Structured Structure

I have been writing about Bourdieu lately, which means that I have to type phrases like "a structured structure and a structuring structure" often.

I noticed a peculiar, deep-in-the-word-geek-woods pleasure: typing the word structure is fun. It makes an interesting circular pattern in the left hand, especially in the index finger.

If you like that sort of thing, try it a few times. Structure structure structured structuring structure. Oh, and structuration (but that is Giddens and not as much fun to type).

If this is not your kind of thing, just move on. Nothing to see here. (structure structure structure).

No, Secularism Is Not Saving Marriage

Oliver Thomas' religion column in USA Today, "Is secularism saving marriage," is mostly wrongheaded.

Thomas' premise is that marriage should have disappeared in postmodern America, since it is so confining and patriarchal and permanent. Marriage seems to be coming back. How do we explain this mystery, Thomas asks? It must be that men have learned to be more egalitarian and intimate from secular society. Secularism helps people delay marriage without delaying sex, which is healthy. Thus, secularism is saving marriage from religion.

No. Religious people have longer and stronger marriages. Grownups of all kinds, religious and otherwise, know that the greatest social value of marriage is not the intimacy it fosters between adults, but the permanent team it creates between them to raise children. Religious marriages are, on average, more intimate and more mutual. Religious people are more likely to get married in their mid-twenties, the optimal time, rather than delaying for their careers until they are so set in their single ways that it is hard to make a permanent team. The secular emphasis on getting my individual way in all things undermines marriage.

Permissive Families Breed Spontaneous Kids, Authoritarian Families Breed Directed Kids

Some parents are highly supportive of their children, some are highly challenging, some are both, and some are neither. This nifty four-fold division was used by Kevin Rathunde, continuing work of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, to look at how much some talented high school students were involved in their school-related activities. They had students wear pagers through a school week, beeping them several times a day to record what they were doing and how they felt about it.

The researchers were looking for highly engaging "flow" experiences. The students' responses were turned into a -.4 to +.4 scale, with the boring experiences at the -.4 end and the flow experiences at the +.4 end. They also had separate averages for the students' spontaneous activities and their directed activities

Rathunde then compared the average responses of the kids from each of the four kinds of families. The kids from the high support/high challenge families reported the highest average score - almost .35 - for both spontaneous and directed activities. The kids from the other three kinds of families all had average scores at or below zero for both kinds of activities.

What is most interesting to me, though, are the differences in the latter three families in which kinds of school-related activities, spontaneous or directed, went with which kinds of families. Kids from low support/low challenge families reported average scores a little below zero on both spontaneous and directed activities. This is a far cry from the high/high group, but, on the whole, they net out higher than the remaining two. These kids are on their own as far as their families go, so they make their own way with middlin' results.

Kids from high support/low challenge families (what Diana Baumrind, in a similar scheme, calls permissive families) are more satisfied with their spontaneous activities than their directed ones - about -.1 vs -.3. The low support/high challenge families (Baumrind's authoritarians) report the reverse: much higher satisfaction with directed activities (0) than spontaneous (-.4). This mixed finding from the mixed families is in the direction that I expected. I was surprised, though, at how much the permissive kids liked spontaneity and how much the authoritarian kids like direction.

The Global Problem of the Color Line

We have been reading W.E.B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk in our social theory class. Du Bois famously said, at the dawn of the previous century, "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”

I had not fully realized until this reading that he did not just mean that the color line is the main problem of the twentieth century in the United States, but rather, that this is the global problem of the century.

Later in the book he writes “the characteristic of our age is the contact of European civilization with the world's undeveloped peoples.” When we think about the world in 1900, almost the entire globe was directly ruled by European countries or their colonial heirs. The Europeans and their transplants operated on an explicitly racial theory which held that the white race(s) developed the world. The "undeveloped" peoples were those on the other side of the color line globally.

In the second half of the twentieth century Du Bois' prophecy came true with striking clarity all over the world. We are still working through the aftermath of ending racist and imperialist theories that justified European domination. The problem of the color line is far from over in the global clash of civilizations. But the theory that justified the color line has been subverted.

What Dad's Job is Like Matters More to Kids Than What Mom's Job is Like

I am working with students on the 500 Families study, which surveyed middle-class, dual-career couples on work-family balance. One paper from this study, by Ariel Kalil, Judith Levine, and Kathleen Ziol-Guest, looked at what might make teen boys and girls want to have jobs like their mothers' and fathers' jobs. How much the jobs paid, and how much the parents talked about their work with their kids were not significant factors in whether teens wanted jobs like their parents'. And boys and girls were not very different from one another in their response to their parents, though girls were somewhat more likely to want a job like mom's. For both boys and girls, dad's job seemed more attractive.

Teens, like everyone else, are more attracted to jobs with complex work and freedom to do it. Quite a few of the mothers and fathers in the study had work like that. The surprising finding was this:

When fathers hold jobs that are substantively complex and when they report having higher levels of autonomy at work, adolescents express a greater interest in having a job like their fathers’. Interestingly, these relationships do not apply to interest in having a job like their mothers’.

The authors are not sure why teens are differently attracted to their parents' work in this way, and neither am I. Here is my guess, though. For most mothers, motherhood is the most salient part of their identity to children (and probably to the mothers themselves); mom's job is important, but secondary. For fathers, though, their work is very salient to their being fathers, because how they support their family is a vital part of their identity as fathers. The kids pick up on this, so the qualities of their fathers' jobs are more salient to the children than are the qualities of their mothers' jobs.

Marriage Makes Women More Conservative; Motherhood Makes Them More Liberal

Marriage makes men and women more conservative. Fatherhood also makes men more conservative. But political scientists Steven Greene and Laurel Elder found that mothers were more liberal than non-mothers on war questions. This is true even though those same women are likely to have been more conservative than single women when they first got married.

Far from producing "Security Moms" who vote for the most hawkish candidates to protect their babies, mothers seem to desire to avoid war and protect their own babies from fighting them.

(I thank Steven Greene for generously sharing this paper with me.)

Ditch the Lectionary

My church uses the Common Lectionary, a selection of readings from the Bible that work through the whole text, pretty much, every three years. Each week we have an Old Testament selection, a New Testament selection from the gospels, and a New Testament selection from the other NT books. The pastor normally incorporates one of these selections into the sermon.

I appreciate the intent of the lectionary. Using a lectionary makes certain that the preacher will not just stick to a few favorite texts, but will have to read, and perhaps preach on, the entire Bible.

Still, as a way of actually teaching the Bible, I think the lectionary is a failure. Three unconnected snippets each week are too short and too many to follow. Since, in my experience, it is a rare preacher who tries to integrate all three each week, most of the readings are not developed at all. And even if the preacher does follow one section - the gospel, most likely - for several weeks, it is very hard to hold on to the thread of preaching. Usually, the sequences of sermons are not connected with one another, and often only loosely connected with the text.

I think we would be better off preaching the Word the way the Reformers did: work through a book, or a theme, thoroughly. This does not mean that today's events and concerns could not be incorporated - on the contrary, nearly all of the Bible ties readily to today. But I, as a listener and student, would rather hear one sustained argument for a season that really explicated and connected a text.

The lectionary, it seems to me, makes most of our Scripture reading in the service into a magical act of just saying the words and hoping they have some effect.

Reboot Universe

A delightful prank.

Birth Order Advantages of Chattering Parents.

“The best environment to grow up in is basically two parents who are chattering away at you with fancy words.”

So says Frank Sulloway, author of Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. Sulloway was quoted in a New York Times story, "Birth Order: Fun to Debate, But How Important?" which I thought mostly missed the point of Sulloway's study.

Sulloway says that there is not a specific character that goes with each birth order position. Rather, the dynamic rule is "first born gets first choice." Normally the first born will gravitate to the things the parents value most, will get the most parental conversation, will seek to work hard, do well in school, and succeed in life, because that is the simplest path to eminence. The later-borns then have to find a different niche, especially when the kids are young and all at home. But if the first-born does not choose that niche, it is available for the second, and so on.

Sulloway cites a recent study of birth order using Norwegian military data. That study found that first borns have a modest but real 3-point IQ advantage over second borns. Sulloway's conclusion from this is the wonderful quote above.

Background, Education, and Effort Matter in About the Right Proportions

In the Social Structure class we are working through the classic studies of social mobility (for SOC nerds that is Blau and Duncan, as modified by Jencks). They look at which factors in your background help predict your likely socioeconomic status (SES).

The basic finding is roughly this:

The class of your family, plus the way that class shapes your schooling, predicts a fifth to a quarter of your ultimate SES.

Your own education predicts another fifth to a quarter.

The other 50 or 60% is due to other factors - including your own effort in getting, keeping, and improving in a job.

As we talked about it, it seemed to me that this is an ethically satisfying distribution. As a parent, I am glad that my efforts to help my children be cultivated and successful do matter. As a teacher I am glad that education adds a sizable hunks to my students' ultimate success. And as a citizen I am glad that there is such ample scope for personal effort to make the biggest difference in one's achievement.

Darwinist Dating Should Not Be A Template, But a Cautionary Tale

Kay Hymowitz has another fine piece on mate selection in City Journal, "Dating in a Time of Darwinism." She gives their due to single men who have been burned and become jaded about dating. They try to be nice guys, but get dumped for bad boys. They try to be chivalrous, but get attacked as sexist. Or try to be egalitarian, and get scorned as inconsiderate. So some men turn to a brutal Darwinian calculus that they will be more successful in their sexual conquests if they are more callous to women. As women's biological clock ticks louder, men can get away with even less consideration. And the saddest part is that many of them are right.

Hymowitz rightly notes that what a Darwinian approach to sexual relations misses the fact that human beings can be cultivated and civilized past their merely biological desires. This goes for women just as much as it does for men. There is a short-term sexual advantage to men in being jerks. Today there are more women with the freedom to do the same. But they are both still being jerks.

What strikes me about this sad state of affairs, which might affect as many as a fifth of single young men and women, is that it is so short-sighted. Most people do want to marry and have kids and stay that way. Nearly all of the pleasure-seeking young women of the New Girl Order harbor the desire for real marriage and a family, and most of the single young men now studying up to be Pick-Up Artists will want that, too.

The smart young men and women, like most of the students I teach, can figure out that if they want something eventually, they will be better off is they start seeking it now. The happiest group of grownups are likely to have married in their mid-twenties and gotten on with a solid, building-up life.

If You Are Ready to Marry in Your Mid-20s, You Will Be No Happier if You Wait

This is the conclusion of a paper by University of Texas sociologist Norval Glenn and colleagues. One of them, Jeremy Uecker, presented the paper at the American Sociological Association meeting in San Francisco. I attended that session.

The Texans cautiously conclude that "it would be premature to conclude that the optimal time for first marriage for most persons is ages 22-25." The bottom line, though, is this:

However, the findings do suggest that most persons have little or nothing to gain in the way of marital success by deliberately postponing marriage beyond the mid twenties.

Lawless Courts Undermine The Legitimacy of the Law

I believe this rule applies to the courts and the law of all kinds of institutions. This Sunday I have in mind the Permanent Judicial Commission of the Presbytery of Boston in their ruling on Rev. Jean Southard performing a same-sex marriage in First Presbyterian Church of Waltham.

Everyone agrees on the facts. Jean Southard, a Presbyterian minister, did perform the usual wedding service in a normal church, joining two women. Everyone involved called it a marriage, both in the civil and in the religious sense. Yet the church's Directory of Worship clearly says that Presbyterian ministers and Presbyterian churches can only assist in the marriage of a man and a woman.

Southard's defense was that the language of the Directory is "merely descriptive" and reflects outdated social conditions. The Boston PJC bought this argument. Or rather, as part of their desire to overturn church law, which has been reaffirmed by the votes of the whole church several times and recently, the judicial commission legislated for the church. Worse, as the dissent of two members of the commission strongly protested, the majority of the commission is ruling that the church law should be determined by the lead of the state law.

The Southard decision follows on the Orwellian reasoning of General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission last spring in the Spahr case. Rev. Jane Spahr had also performed a same-sex marriage (actually two, just to be sure) in order to create a test case. The GA PJC ruled that since the Directory says a marriage can only be between a man and a woman, the thing that Spahr performed, which all present regarded as a marriage, couldn't really be a violation of the Directory since it didn't involve a man and a woman. Case closed.

Such games undermine the whole church. Wrong, wrong.

Eccentric Grownup

I think I need a shirt that says that.

Crisis Pregnancy Centers Support Adoption. People Who Don't Like That Should Start Their Own.

Kathryn Joyce has an article, "Shotgun Adoption" in The Nation that criticizes "crisis pregnancy centers" as a plot to coerce pregnant single women to give up their babies for adoption by conservative Christian parents.

There have been abuses by crisis pregnancy centers. That is wrong and should be treated by the appropriate authorities. But this article goes way beyond legitimate abuses to posit a conspiracy. This is unfair and unbalanced left-wing paranoia. Which I oppose exactly as much as I oppose unfair and unbalanced right-wing paranoia.

Christian crisis pregnancy centers (CPC) try to talk women out of abortion. That is their open and stated purpose. No one has to go to them if they don't want to hear that message. Most Christian crisis pregnancy centers promote the idea that children do best when raised by their two married parents. This is true, as I have often argued on this blog. The best outcome, from the CPC's perspective, would be for the pregnant woman and the father of the child to marry, raise their child together, and join the church. Again, this is all open, above-board, and no one has to listen. Of course, few of the women who come to CPCs are already married, in the church, and ready to raise their child - if they were, they wouldn't be having a crisis.

So the next two options are either that the woman would raise the child herself, or that she would give the child to a married couple who dearly want a child of their own and have the commitment, resources, and desire to raise that child in a stable and loving home. Most Christian CPCs think the latter option is better than the former. Two parents in a stable home beat one mom in crisis. There is solid sociological support for this judgment. Still, the issue could be argued either way. Christian CPCs promote adoption by a married couple as best for the child.

For women who agree with this conclusion, the Christian CPC offers to house, feed, care for, and cover all the medical expenses of the woman as she grows her baby and goes through the process of handing her baby over to the adoptive couple. This handover is painful for most women. That is why such a pregnancy creates a crisis in the first place. If it weren't hard, CPCs would be necessary. Many people, including those not directly involved in the adoption, give charitably to support all of this care to give the best ending to what could be a terrible crisis.

People who believe that the child would be better off raised by a single mother can form their own Crisis Pregnancy Centers. They can offer to house, feed, nurture, and cover all the medical expenses of pregnant women who will then go home with their babies. I can see this as honorable work. I think Kathryn Joyce should be the first to volunteer her house and her bank account to the cause. There could be such things as Secular Single-Mom Support Centers. But I am not holding my breath.

Marriage vs. Alzheimer's

A Finnish study, reported in the British Medical Journal, reports that

Being widowed from mid-life onwards was associated with the highest risk of cognitive impairment later in life with a highly significant odds ratio of 7.67 for Alzheimer’s disease

Living without a partner for other reasons was also related to impaired cognitive functioning much later in life

They theorize that married people have someone to talk to in old age, which helps fend off Alzheimer's.

Cancer + Separation = 1/3 Lower Survival Rate

The BBC is reporting on a study by Gwen Sprehn and colleagues at Indiana University on the effect of marital status on surviving cancer. They found, as other research has, that married people are more likely to survive than unmarried people. The new element in this study is that those who are separating are the worst off.

The usual understanding of why married people live longer is that they have someone to care for them and to live for. I think what this research adds is that separating is positively harmful to your health. You don't just lose the benefit of marriage, you add a killing stress.

Married - 63% survival after five years and 58% at 10-year mark
Never-married - 57% and 52%
Divorced - 52% and 46%
Widowed - 47% and 41%
Separated - 45% and 37%

2/3rds Cohabit, 2/3rds of Them Slide Into It Without A Plan

This is the new finding of Scott Stanley and his colleagues. He has been doing follow-up research on the early '90s finding that married couples who cohabited first are more likely to divorce than marrieds who waited to live together. The nuance that the first study found was that people who were engaged when they cohabited end up like marrieds who waited to live together. It is the other kind, the ones who drifted into living together, who are more likely to drift in to marriage and drift out again.

The new finding in Stanley's latest study is how a big a proportion of cohabiters slide into living together without a future plan of marriage. This means that almost half of all couples cohabit without a definite marriage plan. This is a sizable group putting itself at risk willy-nilly.

Sex and Fear, Part 2

Yesterday I noted that men fear more what their wives fear. In thinking further about this idea, I made a connection back to something I learned from Steven Stosny last year: we get angry not to protect ourselves, but to protect our loved ones. In fact, responding to things that threaten us with anger is often more dangerous than if we ran away. We have to get angry in order to stay and fight, even if it endangers ourselves. Why would be do that? To protect our loved ones.

I usually take the world's shocks philosophically, or with sadness. The things that make me mad are more likely to be threats to my family, and by extension, my community. The same applies, I realize, to the things I fear in an emotional way. I can work around dangers to myself calmly, if they can be avoided. But I can feel fear for my children far away, because I can't work around the things that might endanger them. I have to rely on their good sense and safety-making social structures.

That men would feel fear for their loved ones more than for themselves is a corollary of the socially healthy tendency of men to protect women and children. But it also means that fearful men are more likely to damage others if they think that doing so is a righteous way to protect their loved ones.

Sex and Fear

I have been having a discussion with a friend about what we should fear from the government. I am afraid of torture, suspending habeas corpus, declaring citizens "enemy combatants," warrantless wiretaps, secret prisons, and failing to enforce securities regulations that threaten the world economy. He is worried about government health care and the car company and bank bailouts as communism, which might force armed resistance to the state. I am not here raising the merits of these fears.

Instead, I was struck by a point that he made in a recent conversation. His wife was much more worried about these things than he was. As I thought about it, several of the women in my life are more worried about the things I fear than I am.

So I had this thought. Moms worry about dangers to their families. That is part of the job. And daughters who are preparing to be moms one day can do a fair job of worrying, too. Dads protect moms and daughters. They fear things that are actually threats to their families and, by extension, their communities. Dads also worry about things that their wives are worried about because their wives are worried. If mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.

This is the rough thought I am working on. Much of the emotion in the various cultures of fear are driven by the good impulse of men protecting women.