Happiness Most LIkely at Mid-Life

Richard Easterlin, a pioneer in the economic study of happiness, concludes this about happiness and age:

"Happiness is greatest at midlife, but not by very much."

From 18 to 51, about 7% of the population move up to “very happy”;

From 51 to 89, about 9% of the population move back down.

(Incidentally, I am 51. And very happy.)

You Can't See Beyond Divorce's Threshold

Eileen Ansel Wolpe, in trying to describe divorce to someone contemplating it, compares divorce to death in a way I had not heard before:

You cannot see what lies beyond the frame around the door that is the exit. It is not possible. It is a death. And just like life’s death, you are not permitted to see beyond the threshold. But I have been here for the past year and I can tell you it looks nothing like it does from inside the threshold.

Re-reading After Virtue

Thirty years ago, when I was a senior in college, a book came out that shaped my thinking profoundly: Alasdair McIntyre's After Virtue. My now-wife and I read it to one another as we made our evening cocoa. This week I re-read the book for the first time since those formative days.

McIntyre argues that modern moral language is so incoherent, because what we have today are the fragments of several contrasting moral cultures from the past. The virtues tradition, especially as understood by Aristotle and improved by Christianity, was concerned with how people could lead a fulfilling life within the roles and destiny of their community. Modern societies, by contrast, try to find a picture of how human beings can have a fulfilling life without specifying their roles or their community, or even what might be fulfilling.

McIntyre helped me understand why individualist theories of what human beings are seem so impoverished. This has been a great help to me as a sociologist.

His account of politics as a civil war among the virtues of different communities has been a help to me in understanding politics as a social enterprise, while not thinking that my community and my virtues are the only rational ones.

His account of how Christianity synthesized the virtues of the Greek polis with the broader and more inclusive history of the biblical story was crucial to my becoming a Christian.

One surprise of re-reading After Virtue is how little of it seemed new to me this time. I think it was just the right book at the right time for me when it first appeared. I absorbed its message so thoroughly that it shaped the architecture of my worldview. And its message is not a bit less timely now.

Evening the Sex Ratio Among Old People

One of the surprising findings of the new census is that the ratio of old men to old women is evening out. From middle age on there are always more women than men, with the gap widening to about two-to-one by the time people are 85. However, older men are surviving at a higher rate than they used to.

Since 2000, the number of women 60 - 74 has increased by 29.2%. The number of men in that age rage increased by 35.2%

There will probably never be an equal ratio of old men to old women, but things do seem to be evening a bit.

My nominee for the cause: the declining smoking rate.

Win The Future: Have Babies

David Brooks has a column that sensibly counters the thrust of most recent commencement addresses. He wrote

College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to.

What most people will make a good life out of are the central commitments they make to other people. Commitments are limits on the self. If you try to live your life having experiences for yourself, without ever committing to build this specific something with others, you will be a tourist all your life.

For the vast majority of people, the biggest commitment we make is who we marry and then have children with. The downside of spending your twenties and even thirties as an experience-seeking tourist is that you delay marriage so much, you may well end up without time for children, children you now really want to have and build something for.

So if anyone everyone wants me to give a commencement address, here is my counter-cultural topic:

Win the Future: Have Babies.

Recentering the Party Balance in the Officer Corps

A centrist trend to note on Memorial Day.

In the '70s, about half of U.S. military officers were Republican. Through the '80s and '90s they became increasingly Republican, reaching about two-thirds by the end of the decade.

During the George W. Bush administration, however, the trend started to reverse. Today, among newly commissioned officers, there is about an even split between the Republican and Democratic Parties.

Anti-Liberal Alliance Has a 50-point Gap on Accepting Homosexuality

The Pew Research Center documents increasing acceptance of homosexuality in a new study. The people who most oppose homosexuality, not surprisingly, are "staunch conservatives." In answer to the question "Should homosexuality be accepted or discouraged by society?" staunch conservatives say

Accepted 22% and Discouraged 68%.

What I find most interesting in this study is that "libertarians," who in most political issues are allied with the conservatives, differ dramatically on this issue. They answer

Accepted 71% and Discouraged 19%.

The anti-liberal voting bloc, which had such success in the last election, is an alliance of opposites. This is nowhere more clearly shown than on the issue of the social meaning of homosexuality.

Using Prenups to Fight No-Fault

Heather Mahar, a researcher at Harvard Law School, has been studying pre-nuptial agreements. She found, not surprisingly, that most people do not want to use them for fear of signaling (or causing) ambivalence about the marriage. Mahar thinks prenuptial agreements do comply with what economists think is rational, but not with the emotional commitments that most people value more highly.

Mahar does, though, think that premarital counseling should include a prenuptial checklist, so a couple can work through their common values about marriage, including what they think about divorce.

The most interesting part of Mahar's research to me was that some couples use prenups to establish higher standards for divorce than the low "no-fault" standards that most states use. Couples can specify the only grounds that they will allow for divorce, such as adultery, desertion, violence, or crime, and the distribution of assets that the guilty party must suffer as a result. Since many courts are unwilling to enforce the marriage contract itself, but instead allow unilateral divorce, strengthening the marriage contract through a personal pre-nuptial agreement might be worth doing.

Richer, Educated Women Have Fewer Abortions

The abortion rate overall has dropped 8% over from 2000 to 2008, according to a Guttmacher Institute study. However, the abortion rate for poor women rose 18%. This means that richer, better educated women are having fewer abortions.

Poor women now make up 42% of those who have abortions. If the present trend continues, within a decade I expect that poor women will have most of the one million plus annual abortions in this country.

Educated women are already marrying more and divorcing less than they did a decade ago. If they are also having fewer abortions, this bodes well for developing truly planned and sustained family life in the college class.

A Quarter of Moms with Two Kids Had Them by Different Men

Twenty-eight percent of mothers with two or more children had them by two or more different men.

Among black women, 59% had them by two or more men.

Christian Schools Produce Decent Citizens

Ray Pennings, in the Cardus Religion Survey, presents these interesting conclusions from a comprehensive study of Protestant Christian school graduates:

Compared to their public school, Catholic school, and non-religious private school peers, Protestant Christian school graduates have been found to be uniquely compliant, generous, outwardly focused individuals who stabilize their communities by their uncommon commitment to their families, their churches, and larger society.

He goes on to say that they marry more, divorce less, and have more kids. Christian school graduates are changing the world - from the bottom up, by living decent lives. They are not primarily aimed at changing large social structures.

Indeed, I think the Christian Right has been so vocal about turning family values and biblical values into business-oriented national political positions precisely because macro politics is so at odds with the lives and concerns of the core evangelical Protestant world.

Centre Commencement

Today was Centre College Commencement. It was lovely. And exhausting.

Sabbatical begins tomorrow. I will seek The Happy Society in earnest.

Ain't no Rapture like the VelociRapture

This my favorite of today's rapture jokes.

(Thanks to Jay Garmon)

Proportion of Marriages Making it to the Tenth Anniversary Is Rising

Traditionally there has been a spike in divorces from the "seven-year itch." If couples make it to their tenth anniversary, their odds of going all the way step up significantly.

The proportion of married couples making it to their tenth anniversary is rising.

75% of couples married in the early '90s made it to their tenth anniversary.

This is 3% higher than the success rate of couples married in the early '80s.

Costs of Married Parents?

I asked my "Introduction to Family Life" class to consider the costs and benefits of the most common type of family - a married couple and their children - and the several major variants that we studied. They did a good job considering the costs and benefits of the variants. On the most common type, though, several of them came to this considered judgment (I am quoting from one exam):

There are not real costs to marriage and a two parent household, there are only benefits.

I was taken aback by this. Not really because I disagree, but because I am used to thinking that all arrangements have costs as well as benefits.

I would be interested in your thoughts on this question and answer.

Presbyterian Church Votes to Tolerate Gay Ordination

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has just changed ordination standards to, in effect, allow practicing homosexuals to be ordained.   The exact language of the church's constitution that was dropped and replaced is written below.

Some have read this as a move by the church toward liberalism.  I do not think that is quite right.  Rather, I believe the loyalist middle of the church changed what it thinks can be tolerated.  It did not change its traditional view that the Bible calls homosexual practice a sin.  Instead, the loyalist center changed its traditional view that the sin of homosexual practice cannot be tolerated.

In other words, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) used to say that homosexual practice was a sin like child sacrifice - absolutely forbidden.  Now the church says homosexual practice is a sin like divorce - bad, but tolerable.

STRIKING: “Those who are called to office in the church are to lead a life in obedience to Scripture and in conformity to the historic confessional standards of the church. Among these standards is the requirement to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman (W-4.9001), or chastity in singleness. Persons refusing to repent of any self-acknowledged practice which the confessions call sin shall not be ordained and/or installed as deacons, elders, or ministers of the Word and Sacrament.

AND INSERTING: Standards for ordained service reflect the church’s desire to submit joyfully to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in all aspects of life (G-1.0000). The governing body responsible for ordination and/or installation (G.14.0240; G-14.0450) shall examine each candidate’s calling, gifts, preparation, and suitability for the responsibilities of office. The examination shall include, but not be limited to, a determination of the candidate’s ability and commitment to fulfill all requirements as expressed in the constitutional questions for ordination and installation (W-4.4003). Governing bodies shall be guided by Scripture and the confessions in applying standards to individual candidates.”

Still No Rush to Gay Marriage, Even Among the Tolerant Dutch

In the ten years since the Netherlands legalized homosexual marriage, only 15,000 couples have actually married.  The Dutch national statistics agency estimates that that is only 20% of homosexual couples in the Netherlands, compared to a marriage rate of about 80% for heterosexual couples.

This confirms what I had estimated based on Eskridge and Spedale's pioneering study of gay marriage rates in Denmark, the first country to legalize homosexual marriage.

There is not a large demand for marriage among homosexuals.  There is a large demand for the right of homosexuals to marry among liberals.

As a practical matter, passing gay marriage laws does not change much in how very many people live. This says to me that those who are worried that gay marriage laws will lead to big changes in American life can rest easier.

A Fifth of American Women Never Have Kids

Almost a fifth of American women in their early 40s have not had a child.  Barring something very unusual, they will never have any.

The rule of thumb for all societies is that 90% of people marry, and 90% of them have children.  This yields an average of 87% of the people in most populations have children.

Immigrants to the U.S. reproduce at exactly that rate: 87%.  But the native population is down to 80%.  Were it not for immigration our population would be declining.

Religion-Income Link is Not Just From Education

A new Pew study of religion and class shows an almost direct line between education and income.  The denominations with the highest average income - Reform Jews, Hindus, and Conservative Jews - also have the highest level of education.  Two-thirds of Reform Jewish households make more than $75,000 per year.  The median income of a household of four is $50,000.

David Leonhardt, in the New York Times article on this study,  rightly notes the education/income link.  He wonders why the secularists and Unitarians, who have high levels of education, do not have household incomes to match. 

I have a hypothesis: secularists and Unitarians have a high unmarried rate.  Secularists tend to be younger than other religious groups, and less likely to have married yet.  Unitarians have a high fraction who changed religions, often after a divorce.  Both of these conditions reduce household income compared to other religious groups, which are more married.

"Intra-Conservative Marriage Fight" Post Also Deleted

Don't know why, either. This is all that remains:

Gruntled Center: Intra-Conservative Marriage Fight

May 12, 2011 ... Intra-Conservative Marriage Fight. Keith Ablow, the libertarian psychiatrist who comments on medical matters for Fox News, ...

Maggie Gallagher took Keith Ablow to task for saying that marriage is oppressive to most marriaed people and produces high rates of depression. Social conservative Gallagher is right, and libertarian Ablow is wrong. Showing again that social conservatives and libertarians are opposites on family issues, as they are on most issues.

"Pregnot" Post Deleted - I Don't Know Why

On May 11 I posted an entry that, for unknown reasons, was lost (deleted?) by Blogger. All that remains is this much of a web-memory:

Gruntled Center: "Pregnot" Experiment Doesn't Justify the Deception

May 11, 2011 ... "Pregnot" Experiment Doesn't Justify the Deception. Gaby Rodriguez, a student at Toppenish High School in Washington state, pretended to be ...

The gist of the post was that a high school student who pretended to be pregnant as an "experiment" is in the wrong, and would not have gotten by a college-level Institutional Review Board. The deception hurt others, and was not necessary - she could have worked with a real pregnant student to see how others reacted to her. This was not so much an experiment as a stunt, which gives sociology, her intended college interest, a bad name.

"Obama or Palin?" as a Mate Selection Standard

Church attendance and political ideology top the list of similarities in a study of 500o married couples conducted by Rice University political scientist John Alford and colleagues.

The news report in Science Daily humorously suggests a new pickup line: "Obama or Palin?"

This sounds to me like an excellent experiment. I hope a speed-dating venue suggests that as an opening question. For all but the least politically aware, this would be a very efficient sorting test.

Intra-Conservative Marriage Fight

Keith Ablow, the libertarian psychiatrist who comments on medical matters for Fox News, says that marriage is a major cause of depression and a source of suffering for "the vast majority" of married people. He wants to abolish marriage, leaving couples to simply choose each other every day.

Maggie Gallagher, the social conservative founder of The National Organization for Marriage takes Ablow to task for having his facts all wrong.

In this fight, Gallagher is right.

The larger issue, I think, is that libertarians and social conservatives are opposites. Nowhere is this more clear than on family issues.

"Pregnot" Experiment Doesn't Justify the Deception

Gaby Rodriguez, a student at Toppenish High School in Washington state, pretended to be pregnant all during her senior year as an experiment to gauge reaction. At a school assembly last week she revealed the deception, and read comments made to and about her.

I think the deception is not justified by the experiment. This is the kind of thing that gives sociology, her future planned major, a bad name. I don't think this experiment would have gotten by a college Institutional Review Board. There are plenty of actual pregnant girls like her in her high school and others like it that she could have enlisted for this experiment.

What is more remarkable is that almost no "results" of this experiment have been reported, though the incident has received wide publicity in marriage-studying circles.

The news reports suggest that her intention was to show that even smart girls get pregnant without marriage, and that other people should help them act as if this were no big deal. I think it is a big deal - proof of which is that she says she has no intention of actually getting pregnant until she is out of college. She did not mention anything about marriage.

Keeping Up With the Joneses

I tried a new assignment in my "Social Structure" class this year: a paper called "Keeping up with the Joneses."

Our aim was to explore the relationship between absolute class and relative status. I had students collect some markers of their own family's class - their parents' education, occupation, and income, and the family's major assets and expenses. With this information they could see where in the national class structure they fit.

Then I asked them to think about experiences they had that showed their status relative to peers and near-peers. One body of evidence came from times when they felt relatively poor or lower status, and times when they felt relatively rich or higher status, than those around them.

In class yesterday we compared experiences, and afterwards I read all the papers.

This turned out to be an eye-opening assignment. Many students had only the vaguest idea of their family's income, and had never asked before. Some parents - fathers, especially - were reluctant to give a specific answer, and not all did. A few students had a clear idea of their family's finances, especially if they were tight. In most cases, though, students thought of themselves as average, middle class people. And in most cases they were surprised to find that their families were significantly above the median income of American families.

They had no trouble remembering moments when they felt up or down relative to the status of someone near. Their stories from childhood turned on things they were not allowed to have, or had when a friend did not. If the parents did not supply an explanation of why some things were not to be had, the students as children had automatically supplied one explanation: we (they) can't afford it.

As they got older, though, students noticed status differences that turned on culture and learning, more than on objects and money. These status differences are more subtle, but more enduring. One excellent fruit of their education is that they gradually come to value understanding more than things.

The strongest emotion that came from most of my students' exploration of their family's class and status is gratitude for all that their families have made possible for them.

What Makes for Longevity

These are the two main conclusions that Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin reached in The Longevity Project:

Those who cared about others – who were agreeable but not necessarily sociable – often thrived even in the face of adversity. … they sought the best in others, which was key road to resilience.

And the summary of the whole book:

It was those who – through an often-complex pattern of persistence, prudence, hard work, and close involvement with friends and communities – headed down meaningful, interesting life paths and … found their way back to these healthy paths each time they were pushed off the road.

Religious Women Live Longer

Religious women are very likely to live long lives. “It was the least religious women who were least likely to live a very long life.”

So conclude Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin in The Longevity Project. Since this study followed their subjects from elementary school until death, we can also see what these long-lived religious women were like as children. Even at eleven, they were more prudent, unselfish, and generous than other children. As adults there were more socially involved and outgoing. They were outgoing, but concerned - very friendly, but worriers. This sounds like many of the church moms I have known.

The least religious women, by contrast, were less likely to get and stay married, to have kids, to be involved, or to be trusting.

For men, family and work effects overwhelmed religious effects. For men, religious effects on longevity may be mediated through their wives and the community they create.

Masculine Men and Masculine Women Die Sooner

Friedman and Martin use an ingenious measure of masculinity and femininity, which allows for some nuanced calculation of how these gendered styles relate to longevity.

To measure degrees of masculinity and femininity, they took the subjects’ preferences for specific occupations and preferred activities. Then they scored those occupations based on the actual ratio of men to women within them. Comparing preferences with actuality, the researchers could distinguish masculine men, masculine women, feminine men, and feminine women.

Which then led to this interesting finding:

The more masculine men and the more masculine women had an increased mortality risk, while the more feminine women and the more feminine men were relatively protected.

More masculine people do riskier things. More importantly, though, they make smaller and weaker social networks that might insulate them from life-shortening social risks.

Children of Divorce Die Sooner

Friedman and Martin's Longevity Project reached this somewhat surprising conclusion:

Children from divorced families died almost five years earlier on average than children from intact families. … In fact, parental divorce during childhood was the single strongest social predictor of early death.

Divorced kids die earlier of all causes. The sons of divorce were significantly more likely to die violently, by accident, suicide, or fighting.

One of the big factors in later life tied to earlier death is that the divorced kids were more likely to divorce themselves.

If the divorced kids made happy marriages and found work they liked, they lived longer than the other divorced kids, and almost as long as the children from intact families who also made happy marriages and found meaningful work.

Optimism Can't Fend Off Death

The cheerful do not live longer. So conclude Friedman and Martin in The Longevity Project.

The cheerful are more likely to have better health in the short run. They are more likely to follow through with medical treatments and therapy regimens because they believe that things will work out well. Pessimists are more likely to quit early, or not even try, because they do not expect a good result.

Friedman and Martin speculate that optimists may be disheartened if things do not work out quickly, and so suffer worse stress or depression which negates the health advantage of cheerfulness.

I am in favor of cheerfulness. I believe, and teach to my kids and my students, that everything will work out just fine. I think Friedman and Martin make a mistake in conflating cheerfulness with optimism (and at one point with a "happy-go-lucky" attitude).

Optimists expect things to work out well. Cheerful people deal with reality with good cheer. Both attitudes help you get through illness better. But optimism can't fend off death. However, cheerfulness helps you deal with death better. SO optimism (which I think is what Friedman and Martin are really measuring) can have a good health effect without having a longevity effect.

Why Conscientiousness Leads to Long Life

I previously noted the main point of Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin's The Longevity Project.

The fruit of an eight-decade longitudinal study of talented kids, begun in 1921 by Lewis Terman, the book comes to this conclusion:

"Conscientiousness … turned out to be the best personality predictor of long life … The young adults who were thrifty, persistent, detail oriented, and responsible lived the longest."

Friedman and Martin offer three reasonable guesses about why this is so.

First, the conscientious are usually prudent, taking only sensible risks.

Second, they may be healthier in general - not just healthy living, but healthy basic constitutions.

Third, they create healthy relationships with other people, which not only makes us healthier, but also happier.

Go persistent prudence!

We Killed Bin Laden the Right Way

The September 11 attacks were a surprise mass murder of civilians designed to create terror. Fighting and killing the people who did that is about the clearest case of justified war I can think of.

The United States mobilized to find Al Qaeda, especially its leader Osama bin Laden, and capture or kill them. We asked the government that was harboring Al Qaeda, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, to help us, or at least get out of the way. They considered it, but decided to continue sheltering our enemy. That made the Taliban an enemy too. We removed the Taliban regime in order to get at Al Qaeda.

When bin Laden fled to Pakistan, we made the same request of the Pakistani government. They decided to help us find Al Qaeda. We learned, the hard way, that some Al Qaeda sympathizers within the Pakistani government were tipping off the enemy, so we cut back on what information we shared with the Pakistani government. Finally, after a long search and excellent intelligence gathering, we found Osama bin Laden. We sent in a small team of Americans who captured and killed the enemy. They did not kill civilians, and none of our guys were lost. Bin Laden's corpse was identified, given Muslim funeral rites, and buried at sea to prevent anyone making a shrine of his grave.

That is doing war the right way.

The many distractions that were added by opportunists to this basic story were huge costly mistakes, designed to serve personal or venal interests. But those mistakes should not distract us from the clear narrative of the right war fought the right way.

Don't Rush to Sanctify Your Old Boss

Pope John Paul II was beatified yesterday by his successor and close ally, Benedict XVI. To do that Benedict had to suspend the normal five-year waiting period to begin the drawn-out beatification process. John Paul died six years ago, so the speed-up was not huge. Still, I think it imprudent.

I am a Presbyterian. The internal politics of the Catholic Church are their business. I think John Paul was a great man and a force for good, especially in the struggle against communism and other kinds of materialism. Nonetheless, I am not really commenting here on the whether John Paul II is worthy of religious veneration, and am not qualified to have an opinion on his qualifications for sainthood.

Rather, I think rushing to judgment for permanent honors is a bad idea for anyone. I think it is always good policy to wait some years for the passions of the moment to cool. I am particularly suspicious when those in power move to permanently honor their patrons and fellow partisans. That smacks of an attempt to sanctify current policies, not just former leaders. I think this is just as bad (and much more common) when practiced for secular political leaders. The Catholic Church's canonization process rarely involves people who were powerful in any ordinary sense. But in the case of John Paul II, it does.

I hope the church waits a long time, with much deliberation, and probably a new pope, before it decides whether to elevate the beatified pope to sainthood.

A Further Thought on the Middletons

The star of the royal wedding was the lovely bride, Kate Middleton. Equally lovely, though, was the maid of honor, Pippa Middleton. And the bride's brother, James, was quite presentable while reading the choice Scripture portion from Romans.

Which made me wonder - how did the Middleton parents produce such a handsome family?

The answer turns out to have a good sociological underpinning. Michael and Carole Middleton met while they were both flight attendants - a business that rewards good looks. And opportunities for male flight attendants opened up in the 1970s as a result of legal and cultural changes promoting gender equality - just when Michael Middleton got into the business. So the airline business at that moment brought together unusually good-looking men and women as co-workers and status equals - a good basis for mate selection.

The fruits of that particular union produced several "genetic celebrities" who were on display all over the world yesterday.

Middleton Marriage May Upgrade Dysfunctional Windsors

I am glad that William Windsor, whose parents made such a hash of their marriage, has married into a more stable family. I wish the young couple the best.

Is Capitalism Consistent With Christian Values?

Is capitalism consistent with Christian values? In only one of these groups do a majority say yes.
Democrats? Independents? Republicans? Tea Partiers?

Yep, only in the Tea Party did a majority agree - and not a huge majority at that: 56%.

In the other political groupings the yes votes were:
Democrats 26%
Independents 39%
Republicans 46%

Asked the opposite question - Is capitalism at odds with Christian values? - the trend reverses:
Democrats 53%
Independents 41%
Republicans 37%
Tea Partiers 35%

Data from a new Public Religion Research Institute/Religious News Service survey

More Intelligence Leads to More Drinking?

Here is a poser. Two recent studies found that "more intelligent children in both studies grew up to drink alcohol more frequently and in greater quantities than less intelligent children."

I don't know why this would so, and am surprised at the result.

My best guess about why: intelligence does not reduce social awkwardness, and in confirmed nerds may increase it. Many people say they drink as a "social lubricant." Perhaps intelligent people need more social lubrication than others.

Just a guess, though. Puzzling.

Hinduism - the Next American Banquet Religion

The Institute of American Religion reports in their first census of American Hindus that there are about 1,600 Hindu temples and centers in the U.S., with about 600,000 active adherents. As is typical of most religions, twice that number call themselves Hindu in national polls. Most Hindus are concentrated in greater New York City and in California, but there are significant groups of Indian physicians and motel owners spread across the country, most of whom are at least nominally Hindu.

In 1955 Will Herberg published a landmark book on the American religious landscape, Protestant, Catholic, Jew. He argued that since World War II, Catholics and Jews were becoming fully incorporated into the mainstream of American culture, which had previously been predominantly Protestant. His measure of this new acceptance is if a civic organization, such at Rotary, held a banquet, what kind of minister would they ask to bless the meal? Before the war, he argued, the list would have been limited to Protestants. In the new religious culture after the war, the local Catholic priest or the local rabbi would also be included in the uncontroversial "banquet religions."

The silver lining of 9/11 is that Muslims are increasingly included in the normal self-conceptions of mainstream religion in America. Starting with Pres. Bush's invitation to an imam to take part in the memorial service at the Washington Cathedral (the so-called "National Cathedral") along with the usual Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish religious figures, Muslim clerics and community leaders are being routinely included in America's civic banquets. There are some anti-Muslim agitators, to be sure, who object to the mainstreaming of American Islam, but they are losing the cultural struggle.

The next American "banquet religion," I expect, will be Hinduism. Pres. Obama made mention of Hindus in his inaugural address - a first. I expect that this kind of rhetorical inclusion will become routine. Indian-Americans are increasingly prominent in politics, though the most successful so far, Gov. Jindal of Louisiana and Gov. Haley of South Carolina, are Christians. The moment will come soon, though, when there are practicing Hindus in Congress. When we next have a "National Cathedral" event of the civil religion with presidents and former presidents in the front row, someone will think to ask the local Hindu leader to ask a blessing, too.

Only Half of Last Year's Law School Grads Are Full-Time Lawyers

Fewer than half of last year's law school graduates are employed full-time in law jobs. That is the estimate of law professor Paul Campos in The New Republic.

Campos made this calculation because law schools have been routinely lying about their graduates' employment rate. Almost all of them claimed 90% or higher were working in law jobs within a year. Lately they have been under pressure to produce more credible numbers, and have been revising their claims downwards. Still, Campos contends, they are fibbing quite a bit.

Truth is good. True numbers are better than false. Campos' main point is sound.

Still, a 50% legal employment rate might not be as bad as it sounds. There are quite a few things that law school graduates might fruitfully be doing right after law school. And many of those not employed in law right now will likely find their way into the profession as economic conditions improve.

One alternative that I am particularly interested in is how many are having children. I can't answer that question, and neither can Campos. Still, most law students are women, and most of them wait a bit after college before going to law school. So it is reasonable to expect that a significant fraction of those graduating from law school are in their prime fertility years - their late twenties or early thirties. Most probably put off having children while they were in school. So some of those who do not find full-time legal jobs right out of law school may be taking a temporary fertility break.

China's Government Suppresses Christians on Easter

I am grateful to be able to walk to Easter services with my family with the full support of my community and government.

In China the government suppresses the growing millions of Christians, especially those not in the officially recognized churches. Today a Beijing house church that had not been allowed to rent a sufficient worship space planned to hold Easter services outdoors. The Chinese police had already placed all the church leaders under house arrest. This morning they arrested members as they tried to gather at a public square for an Easter worship service.

Someday there will be freedom in China. Then, I believe, their will be a massive, home-grown evangelistic explosion there.

Machiavellians Believe in Conspiracies Because That is What They Would Do

Why do some people believe conspiracy theories? Because they would join conspiracies themselves.

British psychologists Karen Douglas and Robbie Sutton found that people with a machiavellian attitude toward deceiving and manipulating other people were more likely to believe in conspiracies to manipulate and deceive.

This makes me wonder what kind of people believe, as I do, that there are many "conspiracies" to help others and build up the world. Though I don't think of these as conspiracies so much as cooperation.

The Moral Majority is Gone from Young Memory

As background to today's discussion of Bill Bishop's The Big Sort, I was teaching the early history of the culture war. The students knew about many of the cultural changes of the Sixties. They knew that there was a conservative backlash. One ventured "Religious Right" as the name of the conservative mobilization.

But none of them had heard of the Moral Majority or Jerry Falwell.

When I was in college in the late '70s and early '80s, the Moral Majority was as familiar as the Tea Party is today.

Contented People Are More Likely to Vote

Baylor political scientist Patrick Flavin thought contented people would be less likely to vote, and discontented people more. Just the opposite turns out to be true.

This makes sense to me. Bill Bishop argued in The Big Sort that voting is mostly a way of expressing solidarity with community values. People in the majority party or ideology are more likely to turn out to vote regularly, while the minority party or ideology is much harder to mobilize in any given constituency.

Serenity Parenting Leads to Pro-Natalism

I just read a very Gruntled Center argument. Bryan Caplan, based on twin studies and his own parenting, came to this conclusion: parenting matters less to how kids turn out than most anxious "concerted cultivation" parents think. So lighten up and enjoy your kids. He calls this "Serenity Parenting."

The corollary is more interesting: if you don't really need to run yourself ragged raising each kid, you can have more of them.

I am looking forward to reading (and blogging) his book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think.

Social Media Builds Social Ties

The Gruntled Center is naturally interested in a blog called Gruntled Employees. Jay Shepherd writes about employment law that makes for happy employees. He had an interesting post lately, "Vote 'Yes' on Social-Media Law." He urges companies to accept social media as a fact of life, and encourage employees to use them well, rather than try to prohibit social media on the job.

One of Shepherd's arguments for a "Yes" rather than a "No" policy is "Yes, these employees can act as effective brand ambassadors for their companies, and they should be encouraged to do so."

I am not precisely an employee of Centre College, and I am not at all an employee of the Hub Coffee House. Nor do I think of the work and life of either institution as merely a brand. But I am very interested in the life and prosperity of both communities.

A real example of what Shepherd is talking about occurred while I was reading Gruntled Employees. This exchange happened on Facebook:

Samantha ___ Misses Centre College. Who's with me?

(Within minutes, 12 alums liked this status.)

I wrote (I like your sentiment in missing Centre. I am still here, sitting in the Hub. Now I am thinking about y'all.)

Ted ___ Now I miss the Hub!



By such exchanges social media help build up the ties of social life. And, incidentally, help the "brand" if it, too, builds up the ties of social life.

Virginia Commemorates Both Sides of the Civil War

Robert McDonnell, the governor of Virginia whose policies I often disagree with, has issued a solid and well-balanced declaration of April as "Civil War History in Virginia Month." I particularly appreciate this point:

The largest wartime population of African-American slaves was in Virginia, yet through their own acts of courage and resilience, as well as the actions of the United States army and federal government, they bequeathed to themselves and posterity a legacy of freedom.

Acknowledging both sides of Civil War history in Virginia is, I think, superior to the Gov. McDonnell's earlier proclamation of April as "Confederate History Month."

Yes, Sex Discrimination Did Happen and Still Does

Mrs. G. thought my last two posts were insensitive to the actual discrimination experienced by women we know, especially in our mothers' and grandmothers' generation. So, just to be clear, I of course know that sex discrimination was not just rampant more than a generation ago, it was official policy. And I know that sex discrimination still goes on. There are women right now who are paid less because they are women.

BUT we have had a sea change since the 1970s in how we think of men, women, and work. The aim of both kinds of feminism has been to open all choices to women. In this endeavor we have been hugely successful. Not completely successful, but hugely successful.

And the main point of controversy between egalitarian feminism and difference feminism is whether, given a choice, men and women would choose each option at the same rate or not. I believe the unfolding facts increasingly support the difference feminist view. The goal of having all choices equally open to men and women remains, and remains vital. But equal opportunity will not, I am convinced, produce equal outcomes.

The Wage Gap is Due to Life Choices - The Attempted Rebuttal

Yesterday I argued that the wage gap between men and women is mostly due to the different life choices that men and women, as a group, tend to make. The American Association of University Women regularly argues that the wage gap is due to discrimination and a "glass ceiling." Their most recent report is here.

The AAUW report begins with the familiar claim that women earn 77 cents to a man's dollar - a 23% wage gap. Later in the report, though, they admit that

After accounting for college major, occupation, industry, sector, hours worked, workplace flexibility, experience, educational attainment, enrollment status, GPA, institution selectivity, age, race/ethnicity, region, marital status, and number of children, a 5 percent difference in the earnings of male and female college graduates one year after graduation was still unexplained.

Many factors could go into this 5 percent gap, including discrimination. However, other research has found that woman are more reluctant to negotiate their wages, and men are more likely to ask for more than they were offered.

The AAUW report goes on to cite another study that shows the wage gap growing for college-educated women and men in the decade after college. They write

A similar analysis of full-time workers 10 years after college graduation found a 12 percent unexplained difference in earnings.

However, that "similar analysis" leaves out the crucial difference between men and women in their 20s - women are likely to leave or cut back on work when they have children, while men are likely to work more when they have children.

As Susan Pinker argued in The Sexual Paradox, the more choice women have, the more they differ from men. American college-educated women in the 21st century are among the freest to choose of any group of women in the history of the world.

The Wage Gap is Due to Life Choices, 2011

It is time for our annual discussion of why men earn more than women in the "Family Life" class. This year two enterprising students shared with the class two opposing current reports on this subject. I will blog one today and the other tomorrow.

Carrie Lukas, of the Independent Women's Forum, argues that there is no male-female wage gap. Sure, the median woman's wage is about three-quarters of the median man's wage, and has been for some time. However, when you make an apples-to-apples comparison, controlling for how much men and women work, their education, experience, job sector, industry, and firm, almost all of the pay gap disappears. In fact, for jobs that require more education in our knowledge-oriented economy, women start out doing better than men.

The core of the wage gap is that women are much more likely to choose to trade pay for family time. The gap begins in the prime childbirth and child-rearing years.

The second main cause of the wage gap, and one that egalitarian feminists and difference feminists most fight over, is that women are much less likely to take jobs that require the most time, intensive effort, and responsibility - which also tend to pay more. This gap continues after the kids are grown.

Men trade success for more money and power. Women trade success for more time and to focus on just the kind of work they like. These choices tend to improve women's lives. All it costs them is money.

Even Among Very Happy Parents, Marriage Matters to Kids

Child Trends has an interesting new report comparing how well the parents get along with how well the kids are doing.

"Social competence," measures whether kids are respectful of teachers and neighbors, get along well with others, understand other people's feelings, and try to resolve conflicts with others. If the child's parents are very happy, the kids are more socially competent.

The most interesting finding to me, though, is that even in this best-off group - very happy parents, socially competent kids - the kids with married natural parents are still better off.

The social competence rate is about the same for very happy married step-parents (60%), cohabiting biological or adoptive parents (58%), and cohabiting step parents (57%).

For married biological or adoptive parents, though, the proportion of socially competent kids is significantly higher: 70%

46% of Mississippi Republicans Think Interracial Marriage Should be Illegal

Public Policy Polling surveyed Mississippi Republicans about their preference for the GOP presidential nominee next year. In the middle of that survey they found this shocker:

We asked voters on this poll whether they think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal- 46% of Mississippi Republicans said it should be illegal to just 40% who think it should be legal.

Among the potential nominees, people who thought interracial marriage should be allowed most favored Mitt Romney, while those Republicans who thought interracial marriage should be prohibited favored Sarah Palin the most.

College Trip to a University

I am taking my son on a college-exploring trip. Our family is strongly oriented to small colleges. My son is the third child, so I have always expected that he would diverge more from his parents than the first or second child did. One form of that divergence might be that he would want to try a university for his undergraduate education.

Universities offer amazing resources for students who know just what they want to to do. Child #3, who wants to be Under-Secretary of State for East Asians Affairs, may be that student.

So, we might have to suck it up if he wants to go to Vanderbilt. It's pretty rough.

Mappiness

I nifty British experiment has begun to map happiness using iPhones. Mappiness pings iPhone users who have signed up for the project several times a day to ask them how happy they feel and what they are doing. The phone will also tell the researchers where the respondents are, and the time of day. The research project can them map which places are happiest, and what sort of features those places have. The app also keeps track of the users responses over time, creating personal happiness graphs for each person.

Christian Practice, Not Nominal Faith, Prevents Divorce

The widely-reported statistic that Christians are as likely to divorce as other people is not quite true.

Brad Wilcox, of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, reports that people who attend religious services are 35% less likely to divorce than people who do not attend religious services.

Even more intriguing, though, is his report that people who report conservative Protestant beliefs, but who do not actually attend church, are 20% more likely to divorce than secular people are.

The Ballad of Mary Magdelene

This song, by Cry, Cry, Cry, has this wonderful line:

Long ago I had my work
When I was in prime
But I gave it up and all for love
It was his career or mine

Blue Kentucky

Last Sunday I wrote about basketball as the civil religion of Kentucky.

This week, the feeling is even stronger. The University of Kentucky men's basketball team plays a Final Four game tonight. Today, our town was blue and white. In the grocery store, the bank, the coffee shop, on the street - by my count every third person was wearing blue and white and/or the word "Kentucky."

The commonwealth will slow down at 8:40. This is a binding fact among people of all classes. Civil religion's high festival is upon us.

College Couples Parting With a Handshake

I have been re-reading the wonderful anthology of marriage and courtship texts, Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar, collected by Amy and Leon Kass. In the selection from Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind is this gripping complaint:

When I see a young couple who have lived together throughout their college years leave each other with a handshake and move out into life, I am struck dumb.

Bloom fears that they suffer from true apatheia, from numb, passionless souls. I think the cause is not quite as bad as that. I think many college students have absorbed an ideology that they should not settle in to adult life until they are old - say, 30. College couples have all the normal human desire to find their mate and get on with life, which in any other culture and time they would just go ahead and do. They have an idea, though, that they should go experience things before they find their spouse.

The married couples who come to my "Family Life" class are subversively suggesting, by their very lives, the alternative idea that experiencing things with your spouse makes for a great adventure.

Kids Increase Married Parents' Happiness

Some studies had found that having children did not clearly increase parents' happiness, while others found that it did. Luis Angeles has cleared up the mystery, I think: Kids increase the happiness of married parents, but decrease it for single parents and cohabiting couples.

Moreover, Angeles found that married parents' happiness increased with each child up to three kids, which he thinks is the amount of kids most married couples want to have. Married mothers were made happier by having children than married fathers were - with three kids, mothers were made about twice as happy as fathers.

[ Luis Angeles, “Children and Life Satisfaction”, Journal of Happiness Studies, 2009]

11% Extremely Satisfied With Their Lives

I was sent a tidbit from a new Gallup poll. When asked, on a five-point scale, to rate how satisfied they are with their lives, most people (58%) said they were satisfied. Eleven percent chose the strongest ranking, saying they were extremely satisfied with their lives.

Basketball as Religion

Today is one of the great movable feasts of Kentucky's civil religion - the NCAA men's basketball tournament. The feast happens for a month each year, and Kentucky gets to participate almost every year through several avatars, most especially the University of Kentucky. This year has been a heightened collective effervescence. The team beat the top-ranked team in a very close game the other night. 90% of my friends' Facebook posts for the next ten hours were about the game.

Tonight the UK teams faces off against a traditional rival power, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Which means that the Bluegrass will simply stop functioning from 5 to about 7 tonight. I bet half the households in the middle of the state, and probably a quarter of the rest, will watch or listen to the game. Facebook will be full of running commentary. Tomorrow's conversation in all venues, high and low, male and female, of every color and nominal creed, will at least touch on the game, whatever the outcome.

Which is fine. Civil religion unites. The content does not have to be the most elevated, as long as it is shared. Indeed, there is only a minority taste for the most elevated content (or the least elevated, for that matter). Civil religion faith and practice pretty much have to be middle-brow and middle-morals. But if everyone is willing to care, and share their caring, then civil society is renewed. Which is a good thing.

Humorous Daddy Blog

There are many mommy blogs. My favorite is Let's Panic About Babies!

This is a humorous daddy blog, Message With a Bottle.

Interracial Marriage is No Longer Controversial

Pew Research Center has a fine new study of attitudes toward the family changes going on in our society. They ask about attitudes toward seven family changes, such as single parenthood and gay marriage. About 1/3 accept all the changes as indifferent or good for society. About 1/3 reject almost all of them as bad for society. About 1/3 are skeptical but not rejecting.

Except one: rising rates of interracial marriage. In each of the three groups, 6 in 10 think interracial marriage makes no difference to society.

The three groups do differ significantly in whether they think interracial marriage is good for society or not. Among the Accepters and Skeptics, about 3 in 10 think it good (31% and 27%). Among the Rejecters, only half that number (15%) do.

Still, interracial marriage was a flash-point issue within living memory. Now, most people across the whole spectrum think it is not a big deal.

This is progress.

Adultery Website Pretends There is a Woman Behind It

Ashley Madison is a website that brings adulterers together. The website is very feminine in graphic style and tone.

But there is no person named Ashley Madison. It was created by Noel Biderman, a married father of two small children. His wife, after a long sigh, says the anti-marriage line that Biderman uses professionally, is not at all like him. The business is just a business.

Biderman was a sports agent, juggling the wives and mistresses of professional basketball players, when he had the idea for making money from arranging adultery. He reasoned that men would turn up for any sex site. The key was to get women to sign up - married women, not just the prostitutes who also flock to all sex sites.

Here Biderman had what I think is the critical business insight of Ashley Madison, named for the two most popular girl's names of 2002, the year he started:

"For them to go and have anonymous affairs, I was almost gonna have to create that paradigm," Biderman says. "And to do that I felt that women were going to have to feel that there was...I don't want to say a woman behind it, but definitely that they were the focal point."

The Hard Work of Combining Lab Science and Young Motherhood

A friend, Jessica Lang Kosa, has an excellent piece on how motherhood changed the direction of her work from lab science to lactation consultant. Her larger point is that this change was not a rejection of her mother's feminism, but a new direction of her own feminism from working away from her children to work with other mothers about children.

The crucial moment of unexpected redirection she describes thus:

When I first got pregnant at 28, I was a postdoctoral scientist working in genetic toxicology at MIT. I researched daycare centers and breast pumps, and assured my mentor I’d be back in 12 weeks.

Then I had a baby.

This is a familiar story that the Gruntleds and many other feminists have discovered. The path that we and the Kosas and others have followed balances family and work more than our pre-baby understanding had prepared us for.

I do wonder, though, if there is any good way to combine young motherhood and lab science - genetic toxicology, for example. It seems to me that a biology lab is about the least friendly environment for babies and small children possible. Moms doing this kind of work really have to separate work and family very thoroughly and physically. I know women who are lab scientists, and I know many science-trained mothers, but I know few women who have been able to combine intensive lab science with young motherhood.

I would welcome some good stories of "how I did it."

"Cockpit Parents" - A Step Beyond Helicopter Parents

Christine Hassler at The Huffington Post has come up with a useful new pop sociology term. Where "helicopter parents" hover over their children, "cockpit parents" run their children's lives for them.

We all have the vices of our virtues. If one of the virtues of your family is that parents and children are close, and adult children respect their parents' wisdom, you (we) are also likely to have the vice of trying to support and advise too much. Hassler offers some helpful advice to parents about how to step back from running their children's lives. Complementary advice to those grown children would be to turn down your parents' direction, even when it would, in the short run, be helpful and easy.

Delayed Marriage Causes Middle East Risings for Democracy (Partly)

Delayed marriage is a significant cause of the unrest in Middle Eastern dictatorships.

Arab societies strongly control sex outside of marriage.
Young people can't get married without a job.
Jobs are mostly controlled by the government.
The governments are corrupt and nepotism is rampant.

This produces a rising tide of educated, unemployed young people, especially young men, who can not get married - and blame the government.

Police State Libertarians

This is the first of what I am afraid will be a many, many part series.

The strongest proponents of liberty and Christianity for themselves support the most draconian controls and merciless coldness toward others they regard as dangers.

Today's case in point: a proposal by Minnesota Republicans that welfare recipients not be allowed to withdraw cash. Anyone receiving public assistance would have to conduct all their business transactions through a state-issued debit card, so the state could monitor and control their purchases.

The crucial provision of the original proposal read:

Electronic
1.11benefit transfer (EBT) debit cardholders in the general assistance program and the
1.12Minnesota supplemental aid program under chapter 256D and programs under chapter
1.13256J are prohibited from withdrawing cash from an automatic teller machine or receiving
1.14cash from vendors with the EBT debit card. The EBT debit card may only be used as a
1.15debit card.




In a tiny step toward allowing some freedom to poor people, the revised bill allows welfare recipients to withdraw $20 in cash.

Facebook Fans Old Flames

The headline is "Facebook cited in 20% of divorces." The story inside, though, is that people reconnect through Facebook with old flames. I think the underlying story is that when we have intimate relations with others it leaves a connection.

In my previous posts on Premarital Sex in America I noted that the authors found that what was bad about a series of intimate relations that do not lead to marriage is not the sex, but the breaking of the ties, over and over.

I take from this that love, and even lesser intimacy, is not without cost, and should not be entered into lightly. Or, in the case of Facebook romances, re-entered into.

Tweeting Sorts By Happiness

Johan Bollen and colleagues at Indiana University have found that happier people tend to exchange tweets with other happy people, and unhappy people tend to tweet with other unhappy people.

They were just analyzing the content of the tweets, without any background data on the people sending them.

It does make sense to me. I don't tweet much, but I do blog and use Facebook. I know I am much more likely to respond to happy, or at least not unhappy, messages. I have also seen exchanges among blog commenters in which unhappy people respond to one another in long chains. These are aptly called "troll wars." I stay out of them.

Conscientiousness Leads to Long Life; Divorce Kills, Even in the Second Generation

The Terman study followed smart kids from 1921 until the last of the subjects died. A new book, The Longevity Project, mines this data for clues about what makes for a long life, and what doesn't.

The main point: conscientious persistence in long-term projects with others is the single best predictor of long life.

And the main killer?

Parental divorce during childhood emerged as the single strongest predictor of early death in adulthood. The grown children of divorced parents died almost five years earlier, on average, than children from intact families. The causes of death ranged from accidents and violence to cancer, heart attack and stroke. Parental break-ups remain, the authors say, among the most traumatic and harmful events for children.

Millenials Don't Really Care Less About Marriage, They Just Marry Later

The Pew Research Center has a nifty study of marriage attitudes by generation. To start with, let's compare the marriage facts. Below are the proportion of each of the four most recent generations who were married when they were 18 - 29:

Millennials: 22%
Gen X: 30%
Boomers: 40%
Silents: 50%+

On the attitude side, only 30% of Millennials think making a good marriage is one of the most important things in life. At the same age, 35% of Gen Xers thought that way. (The Pew study doesn't have comparable attitude data for Boomers and Silents.)

Some have read this to mean that Millennials are starting to give up on marriage.
I read this differently.

The average age of marriage has been rising. The average age of first marriage now is 27.5 years for men, and 24.6 years for women. In the mid-'90s, when the Gen Xers were at a similar point in their generational career, the average age of first marriage was two years lower for men and for women.

It seems reasonable to me that married people rate the importance of making a good marriage higher than never-married people do. When we compare the marriage attitudes of 18 - 29 year old Millennials with Gen Xers at the same age, we are comparing a mostly unmarried group with a halfway-married-already group.

I expect that when half the Millenials are married, we will see a comparable rise in their estimate of how important it is to make a good marriage.

My Life Story

Tonight I get to speak in my favorite Centre convocation of the year: "Life Stories." The student leadership group ODK asks three professors each year to tell their life stories, in about 20 minutes apiece.

My daughters helped me put together the slides for my portion of the convocation. As I looked at the good pictures I have, I realized that they are more about family than work. The more I thought about it, the more this seemed an important clue and opportunity.

I am going to tell my life story to students as a back-and-forth balancing of career and family. I have been teaching this subject in the "Family Life" class this week. This is a topic of intense interest to students, especially to women. Much of the scholarship about family life is driven by women trying to balance their careers and their own families. I have heard many women speak on this topic, and the women who study work/life balance almost always use examples from their own lives.

I realized today, though, that I have never heard a public lecture on work/life balance, with research and personal examples, from a man.

So that will be my theme tonight. Having it all. Seeking the happy balance of career and family. Which matters to me as a man just as much as it does to most women. Sociology gives me a vocabulary to talk about it that most men don't have. And ODK has given me a platform.

Ehrenreich's Incoherent Worldview

At the end of Bright-Sided, Barbara Ehrenreich reveals her own worldview, in opposition to the positive thinking that the book criticizes.

“What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, with our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.”

This strikes me as a curious and unstable mix. She has a dogmatic certainty both that there is order in the world and that is not made by a being that cares about us. I can see how one might believe in a God who created both cause and effect and who regards human feelings, as most people on earth do, myself included. I can see how one could at least try, in the name of intellectual consistency, to believe that there is no God and no order, that these are both illusions we invent to comfort ourselves - though I don't know anyone who can actually stick to this hopeless view. But to insist, as Ehrenreich does, that there is both cause and effect in the world and that it has no human-regarding creator seems to me at least a very eccentric view.

Beards Help

Women "find men with full beards more ... mature."

There are other words in this story, but these are clearly the most important. :-)

The Dark Side of Positive Thinking

Barbara Ehrenreich makes a good point in Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America. The dark side of positive thinking is the belief that if bad things happen to you it is your fault because you had a bad attitude. She details the ways in which the purveyors of positive thinking urge their followers to banish all negative thoughts because they drew bad actions. It is a short step to conclude that if bad actions occur to someone, they must have attracted them by their bad thinking.

Ehrenreich suggests, though does not actually document, that some corporations that are very enamored of positive thinking actually fire people for having negative thoughts.

Positive thinking today focuses mostly on getting money. This is true even in "health and wealth gospel" churches, where the emphasis these days is more on the wealth than the health. This is different from the nineteenth century, when mind cure and New Thought focused more on health. The dark side of today's positive thinking, therefore, leads to the idea that if people are poor, it is their own fault. Positive thinking rejects structural explanations for poverty - global recessions, corporate outsourcing, massive layoffs, etc. - and emphasizes only individual attitudes.

This explains to me why many otherwise Christian people that I meet object to programs that help poor people. They don't usually offer economic arguments about "bad incentives" and "moral hazard." They don't offer old-fashioned Protestant work ethic arguments about "laziness" or "fecklessness" (I told you it was old-fashioned). Instead, they think that poor people have chosen to have a negative attitude, which is why they are poor. If they stay poor long enough, I think this argument goes, they will see that they need to change their attitude, to just think positively.

Academic Culture is Not Driven by the Magic of Positive Thinking

As a proponent of cheerfulness and contentment, I felt obligated to read Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America. She has not persuaded me to turn into a fusspot, but I will give her credit for being about 40% right.

Ehrenreich sees "positive thinking" as a kind of popular magic. At its loonier end, it claims that by simply visualizing what you want, you can make it come to you through the "law of attraction."

She finds the roots of today's positive thinking in the New Thought of the 19th century, which gave us Christian Science, the Unity Church, and the many kinds of mind cure. In the 20th century the focus shifted from envisioning health to envisioning wealth, as the hard-working Horatio Alger boys turned into the Power of Positive Thinking Dale Carnegie followers.

Ehrenreich shows that milder versions of positive thinking are endemic to corporations, megachurches, and, especially, to entrepreneurs. Which made we wonder about positive thinking in academic life. I can't think of any professors who are big consumers of motivational books, videos, or live seminars. To say the phrase "I visualize my article published in the leading journal in my field" seems weird. I can't see one academic bucking another up with "If you picture yourself as a full professor, it will come to you; name it and claim it." That just isn't how we think. Academic life is based a strong expectation that results come from work. Sure, there are many irrational factors in an academic institution, especially the large ones. But I rarely hear professors attribute their successes or failures to their ability to adjust their attitude right, which will attract success.

Academics really do believe in critical thinking, sometimes to excess. But the first great fruit of critical thinking is that we don't simply accept the magic of positive thinking.

Protestants Face Fear With Action, Then and Now

In Be Very Afraid, Robert Wuthnow offers this interesting comparison between how the first Protestants reacted to the fearful anxieties of their day, with how modern Americans react to the fearful anxieties of ours:

“The radical danger that people now fear is no longer that of roasting eternally in hell … It is the threat of life being cut off prematurely and on a massive scale that brings social chaos and perhaps destroys the planet or makes it unlivable for generations. … Yet the dominant response is action, just as it was for the Puritans. Action is driven by uncertainty. The possibility of danger is a motivating force. Taking action is a way of assuring ourselves that we are doing something – doing what we can, hoping that the search for knowledge will be rewarded.”

In each case, Wuthow, with Weber, argues against the popular idea that people deny and suppress their fears. Rather, the bias of Protestants, and the Protestant-shaped culture of America, is a bias toward action.

Alvin Wong - Happiest Man in America

Gallup has a nifty survey about happiness. They made a list of characteristics that correlate with happiness. The New York Times put these characteristics together and set out to find a person who embodied them. A married father, Chinese-American, observant Jew, successful in business - in Hawaii.

They found him, through a Honolulu synagogue: Alvin Wong.

What stands out to me in this list are the several factors that strengthen meaningful purpose in life. The core element, I think, is being a married father. Chinese Americans, and observant Jews, are both subcultures that strongly support married fatherhood. The successful business flows from sticking to the purpose of supporting your family with work, the more meaningful the better.

Hawaii is just a bonus.

Virgins Up, Sluts Down

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released their periodic National Health Statistics Report on sexual behavior. The news that has been making headlines is that virginity is up. Among women 15 - 44, the percent of virgins rose from 8.6% in 2002 to 11.3% in 2008.

I was also struck by the fact that the proportion of very promiscuous women, with 15 or more lifetime sex partners, went down over the same period, from 9.2% to 8.3%.

The proportions of women with one or two lifetime sex partners were unchanged. Together they make up a third of all women.

Something similar happened among men. The virgin proportion rose from 9.6% to 11.4%, while the very promiscuous proportion dropped from 23.2% to 21.4%.

Comparative Advantage Probably Yields a Traditional Division of Household Labor

The authors of Spousenomics say that couples are happiest if they divide chores by comparative advantage - that is, if you do what you are somewhat better at. There does have to be some rough balance of the total labor that each does for the family, too.

I am confident that if couples followed this rule, the division of household labor would skew toward a traditional gender division of tasks. Any given couple might divide tasks up in any way at all, and some couples would be very untraditional, indeed.

Nonetheless, the traditional division of labor got to be traditional for a reason. It reflects the skew in the population as a whole of the comparative advantage of the sexes. So be it.

Legislative Walkouts Are Not Good Democracy

I support the right of government workers to unionize. I think they are as likely to be exploited by their employers as private workers are. I think the attempt of Republican governors to break the public unions is wrong.

I also think legislators should stay in the legislature and fight political fights there. That is the democratic way. The right way to stall a vote to buy time to change public opinion is through the filibuster. "Filibuster by flight" is wrong.

If you lose the vote, then you lose. You reorganize and come back to fight the next election. You make your opponents' wrong-headed policies the main issue of the next election.

All the legislatures should get back to work. We'll take our lumps this time. The other side will reap the whirlwind next time.

Social Animal 5: The Main Point

The main point of David Brooks' The Social Animal is that our emotions and connections with others are the core of our being; the conscious, reasoning parts of our beings are better understood as servants of that core than masters.

Moral reasoning does not lead to moral behavior. Instead, we are more guided by intuition than reason. Our intuitions have supremacy but not dictatorship. We can encourage good moral habits, and sometimes we can consciously direct our actions even despite our moral responses, though it takes much work.

To be more moral, our best help is to interact more, to be more social, not to reason more. Our social interactions lead us to become part of institutions, which we did not build. When we inherit institutions, we feel like debtors to them and want to be stewards of our inheritance.

I will give Brooks the last word:

“The cognitive revolution demonstrated that human beings emerge out of relationships. The health of a society is determined by the health of those relationships, not by the extent to which it maximizes individual choice.”

Social Animal 4: Limerence

The most useful word I learned from David Brooks' The Social Animal is "limerance" - intensive love toward another with a strong desire for reciprocation. What we most desire is connecting with what we love. This is even more rewarding than completing the connection. The mind is geared more toward predicting rewards than the rewards themselves.

“So a happy life has a recurring set of rhythms: difficulty to harmony, difficulty to harmony. And it is all propelled by the desire for limerence, the desire for the moment when the inner and the outer patterns mesh.”

He reads limerence as melding together in harmony. It is not simply the fact of matching our map of the world, our information, with another person's that we value. We coat information with meaning, with emotional value. He cites a controversial theory that love is not an emotion, so much as a motivational state.

And what turns limerance at the individual level into a source of social structure is that we compete with others in order to connect. We can see this most clearly in the competition for mates, but it applies very broadly. We compete in patterned, predictable ways. These patterns are also information that we coat with meaning and emotion.

Social Animal 3: Good Character Comes from Right Perception

David Brooks' premise is that we are moved primarily by our emotions. This is especially important in understanding how we can come to have good character.

Most models of character focus on either the will or the reason. Neither work very well. They are not strong enough to overrule emotion.

Instead, the crucial step in building good character is the first one: how we perceive the situation. This is where our emotions are first engaged. Perceiving and judging are the same act.

People of good character perceive the world the right way. This makes it possible for their reason and their will to channel action in the right direction.

How we perceive the world the right way is a mystery, the result of a million good influences. The most important influences come down to:

• Being in a virtuous community;
• Seeing virtuous action; and
  
• Doing virtuous action

Social Animal 2: Marriage as Map Meld

David Brooks starts The Social Animal with a marriage and a baby. This lets him describe marriage as a "map meld," where two people gradually meld their maps of the world together.

The map meld, in turn, lets Brooks describe the minds of mammals in general as growing through "mindsight." We intertwine our lives with the lives of others. This applies to husband and wife, and to parent and child. We learn to feel what others are feeling by mirroring their actions in our minds – even if we do not mirror them in our bodies (this is the theory of "mirror neurons"). We mirror what others are feeling by interpreting the meaning of their actions.

I especially enjoyed Brooks' contention that humor is a tool we use for bonding with other people, and is itself the reward for getting our minds in sync with theirs.

Social Animal 1: Reason Lightly Guides Emotion

I have been favored with an advance copy of David Brooks' forthcoming book, The Social Animal: A Story of Love, Character, and Achievement. It is a substantial and interesting book about having a fulfilling life. Brooks makes his theoretical argument engaging by framing his philosophical ideas and empirical theories around the story of the fictional couple Harold and Erica.

Brooks' overarching idea about how people work is this:

“The central evolutionary truth is that the unconscious matters most. The central humanistic truth is that the conscious mind can influence the unconscious.”

One of the scholars Brooks draws on is University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt expressed this idea metaphorically. Our emotions are an elephant, and our reason is the rider. That gives some idea of the relative power of the two forces in our psyche.

I like Brooks' way of putting it, because it does equal justice to science and philosophy. Our bodies have strong tendencies, which is why sociobiology is so helpful in understanding our basic instincts. But our culture has also found ways to train our habits to direct our bodies in helpful ways.

Brooks puts the reason vs. emotion argument in a way I had not thought of before. In the story he tells in The Social Animal,

“The French Enlightenment, which emphasized reason, loses. The British Enlightenment, which emphasized sentiment, wins.”

Teaching Justice to the Privileged Youth

Last summer in Theory Camp we read Michael Sandel's Justice, based on his famous Harvard course of the same name.

This month I have been helping teach a Sunday School course on justice, using videos of Sandel teaching that course in a large auditorium.

Both book and course start from very individualistic conceptions of justice and work up to the communitarian argument. In the end, Sandel argues, we should see that we also have obligations of solidarity to groups that we did not simply choose.

Something I saw from the video, that I had not noticed in reading the book, is that this course is designed to bring accomplished and privileged young people, especially young men, from their natural starting point - I am an individual responsible only for myself - to the more mature position that they are responsible to a much larger whole. Indeed, accomplished and privileged young people - Harvard students, for heaven's sake - have greater responsibility to society than other people do.

Though Sandel is teaching an enormous class, he does call upon students in each class. His assistants run around with microphones, so the students can be heard responding to the challenges he has posed for them. Sandel always asks the students' names. And again and again, the students making the individualistic arguments are men, and the students groping toward some sense of communal ethics are women. These are not all white people - this is 2011, and Harvard draws excellence from the whole world. But there is a gender skew in who makes what kind of argument. When you are watching for it, it gets almost comic.

I had a further thought as I noticed the trend of "Justice," the course. I think the whole discipline of teaching ethics is designed to get people with the fewest responsibilities to others - smart, privileged, leisured, single young men - to work their way up to a sense of their connections with the larger social world. This was true when Socrates was walking around talking to leisured bachelors, and is true today.

The practice of ethics begins with community; the teaching of ethics begins with individuals, who need instruction to understand community.