A Secular Age - Transformed!

We have been reading A Secular Age in Theory Camp this week. One of our number noted that an important theme of the book is how one age was transformed into something quite different. So he got us all Transformers stickers to annotate our books with.

A Secular Age 5

From the Theory Camp discussion of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.

At the halfway point of Theory Camp we came to a really big issue. Taylor writes that what we experience now is:

“the sense that all order, all meaning comes from us. We encounter no echo outside. In the world read this way, as so many of our contemporaries live it, the natural/supernatural distinction is no mere intellectual abstraction. A race of humans has arisen which has managed to experience its world entirely as immanent. In some respects, we may judge this achievement as a victory for darkness, but it is a remarkable achievement nonetheless.” (376)

Several of us saw the sociological reality that many people act as if their world is entirely immanent, with no reference beyond this world. Taylor's larger philosophical point, though, was eye-opening. To really grasp that there is a "race of humans" (though I think it is a class) who believe that all meaning comes from themselves, and who experience the world as entirely immanent because they believe that this world is all there is - was scary. "That's just crazy" said Scott* (possibly not his real name).

A very mind-expanding day. Worth the price of admission. And coffee.

A Secular Age 4

From the Theory Camp discussion of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.

Charles Taylor treats Reform - the larger movement that includes the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and their precursors - as the social movement that ultimately and without intending to produced today's secular subculture. His argument is surefooted and dense. At one point, though, he makes this remarkable admission:

“a very long-lasting bent in European culture towards Reform, in the widest sense … [is] the attempt by elites to make over society, and the life and practices of non-elites, so as to conform to what the elites identify as higher standards. This is a remarkable fact. I don’t pretend to have an explanation for it.” (242)

His main point is that the religious mission to fully Christianize the masses had a secondary goal of civilizing them. The irony is that civilizing, which was to be a secondary benefit of evangelizing and conversion, came to displace evangelizing as the primary goal. And this is doubly true of all the many subsequent social reform movements, which are still largely carried about by religiously motivated elites.

I have been puzzling over the "remarkable fact" for which he has no explanation. I put this question to the Theory Camp this morning. "Scott" (not her real name) offered that the elites might want to reform the masses in the elites' own image as an exercise of power. Scott apologized for offering so cynical an explanation. We then discussed the various "hermeneutics of suspicion" as a distinctively modern way of understanding - and undermining - seemingly well-meant actions.

I am disinclined to a cynical view. To be sure, every social movement is tinged with pride and self-assertion. Still, I think that the many movements to lift up the poor, marginal, and even self-destructive are primarily motivated by a good desire to help. They may be misguided, soft-headed, and produce unintended consequences. But the motivation is, on the whole, good. And the fact that a segment of the elite is moved to help the worse off is a basic fact about our society.

Taylor says that the great ethical issue for a secular society is whether this movement toward mutual benefit can really be produced by secularity itself, or whether it is parasitical on a prior religious culture, and draws mostly from religious people today. My observation is that people who stick with good works for the badly off are mostly religious people. In principle a sustained good works movement of secularists could be possible. But I don't think it likely. When secularists want the poor helped, they make the state do it, and tax everyone to pay for it. A move which produces more unintended bad consequences than good works that voluntarily come from the (religious) heart.

A Secular Age 3

From the Theory Camp discussion of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.

A great achievement of modern civilization is that the social elite do not spend their time making war on one another. Instead, they make business on one another.

Charles Taylor says that one of the great achievements of our modern moral order is creating "the economy" as an autonomous sphere, which has become the central arena of action for our ruling class. This is the last step in the long social process of taming the feudal nobility.

The nobles were independent military actors through the wars of religion. The revulsion against those wars created the idea of religious toleration and moved religion out of the state and into the new "civil sphere." A side effect was to reign in the nobility to royal power, and to expand the elite to include the non-military gentry. The warrior elite and the gentry elite were both domesticated as educated, civil, advisors and agents of royal power. The English elite broadened to include economic functions, both through the state and through their own business. The English pattern became a model for other national elites.

America, which was born without a warrior caste, or even with nobles, so takes for granted that the ruling class is a business class that this seems like common sense. It is good, therefore, to step back and celebrate the civilizing of the warrior class.

A Secular Age 2

From the Theory Camp discussion of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.

Charles Taylor rehearses the argument that all structure needs some outlet of anti-structure. In the pre-modern "enchanted" world, order exists in tension with disorder, and both need one another. Order is a world of power and inequality, even if it conduces to human flourishing; disordering the world’s order in the name of human solidarity - as in the medieval Carnivale - reminds us of the transcendent which unites and equalizes us.

When, in the modern world, we lost the sense that structure needs its complement of anti-structure, we laid the foundation for secularizing the public sphere. This way also leads to totalitarianism. He sees the French Revolution as the beginning of the eclipse of anti-structure. The revolutionary regime made festivals, as communist regimes do. But these celebratory totalitarian festivals are so dull that they fall with the regime.

Modern liberal societies recognize the need for complementary anti-structures in the division of powers. Pluralist liberalism allows a wide realm of anti-structure in the negative liberty of the private domain. The “public spheres of private life” – art, music, literature, thought, religion – create the voluntary public that complements the obligatory public of the state.

“All structures need to be limited, if not suspended. Yet we can’t do without structure altogether. We need to tack back and forth between codes and their limitation, seeking the better society, without ever falling into the illusion that we might leap out of this tension of opposites into pure anti-structure, which could reign alone, a purified non-code, forever.” (54)

The latter was the ‘60s revolutionaries’ error.

I see the force of this argument intellectually, but resist it in every other way. I have a dread of disorder, and do not see chaos as appealing at all. I would not go so far as to impose order on the unwilling, but I do think their lives would be better, and social life would be better, if everyone lived an orderly life.

Taylor reads the Reformation, as I do, as bringing the ordered life of the monastery out into the world, into the lives of all Christians. Taylor thinks the Reformers were unrealistic in thinking that the masses could sustain that level of order. I believe Taylor is correct. Which brings me to this question: Did the monasteries and convents also need bouts of anti-structure to renew their commitment to order? Or can some people, a small minority no doubt, maintain structure indefinitely without anti-structure?

A Secular Age 1

From the Theory Camp discussion of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.

Each year I run a two-week Theory Camp in which I sit down with a handful of students to work through a hard social theory book. Charles Taylor, a philosopher at McGill, has expanded his 1999 Gifford Lectures to a suitable fat book. We began our discussion today. I will blog as we work though it.

The usual way we talk about secularization is either about how religious institutions have been removed from the state and the public sphere, or about how religious belief has declined and unbelief expanded. Taylor says these are both true. He wants to consider a different sense of secularization that is broader and deeper.

People from all eras and civilizations report experiences of the "fullness" of existence - a connection between their lives and a deeper, richer existence. Fullness gives us a sense that our lives are meaningful, and meaningfully connected to a larger existence. The great religions of the world have articulated how this fullness is connected with a transcendent being, or at least a transcendent plane of existence.

Taylor says that the modern age has developed a third kind of secularization: whole communities now exist that believe fullness is possible without God or reference to a transcendent plane. To be sure, these communities are minorities even in their home societies in the North Atlantic world, and are tiny minorities on the planet as a whole. Nonetheless, Taylor is making sense of a social world that is common to most academic and many other highly educated people.

My interest as a sociologist in Taylor's notion of secularized communities is in finding their distinctive class location.

Arresting the Cat

My sister reports that my nephew, who is 7, "got a disturbing police office kit with handcuffs, sunglasses, and a pistol. Tried to arrest the cat. Not sure what the charge was but
'loitering' comes to mind."

Mrs. G. suggested "Driving While Feline."

Why Are There So Many Family Values Sex Scandals Now?

Most of the people drawn to marriage promotion and family values politics just want to improve marriage and family values. Some people who make a public name for themselves as family values politicians, though, were drawn to the movement to fight their own temptations. They were concerned about sexual morality in the first place because they knew the desires they were suppressing in themselves.

The Republican Party hitched its wagon to the "family values" star a generation ago. When sexual orientation became a major political issue, that, too, became part of the sexual purity package that Republicans used to differentiate themselves from Democrats. Opposing homosexuality and excoriating adultery became almost obligatory for new Republican politicians. Some of the people drawn to the movement at that time had demons they were fighting in themselves. Some of them got elected.

And now the chickens are coming home to roost. There are so many family values Republicans in office with affairs and, more rarely, homosexual encounters in their past that there is a new family values sex scandal almost every week. This week's affair, by State Sen. Paul Stanley over an affair with an intern, follows sex scandals of Mark Sanford and John Ensign and Larry Craig and Mark Foley .... And, no doubt, more to come.

Black Marriage Promotion is a Great Thing

CNN's series "Black in America 2" tonight featured Nisa Muhammad, the promoter of Black Marriage Day. I honor her hands on work in boot camps all over the country to help black couples make or keep good marriages. Black Marriage Day is a worthwhile publicity stunt to push the discussion. African Americans have the lowest marriage rate of any ethnic group in the country.

I learned from the show that Muhammad was motivated by a story that is all too familiar for African Americans today. Her own parents divorced. She married, had five kids, and then divorced herself. She started her black marriage crusade as a single mother. Since then she has married, though she and her husband live in different cities. Muhammad is on the road much of the time.

The next Black Marriage Day is March 28, 2010. The difficulties that African Americans face are a national problem for all Americans. I believe that the low black marriage rate, especially for parents, is the single most important source of the gap between African Americans and other Americans. I think it is particularly important for white people to study and understand black marriage. We will include Black Marriage Day in our family class next spring.

The Highest Status Group in the World

"The Elders are an independent group of eminent global leaders, brought together by Nelson Mandela, who offer their collective influence and experience to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity."

And who does Nelson Mandela call together to make the world better, using nothing but their personal charisma and the bully pulpit?

The Elders

• Kofi Annan
• Ela Bhatt
• Lakhdar Brahimi
• Gro Brundtland
• Fernando H Cardoso
• Jimmy Carter
• Graça Machel
• Mary Robinson
• Desmond Tutu
• Muhammad Yunus

Honorary Elders

• Nelson Mandela
• Aung San Suu Kyi

Top that, anyone.

Country Club Vs. Coffee House, By Party

From the Centre College Alumni Survey.

I asked "Is there a place, besides home or work, where you regularly spend time socializing?" This is a test of the "third place" idea, derived from the work of Ray Oldenberg.

I have noticed that coffee houses have a strong tendency to be left of center and Democratic. I don't think there is a distinctly Republican third place, but my guess is that the country club comes closest.

In the alumni survey, 138 said they socialized at the country club, while 164 socialized at the coffee house, out of about 1400 respondents. There was a 10% overlap between the two groups. The party ratio between the two third places:

Country club: Republican 54%, Democrat 30%
Coffee house: Republican 17%, Democrat 65%

(By the way, of the overlap group, 2/3rds are Democrats.)

Moon Landing

We were on the big family vacation of my childhood, a camping trip from Pennsylvania to Montana. That night we were listening to the car radio as we pulled into a campsite in North Dakota. Riveted. I was 9.

Neil Armstrong stepped on to the moon. And blew his big line.

Today's Perfect Irony: Big Brother (Amazon) Vanishes Your 1984

Amazon sells many copies of 1984. If you buy a book from them, and they change their mind about it, too bad for them. It is your property. That is what "property" means.

Recently Amazon created another nifty way to sell books, in the highly useful Kindle electronic book platform. They have sold many copies of 1984 in the Kindle form, as they have in other book forms. This week, though, Amazon stole back all the copies of 1984 that it had sold on Kindle.

Amazon is Big Brother. They should be ashamed of themselves. And this kind of anti-thought and anti-property theft will kill Kindle. I was going to get one. Now I will not, until they disable the "Amazon can steal all your stuff whenever it wants to" feature.

No WMD in Iraqi Sociology

Sociologists are ever vigilant for WMD - Weber, Marx, and Durkheim. A recent search of Iraqi sociology departments has revealed that they have no WMD.

Only Allah.

[Note to the humor impaired: this is a joke.]

C Street House is a Bad Frat

Centre College is favored with many fraternities for such a small school. There are good frats and bad frats.

A good frat lifts the brothers up to a higher standard. The weaker students are helped by the stronger ones. The less moral are helped by the more moral. The philanthropic work of the whole chapter helps each member develop the habits of being civic minded. All fraternities profess high ideals. When the organization actually works to help each other live up to those ideals, the result is very good for the men and for society.

A bad frat comes to think that "brotherhood" means that you back the play of the biggest fool in the house. If the Bluto of the house yells "Hey, y'all, let's go ... [do something stupid]" they all rise as one to do it to. If Otter sneaks his latest conquest back into the house, the other guys don't try to talk him out of it - they organize the cover-up.

The C Street House in Washington was born as a remarkable experiment in organizing poweful Christian men. Several members of Congress share a house, which also serves as their pastoral counseling and mutual accountability group. It has been in the news lately because several sex scandals by its members have been exposed all at once.

An example of C Street functioning as a good fraternity was when Sen. Coburn forced Sen. Ensign to write a letter to his mistress apologizing for using her for his [Ensign's] own pleasure. Coburn did not also see the sin in the political corruption of that affair - putting his mistress' son on the payroll, and the later payoffs and hush money to the mistress and her husband after Ensign fired them. Nonetheless, it was a start. The fact that Ensign resumed the affair immediately is not Coburn's fault, or C Street's. Some people are too corrupt to be helped even by their chosen accountability group.

It is hard to know whether C Street was being good or bad in Gov. Mark Sanford's sex scandal. Sanford said he "sought counsel" from C Street, which clearly didn't work. Sanford lived in the C Street house when he was in Congress.

Now another family-values Republican Congressman has been caught in a sex scandal. Chip Pickering, when he was a Congressman from Mississippi and living in the C Street house, had an affair that is now at the heart of his wife's divorce suit. The accountability group was obviously ineffective in stopping that affair. Worse, some of "wrongful conduct" between Pickering and his mistress supposedly took place in the C Street house. Pickering's mistress then put him on the company payroll to lobby his old buddies in Congress. This is more than just a failure of the C Streeters to be good Christian men of power. This is complicity in wickedness, corruption, and stupidity.

C Street House has become a bad frat.

Time Mostly Right on Marriage

Caitlin Flanagan has a sensible cover story in Time magazine about marriage. The moral pivot of her argument is this:

America's obsession with high-profile marriage flameouts — the Gosselins and the Sanfords and the Edwardses — reflects a collective ambivalence toward the institution: our wish that we could land ourselves in a lasting union, mixed with our feeling of vindication, or even relief, when a standard bearer for the "traditional family" fails to pull it off.

She goes on to argue, rightly, that marriage is not primarily about the adults' happiness, but about raising children.

I believe that Flanagan is right about the ambivalence that many people feel about marriage. I don't want to agree with her, but I have to admit that she is right. I don't want to agree because ambivalence kills.

So I see an additional conclusion to draw: people who promote marriage, like me, should school ourselves against feeling any sense of vindication when the marriages of family values hypocrites fail. It is just sad. These failures hurt the good cause. Feelings of Schadenfruede may be unavoidable, but we should not revel in it.

Most Centre Alumni Think of Themselves as Professionals

From the Centre College Alumni Survey.

I ended the survey with some experimental questions. Here is the first.

Sociologists try to come up with names for the different social status groups that most people fall in to. No one set of groups or names covers everyone equally well. These names are often based on your occupation. Based on your understanding of what you do and where you fit in American society, which names best describe your social group? Check those that apply best. 1200 out of 1400 alumni answered, often with overlapping answers.

63% Professional
18% Knowledge industry
14% Upper management
13% Middle management
13% Small business
12% Creative class
11% Entrepreneur
9% Home parent
3% Artisan
3% Skilled trade
3% Leisure class
2% Worker

Centre Alumni Help Out in Their Communities

From the Centre College Alumni Survey.

Half the alumni "regularly participate in local organizations, such as Rotary, garden club, community theater, Boy Scouts, recreational sports." About a third of those participating listed formal service organizations first, with youth support close behind, and religious organizations third.

In answer to the "third place" question - that is, "Is there a place, besides home or work, where you regularly spend time socializing?" two-thirds named at least one place. Among the most popular locations, with many overlaps, were: restaurants, named by 32%; athletic fields and gyms, 19%; parks 12%; coffee houses 12%; and country clubs 10%.

Centre Alumni Lean Democratic

From the Centre College Alumni Survey.

95% said they vote every election, or nearly. Only 9 individuals said they never vote.

About a third of the alumni said that their experience at Centre made their political views more liberal, while about an eighth said they were made more conservative by their college experience. Today, the alumni describe their political views this way:

30% Strong Democrat
20% Lean Democratic
14% Independent (including libertarian)
20% Lean Republican
16% Strong Republican

Young Earth Creationism as Innumeracy

Almost half of Americans believe that the entire universe was created within the past 10,000 years.

I am a centrist on creationism, as on most issues. I am with the 38% who believe that God has superintended evolution over millions of years. I think the "young earth" view is completely implausible.

So why do so many people believe in young earth creation? I believe it is because most people have no sense of history beyond their own grandparents, or perhaps their great-grandparents. Beyond that, all time seems equally distant. 1 thousand years, 10 thousand years, 10 million years, 10 billion years -- to a huge plurality of people, these are all just different ways of saying "a long time ago."

To be sure, there are some well-educated people who believe in young earth creationism. For them, their primary commitment is to the Bible; moreover, they are committed to a particular theory of Biblical interpretation. Young earth theories are a loyalty test to their more important intellectual commitment to their view of Scripture.

For the mass of people, the other 44.99 of the 45% of Americans who profess a young earth view, the important thing is that God is in charge. How many years God has been in charge is a quibble. What matters is that God has been in charge for all of the years that there have been. How many that is doesn't matter in any way that affects them.

When most people check the box on the poll marked "God created the world pretty much in its present form within the last 10,000 years" they don't really mean 10,000 years as opposed to 10 million or 10 billion. They mean "God created the world and I don't care what number you use."

Young earth creationism reflects innumeracy. But it reflects a deeper commitment to God's sovereignty.