Sociologists Have One of the Best Jobs

Says a new study conducted by sociologists.

No disagreement from me. I just try not to rub it in to people who have to be investment bankers and the like.

The Strange Religionless America of Atlas Shrugged

I am reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time. I will say more about it later this week. This Sunday I just want to note that this huge novel that is set in the United States has almost no religion in it. There are a few mentions of fiery preachers, who are treated as symptoms of irrationality. One rich, old woman mentions her church group. That is it.

Ayn Rand was an anti-religious rationalist, so it makes sense that her heroes denounce "mysticism" and promote reason as if they were alternatives.

What is surprising, though, is how little her America resembles the real America. Nowhere is this clearer than in her utter neglect of religion - even to attempt to have her characters refute it.

IMMD: A Gruntled Website

"It Made My Day: Little Moments of WIN" is an excellent website of small moments that made people smile. Which they write up and send in. Some of the moments are mean, but many are very gruntled.

For example:

At work we have a dry erase board that we write a fun fact on each week. This week it said that the longest recorded flight of a chicken is 13 seconds. A little boy read it then looked at me and said, “What if they shot one out of a canon?” IMMD

Happy Thanksgiving, One and All

I am going to spend the day reading a novel.

A Little More Marriage in Sociology of Family Textbooks.

A dozen years ago Norval Glenn, a sociologist at the University of Texas, wrote an important review of the leading sociology textbooks covering family life. He found that they tended to downplay children and marriage, and play up the more unusual kinds of family life. Many were openly ideological.

Glenn has just written a follow-up essay in Academic Questions. The good news is that marriage gets more play. He thinks this is due to the influence of Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher's The Case for Marriage, which I have written about often. The bad news is that marriage and children still do not have the central place in family sociology textbooks that they have in actual societies.

Re-reading Fussell's X Category

I have been teaching Paul Fussell's Class: A Painfully Accurate Guide to the American Status System for twenty years. It is usually the last book in "Introduction to Sociology." Students find it disturbing and very helpful. Fussell spends almost the entire book making fun of every social class. At the end, he offers "The X Way Out." X is not a class, but a category of personhood that one can earn by pursuing your own interests in freedom. He calls the X category a "parody aristocracy" or an "unmonied aristocracy" because of this freedom.

For years I have thought that Fussell hoist himself on his own petard. He condemned all others for their status-seeking, while reserving for himself a category free from status-seeking. Yet clearly it is better to be X than any class. Better means higher status.

His summary of what is good about the X category is this:

They occupy the one social place in the U.S.A. where the ethic of buying and selling is not all-powerful. Impelled by insolence, intelligence, irony, and spirit, X people have escaped out the back doors of those theaters of class which enclose others.

This year, though, I read this very familiar passage in a new way. X offers an escape from the ethic of buying and selling. X is an escape from class. It is not, and is not meant to be, an escape from status. Fussell is not being a hypocrite in exchanging the status system of curiosity and freedom for the status system of material goods and the control of the means of production.

X offers a different standard of status, not an escape from status.

DNA Paternity Doesn't Need to Define All the Financial Responsibilty

The New York Times Magazine has a gripping story about fathers who discover they are not biologically related to their children, want to stay connected with them socially, but also think the biological father should foot some of the bill. The core story centers on a man who divorced his wife when he discovered that their daughter was really the child of affair she had with another guy. Since the man had been acting as her father for years and still loved her and wanted to be connected with her, he paid full child support. However, when his ex-wife married the man who was actually the biological father of the child, the court concluded that this new man - legal step-father, actual bio-father - had no financial responsibility for the little girl, though she lived in his house. The man she still called "daddy" was left subsidizing the household of the man who had displaced him.

I don't think there is any good solution to a complex disaster like this. I do think the courts should divide up the money in some proportional way. This division would not need to be based wholly on biological paternity or wholly on social relationship. Money, unlike any other good, has the great advantage of being something you can divide up minutely. Unlike people's affections, and their time, money doesn't care how it is divided.

What Can You Tolerate in the Church?

Yesterday I had the honor of speaking to Northumberland Presbytery on the subject of conflict and competition in the Presbyterian Church (USA). My main theme was that the church has always been diverse and always will be. This means that there are some beliefs and practices that some people in the church engage in that other people have to tolerate.

There are limits to what the church will tolerate on the left and the right. There are beliefs and practices so standard and orthodox that nearly everyone accepts them. And then there is a gray area in each tail of the bell curve between those poles. Here lie things that someone is merely tolerating.

The danger that conservatives pose to the church is the belief that if we just expel this group of intolerables, the church will be pure. And if they don't get that expulsion, they are inclined to leave. But the legacy of schism is more schism. And a church of millions will never be pure. Some things will have to be tolerated by the right.

The danger that liberals pose to the church is the belief that merely tolerating some things is unjust because it creates a "second class" status. They believe that it we just all embrace every practice and belief that is allowed in the church as equally good, the church will be just. And if they get something tolerated today, they will come back tomorrow to argue that it is just as good, right, and orthodox as anything else in the church. But it is possible to be so open-minded that your brains fall out. Some things will have to be tolerated by the left.

We did an exercise in the presbytery meeting. I asked everyone to write down one belief or practice that anyone would need to accept to be an officer of the Presbyterian Church. We then talked about them. The items that different people came up with were a little different. But everyone came up with something. Everyone agreed that the church must have some standards. We then began the discussion of which things they would find tolerable, even though they are not ideal. We did not come to a conclusion on this discussion. But I think everyone accepted that there are some items in the "tolerated" category.

I Am an Etsy

Diane Koss makes plush monsters and sells them from Cutesy but not Cutesy on etsy.com. She asked our mutual friend Rob to tell her about some people he knew with a few facts about them.

I am humbled and honored to be an etsy. I will try to live up to the role.

Slave to Parental Love

Regular reader Black Sea sent this wonderful response to one of my earlier posts. I thought it too good to leave in the Comments tail.

This bit of pop trivia may interest you. I was this morning watching on Youtube the video of Bryan Ferry's 1985 song "Slave to Love," when I noticed something rather remarkable. (Actually, it was pointed out by one of the Youtube commenters.)

"Slave to Love" is -- or maybe seems -- one of Ferry's classy paeans to erotic enchantment. Certainly much of the song is, but note that at the end of the video, as he's singing "The tide is turning, and so it seems, we're too young to reason, too grown up to dream" he's also sitting in a darkened bedoom, on the edge of the bed. Of course, one expects him to be crooning to his lover. As the camera pans down the bed, we see that he's looking at his sleeping child. In other words, it's a song about the maturation of erotic obsession into familial love.

I'm sure some people will find this trite or sentimetal, but as the father of two young daughters, I have to say that it struck me differently. Of course, it probably helps that I think Bryan Ferry more or less defines the word "suave."

The System Works: Abstinence-Only Sex Education Doesn't Survive the Test of Reality

When welfare reform was passed in 1996, Pres. Clinton compromised to get conservative votes by including funding for abstinence-only sex education programs in schools. As Sarah Kliff shows in the October 27th Newsweek, abstinence-only programs have now fallen on hard times.

This strikes me as an illustration that our government is not broken, but actually works pretty well. Both welfare reform and abstinence-only education became law by the normal kind of political compromise. More than a decade later, we are continuing welfare reform because it works. And we are discontinuing abstinence-only sex education because it doesn't work.

Marriage is Not a Luxury Good, But a Transformative Practice

Two of my fellow sociologists, Laurie Essig and Lynn Owens, offer an attack on marriage that is fairly typical of what they call "critical" sociology. They view marriage as a kind of magic that the privileged add to themselves. They conclude that

When there is broad, seemingly unanimous support for an institution, and when the institution is propped up by such disparate ideas as love, civil rights and wealth creation, we should wonder why so many different players seem to agree so strongly. Perhaps it’s because they are supporting not just marriage but also the status quo.

This is almost completely backward. Marriage is a formative institution. We make ourselves and our society more loving, equal, and richer through marriage because marriage leads people to act differently - especially men. The worst off groups are the least married. This is not because marriage is a luxury of the best off. It is because people who don't make the transformative commitments of marriage tend to end up badly off. And what is likely to individuals is nearly certain for groups.

When there is broad, seemingly unanimous support for an institution, and when the institution is propped up by such disparate ideas as love, civil rights and wealth creation, we should wonder why so many different players seem to agree so strongly. Perhaps it’s because they are trying to build up civilization and benefit everyone.

Married Parents are Happier

There has been some back and forth about whether kids make parents happy or unhappy. A new study in the Journal of Happiness Studies says that kids make married parents happier. This makes sense to me. Marrying and raising a family together as a deliberate and permanent status is a coherent, whole project. It is not each piece that may or not make a couple happy, it is the package.

Calvin at 500

This year is the semi-millennium of John Calvin's birth. My congregation has been celebrating with a three-week Sunday school session on Calvin and his legacy. Naturally, Presbyterians turn a birthday party into an opportunity for school.

I got to teach the third and final session this morning, on Calvinism and modern culture. I taught a whole course on this subject a few years ago, so I was brutally compressing a hurried term into a lightning-quick class.

We talked about the crucial role the Reformed tradition in creating democracy, the Protestant work ethic, science, and in general the "affirmation of ordinary life." This is exciting story, energizing to teach. The class was a rich one, and may lead to a longer course of study in the future.

The best part for me was articulating that the Reformed tradition has made a distinctive way of life out of an idea that is found in all Biblical faith - God made the universe as a great story and great task, in which we all have a part. God made a meaningful universe, as only God can. And God gave each and every one of us a life of work within that meaningful universe, work that is itself meaningful.

Thank you John Calvin for articulating that idea, decently and in order.

Chef's Animals

My mother sent me an email of "What chefs do when they are bored." They are really great. Here are just a couple.

Darwin's Evolutionary Context

Last night David Quammen, author of The Reluctant Mr. Darwin gave a lecture at Centre. His book was read by all the first-year students. This is Darwin year for two reasons - the bicentennial of Darwin's birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species.

I had known that Darwin had the basic idea of evolution through natural selection long before he published it. I had not really processed, though, just when he had his big idea. Darwin's notebooks show that it was 1838 that he had his big intellectual breakthrough. This is right in the middle of founding era of sociology.

1827 August Comte coins the term "sociology" and articulates the Law of the Three Stages of scientific evolution.

1838 Darwin conceives biological evolution by natural selection.

1848 Marx and Engels publish "The Communist Manifesto" articulating the theory of social evolution through struggle over the means of production.

It was only in 1859 that Darwin finally published the book that made "evolution" a term we think of primarily in biological terms. We are still living with the legacy, though, of the several kinds of evolutionary ideas, biological and social, in sociology. In general, the social sciences turned away from evolutionary theories just as biology was turning toward them. Now that biology is being re-incorporated into social science (especially in family studies), we may see a new turn in sociological thinking on evolution. Or a new reaction.

"Fireproof" is a Decent Marriage Movie

"Fireproof" is about a couple on the brink of divorce working back to real love and respect for one another. It is explicitly evangelical and a little clunky. But its heart is in the right place. It gets Southern evangelical culture right (it is set in Albany, GA). I particularly liked the parallel complaints that husband and wife made to their friends about how the spouse was the real problem because he/she did not give the complainant enough respect.

"Fireproof" has been the talk of the pro-marriage circuit this year because it shows in some detail what steps and what changes a couple who want to save their marriage can take to get on the right track. And the happy ending teared me up, even if it was a little cheesy.

On "Cellphones, Texts, and Lovers"

David Brooks has an interesting column on the way some people use cellphones and texting to create a fluid market in sexual hookups. The data come from New York magazine's sex diaries, submitted by readers.

Brooks' main point is that in courtship in days gone by social institutions provided a set of "guardrails" to help people sensibly get from short-term attraction to long-term commitment. He concludes that it is a loss that young people today do not have such guardrails.

I mostly agree with Brooks. I disagree on two points of emphasis.

First, most young people who court in school, with friends around and families in consulting distance, do in fact have help and guardrails. Some (not most) engage in hookups, especially in the first flush of freedom from home. But most leave that behind when looking for a serious mate.

Second, I don't think the sex diarists submitting their sad erotic adventures to New York magazine readers are young people courting. I think they are likely to be the people who are left over after the rest of their cohort finished their serious courtships, guardrails and all. They are left over, in part, because they did not court when they had the social structure to support them, but instead approached sex as just another way to spend the evening, disconnected from love, marriage, and parenthood.

Soldiers Understand Commitment, Marry Younger

Rev. Charles Rush has a wonderful story of the brief visit of his son and daughter-in-law, both soldiers, home from Afghanistan just long enough to get married.

Young Rush was the first of his siblings and friends, all elite college students and graduates, to get married. Rev. Rush made this striking observation:

And in the college world his friends inhabit, especially the fraternity world, marriage is not exactly at the top of everyone’s list.

In the world of the enlisted men and women, however, a premium is placed on loyalty and steadfast support, and this translates into a high rate of marriage, even among young people who are only in their late teens and early 20s.

Our birthrate is so low, especially among the educated classes, in part because we are delaying marriage longer and longer. One unexpected effect of this war may be to reduce the marriage age in at least one sector of the younger generation.

Alice Rossi, R.I.P.

Alice Rossi, a leading family sociologist, died this week at 87. She was criticized from the right in the '60s for proposing sexual equality. She was one of the founders of the National Organization for Women. In later years she was criticized from the left for allowing that there are some important biological differences between men and women. While not a centrist, she came closer toward the middle on the sex and gender question than most feminist sociologists of her generation.

This picture is from her term as president of the American Sociological Association in 1983.