Fight the Dragon. Or Housefly.

To stop men from peeing on the floor, authorities at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam have etched the image of a black housefly into each urinal. It seems that men usually do not pay much attention to where they aim, which can create a bit of a mess. But if you give them a target, they can’t help but try to hit it. Similar designs have been implemented in urinals around the world, including mini soccer goals, bulls-eyes, and urine video games (seriously). Do they work? Since the bugs were etched into the airport urinals, spillage has decreased by 80 percent.

(From the very gruntled GOOD magazine.)

On the Forbes College Rankings

This is my final back-to-school story.

Forbes magazine just published its first college rankings. Centre College did exceptionally well -- 13th among all colleges and universities in the United States -- so you can imagine that we have been pleased. Still, modesty compels us to be a little skeptical of such a result.

A closer look at the method they used, though, increases my confidence in the result. The great weakness of the U.S. News rankings, the standard in the field, is that they are based almost entirely on inputs to education, such as endowment per student or student-teacher ratios, and not on measures of the outcomes of education. Forbes, by contrast, uses outcome measures. Specifically, the Forbes rankings, compiled by The Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP), used these five components:

1. Listing of Alumni in the 2008 Who's Who in America (25%)

2. Student Evaluations of Professors from Ratemyprofessors.com (25%)

3. Four- Year Graduation Rates (16 2/3%)

4. Enrollment-adjusted numbers of students and faculty receiving nationally competitive awards (16 2/3%)

5. Average four year accumulated student debt of those borrowing money (16 2/3%)

Outcome measures are, in principle, better than inputs in figuring out what real effect a school has on students. And each of these outcome measures is not a bad one. Even the Rate My Professors score, which seems the sketchiest, is (as they show) well correlated with more commonly used measures of teaching effectiveness.

Forbes measured outcomes while controlling for the size of the school. This sensible procedure demonstrates that small liberals arts colleges really do stand out. Sure, every big U has some great student successes, but on a base of tens of thousands who pass through the ed factory. A small college with a good faculty, of which there are many, offers better teaching for most students than even the best universities. Sure, the University of Virginia (43) gets some really great students, but Centre College (13) does more with the fine students we get -- all of them, not just the stars.

I hope Forbes will push all the college rankers to focus more on outcomes, especially long-term outcomes.

Here, then, are the Forbes top 25:

1 Princeton University
2 California Institute of Technology
3 Harvard University
4 Swarthmore College
5 Williams College
6 United States Military Academy
7 Amherst College
8 Wellesley College
9 Yale University
10 Columbia University
11 Northwestern University
12 Wabash College
13 Centre College
14 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
15 Bowdoin College
16 United States Air Force Academy
17 Middlebury College
18 University of Chicago
19 Smith College
20 Pomona College
21 Wesleyan University
22 Haverford College
23 Stanford University
24 Hamilton College
25 Sarah Lawrence College

High School Graduation Peaked Last Year

A third back-to-school story:

All the public and private high schools in the United States graduated about 3.34 million students last year. That is likely to be the peak number for the foreseeable future, projecting out to 2022. This is the finding reported in the most recent edition of the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education's series of high school and college projections.

The declining number of high school graduates will put further pressure on the massive expansion of college and college-like training to go deeper into the pool of warm bodies just to sustain the credentialing apparatus we now have.

Still, it is a very good thing that there are more high school graduates than ever before.

Murray is Right: Too Many Go to "College"

Here is another good back-to-school subject.

Charles Murray has written another provocative book, Real Education. A few months ago he gave a summary of his argument in the Wall Street Journal.

He argues that liberal arts education is for the intellectual elite. Our society is already good at seeing that the smartest kids get channeled toward the best colleges. We are not so good at channeling the vast middle of kids to vocational education. We do not give vocational education the same status. This inflates the value of college degrees socially and economically, and forces liberal arts colleges to try to provide job training for which they are ill equipped.

I am a sociology professor at a liberal arts college. Murray specifically slams a B.A. in sociology as telling you nothing about what the degree holder knows. I agree. In a liberal arts education, where you went to school matters more than which discipline you studied most.

And if you don't need a liberal arts education, or aren't ready for one now, by all means don't go to college just for social reasons. Vocational education, if it really teaches its craft, is honorable education, just as craft works of all kinds is honorable work.

Faculty Moderation

The New York Times reported in the dead of summer on the increasing moderation of professors. This seems like an excellent back-to-school story to me.

On a liberal-moderate-conservative scale, professors as a whole are more liberal than conservative, with a strong body of self-described moderates. Within disciplines, social scientists are the most liberal, with just over half reporting that position. Business professors have the most conservatives - about a quarter. The middle-most disciplines are computer science and engineering, which report nearly 90% moderation.

When we look by generation, the Baby Boomers, now aged 50 to shading off to retirement at 65, are the most liberal. Boomer humanities professors are the most liberal group of all, with nearly three quarters choosing that label and negligible percentages choosing "conservative."

The younger generations, though, are notably less liberal than the Boomers, and more moderate. Gen X humanities professors, for example, have only half the rate of liberals that their elders show.

There are significant variations by disciplinary area. The Boomer scientists are not nearly as liberal as their humanities counterparts are; Gen X scientists, though, show more liberals than their elders. My guess is that this reflects the massive increase in women in science after the Baby Boom generation.

The general trend across all disciplines, though, is that the professoriate will get less liberal and more moderate as the older generations retire. This is good news for centrism.

Gone to Capon Springs

Like most Americans, I take two weeks of real vacation a year. Christmas week is one of those weeks. This week is another. The Gruntleds are off to lovely Capon Springs, WV, a fine, mineral-spring-fed family reunion.

See you in a week.

Obama and McCain's Favorite Songs

I can see why Obama would favor Ready or Not. It could work as a campaign anthem.

But John McCain's favorite song is Dancing Queen? Seriously? I guess if he is just discovering the internet now, maybe he is really a teenager. Let's watch for OMG to start appearing in his speeches.

Blender magazine asked the presidential candidates to name their top ten favorite songs.

Sen. Barack Obama
1. Ready or Not Fugees
2. What's Going On Marvin Gaye
3. I'm On Fire Bruce Springsteen
4. Gimme Shelter Rolling Stones
5. Sinnerman Nina Simone
6. Touch the Sky Kanye West
7. You'd Be So Easy to Love Frank Sinatra
8. Think Aretha Franklin
9. City of Blinding Lights U2
10. Yes We Can will.i.am


Sen. John McCain
1. Dancing Queen ABBA
2. Blue Bayou Roy Orbison
3. Take a Chance On Me ABBA
4. If We Make It Through December Merle Haggard
5. As Time Goes By Dooley Wilson
6. Good Vibrations The Beach Boys
7. What A Wonderful World Louis Armstrong
8. I've Got You Under My Skin Frank Sinatra
9. Sweet Caroline Neil Diamond
10. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes The Platters

The Marriage Movement in the Civil Sphere

Jeffrey Alexander envisions the civil sphere as driven by social movements that realize the basic civil values against intrusions from the uncivil spheres. All of his examples of such movements are “progressive” in the liberal sense. They are movement to remove hierarchy, exclusion, restriction.

Marriage, by its nature, is exclusive and restrictive. Parenthood, by its nature, is hierarchical. Could a movement to restore marriage and married parenthood to the center of the civil sphere’s understanding of family life succeed in Alexander’s conception of the civil sphere?

Marriage is an institution. Alexander lays out what he thinks are the basic binaries governing institutions.

A marriage movement would need to make a convincing case that marriage is the more legitimate institution of the available alternatives.

The first thing an Alexandrian marriage movement would need, therefore, is a good enemy. Ideally, the enemy would be an institution with the same functions as marriage, but embodying the bad side of the binaries. I think the main, irreplaceable function of marriage is to bind a man and woman together in a uniquely powerful way so that they can endure the sacrifice and stress of raising their children in the way that serves society best.

The name of the enemy institution, therefore, is cohabitation.

Let’s contrast marriage and cohabitation in the terms of Alexander’s binary of institutions:

Marriage is strongly rule regulated: all of your resources belong by rule and definition to the marriage, with your children having first claim on their use. Cohabitation is arbitrary, because either party can declare some resources to be personal, and there is nothing in the rules of cohabitation that can be appealed to to prohibit that claim. This applies especially to the rule of sexual exclusivity.

Marriage is a relationship recognized by law. It is not a private arrangement between two individuals, but a social relationship recognized in public and protected by law from anyone who would pull it asunder – including the parties themselves. Cohabitation is regulated only by the relative power of the two parties, with the less committed party having more power to get his or her (usually his) way by the threatening to unilaterally withdraw.

Marriage requires equality in the couple. To take the biblical metaphor of what a marriage is, two become one flesh. In one flesh, as St. Paul says in another place, it makes no sense for one part of the body to claim superiority over another, because both (all) parts are necessary to the whole. Cohabitation, by contrast, produces inequality in the relationship. In practice, the one who contributes more money controls the decisions. Alexander, in discussing the movement for women’s equality, describes patriarchy as coming from the family sphere. Yet patriarchy is not essential to marriage, nor to family life. We should see this move on Alexander’s part as his attempt to pollute the family sphere as a whole as uncivil in order to bolster his case that the civil sphere is egalitarian and therefore civil.

When we get to the inclusive/exclusive binary, we run into a problem. The best I can think of is that marriage includes a concern with the public good, especially for raising children as citizens, whereas cohabitation excludes a concern for the public good because it is exclusively oriented to the private benefit of the couple. This is true, but a bit of a stretch. I am inclined to think that Alexander is just wrong that inclusive/exclusive is one of the basic binaries of society. In particular, I think any theory that aims at solidarity has to treat an exclusive commitment to the solidary whole as a good thing.

Alexander says institutions are civil if they are impersonal contracts – meaning that they are valuable regardless of the specific people embodying the institution and the specific relations they have with one another. Uncivil institutions reward only those who have personal bonds of loyalty to the specific people in them. Marriage as an institution is a civil contract that is supported by society because it benefits society as a whole, impersonally. Cohabitation is a private relationship that only benefits those with a personal bond of loyalty from the cohabiters.

Married parents form a powerful group in society with a permanent interest is seeing that all of society has public schools, public health, public safety, public security, and so forth. Cohabiters can, at best, form a temporary faction arguing for this policy or that, and usually for their own benefit rather than for the permanent public good.

To be a husband or a wife is to occupy an office through which the civil sphere regulates the uncivil sphere of family life. To be shacking up means you do what you want according to whatever personality you happen to have, with no point of leverage for civil regulation.

Thinking about a marriage movement in the Alexandrian civil sphere makes me notice another quality of all of his examples: they are all movements that promote solidarity. This is not so surprising, since he tells us first and last that social solidarity is the utopia we seek. What he did not make clear is that the values of the civil sphere would lead one to reject the libertarian values of sheer individualism. Alexander does not support social movements that aim to produce less social solidarity. The “leave me alone” movements simply have no place in Alexander’s civil sphere. They are anti-solidarity, and thus self-polluting.

A marriage movement could beat a cohabitation movement on the grounds that marriage is more civil (though we would have to wrestle about the relevance of the inclusive/exclusive standard to either one). A marriage movement could beat a cohabitation practice – or worse, a practice that left kids with divorced parents, never-married parents, sometime parents, or sheer chaos – on the grounds that all the disorganized forms of parenting were anti-social, were a threat to solidarity itself.

The Civil Religion of the Civil Sphere

Jeffrey Alexander treats religion as one of the uncivil spheres that surrounds the civil sphere. Religion makes a contribution to society, but it produces its own peculiar beliefs and hierarchies that ever threaten to intrude into the civil sphere. The civil sphere must do constant boundary maintenance and civil repair to keep religion in its place.

The civil sphere itself, in Alexander's account, has its own distinctive values and moral aspirations. It is, as he says several times, a project to create a democratic society. The overarching values of society reside there, which can be mobilized to trump and regulate the values of the uncivil spheres.

The values of a society get enacted and celebrated in rituals, something that Alexander, a good Durkheimian, would acknowledge. Celebrating the rituals of civil life helps create and renew solidarity in society as a whole.

In other words, the faith and practice of the civil sphere is the civil religion of society.

Civil religion is not part of the state, any more than voting, parties, or the norms of office are part of the state. Civil religion is one the ways in which the civil sphere regulates the other spheres, especially the state.

Civil religion has a complex relation with the universal religions that are (barely) contained in the religious sphere. They differ primarily in their Ultimate Concern -- God or Enlightenment in the case of universal religions, society itself in the case of civil religion.

Contrary to Alexander's hopeful, but maddeningly vague, picture of the contents of the civil values, it is not right to say that the ultimate concern of every civil sphere is democracy. As he notes repeatedly, each society's civil sphere is specific and historical. Its concerns are those of that society first, and perhaps of some higher global civil society only at the edges. And the object of veneration of civil religion, even the civil religion of a democratic society, is not democracy. It is the veneration of that particular society, its particular people, history, and manifest destiny.

The civil sphere does not put religion in its place. The civil sphere has a civil religion of its own.

Are the Melting Pot and Hyphenated-Identity the Same?

Jeffrey Alexander argues that out-groups can get included in civil society in three ways: assimilation, hyphenation, and multiculturalism. These modes of incorporation form a spectrum. Every group experiences a bit of each - which predominates in each era and for a specific group is an empirical question. Alexander cites the case of Jews in America as a successful case of incorporation that moved from assimilation prior to the twentieth century, through hyphenation in the early part of the twentieth century, to a remarkable form of multicultural acceptance of difference since World War Two.

Alexander treats the middle term of this sequence as hyphenation, which he says is better known as the melting pot. Yet on the face of it, hyphenating a group's identity, or amalgamating it into the whole, are different processes. They may be opposites. Both ideas were, in fact, developed by Jewish Americans to understand and theorize Jewish-American experience.

In Israel Zangwill's popular play, "The Melting Pot," all the national identities that the peoples of America bring are melted together to form an amalgam, an alloy, that is different from any of the source identities. This is the critical difference between amalgamation and assimilation. Even when there is a clear difference between the host society and the newcomers being incorporated, it makes a big difference whether the outcome of incorporating the out group leaves the host society unchanged. The host society assimilates the out group by stripping off their cultural distinctives, leaving only their naked personhood to be remade in the host's image. The host society amalgamates the out group, by contrast, by melting both together to produce something new, including a new culture for the host society.

"Pluralism" as a social theory was primarily developed by Horace Kallen. He argued for hyphenated identities -- a group could be both loyally American and still distinctively itself. The two identities, though, are clearly in a hierarchy: American is the overarching identity, modified by the hyphenated variant. In becoming Newcomer-Americans, the newcomers have clearly given up some elements from the old country. They have gained a new way of being Newcomers (whatever that means in a cultural sense).

Alexander argues, and I agree, that the civil sphere of the United States is actually pretty healthy. We are good at incorporating newcomers. We are getting better at incorporating them (us) in a way that makes them real Americans, but with the distinctive flavor of their group culture. The outsider is converted from “a strange intruder to a familiar friend.”

Alexander rejects the extreme kind of multiculturalism that sees each group remaining separate. He does not denigrate America society as inherently oppressive, to be resisted in the name of identity politics.

As I look at it, Alexander's multiculturalism (the good kind) is the same as what he describes as hyphenated incorporation. Hyphenation is not the same as the melting pot. Hyphenation is the same as multiculturalism.

The Civil Rights Movement Proves Alexander's Case

The most convincing part of Jeffrey Alexander's The Civil Sphere is his account of the civil rights movement as, at heart, a struggle for the culture of America. Alexander's "strong program of cultural sociology" is at its best in showing the cultural competition that lies under the struggle for power and resources.

Traditional social movement theory emphasizes that movements win by mobilizing resources and seizing power. The model of success, Alexander argues, is the storming of the Bastille. Yet the issues in a real struggle to change a society are, at root, about how the basic values of society should be lived and institutionalized. The main struggle is cultural. If it is waged right, on both sides, it can stay cultural and remain in the civil sphere. It is only when a struggle fails that it turns violent. Sometimes revolutionary violence is necessary, but as the last, last resort -- not the exciting ideal.

Looking at the civil rights movement as a cultural movement makes clear that America had deep cultural resources for racial equality, as well as a long practice of the opposite. This, indeed, was the American Dilemma that Gunnar Myrdal exposed in the book of that name. Not every society starts with a commitment to equality in its cultural DNA. But we did.

What was needed was an inspired moral leader who could stick to the high road in calling America to live out its own values. This is why Martin Luther King, Jr., was the indispensable man at that moment. He kept the movement civil -- a cultural struggle in the civil sphere -- despite intense provocation to turn to violence and direct power struggles, which would have been suicidal for the movement.

Alexander also successfully shows how the civil rights movements created the organizations that could mobilize people on the basis of the commitments they already had. The key act of the leadership, King and others, was to translate those commitments into action -- most importantly, into non-violent action consistent with Christian morality.

Alexander's cultural theory rests on a claim that our society already is committed to a set of values, in positive and negative binaries; cultural movements just get us to realize them. The South was so twisted by racism that all the institutions that should have defended racial equality were coopted. So the civil rights movement appealed to the non-South, acting through the federal government, to bring reasonable Southerners to their senses about the contradiction between the values they already held and the practices of Jim Crow. For this reason, King would break any state law that needed to be broken, but not a federal law or federal court order, even when it would have seemed justified to do so.

The civil rights movement worked because it healed the breach the let racist values intrude on an essentially non-racist American civil sphere. This is a powerful argument.

Class and Status in the Civil Sphere

Where do class and status fit in Jeffrey Alexander's Civil Sphere? They are not a separate sphere of their own. They are not simply part of the economic sphere. They matter a great deal in people's lives - they can't be ignored. He is not a Marxist, so he can't use classes as the basic building blocks of the social structure. Like all Durkheimians, he has a tough time translating the individual differentials created by the division of labor into the social groups - the layered, hierarchical social groups -- of the social classes.

I think Weber can be helpful here, as he usually is. Weber, against Marx, says that classes, defined as those who share an income level, are not really social groups at all except under rare circumstances. Status groups, on the other hand, are real social groups. They share a conception of how to live. They are measured at the same level of honor.

The civil sphere is where campaigns about the basic values of society are conducted. The basic values are coded, Alexander says, in binaries that underlie the motives, relations, and institutions of society. The normal form of a value competition is to argue that our side embodies the good side of the binary, while the other side is polluted by the bad side. And vice-versa. The outcome of the competition is decided when a majority, or perhaps a strategic minority (Alexander is not clear on this) accepts one side's characterization of good vs. bad, and rejects the other.

If one group in society is regularly and routinely thought by most people to embody the good side of the binaries, and another group is thought to embody the bad -- with many groups in the gradations in between -- then society would have a status hierarchy. This is a social structure. And in Alexander's theory, the natural place - maybe the only place -- this status structure could be located is in the civil sphere.

Alexander has resisted describing any social structures in the civil sphere. Structure, and especially hierarchical structures, are the uncivil tools of the uncivil spheres. Yet if there is a status structure in society (and it would be hard to find a complex society without one), and if the status structure is related to the actual values of society, then the civil sphere must be built on a hierarchy of status.

Civil Sphere and Naked Public Square

Reader Corky asked this question of my previous post on Jeffrey Alexander's seeming ban on hierarchy in the civil sphere: "So how is Alexander's desire for nonintrusion different from the ugliness of the 'naked public square?'" This is an excellent question.

I have been wondering as I read whether Alexander is simply defining "civil" as "secular." On the rare occasions when he does mention religion, he usually says that religious understanding is either a negative intrusion that needs to be overcome as a dangerous essentialism of (falsely) primordial groups, or is a positive kind of social action that nonetheless needs to be translated into an idiom appropriate for modern secular societies.

So is the civil sphere the naked public square? In the sense that Richard John Neuhaus meant in the book of the same name, clearly yes. Alexander's civil sphere needs, he believes, to be defended from "intrusions" from the religious sphere; intrusions in the other direction are legitimate regulatory "inputs."

In another sense, though, the civil sphere is not a naked public square. Alexander fills his civil sphere with all kinds of moral content, even moral aspirations. Political campaigns, social movements, and other sorts of interpretive arguments take place within the civil sphere. In this version, it sounds like the marketplace of ideas, though perhaps with a bit more institutional muscle. Even religious arguments seem to be permitted in this civil sphere, as long as those who make them claim no authority as religious leaders.

In Alexander's long account of the civil rights movement as an exemplary case of "civil repair," he does allow that Martin Luther King's faith, and that of other religious figures who were leaders in the movement, may be taken seriously as a motive. The movement was not simply about power, and it did not proceed simply by mobilizing material resources. Yet Alexander himself seems tone deaf -- perhaps we should say "religiously unmusical," using Weber's wonderful phrase -- when trying to deal with the content of that (or any) faith.

I will return to this question when I consider his treatment of anti-semitism and the Holocaust.

Raise the Red Lantern

There was a film joke in the middle of the spectacular opening ceremony of the Olympics yesterday. Zhang Yimou, China's greatest film director, directed the ceremony, which just had topper after topper. Toward the end, a giant globe, in the form of a paper lantern, was raised high in the air. It was big enough that a dozen dancers on wires could run horizontally around it in multiple layers. The globe changed colors, and had many images projected on the surface as well.

At one point, though, it was red. A giant red Chinese lantern, raised high in the air. Like Zhang Yimou's early big-time film.

Is Hierarchy Uncivil

Jeffrey Alexander reluctantly admits that some hierarchy is necessary to get the job done - but only in the uncivil spheres. The state, the economy, religious institutions, family life, and perhaps other spheres, all need functional hierarchies.

These functional hierarchies lose their begrudged legitimacy when they cross the boundary into the civil sphere. Alexander argues that the civil sphere needs to be defended from illegitimate intrusions by these hierarchies of the other spheres. Elites from the other spheres may enter the civil sphere, but only as individuals, equal with all others.

Alexander never comes out and says so, but he seems to be assuming that egalitarianism is a necessary value of the civil sphere -- in any society, not just our own. He appears to think that hierarchy is just undemocratic. He otherwise makes very sophisticated and historically rooted arguments, so it is surprising that Alexander seems to be smuggling in such a major value commitment into the very definition of the civil sphere.

I see a further problem with banning hierarchy from the civil sphere: the social movements that compete in the civil sphere need leaders. That need produces as much of a functional hierarchy as we find in any of the "uncivil" spheres.

Polluting Your Enemies

Jeffrey Alexander rests his strong program for cultural sociology on the claim that we have to take the content of culture seriously. In The Civil Sphere he delivers what he thinks are the core binary pairs of American civil-uncivil values.

Alexander argues that we use these civil/uncivil binaries in just the way that Durkheim said we use the deep opposition of sacred and profane: we conduct ritual purity struggles. In the civil sphere we find campaigns of Us versus Them, in which we clothe our position in the positive side of the binary, and try to wrap our opponents' position in the negative side. Alexander describes this as polluting your enemy.

I was put off by this phrase at first, but I quickly came to find it useful. We usually describe polluting in a more indirect or bureaucratic way. We might say that someone is polluting "the environment," or even just polluting, without specifying what. But it is more powerful and direct to say Smith pollutes Jones by connecting Jones with a bad value or an embodiment of bad values ("He's just like Hitler!").

We, the People - the Voice of the Civil Sphere

One of the difficulties in grasping what Jeffrey Alexander is getting at in The Civil Sphere is that he is very coy about describing what the civil sphere is. He defines it mostly by what it is not, or by criticizing previous definitions as not quite right, or by naming the other spheres that it defends its boundaries against.

The main spheres of social life that the civil sphere is distinguished from seem to be the state and the market. He also suggests that religion, family life, and perhaps race will be distinguished more fully hereafter.

The civil sphere is the place in public life in which there is a "public" -- where the People can develop a consciousness of themselves and voice their opinion. The insight of Theory Camp yesterday was that "We, the People ..." in the opening phrase of the Constitution is a powerful instance of the way in which the amorphous and ephemeral public of the civil sphere finds voice and remakes reality.

I am very interested in how Alexander is developing this idea. I may sound critical here, but really I am intrigued by the idea and am hoping he can pull it off.

Solidarity Rests on a Feeling For Ideas

The first day of Theory Camp reminded me why I like to study collaboratively with people different from me.

Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith argue that social solidarity rests on a shared commitment to basic values. The sophistication of their approach is that the values are expressed as antinomies, pairs of opposing ideas. These pairs are not quite identical relations to one another, but they are homologous relations. The work of culture is drawing analogies from what one pair would lead one to do in one situation, to what a homologous pair would lead one to do in an analogous situation. Since we have to do the work of making these analogies, and there are alternative analogies that others could draw, we are free to make different choices from other people even within our shared culture.

I was caught up short by Olivia's summary: culture rests on feelings. My first reaction was, no, culture rests on ideas. The more I thought about it, though, the more I could see that she was right. Culture does rest on ideas. But solidarity rests on our feelings of attachment to these ideas. The ideas don't automatically generate their own emotional attachment. People are not normally willing to live and die for ideas alone, but for the imagined community of people who passionately share those ideas. Moreover, as Alexander makes clear in several works, most of us are not consciously aware of what the pairs of opposing ideas are that we live by -- we just work with them as we need to.

Thank you, Olivia - Theory Camp has paid for itself already.

The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology

Today begins our annual intellectual feast/boot camp, Theory Camp. For the next two weeks I will be sitting down each day with a group of students to work through a big theory book. This year we will take on Jeffrey Alexander's The Civil Sphere. As a run-up to the book itself we are starting with two earlier articles that Alexander wrote with Philip Smith, "The Discourse of American Civil Society: A New Proposal for Cultural Studies" and "The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology: Elements of a Structural Hermeneutics."

Alexander is a rising star in sociology. He now teaches at Yale, though he came there after my time. He and Smith are directors of the Center for Cultural Sociology, which "provides a focus for meaning-centered analysis in the social science tradition."

Alexander and Smith draw a distinction between the sociology of culture, and a true cultural sociology. The former treats culture as the dependent variable, produced by deeper forces in the social structure. Cultural sociology, by contrast, treats culture as the cause of why people act as they do.

Alexander and Smith's beef with other attempts at cultural sociology is that they don't take meaning seriously enough. That is, they see that people act on the basis of what they believe is true and meaningful, but the sociologist takes the content of that meaning as, in Pierre Bourdieu's phrase, a "cultural arbitrary." Against several "weak programs" of cultural sociology, of which they think Bourdieu's is the best, Alexander and Smith propose a strong program.

I am very interested in a sociology that takes the content of what people believe seriously. I will report on how our Theory Camp conversations on this strong, meaning-oriented program in cultural sociology turn out.

Christian Dignitarian Movements

The other day I wrote about "rankism," the abuse of rank to insult the dignity of others. In talking to Bob Fuller, who coined the term, it struck me that combating rankism requires more than just raising the consciousness of individuals that "that's not nice." To use rank without abusing it requires new social movement to create new social types.

Christian thought is full of movements and social types of those who respect those of lower rank. The notion that all souls are equal before God is the root of democracy. The servant-leader follows the model of Christ to lead by serving, even unto death. The great saints cheerfully serve "the least of these." Somewhat more secular version of Christian ethics, such as chivalry and the Lady Bountiful -- indeed, the whole idea of gentility as a way of ennobling the warrior code -- are fruits of the "dignitarian" impulse (to use another of Fuller's terms) in Christianity.

Nietzsche thought Christianity was itself the triumph of slave morality. I think it is rather a triumph of a dignitarian morality among the powerful. Christianity encourages the self-humbling of those of high rank.