have to lift themselves is in the hands of all Americans, no matter how poor they start out: stay married and have your kids in marriage.

Decent Muslims Turn Out to Protect Christians

This is how to make a good society.

When Muslim extremists threatened to attack Christians on Christmas eve, ordinary decent Muslims turned out by the thousands to act as human shields to protect their Christian neighbors.

That all of this happened in Egypt, where Christians are a small minority, and the government has turned a blind eye to Muslim attacks on Christians, makes this story all the more remarkable and heroic.

Women's tears reduce men's sexual arousal

This is such a nifty study. Lots of animals have tears, but people make tears to express emotions. Women's emotional tears have a chemical that causes men to dial back their (easily aroused) sexual desire. This says to me that we have yet another ingenious system to calibrate the sexual communication between men and women.

What the Government Does Is What Matters, Not Simply How Big It Is

David Brooks has a great column on "The Achievement Test" for judging government. His core point:

The size of government doesn’t tell you what you need to know; the social and moral content of government action does. The budgeteers and the technicians may not like it, but it’s the values inculcated by policies that matter most.

Right. Shrinking government is not a good in itself. Judgment is required.

Liberal Brains vs. Conservative Brains

A small study of University College London students found this interesting result:

"Self-proclaimed right-wingers had a more pronounced amygdala - a primitive part of the brain associated with emotion. ... However, those aligned to the left had thicker anterior cingulates - which is an area associated with anticipation and decision-making."

Strong Marriages Develop Shared Traits

This is a lovely experiment, by psychologist Arthur Aron:

"In experiments by Dr. Aron, participants rated themselves and their partners on a variety of traits, like “ambitious” or “artistic.” A week later, the subjects returned to the lab and were shown the list of traits and asked to indicate which ones described them. People responded the quickest to traits that were true of both them and their partner."

The article that this experiment is reported in, Tara Parker-Pope's "The Happy Marriage is the 'Me' Marriage," sensationalizes, or at least misreads, the data it is based on. She draws a false contrast between enduring and "sustainable" marriages, without offering any evidence that there are many enduring but unsustainable marriages to begin with.

Nonetheless, this experiment is an interesting demonstration of the way in which strong marriages shape the couple into one.

Homely Work in A Deep Society

Alain de Botton writes light, thoughtful books about living a meaningful life. In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, he follows various kinds of work and workers. He explores how the work may or may not lead to a fulfilling life for the worker, and for the society in which they work. One of his chapters is devoted to the creation and marketing of a new British biscuit ("cookie" in American). De Botton uses this homely case to see both how narrow this work seems in itself, but also how it is part of a larger economy of wealth and deeper human value.

From the beginning, observers of these [commercial] societies have been transfixed by two of their most prominent features: their wealth and their spiritual decadence. ... Their self-indulgence has consistently appalled a share of their most high-minded and morally ambitious members, who have railed against consumerism and instead honoured beauty and nature, art and fellowship. But the premises of a biscuit company are a fruitful place to recall that there has always been an insurmountable problem facing those countries that ignore the efficient production of chocolate biscuits and sternly dissuade their ablest citizens from spending their lives on the development of innovative marketing promotions: they have been poor, so poor as to be unable to guarantee political stability or take care of their most vulnerable citizens, whom they have lost to famines and epidemics. It is the high-minded countries that have let their members starve, whereas the self-centered and childish ones have, off the backs of their doughnuts and six thousand varieties of ice cream, had the resources to invest in maternity wards and cranial scanning machines.

Merry Christmas to one and all - see you in the new year

The Gruntled Center shuts down for two weeks in the year - August family reunion at Capon Springs, and Christmas week.

I hope you all get to enjoy blessings this week, and that we all return refreshed in 2011.

The Gruntlwagon, Complete

I owe you several weeks of Saturday posts of the new stickers on the Gruntlwagon, much delayed by weather. Here, as an early Christmas present (to me, at least), is the finished, um, canvas.

If they are too small to read, the five rows, from top to bottom, left to right, read:

Earlham; Swarthmore; Yale.

Flaming Moderate; Fear Less, Sanity More.

E Pluribus Unum [Earth flag]; GRUNTL; We the People Are All Immigrants.

Moderate profits fill the purse; Obama sunrise; Centre College; Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty - Socrates.

Christian and a Democrat.

Accommodating Breastfeeding Is Good Family Support

President Obama has set up a group to create uniform standards for federal agencies to accommodate workers who breastfeed their babies. Many federal agencies have their own policies. The new standards would provide a model for the other agencies and encourage best practices. Accommodating breastfeeding is a good, low-key kind of family support.

Interestingly enough, the first federal agency to create its own breastfeeding policies was the National Security Agency.

Teens Plan For Recession, Have Fewer Babies

The teen birth rate is down 6% since last year - the lowest level recorded in 70 years of U.S. statistics.

The young adult birth rate is down 7% since last year.

Both drops are probably due to the bad economy - girls and women choosing not to have babies because it will be harder to afford them.

Which demonstrates that most of the teen pregnancy rate is not due to ignorance or an inability to plan.

The Birth of an Erroneous Statistic: How Many Wives Earn More Than Their Husbands

About a quarter of wives make more than their husbands in couples in which both work.

This figures is based on a study made just before the recession. Since the recession laid off more husbands than wives, the number may, at this moment, be closer to 1/3. In many of those couples, the husband is not working at all, though he is likely looking for work.

Historically, husbands and fathers work or seek work - period. Most wives and mothers, on the other hand, are more likely to trade off work, or more consuming work, against family needs.

Moreover, in cohabiting couples, she is likely to work more and he is likely to work less than in married couples. Mixing the two kinds of couples muddies the statistics.

A recent Reuters story, citing an unnamed "Princeton study," stated flatly that in a third of couples, she makes more than he does. The nuance of "married" and "both working" was lost.

I fear that this number - "She makes more than he does in one third of American households" - will take on an independent life, like the "50% of marriages end in divorce" myth.

No Labels Will Go Nowhere

As a centrist I want to like No Labels, an attempt to create a common ground political movement. They offer that they are Democrats, Republicans, and independents marching under the slogan "Not left. Not right. Forward."

Alas, I think they will get nowhere. We have never been a non-partisan country - that version of "no labels" is a non-starter. The centrist path has always depended on bipartisanship. Bipartisanship depends on there being two parties with a plan for governing. Right now the civil war within the Republican Party has left them torn among the social conservatives, the libertarians, and the remaining lower-taxes-on-the-country-club Establishment. The only thing they agree on is preventing Democrats from governing. I think that until the tea party revolt runs its course, the GOP will have no positive plan of what it is for.

When we return to the normal American condition of two parties each in favor of government and governing, then we can have bipartisanship and a centrist way forward again.

Still No Stickers

No new bumper stickers on the Gruntlwagon this week. To top the snow of two weeks ago and the rain of last week, we had an ice storm.

Go Mother-Bear Wallets!

MIT is developing proverbial wallets that physically change as your electronic accounts grow and shrink. They aim at "unabstracting virtual assets" - just as the amount of bills and coins in your pocket unabstracts how much physical money you have.

I particularly like the "Mother Bear" model. It has a hinge inside, and an electronic connection to your bank. If making your monthly budget goal looks tight, the wallet makes itself harder to open. That is a good nudge.

Claiming the Sad Virtues of Divorce

Rachel Zucker's "Let's Get a Little Divorced" column is shocking, as it is meant to be.

Her underlying sentiment, that married couples should keep up their independent skills even as they work together as a team, is a sound and honorable one. Framing independence as a good fruit of divorce is not entirely wrong. Still, it is a sad commentary that we have to work backwards through divorce to think about how to be married well.

It reminds me of the story that goes around every year before Black Marriage Day. A little boy in a community where marriage is rare and decent fathers are scarce vows "when I grow up I am going to be a good dad; I'll pay my child support." This is so sad it makes the grandmothers weep.

Sidney Center, NY, Does Religious Unity Right

The Sufi community in the little town of Sidney Center, NY, buried one of their own on the community's farm. The Board of Supervisors investigated to make sure the burial was legal. It was. Nonetheless, one Supervisor, an anti-government Republican named Robert McCarthy, still objected, calling for the dead to be disinterred because "you can't just bury Grandma in the backyard under the picnic table."

That is the ugly part. This is the good part.

The town rallied 'round the Sufis. The next Board of Supervisors meetings was packed - a rare occurrence - calling shame on McCarthy. A local lawyer, who is Jewish, offered to represent the Sufis pro bono. A Republican committee woman resigned in disgust, and instead went to the Sufi community center to meet her turbaned neighbors for the first time. Hans Hass, spokesman for the Sufis, became a national figure for a moment as the story spread. But Hass was already a well-respected local figure, integrated into the town. Hass is a building contractor, volunteer fireman, and captain of the ambulance squad (!).

As if on cue to illustrate the points I had been writing about from American Grace, Sidney Center shows how religious difference binds us together, even in the face of the uncivil minority.

Newseum Press Freedom Map is a Good Shaming Tool

The Newseum in Washington, D.C. has a fascinating map of world press freedom. Green countries have a free press, yellow are partly free, and red countries control their press. The calculations are made by Freedom House, and the tiles that make up the map are changed annually.

The press freedom map shows how unusual our press freedoms are. The map is also an effective tool for shaming the yellow countries into loosening up. For example, Israel moved back from yellow to green this year when it lifted government restrictions on reporting from Gaza.

"What's That Name?" as Class Privilege

This is a fine illustration of class privilege.

One More Thought About American Grace

Robert Putnam is famous for Bowling Alone, his study of declining social capital in America.

American Grace is his major follow-up study, in which he was looking for what does hold America together. He concluded that religion actually does hold us together (which is does not do in some countries). This is an encouraging conclusion, more encouraging that Bowling Alone.

In fact, Putnam and Campbell said that “praying together seems to be better than either bowling together or praying alone.”

No Stickers Again

Too rainy. Soon, though.

American Grace: Conclusion

Putnam and Campbell conclude that religion is the glue that holds American society together. Most people, of all faiths, think all good people go to heaven (or the equivalent good outcome).

Even the "intolerant tenth," who think there is only one true religion, think religious diversity is good for America.

So why doesn't religion divide America, as it does other nations? Because nearly all Americans have friends or relatives of other faiths in their social networks. Putnam and Campbell call them "Aunt Susan" and "my pal Al."

The conclusion that Putnam and Campbell reach at the end of American Grace:

“Devotion plus diversity, minus damnation, equals comity."

American Grace 11: How Does a Religiously Divided Nation Get Along So Well?

The puzzle that Putnam and Campbell are trying to explain: how a country with high religious diversity and high religious devotion has such low religious conflict?

The answer is that we are not really very divided by religion. The secular tenth are the outliers on most measures. The moderately religious and the very religious are alike in most things.

On feeling thermometer measures - how warm (positive) toward Group X do you feel? - the results are a little unexpected:
Mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews are all liked by others at above average rates;
Evangelical Protestants and Nones a bit below average;
Mormons, Buddhists, and Muslims (in that order) are least liked.

In the end, ideology generates more animosity than religion does.

American Grace 10: Religious People Oppose Dissent

The one civic negative that Putnam and Campbell find about religious people is that they are more likely to oppose dissent and accept restrictions on civil liberties.

After disposing of two possible arguments - that religious people are more Manichean in their worldview, or that religious skeptics support dissent - the authors offer a different explanation.

Religious people support authority more than secular people do. Religious people build up the social order by giving and serving those in need. For a similar reason, they build up civic order by supporting the authority on which that social order legitimately rests.

American Grace 9: The Religious are More Civic

Religious people give more and do more for religious and secular life than secular people do.

People in religious networks give and do more than people with religious beliefs but no networks.

People who profess no religion, but who nonetheless go to church sometimes, give and do more than their co-(non)-religionists who do not go to church.

Arthur Brooks, who I have written about before, says that conservatives give and do more than liberals. Putnam and Campbell find that this is because conservatives are more likely to be religious. Secular conservatives are not notably giving or civic-minded. In fact, American Grace argues,

“According to the best available evidence, the ‘civic good guys’ are more often religious liberals, not religious conservatives.”

American Grace 8: The Glue of Religion and Politics

The core of American Grace is the connection between religion and politics. The main finding is that the more religious people are, the more likely they are to be Republicans; the more secular they are, the more likely they are to be Democrats. There are, of course, some secular Republicans, and many religious Democrats, but the trend line is clear.

Except for African Americans, who are both very religious and very Democratic.

Putnam and Campbell consider several issues that might connect religiosity and partisanship. This is their overall conclusion on this issue:

The glue which holds religiosity and partisanship together is the political salience of two issues in particular: abortion and same-sex marriage.

In the late '70s the two parties took the same position on these issues, so religious traditionalists had nowhere in particular to go. From the first Reagan election on, though, the Republican Party took a conservative line on both of these issues. There after, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party clearly captured the conservative religious and liberal secular poles of the electorate, respectively.

American Grace 7: Evangelizing Faiths Are the Least Homogeneous

Putnam and Campbell found that 90% of American congregations are ethnically homogeneous. There is still a strong ethnic foundation to religion, most especially for Jews, Black Protestants, and, to a lesser extent than a generation ago, Catholics.

The least ethnically homogeneous congregations were found among Mormons and evangelical Protestants. This is somewhat ironic since Mormons famously resisted admitting black men to their priesthood until the 1970s, and conservative Protestant sects were the core of the religious resistance to integration and black civil rights a generation ago.

However, the whole nation has enjoyed a sea change in racial attitudes. Religious people are now against racism and for ethnic diversity, pretty much across the board. The remaining racists tend to do their organizing outside of religious networks.

Moreover, it makes sense that Mormons and evangelicals would be creating congregations that are increasingly diverse by ethnicity: these are the faiths that most evangelize new people into the faith. And, for the same reason, Mormons and evangelicals are the least ethnically based of major faiths, because what holds them together is common faith, more than a common background. Evangelical megachurches, in particular, have made a concerted effort to evangelize beyond their white base, which has paid off in the past decade or so.

The growing points of American religion are getting less and less segregated, and the younger generations are more and more likely to value ethnic diversity. This bodes well for the future.

No New Bumper Sticker Today - Too Much Snow

I will have a double post on the next dry day.

American Grace 6: Women's Equality Has Shaped All Religious Traditions

Putnam and Campbell note that the main religious families do differ significantly on women's roles, but only on a few points. About half of American denominations allow women clergy, for example, and half do not.

However, in their roles in the world, both very religious and very secular women have followed a similar path. In 1970, secular women were 10 to 15 percentage points more involved in the work force. There is a similar gap today. However, both groups have increased their participation in the work force at the same rate.

Likewise, today religious women have more traditional gender views than secular women do, but both groups have liberalized since 1970 to the same extent.

The most religious fifth of women today are more liberal on gender than the most secular women were in 1970.

American Grace 5: People Reconcile Their Faith and Politics for Religious Reasons

Yesterday I reported Putnam and Campbell's finding that when people find their politics and religion out of alignment, they tend to change their religion. I don't want to leave that finding out there for a merely cynical interpretation. People choose their religions for religious reasons, and the more religious they are, the more true that is.

Putnam and Campbell found that at the macro level there is a clear correlation between political ideology and denominational choice. Yet they did not see the same thing on the micro level, at least not at first blush. When people explain why they chose their religious institution, they give religious reasons; the more religious they are, the more true this is.

Putnam and Campbell square this seeming contradiction this way. People with no religion leave formal religion because they don't like all the politics, so they do not show up in congregational studies. People who choose conservative faiths do so to fight moral decay, which they do directly through the theology of their faith, and only indirectly through politics.

American Grace 4: Getting Your Religion and Ideology Coordinated

Putnam and Campbell are particularly concerned with the political effects of American religious divisions. They note that religion and political ideology have gotten more coordinated in the past generation. In particular, people who switched religions are more polarized than those who stayed put; that is, the switchers change toward the ideological pole they leaned toward, moving further away from the many switchers in the other direction. This increasing polarization is especially true of younger generations.

One surprising finding is especially interesting, if a bit ominous for religion:

“people whose religious and political affiliations are ‘inconsistent’ … are more likely to resolve the inconsistency by changing their religion than by changing their politics.”

American Grace 3: Who Are the No-Religions?

Putnam and Campbell, in American Grace, offer a pretty high number for Americans who say they have no religion: 17%.

As others have found before, Putnam and Campbell find that the Nones tend to be young, liberal, from unchurched, mainline Protestant, or Catholic homes. And they are very changeable - most come from a churched background, and many will end up churched later in life.

One interesting new finding is that many of them change their self-definition without changing their practice. Even in the year between the two iterations of their Faith Matters survey, 30% of the people in the category had changed. Many of them said "no religion" one time, and named the tradition they came from or were heading to the other time.

The authors conclude that many of the Nones are not anti-religious, and only a tiny fraction are atheists. Rather, Putnam and Campbell see that around each major religious family there is a "penumbra" of an additional 10% who sometimes see themselves in the fold, and sometimes see themselves outside of it. The people who say they have no religion are not, for the most part, anti-religious, but are disappointed with the religious institutions they know - and many would like to find a way to come back.

American Grace 2: Sexual Morality is the Dividing Issue

In American Grace, Putnam and Campbell argue that the triumph of liberal values in the 1960s produced a conservative reaction that came to fruition in the 1980s.

They empirically consider which values provoked the main reaction. They conclude that the religious right was not primarily produced in reaction to Great Society liberalism, nor the civil rights movement; not much by women’s equality; not much by the Supreme Court decisions. The biggest motive was moral decadence and sexual permissiveness. In the 1970s, the single most powerfully divisive issue was premarital sex.

“We argue that throughout these last five decades libertines and prudes have successively provoked one another: liberal sexual morality provoked some Americans to assert conservative religious beliefs and affiliations, and then conservative sexual morality provoked other Americans to assert secular beliefs and affiliations.”

American Grace 1: The Thesis

The big book in the sociology of religion this year is Robert Putnam and David Campbell's American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. Putnam, of Bowling Alone fame, unites with a Notre Dame political scientist to parse the current state of American religion, and tell a story of how we got here.

Their thesis starts in a familiar place: the unusually high levels of churchedness of the 1950s were dealt a huge shock by the Sixties, which led to massive declines. This is a story we have been telling for forty years.

The culture shock then led to a conservative reaction and culture war. This is the story we have been examining for twenty years.

The new element in their tale is that the conservative resurgence ended in the late '90s. What followed was a broad disaffection with organized religion by the bystanders in the culture wars.

In coming posts I will work through their argument.

Contentment is Natural Wealth

Each Saturday I add a new sticker to the Gruntlwagon.

Today's is a mate for last Saturday's.

Britain to Start Measuring General Well-Being

The coalition government of Conservative and Liberal Democratic Parties in Britain is planning to start a regular measure of the population's general well-being, to complement the more familiar national economic scales. The Labour opposition sees this as a trick to show that people are happy in bad economic times, justifying the government's strong austerity cuts in government services. Tory Prime Minister David Cameron, though, says that promoting the general well-being of the population is the main business of government, and is something they should have been measuring before.

I agree with Cameron on this point. In fact, I think measuring general well-being is a direct continuation of the founding principles of the Liberal Party, the ancestor of the Tories' coalition partner.

I believe we will see more governments attending to the people's general well-being as a crucial measure of national success.

Happy Thanksgiving - A Very Gruntled Holiday

Thanksgiving is the core sacred holiday of our domestic civil religion. I see it as the counterpart of the core secular holiday of American civil religion, Independence Day. Gratitude is one of the most powerful ways to make a happy person and a happy society.

For my part, I will spend the day by the fire, reading one of Kentucky's best-known native humorists, Irvin S. Cobb, and being grateful to having my family about me.

Divorced Kids' Marital Stigma

Elizabeth Marquardt, one of my favorite writers about divorce, writes of the anecdotal evidence that children of divorce are having trouble marrying because they are regarded by potential partners as damaged goods. The divorce stigma is mostly gone for the divorced, but has passed on to the next generation.

It is true that children of divorce are more likely to divorce themselves. They are more likely to rush into marriage impulsively, or delay (and cohabit) endlessly, trying to be sure. In either case, they are likely to doubt that they themselves know how to marry. They expect that any fight could lead to good-bye.

It is also true, though, that a good marriage is the most healing of institutions. Divorce is not inevitable for the children of divorce. Millions of divorced kids have made successful marriages, ending the cycle.

The best tool for overcoming the causes of divorce is to know what they are and communicate directly about the problems. If the problem is communication itself, as it so often is, meta-communicate about how you are communicating. Every marital problem has a work-around, if both people want to stay married.

The divorced-kids' stigma is not unfounded. But it is not a doom, either.

Men Live Longer With One Marriage - Not Zero, Not Three

The Daily Mail reports a study by University of Florida researcher John Henretta, who studied marriage and mortality for men over 50. The bachelors were more likely to die at any given age, a fact long known. What was new was that men who were on their third wedding (or more) were 34% more likely to die at any given age than men in their first marriage.

Couples Who Can Do Simple Math Are Richer - In a Big Way

Try these math questions:

1. If the chance of getting a disease is 10 percent, how many people
out of 1,000 would be expected to get the disease?

2. If five people all have the winning numbers in the lottery, and the
prize is $2 million, how much will each of them get?

3. Let's say you have $200 in a savings account. The account earns 10
percent interest per year. How much would you have in the account at
the end of two years?

Then have your spouse, or potential spouse, try them.

According to the RAND corporation, couples in middle age who answer just these three questions correctly are likely to have much more net wealth than couples who do not. The average net wealth difference between couples with all three right to all three wrong or unanswered: $1.7 million to $200,000.

Marriage Is for Smart People

The talk of the pro-marriage world lately has been the Time/Pew survey of marriage. It found that marriage rates have been declining in all classes, and have fallen below half for the least educated. This has led to stories about marriage being obsolete.

I read the numbers the opposite way. Smart people get married, if they can. Smart is not the same as educated, but there is some relation.

Marriage benefits couples who stay together and work together. This is true in all classes, all education levels, all everything.

I think college graduates are more likely to marry because they are more likely to know the wisdom, as well as the research findings, that marriage is not the capstone of social success, but, for most people, the foundation of it.

Moderate Profits Fill the Purse

I am adding a new sticker to the Gruntlwagon each Saturday.

This one was described as "an Italian proverb."

Cultivating Conscience 3: Passive Altruism

Lynn Stout, in Cultivating Conscience, offers several reasons why we do not credit how often people act on conscience.

These two struck me as the most interesting.

1) We discount our own prosocial acts because we know that we do not always have altruistic feelings. Stout emphasizes, though, that the prosocial acts are what benefit society. I would say that in a well-ordered society, the laws and many of the acts that benefit me are in line with conscience. All three motivations - following the law, seeing how helping others helps me, and following conscience - are normally all mixed together in our feelings and motivations.

2) The banality of goodness: it is so common that we do not notice it. In particular, we do not notice the many acts of passive altruism - the ethical restraint of not doing bad things even when it might be in our material interests to do so.

Cultivating Conscience 2

Lynn Stout, a law professor at UCLA, has written a very interesting happy society book, Cultivating Conscience. I blogged about it yesterday.

Stout's key claim is this:

“conscience is triggered primarily by three particularly powerful social cues: instructions from authority; beliefs about others’ unselfishness; and perceived benefits to others.”

These cues to conscience work because they map on to the powerful human emotions of obedience, conformity, and empathy.

We already have a conscience. We can shape social structures to nudge that conscience into action. We can do this by:

1. Having people in authority in all walks of life say clearly that helping others is a good thing to do;
   
2. Show the evidence that most people do help others; and
   
3. Show that others really benefit from our helpful acts.

Stout notes that there is one caveat: we act unselfishly toward others if we perceive that the cost is not too great to ourselves, compared to the benefit that others receive.

I think it is very helpful to the happy society to simply know that most people do act for the good of others all the time. We can make society better and happier by just clearly showing what is already happening.

Cultivating Conscience 1: Containing Homo Economicus

Lynn Stout, a law professor at UCLA, has written a very interesting happy society book, Cultivating Conscience. I will blog it over the next few days.

Her main point is that law, and many other social science and social policy disciplines, have been infiltrated by the idea that people are like the imaginary homo economicus - selfish profit-maximizers who only care about others or about society only if they rationally calculate that their self interest is involved. Stout says that law, especially, has been driven by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s, theory that law should be made from the perspective of the "bad man" who does not care about others or the common good.

Stout argues, though, that most people are, in fact, driven by conscience, not a relentless rational selfishness. She demonstrates this through many psychological and economic experiments. She also argues that the major areas of law only make sense if we assume that most people are, in fact, "good men."

This leads me to see that when making social policy for the happy society, we can not ignore homo economicus. As Stout points out, some people are primarily self-interested profit maximizers, to the point of cheating and exploiting others. Some are just psychopaths, and others have taken too many classes in which they were told that rational people ought to be selfish. But most people are conscientious. Most people are at least "passive altruists."

Social policy, therefore, should be built to contain and discourage homo economicus.

For Poor Kids, Family Instability is Worse Than the Poverty

Most poor city kids are born to parents who are not married. Half of those parents say they will marry. But only 15% actually do. For the rest, most lose contact with their fathers. If mom has kids with a different man, dad is likely to be gone for good.

I think this is the bedrock of why poor neighborhoods are a tangle of pathologies. As Kay Hymowitz says, the instability of their homes is more damaging to poor children than the poverty.

Is Wendell Berry Kentucky's Leading Intellectual?

Wendell Berry favored Centre College with a fine reading of some of his poetry and a short story tonight. He will be meeting with students tomorrow, and then the Danville community at the public library.

It is hard to classify what kind of thinker he is, exactly. He has described himself as "an artist, of sorts, and a farmer, of sorts." He is a kind of agrarian social thinker, and an environmental activist in Kentucky.

When encouraging students to come to the convocation, I described Wendell Berry as Kentucky's leading intellectual. I have been thinking about this since I said it. I still think it is true. But I would welcome some critical thought and comment on the subject.

Burma's Mandela Moment?

The best news of the day is that the Burmese dictatorship released Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest. This may be the long-awaited Mandela Moment, when the regime finally starts on the path to the transition to legitimate government.

I am not counting on anything as certain, though. The Burmese junta is the most mercurial government in the world, in my judgment - even more so than the North Korean. They have let her out in the past, only to lock her up again.

One hopeful sign, though, is that the government does not seem to be insisting that the recent "election" proves that they are legitimate, and therefore the banned opposition party does not have to be permitted again.

Aung San Suu Kyi is one of the shining lights for democracy in the world. It is a great day that she can walk free again.

Flaming Moderate

Each Saturday I will add a new sticker to my van, starting from here.

Today I put up what I think of as the title of the collection.

Veterans Day 2010 Was So Much Better Than Veterans Day 1976

Yesterday my son, who is 16, put on a suit to help lead the Veterans Day celebration put on by the Junior State of America at his school. In Danville, Kentucky, there were flags everywhere. My home coffee house gave free coffee to veterans. People - quite liberal Democratic people - shook veterans by the hand and thanked them for their service.

This was not just in Danville. Facebook was full of flags, thanks, and remembrances of veterans - mine included. Rachel Maddow on MSBC, a notable liberal on the most liberal network, had encouraged everyone the day before to may a big splash of celebrating Veterans Day.

This made me think back to what things were like when I was 16 in 1976. We pulled out of Vietnam in 1973. Nixon fell in 1974. Saigon fell in 1975. By the Bicentennial we were ready to celebrate the Revolutionary soldiers, but not the recent ones. Liberals didn't fly flags. Veterans Day was celebrated by old soldiers, only. It was, as Doonesbury put it, a kidney stone of a decade.

Things are much better in this country today.

The Republican Brain Drain

Nils Andresen has an interesting series on the conservative Frum Forum blog on the brain drain of elite college students from the Republican Party. He summarizes the trend thus:

Republicans have gone from having a clear advantage among top students in the decade following the Eisenhower administration, to being competitive under the Nixon and Ford administrations, and from being an energetic minority during Reagan and Bush Sr. to being almost eradicated today.

Andresen speculates that this trend is driven by the Republican leaderships' attacks on "elitists," their cultivation of anti-science (young earth) creationists, and their encouragement of sheer falsehoods like those of the "birthers." He worries that the long-term effect will be to dry up the pool of conservative policy thinkers and people well informed about the world context in which policy has to be made.

I can testify that the recent turn of the Republican Party has made the position of Republicans at Centre College more difficult. Centre students are centrists, on the whole. There are significant numbers of moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans among the students. Town/gown relations have historically been good. Yet in the most recent elections the tone of local Republicans has taken an unpleasant turn, attacking the "elitism" of the college, charging professors with socialism, and even suggesting that students not be allowed to vote locally lest they "cancel out" the votes of local "property owners." Centre Republican leaders have been put in a difficult position by the ill-informed positions of some national party candidates and the short-sighted radicalism of the tea party wing of the Republican Party. I have seen on the ground that these well-educated and politically interested young people will have a harder time committing themselves to the Republican Party, when the party disparages people like them.

When I was in the federal Department of Education under President Reagan and Secretary Bill Bennett, it was clear that the Republicans could not field a team. In other fields - finance, and perhaps in defense - they had an informed policy makers. In education, though, and most other fields of domestic government, the Republicans did not have a body of informed people to draw on to make policy, and even fewer willing to implement it. All of the top leadership of the department were Democrats when they learned how to govern, and had only recently switched parties in order to take office.

Educated people run society, including government. A party that loses the most educated young people today will reap a poor harvest tomorrow.

Babies Teach Kindness

Roots of Empathy is a fantastic program that teaches kinds empathy by having them watch, and take the perspective of, real babies. The researchers do not know how it works. But is does.

My favorite line from David Bornstein's article: "The baby seems to act like a heart-softening magnet."

Dismantling Orientalism, One Piece at at Time

The Centre College faculty met yesterday to consider revamping our religion requirement.

For years we have required students to take two courses under the General Education heading of "Fundamental Questions." One of those courses must be either REL 110 "Biblical History and Ideas" or REL 120 "History of Christian Thought." For the second course they may choose from a wider array, which includes 110, 120, and REL 130 "World Religions" as well as a variety of philosophy courses. "History of Christian Thought" is an introduction to the whole Judeo-Christian tradition, as a fundamental basis for understanding Western civilization. "World Religions" is primarily about Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.

The Religion program and the curriculum committee proposed changing these General Education requirements, which is a fairly big deal here. They proposed that the two basic choices be 110 (the same Bible course) and a new course, REL 150 "Western Religious Traditions." REL 130 "World Religions" would become "Eastern Religions." REL 120 (Christian thought) would move to the second array of courses.

What does this boil down to? Islam is being moved from "world religions" to "western religions" - understood as the Abrahamic faiths.

Coincidentally, my "Macrosociological Theory" seminar is working its way through Edward Said's Orientalism this week. Said's point is that Europeans invented an "Orient" that began with Islam, then incorporated the cultures of India and points east. Islam was made to seem more different from the other Abrahamic faiths than it really is. This has had bad consequences for centuries, and never more so than today.

The faculty passed this improvement to our General Education core without a dissenting vote.

Getting rich doesn't make you happy. Doing something worthwhile does.

Arthur Brooks, in Gross National Happiness, illustrates the former point with some tragically unhappy lottery winners.

This week's news illustrates the latter point with some charmingly happy lottery winners, Allen and Violet Large of Truro, Nova Scotia. They gave away almost all of their winnings, mostly to local charities. They chose to decline in class in order to increase in status - a success they earned.