Stuff White People Like

The blog "Stuff White People Like" is a self-parody of yuppie culture that is pretty funny. As is quickly apparent, it is not about all white people -- in fact, the current item on the blog, #84 Tee-Shirts, cites "Getting Lucky in Kentucky" as unacceptable because it is worn by the "wrong kind of white people." But that, itself, is part of the parody -- the kind of white people who are self-conscious about being white, and parody themselves because of it, are drawn from the yuppie end of Anglo culture.

And the #1 thing white people like? Coffee.

Why Are There So Many Useless Young Men? Easy Sex

Kay Hymowitz has an excellent article in the current City Journal, "Child-Man in the Promised Land," on the spread of educated, employed, socially retarded young men. These are the men that society has made a huge investment in, in hopes that they would become responsible husbands, fathers, and citizens. But they remain in gadget-strewn arrested development. Hymowitz notes that these guys, with the resources to make a social contribution, spend their time and money on proudly immature self-indulgence.

The punchline, though, is that all this self-pleasuring doesn't fill them with pleasure. It makes them numb and apathetic.

Hymowitz cites two successful "lad lit" authors, Nick Hornsby and Benjamin Kunkel, in naming the source of slacker apathy: the easy availability of sex.

I think Hymowitz buries the lead. She set out to chronicle this new social type, the happily immature Single Young Man. As a sociobiologist and a Calvinist, I do not need any convincing that most men, left to their own devices, would live for the sense pleasures of the moment.

I am more interested in what turns boys into men. The great lever that civilization has is the intense, passionate interest of most men in sex with women. I think Hymowitz, and other promoters of civilization, should put that in the lead of each marriage article. If men could only get sex in marriage, the vast majority of SYMs would straighten up within a year.

It is a free country. Men don't have to be responsible. Neither do women. But there is great wisdom in the near-universal social custom of women strictly limiting sex outside of marriage. And without some responsible men, society itself will fall apart. Women can't do everything by themselves.

The Richest Families Are Having More Kids

I have previously reported the good news that the marriage rate and the birth rate among the most educated women has risen recently. I attribute this to more study of good sociology. :-)

Now there is evidence that the richest families are bigger. Among the top 1.5% of families by income, the proportion of 40-something women with three or more kids has risen over the past decade from 29% to 41%.

This group is too small to affect the overall birthrate very much directly. Indirectly, though, trends among the rich do tend to affect patterns among the upper middles, at least. And the rich are the people who can best afford more kids. This is a hopeful small development.

57% of Pakistani Britons are Married to Their First Cousins

Birth defects follow. Altogether, 70% of Pakistani Britons are married to relatives.

The West is in a race between the dangerous social patterns that immigrants bring with them, and the assimilation to our social patterns. We are hampered by the fact that some of our social patterns are also dangerous. Pakistani Britons rightly fear that if their children do not marry safely within their own families, they may assimilate to the British pattern of illegitimacy, which is now becoming the norm among the native British population.

I am not for either wholesale assimilation or wholesale rejection of the host culture. And I am certainly not for restricting immigration just because the immigrants, if there are enough of them and have a strong enough culture, resist assimilation. I think each case of assimilation or not should be judged on its merits.

Mark Steyn, who publishes these scary facts, is worried that the relativism of elite culture in the West gives us no grounds to resist the bad practices that immigrants might bring. I think he is right about that. Things are worse in Europe and Canada than they are in the United States. But we also have a problem with spineless relativism. It is worth practicing vertebrate enhancement of our culture, in anticipation of similar problems.

Low-Sex Marriage is Only a Problem if it Is.

CNN has an article on the reliably titillating subject of the "sexless marriage," which their experts describe as having intercourse less than ten times a year. One of their experts, Marty Klein, a licensed marriage counselor and certified sex therapist in Palo Alto, California, says that one cause of the problem of sexless marriages is "America's obsession with marriage."

I think this is exactly backwards. I think one cause of the problem of unhappy marriages is America's obsession with sex. Sure, sex is a fun, and is one of the many channels through which married people build up their ties with one another. Human beings are built for strong sexual desire at times, especially men. And you can't beat sex as a way to make babies.

Still, there are many more important things in life than sex. Sex is a normal good of marriage, but its good is not best measured in quantity. The more educated people are, the less often they have sex. This doesn't mean there is something wrong with them. It more likely means that they have other good things to do.

If a couple doesn't have sex much, that could be a symptom of a problem in their marriage. But a low-sex marriage is not a problem in itself.

Divorce Cuts Close Ties With Fathers in Half

Penn State researchers Alan Booth, Valarie King, and David Johnson,and Mindy Scott of Child Trends, studied how close adolescents felt to their fathers before and after divorce. The great majority (70+ percent) felt close to their mothers early and late in adolescence, regardless of whether their parents divorced.

With their fathers, most -- 57% -- felt close when asked in early adolescence. In later adolescence nearly half (48%) of the kids with married parents still felt close to their fathers. For the divorced kids, though, those feeling close to their fathers dropped to a paltry 25%.

Who Tortures? The Loyal. Who Won't Torture? Those with a Higher Loyalty

This week Centre College was visited by Darius Rejali, one of the leading experts on torture in the world. In his public lecture, he said that torturers are not chosen for their intelligence, but for their loyalty. One consequence of this fact is that torturers often can't tell when their victims have told them the truth. Their cruelty is for nothing.

In private remarks to another group at the college, Prof. Rejali was talking about the whistleblower at the Abu Ghraib military prison scandal, as well as in some other cases of torture. The whistleblower is usually someone just like the torturers in rank, in class background, in authority at the torture site. What they differ on is their commitment to a higher standard that gives them the courage to say "this is wrong, even if my superior says it isn't." Among Americans, the whistleblower is usually an evangelical Christian.

I think all of us have the capacity of be torturers if we thought it was the only way to protect our loved ones. Scholars like Prof. Rejali can convince our heads that torture does not work to do that, and creates worse harm to society. To move our hearts and guts to say no and stop torture usually requires an additional conviction, from a more spiritual source.

Religious Churning is Good

On the Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 4 (and last)

The headline on most articles about the Pew survey of the religious landscape have emphasized how much denominational switching Americans do. A quarter of American adults have made a biggish change from their childhood faith -- mostly Protestant-Catholic swaps, or vice-versa, but also switching across the Christian/non-Christian divide. When we include people who have switched from one Protestant denomination to another, the percent of religious switchers among American adults rises to 44%.

On the whole, I think religious switching is a good sign. This is what a free market looks like. Choice normally increases commitment. Converts are more intense members, as a rule. To pick a number out of the air, we might expect that nature plus nurture would make, say, 2/3rds of kids choose the same denomination as their parents. Even the groups with much higher retention rates now -- such as the 90% Hindu retention rate -- will likely drop closer to the two-thirds mark as subsequent generations get more Americanized.

Moreover, one of the critical requirements of a religious free market is the willingness to evangelize. Catholics and evangelicals can have significant switching out and still hold their market share because they evangelize. Jews and Episcopalians, to take just two of many examples, have significant losses but do not evangelize, and are slipping.

Religious change is a sign of a religiously vibrant society.

Catholic Lose Big, Hold Steady

On the Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 3

The Roman Catholic Church has been the largest denomination in the United States for five generations. Catholics make up about a quarter of the population. Yet the Catholic Church shows huge losses over a lifetime in the new Pew survey. Asking adults what religion they are now, and what they claimed as a child, the RCs show a 24% loss. Yet they remain nearly a quarter of the population. How is that possible?

Part of the answer is conversion. While 7.5% of the population reports that they once were Catholics but now are not, another 2.9% of the population made the shift the other way, making up almost 40% of the loss.

The other part of the answer is immigration. Almost half of all immigrants are Catholic. Immigrants make up nearly a quarter of the Catholic membership in this country - double the percentage of Americans who are foreign-born.

The Pew survey does not tell us when the exiting Catholics departed. It seems likely to me that there was a spike of departures in the wake of the recent priestly pedophilia scandals. If so, then the rate of departures is likely to slow down soon.

Still, for a group with such massive losses, the Roman Catholic Church is surprisingly and steadily robust in the United States.

Deconstructing the Religiously Unaffiliated

On the Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 2

One of the big findings of the Pew survey is that the "religiously unaffiliated" are now 16% of the adult population - making them the fourth largest "religious family." However, Pew also added a nuance to their questions that most surveys miss. They had the usual categories of atheists and agnostics, and then a catch-all category of "nothing in particular." The nuance comes in the next step: they let people within the nothing in particular category further defined themselves as "secular unaffiliated" and "religious unaffiliated."

So how do the religiously unaffiliated break down? The 16% of the total falls out:
Atheist 1.6% (of the total adult population)
Agnostic 2.4
Secular unaffiliated 6.3

Thus, the truly not religious population of the U.S. at the moment is 10.3% of the total. Another 5.8% of the total are not affiliated with a religious institution, but nonetheless think of themselves as religious.

Moreover, the unaffiliated are a changeable group. While 16% are unaffiliated now, only 7% were raised that way. And they are young - 31% are under 30, vs. only 20% of the whole population. And they are less likely to be married - 46% vs 54% of the total. They are more likely to be men - 59 vs. 48. Interestingly, the education and income profiles of the unaffiliated are the same as the population as a whole.

What this suggests to me is that the core of the religiously unaffiliated are unmarried young men. If we check in with them later in the life course, a significant portion of them will have become affiliated.

The Big Lumps of American Denominations

On the Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 1

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has released a new survey on the landscape of American religion that will be the benchmark study of this subject for a decade. It is big enough, at 36,000+ respondents, and diverse enough to give a picture of denominational groups down to .3 of the population.

I want to start with the big lumps of denominational families that it reveals. Americans are

1/4th Catholic
1/4th Evangelical Protestant
1/4th Mainline + Black Protestant
1/4th Everything else

Of the Everything else, about half are "nothing in particular" - but half of them say that religion is important in their lives.

All the non-Christian religions add up to about 5% of the total U.S. population.

58% of American Kids Live with Their Married Parents

The latest good news from the Census Bureau finds that a solid majority of kids live with their married parents. Another couple percent live with their unmarried parents -- and a significant hunk of those parents will marry. Being raised by their own married parents is the best situation for kids. That doesn't mean that the other options are terrible, or that all married parents are great. But most kids get the best option. And since most parents want to stay married and raise their kids together, most parents get the best option, too.

The Thin Religious Coalition Against Gambling

Kentucky is considering casinos. A broad coalition of religious groups oppose them. The surprise is that the liberal churches, starting with the Kentucky Council of Churches, have been strong leaders in the anti-gambling coalition. Many mainline churches, my Presbyterian Church included, have firm teachings against gambling going back to the days when we strictly regulated our own conduct.

I believe, though, that the mainline churches are more worried about other people's gambling than our own. Sure, gambling can ruin people in all classes, but it is far more likely to ruin the lives of poor people -- just like all the other regulated vices. Sure, everyone who is tempted to an addiction is helped if the temptation is forbidden. But ruinous gambling hasn't been a big item in the moral agenda of most mainline members for a long time. You can get a bigger mandate to limit smoking from mainline Christians than to hit the streets to fight gambling. Even the limited kind of gambling, such as the lottery and bingo, that are permitted here, involve the Other Danville and the Other Kentucky. On those rare occasions when I have seen lines of people purchasing lottery tickets or playing commercial bingo, I didn't know anyone there. In a small town, it is hard to go into any social setting and know no one.

The Louisville Courier-Journal had a good piece on this debate today (in which yours truly is quoted). I think Peter Smith, the journalist covering the religious angle of this story, is right that this debate has created some "strange pew-fellows."

Witty Prank of the Year: Frozen Grand Central

On Stridency in Bipartisan Marriages

The New York Times has a light piece in their "Modern Marriage" feature, "I Married a Republican." The author, Ann Hood, is of the all-good-people-are-Democrats school, yet she falls for and marries a man who "votes for the best candidates" - who almost always happen to be Republicans. Her friends are appalled. She finds his friends to be very nice people, yet she ends up ranting at them whenever politics comes up.

The moral turning point in the story comes when she realized that "it was not his stridency that was causing this rift in our marriage, but mine."

The story has a happy ending from Hood's (and the Times') perspective. Her husband decides Obama is the best candidate. As an Obama supporter myself, I applaud that outcome. I enjoy her suggestion that there should be a bumper sticker: "Barak Obama: Uniting America, One Bipartisan Marriage at a Time."

What struck me as odd about the story, though, was that the author never describes her political choices, or his, or anyone's as based on reasons. The whole frame of the story is that blind loyalty on our side is good, blind loyalty on the other side is bad. Stridency comes in for some muted criticism, because it creates marital rifts. But she does not make a case for choosing the best candidate. She is not won over by her husband's apparent calm and reasoned judgment. Only that she won.

Now, I appreciate that Ann Hood is employing a common women's conversational ploy of presenting herself as strident and unreasonable -- she is starting in the one-down position in relation to the reader -- so that the reader can invite her up to an equal position. I imagine that many of the women that she tells this story to respond with their own tales of realizing they were being unreasonable. This restores equality. It is a species of "troubles talk." Nonetheless, it seems to me that she missed the point of her own story. It is not just stridency that creates the rift. If we don't think critically about our own positions, and give others credit for thinking critically about theirs, we cannot reasonably heal the rifts created by our stridency.

She Is Ready for the Question Four Months Before He Pops It

The British program The National Wedding Show commissioned a survey of married couples in that country. They found that, on average, a couple got engaged nearly three years after they met: two years, eleven months, and eight days, to be exact.

The survey also found that she wished that he had proposed sooner -- four months sooner, on average.

I have met many couples in which she was waiting, with decreasing patience, for the proposal that she knew was coming. In fact, he often delays the proposal just because she is expecting it. He wants to surprise her. And he doesn't want to feel like he is following orders.

Still, if four months of grief can be avoided, or even cut back to two, many couples might have a happier life.

What Anger is For

Steven Stosny was the keynote speaker at the Bluegrass Healthy Marriages conference. Stosny is a marriage therapist and researcher, and co-author of the wonderfully titled How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It (which must be aimed at men).

Stosny had a fascinating sociobiological tidbit in his talk. He said the portion of the brain that is given over to anger is more than twice as large as the portion concerned with self-preservation. His reading of this: we developed anger to get us to protect our loved ones. We need to protect our loved ones because humans are more dependent on other people than most species are, especially during our long childhood. It is to our long-term advantage to protect our loved ones, especially our genetic relatives. But protecting our loved ones to the extent of endangering our own self-preservation is a hard and biologically costly choice. Thus we need to devote big brain resources to overcome our short-term individual interest in order to realize our long-term social interest. And anger makes us mad enough to override our higher calculations of interest and just do what needs to be done to protect our own.

Two Military Dictatorships Crumble

This is a great moment for democracy: Pakistan had an election displacing the military dictator, and Cuba announced the retirement of its military dictator. The Pakistani election has been marred by many things, yet it promises to bring to power multi-party democracy in a Muslim state, which is extremely rare. Cuba's announcement that Fidel Castro is retiring is even further from bringing in multi-party democracy, since he is likely to replaced by his brother.

Still, if the military (theirs and ours) can keep their hands off, I think we will see functioning democracies in both countries within a few years. It would also help if we had normal trade with both countries -- if we had ended our foolish embargo of Cuba 40 years ago, I think we would have brought Cuba into the club of American democracies long ago.

I am hopeful. Building democracy builds centrism.

Fraternities Fighting Casual Sex Face Challenges, Too

Fraternity parties are notorious sites for casual "hook ups." Recently I got another view of this issue from an officer of one fraternity that is trying to change that story in their own house.

"being respectful of women [is] a key element among our brothers, and even brothers [will be] called out for any disrespectful actions (such as groping, or any action that may make a woman uncomfortable).

[In our house, at least,] I believe the general statement that “fraternity parties are places where people hook up” to be especially true with non-fraternity male members. I believe the dance floor of a fraternity party provides a certain degree of anonymity in which males can “make a move” on a female, and if the female is willing, she can be taken back to a dorm without anyone noticing. I am frustrated by such occurrences because men who take women home anonymously will not have the criticism from the entire chapter to motivate them to choose the right decision."

Fraternities have the power to partly regulate their members' actions -- for good or ill. If, as sometimes happens, fraternity means that brothers assist one another in taking advantage of women, as in "Animal House," then the group makes things worse. On the other hand, a "good guy" fraternity can help one another uphold a higher standard of treating women respectfully. In that case it is the independent men who take advantage of the fraternity's open parties to meet incautious women, without the fraternity having any leverage to regulate the men's behavior.

The fraternity is, in this case, a help to women and the moral order; it is the independence of independents that leaves women and the moral order without protection.

The Adopting Act Holds

The General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission, the "supreme court" of the Presbyterian Church (USA), released a major decision this week on the Pittsburgh case. This case is the first of several heading to the GAPJC to test the real meaning of the church's adoption of the Peace, Unity, and Purity report in 2006, on which I have blogged quite a bit.

At issue in the Pittsburgh Presbytery case were two related points:
can a candidate for ordination in the church scruple behavior, as opposed to belief? and
can an ordaining body make a blanket determination of what the essential and necessary standards for ordination are?

In both cases the GAPJC said no.

Specifically, the court said that ministers and elders may declare that they disagree with the church's interpretation of scripture as requiring that all officers must “live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman or in chastity in singleness” (Book of Order, G-6.0106b) - but they must still act within that standard of behavior until and unless the whole church constitutionally changes that interpretation.

Second, the court said that the presbytery must take each case for ordination individually and not issue a blanket interpretation of church rules that go beyond what the constitution itself explicitly says. Each candidate's confession and scruples must be considered individually and as a whole.

In other words, the middle way that PUP promoted, and the Adopting Act of 1729 standard that it revived, were upheld by the court.