Legislative Walkouts Are Not Good Democracy

I support the right of government workers to unionize. I think they are as likely to be exploited by their employers as private workers are. I think the attempt of Republican governors to break the public unions is wrong.

I also think legislators should stay in the legislature and fight political fights there. That is the democratic way. The right way to stall a vote to buy time to change public opinion is through the filibuster. "Filibuster by flight" is wrong.

If you lose the vote, then you lose. You reorganize and come back to fight the next election. You make your opponents' wrong-headed policies the main issue of the next election.

All the legislatures should get back to work. We'll take our lumps this time. The other side will reap the whirlwind next time.

Social Animal 5: The Main Point

The main point of David Brooks' The Social Animal is that our emotions and connections with others are the core of our being; the conscious, reasoning parts of our beings are better understood as servants of that core than masters.

Moral reasoning does not lead to moral behavior. Instead, we are more guided by intuition than reason. Our intuitions have supremacy but not dictatorship. We can encourage good moral habits, and sometimes we can consciously direct our actions even despite our moral responses, though it takes much work.

To be more moral, our best help is to interact more, to be more social, not to reason more. Our social interactions lead us to become part of institutions, which we did not build. When we inherit institutions, we feel like debtors to them and want to be stewards of our inheritance.

I will give Brooks the last word:

“The cognitive revolution demonstrated that human beings emerge out of relationships. The health of a society is determined by the health of those relationships, not by the extent to which it maximizes individual choice.”

Social Animal 4: Limerence

The most useful word I learned from David Brooks' The Social Animal is "limerance" - intensive love toward another with a strong desire for reciprocation. What we most desire is connecting with what we love. This is even more rewarding than completing the connection. The mind is geared more toward predicting rewards than the rewards themselves.

“So a happy life has a recurring set of rhythms: difficulty to harmony, difficulty to harmony. And it is all propelled by the desire for limerence, the desire for the moment when the inner and the outer patterns mesh.”

He reads limerence as melding together in harmony. It is not simply the fact of matching our map of the world, our information, with another person's that we value. We coat information with meaning, with emotional value. He cites a controversial theory that love is not an emotion, so much as a motivational state.

And what turns limerance at the individual level into a source of social structure is that we compete with others in order to connect. We can see this most clearly in the competition for mates, but it applies very broadly. We compete in patterned, predictable ways. These patterns are also information that we coat with meaning and emotion.

Social Animal 3: Good Character Comes from Right Perception

David Brooks' premise is that we are moved primarily by our emotions. This is especially important in understanding how we can come to have good character.

Most models of character focus on either the will or the reason. Neither work very well. They are not strong enough to overrule emotion.

Instead, the crucial step in building good character is the first one: how we perceive the situation. This is where our emotions are first engaged. Perceiving and judging are the same act.

People of good character perceive the world the right way. This makes it possible for their reason and their will to channel action in the right direction.

How we perceive the world the right way is a mystery, the result of a million good influences. The most important influences come down to:

• Being in a virtuous community;
• Seeing virtuous action; and
  
• Doing virtuous action

Social Animal 2: Marriage as Map Meld

David Brooks starts The Social Animal with a marriage and a baby. This lets him describe marriage as a "map meld," where two people gradually meld their maps of the world together.

The map meld, in turn, lets Brooks describe the minds of mammals in general as growing through "mindsight." We intertwine our lives with the lives of others. This applies to husband and wife, and to parent and child. We learn to feel what others are feeling by mirroring their actions in our minds – even if we do not mirror them in our bodies (this is the theory of "mirror neurons"). We mirror what others are feeling by interpreting the meaning of their actions.

I especially enjoyed Brooks' contention that humor is a tool we use for bonding with other people, and is itself the reward for getting our minds in sync with theirs.

Social Animal 1: Reason Lightly Guides Emotion

I have been favored with an advance copy of David Brooks' forthcoming book, The Social Animal: A Story of Love, Character, and Achievement. It is a substantial and interesting book about having a fulfilling life. Brooks makes his theoretical argument engaging by framing his philosophical ideas and empirical theories around the story of the fictional couple Harold and Erica.

Brooks' overarching idea about how people work is this:

“The central evolutionary truth is that the unconscious matters most. The central humanistic truth is that the conscious mind can influence the unconscious.”

One of the scholars Brooks draws on is University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt expressed this idea metaphorically. Our emotions are an elephant, and our reason is the rider. That gives some idea of the relative power of the two forces in our psyche.

I like Brooks' way of putting it, because it does equal justice to science and philosophy. Our bodies have strong tendencies, which is why sociobiology is so helpful in understanding our basic instincts. But our culture has also found ways to train our habits to direct our bodies in helpful ways.

Brooks puts the reason vs. emotion argument in a way I had not thought of before. In the story he tells in The Social Animal,

“The French Enlightenment, which emphasized reason, loses. The British Enlightenment, which emphasized sentiment, wins.”

Teaching Justice to the Privileged Youth

Last summer in Theory Camp we read Michael Sandel's Justice, based on his famous Harvard course of the same name.

This month I have been helping teach a Sunday School course on justice, using videos of Sandel teaching that course in a large auditorium.

Both book and course start from very individualistic conceptions of justice and work up to the communitarian argument. In the end, Sandel argues, we should see that we also have obligations of solidarity to groups that we did not simply choose.

Something I saw from the video, that I had not noticed in reading the book, is that this course is designed to bring accomplished and privileged young people, especially young men, from their natural starting point - I am an individual responsible only for myself - to the more mature position that they are responsible to a much larger whole. Indeed, accomplished and privileged young people - Harvard students, for heaven's sake - have greater responsibility to society than other people do.

Though Sandel is teaching an enormous class, he does call upon students in each class. His assistants run around with microphones, so the students can be heard responding to the challenges he has posed for them. Sandel always asks the students' names. And again and again, the students making the individualistic arguments are men, and the students groping toward some sense of communal ethics are women. These are not all white people - this is 2011, and Harvard draws excellence from the whole world. But there is a gender skew in who makes what kind of argument. When you are watching for it, it gets almost comic.

I had a further thought as I noticed the trend of "Justice," the course. I think the whole discipline of teaching ethics is designed to get people with the fewest responsibilities to others - smart, privileged, leisured, single young men - to work their way up to a sense of their connections with the larger social world. This was true when Socrates was walking around talking to leisured bachelors, and is true today.

The practice of ethics begins with community; the teaching of ethics begins with individuals, who need instruction to understand community.

Date Tables

The one thing I most wanted to change about Centre College in my first two decades here was the seating arrangement in the dining hall. It was a big round room, full of big round tables. The fraternity men sat together in the tables around edges of the room, looking at the sorority women at the tables on the inside of the room. Independents, and the handful of couples brave enough to eat together, sat in the wings - literally marginalized.

A few years ago we tore down that building. Our new student center was designed, in part, to break up that somewhat toxic seating arrangement. And it worked. The tables are smaller, and the seating patterns are more diverse and less static.

In a journal for my "Family Life" class a student noted that now there are three kinds of seating in the dining hall:

• Round tables - where groups discuss whatever;
  
• High toppers - taller tables, well suited for people watching; and
  
• Date tables - where couples eat together, publicly proclaiming their relationship

Date tables, and the public display of relationship that they entail, have their detractors. I think, though, that they represent a large step forward from the previous culture that tended to limit much of the sober cross-sex conversation to the classroom.

No Wedding, No Womb is a Great Idea

Christelyn Karazin is a journalist who specializes in black women's issues. She has launched a blog and blogger project on one of the biggest: combating the 72% out-of-wedlock black birth rate. She has given this project the catchy name of "No Wedding, No Womb."

I think the rising out-of-wedlock birth rate is one of the most important sources of national problems. In no community is this problem greater or more pressing than among African Americans. I have long thought the major initiative to do something about it will have to come from black women. Therefore I am especially glad to see "No Wedding, No Womb," and commend Christelyn Karazin's efforts to everyone.

Fertile Women Are Most Attractive to Men - Unless the Men Are Already Committed to Another Women

A nifty experiment put men in a room with women who were at various stages of their monthly fertility cycle - unbeknownst to the men. The men were then asked to rate the women's relative attractiveness.

One interesting finding is that men rated women differently depending on where the women were in their cycle, even though there was no obvious visual sign of their fertility.

The more surprising finding is that the single men found the most fertile women most attractive, but men in a relationship found the most fertile women least attractive.

This seems to me a subtle chemical defense of marriage that is going on in men.

Are Actions "Direct Communication?"

In the "Family Life" class we are discussing gender differences in communication.

One difference is that women are more inclined to communicate their love in words, while men do it with actions. To take an example we used in class, a woman complained that her husband never told her that he loved her. "What do you mean," says he, "I washed your car, didn't I?"

Another difference is that men are more likely to be direct in speech - directly addressing a topic, and speaking directly to the person they are trying to communicate with. Women are more likely to be indirect - introducing the subject indirectly, and speaking to a third party in the expectation that the message will eventually get back to the person they are trying to communicate with.

One female student took communicating love through actions - a man washing his wife's car - to be indirect. I realized from this conversation that I had simply been assuming actions to be direct communication. The difference illustrates the point we had been discussing.

I would be curious to know your reactions to this question. It would probably be useful to name your gender in your response, if that is not obvious.

This is the Most Exciting Moment in World Politics Since the Fall of the Wall

The great moment when the Berlin Wall fell was an era when two great bastions of tyranny fell - most of the Communist states, and most of the Latin American capitalist authoritarian states. The world is a freer, richer, and more peaceful place because of those two great revolutions.

They were revolutions not just of one nation or another, but of many nations suffering under similar ideological regimes. The several revolutions fed off one another as they rose up. And, just as important, those ideological regimes lost heart, lost faith in their own legitimacy. The continuous pressure and example from the democracies was vital to both encourage the people and discourage the regimes. The democracies, the United States included, have many faults and mixed motives, and we also supported many of those oppressive regimes for a long time. But in that glorious moment, the good causes and good reasons came together.

The Muslim states are the last major bastion of ideological authoritarianism on earth today. We are witnessing a similar combination of happy forces against that ideology. There are sufficient pro-democracy populations in most Muslim nations to rise up, and to rise up with amazing discipline. The ideology that authoritarianism is a Muslim value is tottering, and is being opposed by Muslim intellectuals, journalists, and some religious leaders. And the democracies seem willing, even eager, to support democratic regimes in Muslim nations - even the ones with oil.

The news of the next few months will no doubt bring blood and horror, as some regimes - the Libyan, for example - fight back with brutal oppression. And we do not know what kind of regime Egypt will end up with. After the Wall fell, after all, the Russians gave up their empire, but the Chinese did massacre their democrats at Tienanmen Square. Some tyrannies will win this round, and some oppressed people will not even try to rise up.

I believe that when the dust settles, though, there will be, say, half a dozen Muslim democracies, and a several less oppressive Muslim regimes. Most importantly, the connection between Islam and authoritarian ideology will be broken.

"Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus" Has Fine Ethnographic Film In It

"Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus" is a kind of documentary of poor white Southerners living extreme lives. It is framed by the commentary of people who are not poor white Southerners, notably musician Jim White, who like to put themselves near extreme lives in order to draw upon other people's passion and authenticity.

I think the commentary is mostly not helpful, especially when they try to claim that these scenes of people at the margins of American society represent the South as a whole.

I do commend, though, the segments shot in a bar, a prison, a coal mine, and Pentecostal church. These are fine bits of life. The people in all these places are clearly from the same place in society. They repeatedly talk about living a self-destructive life as young people. Some turn to church to turn their lives around. Some do not. Both, though, talk about God - and their willful attempts to follow God and live right - as their only hope for a decent life.

I think a fine short film could be made from just these scenes, with a neutral voiceover describing where, exactly, they are shot.

A big part of the film was showing off the performances of musicians described in all the commentary as "alt.country." I don't know enough about the genre to know if these were significant performers within it. The songs themselves were not my cup of tea; that is not essential to what I thought was most valuable in the film.

The filmed bits of real life, though, are worth the visit.

Financing the Ring

We had our first guest couple visit the "Family Life" class yesterday - the Newlyweds.

The piquant detail that the students most enjoyed: he paid for the engagement ring by selling his video games.

Semi-Coercive Medical Care for the Self-Destructive

I was talking to a doctor friend today. She treats many alcoholics, drug addicts, and heavy-eating diabetics who come to the hospital regularly to be cleaned up - only to go right back to their self-destruction.

Medical ethics and the law mean that these very sick patients can't simply be turned away, even if they have been treated and taught better many times before.

This is a "moral hazard" problem - when we subsidize help for people's problems, some of them will produce more of that problem than they would if they were on their own. That is the hazard of helping. Yet it is a great moral good when the able help the hurting.

I do not think there is an excellent solution to this problem.

The best solution I can think of is that the persistently self-destructive can have the free or subsidized care that they get now - at the cost of losing some freedom to damage themselves. For example, after the nth detoxification for an alcoholic, they have to take Antabuse, either implanted (if such a thing exists) or show up at a location for to be observed and certified while taking it. Accepting the detoxification would legally constitute voluntary acceptance of this restriction for a time - say, a year.

The Great Black Return Migration

A century ago the Great Migration of African Americans out of the rural South to the northern cities began. They left to escape caste oppression, racism, lynching, and massive economic discrimination. Fifty years later, half of African Americans lived outside the South. Moreover, black Americans had changed from overwhelmingly rural peasants to overwhelmingly urban proletariat.

Now, fifty years further on, there is a significant move of African Americans back to the South. This great migration, though, is led by the middle class and professional class. They are heading to Sunbelt cities, not the "black belt" farm country their great grandparents left. Georgia has displaced New York as the state with the most African Americans. Atlanta has displaced Chicago as the city with the second most African Americans, after New York City.

I take it as a great thing, a measure of the huge progress that the United States has made in overcoming our original sin - anti-black racism. Fifty years ago, the American South was the last place black Americans would want to move to. Today, the South is as appealing to black Americans as it is to everyone else - which is quite a bit.

Facebook Versus the Church

Richard Beck, a psychology professor at Abilene Christian University, makes a strong argument that "Facebook killed the church." His conclusion is this:

Why are Millennials leaving the church? It's simple. Mobile social computing has replaced the main draw of the traditional church: Social connection and affiliation.

I think Beck's insight is sound. The main appeal of any voluntary organization is the social connection with the people there. If it is to serve a function beyond social connection, then the activity that people do together has to be worthwhile in itself. Facebook can't replace, for example, playing sports together, no matter how much you like the camaraderie of the team - playing the sport requires others, and playing has a value to you beyond the social connection.

So what is the value of the activity of church? The stated goal is to worship God. I think it is a well attested sociological fact that collective worship can be more powerful than individual devotion - perhaps the most powerful of all human activities. But emotionally powerful worship is rare in ordinary church life, especially for young people.

My church is the kind of church that builds powerful social connections from regular, face-to-face interaction. Ours is a small-town church that plays a significant role in our town. It makes sense for us to get together regularly at church.

Most millennials are more likely to go to large, self-contained churches that could be located anywhere. The social space of a megachurch is not that much different from the social space of Facebook. They do not need church to make their social connections, which they then nurture daily by virtual means.

Of course, it helps that the people in my church are so old that most of them have not adapted to Facebook. But that will gradually change.

Free Public Radio From Federal Funding

There are few bigger fans of public radio than the Gruntleds. We start our day with "Morning Edition" each day. We are donors every year. Local public radio stations are the best network of local political reporting. Our local station, WUKY, has the best mix of music during the day. I have long advised students to begin each day with "National Professors Radio," just as most of their teachers do.

I think public radio would be better off if it were freed from federal funding.

Members like me can and should support the best news network on American radio. Rich people who like depth reporting should endow their local station and the whole network for everyone.

Moreover, National Public Radio would be better off if it were free from the endless threats from its opponents.

The time has come. Free Public Radio from Federal Fetters.

Right-Sizing a Family House

Yesterday I wrote about a family who found that their big dream house was separating them as a family. This led to some interesting personal replies and links about what is a good size for a family house.

We used to live in a lovely small house of about 1100 square feet. Facing the prospect of three growing kids and one bathroom, we moved down the street to a house of about 1800 square feet with two more half baths. It is hard to know how exactly to measure the space - we have an attic which makes a wonderful teen bedroom, despite the 4-foot ceilings in most of it. Likewise, the dry basement is good for storing things, though it is not living area.

In any case, I find the size of our house to be ample for our family. I am delighted that our house has long been the place that teenagers hang out and sleep over. Last Christmas we had our college girls back with their friends and a horde of teens in the attic - all at the same time. Mrs. G. and I sat by the fire, reveling in the life of the house.

As I look at the websites offering advice on a good square footage for families, the modest consensus seems to be about 200 per person. We are well over that. I have been trying to figure out how a smaller space would work for us. None of the kids share a room. We also have an old outside porch that has been enclosed, which is additional space, though a bit awkward. Still, we seem to be over the recommended family-sized house, without feeling too spread out. Hmm; perhaps I shouldn't count the attic and basement.

As I think about how we use the house, we do seem cozier. We tend to gather together when we are all home. Still, as I imagine what we would have to do with a room lopped off of each floor, we could adjust well.

I think one of the things that makes McMansions so hard on families is that each room tends to be large, larger than the family needs even if they were all together at once. That may be the next frontier in thinking about family-sizing a house.

The Power of Half of Our Too-Big House

The Salwen family were living a comfortable upper-middle class life. Hannah, a tender-hearted fourteen year old, was moved by the plight of the have-nots when her family had so much. This story is probably repeated in most upper-middle families.

What made the Salwens notable is that Hannah's parents were moved by her argument. The family cut their expenditures in half, so they could give to others more. They have written about their new life in The Power of Half: One Family's Decision to Stop Taking and Start Giving Back.

What particularly struck me in their story is that the family's biggest move was to sell their "dream house" in suburban Atlanta and move into a house half that size. I don't know the exact sizes of these houses, but I have seen suburban Atlanta upper-middle class neighborhoods, and they can run to quite large. Kevin Salwen, the father in the family, reported the unexpected effect of living in their large dream house:

In our big house, we stopped communicating. We'd scatter to different rooms, far from one another physically and spiritually. The house actually began to weaken our love, or at least our ability to express that love.

I think the richer classes in America are often afflicted with this unexpected problem: their houses are too big for their families to live in as families. The much-desired structure actually undermines family life.

Perhaps a silver lining of the bursting of the housing bubble is that more people will want more modest houses, with manageable mortgages. And the unexpected benefit will be greater intimacy in their families.