The Public Sphere is Secular

Charles Taylor's Modern Social Imaginaries is concerned primarily with how modern society created three new spheres in which people could act: the economy, the public, and "the people." All three were created by imagining them as separate from, and a check on, the polity - the state, as we now think of it.

Premodern Europeans already thought of a sphere separate from the state which acted as a partial check on it: the church. The public sphere, Taylor suggests, is analogous to the church. But there is an important difference: the public sphere is secular. Taylor does not mean that the public sphere has to be separated from God, nor that the people acting in it must be separated from religion. Rather, he means that the public sphere is a place created in time by the people (some of them, anyway) acting collectively. And the way the people interact with the polity, and the economy, and the democratic machinery of the people as sovereign, all take place in time with reference to the order of this world.

The time of the public sphere is homogeneous, profane time. We may think of religious time or eternity as also existing, but the business of the public sphere is conducted in this world's time. And the business of the public spheres of other societies are also conducted in time - in the same time and in the same relation to time.

The modern public sphere makes the "public opinion" of the modern social imaginary essentially secular in the way it is made.

Modern Social Imaginaries 1

I am working my way through Charles Taylor's Modern Social Imaginaries. I am thinking of using this book in my Macrosociological Theory class. Early in the book, Taylor illuminates one of the great problems in teaching social theory: it is an intellectual's way of looking at the world. Most people do not live their lives thinking about the theory underlying even their own actions, much less the order of society as a whole.

Thus, Taylor proposes the idea of a "social imaginary." Ordinary people do not think in terms of theory, but they do think. They do things for reasons that make sense of their world. Moreover, what they try to do is limited by what they imagine will be an effective way to act. A social imaginary is a shared notion of how the world works and what actions make sense in it. Doing those actions, if they tend to work, makes the whole imaginary seem more true, more legitimate.

In teaching social theory I am initiating students into the small circle of social theorists, at least for a time. Yet they - we - are already participants in the social imaginary that we theorize about and with.

Taylor says that one thing that is distinctive and important about modern social imaginaries is that they do incorporate some elements of explicit social theory. The great modern revolutions, especially the American and the French, enacted theoretical ideas that had been debated and thought through by intellectuals in discourse with other educated participants in making social life. Thereafter, the social imaginary included some theories about individuals, equality, and liberty.

When we are studying social theories, one of the important ideas we will need to keep in mind is Taylor's theory of the not-quite-theoretical social imaginary.

Half of Kids are First-Borns

The other day I noted that a fifth of older Gen X women had no children. To complete the set, I made a rough calculation, based on Census data, of the proportion of their children in each birth order position. For women 40 to 44 in 2006, their children were distributed thus.

Onlies: 21.1%
Firsts (besides onlies): 32.1
Seconds: 32.1
Thirds: 10.5
Fourths: 2.8
Fifths and beyond: .8

What Would a Presbyterian Establishment Do Right Now?

I have been promoting rebuilding an authoritative (not authoritarian) establishment for the Presbyterian Church. The current votes in the church illustrate why we need such a thing.

The church has several amendments to the constitution before it for presbytery votes. One is the perennial attempt to remove the requirement that officers of the church be married or chaste in singleness. We keep voting on this because we have no establishment that can work out a settlement, behind the scenes and within the constitution, that will allow for the normal historic variation within the church on just how strictly each presbytery must subscribe to the constitution.

The other vote before the church has gotten much less attention than the sex amendment, but is more important in the long run. This is the proposal to adopt a new Book of Order. The proposed new book would be a general framework that could be adapted by the different presbyteries. If we adopted this new understanding of what the constitutional rules of order are for, we would not have to convulse the whole church every couple of years with a sex fight.

The Presbyterian Establishment, insofar as we have one, should come out strongly for this new kind of Book of Order. If we understood the constitution as a constitution, rather than as a rulebook, the Establishment could better function as an establishment within each presbytery, and across the whole church.

In Real Life, Awesome

My niece, a first-grader, uttered this dispatch from the cutting edge of youth lingo:

"Awesome. Really awesome. Seriously awesome. In real life, awesome."

Pronatalist Payroll Tax Policy

Philip Longman writes about the scary possibilities of the coming population decline. He and New America Foundation colleague David Gray have been working on a "new social contract." At the root such a contract they propose policies and cultural changes to assure that there is a new generation to have a social contract with.

One of the reasons population decline is scary is that in the future there won't be enough workers to support the retirement and medical entitlements of retired workers. Longman and Gray, therefore, propose that the payroll tax for parents be reduced by a third for each child while the kids are under 18. Parents of three children would pay no payroll tax while raising those future workers. Employers would keep putting in their share, though, and come retirement, the parents would get their full benefit from a grateful nation/economy. Longman and Gray propose to make this full benefit contingent on the kids graduating from high school, which is coming to be a minimum credential for workers.

This proposal seems to me to be sensible. The solution and the problem are tied together rationally. The policy would be simple to figure out and do. And policies that support the next generation of workers are not only good for the economy, they are good for all the family values of the nation.

15% of a Rich Nation Are Not Religious

The latest edition of the American Religious Identification Survey has found that 15% of Americans are not religious. This is up slightly from the 2001 survey, but is almost double the result found in 1990.

Educated people are less likely to be religious. Some think that religion is primarily a way of explaining the world, and educated people have learned another explanation. However, educated people are also more likely to be well off in every way - in their finances, their relationships, their psychic security. I think religious faith, for adults, is not primarily cognitive. It is not an explanation or set of ideas. Theology is for intellectuals. For most people, God is a source of confidence that their lives mean something, and a source of comfort that they are cared for in good times and, especially in bad.

When educated, secure people suffer serious setbacks, they often see that their cognitive idea of religion is not enough. For some this means a crisis away from faith. For others, like many of the no-religion people I meet, their crisis can be toward a real appreciation of the emotional roots of faith.

It is harder for rich, secure people to be religious. If you think you are doing well, are secure in your position, and that you got there by your own efforts, it is hard to feel gratitude to God. When bad things happen, it is easier for people to see how much we rely on the protecting hand of Providence.

Rich, secure, educated people who are religious typically do not think they achieved their lives on their own. The feel blessed and are grateful for their blessing which they do not deserve.

1/5th of Older Gen X Women are Childless

The rule of thumb is that about 87% of the women in a population will have children. In the United States and other industrialized nations the percentage has fallen below that as we move from the first wave of Baby Boomers, born in the 1940s, to the first wave of Gen Xers, born in the 1960s. By the time they were 44, the usual end of a woman's fertile years, about 86% of older Boomer women had children. For older Gen Xers, the number is 81%.

Put another way, almost a fifth of older Gen X women, the "Atari wave" as opposed to the "Nintendo wave" of the '70s, will have no children. Gen Xers are more likely to be educated, and to have more education, than their predecessors. All those years of schooling and career starting eat into baby time. This catches many forty-something women by surprise. Also, as the most divorced-upon generation, the Xers were much slower to marry and have kids than their predecessors were, for fear of screwing their kids up.

It is too early to know the completed fertility of the Millennials, or even the later wave of Xers. If the increasing numbers of weddings by young Millennials that I get invited to are any indication, though, the rising generation of fertile women may reverse the trend of their "lost generation" predecessors.

Old Dads Risk Dumber Kids

Australian psychiatrist John J. McGrath and colleagues found that children of older fathers were likely to have lower IQs than children of younger fathers. Their kids were also more likely to be schizophrenic or autistic.

The children of 50 year old fathers had average IQs 6 points lower than the children of 20 year old fathers. That is half a standard deviation - a pretty substantial difference.

A woman has all her eggs at birth. They run the risk of wearing out and breaking down, which is one of the reasons that children of older mothers are more likely to have some birth defects. However, the children of older mothers did not score any lower on the intelligence measures in this study.

Sperm, on the other hand, and made continuously. It was thought that this prevented the kind of breakdown with age that eggs show. McGrath and colleagues, though, point out that there are many more steps in the copying process to produce sperm in older fathers. The sperm of 20-year-old men are the result of about 150 cell divisions; those of 50-year-old men, 840. Each division provides a new opportunity for mutation and error.

The Peculiar Religious Obliviousness of "Kings"

NBC's new series "Kings" was advertised as a "what if" story of a king arising in a place that looked remarkably like America after a major war. This looked like a large-scale epic, beautifully shot, with Ian McShane in the leading role. The capitol, rebuilt from the rubble, looked like the proposed Freedom Tower to be built on the World Trade Center site. The Gruntleds tuned in, looking for a modern political allegory, and wondering who thought monarchy was the answer.

To our surprise, the story is built directly out of the story of King Saul and King David. McShane's "King Silas" leads Shiloh in a war with Gath. Young David Shepherd single-handedly defeats Gath's Goliath (tank) while rescuing the king's son, Jack. The story does not shy away from God - King Silas takes his mission from a divine sign. Young David is annointed by a preacher named Samuel(s).

And yet, after a valiant hour, we gave up. The show is well done - good acting, decent dialogue, really nice photography. But I just couldn't forget the Biblical story in order to get into this story - not after the show went to such great lengths to remind us of the biblical story. This wasn't, as the official website contends, "a contemporary re-telling of the timeless tale of David and Goliath." This is the story of David and Saul - but without God as the central character.

The Bible is a rich field of story and image, the most fertile bed of the imagination of the West. I have no problem with allegories and analogies drawn from Biblical models. But it seems to me a perverse misreading of the Bible to treat its stories as if they were themselves allegories of politics in religious dress.

I was once in a group of earnest young people wrestling with how to understand the mystical experience of God. One young man, not really in sympathy with the project, said it would be easy to find out: just go into the desert and fast for forty days. If you had a mystical experience, then it was real. This was such a perversely backwards way of understanding mysticism that we were left speechless. If you go into the desert and fast, but are not earnestly seeking God, you are not recreating the absolutely vital core of the desert mystics' experience.

The story of David and Saul is the most poignant story in the Bible of trying to serve God while wielding earthly power. If you tell the story of Saul and David but they are not earnestly seeking to fulfill the vocation God gave them, you have missed the vital core of the David and Saul (not David and Goliath) story.

Facebook Protestant Award

Last week, as I was recovering from surgery, I remarked a particularly happy milestone with this status update on Facebook:

"[Gruntled] says no painkillers + coffee = clearer head, better work ethic"

To which a very Catholic friend replied:

"if that fb update were to enter a contest for the most protestant update ever, it would win."

Men's and Women's Different Sexual Peaks Not a Tragedy, But a Complement

In class I mentioned the well-known stereotype that men reach their sexual peak in their early 20s, whereas women reach their sexual peak in their mid-30s. Afterwards I realized that I did not really know the research behind this claim, nor what, exactly, "sexual peak" means.

Alicia Barr, Angela Bryan, and Douglas Kenrick did research at Arizona State on whether people think men peak in their early 20s and women in their mid-30s. They do. And what most people seem to have in mind for "peak" is a little different for men and women. For men, sexual peak means their peak of desire; for women, their peak of satisfaction. When they asked when men and women peaked in sexual desire, satisfaction, and frequency (of intercourse), men were still thought to peak earlier than women on each dimension, though they were pretty close together, of necessity, on frequency.

Alfred Kinsey's plaint that this difference was a tragedy. Some have even suggested that it would be good to change our mating system to bring older women together with younger men, matching peak to peak. This is what might called the "cougar strategy."

Barr and colleagues, though, speculated on why this difference might have evolved. Men prefer young women who are at their most fertile. Women favor older men when they have the most resources. Different sexual peaks would counteract these opposing desires with a balancing sexual motivation.

If young men with few resources most desire young women, they will compete harder for them, wooing them with ambition and commitment. The young women, prudently, are not so swayed by sexual desire that they do not choose wisely among their suitors. If women in their mid-30s, by contrast, are heading to the end of their childbearing years just as their male counterparts -- their husbands, for most women -- are becoming most successful, they will compete better to hold their mate's attraction with more satisfying sex. For both men and women, the shifting balance of passion and prudence across the childbearing years strengthens marriage.

Contrasting sexual peaks is an instance of the marvelous complementarity of marriage.

Making Marriage Ordinary is the Best Role Model of All

Merlene Davis writes a column for the Lexington, KY Herald-Leader. She writes homey, sensible pieces about her husband and children, jobs and schools, their local neighborhood, and sometimes about larger issues. Most papers have a middle-aged mom writing a similar column. I like her column and read it regularly. Davis is black, so often takes an explicitly African-American take on these universal themes.

In today's column Davis has a nice piece about the quiet 25th anniversary celebration she had with her husband recently. She notes that there are many public benefits to marriage. Communities in which marriages are the norm are safer, richer, happier, and more giving. Married people are richer and healthier, too. But the main reason she is married is because she loves her husband, and likes him, too. The feeling, she says, is mutual. The public benefits are gravy.

These micro and macro benefits of marriage are universally true. She says the Davises don't deserve any particular notice for making it to 25 years. Their parents and couples in that generation routinely enjoyed mariages twice that long and then some.

What struck me most in Merlene Davis' column was her modest assessment of how she contributed to the public good:

Through it all, I've never considered us to be examples for younger couples. We are rather run-of-the-mill. Most of our friends, black and white, are ancient, and most have been married much longer than we have.

Davis notes, though, that black America passed a tipping point in the past generation. Marriage is not the norm for most black Americans. This is not true of any other ethnic group. She praises the upcoming annual Black Marriage Day. She and her husband should be role models, encouraging young African-Americans, including their own children, to aim for marriage. And the best role modeling is to make a community where marriage is a normal, "run-of-the-mill" institution that regular people join in. For themselves and for the public good.

The Gender Gap Only Matters If it Hurts Society as a Whole, Over Generations

There is a well-known gender gap in the average pay of men and women. Likewise, there is a gap in the proportion of men and women at the top of most occupations.

People whose main conviction is for equality look at the gender gap and see something bad because men and women aren't the same.

People whose main conviction is for liberty look at the gender gap and see something potentially good because men and women get to choose what they want.

Most of these gaps come from the differences between married fathers and married mothers. Married men respond to parenthood by working more and seeking more money, status, and power. Married women respond to parenthood by working less and trading money, status, and power for greater time to raise their children.

From the perspective of the good of society as a whole, both equality and liberty are means to a greater end. Neither equality nor liberty are ends in themselves. In order for there to be society at all, there have to be children. Having some educated women choose to have children and invest themselves in them is a good thing for society.

On Mental Fogginess

I have felt too mentally foggy since surgery last week to write the blog. Last night I stop taking painkillers. This morning I had caffeine for the first time in almost a week. I feel much clearer right now.

On the other hand, I thought several emails that I wrote over the past few days, including some written from the hospital, were competent -- until the recipients had to ask for clarification of some words that were clearly not the right ones. So I decided I better not try to grade until I could get external validation that my brain was truly up to speed.

When I told my father-in-law the above, he told me of a time he had twisted his back and was on serious pain medication for a week. He did his job through the week - but found afterwards he had no memory of anything he had done.

His conclusion was the punchline of my thought on this subject: "To think that some people take drugs on purpose." Amen.

I don't understand why people would want to have an altered consciousness. I am not talking about medicine that helps give you a normal, focused mind. I am talking about wanting to be high or drunk. I just don't get it.

In many ways I am a regular guy. (More ways than my family will assent to, I maintain). But I know from the long history of alcohol and high-inducing plants found in every culture I have ever heard of, that most people do like an escape (I guess) from this reality. And the well-off seem as likely to seek this escape as the miserable, at least in moderation. I don't condemn this. Jesus made wine - it can't be all bad. But in this particular I am an outlier, in the tail of the distribution.

I don't like to be mentally foggy. I like this reality, seen clearly.

Out of Action for a Bit

I am going in for non-scary surgery this morning. [OK, Mrs. will only allow that it is not very scary.] This will knock me out for a few days.

I am working on a nifty post about the science of the idea that men and women have different "sexual peaks." Stay tuned.

Scratch Beginnings is Not About Race (Surprisingly)

Adam Shepard is white - I know this from his picture on the cover of Scratch Beginnings. Some of the people he lives with in the shelter and works with at the moving company in Charleston, SC, are black. I think. There are clues in the biographies and dialogues he gives us that suggest as much. So does the sheer demography of Charleston. If there is a hero in the book, it is Derrick, the best mover in the company who becomes Shepard's partner and landlord. Several context clues suggest strongly that Derrick is black.

Yet it is a remarkable fact about this book and the world it illuminates that race never intrudes in the story. The men in the shelter and on the several jobs Shepard has seem to be of many hues and ethnicities, but that is not central to their story. And it is not possible that a college-educated Southern white boy did not notice race or did not think about whether it matters. My guess is that Shepard was determined not to make race one of his standards for measuring people. When he was writing his story, his race did not seem to be central to how others were measuring him. I believe he must have made a conscious decision not to tell readers the race of the people he met because it was not really important to the story he was telling.

I take this as a measure of progress. Adam Shepard is of a new generation. Survey research suggests that Millennials think that ethnic variety is a good thing, and race just doesn't tell you much about what another person is like. If this means the rising generation is less obsessed with race than the retiring generation has been, then we are indeed making progress.

Scratch Beginnings Shows the Continuing Power of Privilege

Yesterday I wrote about Adam Shepard's experiment in Scratch Beginnings to work his way up from nothing to something by hard work and careful thrift. He succeeded, which is the main point of his book and a valuable lesson to keep testing.

Shepard also had several advantages that many of the other guys in the homeless shelter did not. He was young, healthy, and educated. He did not come into the shelter with addictions, a criminal record, or children to care for. He was a native English speaker. These are all privileges. Shepard did not ignore the advantages he had. Rather, he was making a case that attitude, work, and prudence can still produce success. He also believes, though of course could not prove with this one-case experiment, that attitude, work, and prudence could overcome the disadvantages that many of the other guys had.

Shepard bolsters his case with some valuable lessons he learned from the people he met in the shelter and on the job. Chapter 7 is entitled "Job Hunting 101 with Professor Phil Coleman." Coleman was one of the "resident nutcases at the shelter that no one paid much attention to." But he did give Shepard a valuable lesson in how to get hired:

You gotta go down to these managers and be like, 'Look here, homeboy. You need me. I'm the best worker you're gonna find, so hire me or not.'

Shepard accepted this as a solid point. He did go on to get a real job by persistently selling himself as a good worker. Shepard also knew the even more important follow-up point:

And after I had a job, it was just a matter of disciplining myself enough to keep that job and save the money that I needed to achieve my financial goals.

This second point was one that, sadly, Professor Coleman never managed to take in, which was why he had had 50 jobs but was still a regular at the homeless shelter.

Scratch Beginnings Shows the Continuing Power of Hard Work

Adam Shepard read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed in college. As an experiment, she tried to live on minimum wage, and found it nearly impossible to feed, clothe, and, especially, house herself on minimum wage. Shepard wondered if it would really be so hard to work up from nothing, if you were disciplined and not self-destructive. Putting his money where his mouth was, he took the clothes on his back and $25 to Charleston (chosen at random). He tells his story in Scratch Beginnings.

He found a homeless shelter the first night. He took every job he could find. He managed his money very carefully. He didn't smoke, drink, or buy lottery tickets - the specific ways his sheltermates wasted their little extra money.

Most importantly, he learned that he was never going to get a regular job by filling out want ads when he lived at a homeless shelter. Instead, he took himself to an employer who caught his eye - a moving company, but it could have been any of dozens of blue collar jobs - and made a determined pitch that he was a hard worker who could be relied on. They took a chance on him. He wasn't a great mover, but he learned. He worked civilly with the other movers, especially the good ones. And he just kept showing up reliably, taking harder jobs as they were offered.

Shepard gave himself one year to have himself housed with next month's rent ready (Ehrenreich's standard) plus have a working vehicle and $2,500 in the bank. Through hard work and diligence, he met those goals within 8 months. He also made friends, and learned to respect the guys at the bottom who kept working honestly.

Adam Shepard gives a good answer to Barbara Ehrenreich's main claim that the bottom rung jobs are not enough to sustain a worker.

Can Gen-X Bring Outcomes Assessment to the Church?

My fellow Presbyterian-poker Michael Kruse has a good post, "Budgets Are Not Moral Documents." He takes issues with evangelical Left leader Jim Wallis, who has famously argued that budgets are, indeed, moral documents. Wallis' contention is that you tell what an organization values by what it spends on. I think this is partly true. But Kruse makes the important point that what really matters to the world is not what you spent money on, but what effect your spending, and your work, has.

The church, and the non-profit world in general, are just pervaded with the idea that what matters is what we put in to achieving our goals, not what we get out of our money and work. Kruse is a church reformer trying to get the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to pay more attention to the effects of its spending than their good intentions (or worse, to their job protection intentions). Mrs. G. is an education reformer trying to redirect the attention of public schools in a parallel way. Higher education, where I labor, is beset by ranking systems that measure inputs, like endowments size and spending per pupil, and not outcomes - what students learn and what kind of people they become as a result.

I have written about the broad difference in mindset between Baby Boomers and Generation X. I don't know where Kruse fits in this narrative. I do know that Wallis is a classic Boomer. I am on the cusp between the two generations, so I daily notice the difference. Boomers are often content to be judged by the morality of their rhetoric. Xers are more likely to eschew rhetoric and Just Do It.

One of the great achievements of Gen X as they now come to power could be to shift the practice of institutions from talking a good game to doing what it takes to actually improve achievement.