Good News for the New Year

A Dutch journalist and data analyst have come up with a wonderful idea to open the new year:  cards made of good-news charts.

Below is an example, based on Dutch life expectancy.

This is an excellent idea.  I think next year I will make Christmas cards on this principle.

The Federal Government Shows Admirable Restraint Against Armed Anti-Government Renegades

An anti-government militia has seized federal property in Oregon.

The federal government has show admirable restraint in containing them thus far.

Ironically, these white guys, who have taken up arms against the United States, claim they are not traitors, but are defending the Constitution.

I have no doubt that if this group of armed rebels had been Arabs or black people claiming to defend their rights, Fox News would be calling for their heads.

Fear Produces False Negatives

Trusting people are prone to false positives, in thinking that some specific Other can be trusted.  

Fearful people are prone to false negatives, in thinking that some specific Other can not be trusted.  

The bias of our sociobiology is to be too fearful, just in case; it takes a high degree of civilization to nurture people who are too trusting.  

Nonetheless, civilization is a great thing, the highest achievement of human beings. A bias toward trust is a good thing.  And the best way to create trust in others is to be trustworthy, and to be trusting.

The Residence of Fear and of Trust

Where do people live when they are primarily driven by fear of other people?

Where do people live when they are primarily driven by trust in other people?

I am working on a new research project.  I have been wrestling with the core question.

Today, I think this is it.

The Japanese Apology to Their WWII Sex Slaves.

Today's good thing:  the Japanese government apologized for making thousands of Korean women sex slaves during World War II, and agreed to pay a billion yen as compensation to the victims.

A Great Thing in the World This Christmas: The Canadians Welcoming Syrian Refugees

The Canadian government has taken the lead in welcoming large numbers of Syrian refugees to the country.

Even better, though, thousands of Canadian citizens, often organizing through their churches, have gone above and beyond the government's legal permission to immigrate to help and support the tens of thousands of families fleeing a brutal war.

The West's best response to both brutal tyrannical states and brutal persecuting religious nationalists is this open-arms response to ordinary families.  This is a good work in itself, and our best "hearts and minds" strategy.

Mothers Are 10% More Likely to Work if Their Mother or Mother-in-Law Lives Nearby

The headline on the story is the half of American adults live within 18 miles of their parents.

In the college-educated class - roughly a quarter of the population - the distances typically get much greater, as the Gruntleds can attest.

Hidden in the report is this interesting additional fact:

labor force participation by married women with children increased by as much as 10 percentage points when they lived near their mothers or mothers-in-law

Professional men and women tend to go where the job is, regardless of family ties. However, professional women, if they have any choice in the matter, tend to try to live near their mothers. The help that grandparents give is especially important for emergencies, more than for daily care.

This is a good idea to bear in mind when professional and managerial couples are starting out: plan to live near backup care before you have kids, if at all possible.

Yay for Positive Criminology

Here is a happy new development on the way to a full-fledged positive sociology:  positive criminology.

This project comes from Bar Ilan University in Israel.  The epigraph of their webpage contains a fruitful theory of how all of positive sociology works:

Run to do even easy mitzvah and run away from any sins, for doing mitzvah leads to more mitzvah and sinning leads to further sinning.

The Liberalizing Effect of Actually Reading the Bible

Christianity Today has a nifty study of the effects of Bible reading on people's political views.  This finding gives a taste of a range of their fascinating findings:

“Ask an evangelical who is politically conservative, has some college education, has an average level of income, is a biblical literalist, and does not read the Bible, and you’ll have only a 22 percent chance he or she will say reducing consumption is part of ethical living.

Ask the same person, only now they read the Bible, and you’ll have a 44 percent chance they’ll say so.”

Republican Leadership Rejects Trump's Muslim Ban

Today's good news:  the entire Republican leadership has denounced Donald Trump's proposal to block Muslims from entering the country.

Even former Vice-President Dick Cheney called Trump's proposal un-American.

Perhaps, perhaps, the GOP has turned a corner back, slowly, in the direction of the center.

Calvinism and the Second Amendment

Calvinism sees the world ordered by the sovereign God, and disordered by human foolishness.

Yet Calvin was a protestant reformer - he protested against a disordered church, and enacted a wide-ranging reform in church and state.

For anyone who believes both in divine order and godly protest, there is a bit of a problem.  Calvinists can't be anarchists.  They cannot countenance resistance to duly constituted authority, in church or state, by mere personal judgment.

Calvin solved this by justifying reform, and even resistance, through the doctrine of the "lesser magistrate". Reform and resistance against the actions of the greater magistrate were only legitimate if conducted on behalf of the fundamental order of society and were supported by some lesser magistrate.

The American Founding Fathers were as influenced by Calvinism as they were by any secular Enlightenment theories.

Therefore I conclude that the Second Amendment could not have been intended to justify arming each citizen against the government.  The Founding Fathers were, indeed, revolutionaries against the duly constituted authority of the day.  But they were also lesser magistrates in their own right.  The well-regulated militia in which citizens have the right to bear arms is itself part of the government - not a justification for armed citizen anarchy.

Rising Death Rates Among Low-Status Whites is Due to Despair at Their Declining Privilege

Josh Marshall, of Talking Points Memo, has a good take on the important Cole-Deaton study on why death rates among less educated white people have been going up - while every other group is living longer.

The causes of death are self-inflicted:  suicide, booze, drugs, and sheer reckless living.

Marshall's educated guess is that the relative value of white privilege is declining, which leads some white people to despair that they are losing their place in society.  The anti-government Tea Party politics was rooted in this demographic group.  Today's even more aggressive white nativist populism  is almost entirely a movement of angry, low-status white people.  Marshall cites a re-study of Cole-Deaton which finds that this increasing death rate is most pronounced in the South, which makes sense as the place where low-status whites have lost the most relative privilege.

... in a Well-Regulated Militia

That is the gun right protected in the Second Amendment.

Divorce Ideation is Common, But Most Couples Work it Out

Brad Wilcox' National Divorce Decision-Making Project found that most couples have thought about divorce in the early years, and a quarter have thought about it recently.

Nonetheless, most of them work it out because they want to work it out.  And they do it on their own, through patience, taking a broader perspective, and remembering their promises to one another and to their community.

"Divorce ideation" - a wonderful phrase, derived from "suicide ideation" - does not mean you are at high risk for divorce.  In fact, Wilcox and colleagues conclude, in our divorce-prone culture it would be hard not to think about divorce sometimes.

The good news is that most couples do work through these fleeting ideas.  And the great majority of them are happy they did.

In Praise of the Rat Squad

Professions must police themselves in order to remain ethical and effective.

Professions know best what bad actions to look for.

But it is very hard to police your friends and colleagues.  It is easy for us to understand our own kind, and thus make excuses. It is painful to punish the bad, and to lose the those who are sometimes good, or used to be good. And it is embarrassing to the profession to air dirty laundry.

Nonetheless, no one hates a bad cop more than a good cop.

Religious Nationalists, East and West, are Spoiling for a Fight

Nationalism is the modern version of tribalism.

Religion is our most powerful cultural tool to transcend tribalism.

But tribalism is powerful, and crafty.  It finds ways to co-opt every form of religion and cosmopolitan sentiment.

Thus, religious nationalism uses the terms and forms of universal religions to, ironically, support tribal conflicts.

Religious nationalists are usually kept in check by two unlikely allies: secular realists who oppose the utopian and apocalyptic excesses of nationalist religion; and truly religious people who oppose the parochial and violent excesses of nationalist cooptations of universal faiths.

But there is a cycle to human affairs.  New nationalist generations arise who "knew not Joseph," who forget why the last great war was so terrible.

I believe we are entering such a phase now.  Muslim religious nationalists, on one side, and Christian and Jewish religious nationalists, on the other, are spoiling for a fight.

Class Taste Reflects Our Conception of Happiness

We are now interviewing college graduates to see the connection between their tastes and their social class fraction. We started asking about why our subjects chose particular things or chose particular services. We soon realized though, that the more important question, the prior question, is to ask which choices seem like just utilitarian selection, and which choices involve a moral element.

I have over the past few years also been studying happiness, looking for what makes for a happy society.

I now see a point of convergence between these two lines of inquiry:  to ask people which of their choices seem to involve a moral element is to ask them their conception of the happy life.  In these questions, as we add them up, we are discovering (together with our subjects) their vision of eudaemonia - of a flourishing life.

Gov. Beshear Restores the Voting Rights of 180,000+ Nonviolent Felons in Kentucky

Kentucky is one of the few states that does not automatically restore voting rights to felons after they have completed their sentence.

Outgoing Governor Beshear, in a fine act of statesmanship, signed an executive order to restore voting rights to more than 180,000 nonviolent felons.

This is a good day for democracy.

Positive Civility Requires a Thick Skin

Here is a good centrist idea:

To take a positive step toward creating civility in society, be relentlessly reasonable.

Have a thick skin.

Don't get upset over potential problems.

Cut other people some slack when they are insensitive or thoughtless. (You undoubtedly need the same slack cut for you sometimes.)

Too often we think of civility as consisting of what we do not do - not being extreme, not getting worked up over minor issues, not calling names.

I offer this idea as something that centrists (or anyone interested in civility) can do to actively promote the happy society.

Millennials are the Most Willing to Use Government Censorship in a Good Cause. This is Still Wrong, But Teachable.

It is alarming that 40% of Millennials would be willing to have government prevent people from saying things that are offensive to minority groups.

Still, I see this as a vice of their virtues.  They are trying to overcome America's long history of racism.  The tool they have chosen - government censorship - is a cure worse than the disease, but they are trying to cure a disease.  Millennials are young, and famously less informed about history, including the historical use of government suppression of free speech to oppress minority groups.

I think most Millennials are not far from supporting other, less oppressive means of helping denigrated minorities. The traditional mechanism for opposing outright racists - public shaming - is effective and not as dangerous as government suppression.

For most people, though, the problem is not so much outright racism as it is insensitivity to unexamined denigration.  The cure for insensitivity is gentle consciousness raising.  And that applies to educating Millennials who are insensitive to the dangers of government censorship.