The European Union's Well-Deserved Nobel Peace Prize

The European Union was the surprise winner of the Nobel Peace Prize this week.  Yet, as I pondered this choice, I chided myself for not having thought of it before.  The Long Peace of Europe since the Second World War is so much a part of our taken-for-granted world that we have already forgotten what an achievement that peace is. 

The massive decline in violence in the world in the past two generations is due primarily to the strong system of inter-connected and law-abiding states. And the core of the system of peaceful states is a stable Europe and a stable North America.

Good job, Nobel committee.  The prize is long overdue.  I hope it helps the EU overcome its current financial difficulties.

Creating, Versus Consuming, Love on the Internet Dating Market

I am working through the new book of that fine sociologist, Arlie Hochschild. In The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times she looks at the many ways we have turned to the market for aspects of personal life that we used to rely on "the village" for.

In the chapter on internet dating that opens the book, she makes this helpful observation: internet dating clients had such trouble finding a mate because "they were preparing to be consumers, not creators, of love."

One fruitful insight of our "Happy Society" class is that the simple act of performing acts of kindness for others makes one feel happier.  And we notice that our friends, seeing our example, are more likely to do the same.

I find that students have another, even more unexpected insight.  They have clear feelings about whether society is happy and kind, or unhappy and cold.  But until doing this class exercise, they had just never thought about themselves as the creators of the moral tone of society.

Creating love, like creating kindness, is hard and risky.  But it is also empowering.  And, of course, good.

Protestants Fall to Less Than Half: Nones Rise to a Fifth

The Pew Research Center has released a new report, The Rise of the Nones, on the changing shape of American religion.

Protestants are down by 5% to 48% total.

Religiously unaffiliated (nones) are up 5% to 20%.

Catholics are down 1% to 22%

Other religions are up 2% to 6%.

The main thing that seems to have happened is that lightly affiliated Protestants of five years ago now no longer call themselves religious at all.

Marriage is the "Group Selection" on a Molecular Scale

Evolutionary thought usually focuses on individuals being selected for, and thus passing on individually valuable traits.  The idea that groups can be selected for, thus passing on a trait of "groupishness," is usually dismissed.  Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind, makes a case for group selection. It is precisely groupishness that gives humans an advantage as a species, and more social groups of humans their advantage, in the long run, over anti-social aggregations of people.

We see the same group advantage at the molecular level of society: families.  Couples who successfully marry and raise children together have well-documented advantages in their own lives.  Their children, likewise, benefit in many ways.  The gap between the social class that marries and the class that does not is growing.

What this says to me is that successful marriage is an instance of group selection in an evolutionary sense. Lineages that produce more successful marriages get selected for, generation after generation.  These benefits accrue quickly, too.  It does not take the tens of thousands of years that random physical mutations do to become part of the dominant fraction of the species.  People choose who they marry, and who they have children with, much more than other species do.  Thus, those selecting for long marriages can do so deliberately and with pretty good information.  And pass their advantage on in human-scaled time to their descendents.

If We Really Want to Reduce the Abortion Rate, We Should Provide Reliable Contraception for Free

An exciting study from Washington University School of Medicine provided reliable birth control - intrauterine devices and hormone implants - for free to 9000 women, aged 14 - 45 for three years. The researchers tracked the effects on their abortion rate, and also on their teen pregnancy rate.

Nationally, women in this age range have about 19.6 abortions per 1000 - a huge number.

The women in this study: 4.4 to 7.5 abortions per 1000.  That is a huge improvement.

Moreover, teen girls (15 - 19) have a staggering 34.4 births per 1000 every year.

The girls in this study: 6.3 per 1000 annually.

Moreover, IUDs and hormone implants such as Norplant are cheaper than birth control pills.  They are also more reliable, since many women, especially the poorer and younger ones, don't usually take the pill every day - a problem that is solved by implanted methods. 

The implants, though, have a higher up-front cost, which tends to put off those same younger and poorer women from using them.  This is why providing them free was a crucial element of this study.

As someone who would like to dramatically reduce the abortion and teen pregnancy rates, I find this study to be very good news.

Thrift Was a Greater Virtue When We Were a More Modest People

David Brooks gave an excellent lecture at Centre College last night on how our politics today reflects a change in our culture.

During World War II, he argued, we placed more value on modesty, self-control, and limiting our self-assertion.  The cultural revolution since then produced many good things, especially in overcoming the oppression and self-suppression of African-Americans and women.

But some things have been lost, which has contributed to the polarization and mistrust of the current moment.

This talk led me to make a connection that I had not seen before.  People who are personally modest are more likely to be thrifty.  If it seems wrong to spend lavishly on yourself, you are less likely to go into debt for things.  If you think that your present comfort and status are not more worthy than your children's and their children's, you are more likely to save.

Thrift is not only a good personal virtue and family virtue. Thrift is a humble virtue.

The Privileged Have a Greater Duty to Initiate Positive Reciprocity

Jonathan Haidt, in The Happiness Hypothesis, says that reciprocity is the currency of society. Giving and getting help bind our group together. Some of this reciprocity comes in direct tit-for-tat,  contract-like exchanges.  More comes from longer term gift exchanges - I give a gift to you or the group now, you give a gift to me or the group later. 

Economists and others who emphasize self-interested choices as the measure of rational action note that it is hard to explain why anyone would initiate a cycle of reciprocal trust and gift giving - even though all can see the benefits of being in such a social group.

As part of our "Happy Society" class, I assigned students to perform random acts of kindness for other people each day for a time, recording and reflecting on the results.  All students found the assignment interesting and nearly all reported that it increased their happiness (as happiness research predicts).

I have been thinking about a hidden element of this assignment: it was easy for my students, and me, to initiate a beneficial cycle of gift giving because we are privileged relative to nearly everyone else we interact with. 

This leads me to a general insight: the privileged risk less by giving the gift of trust and service.  Therefore, it is more incumbent on the privileged to take that risk and start the virtuous cycle of reciprocity.

Which Candidate Do Small Business Owners Think Would Be Better?

What do actual job creators (not just rich people) think about the presidential candidates?

George Washington University and Thumbtack.com survey small business owners and entrepreneurs, who create 2/3rds of new jobs in the average year.  They were asked which candidate is most supportive of small business.  The results:


39% President Obama
31% Governor Romney
28% Not sure

This result is particularly interesting, since small business owners have traditionally been one of the most conservative and Republican constituencies.

Moving Out of a Poor Neighborhood Makes You Happier Like a $13,000 Raise

In the 1990s a major experiment was done to improve the lives of some of the poorest city people.  They were given subsidies to move out of the slums of concentrated poverty into neighborhoods that were a little better off and better mixed economically.  The policy makers hoped that the people who moved would get more education and better jobs.

They didn't.

What they did get, though, was much happier.  Moving their families to safer, less stressful neighborhoods increased their happiness the equivalent of a $13,000 raise.

A parallel experiment that moved poor non-white people into equally poor white neighborhoods had no such positive effect.

This report does not tell what happened to the children of these relocated families.  My guess is that they grew up safer, with better chances, and happier.

Baby Boom Among Women Ph.D.s

A decade ago, one third of women Ph.D.s past 40 were childless.

Today that fraction has dropped to a quarter.

(Thank you Pew Center for another nifty study.)

In my own little faculty at Centre College, six female colleagues have had babies in the past three years.  One was born yesterday.  Her birth announcement was the first I had seen with a full account of the classical derivation of her name, with footnotes and web links.

Why Religious Belongers Are Happier

I am teaching a Sunday School class on "Happiness and Faith."  Reviewing the research on this subject, I have come to this partial insight.

Happiness comes more from the process of doing something worthwhile with other people we care about than it does from any specific outcome of that process.  This is a common finding of happiness research.

Religious people are, on the whole, happier, than non-religious people.  This is also a standard finding of happiness research.

Happiness correlates more with religious belonging than with believing - that is, people who are active in religious communities report higher happiness, whereas people with strong religious beliefs who are not part of religious communities do not report higher levels of happiness.

I believe what religious institutions do that adds to happiness is to give structure and permanence to the process of doing good things together with other people.  One-off group projects are good, and an interest in civic betterment can produce such projects.  But for sheer persistence and long-term effect, nothing can compete with religious institutions for getting a group of people to work together for the common good week after week, year after year, decade after decade.

New alumni-driven college ranking rates Centre graduates “Happiest in the Nation”

Sometimes, the world writes my blog for me.

I am a Centre College professor, teaching and writing about happiness.

This story is the lead on the Centre College website. 

The story is a based on a new form of ranking from The Alumni Factor, which uses, as the name suggests, on surveys of alumni.

Rubin's Happiness Project Enacts Aristotle's Conclusion

In my "Happy Society" class we started with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, as most studies of happiness do.  Aristotle says happiness is the highest end of life, the only end that is not a means to some other end.  And happiness is a thing we do more than a condition we have. Happiness is an action of the soul, in accordance with virtue.

In other words, happiness is a project.

Which is why the second book we studied is Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project. Rubin read the wisdom and empirical literature of happiness and tried to put it into practice over the course of a year.  She, too, started with Aristotle.  She was not overtly implementing Aristotle, but the similarity in conclusions is striking.

The puzzling thing for many about Aristotle's argument is that he spend 9/10ths of the book talking about happiness coming from practical virtues, and then in the final chapter says that true happiness comes from contemplation.

Rubin, too, spends nearly all of her project on things that she did to increase her happiness - but the final chapters are about mindfulness, attitude, and reflection.  And what she concludes is that what most increased her happiness was not what she did, but what she stopped doing - namely, thinking and saying criticisms of herself and others. A cheerful and contented attitude did more to make her happy than any particular thing she did, even things she did with her children and husband, the loves of her life.

That is, the greatest fruit of Rubin's happiness project came from contemplation of the attempt to act virtuously, more than from the virtuous acts themselves.  The virtuous acts were still virtuous, and worth turning into habits, and also happy-making. And I believe that Rubin could not have fruitfully contemplated the attempt to become happy by acting in accordance with virtue if she had not, in fact, wholeheartedly done all that virtuous acting.

But the greatest happiness comes from the contemplation of the action of the soul in accordance with virtue.

Do Old Fathers and Defeated Fathers Produce Biological Problems in Their Offspring?

Judith Shulevitz has a fascinating roundup of several bad biological effects in kids that are correlated with traumas or sheer age in their fathers.

Children of traumatized fathers (shown more clearly in mice than humans) are more likely to be timid.  Stranger still, so are their grandchildren.

Children of older fathers are more likely to be autistic or schizophrenic. The increasing number of older fathers may explain the otherwise puzzling rise in autistic children.

This research is just beginning, especially on the human side.  But it is fascinating, and promises to provide some balance to the large body of evidence that older mothers risk biologically damaged children.

The Last Tea Party Election

David Brooks laments that

The country that exists is not on the right track. It has a completely dysfunctional political system. What was there in this speech [of Obama's at the Democratic Convention] that will make us think the next few years will be any different? America will only be governable again if there is a leader who breaks the mold and reframes the debate. Romney is unlikely to do that, and Obama’s speech didn’t offer much either.

I am more optimistic than David Brooks that our political system will soon recover some balance.

There are many legitimate interests in a complex society, some of which are in conflict. Working out these conflicts requires compromise.  These compromises will, of necessity, not please most people in every detail.  But most people can see that compromise is necessary. Politics requires the ability to compromise. If you are not willing to compromise, if you see compromise as weakness or treason, then you should not get involved in politics.

The main reason our political system is so dysfunctional right now is the Tea Party movement. They reject compromise on principal.  They want contradictory things - smaller government for people they disapprove of, without any reduction of government for themselves. They attack their political enemies, and they attack their political allies - that is, normal Republican politicians - even harder if they don't toe the line.

The Tea Party is a Know-Nothing movement, of a kind that periodically appears in American politics. And the history of Know-Nothing movements convinces me that they are self-limiting.  They typically last about three electoral cycles.  2012 is the third Tea Party cycle. If the Democrats win, the Tea Party will start to get disheartened with politics - their normal attitude - and return to their previous grudging support of the establishment Republicans or political quietude. If the Republicans win, the Tea Party will turn on them even greater disillusionment for not being able to deliver big government for good people, no government for bad people, and all at no cost.

And when the Tea Party is gone, the regular politicians of both parties will be able to work with one another.  They will not completely end partisan politics and some mutual obstruction.  But the Party of NO will be able to become, once again, the party of Let's Make a Deal.  And the normal, fairly functional politics of American government can resume.

Republicans and Democrats on the Immigrant Story

Both the Republican and Democratic conventions have been full of immigrant stories, or "up-from-nothing" stories.

I have noticed, though, an important difference in what they emphasize.

The Republican versions emphasize how hard the immigrant (family, usually) worked to build up their business on their own. This is in keeping with the convention's theme, "We Built It."

The Democratic versions emphasize how hard the immigrant (family, usually) worked to succeed in this country, with the help of the public schools, college loans, GI Bill, small business loans, and now health insurance - not to mention the larger structure of honest government that did not take arbitrarily in the first place.  The "land of opportunity" has that opportunity because it is guaranteed by the people's institutions, and the entire infrastructure of opportunity to which we all contribute. This version is in keeping the less formal convention theme of equal opportunity "for all."

"You Didn't Build That" - On Your Own

The theme of the Republican National Convention is "We Built This."  This is a critique of an off-the-cuff remark the President Obama made:  "If you've got a business, you didn't build that." They have repeated the audio clip several times during the convention.

President Obama's phrasing is unfortunate.  If he had completed the thought - "If you've got a business, you didn't build that on your own" - this whole kerfuffle would never have arisen.  The rest of the president's statement makes clear his intent.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

 I believe this is obviously true.

In watching the convention, it is clear that both sides perceive the world differently.  One side sees the achievements of your life as almost entirely your own work.  The other side sees the mountain of work done by other people - including other people working through the government, but also much, much more - that makes my achievement possible.  The president gave a few examples, which could be multiplied almost infinitely.  And if you believe, as I and most Americans do, that God created the entire universe and still actively superintends it, then the realm of "I built this on my own" shrinks to a tiny fraction of my achievements, indeed.

The major insight that sociology brings to this problem is that privilege creates a whole ladder of unearned benefits that help us "build it."  And the greatest privilege is not realizing that you are privileged.  If you are, for example, a white man in America, from a rich, powerful family, who went to a leading prep school and the fanciest graduate school, you have a huge leg up - even if you then use that privilege to build up a successful business.

Hard work and responsibility are good things which we should honor and assist. But few indeed build anything, no matter how smart and hardworking they are, by themselves.

Merit and Privilege Among our Presidents and Candidates

George W. Bush, Andover '64, was a prep school slacker.
He is the heir to every privilege this country has to offer.
As a result, he does not admit when he is wrong.
He stuck with his decisions, even when they led to growing disaster.

Mitt Romney, Cranbrook '65, was a prep school bully.
He is the heir to just about every privilege this country has to offer, save his religion.
As a result, he does not admit when he is wrong.
He sticks with his decisions, even when they lead to growing pain for others.

Bill Clinton was the child of poverty and family disaster.
He made his way by intellectual merit and hard work through the best meritocratic institutions this country has to offer.
As a result, he readily admits when he is wrong, sometimes very embarrassingly.
He tried to reach out to those who differ from him and to compromise with them for the larger good.

Barack Obama, Punahou '79, was the child of family disorder and ethnic-identity confusion, but also of a supportive extended family.
He made his way by intellectual merit and, eventually, hard work, through the best meritocratic institutions this country has to offer.
As a result, he does not readily admit he is wrong.
He does try to reach out to those who differ from him and compromise with them for the larger good.

Capon Springs - the Pivot of My Year

My family has reunited at Capon Springs and Farms in the West Virginia mountains since the 1960s. We do this the same week in late August.  Many other families have come for years during that same week. The kids I grew up with now bring their kids.

For an academic, the end of August is the end of the year; September is when the year really begins.

Thus, for me, this week of vacation in the mountains, and in the cold, spring-fed pool, is the pivot of my whole annual cycle.

See you in the new year.

Happiness in the High-Trust Society

(Today we conclude our annual Theory Camp.  I apologize for a long entry, but I wanted to pull together my thoughts on both books, and on how they can help us think about the happy society.)

Francis Fukuyama argues in Trust that high-trust societies are generally richer than low-trust societies. This is because trust reduces transaction costs.  I think this is true.  Moreover, I think that high-trust societies are happier societies.  This is not only because they are richer, but because trust itself is a happy-making public good.

Adam Seligman, in The Problem of Trust, argues that Fukuyama does not really mean “trust,” but rather “confidence.”  Trust, he contends, is what an individual can extend to another individual on insufficient evidence.  By contrast, in a well-functioning social system we can have sufficient evidence to be confident that it will function well in our case, too.

I can accept revising Fukuyama to say that high-confidence societies are richer and happier.  At least, I can accept saying that this is a viable alternative expression. As a practical matter, I think Fukuyama is right that we should still refer to “high-trust” societies.  But Seligman’s main point – social trust rests on confidence in social systems – is correct and powerful.

There remains, though, the question of whether Fukuyama’s society needs trust in the sense that Seligman means.  Seligman believes that there is a realm beyond the limits of social structures, beyond where we can have confidence or even where we can make educated guesses about people based on familiarity. Here agentic individuals, in the full measure of their freedom, may meet other agentic individuals.  Neither have enough structures or cultural clues to be confident.  Here, the individual must make a leap of faith to trust, or a protective calculation to mistrust.

Is Seligman right?  My gut reaction is “no.”  I think human beings are so deeply cultured that we will read any presentation of self as providing some familiar clues about how the other will act. We could be wrong, of course, in reading those supposed clues. But we could be just as wrong in more familiar situations (such as Seligman’s man on the subway who looks like he played stickball). But I think it takes an ideological commitment to the complete otherness of the other to read another person as being completely unfamiliar.  The main ideological commitment to the complete otherness of the other that I can think of is racism, but there could be more.

Seligman defines trust as a rare event occurring at the limits of social structure.  And he argues that the differentiation of the self has gone so far today that our remaining “selves” are too removed from social roles to be true selves in any socially meaningful way.  Therefore, civilization will collapse and we all die.  Or something like that.  He is a little vague about actual consequences.

If, however, there are not really many cases of people beyond institutional confidence and social familiarity, then Seligman’s project may not apply to reality.  And if there are not really many cases of people so removed from their abundance of social roles that they have no true selves, then Seligman’s worry may not apply to reality, either.

Fukuyama, on the other hand, is clearly on to something real when he says that high-trust societies yield a valuable economic benefit from their institutions of trust, compared to low-trust societies.

In thinking about what all this has to do with the happy society, therefore, I think Fukuyama has the more fruitful empirical approach.  However, I do find one part of Seligman’s argument to be helpful for the happy society.  If what Fukuyama calls trust is best thought of as confidence in the social system, then I see a line of action we can take to make society happier: promote confidence in the social system.  Or more exactly, show the ways in which many social systems (the sub-systems of society as a whole) are working well and getting better. Show that confidence in social systems is well-placed.  Show, further, that developing the habit of confiding in social systems promotes the better functioning of those systems, and encourages others to be more confident, as well. 

One finding of happiness research is that happy people tend to see bad events as temporary and unusual, and good events as permanent and common.  Unhappy people tend to see the same events in the opposite way.  Everyone has some bad experiences with social systems.  However, happy people are likely to remain confident in the basic good order of the system, and attribute that particular bad experience to temporary, non-systemic qualities. Unhappy people, by contrast, are likely to blame the whole system any time they have a bad experience.

If most people are confident in their social systems, the society will be happier; if the society is happier, most people will be confident in their social systems. 

This suggests two lines of action to make society happier.  First, fix any actual problems in social systems.  Second, persuade the persuadable to re-interpret their bad experiences, or (more likely) what they have heard about other people’s bad experiences. Some people are, of course, determined to be unhappy. This will be true in the happiest society.  But there is a middle group who can be moved, by example, emotion, and reason, to read the social systems in a positive, confidence-building way.

To persuade people that the bad experiences they have had, or, more likely, just heard about, are unusual, it may be helpful to show that “the news is a freak show.”  That is, the news is designed to present the unusual, and has a bias toward the unusually bad rather than the unusually good.  This is not a flaw in the news.  The unusually bad can be fixed.  We know this is true, in the main, because the bad thing is unusual. The usual practice is better.  So if we can fix or prevent this deviant case, the usual working of the system is good. In any case, even if the bad case can’t be fixed, it is helpful to remember that the case is presented on the news because it is unusual.

Yet many people – most people, I expect – treat the news as a picture of what is normal and usual, because that is all they normally hear and see about that kind of social system. This is not a flaw in the news.  This is a flaw in the audience for news. The main audience for news falls victim to bad stereotyping.  The cure is not to do away with stereotyping – in this case, doing away with the news.  The cure is to teach the audience the difference between the rule, which is not reported, and the exception, which is.  This is why sophisticated people usually have a deeper grasp of what is going on. Not only do they know the latest news, they also know the larger context of the normal that does not make the news.

So, we can promote the happy society by teaching people that they have good reason to be confident in the social system.

Seligman's "Trust" is Only in the Social Gaps

(Continuing the discussion of Adam Seligman's The Problem of Trust from our annual Theory Camp.)

Seligman's most distinctive idea is that trust is rarely needed.  Most of the theorists he is arguing with, especially Francis Fukuyama and Anthony Giddens, treat trust as a common and necessary feature of modern societies.  They think that modern people have to trust that millions of faceless strangers have done their jobs correctly in making our food, building our buildings, driving cars in the opposite lane, and so forth.  But Seligman says that that should not be called trust in other people, but confidence in the social system.

Trust, Seligman thinks, is needed when we confront other people beyond any reliable role in the social system, and beyond any signs of familiarity that they give off that they are people we can predict. Trust in other people is like the faith that people had in God in premodern times before, as he claims, we all became atheists.

Having defined trust as beyond social roles and beyond experienced familiarity, he then draws his grim conclusions.  Our roles are becoming so differentiated that we can't connect any of them to a real self - neither in ourselves nor in others. The globalized world brings us into contact with so many people with different experiences than our own that we cannot assume familiarity. We are forced to trust, or led to mistrust, in more and more encounters.  We are in danger, he thinks, of "re-enchanting" the world.  But the new world would not be enchanted by God, but something "more brutal and more Hobbesian."

[I disagree with Seligman's conclusion, a matter I will take up in the next post.]

Trust in Civil Society vs. Civic Virtue

In Theory Camp this year we are working through books on trust.  This week we are considering Adam Seligman's The Problem of Trust.

Seligman contrasts the "civil society" version of how citizenship works with the "civic virtue" approach. The former is more congenial to Americans and other English-speaking theorists, while the latter is found more among continental European thinkers.

The civil society approach, since Adam Smith, has seen society as an association of individuals pursuing different ends, within a social order that has enough even-handed institutions to help them live together fairly and pursue their ends without stepping on each other too much.  Tocqueville's great insight was that these free individuals realize that their self interest can be best served if they create civic associations to address many problems of social order.  These associations work for the common good.  Seligman sees that these associations working for the common good engender trust.  I see that, beyond trust, they contribute to the happy society.

The civic virtue approach sees the whole society as having an end toward which it is working, not just the ends of the many different individuals in it.  This is an appealing, Durkheimian vision of a society unified in one collective conscience and one collective consciousness. In the tiny hunting and gathering bands that Durkheim used as his examples of the elementary forms of social life, this degree of unity seems possible.

In modern societies, though, which are huge and highly differentiated, the idea that there is one collective conscience and consciousness is harder to see.  Durkheim offered an ingenious solution, through the collective cult of the sacred individual.  Seligman, though, doesn't think it can really happen. He argues that we cannot know that we share a social conscience with others, nor even, have confidence that our shared social institutions make others predictable.  There, and there only, in the place beyond the limits of the collective sacred or the social institution, is the realm where trust is needed.

Trust - Masculine and Feminine Evaluations

In Theory Camp this year we are reading about trust.  Specifically, we are starting with Francis Fukuyama's Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity.

One of the men in the group remarked that trust seemed like such an emotional idea, and therefore not something one could reason about.  However, when we understood Tocqueville's argument (transmitted, in this case, by Fukuyama) that our self-interest is best served by serving our community and building a trusting society, then trust was rescued from irrationality. Trust, on this view, is not self-justifying; however, if trust is a means to a material end, then it is shown to be secretly rational.

For the women in the group, the value of trust did not have to be demonstrated.  They started from the view that trust is a good thing, and an obvious goal of a happy society.

I think these two approaches to social trust - justified as a means to self-interested ends, vs. a social good in itself - are characteristically masculine and feminine responses to the value of trust.

Turkey 6: Atatürk

Kemal Mustafa was given the name Atatürk, "Father of the Turks", by a grateful nation. He is not just the father of modern Turkey, he is the object of an ongoing national cult.  His mausoleum, erected on the most visible hill in the capital, is a massive pilgrimage site for Turks, and an obligatory stop for foreign dignitaries. Since Muslims must be buried in the earth, his body is not in this tomb cover, but sixty feet below it.

The ceiling of the great, open-air hall is a mosaic in the form of a Turkish kilim rug.

Directly above Atatürk's tomb marker is another mosaic, in the form of a Turkish carpet.

The exterior faces a large ceremonial plaza. We went to many ruins of Greek temples in Turkey. At Atatürk's tomb, I got a sense of what it would have been like to see a civic temple in its prime.

Turkey 5: Muslim Nation, Secular State

Turkey has a secular state.  Indeed, through much of its history, Turkey has had an aggressively secular state. With an Islamist party in power, the state is more accommodating of religion.  On the other hand, the Turkish nation is very Muslim.  The call to prayer sounds in every city.  We were in Konya, perhaps the most important Muslim site in Turkey, when Ramadan began, and the town came alive when the fast was broken.  One rich symbol of the pervasiveness of Islamic culture in Turkey was this sticker.  In hotel drawers you will not find a Bible, provided by the Gideons.  You will, though, find a kible, marking the direction to Mecca.

Turkey 4: Coffee

The Turks gave coffee to Europe. Turkish coffee is made by pouring very hot water directly on to finely ground beans in these small cups. It is bitter and strong, but surprisingly addictive.  They normally ask how much sugar you want in it. It is available everywhere. In the non-tourist places I had it, the consumers were overwhelmingly men.

This is the leading Turkish coffee chain that offers Starbucks-like coffee drinks, heavy on milk and sweeteners. Not surprisingly, I only saw them in tourist and international business districts.

Ataturk drinking coffee (inside a Kahve Dunyasi store).

Turkey 3: Hittites

I spent two weeks in Turkey with the Brown Fellows, Centre College scholarship students.

The Hittites were a Bronze Age people who flourished in Anatolia (the heart of modern Turkey) in the centuries around 1500 BCE. The modern Turkish state has embraced the Hittites to a surprising degree. This headpiece, featuring the Hittite bull god, was adopted by the city of Ankara as its symbol.  A large sculpture of this piece stands in the middle of town.

The Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, sometimes called the Hittite Museum, has the best collection of Hittite artifacts in the world. The museum was created early in Ataturk's reign. It helps foster the idea that Anatolia has had many civilizations, including important non-Christian and non-Muslim ones like the Hittites.  All of these civilizations are honored by modern Turkey - and none define it. This uncaptioned picture of Ataturk inspecting the collection is posted amidst the exhibits.

Ataturk's image and signature, which are everywhere in Turkey, hang from a banner in the Hittite Museum, above the treasures from King Midas' tomb. The civil religion of modern Turkey embraces the Hittites as part of the useable history of the many civilizations that have existed in Anatolia.

 

Turkey 2: Three Interesting Things About the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque

I spent two weeks in Turkey with the Brown Fellows, Centre College scholarship students.

 

The Hagia Sophia (Ayasofya) was built as a church, which is why the center window faces Jerusalem. When it was converted to a mosque, the mihrab (the gold niche, above) was made a little off-center, to point to Mecca. The secular Ataturk government converted the building to a museum.

The Sultan Ahmed, or Blue, Mosque, is the greatest Islamic landmark of Istanbul. The current prime minister heads an Islamic party, but the state is resolutely secular. How does the prime minister associate himself with this great Islamic site without implicating the government?  By personally giving the mosque a model of Medina.

The Hagia Sophia and the Sultan Ahmed Mosque are neighbors, sharing a plaza. The trinket sellers in the plaza, wanting to serve all markets, offer Koran verses, Christian icons, and evil eyes. On the same sales rack.

Turkey 1: Istiklal Avenue

I spent two weeks in Turkey with the Brown Fellows, Centre College scholarship students.

Istiklal Avenue is the main shopping street of the European side of Istanbul.  I will start my reflections on Turkey with a few light scenes from the street, suitable for a Saturday post.

Taksim Square, at the head of the street, is the main staging area for protests.  This one was against cheating on the university placement examinations on behalf of members of the ruling party.  Protests are so common here that riot police are permanently stationed on the square.

English is the second language of Turkey, especially in commercial areas. While American culture was not evident everywhere, I was impressed that the NBA was such a world brand that it could be displayed without any further explanation.

And the first item? A pet food ad that loses a little in translation to English. :-)

Marriage and Children Make People Happier Than Work Does

"Marriage and Children Make People Less Happy at Work."  So reads the headline reporting a new study of 10,000 Britons by Kingston University Business School.

The main finding is that when people get married or have kids, they are less happy with their jobs.  This is especially true of women.

Or in other words, getting married and having kids makes people happy, especially women. This tends to make other aspects of life, including work, pale by comparison.

I am not surprised that a business school puts the work effect first.  But I think most people put the family effect first.

Cohabitation Makes It Hard to Break Up, Even When You Should

Scott Stanley, one of the great scholars of marriage vs. cohabitation, reports, as other have, that people who cohabit before marriage are about one-and-a-half times more likely to divorce than are people who do not cohabit before marriage.

At the recent Schreyer Seminar he offered this account of why: cohabitors are more likely to marry someone they would not otherwise marry just because they are already living together.  At a certain point, it becomes easier to marry than to break up.

Marry at 25

The median age of marriage in the USA is older than as it ever has been - 26+ for women, 28+ for men.  But the age of coupling - including cohabitation with children - seems to be about the same as it has always been - when you are done school and beginning adult life.  When that is varies by class - about 19 or 20 for the less educated majority, and about 23 or 24 for the more educated minority.

Young people seem to be putting off marriage because they think that they need to be fully ready for adult life first.  I think this is an impossible ideal.  Moreover, it shows a misunderstanding of one of the foundations of a strong marriage: our commitment to each other, and to the institution of marriage, helps us become adults together.

At the same time, research on marital satisfaction shows that the happiest marriages tend to come from couples who marry in their mid-20s.  And this is also the age that most young people and most parents of young people regard as the most desirable age for marriage. 

Life leads to many compromises with our abstract ideals, of course, and most of the time these compromises work out.

Nonetheless, I am led to a radical idea for a social norm: plan to marry at 25 (give or take a year). This allows most people to make a good start at adult life, without setting an impossibly high ideal for being "ready."

Your mileage may vary, of course.  But I believe that planning to marry at 25 would be a good norm for most people to plan around.

Justice Roberts' Decision in the Health Care Case is a Triumph for Centrism

Chief Justice John Roberts agreed with the conservatives that the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause are not a sufficient foundation for the individual mandate in the universal healthcare law.  He agreed with the liberals, though, that the mandate could stand, because it is not really a mandate but an exercise of Congress' taxing power.

Some see this as an incoherent position, or some kind of sellout.  I disagree.  I think the Chief Justice has forged an important centrist position. 

In fact, I think he may be finding his way to be the leader of the middle of the court, so that the Supreme Court is more than just a battle of left vs. right.  He has said that he wants to see - to create - more unanimous decisions, and fewer of the horrible 5-4 slugfests that we have seen in recent years.  I wish him very well in that quest.

Hymowitz is Right About Young Adults Not Understanding What Marriage Does - But Did They Ever?

Kay Hymowitz' new book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys, argues that young men and women are delaying marriage so much these days because they see it as something you do when you are already an adult. Now, young people who plan ahead try to get all their education done and their careers started before they marry and have children. For many women, this means they wait too long for kids.  Men do not have the same timeline, so the mismatch between the sexes creates the problem Hymowitz is writing about. There is, she argues, no certain script for adulthood, which leaves "emergent adults" emerging (or floundering) for a long time.

I think this is true - which raises an important question about the past.

Prior generations found marriage to be a formative institution of maturity.  You got married, then you figured out together how to be adults, especially when the first child came along. The script of adulthood often began with early marriage, with or without pregnancy, with growing maturity to follow.

The question I put to her at a recent seminar was this: did past generations understand marriage to be something that forms you into an adult, or did they just get married as part of the script, and then find out how formative marriage is through experience?

Hymowitz didn't know, and neither do I.  I put this question to you, blog friends, for your thoughts.

Corporate Coup at the University of Virginia Turned Back: Sociologist Reinstated as President.

Good news for higher education in general, and sociologists in particular.

Blankenhorn Evolves to a Centrist Position on Same-Sex Marriage

David Blankenhorn, the head of the Institute for American Values, is an important advocate for marriage and for responsible fatherhood.  Recently he has become a noted opponent of same-sex marriage, especially during the Proposition 8 debate in California.

This week he changed his position, coming out in support of same-sex marriage. He has not changed his views that, on the whole, children do best when raised by their married natural parents. But he now says that "the equal dignity of homosexual love" is also an important social principle. The children raised by same-sex couples would be better off if their parents were married, and therefore social policy should be changed to make it possible for same-sex parents to marry.

I believe Blankenhorn's evolution to a centrist position on same-sex marriage is commendable.

Slaughter is Mostly Wrong About Women Having it All

Anne-Marie Slaughter's cover story in the current Atlantic Monthly is an argument that even ideal conditions for a woman "having it all" aren't enough.  I found it a very frustrating article.

Slaughter was a tenured dean at Princeton, married to another tenured Princeton professor who was a very involved father, with a full-time housekeeper to help care for their home and two adolescent children.  She got her dream job in the Obama administration. But after two years she decided to leave that job and go back to Princeton to spend more time with her family.

The way she put the choice to herself was to ask whether she was indispensable to her job or indispensable to her children.  Put that way, the choice seemed obvious.  She went home.

She was asked in an interview if the answer to that question isn't obvious for everyone? She dodged the question.  Yet, if those are the choices, the answer is obvious to every parent.  By that standard, no parents, fathers or mothers, would ever go to work.

My wife is a highly educated attorney with an important career.  When we speak as a couple to my "Family Life" class on this exact subject - Can women have it all? - the answer she gives is "yes, but not all at once." You can marry and have your kids and even start a career when you are young.  As your kids get more self-sufficient, you can devote more time and effort to your career, and really hit your stride in late middle life.  For healthy middle class people these days, life is long enough for most women to do all of these things.

Slaughter says that for older women that might be fine, but that these days marrying young and having kids early has "fallen out of fashion." (She is the same age as Mrs. G. and me.)

She says that women today need to fully start their careers, and then pause to marry and have kids in their late 30s or early 40s.  They can pick up their careers a decade later and head to a peak a decade after that. She also wants a woman president, 50 women senators, and equal representation of women in corporate and judicial leadership, who will remake work and social life so women like her can have it all.

This plan strikes me as unrealistic. It would require massive social engineering, not to mention rewriting biology. 

I am also stuck on her dismissal of the "having it all, but not at once" plan as "out of fashion." The best researcher in how highly educated women can have it all, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, concluded from her empirical studies that this is the most likely plan to work in the world that actually exists.  In fact, Slaughter reveals in the interview, though not the article, she herself first married in her early twenties to a fellow professional. She then divorced and married again at 35, and only then had children. So her social engineering looks more like special pleading for her own case than a necessity for all elite women.  And there is still that pesky biological clock to work with.

There are some elements of Slaughter's article that I think are very good, especially her critique of the "cult of face-time" in office work.

But on her main points I found her argument wrong-headed and ungrateful for her fantastic opportunities.

Fatherhood Makes Sociologists More Successful

The headline news of a study of women sociologists is that having children does not interfere with having a successful career at a research university.

What struck me about the study by Roberta Spalter-Roth and Nicole Van Vooren, though, is the even larger difference that having kids made to the careers of men.

The study divided these sociology Ph.D.s, measured a decade after getting their degree, into "ideal" careers as tenured professors at research universities, "alternative" careers as tenured professors at teaching colleges, or "marginal" careers as adjunct teachers and the like.

For the fathers, 80% were in either ideal or alternative positions, with only 20% getting by marginally.

For childless men, 41% were in marginal careers.

I see this is further evidence that marriage and fatherhood transforms men from the least productive to the most productive workers.

The Theory of the Creative Class Has Some Holes

Frank Bures is a writer who has been living the creative class life for some time.  He and his wife moved to Portland before it was Portlandia, to Madison because they thought it would be welcoming to cool creatives, and finally back to Minneapolis because they had friends and families and because it was substantial and cool enough.  Writing in the new Twin Cities creative-class magazine thirty two, Bures debunks the idea that cities can spark economic growth by attracting people like him.


Bures assembles the scholarly critiques of Richard Florida's "creative class" theory.  These criticisms are well taken.  The upshot is that smart techies can spark economic growth. But the big investment that some cities have made in drawing smart artists probably does not pay off in economic growth.

Bures is the first to say that the arts are good for life in a city.  But the correlations that Florida touts between having lots of artists and gay people (the most famous part of his formula) and economic growth are not really causal in the way he believes.

Paul Fussell, Author of Class, R.I.P.

Paul Fussell died earlier this year.  He is best known for The Great War and Modern Memory, a study of the effects of World War I on popular and literary sensibility.

For me, though, Fussell is primarily the author of Class. I have taught that book in my "Introduction to Sociology" class for two decades.  I often use it as the closer.  Fussell is mean about the status strivings of every class.  One of the students' possible assignments is to write a class analysis of their family Thanksgiving, an event that often brings people of different classes together on intimate terms.  Students find the book irritating, but also eye-opening. 

I have found that the people who write the most insightful books about the experience of social class are British literary scholars, steeped in English novels of the status struggle to be rated a gentleman, or not.  Fussell, though an American, was officially a scholar of British literature, especially of the 18th century.  His several books on the experience of war came from his own harrowing experience in World War II, but also from his study thereafter of the British war poets of the Great War.

For a teacher, the most helpful parts of Class are the illustrative examples of status markers from the early '80s, when the book was written.  These, inevitably, now seem quite dated to students.  Yet the basic idea remains true: status is not based on things, but on freedom.  And people whose identity is bound up in their things are not free.

I will leave you with one illustration of Fussell's insight about class.  He says the middle class is touchiest about class, sometimes denying that there even are classes in America.  He says the middle classes are most prone to use euphemisms and to avoid pungent words about topics they find embarrassing - such as the concept of class itself.  And this is shown in the short history of his own book.  My edition, an early one, is subtitled A Painfully Accurate Guide Through the American Status System. The edition the students now get, after some years of middle-class de-flavoring, is subtitled An Accurate Guide Through the American Status System.

Teachers are Better Read Than Researchers

Professors at research universities know far more than I do about their subject.  They not only read what they need to know to do their own research, but also what their competitors and fellow workers in the same vineyard are up to. I am grateful for the research they do, which I use all the time. 

But I am better read than the average research professor.  This is not to claim to be smarter, just more widely read.  A family sociologist, for example, will read in family sociology, and maybe a few other of the biggest intellectual books in a year.  I read pretty steadily in family sociology, too, because I teach it every year.  I am just now off to a workshop with leading researchers in the field to hear their latest.

But I also teach a social structure course every year, so keep up with class and status research. And I keep my hand in on the sociology of religion, my first specialty.  And read enough in social theory to teach it regularly.  And the books in "Introduction to Sociology" come from every field I read in.

Lately I have spent a few years learning the field of happiness studies, which draws heavily from psychology, economics, neuroscience, philosophy, and literature, in addition to sociology.

I read widely because I love to, first and foremost.  But also my job of teaching in a liberal arts college creates a structural necessity for me to read widely and keep doing it, year by year, because my students need and expect me to know a wide range of things.

I was thinking of this today due to a blogpost by Cal Newport at Study Hacks on ultralearning, the practice of learning a range of techniques which, in turn, helps you see new solutions to old problems.

Broad reading is not just for teachers.  One of the enduring aims of a liberal arts education is to make each student a broad reader all your days. This is a reason why liberal arts learning it the best preparation for life, #423.

Regnerus' Study Shows that There Are Differences Between Children of Same-Sex and Opposite-Sex Parents

Mark Regnerus has published the first results of his New Family Structures Study, the first study to allow comparisons with a representative sample of adults raised by lesbian and gay parents. The controversy is already hot.  Up until now, the conventional wisdom has been that there is no difference between children raised by same-sex couples and those raised by their natural parents. However, that conventional wisdom was based on non-representative samples of same-sex parents - who are pretty rare, and hard to find in even the largest representative surveys.

To get a taste of the differences Regnerus found, each of these comparisons between the young adult children of intact biological families and lesbian-couple families is statistically significant. They show percentages of the children of intact biological families first, then of lesbian couples second:

Currently cohabiting:  9 vs 24
Received welfare growing up: 17 vs 69
Currently on welfare: 10 vs 38
Currently employed full time: 49 vs 26
Currently unemployed: 8 vs 28
Voted in last presidential election: 57 vs 41
Identifies as entirely heterosexual: 90 vs 61
Had an affair while married/cohabiting: 13 vs 40
Ever touched sexually by a parent or other adult (as a child): 2 vs 23
Ever forced to have sex against your will: 8 vs 31

Clearly, there are some differences between the children of lesbian couples and of intact biological families.  What exactly causes those differences will be the subject of much further debate.

I was struck though, by the next comparison in the table: between the children of intact biological families and gay-couple parents. Here are all the statistically significant differences:

Received welfare growing up: 17 vs 57

And that is it.

What might account for the difference between lesbian-parent effects and gay-parent effects? This is a complex question, not answerable from this evidence.  But I have a hunch: involved fathers.

Liza Mundy 3: Women Don't Want to Be Breadwinners, but They Can Adapt

In The Richer Sex, Mundy starts with the fact that 37.7% of husbands right now earn less than their wives.  Late in the book she allows that only 3.3% of husbands have no earnings, are home with minor children, and have wives with jobs.  This book is not really about "breadwomen" - wives who are the sole or even predominant earners in their families. It is about two-earning couples in which, at least for a time, she earns more.

Mundy found, as others have before, that it is harder for wives to respect lower-earning husbands than it is for husbands to respect lower-earning wives.  But Mundy also offers this helpful nuance:  "If there's anything that every woman I interviewed can't stand, it's a partner who seems to be standing still." This makes sense to me. And this may be the main lesson to take from the book:

Wives outearning husbands is not a problem, any more than husbands outearning wives is. What both husbands and wives want is a partner who pulls his or her weight in the family, and who is ambitious to do it better.

Liza Mundy 2: Avoiding Social Comparison With Your Spouse

The most interesting part of The Richer Sex for me was Mundy's discussion of social comparison.  We want those we love to do well, but we would like them to do it in a field that is not in direct competition with our own.  As women and men increasingly have the same levels of education and are entering the same fields, the opportunities for husband and wife do be doing exactly the same kind of work increases.  It is all but inevitable that we will make comparisons with people doing just what we do.  This makes the possibility of invidious marital comparison rear its ugly head.

This got me thinking about the ways in which couples specialize, at work and at home, in ways that take them out of direct comparison with one another.  Even couples who collaborate in their professional work usually divide the labor.  And I have known many married people who let some interests drop that might put them in direct competition with their spouses. 

Mrs. G. and I, for example, used to both work in the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, and were very knowledgeable about education policy when we first came to Kentucky.  Other things equal, it would have made sense for me to teach sociology of education, and to become involved in Kentucky's nation-leading education reforms.  However, as my wife developed a career in education policy, I found that it made more sense to develop other intellectual interests, while fully following and bolstering her career as a supportive spouse.  And she has done the same with my professional interests - fully supportive and a good sounding board, but not a worker in the same vineyard.

In fact, she realized early on that we should not play competitive games against one another. I think this is a very wise policy.

Mundy reports the many ways that high-earning women subtly avoid professional competition with their spouses. I recommend that couples talk about this issue directly, and make explicit policy for the good of the marriage to avoid the occasion for invidious social comparison.

Just as a couple can meta-communicate about which communication style they should use in a given situation, they can meta-communicate about how they can work together without competing with one another.

Liza Mundy 1: The Coming "Breadwomen"

Liza Mundy, in The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners is Transforming Sex, Love, and Family, notes the rising trend of wives outearning their husbands. She foresees a day soon when a majority of wives will be the main earners in their families - what she calls "breadwomen."

Her core facts are these:

• 37.7% of wives with any earnings at all make more than their husbands (2009, Bureau of Labor Statistics).
• Women now hold 51% of managerial and professional jobs.
• Women are better represented in 9 of the 10 job categories most likely to grow in the next decade. 

Mundy does outrun her data a bit.  The recent rise from 20-something percent of wives outearning their husbands to 30-something percent may be a temporary effect of the "mancession" of 2008 - 09, in which men disproportionately lost their jobs.  And "nearly 40%" is not the same as "the new majority," as her subtitle claims.

Moreover, women who make only a little more than their husbands are not quite what we usually mean by "breadwinners" (and of the course same is true with the sexes reversed). 

Mundy's best observation is that women having been doing better than men in school for a generation, which comes just at the time when our economy is increasingly knowledge-based.  This should give the average woman a growing advantage in both actual knowledge and in credentials over the average man.

I think the main phenomenon that Mundy's facts reveal is that as wives match or better their husbands' educational credentials and career aspirations, their earnings are more equal. Usually he earns a bit more, sometimes she does. This means that in many couples, neither is really the breadwinner, but together they support their family in roughly equal measure.

Marilynne Robinson Week 7 (and last): A High Estimate of Human Nature

In Absence of Mind, her Terry Lectures at Yale in which she attacks the "parascience" of Freud, sociobiology, and the new atheists, she declares her form of high-toned Calvinism:

I should declare at the outset my own bias. I believe it is only prudent to make a very high estimate of human nature, first of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to liberate its best impulses.

I heartily agree.

Marilynne Robinson Week 6: Family Life as Loyalty

In her essay "Family" in The Death of Adam, Robinson offers that the core bond of family life is a feeling of loyalty and identity.  And if we start our experience of family life with a feeling of loyalty, then we are saved from the degradation of measuring whether our loyalty is deserved.

As I noted in previous posts, Robinson is arguing against a culture of fear.

How are loyalty and fighting fear connected?

“The antidote to fear, distrust, self-interest is always loyalty.  The balm for failure or weakness, or even for disloyalty, is always loyalty.”

Marilynne Robinson Week 5: The Hermeneutics of Suspicion is Suspect

Robinson, throughout The Death of Adam but especially in the essay on "Darwinism," is critical of the whole school of modern thought which believes that under the social and collaborative surface of life there is a deeper reality of selfishness and competition.  This is what Ricoeur called the "hermeneutics of suspicion," a wonderful comprehensive banner.  Robinson has in mind Darwin's own social thought, especially as he drew from Herbert Spencer.  She also includes Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and most of economics in her indictment. They promote a social theory of fear, about which Robinson writes eloquently.

The social theory of fear, selfishness, and competition pictures our current world as if we were consumed with a desperate struggle for survival.  Yet the actual experience of most Americans is freedom from mere survival, and the freedom to enjoy the fruits of civilization. Robinson writes:

All the forms in which this freedom has been celebrated, all the arts and sciences and philanthropies, are only possible because civilization is intrinsically sociable and collaborative.

 

Marilynne Robinson Week 4: Against Fear

In her essay "Facing Reality" in the collection The Death of Adam, Robinson argues that what we take to be reality is a collective fiction, resting on faith just as much as any other understanding of history does.

She argues that the dominant construction of reality in our culture today is based on fear.  Robinson then offers this powerful critique:

When they make fear the key to interpretation of history and experience, as they do so often, as ours does now, nothing contains a greater potential for releasing all the varieties of destruction.  Fearfulness assumes a hidden narrative – that we are all ill despite our health, vulnerable despite our apparent safety. We are contemptuous of transient well-being, as if there were any other kind. Routinely discounting the preponderance of evidence is not the behavior of reasonable people, nor is devaluing present experience because it may be overtaken by something worse.

I see this again and again as I talk about happiness.  Most of the people I talk to are, on the whole, happy.  They know that their lives are full of good things, along with some bad.  When pressed, they concede that our social order actually has many excellent features. But, they say, this could only be temporary.  It could all go away.

"We are contemptuous of transient well-being, as if there were any other kind."

The Creator called the world good. To me, to Marilynne Robinson, that is a good reason not to make fear the key to the interpretation of history. 

Marilynne Robinson Week 3: Home is a Superb Novel

Marilynne Robinson's Home is the counterpart to her Gilead - the same events, told from a different perspective.  Gilead centers on an old Congregationalist minister in a small town in Iowa.  Home centers on his best friend, the old Presbyterian minister in the same town. The action turns on the return of the prodigal son of the Presbyterian minister, who is named for the Congregationalist minister.

The father has a strong faith in the sufficiency of grace, which is tested to the limits by the helpless self-destructiveness of the son.  And the son yearns for home, for his father and sister and namesake, for faith itself. Their serious problems are not resolved fully.

But I spoil nothing to say that the sister, Glory, concludes the tale with "The Lord is wonderful."

Marilynne Robinson Week 2: Gilead is a Beautiful, Wise Book

Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, is a fine piece of wisdom. An old Congregationalist minister in a small Iowa town sees the glory and wonder that God made in the world.  He has plenty of misery and heartache to see, too.  But his gratitude for the glory and wonder shines through.

This is a blessing.

Same-Sex Marriage is Good Enough for the State (Which is Not the Same as the Church)

I recently wrote about the evolution of President Obama's position on same-sex marriage. Not surprisingly, this drew some critical comment. In particular, there were challenges to my suggestion that enshrining religious grounds for making civil law was dangerous for religious institutions. I was asked to clarify the evolution of my own thought on this issue.

Marriage has a vital public role in the good order of society.  I believe that role is primarily about raising children in as good an environment as possible.  Marriage is also the main institution in which real people (not corporations) save assets and transmit them to their posterity.

As a social institution, a child's two natural parents, married to one another, is the first best option. Other options - single parents, adoption, same-sex couples, widows, orphanages - can produce good-enough results, and are certainly better than not raising children at all.

To say that one social institution is better than another is not to say that each individual example of the former is better than each individual example of the latter. And it certainly does not mean that one is all good and all alternatives are bad.

The state has always supported marriage for the parents of children because every other institution for raising children is more costly, less efficient, and less effective for producing citizens.

The Christian church, meanwhile, has not always supported marriage of any kind, but only came to support marriage grudgingly.

The sanctification of marriage in civil religion is more recent still. The recent constitutional amendment condemning all extramarital sexual relations is an example of this kind of civil religion.

For the state to include same-sex couples as married, especially for purposes of raising children, is a decision like that of accepting cohabiting couples or adoptive parents as good-enough.  This decision, though, is only with reference to what the state needs from a child-rearing institution.

I think the Bible clearly condemns homosexual practice as a sin. But it condemns divorce even more strongly and clearly.  Both church and state have made their peace with divorce as a good-enough state, even without embracing it wholly.  I believe the church can do the same with homosexual practice. 

The state can normalize homosexual practice because it does not have a very good reason not to. That is a good rule of thumb for any state in a free society. And the state may prudently judge that children would be raised and assets would be saved and transmitted well enough by same-sex couples to normalize same-sex marriages.

That prudential judgment is the one the President Obama has made. I concur.