Positive Sociology understands that well-functioning institutions are necessary to a happy society

Point Four of my seven-point Positive Sociology Manifesto.

Other points are here: 1, 2, 3.

Happy individuals are not enough to make a happy society. 

Social institutions provide the structures that foster, or hinder, a happily functioning society – including the environments in which individuals can live more or less happily.

Of social institutions, the ones that seem to have the greatest impact on people working together to do meaningful work are families, religious communities, and voluntary associations.  Happiness, and the virtues that conduce to it, seem to depend more on the institutions of soft power than on the hard power of the political economy.

In a larger view, though, the good interaction of all institutions is necessary to a happy society.  Which takes us from the meso to the macro.

Positive Sociology Builds on the Micro Foundations of What Makes Most People Happy

Point Three of my seven-point Positive Sociology Manifesto.

Other points are here: 1, 2. 

Positive Psychology has done a generation of fine research and practical applications to identify what makes individuals and small groups happy.

In essence, when people have basic security in their finances and health, what makes them happy is to build good relations with their families, co-workers, and neighbors, to engage in meaningful work, and to work with others to serve a cause larger than themselves.

There are many exercises that help people develop the habits of gratitude for what they have, and the desire to work with others for the common good. 

Positive sociology can embrace these findings and practices wholesale.  This is the part that most people care about in their daily lives.  Building positive individual and small-group practices helps build the happy society incrementally.

Positive Sociology Asks Us to Be Willing to Accept Good News

Point Two of my seven-point Positive Sociology Manifesto. 

The other points: 1

When Steven Pinker started lecturing on The Better Angels of Our Nature:  The Surprising Decline of Violence, he spent half his time answering his audience's disbelief that violence was declining.  They were so entrenched in the view that things are bad and getting worse, they wanted to reject evidence that the very things they wanted to improve were, in fact, improving.

The world is getting better in many respects.  The world gets better for the good reason that we want to solve problems, and often do.  To be sure, new problems arise.  Some problems are the fruits of new conditions; some are the unintended consequences of prior solutions.  But human being are ingenious in figuring things out, including good things.

Positive sociology asks us to start with a commitment to look for good news, to seek out improvements, and to be willing to accept them when we find them.

World Getting Better: Female Genital Mutilation Banned in Nigeria

Nigeria banned female genital mutilation, also called female circumcision, in May.  The law was passed under the former Christian administration, and has come into enforcement under the new Muslim administration.

While the practice is not specific to one religion, it is more common among Muslims.  Some extreme Muslims promote it as a religious practice, which is part of the reason that it has spread from East Africa into Nigeria and other West African countries.

Nigeria is the biggest country in Africa and the potential super-power of the continent.  It is being torn by an intense Muslim-Christian conflict that is just short of civil war.  If Nigeria can enact this law, and really enforce it, amidst such a conflict, then there is great hope for banning the practice in Africa altogether.

Ashley Madison's Millions of Fake Women

The hacking of the adultery website Ashley Madison found that men's accounts outnumbered women's by about five to one.  This is not surprising.

What is more interesting is that the great majority of women's accounts on the site appear to have been fakes, many of them created by the company itself.  One of the striking findings from Gizmodo's analysis of the accounts:

Out of those 5.5 million purported female users, [Gizmodo analyst] Newitz says that only 1,492 had ever checked their inboxes.

Women do commit adultery.  But not for the same reasons as men.  Men are much more likely to wish to have sex with other women besides their wives, even though most of these men also want to preserve their marriages.

Women, by contrast, tend to use adultery to explore a potential new mate.  Women rarely want novel sex just for the novelty - or the sex.  Men do.

Men signed up for Ashley Madison by the millions.  Most probably got no further than the fantasy of adultery.  Women, it seems, only signed up by the thousands, at best. And very few used it to pursue an affair with a stranger.

Positive Sociology Begins with a Change of Perspective

My seven-point Positive Sociology Manifesto. 

1. Positive Sociology begins with a change of perspective

Many sociologists are first introduced to the discipline through C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination. From the very first, Mills defines sociology negatively:

Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between ‘the personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues of social structure’. … An issue is a public matter: some value cherished by the public is felt to be threatened. (8)

Consider, therefore, the difference it would make if, instead, we started from the distinction between ‘the personal blessings of the lifeworld’ and ‘the good order of social structure’.

In every sphere, for each application of the hermeneutics of suspicion there is a counterpart application of the hermeneutics of appreciation.

Donald Trump as "Republican" Front-runner Would be Like Kanye West as Democratic Frontrunner.

Republicans, please take back your party!

The Republican Party has, historically, been a party of actual governance.

The Tea Party, by contrast, is a party against government.

The alliance with the Tea Party has caused more harm to the Republican Party than good.

It has opened the door for Donald Trump to be the "Republican" front runner, though he is even farther removed from any kind of governance than the Tea Party is.

Positive Sociology and a Proportionate View of Inequality

I got to take part in a panel at the American Sociological Association meeting on “Towards a Positive Sociology”.   I told the story of how I have been developing my “Happy Society” class.  I offer a seven-point “Positive Sociology Manifesto”, which I will share with Gruntled Center readers hereafter.

One issue that I have been wrestling with is that sociology as a rule is overwhelmingly concerned with unearthing inequality, which we often assume is a bad thing as such.  I think this view of inequality, and its presumed moral meaning, often cuts our investigations short, and makes sociology less useful to society.

I have therefore been wrestling with this proposition:

Negative sociology takes equality as a natural state, which is distorted by social practices.  Positive sociology takes inequality as a natural state, which is balanced by social practices.

Against the Academic "Precariat"

I was recently asked by a friend what I thought of this argument:

"The pernicious influence of neoliberal ideology on institutions of higher education is most evident, one could argue, in its increasing and intentional reliance on exploited labor. An overwhelming majority of the professoriate now belong to what economists and sociologists call the “precariat,” a portmanteau combining “precarious” and “proletariat” and referring to the social class of contingently employed or underemployed workers for whom predictability or security in employment is absent". - From here.


I think this is more than half true.

I can see a distinction, though, between "neoliberal ideology" and the simpler cost management of any institution.

Neo-liberal ideology believes that every institution should be "run like a business," with a naive idea that businesses are not deeply embedded in a political economy. Such a view would distort an academic institution into seeing professors as labor inputs, whose cost is to be reduced, rather than (in business terms) as the owners and artisans.  The true view of the university is that "the colleagues are the college", while the trustees hold the necessary property in trust, and the administration makes the trains run on time with a minimum of bother to the professors and students.

Even in a properly understood college, though, the main, and nearly the only cost of the college is seeing that the professors get paid enough to keep doing their work well.  This is why students pay tuition.  The heart of the enterprise, though, very much unlike a normal market business, is not to make a profit, but to have enough for the life-shaping enterprise of education to go on. Everyone benefits from well-educated citizens, so everyone is asked to give to the enterprise.  Most of the money comes from students or their parents, some from loyal alumni, some from friends, some from government. Because education benefits all of society, many people are willing to contribute for the education of others, as well as for themselves and their loved ones.

Therefore, even a properly understood college will have a reasonable and responsible concern to reduce costs.  Since there is mainly only the cost of professors, that is the natural place to look for cost savings.  Thus, colleges are continuously looking for ways to reduce the costs of providing a good education.  Most of them do not work, since the best practices of education continue to be a dedicated teacher and a small number of students working together to understand and form character.

The ideal for a college would be to have a stable group of teachers who teach all the students.  There would be a continuous movement of old professors out and new professors in, in a slow progression.  However, it is inevitable in any human enterprise that there would be some gaps between the ideal relation and reality. I think it reasonable for a college to  hire some adjuncts to cover the occasional gaps, as long as they did not do it very much.

The larger question of whether "neoliberal" ideology is good for any human enterprise is worth considering.  Secure employment is, I think, good for human beings as such, and for the great majority of individual humans. There is a natural tension between the employers' desire to keep the best workers, and the workers' desire to keep a job.  This is inevitable.  But it is not, I think, inevitable that employers should treat, or think of, workers as just another factor of production, to be reduced or discarded at will.  But that is an argument that goes well beyond the initial question of the academic precariat.

A Healthy New Development: Thrifty Athletes

Today's story:  Professional football player Ryan Broyles signed a contract for $3.6 million, but he and his wife have decided to live on $60,000 per year, and invest the rest.

A prior story allowed that Rob Gronkowski, an even more famous and better-paid professional football player, had not touched any of the $10 million that he had been paid for playing, but was living on endorsement money.  He did not live wildly, and invested his professional pay and signing bonus for the future.

My friends at the Institute for American Values have been pushing thrift as a core value we need to re-adopt.  I commend their efforts, and only wish the thrift movement got more attention.

I applaud these thrifty professional athletes.  May they be lifted up as role models.

Academics the Most Trusted Source on Business

"Academics and industry experts are not only trusted content creators, they are also the most credible spokespersons in shaping opinions of a company."

So says a new study based on the Edelman Trust Barometer.

The main point of the study is that the public trusts search engines more than the press or the company.  The connection is that search engines can bring to the fore the assessments of people who are both informed (academics and industry experts) and, at the same time, not primarily trying to make a profit or shape opinion with their knowledge.

This is great news for those who want public discourse to be based on actual knowledge, not just opinion asserted as knowledge.

Trump is Proud to Be a Corrupter

Of all the disturbing things said at the GOP debate, the one that bothers me the most is Mr. Trump's claim that he gives money to politicians so they have to do what he wants.  The other candidates are hoping to attract a corrupt and greedy billionaire to fund their campaigns.  Mr. Trump is the source of corruption himself, and is proud of it.

I Applaud Republican Leaders Who Try to Reconnect the Party with African Americans - But "State's Rights" Is Not the Way

"Too often, we Republicans -- myself included -- have emphasized our message on the 10th Amendment but not our message on the 14th -– an amendment, it bears reminding, that was one of the first great contributions of the Republican Party to American life, second only to the abolition of slavery," Perry said.

I applaud Gov. Rick Perry's attempts to reconnect the Republican Party with African Americans, and end the party's racist "Southern strategy".  I applaud similar efforts by Sen. Rand Paul.  

However, it was precisely the Southern "state's rights" strategy that made the 14th Amendment, and federal intervention, necessary in the first place.

The former governor of Texas should be able to see that, for black people, being freed from federal protection and left to the mercy of the government of Texas - of all places - does not seem like a reassuring bargain.  

David Brooks to Social Conservatives: Become the Christian Left, Instead.

David Brooks recommends that Christian conservatives give up on a losing culture war about sex.

Instead, he proposes this:

The defining face of social conservatism could be this: Those are the people who go into underprivileged areas and form organizations to help nurture stable families. Those are the people who build community institutions in places where they are sparse. Those are the people who can help us think about how economic joblessness and spiritual poverty reinforce each other. Those are the people who converse with us about the transcendent in everyday life.

In other words, the Christian right should instead join the Christian left.

I mostly agree with this sentiment.  However, there is a division between Christian left and Christian right in the first place because they disagree about whether the first priority of Christians should be the economic order or the sexual order.

I Am Glad the Confederate Flag is Down in South Carolina, But Not That Way

When two activists climbed the flagpole and removed the Confederate flag - or more accurately, the Segregationist Flag - from the South Carolina capitol grounds, they acted wrongly, I believe.

It would have been more powerful to have the elected governor of the state take the flag down, as she has already pledged to do. In fact, now South Carolina has to put the flag back up, so that they can take it down the right way.

What makes it all the sweeter is that this particular governor, of Asian descent, would also have been branded non-white by the segregationists who erected the flag in the first place.

Unexpected Good News: Southern Republicans Lead the Charge to Remove Confederate Symbols

The silver lining of the horrible massacre in Emanuel AME Church in Charleston by a white supremacist is that Republican leaders across the South are calling to remove Confederate symbols from public grounds.

In South Carolina and Mississippi this movement has focussed on taking the "rebel flag" off the capital grounds and out of the state flag.

In Tennessee the movement is to remove the bust of Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Forrest from the capitol.

Most gratifying to me, Kentucky Senator McConnell and Republican gubernatorial candidate (and McConnell opponent) Matt Bevins have come out in favor of removing the statue of Jefferson Davis from the state capitol rotunda.

Some cynics have said that this move to get rid of racist symbols is a ploy to prevent the more important matter of gun control.  This is probably true.

Nonetheless, progress is progress, and I applaud it.

The Higher You Go, the More Social Structure Enables, Rather Than Constrains.

This is my bright idea for the day, after reading about the various kinds of homophily in the upper classes.

The Silver Lining in the Charleston Church Racist Mass Murder: His Uncle Turned Him In

I am going on the facts as they have been reported so far, just hours after the likely killer was caught.

Dylann Storm Roof, a young white racist man in South Carolina, after voicing hatred of black people and wearing the flags of apartheid states, was given a big gun by this father.

Roof then went to the most famous black church in Charleston, sat with the church members in Bible study and prayer, before he opened fire.  He killed nine people, including the pastor.  Roof left one witness to his act of terrorism to tell his story.

Then he took off.

The next day, his uncle saw the security pictures, figured out who the killer was, and turned him in.  Roof was caught soon thereafter.

I am reminded of a story of the London subway bombings of a few years ago.  One of the killers was recognized by his mother from the security pictures.  She turned him in because his act of terrorism was very wrong.  But she also said that she did it because she knew that the British authorities would not torture her son.

Roof is not likely to be tortured.  He is not likely to be assumed to be connected to any larger group.  He is likely, instead, to be treated as a deranged individual.  This is because he is white.  Yet he is part of a long tradition of Southern terrorists. And he was armed by his own father.

Thank God for the decent uncle.

Good News On the Baby Front, Starting With a Rising Birth Rate

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the birth rate is up, ending a decline that began in 2007.  This is another sign that we are mentally recovering from the Great Recession.

Further good news:  births to women in their 30s are up.  A few years ago scare headlines announced that most babies were born out of wedlock - to women under 30.  Those article failed to notice the increasing number of women, especially educated women, who begin having children in their 30s.  Those children are much more likely to be born in wedlock than are those to the youngest mothers.

Speaking of youngest mothers, the teen birth rate also continued to decline.

Not Wanting Children Is Not a Problem; Not Wanting Human Beings Is.

I think Sophie Gilbert's review of Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed shows a worse worldview than the problem she sets out to discuss.

That some women do not want children is not a problem.  That they feel pressured to do so is something of a problem.  But this is worse:

Not having children isn’t selfish. Not having children is a perfectly rational and reasonable response given that humans are essentially parasites on the face of a perfectly lovely and well-balanced planet, ploughing through its natural resources, eradicating its endangered species, and ruining its most wonderful landscapes. This might sound misanthropic, and it is, but it is also true.

I think that most women do want to have children, especially after they have taken care of babies related to them. But most is not all. Those women who do not want to have children are just as natural as those who do.  

The rising percentage of women who do not have children, which Gilbert cites as evidence for her position, is not a good indicator that most of them chose not to, though; for educated women, not having children is more likely a "creeping non-choice" due to finding a husband and economic stability in time.  

The attitude that I quote above, though, is literally anti-human, and a much worse problem than women feeling that they ought to want to have children.

Good News: The Rate of Unmarried Young Fatherhood is Going Down

For men under 44,

In the 1980s, 42% of first-time fathers were not married.

In the 1990s, 40% of first-time fathers were not married.

In the 2000s, 34% of first-time fathers were not married.

The big gains came from improvements among black fathers, whose unmarried fatherhood rate dropped from 77% in the '80s to 66% in the '00s.

Moreover, more unmarried fathers are at least living with the mothers of their children.

Americans Tend to be Touchy Nationalists Because Our Nation is So Obviously Constructed

Tocqueville notes that Americans are very touchy in their nationalism.

Yet America is about the easiest nation to join - e pluribus unum means that we take the masses, huddled and otherwise, from anywhere and everywhere.  If you embrace American principles, and profess loyalty to the nation and its Constitution, you can be an American.

I think these facts are two sides of the same coin.  American expressions of nationalism are so touchy, and often so excessive, because our nationhood is so obviously constructed.

And I would expect that the people touchiest about our sacred nation would be those people who are Americans by experience, rather than formal knowledge. Their vehemence against those they claim "violate the Constitution" is in inverse proportion to their actual knowledge of the Constitution.

Today's point is a subset of my larger argument that most people's religion really is the civil religion of the nation; they believe that all of the things they hold sacred fit neatly under the national umbrella, without being able to explain exactly how.

Natural Growth Childrearing is Like Having Cats

My students always learn from Annette Lareau's excellent study, Unequal Childhoods, about the difference in the way middle-class parents typically raise their children, compared to the way working-class and poor parents typically raise their children.

Middle-class parents use what Lareau calls "concerted cultivation" - marshaling their own resources, and that of many other teachers, coaches, tutors, and others to cultivate the talents of each of their children.  This is the typical upbringing of Centre students.

Lareau found that poorer parents use what she called "natural growth" parenting.  Good parents make sure their kids are fed, clothed, sheltered, and loved - and make them go to school, as the law requires.  They depend on the school to do the teaching, since the teacher are the professionals.  When kids come home, they are free to choose how to spend their time, either in the house or out of it.

My children were raised in the way typical of my class - concerted cultivation, but not over-the-top.  I realized as I was letting the cats out after feeding them this morning that I raise my cats by natural growth.  Once they mastered the litter box, I have not worked much on developing their skills.  They are free to come and go.  I feed them, get their necessary shots, and pet them sometimes.

My students also learn from Edin and Kefalas' excellent study Promises I Can Keep, about teen welfare mothers.  For Centre students, it is a through-the-lookingglass experience to read about teenagers who think raising a child at their age - with no husband, no job, and no real plan - is a sensible thing to do.  The difference, they come to see, is that the women in Promises I Can Keep are using a natural growth standard of what being a good mother would be, whereas my students are using a concerted cultivation standard.

At the same time, many of these same students, especially the young women soon after they graduate from Centre, will casually take on the care of a cat.  Because for cats, they find the natural growth standard is sufficient.

The Railroads Won the Civil War

I have long puzzled over how the Republican Party, which was born as the progressive do-gooder party, became the party of corporate interests.  I had vaguely thought the shift might have happened with Taft.

The more I think about the origins of the party, though, the more I think the corporate interest was there from the beginning. And today it came to me:

The railroads won the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.

Robert Todd Lincoln, business leader and Republican power broker, was general counsel, and later president, of the Pullman Palace Car Company.

The Hunger Games for Universities

Mark Chelgren, a Tea Party Republican state senator in Iowa, proposed a bill that would, among other things, do the following:

(2) The names of the five professors who rank lowest on their institution’s evaluation for the semester, but who scored above the minimum threshold of performance, shall be published on the institution’s internet site and the student body shall be offered an opportunity to vote on the question of whether any of the five professors will be retained as employees of the institution. The employment of the professor receiving the fewest votes approving retention shall be terminated by the institution regardless of tenure status or contract.

The bill is really breathtaking in its peculiar view of what professors - or any kind of professionals - do, and how they should be judged. It is a kind of cut-throat competition that would make for poisonous relations among any staff.  This was the principle governing co-working relations at Enron, which led them to try to outdo one another in ruthlessness toward customers.

One blog commentator, tmareace, wrote "How about doing the same for the legislators in the state?"

The good news is that, as far as I can tell, this bill went nowhere, to the credit of the Iowa legislature.

Would Government-Provided Birth Control Be Fair, Because Voluntary? How About Government-Provided Guns?

My students have been reading Cahn and Carbone's Red Families vs. Blue Families. As the name suggests, the authors contrast the vision of family life of conservative and liberal ideologies, and actual practice.  The short version of the difference:

Blue families promote marital delay, birth control, equality in marriage, and higher education.

Red families promote early marriage, sex control, complementarity in sex roles, and conservative religion.

I asked the students to try to come up with several policies that would justly serve a nation with both kinds of families.  Some of the students are liberals and some are conservatives, but all are students at a selective college, most of whom are planning on careers for men and women, as well as marriage and children. Some are, therefore, 'red' in their ideology, but tilt 'blue' in their practice.

Which led quite a few, on both sides of the spectrum, to want the government to make birth control widely available to everyone.  They reasoned that this was a fair policy to both views; the government was not promoting birth control, as blues would like, but simply making it available.

It occurred to me that a good parallel would be to have the government make guns widely available to everyone.  Would this constitute a fair policy to both views, or would the government be promoting gun ownership, as reds would like?

Yes, "We" Can Still Handle Marriage, As We Always Have

A friend asked me to comment on this article, in which the author, Anthony D'Ambrosio, claims that "marriage doesn't work today" and that "we" (young people) can't handle it.

I don't think this young man understands marriage very well.  

He thinks sex is the most important aspect. He imagines that couples in the past did not struggle with financial problems together. After his divorce, he is hoping for "true love" which somehow counteracts all the problems that he mentions.  

And he does not even consider the core task of marriage from time immemorial: raising children.  

I don't think the problem is his generation, or today's technological distractions, or even student debt. Plenty of young people make excellent marriages in the customary way. They work out a way to deal with these challenges together. 

Marriage is a way for two people to mature together - which makes everything else possible.

Manspreading in Public, Womanspreading in Private

"Manspreading" is the tendency of some men to spread out and take extra space in public - on a subway bench, for example.  This is a real phenomenon, and the public-awareness campaign to encourage men to be more restrained is sensible.

Less noted is what I think should be called "Womanspreading" - the tendency of some women to take extra space when sharing a bed.  A humorous representation of the phenomenon is here:

I think there is a parallel phenomenon of "mansplaining" in a public setting, and "womansplaining" in a private one.

Spreading Democracy vs. Spreading Capitalism

There is a great divide in American foreign policy since World War II.

Some want to spread democracy.  Some want to spread capitalism.

Realizing this clarifies to me much of what has been muddy in why some of our interventions have been for good, and others for ill.

Correct Your Regrettable Habits

Take note of your moments of regret.  Literally write them down in a notebook.

Resist the natural temptation to repress them and move on.

Regrets are your best clue to which habits you need to analyze, and correct.

Most Republicans Support Establishing Christianity as the National Religion

Public Policy Policy has found that most Republicans support establishing Christianity as the national religion, by a margin of 57% to 30%, with 13% unsure.

The proportion rises to 68% among those who would like to see former Gov. Mike Huckabee become president.

The survey does not ask any further questions about the respondents' understanding of the Constitution or of Christianity.  My guess is that this position does not rest on a deep analysis of either.

Instead, this is the characteristic conservative loyalty to what they imagine to be "traditional" as being sacred.

The irony, of course, is that what is actually traditional in the United States is that we definitely do not allow an established religion.

Moreover, I am sure that that majority agreement among Republicans on establishing "Christianity" would disintegrate as soon as they got down to any specifics of which practices of Christianity they have in mind.

Marriage Opportunity: A Centrist Approach

I am happy to be among the original signatories of a new manifesto, "Marriage Opportunity: The Moment for National Action." 

The manifesto calls for the same pro-marriage position that I have been arguing in this blog for a decade.

What is new is that this statement supports same-sex marriage as good for the marriage movement.

I believe this is a centrist position.

The signatories, fellow members of the Marriage Opportunity Council, are from the left, right, and center on a number of issues.  The group includes people who previously opposed same-sex marriage, and those who have previously thought marriage an objectionable institution on the grounds that it was heterosexist or patriarchal or simply outmoded.  We come together on this statement now.

I hope, and expect, that this position will soon be the norm in the middle of political discussion.