Sociology needs a proportionate focus on improvement

I made a trip to Storrs to visit with University of Connecticut sociologist Brad Wright.  Brad wrote a gruntled book, Upside: Surprising Good News About the State of Our World.

We had a fruitful conversation about the state of the world and the presumptions of sociology - which seem to go in opposite directions.  In many ways, as Brad demonstrates in his book, the state of the world is improving.

Yet there is no sociology of how things get better.  Sociology is best at criticism. When some area of social life starts getting better, sociology either focuses on how that practice still falls short of utopia, or moves on to another problem.

Focusing on problems is a defensible strategy if your aim is solely to solve problems. But seeing only the problems gives you a distorted view of reality - and surely no science wants that.

Focusing on problems is not simply erroneous and one-sided.  Thinking only of problems and fears undermines happiness. A happy society needs a science that appreciates improvements and our ability to solve problems, too.

Now, as you can see, I am offering a criticism of sociology's tendency to criticize.  So that this observation is not simply fussing (and ironic), let me point out that sociology is, at its deepest level, committed to truth.

Sociology needs a proportionate focus on improvement, as well as on problems.

The Only Things We Have to Fear Are Fearmongers Themselves

Of course there are real problems and real dangers.  Nonetheless, most Americans are happy with their own lives.  This reflects the fact that there are many, many things right with our society.  Moreover, we solve problems all the time.  We have a strong tradition of improving, which is as active at this moment as it ever has been.

It is a psychological quirk of human beings that we pay more attention to threats than to blessings.  This makes us think that a large proportion of our life conditions are dangerous.  Yet a calm inventory of each of the people and institutions that we rely on each day would clearly show that most of what we depend on is actually working.

In my judgment, the people who spread fear are a greater danger to the happiness of society than are the people and circumstances they are afraid of.

The Close Parallel in the Sociology of the Virtues and of Religion

I was struck by a helpful analogy between two literatures that I have been reading.

Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, says that the main end of life is happiness.  Happiness, he says, is an action of the soul in accordance with virtue.  The whole middle of the book is a detailed consideration of the action involved in cultivating each of the main virtues.

And then in the last chapter he throws a curveball.  He says that there is a virtue that is different from all these active virtues.  It is higher, and ultimately makes those who can achieve it the happiest of all.  This is the virtue of contemplation. Contemplation is what the gods do often, and in contemplating we come as close to being like the gods as human beings can.

The sociology of religion finds over and over again that the religion has many good effects for religious people.  The main good effects come to those who participate in religious institutions, becoming part of a network who help one another and who spur each other to help others, as well.  This leads some people to say that religious institutions are really just social clubs, and the same benefit could be had from all kinds of secular social clubs.

However, in the last chapter, as it were, the sociologists of religion find that there is a kind of religious experience that is different from all this social relationship practice.  It is higher, and ultimately makes those who achieve it the most fulfilled of all.  This is the practice of contemplating and experiencing God.

Nearly everyone contemplates sometimes.  Nearly everyone contemplates God and experiences the transcendent sometimes.  However, only what Max Weber calls the virtuosi make a habit of contemplation (like the gods) and make a habit of contemplating God.

Is Marriage for White People? Is a Pretty Good Analysis

The black marriage rate has declined precipitously in the past half century. A gap has opened between black and white marriage rates which was not true two generations ago. Similarly, a gap has opened between the out-marriage rate (that is, marrying outside their race) of black women and black men, which was not true two generations ago.

Banks' main conclusion is that the imbalance in the relationship market is the main culprit. There are many more black women ready for marriage than there are black men. This lets black men, as a group, get the benefits of marriage, including children, without the obligations.

Banks concludes that if black women were more willing to marry out, the power balance would become more even. In the end, more black men and women would marry each other.

The Two Parties Agree: Democrats Care More About the Poor, Republicans Care More About the Rich

A YouGov/Economist poll found that most Americans agree that the Democratic Party is more concerned about poor people, and the Republic Party is more concerned about rich people.  Democrats and Republicans are about equally likely to see the two parties this way.

There is a kind of balance in this division of labor, with each party holding down their end of the seesaw.

People of both parties and no party agree that millionaires should be taxed more.  Even about half of Republicans agree on this point.

Csikszentmihalyi's Disappointing "Flow"

One of the most cited works in the positive psychology canon is Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. I think the main idea is sound and helpful.  But the book itself is surprisingly and unnecessarily negative.

"Flow" is what we feel when we are having what he calls an optimal experience.  He describes these as “when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” The flow channel is an optimal path between anxiety and boredom, where your skills and your challenges meet.  The result of experiencing flow is that your own consciousness becomes more complex.

Most of Csikszentmihalyi's examples come from avocations - music, art, athletics, crafts. He says that we can experience flow in our jobs as well, though most of his examples are drawn from the white collar professions.  It was surprising to me that he did not treat marriage or childrearing as common settings for flow - the social relationships at the core of positive psychology.  Instead, the social relationships chapter was mostly about friendship.

Most of positive psychology treats religion as the most reliable setting, outside of family life, for positive relations, for serving others and feeling that your life is a meaningful part of a larger whole. 

Csikszentmihalyi, on the other hand, pronounces religion false, and worse. He simply declares at the outset that the universe has no meaning, that there is no God or any other kind of creating or superintending power.  The meaning we find in our lives we put there ourselves.  And this polemic against religion and any form of meaningful universe is not confined to the opening ideological chapters, but is shot through the book.  Moreover, he takes it for granted that "people today" can't believe that old religion.  He cites Muslims from the Gulf States as the kind of people he has met who come from cultures where traditional faith still seems plausible.

I had the feeling at the World Congress of Positive Psychology, where Csikszentmihalyi was honored along with the other Founding Fathers of the movement, that his position was somewhat outside or askew the main stream of positivity.  I now have a better sense of why.

Twice as Many Morning People as Night Owls (so ha!)

Cornell sociologists Scott Golder and Michael Macy studied the moods that people express in their Twitter messages. They found a pattern through the day - happy in the morning, trough in the later afternoon, picking up again last thing. Likewise, happy tweets were more likely on the weekend than Monday (or the equivalent in other cultures).

One side finding that I, a morning person, found particularly interesting was this one:

The pair found that about 7 percent of the users qualified as “night owls,” showing peaks in upbeat-sounding messages around midnight and beyond, and about 16 percent were morning people, who showed such peaks very early in the day.

Gratitude vs. Social Closure

One of the best practical tools of positive psychology is the gratitude notebook.  In it you write, say, three things a day that you are grateful for.  This helps you feel grateful in general, as a daily attitude, and cuts down on complaining and self-pity.

Gretchen Rubin, in her Happiness Project, found that she was more grateful if she compared down than if she compared up.  That is, if she started thinking "I'm grateful I'm not ..." rather than "I wish I were ...," she ended up more grateful.

Social closure works like that, too, but in a negative way.  Social closure is an idea developed by Max Weber to explain how status differences get turned into hard divisions between groups.  The higher status group picks some small and mostly arbitrary difference between itself and the group immediately below, and tries to close ranks on the basis of that distinction. Educational credentials are the most important tools for status difference today, but practically any difference can be pressed into this service.  And the group below, facing exclusion, resists being excluded.  But they, in turn, tend to close against the group below them, engendering the same kind of resistance, and so on to the bottom of the social structure.

We can feel grateful that we do not have the problems of those worse off than us, without thereby wishing to exclude them from our society. 

The fruit of social closure is a status ladder.  The fruit of gratitude is compassion.

NSF Helps Science Moms Have Their Grants and Babies, Too

The National Science Foundation has announced new policies to accommodate women scientists get and keep big science grants while having and raising children.

These changes are in response to a sociological study by Elaine Eklund that women scientists are twice as likely as their male counterparts to regret not having more children. Moreover, the science policy makers are worried by evidence that young women are diverting themselves from science careers because of the difficulties they see in combining that work with a family.

This is excellent news. I have blogged before about how the family-unfriendliness of science was scaring women off. I see these new policies as evidence that the tide is turning.

Do What You Really Find Fun, Not What You Wish You Found Fun

Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project revealed a truth to her that she found very helpful, but also sad: she often did things that she did not enjoy because she thought she should enjoy them. She concludes

Accepting my true likes and dislikes bring me a kind of sadness.  … First, it makes me sad to realize my limitations. The world offers so much! – so much beauty, so much fun, and I am unable to appreciate most of it. But it also makes me sad because, in many ways, I wish I were different. 

I think Gretchen Rubin is a more adventuresome person than I am.  She is sad that she doesn't enjoy many things that other people do. Rubin's list of what she wishes she enjoyed seems to be higher status culture items - classical music, vs. pop - rather than higher cost items.  I think her desire to appreciate beauty is honorable.  And realizing that some kinds of beauty just do not give her pleasure is an important kind of honesty.


I, on the other hand, have a long "Thank you, Lord"  list of things that other people enjoy, which I am grateful not to desire.  The list began with "Thank you, Lord, I do not want a boat."  New items get added all the time. Contentment with what you have, and counting what you do not desire, is the cheapest way to feel rich - and in that way, I am loaded.




 

Most Republicans Think Human Beings Were Created Less Than 10,000 Years Ago

Jay Livingstone, at Sociological Images, has made this fine (though sad) graph based on Gallup data. The three options Gallup offered are:

God created human beings in their present form within the last ten thousand years;

Humans evolved, God had no part in the process; or

Humans evolved, God guided the process.

What "Happy Wife, Happy Life" Means - for the Wife

Gretchen Rubin, in The Happiness Project, has an interesting take on the proverb "If mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy" - or its pithier version, "Happy wife, happy life."

Rubin is herself a wife and mother.  She believes that this proverb is true (with which I agree).  She also argues that because it is true, she has a responsibility to her family to try to be happy.  As a result of her happiness project, she made a concerted effort to be less critical when things didn't go as she hoped with her husband and children, and to enjoy more what her family did with and for her.

Rubin says her effort to be pleased paid off for her family as well as for herself. 

Want Secure Kids? Hug Them When They are Small

Fascinating new research shows that holding and caring for children when they are little turns on genes that reduce the child's stress responses, and helps them grow up balanced and resilient.

We are wonderfully made that an activity that feels so good to grownups is also of such lasting benefit to children.

Erotic Capital is Right on the Main Point

Catherine Hakim's new book, Erotic Capital, makes an interesting case that beauty, charm, and sexiness are an important personal asset - right up there with money, education, and connections. 

She further argues that erotic capital is the great asset that women have more of than men. She thinks this is so in part because women work more at developing their attractive assets.  Mostly, though, women's advantage comes from the fact that, on the whole, men desire sex more than women do.

Hakim cites studies showing that beauty confers an advantage in pay of 10 - 20% across industries.  This is comparable to the pay advantage that comes from being taller.

Hakim thinks that an unholy alliance of patriarchy and radical feminism has suppressed the idea that erotic capital is powerful and is just as honorable as any other kind of capital.

The book, as a whole, is disappointingly thin in its empirical support.  Nonetheless, I think the basic idea is true and worth developing.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, a Centrist Policy, Reaches Its Timely End

When Bill Clinton was first elected president, one of the first items he tried to spend his political capital on was repealing the ban on gays and lesbians serving in the military. However, the opposition from conservatives was so strong that he had to compromise. The result was Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell was a centrist policy at the time. It ended the earlier policy of actively ferreting out homosexuals in the military as a security threat. This was a liberal gain. But it stopped short of fully accepting homosexuality. This was a conservative gain.

In the years that followed, the sentiments of the country changed. Young people, in particular, accept gays and lesbians as normal Americans. This is true even of young people who are otherwise quite conservative. Just as important, a generation of military leaders came to power who also accepted gays and lesbians as normal members of the military. Their testimony, it seems, was the crucial step in convincing some Congressional Republicans to vote with the Democrats to repeal the law underlying Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

This story is the right way to make a controversial social change: take centrist steps until the change is no longer controversial to most people. Some people think this change should have been made long ago, that Don't Ask, Don't Tell was a sellout. Others think the change should not have been made at all, that homosexuality should not be normalized. But this day, when the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy officially ended in the U.S. military, policy caught up with majority sentiment. Which is a good day for centrist social change.

Gigi Grazer's Anti-Divorce Gem

NOTE: The following is anti-divorce. Proceed forewarned.

Gigi Levangie Grazer is an expert on divorce, the hard way. The twice-divorced author of The Starter Wife and the screenplay of Stepmom has a fine piece of hard-won wisdom in the Huffington Post. I can't write with this kind of authority.

My favorite nugget is this:

When you do go out with someone (after the kids go to bed), you size them up not only against your standards, but the standards of your children. You're not the only one going out on that date -- your seven-year-old is right there with you, with his toothy grin. Your fourteen-year-old is scowling in the background. Your stoic ten-year-old has tears welling up in his eyes.

Frankly, other than superficial dating far away from your kids' eyes and ears, E.S.P. might be the only thing that makes sense for the single parent.

Our Moderately Progressive Tax Rate

For my conservative friends who have been telling me that the poorer half of Americans pay no taxes:

According to Citizens for Tax Justice, the lowest 20 percent of income earners (those with an average cash income of 12,500 a year) are paying about 16.2 percent of their income in taxes. The next 20 percent (those with an average cash income of 25,300 a year) are paying 20.7 percent of their income in taxes. The top 1 percent (with an average cash income of 1,254,000) are paying more but still just 30 percent of their total income. But if you go a step above that and calculate the tax rate for the 400 richest Americans in 2008, you find that they only paid 18.1 percent of their income in taxes. That is less than those making an average of 25,300 a year.

Fog Happiness

Gretchen Rubin takes up an important finding in happiness research: when a couple has children, their marital happiness goes down.  After pondering this finding compared to her own experience, and compared with the obvious fact that most parents are happy that they have children, she came to this conclusion:

I have to reject the experts’ argument that children don’t bring happiness. Because they do. Not always in a moment-to-moment way, perhaps, but in a more profound way. 

She calls this “fog happiness.” Caring for children, especially small children, may be a trial at any given moment. Yet the experience of being a parent, having children, of family in the round, is deeply satisfying to most people.

I think that the kind of well-being that comes from having children is the single clearest path from "happiness" to "meaningfulness." And thinking about why raising children produces fog happiness is an instance of what Aristotle means when he says that contemplation is the highest happiness.

Gretchen Rubin's First Splendid Truth about Happiness

Gretchen Rubin develops several Splendid Truths in the course of her Happiness Project. The First Splendid Truth is “To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.”

This is a dense statement.  We need to think about feeling good and think about feeling bad because one of the unexpected findings of happiness research is that feeling happy and feeling unhappy are separate feelings.  She found over the course of her project that reducing the actions that made her feel unhappy gave the single biggest boost to her happiness; however, they did so more by removing an obstacle than by automatically creating happy feelings.

"Feeling right" is about living, giving, and working in a way that feels good and meaningful.  I think living meaningfully is the hardest part of achieving deep and lasting happiness.  I believe that the difference that Rubin found between feeling happy and feeling right is the same distinction that Aristotle was getting at when he said happiness is an action in accordance with virtue, but really the deepest happiness (which not all will achieve) comes from contemplation.

The idea that she had to think about these feelings in an atmosphere of growth adds a necessary dynamic element to living happily.  It also raises what I think is an interesting gender difference in thinking about what makes us happy.  Martin Seligman, the guru of positive psychology, recently revised his long-standing definition of what makes for a happy life to add an element of achievement.  It strikes me that growth and achievement are characteristically feminine and masculine ways of thinking about the same dynamic process.

I think Gretchen Rubin's First Splendid Truth about happiness holds up, and makes sense within the larger philosophical and empirical study of happiness.

“Enthusiasm is a form of social courage”

I commend Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project. It is very gruntled.

I was particularly taken with this sequence of observations at the end of the book:

“Being critical made me feel more sophisticated and intelligent.”

“Enthusiasm is a form of social courage.”

“A willingness to be pleased requires modesty and even innocence.”

The Endpoint of Religious Evolution is Robert Bellah

Robert Bellah's last major work (as he says - he is in his eighties), Religion in Human Evolution, was designed to show that the world religions that emerged in the "axial age" around 500 BCE grew out of parallel social evolution. The new, very hierarchical and often brutal states of that era produced a reaction of "renouncers" - mostly traveling teachers who criticized the current state in the name of a perfect standard located in the past or in another plane beyond this one.  This is an interesting story.  The sociology seems very plausible to me.  I was a little disappointed that there doesn't seem to be much religion left in his discussion of religion once he has extracted the philosophy he was looking for, but that might be a story for someone else to develop.

Bellah then tries to tie this moment of social and intellectual evolution to the larger framework of biological evolution.  The link between them is that playing, which animals and early humans did, led to singing and dancing and rituals.  The rituals, which still partly endure, became the basis of religion and of social solidarity - a very Durkheimian thought.  The evolutionary connection between play and ritual is, he admits, a late addition to the book.  In fact, he barely mentions play through the whole core, where he compares the various axial age proto-philosophers.  Still, I can see how this might be true.  Worth someone investigating.

Then Bellah starts going off the rails.  He says that just because the world religions evolved from earlier tribal religions, and from animal play, doesn't mean they are better or true.  He wants to avoid judging any religious metanarrative from the perspective of another religious metanarrative. So instead he judges them from the metanarrative of evolution, on the grounds that evolution is the only metanarrative believed by nearly all thinking people.

And then I think he gets himself into a real tangle.  On the one hand, he says that there is no standard, not even evolution, from which to choose among the religions.  On the other hand, he extracts from all of them an "axial ethic" of universal equality.  Moreover, he says that that the axial thinkers were utopians, but it would be unreasonable to try to make more than modest social reforms based on their ideas.  And while it would be improper for this book, which ends its story 2000 years ago, to comment on the subsequent evolution of religion, he does think “it is imperative that humans wake up to what is happening [to the environment] and take the necessary dramatic steps that are so clearly needed but also at present so clearly ignored by the powers of this earth.” He doesn't specify what those steps are, but the main culprit he names is the invention of agriculture.

Bellah's position, that the point of all the world's religions is universal equality in social ethics, and environmentalism is a quasi-religious imperative, sounds like just what you would expect a Berkeley sociology professor to believe.  The outcome of religion in human evolution from the paleolithic to the axial age is mild reformist liberalism.

The Moral Muddleheadedness of Most Americans

Two noted sociologists who study religion have each just released a distressing study about the moral muddleheadedness of most Americans, especially the young.

Christian Smith, in a study of youth, found that when faced with a moral dilemma, most had no standards, stories, or virtues they could articulate to guide their actions. Instead, they said “I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.”

George Barna, in a study of American Christians (that is, most Americans), summarizes the view of most people thus: "People say, 'I believe in God. I believe the Bible is a good book. And then I believe whatever I want.'"

I do not think that people are actually so mush-headed in what they believe. I think they have learned the lesson of tolerance, relativism, and not-judging so well that they have no way of talking about how they actually make judgments for themselves. I think people are actually more consistent in their actions than they can explain. And that most people consistently act in accordance with traditional virtues.

Still, if the only theory that people have is that they should act on their current feelings, then the long-term commitments that structure our lives and our societies, like mortgages and marriages, are undermined.

I think every healthy society lives by a narrative of virtue. The narrative of learning not to make judgments is way too thin to live by.

Robert Bellah's Final Attempt at Religious Evolution

I am working through Robert Bellah's magnum opus, the just-published Religion in Human Evolution. As the title suggests, he is placing the development of all religious institutions in the large framework of biological evolution. The core of this large book is a detailed treatment of the breakthrough to theoretical thought in the "axial age" (the centuries around 500 BCE) when the foundations for the world religions and great civilizations of history were laid in ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India.

His discussion of the development of ancient Israel's religion is the most personally interesting to me, and the most personally distressing. Bellah, one of the most eminent living sociologists of religion, has also been an active Episcopalian. I was grieved to see, therefore, that he follows what he calls "most scholars" - most secular scholars - in treating all the story of the Bible up to the prophets as mythic rather than historic. He thinks David and Solomon may have been historic figures, but not as grand as they are made out. All the story before that - certainly Genesis, but also Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and even Moses - were made up or embellished later to support a new, unified story of one God that the earlier "Israelites" probably did not believe - if they even existed.

Bellah makes repeated claims like this: The original god of the people who become Israel was El, with his consort Ashterah. Yahweh was another god of a different group. When El and Yahweh were merged in the later story, Ashterah came along as Yahweh's consort, too. Bellah concludes "the existence of Mrs. God, so unseemly to Jewish and Christian orthodoxy, has become widely, though not universally, accepted."

What saddens me in this statement is not so much the substance of it. Disbelieving the biblical story is what makes secular scholars secular. Rather, I wish that Bellah had not left the sentence unfinished - that he had not implied "accepted by all people whose opinions are worth listening to."

I will keep my own counsel, and my own authorities, on how to understand the Bible.

Wind Down the 9/11 Cycle: Bring the Troops Home

The attack on September 11, 2001, was part of a longer war. We had been fighting that specific war at least since our invasion of Iraq. We are still fighting it today.

Each side has had its victories. Al Qaeda achieved its stated aim: to get the Western coalition to remove our troops from Saudia Arabia. And they achieved their secondary aim: to terrorize the West and take Islamist fighting abilities seriously. We also gave them an unexpected victory by invading Iraq again. This wiped out the sympathy that the world had for the U.S. and against Al Qaeda. We created a massive recruiting field for Islamist terrorists, both in the Muslim lands and within the West. And by imprisoning and torturing whoever fell into our net, without charges or trials or law, we gave away the moral high ground. We will pay for these unforced errors for a long time to come.

For our part, the U.S. finally killed Osama bin Laden, and has severely damaged Al Qaeda. We offered the Taliban regime the chance to turn over Al Qaeda, and they chose not to. As a result, we removed the Taliban from Afghanistan, which was at the time the worst regime in the world (except North Korea). The unrelated war in Iraq removed Saddam Hussein and his family from power, which is a good thing, but at a huge cost to Iraqi civilians and to our relations with the Muslim world. Though there were gains from the Iraq war, I would call the balance of costs and benefits at best a draw.

In the long struggle, neither side is likely to prevail fully.

In the tit-for-tat with Al Qaeda following 9/11, though, we mostly won.

I think on this tenth anniversary we should declare victory and bring the troops home.

Why Dropouts Were Not a Problem a Century Ago

A century ago so few people graduated from high school, or even elementary school, that what was measured was how much schooling they had, not how much schooling they did not have.

Today we have the luxury of conceiving of "dropping out" as a problem because most people get so much more schooling - and better schooling - than they used to. This is a huge improvement that we take for granted.

The positive way to see the same facts is that we have a very high high school graduation rate today, compared to the past. And it is getting higher.

Is There an American Trollope?

Anthony Trollope is my favorite novelist. I enjoy his Barsetshire novels very much. I am now working through his Parliamentary novels in sequence.

Which led to this question: Which novelist is the American Trollope?

I put this question to my colleagues in American literature, asking for their gut reaction. Their responses are helpful and fascinating, though not quite the answer I was hoping for. The first wrote:

Gut reaction: We don’t have a Trollope.

I assume you mean writes about family and community life from a generally optimistic perspective. The first name that comes to mind is Howells, but even in him there’s more darkness than there is in the Trollope I’ve read.

Yes, that is exactly what I was looking for, though I did not know that until my friend put it that way.

Well, I was going to give you Updike, but I’m sure you’ve read the Rabbit books. His life deteriorates—his family’s full of dysfunction. You could try Harold Fredericks’ The Damnation of Theron Ware (Updike rewrote it for his In the Beauty of the Lilies), but that’s (not surprisingly) about disintegration too. Do try Howells: if you haven’t read The Rise of Silas Lapham or A Hazard of New Fortunes, you should—you’d appreciate, if not necessarily like, them.

There are more contemporary social realists who love their characters too much to let them come to any real harm.

I have tried William Dean Howells' The Hazard of New Fortunes, which I found rather stuffy (and I like Victorian novels) - I will give it another go.

A second colleague offered this theory of why there is no American Trollope:

Our rather different culture doesn’t have a Trollope—or an Austen, for that matter. Which is exactly why I usually listen to either of these (right now, I’m in the middle of Emma) whenever I’m in the car alone. Both are so wonderfully sane and intelligent and basically comic in outlook, comedy always having to do with community. We’re too goddamned individualistic. No Brit could ever have written “Self-Reliance” or “Huck Finn.”

Our best stuff is darker, more philosophical, and more profound than Trollope or Austen were capable of. America is a great place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live here.

I do appreciate Trollope for his optimistic comic sanity. As a sociologist I am especially drawn to his portrayal of social types as they interact, which he does with remarkable even-handedness. I think an American novelist could write in all of those ways. Optimism is a famous American trait. Comic and sane writing about family and community should be within any culture's reach.

I am halted, though, by the idea that American individualism really does make it hard to write about social types within the stable social institutions of Trollope's world.

What I am wrestling with now is whether American social structures have always been so fluid that a Trollope could not have set his eternal dramas of marriage and status in them, or if this fluidity is something that afflicts all late-modern or post-modern societies.

A Happy Convergence of William James and G.K. Chesterton

I am reading William James' Pragmatism. I am hoping that it will be a good philosophical text to teach in conjunction with the current empirical work that shows that the practical lives of most populations are, in fact, improving.

In this connection I also recently read G.K. Chesterton's What's Wrong With the World. Chesterton and James were contemporaries, but I had not previously thought of them as conversation partners with one another. Yet James quotes Chesterton approvingly at the opening of this book to the effect that the most important thing to know about someone is his philosophy.

The point of James' pragmatism is that all we can know of truth is what kind of practical action it leads to. He says that pragmatism is a method, and is not wedded to any particular conclusions about what will prove practical. In making this claim, he reviews the argument between materialism and idealism or spiritualism. What impressed me in this argument is how much William James sounds like G.K. Chesterton, both in his tone and in his conclusions, to wit:

A world with a God in it to say the last word, may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that, where he is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things.

The Most Trusting Kids Are From the Middle

David Sloan Wilson ran a "cooperation" game with public school students in Binghamton, NY, as reported in The Neighborhood Project. This game paired kids, and set up the rules such that they would each benefit the most if they cooperated - if the first kid trustingly gave more, and the second kid proved trustworthy and gave more back.

He found that the richest kids and the poorest kids were the least trusting. The most trusting kids were from middle income neighborhoods that gave their children high levels of social support.

Penny-wise and Pound Foolish

Some family humor from the wonderful xkcd (click the picture to see the full image).

David Sloan Wilson's Curious Theological Claims

David Sloan Wilson is a successful popularizer of Darwinism in such books as Evolution for Everyone and Darwin's Cathedral. In his new book, The Neighborhood Project, he offers some surprisingly uncompromising theological claims for an avowed atheist. He writes:

An omniscient God would have created the different kinds of hymenopterans in a single stroke, but evolution exhibits a property that in technical jargon is called path dependence and in more familiar terms could be called you can’t always get there from here.

The second part of this claim is entailed by the Darwinian position. They believe that evolution shows no progress, and is not developing toward any teleological end, but is simply a series of adaptations to local conditions.

The first claim, though, is the one that caught my eye. Wilson simply asserts that a creator would have created all the varieties of creatures at once. This lets him show that some variants (in this case, of insects) seem to have developed later than others, thus disproving creation and proving evolution.

Wilson's victory, though, is over a straw man. The vast majority of Americans believe that God created the universe. Yet very few would claim that all of the kinds of creatures were created at the same time. The Bible tells the story as successive days of creating one kind of thing after another, whether you read those days at ages or as twenty-four-hour periods. The most hard-core Young Earth creationists allow for all extensive micro-evolution within the various "kinds" that the Bible notes. Mainline Christians believe in a longer and more intertwined form of evolution, most accepting at least the main points of the Darwinian theory.

The creationist majority differs from the secular minority over whether evolution is guided by God, and whether it is going someplace.

That is the argument that Wilson needs to address.

Happy Calvinism

Regular reader Ceemac posted this question:

Do you think it is in the DNA of Calvinists to be disgruntled? After all we have a commitment to always be working to reform church and culture. So we are inclined to look at a situation and focus on what needs to be fixed and not what is working.

I do think that a worldview that began with protest and reform does tend to emphasize the negative. Nonetheless, the core of the scripture that Calvinists confess is that God created the world and called it good, and Christ ultimately triumphs over sin. The basic message of Christianity from beginning to end is pretty positive, and Calvinists embrace that message.

I think one of the reasons the Calvinists tend to be so critical is that we find it exasperating that other worldviews do not see the good order God made in the world. Calvinists are stewards of the world in order to work with and bring out the good order that the sovereign God made.

I have toyed with the idea of writing The Happy Calvinist. That happiness is chastened by the knowledge of sin and the Fall, but nonetheless remains cheerful knowing that God triumphs, first and last.

Rick Perry is Who George W. Bush Was Trying to Be

I thought from the moment that Rick Perry mused that Texas might secede from the Union (again) that he was going to be the Republican nominee for president in 2012. I still think so.

George W. Bush was a good-old-boy in the making from a small town in Texas. Then they sent him off, against his will, to the fancy prep school and university that his northeastern blue-blood family traditionally attended. He didn't like either one, spending his real energy on social life and cheerleading. He even got a further degree from another fancy northeastern school. He was a military pilot, but mostly to avoid the war. But as I read his history, George W. Bush never really came into his own until he got to be head cheerleader again for a sports team. That job used his best, Texas-honed sales skills. His Texas Methodist wife finally helped him straighten out, dry up, find Jesus, and become a stand-up guy. He was always a political amateur, but he caught the eye of a political professional, Karl Rove, who recruited the money and borrowed other professional politicians from Bush, Sr.'s shop.

Rick Perry was a good-old-boy in the making from a small town in Texas. Except his Texas roots went back generations, proletarian and petite bourgeois all the way. He went to the local high school, was an Eagle Scout, married a Texas Methodist who was his elementary school sweetheart. He then went to an iconic Texas school, where he majored in social life and cheerleading. He became a military pilot, but for real. His real education, as he tells it, came from his boss when Perry was a door-to-door salesman. Perry was a serious and competent Democratic politician, supporting Al Gore for president and backing Bill Clinton's health care plan. Perry switched parties when the opportunities were better, and drew the attention of Karl Rove. When Perry and Rove fell out, Rove picked up George W. Bush.

George W. Bush represented what the activated part of the Republican Party wanted, but in him it was an overlay that went against most of his training. Rick Perry, on the other hand, really is a white Christian businessman who supports government spending for people and interests like his, but is suspicious of government spending for others. And he is a competent politician who can learn enough about government to make just-in-time executive decisions.

I think Gov. Perry will give the Republican base a chance to try to replay the Bush administration, only this time make it come out better.

On Vacation

Chesterton Is Wise About What is Wrong With the World

I am treating myself to a dose of G.K. Chesterton, who I always find insightful and funny. Today I am finishing What's Wrong With the World, which begins with a fine slam on sociology:

A book of modern social inquiry has a shape that is somewhat sharply defined. It begins as a rule with an analysis, with statistics, tables of population, decrease of crime among Congregationalists, growth of hysteria among policemen, and similar ascertained facts; it ends with a chapter that is generally called "The Remedy." It is almost wholly due to this careful, solid, and scientific method that "The Remedy" is never found. For this scheme of medical question and answer is a blunder; the first great blunder of sociology. It is always called stating the disease before we find the cure. But it is the whole definition and dignity of man that in social matters we must actually find the cure before we find the disease.

The "definition and dignity of man" is really what the book is about, offering a stout defense of human beings against social schemes of left and right to make (poor) people adjust to some new order of the world.

Chesterton is a very healthy minded thinker, especially after his conversion to Christianity. He ends his introductory chapter with this wonderfully gruntled declaration:

I have called this book "What Is Wrong with the World?" and the upshot of the title can be easily and clearly stated. What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.

Black Women's Marriage Rate of 75% Is Good News

About 75% of black women have married by 35. This is a higher marriage rate than is often reported, which is pretty good news.

For comparison, about 87% of white women have married by 40 (the closest comparison I have, which will not be way off the "by 35" rate).

The black divorce rate is higher than the white rate, so the long-term marriage gap is wider than these ever-married figures suggest.

Still the black marriage picture is better than the 58% rate one often reads. Ivory Toldson and Bryant Marks, the researchers responsible for these new numbers, note that black women marry later, on average, than white women do, so a comparison of marriage rates for younger women makes the gap look larger than it eventually will be.

"Last-Place Aversion" Drives Welfare Haters

The most conservative class is normally the petite bourgeoisie. Not the top, not the bottom, but one up from the bottom. The lower-middles are especially opposed to benefits for the bottom class - even if it means giving massive breaks to the rich.

The Economist cites new research on this puzzle. It is not that Joe the Plumber('s assistant) really expects to be in the top tax bracket someday that makes him oppose raising taxes on the rich. It is because he doesn't want there to be any money redistributed to the class below him, which might raise them up to his level.

"Last-place aversion," more than rich envy, makes the petite bourgeoisie so passionately opposed to welfare.

The Gruntleds' TV Choices Show Our Centrism

Which of these shows, if any, do you watch?

Desperate Housewives
The Mentalist
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
CSI:Miami
NCIS
Criminal Minds

According to the YouGov/Polimetrix poll, Democrats and Republicans differ significantly in their preferences among these shows.

Republicans favor NCIS and Criminal Minds.
Democrats favor Desperate Housewives and The Mentalist.

This confirmed to the Gruntleds our centrist credentials: we are Democrats who watch NCIS and Criminal Minds regularly, but Desperate Housewives and The Mentalist not at all.

Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth 2

Eric Kaufmann, in Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? notes that secularism's growth has come mostly at the expense of liberalized versions of traditional faith which tried to accommodate secular thought. Fundamentalism is actually a modern movement, using modern means of thinking about religious "facts," which fights secularism directly. Kaufmann offers a striking metaphor for the ecology of modern secular vs. religion fights:

“Secularism, like DDT, wiped out much of its opposition but also gave rise to new, resistant strains of religion.”

Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth 1

Eric Kaufmann, in Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth, explores what he calls the "soft underbelly of secularism: demography." Secularism has been growing in all developed nations, and there are secularized pockets among the educated in all countries. Northern Europe, especially, has gone a long way down to the road to irreligion. Since the Enlightenment began, intellectuals, both secular and religious, have been predicting the decline and disappearance of religion.

Kaufmann points out, though, that even in the most secularized society, secular people do not have enough children to replace themselves. In most societies, the moderate or mainline religious groups also have sub-replacement fertility. On the other hand, fundamentalists in every religious tradition have enough children to grow - some of them by gigantic accumulating rates.

Moreover, secularity grows by conversion, mostly from the slightly or moderately religious. The strongly religious, by contrast, typically build strong religious communities to go with their firm faith, which helps them retain their children.

The numbers from American Protestants can represent those from other countries and religious traditions. For a population to be stable and replace itself, each fertile woman needs to have, on average, 2.1 children. This is the magic number of the Total Fertility Rate (TFR). The TFR of secular and Protestant Americans:
Secular: 1.5
Moderate Protestant: 2.0
Conservative Protestant: 2.5

Kaufmann predicts that secularists will continue to grow as a proportion of the U.S. population to mid-century. Then, though, the higher fertility and higher retention of religious conservatives (not all of them Protestants, of course) will catch up and become a larger and larger portion of the American population.

Tocqueville: Liberty Over Equality in the Happy Society

My annual Theory Camp is reading Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

I chose Tocqueville with an eye to including his great work in the course on "The Happy Society" that I am developing. We would read it after Aristotle and John Stuart Mill. Aristotle says happiness is the end of human life. Mill says that society should be organized to promote the greatest collective pleasure. Both Aristotle and Mill think that some pleasures are higher than others.

Tocqueville does not say that happiness is the end of human life. He does not say that happiness is the end of social life. So why is this text useful for “The Happy Society”? Tocqueville argues that Americans have a passion for equality. They value it highly. Its rewards are immediate. They had a revolution to get equality and defend the social arrangements that make it possible. Equality is at least the analogue of what Aristotle and the utilitarians say happiness means to people.

Tocqueville’s concern does not end with equality, but is even more interested in liberty. He shows how Americans promote equal liberty – equality as the basis for each individual to have a fair chance to exercise liberty. Yet Tocqueville believes that the masses tend to value equality too much – even to the point of sacrificing liberty to keep equality. Only the enlightened and far-seeing appreciate the true value of liberty as the more precious of the two core values of modernity. I read Tocqueville as saying that liberty is a higher pleasure than equality. This is at least analogous to Mill’s argument about higher and lower pleasures. It may also be analogous to Aristotle’s contention that contemplation is a higher happiness than action.

Tocqueville: The Social Theory God Wants, Not What I Want

My annual Theory Camp is reading Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Tocqueville the liberty-loving aristocrat works very hard to appreciate the value of equality. Throughout the book he makes the claim that democracy is a better form of social organization than aristocracy because democracy reduces many great harms for the mass of people, even at the cost of limiting some of the excellences achieved by the best.

At the end of the book he raises the stakes for this argument, by arguing that God favors equality.

“It is natural to believe that what is most satisfying to the eye of man’s creator and keeper is not the singular prosperity of a few but the greater well-being of all: what seems decadence to me is therefore progress in his eyes; what pains me pleases him. Equality is less lofty, perhaps, but more just, and its justice is the source of its grandeur and beauty.”

The spectacle of Tocqueville wrestling to subordinate his class prejudice to his theological conviction is a fine example of the distinctive virtues of a religious social theory.

Tocqueville: Who Wants War in a Democratic Society?

My annual Theory Camp is reading Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Tocqueville says that aristocratic societies glorify war and disparage greed. Democratic societies disparage war, but glorify ambition. The danger for democratic societies is that their armies do seek, if not glorify, war. Armies in democratic societies are prone to coups if not given an external enemy to fight.

In the United States we have a very professional military, not at all likely to stage a coup due to inaction. This is due, in part, to the fact that they are frequently engaged in wars - we have two and a half going at the moment. When we do have peace, our military is not likely to agitate for war.

So if business in a democracy is against war because it is bad for business, and our military is not eager for war since they get tested enough, in what structural location in our society would we expect to find promoters of war? Military contractors. And if military contractors should become disproportionately influential in any particular party or administration - perhaps through a revolving door that put, say, a defense secretary in charge of a large military contractor, and then back into government as de facto head of warmaking - we might expect that kind of government to start more voluntary wars.

Tocqueville: Taking Domestic Liberty Through War Powers

My annual Theory Camp is reading Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Tocqueville says that democracy calls for a new kind of political science. He rarely talks about that science directly in the rest of the book - except for this point:

“All who seek to destroy liberty in a democratic nation should know that war offers them the surest and shortest route to success. This is the first axiom of science.”

I think the truth of this point has been shown many times, most recently by the massive expansion of the government's power to spy on American citizens that was instituted by a "small-government conservative" administration as part of the "war on terror."

As interesting, though, is that Tocqueville's one direct reference to making a new political science in Democracy in America is to how to scientifically destroy liberty.

Tocqueville: God vs. Gold as Guarantors of Value

My annual Theory Camp is reading Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Tocqueville says that the American conception of democracy (in his day, anyway) rested on a widespread belief that God is the guarantor of the trust and commitments that a democratic people make to one another. He thought that, from society's perspective, the particulars of religion did not matter so much as the fact that nearly all believed.

In other words, democracy depends on something outside of democracy itself, some source of fixed and absolute value.

It strikes me that this is what "goldbugs" think the gold standard does for money. They think gold is something that stands outside of the money system, some source of fixed and absolute value.

Except that God really does have the capacity to guarantee the value of a society's values. Gold, on the other hand, has no intrinsic and absolute value. The only "value" that gold has comes from the money system itself.

Tocqueville: The Dogma of Popular Sovereignty

My annual Theory Camp began this week. We are reading Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

At the end of the first volume, Tocqueville ties together the great themes of the macro and the micro aspects of democracy in America in this account of the core dogma of the American creed, popular sovereignty.

Providence equipped each individual, whoever he might be, with the degree of reason necessary to guide his conduct in matters of exclusive interest to himself alone. This is the great maxim on which civil and and political society in the United States is based: fathers apply it to their children, masters to their servants, towns to the people the administer, provinces to towns, to Union to the states. Extended to the whole nation, it becomes the dogma of popular sovereignty.

Democracy is deep in the bones, the mores, of Americans, because we believe that individuals have sufficient reason to work for their self interest. Popular sovereignty is the sum of those individual reasons, at whatever level of organization we are working.

Believing that individuals reason sufficiently well to discern their own self interest is a dogma. Believing that society is well served by accepting whatever those individual reasons add up to is an even more daring dogma. These articles of faith cannot be proven. They can also be dangerous, which is why he spends much of the rest of the book talking about the useful restraints on majority tyranny. But no society can exist without dogma. This is ours.

Tocqueville: The Majority Desire the Good of the Country

My annual Theory Camp began this week. We are reading Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Tocqueville argues that in a democracy, the majority predominates. Moreover,

“That majority consists mainly of peaceful citizens who, whether by taste or interest, sincerely desire what is good for the country. Around them political parties constantly contend for their adherence and support.”

We considered the profound importance of the idea that most citizens sincerely desire what is good for the country. The parties then contend for the support of these good-willed citizens. I believe that party competition tends to hide the fact that the supporters of the other party are just as good-willed as we are.

To be sure, some individuals on the other side are venal and selfish; so are some individuals on our side. Nonetheless, American politics is much more civil when we can remember that our opponents sincerely desire what is good for the country. And even if I can't make American politics better by myself by holding to an even-handed civility about the contending parties, I can make myself happier and more contented if I stick to that view.

Tocqueville: America Was Always a Nation With a National Government

My annual Theory Camp began this week. We are reading Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

We chewed on this line:

“The American government is not a federal government but an incomplete national government.”

I had been used to thinking that the United States really become one united nation as a result of the Civil War, and that the federal government really became the national government as a result of the New Deal and the Second World War.

However, I think Tocqueville is right that the United States, and the US government, really were a nation and a national government from the start - in an incomplete form. Our patriotism, and our extraordinarily complex government, did grow organically from a unity and power that were there in principle from the beginning.

Tocqueville: Democracy Requires "Equality of Conditions"

My annual Theory Camp began this week. We are reading Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Tocqueville launches his discussion of American democracy from this point:

“I therefore came increasingly to see the equality of conditions as the original fact from which each particular fact seemed to derive. It stood constantly before me as the focal point toward which all my observations converged.”

The students, naturally, asked how Tocqueville could see in America "equality of conditions" when some were rich and some were poor. Tocqueville's answer is that, unlike in aristocratic societies, citizens of a democracy regard themselves as all the same kind of being. The differences, especially of wealth, did not touch the essence of the person.

Now Tocqueville was well aware that slaves were not treat as equal in condition, nor were the Indians. He treats these themes as conflicts inherent in American democracy. But the principle of equality of conditions is the starting point for the new idea of democracy. The fact that this point seems to obvious now is testimony to the overwhelming success of the American experiment.

"Lying for Justice"

Bradley Wright, in Upside: The Surprising Good News About the State of Our World, documents the many ways in which the world is actually doing pretty well. Which naturally leads to the question, why don't most people realize this?

Some of the reasons are psychological tricks we play on ourselves. One of the big reasons is that the media makes a living by telling bad news. But the one that made the normally cheerful Wright mad (and I agree with him here) is that advocates often lie. Even the advocates for good causes have an interest in making us believe that things are bad and not getting better. So when things are not really so bad, and when they do get better - which is the case in nearly every category of social problem that Americans worry about - the advocates "lie - for justice."

This is wrong, no matter what the cause. And if you are dedicated to solving a problem, finding out that things are getting better - or were not so bad to begin with - should be delightful news that you shout from the housetops.

The World is a Better Place Than It Was

Bradley Wright has a nifty new book, Upside: Surprising Good News About the State of our World.

He points out that most Americans think there own lives are good and getting better. We think most things will be better in the future (except morals). We think things were good in the past.

What we can't admit is that things are getting better in the nation and the world now.

This leads me to propose a first step:

The simplest way to make the world a better place than it is now is to see that the world is a better place than it was before.

Do Mothers Suffer More Because They Anticipate Pains More?

At the International Positive Psychology Association congress, Richard Davidson gave a fascinating presentation on the many good effects that becoming an expert at meditation and generating compassionate feeling can have on your life.

One study he shared compared expert meditators - Buddhist monks sent by the Dalai Lama - with a matched control group of novices. Their brains were monitored as they went from a neutral state where they were just trying to be "in the moment," to a warning that they were about to be touched with something hot, to being touched with the hot thing.

The expert meditators had low brain activity in the pain and suffering parts of the brain until they were actually touched with the hot probe. The control group, by contrast, started firing up the pain and suffering parts of the brain when they were given the warning. That is, the novices increased their suffering by anticipating pain.

This made me wonder whether mothers suffer more than other people because they worry more than other people. That is, they are anticipating pain for themselves and those they love (whose pain causes the mother suffering, too). Mothers may even go out of their way to think of things to worry about - that is, to think of unlikely pains to suffer from - as a way of being loving.

A Timely Study About Integrating Immigrants.

John Berry, a Canadian researcher on acculturation of immigrants, gave a report to the World Congress on Positive Psychology that I am attending. He studied the different ways immigrant youth in Canada dealt with the tension between their old and new societies. He identified four ways this tension could be resolved.

The best way, for both the immigrants and the host society, is integration of the two cultures. Some immigrant groups encounter more discrimination, and are more inclined to keep their own culture, leading to separation. A few immigrants favor assimilation to the new society - mostly refugees who fled a bad situation in the old country. Most dangerous for both immigrants and natives is the marginalization of the immigrants, who feel no attachment to either their new or old culture.

The results for his survey of Canadian immigrant youth:
Integration 36%
Separation 23%
Assimilation 18%
Marginalization 23%

This seemed a very timely study to me in the light of the right-wing anti-immigrant terrorism in Norway that happened as the Congress is meeting. Berry reported that settler societies, such as Canada and the United States, promote integration of immigrants, which reduces tensions between the two groups. European nations, by contrast, fall into separation, or worse, which heightens tensions between the two groups - and sometimes leads to nativist terrorism against immigrants and those who welcome them.

Fighting Army Suicides With Positive Psychology

The most interesting thing I learned at the World Congress of Positive Psychology today was reported by the founder of the discipline, Martin Seligman. The Army has been working with several big names in the field, including Seligman, to test and train soldiers to make them more resilient, and to identify people needing help early.

A well-being test developed by Chris Peterson and colleagues was given to all soldiers last year. Two of the crucial measures of well-being ask people whether they think their life has meaning, and whether they think their work has meaning. Those soldiers who scored in the bottom one percent on both measures had the worst subjective well-being in the Army.

They then looked at the test results for the 84 soldiers who committed suicide during the year. Half the suicides were in the lowest one percent on both well-being measures.

The Army is training drill sergeants to teach soldiers to be more resilient. With results like these, the Army can know where to pinpoint its training so it will do the most good.

The Happy Society Needs a Fluid Economy and Stable Families

I am strongly attracted to the view, expressed by Matt Ridley in The Rational Optimist, that a fluid world benefits workers as workers, and benefits everyone as consumers.

At the same time, I know that families benefit from a stable world, especially when they are raising young children.

Families benefit from cheap goods reliably delivered. But families are hurt by unstably employed parents.

I do not know how to balance the exhilaration of the creative destruction of capitalism with the fulfillment of the creative nurture of families. But I think I have identified a central problem of the happy society.

The Rightly Ordered and Disciplined Happy Society

The other day I started what I think will become a major thread of "exploring the happy society," by arguing that

The quest for the happy society begins with the courage to proclaim that the world is better off now than it ever has been, and is getting better.

Regular reader ceemac asked this rich question: "I am curious how your concept of 'happy society' either meshes with or conflicts with the Calvinist quest for a society that is 'rightly ordered and disciplined.'"

My short answer is that a rightly ordered and disciplined society is one in which people are free to pursue what makes them happy.

I will go further to claim that most people, if free to choose, will get sick of the lower pleasures and work their way toward the higher ones.

I believe that there are lower and higher forms of happiness. I think Aristotle is right that contemplation is, or is the form of, the highest happiness. I think that Thomas Aquinas is right that what we contemplate in the highest happiness is the beatific vision.

Few people will reach that highest happiness in this life. But a rightly ordered and disciplined society can help people develop habits that lead toward virtues - and therefore happiness. How, exactly, people reach the contemplation of the divine is, I believe, beyond what any merely social theory can explain.

Millennials are Appealingly Conventional

Penelope Trunk held back from criticizing Gen Y, today's youth and young adults, when she was giving them career advice on Brazen Careerist. Now that she has moved on, she let fly with a few mostly just points.

The main point is that Gen Y like to fit in, be part of the team, do what is normal and conventional. Howe and Strauss, who called this generation Millennials, said they are like the '50s Silent Generation, their structural counterparts in the cycle of generations.

My students now are Millennials. I like them. Their distinctive qualities are about 90% beneficial. They are weak on critical thinking and innovation - but so are most people in most generations. They are nice and want to work together (unlike Gen X at the same age).

The mission of Gen X is to rebuild basic institutions after the Boomers' cultural revolution. The task of the Millennials will be to consolidate an appealing normal life within those renewed basic institutions.

The World Is Just Awesome

We Can Only See the Happy Society If We Accept That the World Is Better Off Now Than It Has Ever Been

My main project for this sabbatical and for the years to follow is to explore the idea of the happy society. I changed the subtitle of this blog to reflect that new quest.

I am reading Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist. He argues that life for the vast majority of people is better now than it has ever been, due to specialization and exchange.

The idea that this reading, and many others like it, has led me to is this:

The quest for the happy society begins with the courage to proclaim that the world is better off now than it ever has been, and is getting better.

I believe this is true no matter how materialist or spiritual your standard of happiness is.

Tiger Mom vs. Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids

Our Centre College alumni study group considered Amy Chua's The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. They are, in effect, arguing with each other.

I have given my overall assessment of each book here and here.

Chua is right that her children would not have been great child musicians if she had not pushed them to an extreme degree.

Caplan is right that upper-middle class children with competent, loving homes will not turn out very much differently as adults if they are pushed to achieve early, or not.

On the whole, I think Caplan has the better argument. I am all for helping your children to pursue their passion to get good at it. And everyone, at every age, needs to be held to high standards. But I don't think that pushing children to either be prodigies by sheer effort, or to spend their youth on something that the parents have the passion for, is worth it.

Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids

Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids is a wonderfully gruntled book.

Based on twin and adoption studies, Caplan concludes that middle-class parents really don't need to overwhelm themselves and their children with a scheduled and directed childhood. In the long run, if you give your kids a vaguely normal childhood, they will turn out like you. The intense interventions have an effect in the short run, but tend to wash out in the long run.

Therefore, raising kids is easier than you probably thought. And kids are great fun for most parents. ERGO: have more than you were originally planning on.

The best advice he gives is that you should think long-term about your own parenthood. Sure, kids have lots of up-front costs in money, time, effort, and sleep, but the payoff later is huge. In fact, Caplan argues, you should pick the number of children you have based on the number of grandchildren you want to end up with.

Unnatural Selection 5: The Worst News, and the Best

This week I will be blogging Mara Hvistendahl's Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.

The biggest danger of masses of men who will never marry is that they will be violent and commit crimes. It is possible they will be used for war, but that is not so predictable from the sheer demographic facts.

The best news is that Hvistendahl thinks the massive sex imbalance is a temporary stage in a country's economic development. As evidence she cites the fact that in 2007, South Korea had a natural sex ratio for the first time in twenty years. It is the first country to start to come back from a massive sex imbalance. They still have super low fertility - 1.22 children per woman - but South Korea seems to have turned a corner in both its sex ratio and its overall fertility. This gives hope that the other massively imbalanced countries can begin to walk back from the precipice.

Unnatural Selection 4: The Silver Lining

This week I will be blogging Mara Hvistendahl's Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.

The shortage of women in many Asian and Eastern European countries does have some silver linings.

In India, the need for brides is leading to some cross-caste marriages that would have been unthinkable a generation or so ago.

In East Asia, "foreign brides" make up so large a percentage of new marriages that old national prejudices are being modified or even given up.

The poor women who marry out of poor countries, such as Vietnam, into developing countries can make a better life for their children than they could have at home.

Unnatural Selection 3: Why Republicans Promoted Abortion

This week I will be blogging Mara Hvistendahl's Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.

Gen. William Draper was a friend of Eisenhower and a staunch conservative Republican. When he oversaw the occupation of Japan just after the war he became a big proponent of abortion – for Asians. He saw it as a way to prevent poverty, and therefore communism. First in Japan, and then in South Korea, he pushed abortion and supported eugenics.

The ruling classes in those countries also supported abortion, thinking only the poor would use it. However, it was the educated women of the urban middle class who were especially drawn to abortion as a part of their planned parenthood. Though abortion was contrary to Confucian and Buddhist ethics, the developing Asian economies, under pressure from the Western aid agencies to aggressively control their population growth in exchange for aid, normalized abortion.

The ruling class in this country, as in other countries, supported abortion in the '50s and '60s . They did so not as a feminist movement for women's control of themselves. They supported abortion as a eugenic movement to control the poor.

Unnatural Selection 2: Both Sexism and Feminism Support Sex-Selection Abortion

This week I will be blogging Mara Hvistendahl's Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.

In the '60s, when men were in charge of population planning and sexism was the norm, Western public health agencies thought sex-selection abortions in developing countries were an uncontroversial and rational way to help families get the boy they wanted without producing unnecessary girls on the way. This seemed like a more ethical path to population control than the more coercive measures they considered because the families were doing the choosing.

By the '80s, when women were in charge of population planning and feminism was the norm, Western public health agencies thought sex-selection abortions in developing countries were an uncontroversial and rational way to help women control their bodies. Sex-selection was a small price to pay for securing the right to abortion.

Unnatural Selection 1: Sex Selection Begins With the Second Pregnancy

This week I will be blogging Mara Hvistendahl's Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.

Hvistendahl is trying to figure out why, exactly, there have been so many fewer female births in some Asian countries over the past generation.

She thinks that smaller family size in developing countries means that the risks of having no boys by natural means goes up from about one in 10 if you have three children, to one in four if you have only two. Thus, richer, smaller families are going with nature in first births, but in each successive pregnancy are more likely to abort a girl, but keep a boy.

She cites as evidence the sex ratio of boys to girls at birth in South Korea in 1989. The natural ratio is about 105 boys for every 100 girls.

First birth: 104/100
Second birth: 113/100
Third birth: 185/100
Fourth birth: 206/100

The Reality of Two-Year-Old Octuplets

Nadya Suleman, the "Octomom," was on television with her eight famous children, with some help from her oldest daughter.

The images of eight infants was staggering enough when they were born. The reality of eight two year olds is wonderfully captured in this bit of film from the "Today" show.

Why I Like Cop Shows Better Than Murder Mysteries or Thrillers

I recently listened to a James North Patterson story while on a long car trip alone. I was dissatisfied with the experience. I discovered that I do not like stories in which the protagonist takes foolish risks, and acts alone. What I want is an intelligent team acting together to beat unreason and selfishness.

I put the question to my Facebook friends. I asked for police procedurals in which the cops act together and rationally. A friend pointed out that it is hard to have a novel about a team, because it is difficult to keep all the people straight. There are some such novels - my wife has been reading Louise Penny's "Inspector Gamache" stories to me, and my mother is a fan of Henning Mankell's "Kurt Wallandar" stories (though he often does crazy things alone).

Which led me to this insight: television and film can tell the stories of teams better than novels can, because the visuals, and the voices, help you keep the group members straight.

Which is why Mrs. G. and I have been particularly enjoying "The Wire," one of the best cop shows ever.

Practical Wisdom is Helpful to a Happy Life, But Not the Highest Happiness

Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe's Practical Wisdom is an excellent book. I find their argument that practical wisdom is superior to both rules and incentives as a way to organize social practices is compelling. They are right that Aristotle's case for practical wisdom is something that is in the grasp of all and very helpful to happiness. In this Schwartz and Sharpe align their argument with the positive psychology of Martin Seligman, with whom they say they have often talked, about what makes for authentic happiness.

But Aristotle goes on at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics to say that the greatest happiness does not come from practical wisdom or the exercise of the moral virtues - the subject of the first 9/10ths of the book. Instead, he concludes that the greatest happiness comes from contemplation. This has posed a puzzle for those trying to follow Aristotle for millennia, as he seems to negate in his conclusion the whole argument he had been building.

Aristotle says that contemplation is what the gods do. When we contemplate, we participate, as we are able, in the divine.

I think there is great wisdom in the idea that our highest happiness comes from participating in the divine. And this wisdom is something that even very smart secular approaches to happiness, and to wisdom, will miss.