In Sweden, All Romance is Teen Romance

Deborah Tannen, in I Only Say This Because I Love You, tells the story of a Swedish couple talking with their daughter about how she should and should not spend time with her boyfriend. The daughter wants to have an adult romance with her boyfriend. Her mom wants their meetings to be like a play date among children. Tannen tells this story as an illustration of the clash of parental and teenage frameworks for the same activity.

What strikes me about this story, though is that the Swedish mom can’t contrast casual dating with the marriage narrative, because Sweden doesn’t have a marriage narrative anymore. In the way that has become normal these days in Sweden, the parents are not married. Their daughter is 14 and her boyfriend is 17.

The mother and her boyfriend hung out, had sex, had kids, moved in together, all of which was supported by the state. If they broke up, little in their lives would change materially or socially. There was no marriage that they entered into on purpose and before the world that made them one flesh, and there would be no divorce to sever that tie.

The daughter wants to do the same thing. The parents can't say "wait until you are ready for marriage," or even "wait until you can support a family," because there is no normal marriage narrative either way, and there is a normal state support narrative either way.

In Sweden, without marriage teen romance and adult mating are becoming the same.

Weird Names and the Fantasy of Uniqueness

Recently I wrote about the odd given name "Chasity." This brought a response from SQ that "I'm sure Chasity is uniquification of Chastity." I think "uniquification" is exactly right. These parents believe that it is possible to give their child a unique name. Moreover, they think it would be a good thing for their child to have a unique name.

Years ago the British sociologist Basil Bernstein studied the speaking styles of working class and middle class Londoners. He noticed that they were likely to use different ways of speaking, which he called the restricted code and the elaborated code, respectively. The restricted code is best used when all the people in the conversation know one another and have many shared understandings. Sentences tend to be concrete and specific. The elaborated code, on the other hand, is more abstract and general, filling in points that might be obscure to people not in the speaker's immediate circle.

Bernstein thought that working class speakers used a restricted code most of the time, even when talking to strangers, because most of their social life was spent with people they knew talking about things they all knew. Middle class people, on the other hand, often used the elaborated code even with their intimates. Each code is an effective way of speaking in the right circumstances, and each can be mysterious or cumbersome in the wrong circumstances.

I think working class parents are much more likely to try to give their children unique names than middle class people are. If you think primarily in terms of your social circle, then it is easy to imagine coming up with a unique name. You are also likely to refer to people only by their first names in your group of regulars, so one fancy name would do. I think this is why rappers often go by one name.

If, on the other hand, you think that your child will live in unknown places in the great world, then you are more likely to see how unlikely it is that you can come up with a unique name. Your family name is more likely to be part of how you are known and referred to.

I think the middle class also avoids uniquification of their children's names because weird names and, especially, weird spellings (or, in the case of Chasity, misspellings) of common names is itself a sign of lower class origins.

In a middle class world, William is a dignified, if formal name, as ordinary as a kitchen clock. Weeyum, [which I hope I made up] on the other hand, suggests parents who were thinking more about yelling the name in the neighborhood than how it would appear on school and job applications.

Do Students Email Professors Too Much?

In a widely circulated New York Times article this week, reporter Jonathan Glater notes:

At colleges and universities nationwide, e-mail has made professors much more approachable. But many say it has made them too accessible, erasing boundaries that traditionally kept students at a healthy distance.

He quotes professors at big universities -- Syracuse, William and Mary, Georgetown, UC Davis, MIT -- who are distressed that students turn to them for information, directions, and advice. The Times, not surprisingly, found a way to make this a story about fear – the fear that professors have of offending the students who will be evaluating them.

I am glad to report that the professors quoted in the story who are from small teaching colleges saw these informal email communications as a teaching opportunity. An Amherst professor saw it as feedback about blind spots in his course, while a Pomona teacher took it as a chance to teach etiquette and power relations in communication.

What this story says to me is that this generation of students relate to their professors in the same close and informal way that they relate to their parents. Many people have noted that the current Millennial generation of young people have close relations with their parents – much closer than was the norm for the Gen Xers and Baby Boomers who are now their professors. Students today do write emails at all hours asking and telling things that the "never trust anyone over 30" generation would not have dreamed of sending to their teachers. I do not think that this means students today are pushy consumers.

Students today are trusting children. We teachers should honor, serve, and teach to that trust.

Daddy's Girls vs. Mama's Boys

Emily King and Kelli McGrath at the Family Class Blog have raised the interesting possibility that children oriented toward their opposite-sex parent might better learn to speak the "genderlect," to use Deborah Tannen's term, of that sex. Being bilingual in the speech habits of both sexes should be an advantage if you can keep the difference straight, though it could easily become a source of confusion if you don't. The general drift of the class's comments, though, has been that these two conditions are not really symmetrical, even if they would carry linguistic advantages. "Mama's boy" is a term of abuse in a way that "daddy's girl" is not.

So here is the question: do daddy's girls talk like daddy, and do mama's boys talk like mama? I don't think there is any real science on this, because the terms themselves are not that precise. Here is my first guess, though. Daddy's girls are allowed to be more feminine in that role, because they are under the understanding protection of their fathers. Mama's boys, on the other hand, are not more masculine in that role, because they are not protecting their mothers, since they are still kids. So mama's boys may indeed learn to talk in a feminine way – looking at who they are speaking to, listening to the words said and to the emotions not said, trying to be equal to the person they are talking to, rather than one-up. All of which would stand them in good stead in friendships with women – but may work against them in courtship. This may work well for gay men, but create real conflicts for hets.

On the other hand, my eldest daughter says "All the best girls are daddy's girls." I don't think this is a scientific statement, either, but I ain't fighting it.

"Only to My Girlfriends"

Deborah Tannen talks about talk. In a series of books on gender differences in speech, she has come back to the ways in which women use talk to establish connection, similarity, and equality with other people – especially with other women. Women often use what Tannen calls "troubles talk" as the common currency of social relations, sharing common difficulties inflicted by the world, work, children, and, especially, men. The point of sharing troubles is to bring connection. The usual response of other women is to bring sympathy – "you poor thing" – and empathy – "I know just how you feel."

Men, on the other hand, like to joke, banter, and argue about the world, politics, women, and the old standby, sports, as the common currency of social interaction. They are more reluctant to talk about their troubles. When they do so, they are usually looking for a way to solve their problems. From other men this kind of troubles talk normally elicits advice – "here's what you wanna do."

The contrasting styles of men and women are ripe for miscommunication. She tells him her troubles often, and he doesn't know why. He tries to offer helpful advice, and she gets mad. He finally tells her his troubles after much prodding, and she doesn't even try to help solve them. This can be an endless cycle of misunderstanding.

For men, having trouble in your love life is a secret. Telling it to others puts you one-down to them in status. You only reveal such secrets to the most select company, and only if the situation is dire. For women, having trouble in your love life is normal, since men as so inconsiderate and incomprehensible. Sharing those troubles is a gift that you give to other women, to establish connection. A big romantic secret is a big gift that you can generously share with your friends. It makes you the queen-for-a-day of the group, and establishes a bond among those in the know against all outsiders.

Presidential historians recently rated the top ten presidential scandals of all time for the University of Louisville. Bill Clinton's sex scandal with Monica Lewinsky ranked #10. (This seems high to me; I think history will drop all sex scandals down below military and corruption scandals, but that is a male-type argument for another day).

Why did the Lewinsky scandal break? Bill Clinton, the married father who was President of the United States was nonetheless carrying on an affair in the White House with an intern his daughter's age. Not only was this wrong, it was insanely risky. He kept it utterly secret, even, it appears, from his best friends. He, in the way of men, assumed that she would see the danger the same way, and mention it to no one. He asked her, "You haven't told anyone about us, have you?" And what was Monica's fateful answer?

"Only to my girlfriends."

Ambivalence Kills

Recently I proposed the idea that the besetting vice of centrists is complacency. Annie at Ambivablog offered a thoughtful response to this idea and other "Musings on Moderation." She suggests that the vice of centrists is indecision – "seeing too much on all sides, becoming so snarled in subtlety and complexity that you can't factor all your insights quickly enough into a vector for action." I think she has a point – and Lord knows centrists have more than one vice.

The title of this blog is a phrase I live by.

Some have suggested to me that decisiveness is another word for rigidity and even simple-mindedness. The world, they say, is not black and white, but shades of gray. The more appropriate attitude is ambiguity, if not ambivalence.

I disagree. I am all for subtlety and nuance. I'm a Calvinist – I know that all people are likely to think we understand more, and more justly, than we really do. But action requires judgment, choice, decision. When we are ambivalent, we still have to act. Acting ambivalently makes us more likely to screw it up, to do conflicting things, to fail to think through the consequences of our actions. Worse, our ambivalent actions make it impossible for other people to act reasonably in response to us, since our actions are not done for a clear reason in the first place.

I was asked in church this morning why mainline churches, like ours, keep declining. I blurted out, only somewhat flippantly, that we lose our kids because we don't know what we believe. On reflection, this still holds up pretty well. Most people in mainline churches personally accept the traditional faith of the church. But they also believe that tolerance and pluralism are even higher virtues than orthodoxy. So they are ambivalent about what The Church believes, even if they are not torn about what they themselves believe. And this ambivalence makes it very difficult for a church to teach its own children what it thinks is right, nor to invite others to join the faith. That way lies death, and we have forty years of decline to show for it.

Picture a squirrel in the road, its head flickering back and forth at the two opposite curbs, uncertain which way to run, while a car is rushing toward it.

Ambivalence kills.

Alholic

There was a very nice story about writing this blog in our local paper, the Danville Advocate-Messenger.

My wife pointed out to me that the headline, which I had been misreading, is sort of mysterious. It reads "Blog-alholic."

This reminds me of a sign that marked off a special parking space on campus for years. The sign read "Reserved for service vech."

You know what they meant. In fact, you know what they meant so much that you breeze right over what is actually written. But the more you think about it, the more mysterious it gets.

Sociobiology 5: Do Women Select for Patriarchy?

One of the most unsettling suggestions that sociobiology makes about mate selection is that women, in effect, select men who will create patriarchy.

Women try to create and maintain equality in their social network. Deborah Tannen shows the dozens of ways in which women's talk is designed to end up with both speakers on the same level. One of the most common gambits of women's conversation is for the first woman to deprecate herself, and the second to deprecate herself to an equal degree, establishing a bond through their shared troubles.

Men, on the other hand, have dozens of ways to establish who is one-up or one-down, to use Tannen's phrase. Men's organizations are hierarchical. Men's play is designed to produce the most competitive game and end up with clear winners – even if the players don't know one another's names.

In their relations with one another there are ample ways in which men's and women's social styles can cross one another up.

Men who are well-adapted to competing within a hierarchy, and have good prospects of rising within it, have a real skill that will help them succeed in life. They are likely to accumulate just the resources that would be most helpful in supporting a family. Women are more likely to pick men who will be good resource providers. SO, women are likely to choose men adapted to hierarchies.

It is a step, though, from saying that women tend to choose men who succeed in hierarchies, to saying that women choose patriarchy. When men and women talk using their normal styles, men are more likely to end up in the one-up relation with women. This does not come, I think, from men's innate desire to dominate women, but from the clash of their normal communication styles. If she takes a one-down position, expecting him to come down equally, and he takes the one-up position she has offered, because that is normal to his way of interacting, she is left, inadvertently, one-down. And more often than not, if she got there by telling him of her troubles, looking for sympathy, he is a likely to try to solve her problem, to her great frustration.

Willy-nilly, then, men and women may find themselves in hierarchical relations. And men who succeed in hierarchies are more likely to get selected as mates. The next step, though, to patriarchy, I don't see as necessary, even if is a frequent outcome. The hierarchy of men over women is not valuable to men or women for its own sake. I can't see how it makes evolutionary or design sense. There might be some situations when the family/clan/band is living on the edge of survival and therefore the group needs strong and clear hierarchical order. In those situations, I would expect most bands to be led by men. But in the normal family in modern society, I can't see the need or the advantage of a default gendered hierarchy. The normal pattern, as I argued in the discussion of male headship, is that he comes home from competing in a hierarchical world, and usually she does, too, to a household in which she makes almost all of the daily decisions for the family.

SO, I can see how women select for hierarchy in society. I do not think women select for patriarchy in society or at home.

Sociobiology 4: The Grandmother Hypothesis

Why human beings have menopause is a puzzle for the sociobiological paradigm. It would seem, on the face of it, that women would be more likely to pass on their genes if they kept having more kids until they died. Yet they stop having the ability to have children decades, in most cases, before they die. It is an axiom of the theory that universal features of human mating and childrearing are not likely to be accidents. There must be a reason for menopause.

The grandmother hypothesis is that women (and their husbands) are more likely to see their line of progeny live and prosper if they stop having new kids, and help their children raise their grandchildren. Menopause is almost unique to human beings. But human beings also take forever to grow up, compared to other primates, and indeed compared to practically all other animals. Chimpanzees, for example, could raise children to sexual maturity, and if calamity should wipe out all the kids, could raise another whole family to sexual maturity. With human beings, though, the time scale for raising a generation is not three years but twenty. So it would make sense, it would be a reproductive advantage, to grandmothers to help raise their grandchildren.

It is also, of course, a huge help to mothers to have help from their mothers. These days we often hear the proverb "it takes a village to raise a child." The single most helpful person in most mothers' villages is her own mother. All three generations benefit in clear material and emotional ways from helpful grandmothers.

The grandmother hypothesis makes real-world sense. It also does what any good scientific theory does – it solves a puzzle generated by the larger paradigm. We can't regard it as proven yet, but I think it is a very promising thesis, and well worth teaching.

Menopause is not a bug; it's a feature.

Sociobiology 3: Evolution and Intelligent Design

Sociobiology is sometimes called evolutionary psychology. It is, as the name suggests, an evolutionary theory. The starting point for sociobiology as it affects family life is Darwin's theory of sexual selection.

In teaching sociobiology, I find myself daily on the front line of the alleged war between evolution and intelligent design. So I bring you this dispatch from the front.

Evolution is a theory. It is as well grounded as any scientific theory, but it is a theory, and is in principle falsifiable by a theory that better explains the material evidence. And, like all human knowledge, even if it weren't falsifiable, it could be just plain wrong. But I don't think it is wrong, in the main.

Intelligent design is a theory. It is as well grounded as any theological theory, but it is a theory, and is in principle falsifiable by a better theory that explains the revelational evidence. And, like all human knowledge, even if it weren't falsifiable, it could be just plain wrong. But I don't think it is wrong, in the main.

The intellectual puzzle of sociobiology is to explain why some features of family life which seem to go against reproductive survival – such as menopause – would get selected for. The intellectual puzzle of design theory is to explain why some features of human life which seem to go against the designer's sovereignty – such as free will – would get designed in.

What the theories of evolution and intelligent design have in common is more important than what divides them. Evolution and design both believe that the world we see works the way it does for a reason. The common enemy of both is the belief that existence is random, irrational, and meaningless.

So when in class we are discussing a puzzle of family life, we often come to a point at which the only thing to say is "this exists for a reason. We cannot say for sure whether the reason was part of an initial design, or the result of millions of functional decisions, but we can discern a reason."

And thus the alleged war between evolution and design disappears.

The real war is not between faith and reason. The belief in reason is itself a faith. The real war is between reason and unreason.

Sociobiology 2: Love Still Matters to Selfish Genes

I thought it appropriate for Valentine's Day to take up a question that always bothers people about sociobiology: doesn't it ignore the importance of love?

The key problem in picking a mate is "Will it last? Is this the one for life?" This problem is especially important for women, because they bear the greater risk in the relationship.

For sociobiology, this is where love comes in. Love is the single best guarantor of commitment. Break out the hearts and flowers!

Ok, that account seems a little flat. Love is reduced to a means to another end, and a fairly mean means, too. In real life, beyond scientific theory, love is huge, transformative, the most emotionally gripping part of life. Love is what makes life worth living. Marital love is the greatest bond we choose, the great tie of adult life.

So is sociobiology just wrong, or simple-minded, about love? I don't think so. I think sociobiology is very helpful in keeping a just perspective on the place of love in marriage. Love is huge, but marriage is bigger still. Or, put another way, love is half of what marriage is about. The other half, though, is the very material, very risky commitment to tie your fortunes to another person for life and for children. Indeed, children are the main point of marriage for society, and the main source of risk.

On this day of all days we are inclined to think of love as an emotion that adults seek and cultivate with one another for their mutual happiness. This is true – there is no sham in thinking that love does help bring and assure happiness. But it is also important and bracing to remember that marriage as a social institution is a material partnership to support each other and our children. This remains true even if love is at low ebb, and the family carries on by duty, love for the kids, and sheer material necessity. And sticking to marriage in these predictable ebb tides is one of the things that makes love grow again.

So here's to love. And clear-eyed mate selection.

Sociobiology 1: Nature vs. Nurture

I am a sociologist. In the great argument about whether sex roles are more nature or nurture, sociologists are pretty much obliged to believe that gender differences are 1% nature and 99% nurture. It’s practically a union regulation. Part of the reason we believe that sex roles are socially constructed is from scientific evidence. But another part of the reason we believe this is because it gives sociologists more power. If sex roles – and, indeed, all of social life – can be reconstructed, who better to do it than sociologists?

However …

Two things changed my mind. First, I got married and had kids, a boy and girls. My wife and I graduated from the West Point of political correctness. We tried to raise our kids androgynously. It didn’t work. Nature will out, and it did. They are not sexists, but the girls are clearly girls, and the boy is clearly a boy. And in the process of being pregnant and having little babies and getting more and more married, my wife and I discovered that we are female and male in deep and ineluctable ways. Which is fine.

The other thing that changed my mind was studying sociobiology. Sociobiology, also known as evolutionary psychology, argues that many of the regular features of human behavior are deep in the human nature because they conferred an evolutionary advantage, long ago if not still today. The key idea of sociobiology that affects family life is that in mate selection, women do the choosing. This is Darwin's theory of "sexual selection," which accounts for competition among individuals within a species in the same way that his more famous "natural selection" accounts for competition among different species. Women do the choosing in mate selection because they bear much more of the risk from mating.

The basic idea is that women have a long list of what they look for in a husband, with resources and commitment being the two basic categories. Men, on the other hand, have a pretty short list: youth and beauty in any woman; youth, beauty, and fidelity in a wife. (Homosexuals, by the way, use pretty much the same rules.) And at root, mate selection is not about the married couple, but about their children. This fundamental asymmetry in what the sexes want means that courtship is a dance, a back and forth of displaying the necessary attributes for making and raising children well, and committing those necessary attributes for keeps. Men and women are almost like different species in their approach to having children – make many and hope some survive vs. make a few and nurture them carefully.

Marriage is a great cultural achievement that unites these two strategies. All cultures have invented some form of it, because our mammalian biology is at is starkest when we are dealing with the difficulty of caring for infants. There are only a few social strategies that really work, though individual variation in any society is enormous around those basic models.

So where does this leave me on nature vs. nurture? I am trying to hold the line at 50/50.

The Work of the Firm vs. the Relationships Within the Firm

Which matters more at work: getting the work done, or the social relationships among the people doing the work? Of course, both are important, and good social relations make for getting the work done with less friction. Still, in all jobs, this conflict exists.

I am not unbiased on this question. In fact, the conflict sometimes exasperates me to the point of threatening my gruntled state.

I think work comes first.

Moreover, I think putting the social relations of the workers first is one of the signs of failing organizations. In fact, this may be one of the main causes of the failure in the first place.

I believe this is what makes bureaucracies maddening so much of the time. For example, the work of serving customers would be better done if there were extra people covering the phones at lunch time, but it would be more pleasant for the workers if they shut down the phones and all had lunch together. Winning organizations will do the former, failing ones, the latter.

Jim Collins, in his superb study Good to Great, found that failing work groups tend to sink to the level of their most anxious member, whereas great work groups follow the leader in better serving the mission of the firm. In failing work groups, the other workers try to assuage the anxious by dropping the requirements of the work that the anxious ones find stressful.

Albert Hirschmann, in his classic Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, found that committed members of failing organizations will use voice – complaining, pushing, prodding, pleading – until it becomes too frustrating, after which they will tend to exit. As I read this, what the committed members are committed to is the mission, the product, the actual work of the organization. Their frustration comes from the fact that the work is not being done well, but it is multiplied many times by the fact that stated mission of the organization is being displaced by unstated goals which, more often than not, are driven by the convenience (or profit) of the less committed.

This conflict is at the heart of the argument between Carol Gilligan and Lawrence Kohlberg about whether personal relations, which women tend to value the most, should trump principles, which men tend to value the most, or vice-versa.

What does this have to do with the church, my usual Sunday topic? Churches are run by pastors. Pastors tend to respond to people, sometimes at the expense of the stated principles of the church. I see this constantly in the declining mainline churches, like mine. Growing churches, on the other hand, tend to talk about forming relationships with people in order to serve the higher mission of the church, of spreading the gospel. Declining churches are more likely to treat relationships with people, especially the people already within the congregation, as the mission of the church.

Chasity

One of the most puzzling names I have run across is Chasity, a given name for girls. According to The Baby Name Wizard, it is unknown before the '60s, peaked in popularity in the early '80s at 344th, and has fallen off quite a bit lately.

Still, it was quite popular, ranking 872 out of 4275 for females of all ages in the 1990 U.S. Census. Since girls' names are much more diverse than boys' names, being in the top 1000 is pretty good.

My problem is – how to put this delicately – that the name seems to be based on a typographical error, compounded by ignorance. A Google search for the word yields hundreds of entries in which the writer clearly meant to write "chastity."

One baby name site politely described the name as a "simplified form of Chastity."

My wife has told me that fads in girls' names are often driven by soap opera characters. I have not been able to find a soap character, or other pop culture source, which might have made this name take off in the early '80s. The most famous real person that I can find with this name is Chasity Melvin, a player in the Women's National Basketball Association.

There was a notorious case in Kentucky involving a high-schooler who was not admitted to the National Honor Society because she had just had a kid without benefit of husband. Just to make the case perfect, her name was Chasity.

Does anyone have any insight into this name?

The Vice of Centrists

I recently offered my thoughts – succinct, I would say, though snarky might also be true – on the vices of conservatives and liberals. An anonymous respondent asked, quite reasonably, what the vice of centrists might be.

I have been puzzling over this. I don't think I have really nailed it, as I do about naming the vices of others. That may be the perennial problem of self-crit. Here is my first cut.

The vice of centrists is complacency.

Liberal and conservative activists seem to enjoy feeling righteously indignant so much that I think that is half the appeal of having an ideology in the first place. But to feel really righteous in our outrage, we have to grossly simplify the issues and options, to eliminate the middle positions and proclaim culture war.

However, sometimes a revolution really is called for. Very rarely, but sometimes. In my lifetime, legal racial exclusion was one such moment. The civil rights movement was the response, and for the most part it was conducted with great justice and forbearance. Centrists are inclined to be gradualists. But the culture of racism really needed to be removed root and branch.

So it is a good thing in the ecology of politics to have the wings as well as the great middle.

On the whole, though, it is best to have the center rule.

What Conservatives and Liberals Did Right

Yesterday I criticized conservative and liberal vices. Today I want to praise their virtues.

What liberals did right was the Civil Rights Movement. Faced with a manifest evil, liberals pushed against it for decades until we all won. Most remarkable was the great forbearance that the leaders and ordinary activists showed in not responding to endless violent provocations with endless violence.

What conservatives did right was the Cold War. Faced with a manifest evil, conservatives pushed against if for decades until we all won. There was quite a bit of violence around the edges of the struggle, but the Cold War stayed a cold war at its heart.

Every virtue has its vice, and vice-versa. We become like the person with a hammer, for whom all problems are, therefore, nails.

The problem that liberals now face is that they tend to see all issues through the lens of the Civil Rights Movement. Yet the condition of women, handicapped people, homosexuals, and, next, polygamists, is not the same as that of African-Americans. The same response will not produce the same result.

The problem that conservatives now face is that they tend to see all issues through the lens of the Cold War. Yet the condition of Al Qaida, Iran, North Korea, and, next, Burma is not the same as that of Soviet Communism. The same response will not produce the same result.

Still, the self-restraint that liberals exercised in the Civil Rights Movement, and that conservatives exercised in the Cold War, is a valuable model in dealing with today's problems. We should notice and honor such self-restraint when we see it now. We argue about offensive cartoons – we don't riot, murder, and burn over them.

The Vice of Conservatives is Believing that Conservatism is a Morality Test; The Vice of Liberals is Believing that Liberalism is an Intelligence Test

That pretty much says what I have to say today.

Family Class Blog

I am trying something new in my Introduction to Family Life class this year: a class blog. Members of the class will report on, and respond to, the syllabus for the class. They will post every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, beginning next week. In May, they will be posting on topics of their own choosing in the family field. I am looking forward to the fruits of their labors.

If you have a chance, I think they would be thrilled if you would have a look and make a comment. I find that writing for the world, as I do each day, has helped make my thoughts and writing clearer (I think, so, anyway). I am hoping that blogging will have a similar effect on student writing.

I also believe that the blogosphere is the cutting edge of cultural criticism. There is, of course, a great deal of muck in blog world, but it is also the cultural arena in which new ideas are first tried out. I want to get students to become critical consumers of blogs, as well as contributors to the discussion.

The link to the Family Class Blog is now at the top of the links list for The Gruntled Center. You can find it here. Enjoy.

First Wave Feminism vs. Second Wave Feminism

Betty Friedan's death has got me thinking about the two kinds of feminism.

The feminism of Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul, and especially Elizabeth Cady Stanton was about recognizing the equal worth of the distinctive excellences of women. In particular, they did not want women as wives and mothers to be denigrated because they were wives and mothers. Of course, they fought against the discrimination that all women faced just because they were women. But their vision was of womanhood which was greater than simply being a person, of womanhood that was (at least) as excellent and necessary to society as manhood.

Now consider the most famous sentence from Betty Friedan's great book, The Feminine Mystique:

The problem that has no name — which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities — is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.

I read The Feminine Mystique while my wife was studying for the bar exam. While she was in a class of prospective lawyers that was about equally men and women in 1985, I sat outside and read about the restrictions on educated women in 1963. I appreciated how many doors had been opened to women in between, and how far as a society we had come. It was a moving experience that, as you can see, sticks with me to this moment.

In the years since then, though, I have come to appreciate the downside of Friedan's kind of feminism. Friedan's brand of egalitarian feminism thought that treating women as different from and complementary to men would be denigrating to women, making them less than people. It is right there, I think, in the famous sentence quoted above. It is not surprising that Betty Friedan was the kind of egalitarian who saw any difference as discrimination. She was trained, after all, as a communist. In recent years, though, this Marxist vision that every one is the same (and the state will give you your equal due) has not fared well in politics both global and domestic.

First wave feminism, though, had a different vision. They saw womanhood as better than mere personhood, just as manhood was better than mere personhood. This difference feminism lives on today, though academic feminists would be more likely to cite Carol Gilligan than Elizabeth Cady Stanton as a source for their ideas. Of course men and women should be equal before the law. Of course, men and women live together in the most richly intertwined ways. To say that men and women are complementary is not to put one above the other. To say that men and women are different is not to say they should live separately, or even that they can live separately.

First wave feminism was about women as women. Second wave feminism was about women as persons. Being a woman is not less than being a person; it is more.

Is Higher Criticism Useful?

A century ago the mainline churches had heresy trials about the Higher Criticism of Scripture, while the conservative Protestants laughed it to scorn. The idea that the Bible was the result of the redaction (editing together) of alternative oral traditions and documentary fragments from many communities over a long time – in both the Old Testament and the New Testament – has one of those weird ideas imported from European unbelievers.

Today, even evangelical seminaries teach the documentary hypothesis and contextual interpretation as the standard scholarly way of reading the Bible. Only hard-core fundamentalists hold to the view that the original autographs were written at one go by their reputed human authors under the unerring guidance of the Holy Spirit. Even some fundamentalist Bible scholars allow that there might have been oral tradition behind some texts, and mutual influence between some of them. Heck, they even expound historical context in interpretation sometimes. Even literalists don't always take their literalism literally.

When I was in college and divinity school two decades ago I studied, knew, and accepted the historical development of Scripture, and knew JEDP and the pseudo-Pauline letters. Over the years, though, my memory of which face is hidden in which tree has faded.

I still accept the Higher Criticism as true. I just don't find it useful.

My pastor and Sunday school teachers talk about how Corinthians was written before Romans (I think), and Hebrews isn't really by Paul, and first Isaiah and second Isaiah and third Isaiah are all from different times and were responding to different terrible things that had befallen the Hebrews. I don't dispute their historical analysis. But I cannot recall a time when historical criticism ever helped me understand what the text means to the church. As a scholar, I could be interested in whether Ezekiel is exilic or post-exilic. As a Christian, I don't see that it makes much difference.

I am for a learned clergy. I am a Presbyterian, and our pastors slog through Hebrew and Greek and lots of theology and biblical interpretation. I am glad that their sermons "smell of the study lamp" – to a point. I think it is more important, though to clearly convey the idea that the Bible tells one story that includes us today. For the faith of individuals and for the faith of the church as a whole, this narrative is more important to know than the historical order in which the pieces of that story were assembled.

If I were teaching graduate students the sociology of religion or the sociology of family life, I would have them read through the classical arguments to work up to a rich understanding of the field. I teach undergraduates, though. Few of them will be sociologists. Almost all of them will be spouses and parents and members of religious institutions. What they really need is the best wisdom that I can bring them about how to make a good marriage, how to raise good children, how to be a good member of the faith. We read lots of current studies, but we look mostly to their applications. They know, and I know, that there is scholarship and interpretative argument behind each claim that they make and that I make, but the lived story of the family and the faith matters the most.

So for my part, I say preach the one living story of Scripture. Save the higher criticism of the Bible for the study.

The Great Obfuscator Proposes

In this week when we celebrate the achievements of Alan Greenspan, we should note his success on the family front - that almost didn't happen.

Greenspan was known to speak in a convoluted way – the Great Obfuscator in contrast to his one-time boss Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator. Greenspan did eventually marry NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell. When asked whether Greenspan was ever so roundabout and ambiguous at home, his wife said:
"Occasionally. In fact, he claims he proposed three times before I was able to understand. He was so oblique."


[Note: This was first posted on Saturday, but blogger seems to have had the hiccups and dropped it later in the day. I repost it 'cause it is amusing.]

$1 Million for Better Dads

Congress finally approved the budget, including $100 million for healthy marriages and $50 million for fatherhood initiatives, per year, for five years. $50 million for fatherhood initiatives next year, divided among 50 states, is likely to mean that Kentucky could have $1 million to do something to promote better fatherhood.

I have been involved in the discussions of the Commonwealth Marriage Initiative for the past few years. I know there is not a well-developed plan on the table for how to spend the money. There are some local agencies, but nothing statewide. There are family promotion initiatives, but few even attempting to produce better fatherhood. Moreover, it is very difficult to target government money to do anything that will deliver better fathers.

We are at a blue-sky moment. So what should we do?

As I have argued before, the only institution that can really improve families are families themselves. Yet it would not really do the job to give every Kentucky family its piece of the $1 million. We need to pick some families to have the greatest impact with this money.

My nominee: Marry Your Baby Daddy Day. There are couples in the commonwealth who have children together and who plan to marry "some day." The best thing that we could do for the children of those couples is make some day, now. Sure, there are some who are ambivalent about marriage for more than just monetary reasons. Yes, everyone should have pre-marital counseling. But the crucial facts, I think, are that they say they want to marry, and they already have kids.

So, I propose that ministerial associations and the justices of the peace get together and arrange a whole bunch of weddings so moms and dads can become wives and husbands. The average wedding costs about $20,000. If we used the money to leverage donations, we could get 100, maybe 200 weddings out of that. That is, at a guess, 500 kids who could have a permanent father at home by, say, Father's Day. If everyone is more modest in what they need, double all those numbers.

That is my idea of a worthwhile fatherhood initiative.

Married Touch Cures Fear

A fascinating study put wives in the anxiety-inducing MRI machine to make their brains fire stress! stress! stress! Then the researchers watched what happened to the women's brains when their husbands took their hands for reassurance. Immediately, the wives calmed down and their brains reduced their fear shots. Having strangers hold the women's hands did not have the same effect.

Even more fascinating, the anxiety-reducing effect was stronger for the closest couples. Dr. James A. Coan, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, the study's lead author, and his co-authors, Dr. Hillary Schaefer and Dr. Richard J. Davidson of the University of Wisconsin, said that "supercouples," who scored at the highest end of emotional closeness on the study's screening questionnaire, showed the biggest effects.

This leads to the natural question: when husbands are in the MRI machine and their wives are holding their hands, do we see the same anxiety and same anxiety reduction? I asked Dr. Coan, who reports that the team is busily conducting the complementary study. He added that they will also be testing homosexual couples to see if there is a similar effect.

Here is my hypothesis: wives are more reassured by their husbands' touch than vice-versa. This goes back to the discussion of protection as one of the jobs that husbands normally do. The great thing about a scientific hypothesis is that it can be tested, and a disconfirmation is as valuable as a confirmation. So we will see what the Coan team (Coan-heads? Surely not) report next year. I will keep an eye out for it.

Serial Monogamy, Serial Polygamy, or Worse?

Kate Zernike's story in the New York Times on rich guys who dump their wives for younger models over and over again, "The Ex-Ex-Ex-Men," is sad.

It does raise the question, though, of whether we should think of this phenomenon as serial monogamy, or serial polygamy. Since polygamy is illegal in our country, these relations have the form of monogamy. Often these deluded playboys imagine that they are in love and that this is really for life. For a while.

Still, polygamy seems to be a closer model. In formally polygamous societies, only rich men can afford multiple wives, leaving poor guys without any. In those societies, each woman and her children typically has their own house, while the husband moves from one wife's house to another. In our society, the rich man pays off the old wife so she and her children can set up their own household, while he moves on to the next. The lead example in the Zernike story is Ron Perelman, who recently dropped wife number four, Ellen Barkin. The story noted that Perelman had paid off his four exes, according to their prenuptial agreements, in the amounts of, respectively, $8 million, $80 million, and $30 million, while Ms. Barkin got $20 million. Evidently wife number two understood her man the best.

The theory of the prenuptial agreement is that it removes any temptation for the poorer party (unless you're Oprah, that would be "her") to try to get half through a divorce, while it costs the richer party (read: "him") enough to make him think twice about dumping her and moving on. And a $20 million payout to his most recent blonde might give the average millionaire pause. To a billionaire like Perelman, though, it is just another business expense.

In Perelman's case – or Donald Trump's, or any number of hugely rich guys who give themselves "weddings" every few years -- this sequence of payoffs, though, suggests another way of thinking about what these relations amount to: prostitution.

Sad, sad, sad.

Who Sets the Housework Standards, Anyway?

[Today we welcome our first guest blogger, Sporcupine (Mrs. Gruntled).]

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if those housework studies assume that whatever the wife does is needed housework, and I wonder if that's fair.

If he's happy with a cleaning service vacuuming every other week and she insists on vacuuming every other day, is someone "right" in that debate?

If he'd alternate franks-and-beans with mac-and-cheese forever, backed with proper vegetables, and she wants to cook from scratch four times a week, what's fair? Does it matter how many cookbooks they each purchase and read?

If he'd serve company on plastic plates on the porch and she likes to get down the heirloom china, set the table with all the pieces, and later wash the china by hand to protect the gilded edge, what's the deal? We know she's elegant and he's practical, but what's an equitable split on washing up?

Home decorating is especially open to different expectations. What if she changes to different slipcovers for each season of the year, and he doesn't even notice the change? What if she carefully selects a different Longaberger basket to display in each room of the house, and he doesn't remember ever hearing the word "Longaberger"?

When the issue is adding grace, beauty, and style to a family's life, I can admire the spouse who wants to set a high standard, without saying the other spouse should do half the work to meet that goal. If the studies don't offer any distinction between necessities and niceties, I think that's a flaw.

Protection is Housework, Too

There are many studies showing that women do more housework than men. Even when both husband and wife are working full time, as Arlie Hochschild famously demonstrated, women still do more of the "second shift" of cooking and cleaning and childcare.

Other studies have shown that husbands and fathers do more than their fathers did. In particular, many fathers today are much more involved in raising their children than was true in previous generations. Some more nuanced studies have further shown that in the widget-laden middle-class home, there is just less housework to do than there used to be.

There is a set of chores that men as still more likely to do – yard work, household and car maintenance, and the outside tasks in general. However, women are more likely to do the daily stuff, while men's household jobs are occasional. The equation is not quite balanced. Men come off looking like slackers in these studies, which bothers me.

Then I had a minor epiphany. There is another important category of housework that men do: protection. This includes the daily tasks of making sure the doors are locked, the longer-term upkeep of smoke detectors and floodlights, and dealing with the rarer dangers like termites and foundation cracks. Most especially, men get to deal with the Scary Noise in the Night. Many other tasks get swapped back and forth across gender lines, but in my experience, this one falls largely to husbands and fathers.

I find that I routinely engage in continuous threat assessment, especially when I am with my wife and kids. I automatically size up the dark street, the unfamiliar guy, the strange dog – anything that might endanger my family. Like most men, I don't like to sit with my back to the door or the crowd in a public place, which I believe comes from the same instinct.

Our lovely town is a safe place to live, but even here there are dangers. And, in a larger sense, providing the protection to society which makes our town safe, and (for the most part) makes our nation safe, too, is overwhelmingly the work of men.

So when we are making our accounts of housework, let's be sure to include protection as one of the valuable tasks of household life. I think that will go some way to balancing the books.

Hurrah for The Bible and Its Influence

I am strongly in favor of teaching about the Bible in all schools, including the public schools. In fact, especially the public schools, where all my children attend. The Bible is unquestionably the most important book in the history of Europe, Australia, South America, and North America. It will soon have that status in Africa, if it does not already. I think the 21st century will ultimately be one of the great Christian centuries of Asia, where it all began. Not teaching about the Bible in American schools would be an absurd folly.

On the other hand, the public schools cannot teach the Bible as true. This is the deal we have made in order to have state-supported common schools.

The same is true, in miniature, of the Ten Commandments. Of course you may post the Ten Commandments on the public school wall – just teach about them and their influence in your class. Of course you may not post the Ten Commandments on the public school wall as the school's rules for conduct – not the first four commandments, anyway.

For years there has been a movement to teach the Bible itself in school. Over and over again, the courts have rejected with as an impermissible endorsement of a particular religion. In principle this is not a partisan issue, though most of the politicians who still make such proposals are Republicans. Democrats have learned the lesson, and are now trying a new and different approach. A book, The Bible and Its Influence, has been written specifically for use in public schools to teach about what the Bible says and why that has been so determinative for Western history and culture. Legislators in Georgia and Alabama have proposed legislation to authorize school districts to have such a course.

Republicans should support teaching about the Bible and its influence. Instead, they have been fussing that Democrats are Pharisees and hypocrites for stealing "their" issue. Yet teaching the Bible and teaching about the Bible are quite different, pedagogically and constitutionally. Religious politicians of all parties should support teaching about the Bible in the public schools in the only way possible. If not, they should give up on the public schools altogether – and stop being politicians.

Oxygen

My wife sometimes talks about helpful people or situations as giving her oxygen. This is not a metaphor that resonates with me at all. I get hung up on the literal image of an EMT strapping a mask to my face – not a scenario that I find stress-reducing.

When I step back and try to accept it as a metaphor, I still don't get it. I don't get stressed very often (though I may be a carrier :-)), so I don't often feel that things are closing in, getting uncomfortably hot, or in other ways getting airless. So it may just be a peculiarity of me.

However, as I have started to listen for people talking about "getting oxygen from" something or other, it strikes me that the expression is used primarily by women.

This idea led immediately to the Oxygen cable network, which is aimed at women.

Geraldine Laybourne, founder of Oxygen,

christened the network "Oxygen" because she believes that in today's frenetic society every woman needs to take a deep breath. To drive home the point, Oxygen's daily programming cycle begins with Inhale, a yoga class, and ends with Exhale, a talk show hosted by Candice Bergen.

Oxygen debuted on the symbolic date of February 2, 2000 – 02/02.

So, what do you think? Is "getting oxygen" a distinctively female metaphor for help in reducing stress? Do people also talk about "giving oxygen" to others? If it is distinctively female, why?

Marriage and Caste 3: Do Spouses Make Marriage, or Does Marriage Make Spouses?

Let's visit Kay Hymowitz' "Marriage and Caste" one more time. She reviews the two standard explanations of why marriage has such a big effect on people's chances in life. Some argue that marriage creates material advantages, of more money, more hands on deck, and the sheer advantage that a committed team has over a lone anyone. Others, though,

take an alternative approach to the question of why children growing up with their own two married parents do better than children growing up without their fathers. It’s not marriage that makes the difference for kids, they argue; it’s the kind of people who marry. Mothers who marry and stay married already have the psychological endowment that makes them both more effective partners and more competent parents.

Hymowitz goes on to make the most important point, I think, about the psychological, or really, the cultural advantage that women (and men) who stay married have:

key part of that difference is that educated women still believe in marriage as an institution for raising children. What is missing in all the ocean of research related to the Marriage Gap is any recognition that this assumption is itself an invaluable piece of cultural and psychological capital—and not just because it makes it more likely that children will grow up with a dad in the house.

This question of which matters more, material resources or the cultural inclination to use them, is one of the deepest and most enduring puzzles in sociology and in social life. Max Weber, following Goethe, uses the phrase "elective affinity" to explain how both of these factors work together and work at the same time. People who are inclined to act a certain way are drawn to social institutions in which other people also act that same way. And being in an institution which rewards a certain kind of action molds the people in it to value that kind of action even more. Elective affinity is, to my mind, one of the deepest, richest, and most mysterious features of social life. We both shape and are shaped by social institutions. Birds of a feather flock together – which makes them more of a feather.

So how does this play out in marriage? Marriage confers huge material advantages. People who stay married normally reap rich benefits, for themselves and their children. And the experience of marriage teaches people how to live with others, to accommodate and compromise and take pleasure in serving one another. But marriage is also a risk and a leap. People who already know how to accommodate and serve, and who trust in the whole institution of marriage in the first place, are more likely to take the risk. SO, people with both the cultural and psychological predisposition and a good material and psychological experience are likely to reap the greatest advantage from their marriages. But whatever you bring to marriage, you are likely – not guaranteed, but likely – to reap a proportionate benefit. Elective affinity multiplies the effect of social institutions, perhaps in marriage most of all.

Marriage and Caste 2: Education Prevents Divorce

Kay Hymowitz, in the City Journal article "Marriage and Caste" that I wrote about yesterday, reports this very important finding:

Around 1980, the family-forming habits of college grads and uneducated women went their separate ways. For the next decade the proportion of college-educated moms filing for divorce stopped increasing, and by 1990 it actually starting going down. This was not the case for the least educated mothers, who continued on a divorce spree for another ten years. It was only in 1990 that their increase in divorce also started to slow and by 2000 to decline, though it was too late to close the considerable gap between them and their more privileged sisters.

Hymowitz focuses, quite reasonably, on the bad news: the marriage gap is creating a class gap.

I see in this finding, though, a silver lining: education helps prevent divorce.

Sociologists talk about "reflexivity" as a growing feature of the post-modern information society. This refers to the way in which we gather more and more information about how society is working, then use that information to change our own actions – thus changing the way society is working. Gathering and analyzing information is not an activity apart from living, but is part of the normal functioning of our society. We all take part in, even depend on, these feedback loops to guide our normal behavior.

Sometimes talk of reflexivity seems mechanical, removed from the emotional, even blood-and-guts choices of real life. Divorce, though, is about as bloody an emotional choice as any of us are likely to face outside of combat.

So here is the good news that I glean from this cold statistic: educated people, especially educated women, learned early from the new research and society's experience that divorce really did hurt their kids. Some people, of course, weren't going to divorce anyway, no matter what the new knowledge showed. Likewise, some were going to divorce anyway, researchers – and children – be damned. But in between are a group of people who reflexively changed their actions based on feedback from the information they learned in their education or were prepared to take in because of their education.

College-educated marrieds and their less-educated counterparts would both hurt their kids by divorce. In fact, the kids of less educated parents were probably hurt more. Yet the more educated parents learned the truth first, took it in faster, and, as a group, began to take corrective action sooner. Education works; reflexivity works. The kids of might-have-divorced-but-chose-not-to parents benefit, and therefore so do we all.

Marriage and Caste 1: Are Things Worse Now?

Kay Hymowitz has written a fine article in City Journal, "Marriage and Caste." Facing the question, "what is America’s chief source of inequality?," she answers, "The Marriage Gap." The top classes not only get educated and keep working, they marry before they have kids and stay married. The bottom classes have kids without any of these structural supports – which is why they stay poorer.

Hymowitz sums up the social consequences of this pattern this way:

Why do educated women marry before they have children? Because, like high-status women since status began, they are preparing their offspring to carry on their way of life. Marriage radically increases their chances of doing that.

Hymowitz then worries that this pattern of passing on status at the top has a worrying corollary at the bottom:

The Marriage Gap—and the inequality to which it is tied—is self-perpetuating. A low-income single mother … is more likely to raise children who will become low-income single parents, who will pass that legacy on to their children, and so on down the line. … Instead of an opportunity-rich country for all, the Marriage Gap threatens us with a rigid caste society.

I agree with Kay Hymowitz that we have a marriage gap. I think we always have – there are a dozen reasons why kids with married parents usually do better than kids without. Nowadays, though, there are many more kids from single-parent homes, or worse. And there are many more kids with two educated professional or corporate parents who get boosted higher. So the gap is bigger, and there are more kids at the bottom.

Where I disagree with Hymowitz is whether this gap is creating a new, rigid caste system. As I see it, the social structure today is the most fluid that it has ever been. Today, more than any previous era in American history, the class, power, and status that you end up with has more to do with how you have chosen to live your life, and less to do with inherited qualities that you can't do anything about. Sure, being raised in a two-parent family is an advantage, and a single-parent background is a disadvantage. It always has been. And, statistically, people are more likely to repeat the pattern of their parents. But any given couple can choose to break a bad marital cycle – or throw away their advantage and disadvantage their own children.

SO: marriage gap, yes; marriage caste, no.

Have Canadians Had Enough of Deconstructing Marriage?

Yesterday Canadian voters turned out the Liberal Party, which has ruled for more than a decade, and elected a Conservative government.

Last year, the Canadian Supreme Court threw out the marriage laws of all the provinces at a stroke and legislated same-sex marriage for the whole country.

Last Thursday the Canadian Justice Department recommended abolishing the ban on polygamy across the country.

The chief author of the study, Queens University professor Martha Bailey, said ``in light of the fact that we have a fairly permissive society, why are we singling out that particular form of behaviour for criminalization?''

The election was close, and the Conservative Party will not have a majority in Parliament. There are not likely to be huge changes in Canadian law. But the drift toward imposing an “anything goes” marriage standard from Ottawa may have been stopped.

At a time when South American electorates are taking a significant step to the left, it is striking that all three North American countries have elected conservative governments. Germany, which has been in the forefront of privatizing marriage, also elected a conservative government recently in a squeaker.

The main reason governments get elected, year in and year out, is “the economy, stupid.” Still, when governments deconstruct family, that most basic of institutions, even the most permissive of societies react.

No-Fault Divorce Presumes Two Incomes

There is a horrible and very public divorce case going on now, pitting Bai MacFarlane vs. Bud MacFarlane. [Not the Bud MacFarlane of the Reagan scandals, by the way.] They were, up to now, professional Catholics. He runs the Mary Foundation, and has written Catholic apocalyptic novels. She was the happy Catholic mom who home schooled their four boys.

Then he dumped her.

One of the public issues in this case has been whether the civil courts should take any account of the religious vows, and the decisions of the religious courts, in determining custody.

I was drawn by another issue. He did not want to pay enough child support to allow her to stay home and continue home schooling their children. Instead, he sued to make her get a job. The court sided with him; she refused to comply; he got custody and put the kids in school, including full day care for the two year old.

The court was forced to judge whether an at-home, home-schooling spouse had a right to keep living the life to which she had become accustomed – indeed, to which she was religiously committed – or whether each individual is obliged to get a job and be self-supporting. Thus far, the court has taken the individualist side of this argument, not the marital side.

I asked a family court judge whether no fault has a presumption against home schooling. He replied that “DIVORCE has a bias against home schooling, fault or no-fault.” In theory, a fault standard of divorce would give the innocent spouse some claim for continuing to get enough support to keep home schooling. In practice, though, “the majority of the time most courts (in my opinion) would likely find such a result inequitable in the event that it rendered the ‘at-fault’ spouse unable to maintain some semblance of a residence. And, in most circumstances, it would.”

Most institutions in our culture now presume two incomes for a middle class or better life. This is not simply an economic fact, but is the result of legal and policy decisions to treat everyone as an individual before the law, and not as part of a family, or even a marriage. No-fault divorce laws do presuppose two-income marriages – but so does the rest of social life.

Having an “Honored Guest”: Why Wheaton Should Not Have Fired a Catholic

Wheaton College fired medieval philosophy professor Joshua Hochschild because he converted to Roman Catholicism. Wheaton, an evangelical Protestant college, has a strong faith statement that all professors are required to sign and believe. Hochschild was willing to sign the faith statement; as Wheaton interprets its creed and the Catholic faith, however, the two are simply incompatible.

The Catholic legal blog Mirror of Justice carries the Wall Street Journal piece that spread the story, and a series of sensible responses to it, starting here. All acknowledge that Wheaton has a perfect legal right to fire Catholics, or anyone else who does not fit the college’s theological commitment. The debate has been about whether Wheaton really serves its own mission well with a blanket exclusion of Catholics. Hochschild, raised a secular Jew, became a Christian at Yale through the study of Christian philosophy. Then a high church Episcopalian, he did his graduate work at Notre Dame, before going to Wheaton. That progression continued, though, and took him beyond Canterbury to Rome.

Wheaton acknowledges that they would like to keep Hochschild, and colleagues thought him likely to be tenured. They also acknowledge that it is difficult to find a first-rate scholar of medieval philosophy who is not a Catholic – Thomas Aquinas has that effect on intellectuals (I know he does on me). The Wall Street Journal article contrasts Wheaton’s “evangelicals only” policy with Notre Dame’s decision to hire non-Catholics, as long as the university maintains a Catholic majority on the faculty.

I am a Presbyterian teaching at a nominally Presbyterian college, and I have written about Presbyterian higher education, especially in Called to Teach. Presbyterian colleges traditionally have had a clear mission, and all faculty members were required to support it. However, the institution had room for some “honored guests” – religious believers from other traditions who nonetheless supported the religious mission of the school. Far from suppressing their differences from the institutional faith of the college, these honored guests hone everyone’s understanding of what the college’s mission and tradition are.

Having honored guests on the faculty (including permanent, tenured members) is not at all like the secular pluralism that has overtaken so many church-founded colleges. There, they suppress all religious commitments in hiring faculty, and soon enough the secular academy sets the norm of what professors should believe. When, on the contrary, a college retains a clear religious mission, it can have room for those who do not embrace that mission, if they nonetheless honor it. As a perfect guest does in visiting another’s home, even if the visit lasts a lifetime.

Joshua Hochschild was willing to be an honored guest at Wheaton. I think they would have been better off, and would better have served their evangelical mission, if they had made a place for him.

Epic Mashup

The missus and I saw “The Chronicles of Narnia” last night. It was a very fine flick, and well done. This is really the first moment in film history when production technology can really do justice to fantasy stories. Which is why we have this wonderful bumper crop of fantasy and science fiction epics – Narnia, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and the big dog, Star Wars.

Which suggests a rich possibility, which I hope some rogue film editors are already busily at work on: a mashup of all of them.

As I watched, for example, the battle scene in Narnia, it was hard not to remember similar moments from a similar battle in Lord of the Rings. Indeed, a few years ago I read a joint biography of the Inklings, the group of religious writers that included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, which recounted the parallel course, and rivalry, of the writers and their series, played out in the Eagle and Child (or Bird and Baby) pub. A mashup of just these two films, intercut with the conversations of the writers around the pub table, would be fascinating.

Another excellent project for someone else to do. I would pay money to see it.

Should We Skip Kids in Order to Get Rich?

Both Jay Zagorsky and Amalia Miller, whose studies we have been considering this week, are writing about families and wealth, especially for women. Putting the two studies together, we would get:

Women are richer if they delay childbirth past 30.
Men and women are richer if they stay married.
Projecting these two facts in a straight line would lead to the conclusion that the best way to end up rich is to stay married and not have kids.

Indeed, Waite and Gallagher, in The Case for Marriage, show that the biggest single material effect of marriage on women is that it makes them wealthier than they otherwise would be.

I can think of three reasons not to make a straight-line projection here, though.

First, parents, most especially men, work so hard at wealth generation because they have kids. In The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas Stanley and William Danko paint a picture of wealth generation as the work of a couple, not an individual: he plays good offense, bringing in a substantial income, and she plays good defense, limiting their spending. I read that through the Case for Marriage lens to see wealth generation as a family affair: the parents make and keep the money, because the kids need it. Remove any one of these three elements from the equation, and the family is just less likely to make and keep wealth.

Second, a couple without kids are less likely to stay married. A couple who are unable, or unwilling, to have kids together are at significant risk to divorce for that reason alone. Moreover, childless couples have a lower threshold for divorce, because there are no kids to hurt by splitting.

Third, I think few people are moved simply by a desire to make more money. Beyond a certain level of financial security, it takes a reason to make the sacrifices that devoting yourself to money-making requires. Spouse, kids, grandkids, familial posterity are reasons to make those sacrifices. Simply moving toward the right-hand tail of the income distribution is not.

So should we skip kids in order to get rich? Naw – there isn’t enough point to it.

Marriage Builds Wealth

The study of the month is Jay Zagorsky’s “Marriage and divorce’s impact on wealth” in the Australian publication the Journal of Sociology. Zagorsky, an Ohio State sociologist, followed young Baby Boomers from youth to their 40s through the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Zagorsky found that on average, a couple’s net wealth increases 16% for each year they stay married. By their mid-40s, marrieds will have 77% more wealth per person than singles will. The divorced are even worse off, losing 3/4ths of their net worth. And that is only the size of the gap at 50, the limit of the NLSY79 data. Since the great majority of those couples will stay married and keep working, the gap at retirement should be even greater.

Zagorsky focuses on simple economies of scale – one household is cheaper than two. But sociologist David Popenoe, director of the National Marriage Project, points to a more powerful factor: married people work more and work harder because they are working for something greater than themselves. Zagorsky found that divorced people started losing wealth four years before the divorce. He speculates that they were already separated and keeping two households. I think, though, that Popenoe is pointing to the greater factor: people who are committed to a marriage work harder and longer because they are building up something greater. It is reasonable to think that people who eventually divorce start hedging their bets about investing in the marriage years before the final breakup.

Zagorsky’s reported results do not take into account what I think will prove to be the greatest factor in why married couples need to produce more wealth and produce it faster: they have kids to support. That is the next study we need: married parents vs. unmarried parents, looking at how much they make, and how much net wealth they end up with.

Is Parenthood Planned?

Yesterday I wrote about economist Amalia Miller’s finding that women make 10% more over their career for each year they delay having a first child. That was the main point of her study. Today I want to write about an incidental point she made, when she compared women who got pregnant on purpose with those who had unplanned pregnancies.

Miller used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which followed the same group of people from youth to early adulthood, beginning in 1979. Miller reports this question and response from one of the follow-up surveys:

“Just before you became pregnant the first time, did you want to become pregnant when you did?”
11.6% of respondents said “Yes,”
4.2% said “Didn’t matter,”
63.8% said “No, not at that time,” and
20.5% said “No, not at all.”

As Miller reads this response, the vast majority of these pregnancies were unplanned.

I contrast this, though, with Promises I Can Keep, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas’ study which I have written about several times. Edin and Kefalas were studying teen single mothers, so their group is not directly comparable to the much broader NLSY79 population that Miller is using. Still, one of the vital findings of Promises I Can Keep is that most of the children these teen moms had were “sort-of planned.” They knew they wanted to have children, and they were ok with having children with their current boyfriends. So they didn’t try not to have children, with the usual result.

If Edin and Kefalas’s moms had been asked the NLSY79 question about whether they wanted to get pregnant then, most of them would have answered “no, not at this time.” Yet that would have been a misleading result. It did not mean, in their case, that their pregnancies were unplanned in the sense that Miller is reading them. For women of the professional class, who plan their lives carefully, a “not at this time” pregnancy is a disaster. For poor teenage girls whose biggest life plan is to be a mother, it is not.

I estimate that for most women in the classes in between -- most especially the married women -- a “not at this time” pregnancy is not a disaster. It is an early delivery of an expected gift. For most women, their job plans are made to serve their family plans, not the other way around.

More Money for Later Moms?

University of Virginia economist Amalia Miller has made a small stir recently with her finding that women who delay having kids past their twenties make more money. The headline finding was that a year of delayed fertility leads to
• a 10% increase in career earnings,
• a 5% increase in career work experience, and
• a 3% increase in career average wage rate.

This finding has been troubling because it runs up against the fact that women’s fertility falls off significantly after their twenties.

SO, if a women wants to have kids, she should start having them before 30; if she wants to make money, she should have them after 30. Or not at all.

On the face of it, this is not an unreasonable conclusion. Kids cost money, both in direct costs and in the opportunities to make money that parents, especially moms, forego. You might see this as a tragic choice, or a choice between two different values.

I do see one problem with Miller’s account that I find troubling, though. She lumps together college graduates with graduate degree holders. Yet women pursuing graduate degrees would be more likely to be in school still in their mid-twenties, and would likely have higher earnings no matter what their fertility choices. Since the biggest returns come to managerial and professional women, this is the group in which the effect of delayed fertility for schooling and earnings affected by schooling should be greatest.

In other words, women with graduate and, especially, professional degrees are likely to make more in the long run anyway, regardless of whether they have kids or not. As a group, they are more likely to have kids later than other women. They skew the whole pool. It could be that they make more because they delayed starting motherhood. More likely, though, they make more because they trained for more lucrative professions. One side effect of their training was that they are less likely to have kids in their twenties.

Now women with graduate and professional degrees often do make a choice for career over children, sometimes by just waiting too long to start on kids. As I have lamented elsewhere, most women with Ph. D.s do not have any children. Some do it for the money, some for the career itself. I think that for most of the high-earning/low-momming women, though, they did not so much make a choice as make a “creeping non-choice,” and then live with the results. The evidence convinces me that most women do not pick their careers primarily to maximize lifetime earnings. People who do that are more likely to be men. Or economists.

Martin Luther King: Great Man. Cheater.

Today we celebrate the work of Martin Luther King. This is the 20th federal King holiday. Most of the population is too young to remember Dr. King in life, but there are few Americans who do not know his name and heroic stature in the civil right movement. Over the years, I think, the holiday has come to be more about the movement, and less about the man. Which is as it should be. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was the necessary man in the civil rights movement, keeping the heart of it non-violent and focused on the prize. But it was the movement that was sacred, not the man.

The civil rights movement is now part of America’s sacred history. For many secular liberals I know, it is the only sacred part of American history. I live in Kentucky, where the effects of the Civil War are all around us. In years of watching Kentucky kids in quick recall (quiz bowl) tournaments, however, I have been impressed that the leaders and moments of the Civil War are not part of their basic knowledge – only the bookish kids know Lee and Grant, Gettysburg and Antietam. The civil rights movement, on the other hand, is obligatory. Rosa-Parks-Montgomery-bus-boycott is all one word. And it is always “the reverend doctor Martin Luther King junior.” The civil rights movement has now been absorbed into all-American history.

Martin King the man, though, is subject to less and less reverent treatment. Taylor Branch’s magisterial history of King and civil rights movement has reached the third volume, which is necessarily thick with King’s frequent and long-running adulteries. Previous volumes, and many other works on King which have been written and will be written, documented his plagiarism of parts of the dissertation that puts the doctor in Dr. King. Coretta King has been, I think, heroic in keeping her husband’s memory alive. His family, though, is clearly dysfunctional, with his children living on the commercialization of his memory, and squabbling in public about how best to capitalize on his name.

I am a Calvinist. I know that everyone (yes, especially me) is a sinner. I am not surprised at how much selfishness, short-sightedness, and even evil there is in the world; instead, I am even more grateful for goodness and generosity. So for me, I am not disillusioned to know Martin Luther King’s flaws. They are wrong and sad, but they do not make him unusually bad, or even unusual. Nor do King’s flaws undermine his heroic and crucial achievements as a leader of the great movement for the redemption of America from its original sin.

So cherish King Day, this living holiday of America’s civil religion. Teach the whole man, and his whole works.

Should Christians Dump the Public Schools? Nope.

American parents have many choices about education. The easiest and cheapest is to send your kids to public school, as all the Gruntled kids do. It is part of the social compact that everyone, whether they have kids in school or not, will pay for public education for all. Harder and more expensive is to send your kids to private school, where roughly 10% of children go. The hardest alternative, if you do it right, is homeschooling. It is also the most expensive in opportunity costs, though the cash outlay may be the lowest. Homeschooling is a minority of the minority of kids not in public school, but it is clearly growing, especially among families who are religiously dissatisfied with the public schools.

In recent years, though, there has been the beginnings of a movement to get Christians to withdraw from public schools altogether. It is, to be sure, a very small movement now, but, like homeschooling itself, it is likely to grow. The movement is fueled by the widespread and official effort to make the public schools religiously neutral, and the annual crop of foolish “Johnny got detention for bringing his Bible to school” errors. There are plenty of reasons for families of all kinds, especially religious conservatives, to conclude that their local schools are not the right place for their own children. Members of my own extended family have made that choice.

It is a big leap from concluding that the public schools aren’t right for me, to the decision that the public schools aren’t right for any Christians, or indeed for any religious people.

In 2004 two Southern Baptist laymen, lawyer Bruce Shortt and retired General T.C. Pinckney, brought a resolution to the Southern Baptist Convention calling for all Southern Baptists to withdraw from the public schools. The convention’s Resolutions committee refused to report the proposal out, so Shortt and Pinckney made a similar proposal from the floor. It was defeated on a voice vote. Shortt, who is making a career of anti-public school activism, returned last year with a new partner to propose that the SBC investigate all public schools for a pro-homosexual agenda.

Every denomination has its hot-under-the-collar agitators of the left and the right. When a prominent seminary president weighs in on an issue, though, the stakes get higher. Al Mohler, of the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, took the occasion of the 2005 Shortt proposal to proclaim, “I believe that now is the time for responsible Southern Baptists to develop an exit strategy from the public schools.”

I think it very unlikely that most Southern Baptists would leave the public schools, any more than they boycotted Disney when the SBC issued that call a few years ago. I do think, though, that there is unease among religious people that public schools are in danger of crossing a line from neutrality to hostility. The current “intelligent design” debate is making things worse, polarizing the science/religion distinction far more than the facts require.

Public schools are democratic institutions. The people who work in them are pretty ordinary members of their communities. Most schools accommodate the faith and practice of the people in them. The schools are governed by elected officials and paid for with taxes levied by elected officials. If the schools get too far out of line with community standards, the democratic remedy is available.

Flight or Invisibility?

We were listening to old “This American Life” stories over Christmas, and were most intrigued by a parlor game that one author (I cannot remember who at the moment) has been playing.

The rules are these:
1) You can have one superpower, either the ability to fly or to be invisible.
2) No one else has superpowers.
3) You can fly 1000 miles per hour.
4) Your clothes become invisible, too.
5) You have all your normal physical properties besides the one superpower.

Which would you choose?

(The originator has found a gender skew to the answers, though the Gruntled family did not quite follow the norm. I will tell you what I would choose, and why, when a few of you have had a chance to respond. Enjoy.)

The World’s Missing Girls

I have been writing in my two previous posts about the shortage of girls in India and China. Today I want to add the even greater sex ratio imbalances in many Muslim countries. Reliapundit, at The Astute Blogger, had a series on Muslim demography, which pointed out that of the 30 countries with significantly more males than females, 20 are predominantly Muslim. Reliapundit speculates that honor killings, and misogyny in general, are a significant factor in producing this imbalance.

Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, argues that one of the reasons that “Islam has bloody borders” today is because the Muslim world’s population is so young. Nations with large numbers of young men are prone to violence internally and war externally. Civilization’s great cure for the violence of young men is marriage. If there are more young men than young women, the men are less likely to marry. This is why a male-skewed sex ratio is dangerous in general. In addition, polygamy would make the effects of a gender imbalance worse, by making it even less likely that low status men will be able to marry.

So here we have the largest countries in the world, China and India, with significant numbers of young men who are not likely to be able to marry. They border on countries, notably Pakistan, which also have significant numbers of young men who are not likely to be able to marry. This is a recipe for war.

Facing them are the industrialized nations with more balanced sex ratios. However, the industrialized populations are old. The upside of these two facts is that men are more likely to find mates and less likely to make war. The downside, though, is that if, God forbid, there were to be a large-scale war, the industrialized nations would be demographically overwhelmed by those places which are already demographically primed for conflict.

China’s Missing Girls

Yesterday I wrote about a report that there is so much sex-selection abortion in India that they are short half a million girls a year. Wasatch International Adoptions reports that in China there are half a million girls in orphanages who have been abandoned by their families. India’s demographic disaster is due to a combination of widespread prejudice against girls and spreading technology for identifying them. China also has a widespread prejudice against girls. China is getting richer all the time, and the same medical technology – amniocentesis and sonograms – spread further into the countryside each year.

In India the government has been cracking down on female feticide. In China, on the other hand, government policy has made the problem much worse. China has had a “one child per family” policy for a generation. This is the sort of draconian measure that the authoritarian communist regime was prone to try. Now they have an authoritarian capitalist regime, which so far show no signs of ending the brutal practice. The result has been tens of millions of forced abortions – and a widespread abandonment of girls. If the government only lets a couple have one child, and most couples would prefer that one child to be a boy, lots of first-born girls get dumped so the couple can try again.

The silver lining of this disaster has been that tens of thousands of Chinese girls have been adopted by American families. Those who rescue these girls are doing a great thing, and they get a wonderful addition to their own families in the bargain. Girls have become an export commodity for the Chinese regime, in the same way that the old East German communist regime sold their citizens to their separated family members in the West.

America is blessed with Chinese girls. They will grow up to be Americans.

The Chinese government will reap the whirlwind.

Missing Indian Girls

For a generation, India had a bad combination of prejudice against girls, and widespread technology to tell the sex of babies before they are born. The result was massive use of sex-selection abortions. In parts of northern and western India, particularly in villages, sex ratios of 800 girls for every thousand boys were common. Activists against girl feticide report that there is a country saying that if you have two girls, you must have done something wrong in a past life. The practice has been going on so long that young men in these regions face a serious shortage of potential brides. They have taken to buying brides from regions hundreds of miles away.

The Indian government cracked down in 2001 on selection-abortions and doctors who misuse sex-identification technology. This has helped in reducing the practice of killing girl fetuses.

A new study, reported in the British medical journal The Lancet, now reports that the problem is not over. Researchers Prabhat Jha of St Michael's Hospital at the University of Toronto, Canada, and Rajesh Kumar of the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Research in Chandigarh, report that not only is sex-selection abortion not over in India, couples who have had a girl are increasingly likely to select a boy when pregnant with their next child. Jha and Kumar estimate that India is short half a million girls a year because of sex-selection abortion.

As I sit here with my second daughter getting ready for school, I find this chilling. The good news for Americans is that, for all the difficulties that girls might have here, we cherish their lives.

The Family Car: Minivans Beat SUVs

There are all kinds of psychological reasons that people might buy SUVs (Sport Utility Vehicles, or possibly Suburbans Über Volkswagens). A conscious part of the marketing has been to sell dads on the idea that they are protecting their families with a monster car. Moms, too, make up a surprisingly large part of the SUV market, largely on the grounds that they are safer for kids. David Brooks, in On Paradise Road, reports the axiom that in the suburbs, the larger the car, the smaller the woman who gets out of it.

A new study from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, however, has found that SUVs are not safer for children. Now, a Ford Mars Expedition or a Chevy Subdivision will probably protect kids better than a Cooper Mini. But for their weight, SUVs are not actually safer for kids.

I recall a study, reported in the New York Times a few Christmases ago, comparing men who drove SUVs with men who drove minivans. The main finding: men who drive minivans are more secure in their masculinity than are SUV guys. And this was before Hummers …

The author drives a sticker-covered Sienna minivan with GRUNTL plates. Thanks for asking.