Marriage is Better, and it is Better Policy to Say So

The new British Millennium Cohort Study of babies born in 2000-01 compares how the parents' relationships fared in the stressful first five years after the birth. The result:

Married couples divorcing: 6%
Cohabiting couples breaking up: 32%
"Closely involved" fathers disappearing: 74%

It will come as no surprise to Gruntled Center readers that marriage works better in holding families together than does hanging out together and hoping for the best. Even I was surprised, though, at the magnitude of the difference that appears already in the first few years of the young family's life.

The other half of this story, though, is that some leaders of the Conservative Party are touting the study to push for a pro-marriage campaign. Critics, both within and outside the party, are afraid that a pro-marriage position will make unmarried parents feel bad and not vote Tory.

I don't usually find myself praising Tory leaders. In this case, though, I think Iain Duncan Smith, the former head of the party who is pushing the current leaders to take a more pro-marriage stand, is right. Marriage is better for children than cohabitation is, and miles better than "closely involved until the going gets hairy" fatherhood. Promoting marriage for parents is the right thing to do regardless of whether it wins votes or not.

I think that promoting marriage to unmarried parents is also politically savvy. Yes, some people will get their backs up and vote against you. But most parents are more concerned about what is good for their children than anything else. Parents will gravitate to parties that tell the truth about what really helps children. As our own politics shows, the party that talks pro-marriage and pro-family will keep winning elections – even if they don't actually do much to help families or promote marriage.

Pro-marriage is good politics. It also has the advantage of being true.

Centrists Against Political Pork

In the current online New Republic, Bradford Plumer makes the liberal case for pork-barrel spending, for special earmarks in federal spending bills designed to pay off particular legislators and their districts. Plumer says that pork is necessary for "activist government." If some legislators weren't bribed with special spending in their districts, they wouldn't vote for good laws. He cites as examples Reagan's tax cut in 1986, and Clinton's tax hike in '93. I think the Reagan tax cut is a somewhat peculiar example of "progressive legislation" and if there hadn't been so many payoffs in '86, it wouldn't have been necessary to pass budget-balancing tax hikes seven years later.

Still, Plumer's larger point is that "Any big-government program on the progressive wish list … won't get done without an orgy of earmarks to entice the inevitable skeptics in Congress. That won't be pretty, but if the price of, say, universal insurance is a bit of borderline corruption here and there, it's a tradeoff worth making. " Plumer notes the obvious sauce-for-the-gander objection – that conservatives can use earmarks to pass their own bills; nonetheless, he believes that "in the long run, institutional mechanisms that are biased toward activist government will favor liberals."

I think this is a point at which centrists part company with ideologues on both extremes. Corruption corrupts. Short-term gains do not justify the long-term erosion of good government or faith in government.

Centrists are typically loyal to the existing institutions of society more than they are tied to a theoretical ideology. Loyalists to our democracy know that Congress has always had some corruption, both of the pork-barrel kind and the Duke Cunningham bribery kind. Our loyalty to our government, though, is despite the bad way it sometimes works, not because of it. Our larger loyalty is to the long-term viability of Congress, beyond the issues, personalities, or even parties of any given term.

The long-term effect of pork on Congress is trichinosis.

Scaring My Son

Last night, as part of the family's commemoration of 9/11, we saw "United 93." We made sure that our son, who is 12, saw it with us. He was 7 when 9/11 happened, and doesn't really remember it. We wanted him to know.

He fell asleep soon after it began, and didn't wake up until the last half hour of the movie.

"United 93" is a superb film. It is done in a documentary style, without famous actors, and with real flight and air traffic people in critical roles. It unfolds in the real time of the flight, and was largely improvised, using official records and the recollections of the passengers' families as checkpoints. It is so powerful because it is not at all sensationalized. It is hard for me to imagine how this film could have been made better.

When the passengers hear that two planes have been flown into the World Trade Center, they realize that they are not in an ordinary hijacking, but a suicide mission. They have a few minutes to figure out what to do, and do it. Ordinary American guys size up the threat, coordinate quickly, and act. As we all know, they did not succeed in taking control of the plane before the terrorists crashed it. The text on the screen at the end said there were "no survivors."

But there were survivors – probably thousands of them. All the people survived who might have died had that plane reached the Capitol. The passengers on the plane died, but they died doing the right thing.

When the film was done, my son was in tears. He is a tough kid. He faced down a bully in elementary school and got a broken arm for his trouble. He has been studying martial arts to give him discipline as well as skill. And, like most boys his age, he had seen thousands of virtual deaths on television and in video games.

This was different. This was real. He doesn't really want to talk about it yet, but I think he saw that you could really be in a terrifying, life-or-death situation, and be called upon to act.

I assured him that the grownups would try to make order in the world so that he wouldn't have to face terrorists. But I know that he, like me, like most American men and many American women, would be ready to act in the face of evil, even unto death.

My Conclusions on 9/11, 2006

We are supposed to be the Good Guys. That means:

We shouldn't torture.

We shouldn't weasel about it when we have been torturing.

We shouldn't have secret prisons.

We shouldn't hold prisoners without charges or trials.

We shouldn't put prisoners in forbidden military bases to keep lawyers from helping them.

We shouldn't declare American citizens "enemy combatants" in order to strip their rights.

We shouldn't make a "pre-emptive" war on a country that is not even close to attacking us.

We shouldn't overthrow a government without a plan for installing a new government.

We shouldn't scorn our allies to make elective wars.


After 9/11, 2001 the world supported us and opposed the terrorists. Today, we have lost most of that support, and created more terrorists, because we did all of the above. It will take decades to undo the damage.

Today would be a good day to start being the Good Guys again.

A Big Day for Big Women

Doris Ozmun, 43, of Snyder, OK, posted pictures of her tattooed body on the web. Her nude, tattoed body. Her husband, the chief of police, felt obliged to resign in the ensuing uproar. He said "My wife is 6-foot-3 and weighs 300 pounds. If there is somebody that thinks they can control her, have at it. I have tried for 11 years and haven't been able to."

The adjacent story in our local paper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, was entitled "Woman Kills Home Intruder."

Susan Kuhnhausen, 51, surprised a hammer-wielding burglar in her home and strangled him with her bare hands. The burglar, a brutal career criminal named Edward Haffey, 59, was 5-foot-9 and 180 pounds. Kuhnhausen is 5-foot-7 and 260 pounds. After killing the crook, Kuhnhausen walked to a neighbor's house, who called 911. Kuhnhausen was briefly treated at the hospital where she worked, then released. "Everyone I've talked to said 'Hurray for Susan," said neighbor Annie Warnock, who called 911. "You didn't need to calm her. She's an emergency room nurse. She's used to dealing with crisis."

Which Part of the Class Ladder is Harder to Climb – the Bottom Half, or the Top?

Some students in my Social Structure class made a claim that took me aback, and I have been chewing on it ever since. They contended that it is harder to climb from the bottom to the middle of the social structure, than it is to climb from the middle to the top.

When I brought this idea home, Mrs. Gruntled agreed with the students.

My first reaction, though, was the opposite. Sure, it is difficult to rise from poverty to the secure middle class. You are beset by obstacles and temptations to self-destruction on every side.

Yet the gap between the middle and the top of the social pyramid is dizzyingly gigantic. The difference in power between the average middle-class family head and the commander in chief of the world's only superpower is staggering. The status gap between respectable suburban college graduate and the oldest of Old Money cannot be bridged in a generation or two. And the view up the slopes from the average American family's net worth, $93 thousand, to Bill and Melinda Gates' net worth of about $25 billion (down from $100 billion at its peak) is truly Olympian.

And this seems to me to be the clincher: though it is difficult to rise from poverty to the solid middle class, millions do it all the time. On the other hand, though millions are striving mightily, and with many valuable assets at their disposal, to rise from the middle to the top, only the tiniest fraction will ever get anywhere near there.

I think most people can envision and even relate to the difficult climb from the bottom to the middle. On the other hand, I think they have no idea how high up the top really is.

I think climbing the top half of the ladder is much harder than climber the bottom half.

I would welcome your thoughts.

Why Don't Homosexuals Rush to Marry Where They Can?

Eskridge and Spedale, in Gay Marriage: For Better or Worse? provide the first hard numbers I have seen on how many gay and lesbian couples would get married if they could. In Denmark, though country that has had gay marriage the longest – 15 years – only 5000 people (2500 couples) out of 5.4 million people have taken advantage of the law. A tenth of one percent of the population has registered a same-sex partnership. The best scientific estimate says that about 3% of the population is exclusively homosexual. The authors found even smaller percentages of the population using registered partnerships in Sweden and Norway, which have had similar laws for about a decade.

Eskridge and Spedale then conducted a very interesting survey of Danish homosexuals about their attitudes toward marriage and the registered partnership law. They do not report numbers for all of their findings, but they do quantify two crucial findings. First, the great majority ("more than three quarters") of their respondents thought registered partnerships were the equivalent of marriage. In other words, they are not holding back from registering until the law gave homosexual unions the same name as heterosexual ones. Second, most Danish homosexuals would get married, but the great majority ("about three quarters" of the unmarried) have not found the right person to permanently commit to.

What does this mean for the American same-sex marriage debate? Scandinavia has a different culture from ours in many respects, especially with regard to marriage. Still, I think we can get a rough guess of what would happen here if homosexual marriage were legalized across the board. I think that there would be a rush of marriages at first, but it would quickly taper off. The overall same-sex marriage rate would not begin to approach the heterosexual marriage rate. I don't think that gap would ever be closed. This doesn't settle the question of whether it would be worth creating legal same-sex marriage for the benefit of that minority of homosexuals who want it. But, fear it or favor it, there is not likely to be a big wave of same-sex marriages no matter how welcoming and equal the law might be.

Who Thinks Gay Marriage and Polygamy Are Connected? Judges Do.

Many proponents of homosexual marriage are perplexed, even offended at the idea that gay marriage creates a precedent or slippery slope that will lead to the legalization of other prohibited unions, especially polygamy. They see no connection between the two. I expect that most proponents of polygamy feel the same way about gay marriage, especially the Mormon fundamentalists who are not, to say the least, pro-gay.

Yet from the legal point of view, it would be hard to legalize one without legalizing the other. Thus far, the legal definition of marriage has been one man married to one woman. The "one and one" formula was nailed down in the 19th century polygamy cases. The "man and woman" standard has always been implicit in the law. Lately a number of state constitutions have been amended to make the man and woman standard explicit, as does the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

If, though, there were a successful legal challenge to either part of the "one man and one woman" standard, it would be hard to explain why the other part would not fall, as well. Restricting marriage to heterosexual couples was ruled a violation of constitutional equal protection standards in Massachusetts. There is no reason, in principle, why restricting marriage to couples (as opposed to larger groups) would not also violate equal protection standards. That did not happen in the Massachusetts Goodridge case only because no one asked the court to. If a heterosexual standard of marriage is just "prejudice" or "mere tradition" or "imposing religious standards," all those same arguments could, and would, be made about a monogamous standard of marriage.

To homosexuals, or polygamists, who want to get married, the two kinds of union are worlds apart. To judges and legal thinkers, on the other hand, they sure look like the same issue.

Does Dutch Gay Marriage Lead to Polygamy? Sort of.

One of William Eskridge and Darren Spedale's main points in Gay Marriage: For Better or Worse? is that when the northern European countries legalized same-sex marriage it did not open the door to legalizing every other kind of union. They specifically note that gay marriage has not led to legal polygamy. "Pandora's box was opened," they cheerfully assert, "and it was empty."

Last September, as Eskridge and Spedale were finishing their book, a married couple, Victor and Bianca de Bruijn, took advantage of the Netherlands' registered partnership law to add a second wife, Mirjam Geven. Geven met the de Bruijns through a chatroom, and soon left her husband to live with them. Registered partnerships were invented to allow homosexual couples to legalize their unions. As I noted yesterday, though, most of the people who have taken advantage of the law are heterosexual couples. The de Bruijn-de Bruijn-Geven union hit the trifecta – he is straight, and both women are bisexual.

Strictly speaking, the Netherlands has not legalized polygamy, because registered partnerships are not precisely marriages, but "marriage-lite." Still, as Eskridge and Spedale make clear, all the northern European countries have effectively legalized same-sex marriage. Most of them did not call it that for political reasons, but the intent was transparent.

Would legalizing same-sex marriage here lead to polygamy? Yes, I think, and even faster than in the Netherlands. Unlike the Dutch, we already have a sizable and militant underground polygamous movement. The ACLU is already on board to defend polygamy. The street demonstrations by polygamists have already begun.

Despite Eskridge and Spedale's happy talk, the Pandora's box that some fear gay marriage might open really does have some other scary items in it.

"Marriage Lite" for Hets

This week I will be working through a new book, William Eskridge and Darren Spedale's Gay Marriage: For Better or Worse? They look at the Scandinavian experience with legalized marriage-like relationships for same-sex couples, starting with Denmark's new law in 1989. They also make sidelong glances at the experience of other countries and provinces that are experimenting with new marriage laws aimed primarily at gays and lesbians.

One of the northern European experiments in marriage alternatives has been the Dutch "registered partnership" law. Registered partners share many of the financial benefits of married life, but there is no legal expectation of sexual fidelity, and it is much easier to get out of than is a full marriage. This was created to allow a version of gay marriage without calling it that.

To everyone's surprise, though, most of the couples who have taken advantage of the registered partner law are heterosexuals. They are attracted to "marriage-lite" precisely because it is not as demanding or permanent as marriage. In fact, I think registered partnership is not so much "marriage-lite" as "cohabitation-heavy."

I know of no research on exactly what these mixed-sex registered partnerships are thinking. I have a guess, though. For many of them, I expect that she thinks it is a step on the way to real marriage, whereas he is content to have the benefits of marriage with few of the responsibilities. When they do the breakup studies of registered partnerships, I expect that all the partnerships involving men, gay and straight, will have a dissolution rate even higher than the high divorce rate.

Walk-away Church Divorce

The Kirk of the Hills, a large conservative Presbyterian Church in Tulsa, has decided to leave the Presbyterian Church (USA) for another denomination that it finds more attractive, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. After years of complaining that the PC(USA) was doing everything wrong, wasn't listening, just wasn't making the relationship work, Kirk found someone new. Kirk is willing to walk away – it just wants to keep the church building. Kirk's lawyers have already filed suit.

In family studies we talk about "walk-away wives." Most divorces are initiated by the wife, after years of complaints that he isn't acting the way she wants, that he isn't listening, that he just isn't making the relationship work. One day, she just walks away. Her lawyers contact his lawyers. Very often he is surprised by this. He knew she was complaining, but had no idea that she was ready to leave. And she just wants to keep the kids and the house.

Presbyterian church law, unlike civil law, makes it absolutely clear that the denomination owns the property.

"All property held by or for a particular church … is held in trust nevertheless for the use and benefit of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)" (G 8.0200 of the Book of Order).

"Whenever property of … a particular church of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) ceases to be used by that church … in accordance with this Constitution, such property shall be held, used, applied, transferred, or sold as provided by the presbytery." (G 8.0300)

"If there is a schism within the membership of a particular church and the presbytery is unable to effect a reconciliation … , the presbytery shall determine if one of the factions is entitled to the property because it is identified by the presbytery as the true church within the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). This determination does not depend upon which faction received the majority vote within the particular church at the time of the schism." (G 8.0600)

If most of the leaders and members of Kirk of the Hills want to leave, they can. It's a free country, and a voluntary church. I wish they would stay, but they didn't ask me. But they don't get to keep the church. And they won't win by claiming that they are the true Presbyterian Church, so they should get everything. The Presbyterian Church is connectional, not congregational, and we all benefit from the connection.

That said, I think the presbytery should considering selling the building to the departing individuals at a reasonable price – a price big enough for the remaining members to build a new, more modest church, and start again. That would be generous on the part of the presbytery, and sensible on the part of the exiting folks. The property settlement is not really a matter of how literally to read the Bible (the official reason for the departure). It is just church property law.

If you must go, just walk away, or pay up, and go in peace.

Corrupt Bastards Club

The FBI is getting ready to round up a gang of crooked politicians in Alaska. The crooks, no doubt wishing to be helpful and obliging, have provided clear labels.

While the FBI won't say what the investigation is about … they are seeking evidence of all kinds, even hats or other garments mockingly labeled "Corrupt Bastards Club," "Corrupt Bastards Caucus," or just "CBC."

Hairdressers, Don't Rat Out Your Clients to the Divorce Lawyers!

According to a story in the London Telegraph today, a law firm in Wiltshire is offering hairdressers a bounty of about $130 to refer any of the salon's clients who might want a divorce. This is so wrong that even other lawyers have protested.

Smartmarriage and other pro-marriage groups have long suggested that beauty salons display and distribute information from marriage counseling and marriage saving groups.

This is the sort of thing that gives lawyers a bad name.

No Muslim Susannah Wesley

Sometimes when I read of Christian Puritan regimes of the past, they sound uncomfortably similar in some respects to Muslim Puritan regimes of today. Zealous restoration movements are, by their nature, intolerant of the old corruption that they are trying to clear away. Some of the excesses of Cromwell's Commonwealth, and Puritan Boston, were so wrong that even the most gung-ho Christian today must contemplate them with shame. I am glad that we don't massacre Irish villages or hang Quakers on the Common anymore.

The succeeding wave of Christian revitalization, with the Wesleys at its heart, was a much more humane and thoroughly honorable improvement. The Christian movement after the Puritan revival was better because women were at the honored center of it. And no woman deserves more credit for the pious remoralization of English-speaking society than Susannah Wesley. The mother of John and Charles Wesley, and 17 other children, schooled them in zeal and service. The fruit of her piety changed the world, and the Pentecostal heirs of the Wesleyan movement are still setting the world on fire for God.

In stark contrast, women are ruthlessly suppressed even by the "moderate" Puritans like the Saudi regime. Al Qaeda and the extreme Islamists are so brutal in their condemnation of women that you wonder if they had mothers.

Someday, perhaps a century from now, there will be another wave of Islamic revival. They will likely look back on the Taliban and their ilk with shame. But it is hard to see how a new Islamist movement, built on the smoking ruins of this one, could build an honored place for women teachers and spiritual leaders.

There will be no Susannah Wesley of Islamic Puritanism.

Polygamy's Young Face

Last week a dozen teenagers from polygamous families rallied in Utah to talk about how great polygamy is. "I love all my moms" read one of the signs they carried. They called their lives blessed, and asked for freedom to practice their religion.

This week the FBI caught Warren Jeffs, head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Jeffs had been on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list for the felony sex crime of arranging marriages of young teenage girls to middle-aged men. (In a wonderful touch, Jeffs was caught in a routine traffic stop driving a red Cadillac Escalade in Las Vegas with three wigs and $54,000 in cash, which I guess was an attempt to be inconspicuous.)

The first group of teenagers did not identify which polygamous group they were part of, or even whether they were religious, though they appeared to be. And the Fundamentalist LDS, which broke from the main Mormon Church years ago, seems to be a pretty scary cult, even by polygamist standards. Still, I think it likely that some of the 13-year-old girls married to Jeffs and the other patriarchs would probably go to a rally in Salt Lake City and talk about how wonderful their lives were, too.

In every oppressive social structure, some individuals will tell you they are happy.

I still think polygamy is an oppressive social structure. I expect that within the decade we will all be expected to take a position on polygamy, just as we are all expected to take a position on the same-sex marriage now.

Picking the Setting for Mate Selection

My parents met at a freshmen mixer dance at Swarthmore.

Mrs. Gruntled and I met during my freshman year at Swarthmore.

Today the eldest Gruntled child enrolls at Swarthmore.

I will keep you posted on whether history repeats itself. No pressure or anything …

Three Milestones

Today, as I return to the blog from vacation (for which I thank you all), I mark three milestones.

First, we begin classes this morning. This is a rich and wonderful thing.

Second, immediately after class, I take my eldest child to college for the first time. This is also a rich and wonderful thing, though it comes with some emotional trauma.

Third, today is the one-year anniversary of the start of this blog. I would welcome your assessments.

Taking My Own Advice

A few days ago I blogged on the importance of taking vacations. I will take my own advice, and the Gruntled Center will be on vacation for two weeks.

(And I will really be taking some actual vacation in that time, too. Really.)

Toolkit: Wrong in So Many Ways

Gay Marriage is Not Inevitable: Remember That the Equal Rights Amendment Failed

A year or two ago it seemed that legalized same-sex marriage was inevitable, and would be coming to a justice of the peace near you soon. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had declared bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, and several others states had similar cases in the pipeline. Several other NATO countries had legalized same-sex marriage. The next logical step in the civil right movement was about to be consummated.

But that is not how things look today. When the Massachusetts court made its ruling, it gave the conservative opponents of "liberal judicial activism" a perfect weapon, which they promptly used in the 2004 election. I think that decision was the most important factor in President Bush's victory. And those judicial cases in the pipeline didn't pan out as the egalitarians had hoped, either. The top courts in New York and Washington states upheld their state constitutions' bans on same-sex marriage. The Massachusetts decision prompted 20 states – including my state of Kentucky – to amend their constitutions to make the traditional understanding of marriage perfectly clear, and another 8 or 9 are likely to adopt such amendments this year. Only a handful of states have gay marriage now, and it appears likely to stay that way.

When I was a teenager one of the biggest issues of the day was the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The ERA, written by Alice Paul (a Swarthmorean, by the way) in the '20s, was quixotically proposed in the Congress for 40 years. Suddenly, in the early '70s, the world changed. The ERA passed the congress in 1972, and was sent to the states for ratification. 30 of the needed 38 states quickly passed it in the first two years. Then the reconsideration set in. The ERA tide peaked at 35 states in Jimmy Carter's first year, then stopped. Some states even rescinded passage, including Kentucky. The time limit ran out just before Ronald Reagan ushered in a new era without the ERA.

The Equal Rights Amendment, having come within a whisker of being added to our Constitution, is dead. My students have never heard of it. What once seemed an inevitable revolution in the law died aborning. To be sure, legal equality of the sexes was achieved in other ways. And perhaps equal marriage-like unions might be achieved in other ways, too.

Don't count your legal revolutions until they hatch. The good ship SSM may sink into the sea like the ERA.

Take Your Vacation

A third of Americans don't take their full vacation time. And many people are disappointed with their vacations, because they build up a huge fantasy about how perfect they have to be, since their vacations are so rare.

The hidden problem, I think, is that workers are thinking of vacation as part of work. They are resting so that they can work better. I am all for work. I have as strong a work ethic as the next Presbyterian elder. But I don't live to work. Work is not my life.

Vacations are to reconnect with family and friends. They are best for rebuilding the social ties that work frays. So even if the weather is not cooperative, if the real point of vacation is to spend time together, a gray day will work as well as a sunny one.

Go play.

Wall Street Goes With Family As Well As Combat Goes With Family

There is an excellent article in the New York Times, Jenny Anderson's "Wall Street's Women Face a Fork in the Road," about the huge difficulties facing women who want the top investment jobs and kids. The story is upbeat, dwelling both on the determination of the women and the formal programs at some top firms to attract women, and especially to integrate returning moms. But the overall picture is pretty grim.

The investment business is organized now to run all the time, and its top performers, especially the young and hungry ones who want to rise, are at the office, on the road, and/or on the phone all the time. They stick with a deal until it is done. They are a can-do crew.

Investment bankers and brokers live like soldiers in combat.

Soldiers in combat cannot care for children.

The difference is that soldiers have families and support networks at home to care for their children when they are in combat. And combat is not supposed to last forever for any given soldier, even if the war itself is endless. Almost no one can stand a life of continuous combat, kids or no kids. The ones who do either have no life outside of combat, or have families that essentially run on their own, which they visit from time to time. Almost no mothers, and not that many fathers, can stand to live that way for decades at a time.

My Favorite Martian

Today is primary day in Connecticut, where incumbent Democratic senator and former vice-presidential nominee Joe Lieberman is in danger of being knocked off by a leftist challenger from within his own party. The main issue – practically the only issue – of that race has been Lieberman's support of the Iraq war.

I like Joe Lieberman. On almost every issue, he has taken a position about where I do, and stuck with it. I was delighted when Al Gore put him on the ticket in 2000, and lament daily that they lost the presidential election by one crucial vote. If Al Gore and Joe Lieberman had been in the White House, 9/11 probably still would have happened. In the aftermath, though, the United States would have led the world in a successful coalition war to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan and attempt to create a democratic society there – or at least a country in which women could learn to read and the national soccer stadium would not be used for daily hangings. And we would not have invaded Iraq and squandered the world sympathy that we had, even in much of the Muslim world.

But that is water over the dam. The Supreme Court gave us their choice for president, which in turn gave us the Bush family's choice of war. And now we are stuck with it. We have to stay in Iraq until we can build up some kind of viable regime. The alternative is sheer chaos and genocidal civil war, at the end of which a new dictator would arise combining the brutality of Saddam Hussein with the insane zeal of Osama bin Laden. That is why Democrats like Joe Lieberman, and I, believe we still have to fight this foolish war that the Decider – who is clearly not the Think-it-Througher – has gotten us into.

I am very disappointed with Senator Lieberman's petulant refusal to support the party nominee if he loses today, vowing to run as an independent if the Democratic voters turn him out. Still, I have voted for independent Connecticut centrists who left their party before. Lowell Weicker left the party of Reagan to run for senator when I was in graduate school. I also am saddened the way Joe Lieberman dumped his first wife, a story I had not heard until this current stink. The Lieberman race has split the Gruntled household, as the earlier Weicker race did. This time, none of us are Connecticut voters, so our argument is more hypothetical.

Readers younger than I am might wonder at the title of this blog. Senator Lieberman resembles actor Ray Walston, who played the title character in the silly Sixties sit-com "My Favorite Martian," which I enjoyed as a child. I often think of the show when I see Lieberman on television, and can imagine a pair of antennae rising from his head while he is making the most serious pronouncements.

I heard David Brooks say that he wished there were a John McCain/Joe Lieberman party. I agree with that. Joe Lieberman's stands on the major national issues –- including this tar baby of Bush's war – is right. I would rather have him in the U.S. Senate than out of it.

For Men at the Bottom, Unmarried Life Nears the 25% Threshold

It is rare for a man to get to 40 and never have been married. The unmarried proportion has been rising in most of the big demographic groups – all education levels, all races, both sexes. Still, the vast majority of people marry. For educated people, the marriage rate has stabilized, and may even have turned the corner.

For forty-something men who did not finish high school, though, nearly a quarter have never been married. This is up from about 8% 25 years ago. The big thing that has changed is that there used to be more women than men at the lowest levels of education. Since women prefer to marry more educated men, this was still a favorable ratio for the least educated men. In the past quarter century, however, women have passed men at all levels of education. This is good news for the most educated men, but bad news for those at the bottom.

In the 1960s Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously sounded the alarm bells on the declining black family when the black illegitimacy rate hit 25% (the white rate at that time was in single digits). He was widely excoriated, but he was right. Since then the bottom has fallen out of the black marriage rate. For uneducated black men, hitting 40 having never married has been the norm for some time. When we now see that marriage is shrinking for all men at the educational bottom, alarm bells should ring, too.

I am not an alarmist. The sky is not falling. Most importantly, there are always things that we can do to reverse bad social trends. Most of these unmarried men would like to marry and have children. Some are afraid of divorce. Some have no secure jobs, which scares them as well as potential wives. Marriage is a risk, and they are not irrational to fear taking it. And marrying without secure jobs or a reliable place in the economic and status ladder increases that risk. But what they are missing is that no one marries in complete security, no matter where they are on the economic ladder. And marriage itself increases the odds of steadiness and security. Couples, even poorly educated couples, help one another through economic rough patches. AND more education is always possible, to improve your odds.

Less education is likely to mean less marriage for men always. But we could stop the erosion of marriage at the bottom before we get to the 25% mark.

"Munich"

Steven Spielberg's fine film, "Munich," follows the secret, unofficial team that the Israeli government sent to kill the leaders of the Palestinian terror group Black September after the terrorists murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. At first Avner, the Mossad agent who leads the group, accepts his charge to hunt down Black September and murder them in spectacular ways, to send a message to Israel's many enemies. However, when each Black September leader is replaced by an even worse one, and when the Palestinians retaliate with attacks on Israeli embassies and civilians, Avner starts to doubt the morality of his team's, and his government's, actions.

Late in the film an anguished Avner asks his Mossad controller "what have we accomplished?" Why, he wants to know, if the men they killed were certainly terrorists and criminals, was he not sent to capture them and bring them back to Israel for trial, like Adolf Eichmann?

When we meet Avner, he is introduced as the son of a war hero, proud to be a Mossad agent, with his lovely, pregnant wife – a real sabra, as he insists. When he is summoned to meet his boss, a couple of generals, and Prime Minister Golda Meir – at her house, where she serves him coffee herself, and praises his father – well, what patriot could refuse the task they set for him to hunt down his nation's enemies? As he explains it to his wife later, he couldn't live with himself if he said no.

I think, though, that he (and Speilberg) get it right in the end. Satisfying though it might feel at first to hunt down terrorists, it was the wrong thing to do. Golda Meir, in the meeting in which she authorizes the assassinations, is shown saying that sometimes a civilization has to make compromises with its own values. But that compromise came back to bite them. The trial of Eichmann was Israel at its tough best. That is what they should have done with Black September. Sinking to the level of the terrorists did Israel no good; it brought even worse terrorists to power.

Pedagogocratic

"Among the senior executives of the University … [lives] the pedagogocratic ambition of subjecting all acts of civil and political life to the moral magisterium of the University."

Pierre Bourdieu, and Jean-Claude Passeron
Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture

What a wonderful word: pedagogocratic, which must mean something like "rule by teachers." Bourdieu coined this word right in this passage. It has not been taken up by the world at large yet (fancy that).

But our time will come …

Husbands Who Have to Go Be Gay Still Can't Bear to Think About the Kids

Judith Wallerstein, the famous researcher on the effects of divorce on children, marveled that in the whole "no-fault" divorce debate in the '70s, the only issue was whether it would make the exes happier – no thought was given to the kids. The effect on the kids, in case this is still a mystery, is gut-wrenching, scarring, and long-lasting.

Now the fashion has turned to married fathers who decide that they are really gay, and therefore have to leave their wives. The New York Times article, "When the Beard is Too Painful to Remove," cites the estimate of UCLA's Gary Gates that between 1 and 2 percent of married men, or formerly married men, are gay or bisexual. The article portrayed some men as trying to have a gay life while remaining married, but most of the subjects seemed to be heading toward divorce. To be gay and still married was thought to be living in denial.

A number of the men in the article were fathers. Yet not a word, by the men, their wives, the researchers, or the reporters, was spent on the effect on the kids of dad going off to be gay. To the kids, though, their father's deepest identity is as "dad."

More Men Not Married; More Men Not Working

The New York Times has a fascinating story on the rising percentage of men in their prime working years (30 – 54) who are not working. Nationally, about 14% of men that age are not working; my state of Kentucky is the second worst at 20.9%, beaten, if that is the right word, only by West Virginia, where a quarter of the men aren't employed.

When we compare the marital status of the working and not working men, what we find will be no surprise to readers of this blog. Of the working men, 70% are married; of the non-working men, only 41% are. The divorced comparisons are particularly scary: 17% of the working men, compared to a whopping 37% of the non-workers – nearly as many as the married.

Wives are more likely to push men to work; husbands are more likely to want to work to support their wives. The Times article tells us nothing about whether they have children or not, but men normally have responsibility for children when they have wives.

The article suggests that it is welfare, especially disability payments, which make this rising rate of non-working possible. I think, though, that welfare is not likely to be a major cause, though it might be an important support force in prolonging unemployment. The major cure for male indolence is marriage and fatherhood. As the latter declines, the former rises.

Does Swarthmore Reproduce My Family, or Does My Family Reproduce Swarthmore?

One of the most fascinating, but head-cracking, aspects of Pierre Bourdieu's work is that he insists that we look at the complex ways in which one whole system of institutions produces and reproduces another whole system of institutions. In Reproduction, Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron look at the way in which the system of classes and the system of schools mutually reproduce one another.

The focus of our research is not on schools, but on families. So we got to thinking – how does the system of schools produce and reproduce the family? We realized that putting it that way was not quite right – the items on either side of the scale did not quite balance. At the level of the whole of society, we would need to compare the system of schools with the system of families.

This formulation raises the mighty question of whether there is such a thing as the system of families, whether the families in society form any sort of coherent unit – even in the loose sense that the schools of society form a coherent unit, or, for that matter, whether the social classes do.

But we could look, at the micro-level, at the relation of a school and a family. At first blush, the two sides of the scale are still unbalanced. A school endures; a family has a life-cycle. It is true that one family normally has a life-cycle, but a lineage does not. Now the longer time scales are more in balance. How do a school and a lineage mutually produce and reproduce one another?

I am a proud son of Swarthmore College, my alma mater, which was, indeed, second only to my own parents in shaping my character. Moreover, Swarthmore provided me the great boon of bringing me my wife, and shaping her character in a way congruent with how it shaped mine.

My parents are also Swarthmore graduates, having met at a freshman mixer dance just after the Second World War.

And now, the eldest Gruntled child is off to Swarthmore herself in a few weeks. When she was sweating trying to get admitted last fall, my sister reassured her with "if you tried to genetically engineer the perfect Swarthmore student, you would come up with" our eldest daughter. The right response to this notion, we realized, is that, in effect, we did genetically engineer the perfect Swarthmore student.

Stepping back and looking at just this tiny slice of social reproduction – one school, one lineage, one full back/forth/back cycle. Swarthmore shaped my parents in ways that surprised them. My mother, the daughter of New York schoolteachers, had some idea of what she was aspiring to and, as she said, "sweated bullets" getting in. My father, on the other hand, a high-school drop out who discovered he wanted to learn during long months at sea in the war, had no idea what "Swarthmore College" was in the status hierarchy of education. After the war he took his G.I. benefit, and walked (!) up to the college, looked around, and informed the admissions staff that "this looks pretty good – I think I'll come." I would like to have seen the look shared by the admissions folks at that moment. But come they did, and were changed by it – as any good school should do.

And the rest is history – the little history of this social reproduction narrative. When my parents sent me to their alma mater, they were, in a broad sense, reproducing themselves and their lineage's place in society. And now Mrs. Gruntled and I are sending our child to alma mater, which will, in a broad sense, reproduce us and our lineage's place in society.

Yet Swarthmore also reproduces itself and its place in society through us.

And the most important part of this whole story of reproduction is that neither family nor school is simply replicating what it already is. Both lineage and educational institution are transformed by the intimate process of schooling, mate selection, and child-rearing. At each step, the same family meets the same school. Yet neither is really the same. Swarthmore has changed notably over the last fifty years. Our family has changed in some of its important beliefs and in its precise class location.

So, did Swarthmore produce us, or did we produce Swarthmore? Does Swarthmore reproduce us, or make something new in us – and vice-versa? I think the only correct answer is "yes." Reproduction is both making the same again and making something new.

Don't Wait On The World To Change

John Mayer, the excellent songwriter whose "Daughters" won a deserved Grammy last year, has a new one that should be just as successful as a Gen X anthem. "Waiting on the World to Change" says, in part:

me and all my friends
we're all misunderstood
they say we stand for nothing and
there's no way we ever could
now we see everything that's going wrong
with the world and those who lead it
we just feel like we don't have the means
to rise above and beat it

so we keep waiting
waiting on the world to change

I live on the cusp between the Baby Boom and Generation X. Normally I side with the Xers. They set themselves smaller tasks than the Boomers, but the Xers actually accomplish those tasks. This song, though, brings out the "change the world" Boomer in me.

Some time back in church an aging Boomer was gassing on about how someone ought to do something to solve all the world's problems, without ever getting down to cases. I turned to Mrs. Gruntled and whispered "Can we just pay the Xers to take over now?" I believe in the power of Generation X to make basic things work again.

Mayer says later in the song

one day our generation
is gonna rule the population
so we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

That day is now. Seize the day!

Religious Cleansing is as Shameful as Ethnic Cleansing

Georgetown, Delaware, has driven one the few Jewish families out of town. Bad Christians insisted on promoting Christianity alone in the public schools, and harassing the Jewish kids even in class. Mona Dobrich asked for a reasonable accommodation from the school on behalf of her children. She wasn't trying to drive God out of school. She was just asked for the Judeo-Christian accommodation that is normal in most American small towns. Instead she got the back of the hand from local government officials, and death threats from anonymous rednecks. The Dobriches moved to more cosmopolitan Wilmington, at great financial sacrifice.

This kind of thing brings shame on Christians. The perpetrators will likely live to see the day when they revile their own actions. But just as culpable are the good Christians who let it happen.

Corbin, KY, drove all the black people out of town just after the First World War. For decades thereafter any African-Americans passing through were harassed. Corbin became a by-word among black Kentuckians for racism and what we would now call ethnic cleansing. Even to this day, nearly a century later and despite strong efforts by more recent generations to be a welcoming community for African-Americans, the taint lingers.

The people of Georgetown, DE, might want to ask the people of Corbin, KY, whether a moment's "purity" is worth generations of shame.

Does Cafe Noise Strengthen the Brain?

I wrote about Boing Boing the other day, and they send us another good one today. They report on Bart Kosko's new book, Noise, in which he argues that working against background noise can strengthen your mind by making you concentrate more. I am writing this from a café with classical music in the background, and conversation going on around me.

On the other hand, I heard on NPR the other day that kids who try to do homework with the television on do much worse at remembering what they have read. I listened to the NPR story as background to reading the newspaper and eating breakfast. I remember the NPR story. But I couldn't tell you what I read in the paper.

I find that I like café noise for reading and writing. I do not like television or music with words, though – it is too hard for me not to pay attention to the meaning of the words.

Of course, I am often surprised at how often people tell me about songs they really like, but they can't tell me what the words are. Sometimes they have even memorized the words enough to sing them, but have never really thought about what they mean.

So maybe I am weird. Or maybe this is another knowledge class culture detail. Cafés yes; t.v. no.

Happy Sysadmin Appreciation Day – the Perfect New Class Holiday

Thanks to Russell Smith's suggestion in an earlier discussion of New Class culture, I have been visiting the Boing Boing site, which I commend to you. Last night they posted this wonderful notice:

In a few minutes, it will be July 28th on the West Coast, marking the start of national Sysadmin Appreciation Day. This is a fine idea. Sysadmins are the secret masters of the world, the tireless workers in the data-centers who quietly keep the Internet and its constituent PCs up and running. Sysadmins get more off-hour phone-calls than surgeons; for that matter, a good sysadmin is better to have around than a surgeon.

Here is the sensibility of what Avrom Fleishman thinks is the core of the New Class in a perfect gem of an example. Consider these markers:

• Being precisely conscious of time zones, and expecting that readers may come from any place and time zone.

• Comparing sysadmins with the high status job of the old technology, surgeon.

• Measuring how essential a job is by the number of off-hour phone calls it gets.

• No snark or ambivalence – unlike, say, President of the United States, this job really matters.

• And, of course, assuming that all readers will know what a sysadmin is.

A new class culture is being assembled all around us. It is fun, as well as rich sociology, to chart it as it rises.

"Class Culture" vs. "Privilege and Oppression"

Recently I was asked if the students in my senior seminar, "Class Culture," could be surveyed as part of an educational psychology study. I want to be hospitable, but I think the questions asked are so far from the aim of the course that we should not participate. But I am torn. So I put the question to you.

The course is designed as a research seminar for senior anthropology and sociology majors. We read some good books about the culture of the social classes to spur and shape their own study of a class culture question of their choosing. A representative recent syllabus is here. As that syllabus says, " The aim of this particular advanced seminar, on class culture, is to understand how and why society is stratified into classes and status groups. We will explore how different classes have distinctive cultures, and consider the larger question of the social function and meaning of a class system." I do not presume at the outset that social stratification is bad or good. Indeed, considering the vices and virtues of particular classes, and particular stratification systems, is one of the main things we talk about. We discuss the full range of classes, but recently we have spent more time on the knowledge class, in keeping with the research that I have been presenting to you lately.

I have been asked by a local graduate student, not someone I know personally, to study this class. This is how she describes her purpose:

My research is focusing on the effects diversity related courses have on students awareness of privilege and oppression, openness to diversity, and ethnocultural empathy. Further, I am investigating what role the classroom environment plays in changing attitudes and awareness of students related to diversity topics.

So, the Class Culture seminar is a diversity-related course, I suppose, and privilege is, in a way, one of our topics. Still, I sense a disjuncture between her understanding of the aim of a "diversity course" and mine. This is an instance of how the classification scheme classifies the classifier: the very structure of her question, and my syllabus, assumes a different understanding of what "diversity" and, perhaps, education about diversity, means.

So what should be done with this disjuncture?

The Taste for All of It

We discovered a fascinating book in our search for knowledge class, or "new class" culture, helpfully entitled New Class Culture, by Avrom Fleishman. His definition of the knowledge class is a little narrower than ours, focusing on those who control knowledge – and, indeed, live their whole lives – through computers. This version of the knowledge class is notably young and drawn from all classes of origin, as well as the most diverse ethnic backgrounds. They have the great virtue of being curious and open, as well as devoted to education and rationality.

Fleishman has an interesting take on what lies at the heart of new class culture:

The New Class’s taste, so varied as perhaps to be incomprehensible as a distinct approach to experience, is a taste nonetheless, the taste for all of it. It is well on the way toward becoming the dominant standard of cultural distinction in turn-of-the-millennium America. As this rising class gains power and prestige, the catholicity of its taste becomes acknowledged as the favored cultural stance. (49)

This is a challenging basis for culture. But I see what he means in my students all the time, especially those who experience the world through computers. They are wonderfully curious, open, and global in their interests.

The downside of that openness, though, is that they find it hugely difficult to select what is truly good from the welter of information and experiences that come as a torrent upon them.

Fleishman says that one of the most glaring problems with new class culture is "the lack of any central or ordering principle by which its cultural choices might be made, its experiences and acquisitions graded" (104). They are trying the nearly impossible task of constructing an ethic and an aesthetic within the limits of an easy relativism.

From Fleishman's account of new class culture, I notice another difficulty: trying to experience all the knowledge and culture of the world through the computer distorts and distances what you experience. Fleishman cites Marshall McLuhan in another context, which put me in mind of McLuhan's contention that television is an inherently "cool" medium, which puts a passion-dampening distance between viewer and subject. McLuhan died before the internet came to be, but it seems to me that his insight would lead one to think of internet experience as, at best, "warm," but not "hot." The web is more interactive, especially through the many ways in which young people write to one another all over the world. Still, experiencing the world through the web is to experience it in a limited way.

The taste for "all of it" is a fascinating idea for the foundation of a new culture. So far, though, the all that Fleishman's new class has a taste for comes through the lens of digital experience.

It seems ironic to post these thoughts on a weblog, and ask for the responses of friends and strangers through the flattening power of the comments section. Please do send those responses, though, and I promise to appreciate the irony while thinking about what you say.

Cities Need to Keep Their Middle Class Staff

The New York Times reports that the middle class is being squeezed out of cities by rising housing costs. The rich have returned, and the poor never left, but in many big cities the middle income group – those within 80% to 120% of the median income – now represent less that a fifth of residents. The median household income in New York, to take a representative example, is $40,000.

For the most part, having the middle class live in the suburbs is not a terrible thing. It is good, I think, for any community to have a broad range of social types; on the other hand, people should live where they want to. The suburbs were invented for middle class families to have a safe place with a bit of green to raise their kids in. It is normal for the middle class to move to the suburbs.

The example that the Times used, though, was of police, firefighters, and school teachers being unable to afford living in their own cities. This, I think, raises a different issue than we face with any other part of the middle class. I think it is a very good thing for the people who provide a city's essential services – and I would include education in that list – to live in the city and share its life. Having the police live in every kind of community is an especially good idea.

It would be worth the while of any city to give every incentive for the city's essential staff to live in town. No city could afford to pay its cops enough to live in the high rent district, nor should it expect them all to live in the slums. The city government could work with landlords and banks to make it easier for city workers to live in town. If I were a big city mayor, I would offer housing subsidies as part of the recruiting package. For teachers, these subsidies might be contingent on them sending their own kids to the public schools.

If the private middle class leaves the city, that is their choice, though it is a loss for the town. If the public middle class leaves, though, the city services themselves will decline. Keep the city staff in the city, though, and they can be the nucleus of a revival of the urban middle class.

Who is Television's Knowledge Class Heroine?

As part of our study of how the knowledge class gets married and has kids, we were discussing portrayals of smart women in popular culture. So I put it to two of the smart women in my house: who is the smartest, best educated, most cultured woman on television? A lively discussion ensued.

One important conclusion we reached was that there is no show that centers on such a woman. The examples we could think of were often in strong supporting roles. The closest we could come to a show centering on a smart accomplished woman was "Judging Amy," in which the central character is a family court judge. I believe this one is no longer in production.

There are a number of strong women on "House," especially the chief administrator of the hospital. "Grey's Anatomy," which seems to be the favorite show of college women at the moment, has a number of strong smart women. Likewise "Gilmore Girls," a big favorite in our house, centers on smart women. The scary-smart best friend, Paris, might grow into a cultured and erudite woman if she stops being psycho.

All lacked something, though, that suggested the kind of deep culture that one would want in a knowledge class heroine. Smarts, education, and a strong will would all be necessary components, of course, but beyond that, I would want to see some sense of reserves of cosmopolitan culture which produced wisdom, one of the rarest of television commodities.

My nominee: Shirley Schmidt, the most functional and wisest of the senior partners in "Boston Legal," played by Candice Bergen. In real life Bergen was the daughter of famous Hollywood performers, who sent her to the best schools -- Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles, the Cathedral School in Washington D.C. and then abroad to the Montesano (finishing) School in Switzerland. She briefly attended the University of Pennsylvania, which she wrote about amusingly as "My Bright College Months," before making her film debut at 19 in Sidney Lumet's "The Group," a dark satire of a Vassar-like college for privileged women. As if in answer to the question, "where are the smart, educated, cultured women on television?" she famously said "Hollywood has been vulgarized, mostly by television, which vulgarizes everything."

I especially welcome your comments on this category.

How Big Will the Schism Be?

These are heady days for the movement to split the Presbyterian Church (USA). The New Wineskins Initiative meeting is underway in Tulsa. They are working their way toward voting on a timetable for a "process of dismissal." They excitedly heard a lawyer tell them they might be able to leave with their property after all. The Layman is egging them on. The Evangelical Presbyterian Church, which might be the prime beneficiary of a mass pullout, sent their moderator to Tulsa to offer encouragement.

Full Court Presby reported on Friday afternoon that

Based on my discussions with leadership in NWI and voting delegates, I believe that the recommendations discussed earlier will be approved. That approval sets a course and time-table for action. There will be convocation in the winter of 2007 that will be VERY INTERESTING. NWI could be in a position at that time to receive congregations that desire to leave the PCUSA. Would this be the time of a mass pullout from the denomination? No one knows.

On the other hand, the biggest renewal organizations have made clear that they are for renewing, not splitting, the church. The Global Fellowship of Presbyterians, a new mission initiative of tall-steeple churches, is observing the Tulsa meeting with interest and is clearly distressed with the way things are in the denomination – but they won't leave, either.

New Wineskins is proud of having accredited representatives of 121 churches with a combined membership of about 65,000. Many other congregations which are not represented in Tulsa are also disaffected, including most of the 1300 that have signed on with the Confessing Church Movement.

However, I think that, when push comes to shove, very few of these congregations will vote to leave the denomination, much less take part in creating a counter-denomination.

So how big might the schism be? At the Assembly, when I was asked this question, I off-handedly said "40 congregations, tops." I still think that is a good estimate. It is a very difficult business to get a whole congregation to leave a denomination, even if the denomination did not own the church buildings. Unless the denominational brass do something boneheaded – such as acquitting Jane Spahr after she begged so hard for conviction – I think the NWI schism will be mostly angry talk.

Bottom line: a year from now, the PUP schism will amount to 40 congregations and 40,000 members. In other words, about an average year's membership loss anyway.

Walking the High Log

A week ago I was in the woods with the Posse group doing a ropes course. (I was going to write about it last week, but then there was a Huge Goat in Danville!) The ropes course was an excellent team-building activity. We worked together to get everyone through at least part of the course. Indeed, they were such a good team already that the staff of the University of New Hampshire's Browne Center, who ran the course, had to make up ways for them to make it harder ("with your eyes closed" or "with one hand" or "backwards" or all of the above).

Each of the high courses was about 25 or 30 feet in the air, crossing a space of about twenty feet. The four sites were: walking a wire with two guidewires; walking a wire with one guidewire; walking a telephone pole bolted horizontally between two trees; and the "leap of faith" – a leap from a platform to touch a ball suspended above the ground. In each case, the team part lay in the belaying rope attached to your harness. This is your safety line. It is also the only way down. You are trusting your teammates on the other end of the rope to keep you safe.

We all knew in our minds that we could do it, and that we could trust the team. Still, it is a big adrenaline rush to walk that high holding on to not much. The posse are healthy teens. All of them climbed the ladders, and then the staples, up the trees. Some told jokes and struck poses. But everyone was affected physically.

So why am I telling this as a Saturday story? Imagine a forty-something fat guy, in a harness with a rope attached, climbing a ladder, then climbing up steel staples about as big as the heel of your shoe, then coming to a telephone pole which hangs out over the staples. This was a poser. Nonetheless, with some thinking, and much grunting, I threw my leg over the log and hauled my way up on to the log. Did I mention that this one has no hand-holds at all? You just walk across a log? Up in the trees? Oh, and it was raining?

Walking the log was great. The adrenaline made my knees a little wobbly, but the thrill was fine. And the posse came through, lowering me gently to the ground.

If you ever get the chance to do a ropes course with friends, take it.

The College/Not-College Class Gap Is Growing

The narrowing social distance between high school graduates and those with "some college" is offset by the widening social distance between those with "some college" and college graduates.

So write Christine Schwartz and Robert Mare. Mare is a long-time researcher in "educational assortive marriage" or how much educational birds of a feather flock together.

Two generations ago, couples made up of a college graduate and a spouse with "some college" were common. Barbara Bush, for example, dropped out of Smith to marry George H. W. Bush. Now, though, couples with one college graduate are increasingly likely to include another. One generation ago, for example, George H. W. Bush and Laura Bush married when both were not only college graduates, but had completed graduate degrees, as well.

This is the trend in the United States of the percent of married couples in which husband and wife are both college graduates:

1940 1.75%
1960 3.95
1970 6.95
1980 11.35
1990 14.51
2000 18.02

One of the reasons for the increase in double-college couples is that men and women are waiting longer to marry, by which time they have usually had time to complete college degrees. Even if a couple meets in college, they are likely to graduate before marriage – both husband and wife.

Just as interesting as the consolidation in "educational homogamy" above the college-graduate line, is the increasing mixing of high school graduates and those with some college. The college/not-college line has been the main class divider in America for some time. In the past generation, though, the bar has been raised: the great class divide begins at Commencement.

How to Raise Critical Thinkers

Many of the biggest proponents of critical thinking are themselves converts from authoritarianism. Raised in families in which authority was simply asserted, they went off to school where they were taught to think critically about all authorities, whether texts or people. Thereafter they regarded themselves as liberated from authoritarianism.

And then they had children. They were put into the position of authority. What to do? Many first-generation critical thinkers went overboard the other way. On principle, they never told their children what to do, never said no. They didn't teach their children any religious faith, in hopes that the kids would make up their own minds. They didn't make their kids read any good books, for fear of imposing a standard of goodness by authority. Likewise, they didn't forbid their children any books, movies, games, etc., for fear of stifling their creativity.

But the basic fact is that children need authority. They need limits, crave structure, beg for authoritative teaching. You can't raise kids to be critical thinkers permissively.

How do you raise critical thinkers? Use your parental authority to teach your children to question authority.

I use the simple expedient of telling my children outrageous falsehoods every day. From "good morning, chicken head, what lovely feathers you have today," to "lights outs, beloved; research has shown that sleep-deprived children develop tails," my kids are subject to a constant stream of, shall we say, critical thinking opportunities. They usually respond with reasoned arguments demonstrating that dad is obviously mistaken, again. Gradually, they are also developing wittier parries to these paternal fibs. This makes for a happy home, though it is sometimes disconcerting to visitors.

So, if you love you kids, lie to them. They will think you for it later.

Are Academics and Engineers Both "Knowledge Class?"

I turn today to a wonderful little book, Alvin Gouldner's The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. Writing in the 1970s, before the term "knowledge class" came into regular sociological use, Gouldner talked about the "new class" which was contending with the old corporate bourgeoisie (Gouldner remained a kind of Marxist) for world domination.

Gouldner argued that the new class was made up of both intellectuals and the technical intelligentsia. He uses "intellectuals" in a familiar way – academics, writers, thinkers not in directly applied or corporate settings, especially in the humanities. For the other half of his new class, though, he needed to stretch ordinary language a bit; hence, technical intelligentsia. In this category Gouldner encompasses scientists, engineers, and the kind of corporate managers who control complex systems through their technical knowledge. Gouldner is joining together what C.P. Snow famously separated in his image of the "two cultures" – humanities and science – that divide (British) universities.

Most of the time, the concerns of humanistic intellectuals and scientific engineers are poles apart. If anything, when Gouldner was writing, in the immediate aftermath of the 1960s, the two groups and cultures seemed more in opposition to one another than they do now. But Gouldner saw a deeper structural commonality and an underlying common interest. When knowledge itself is under attack, the intellectuals and the intelligentsia make common cause. When rationality is criticized, academics and engineers are on the same side. When the book burnings begin, the brave philosophers and brave scientists will man the barricades together.

Deep down, Gouldner argued, a common culture and a parallel structure unite the new class, what I am calling the knowledge class. The common culture is what Gouldner terms the Culture of Critical Discourse, or CCD (which is think is a sly Catholic joke). The highest value, and most honored practice, of the culture of critical discourse is to examine the principles underlying any practice, to dissect the reasons and causes that lead people to act a certain way. The aim is to see if those practices still seem justified after such scrutiny. And this criticism is also self-criticism; CCD requires that its practitioners constantly examine their own practice, including, paradoxically, the practice of critical discourse itself, to see if it can be justified. A measure of the success of the knowledge class is that almost any college catalogue today will list "critical thinking" as one of the most important aims of education.

The structural position that unites intellectuals and intelligentsia is their control of the knowledge necessary to make the social system run. In Marx's day, a "factory" was simple enough that the owner/entrepreneur could master the whole production process. Today, just about any kind of manufacturing is too complex to for the nominal owners to follow. The social system as a whole is of gargantuan complexity. No one could master it, and it is the life's work of millions of smart people to understand parts of it. Moreover, the whole social system now depends on countless feedback loops, reflexive channels that bring ongoing information back to the system, allowing continuous adjustment. The people bringing and interpreting that feedback are essential to the working of the system. They are integral members of the knowledge class.

The knowledge class does not rule the modern world, but the modern world could not function without the knowledge class.

Classification Schemes Classify the Classifier

Pierre Bourdieu enjoys clever turns of phrase that make your head hurt, like the above. The idea, though, when you wrestle with it, is a rich one. We classify others. We fit everyone into some kind of classification scheme. Social stratification amounts to a shared system for classifying others.

At a higher level of abstraction, though, the system that we use to classify others also classifies us. This is true in two senses. The more obvious sense is that if we classify all of society, and we are members of society, too, then we have to be able to fit into our own classification scheme.

The less obvious sense comes from the fact that we tend to use classification schemes that make our class, our kind, look good compared to the other classes. Moreover, other people who are like us tend to do the same thing. When we add up all the classification schemes, similar people will tend to classify similarly. Thus, the classification scheme that we choose among all possible classification schemes tells a great deal about what class we are in ourselves.

One of the things that people in successful marriages tend to share is a classification scheme for classifying all of society.

Classification schemes classify the marriage.

Corporate Gentleman in an Age of Enron

Last week I stepped into one of the stickiest patches of the jungle of social classification: who is a "gentleman?" This is a rich question; indeed, I think it is an endless question, one impossible to answer definitively. Gentleman, and lady, are ethical ideals as much as they are social class types. People with identical backgrounds of family status, education, income, occupation, looks, self-assurance, etc., etc., will still have characters which put them, in the end, on opposite sides of the gentleman/not-gentleman divide.

The gentleman is heir to the ethic of the warrior. In some places, where family honor and shame are still measured by how other people see you, this bloody ethic (in the literal sense) results in honor killings and endless vendettas. In the Christian world, especially the Protestant portion of it, the warrior ethic was significantly modified by Christianity to produce the kind of gentility more familiar to Jane Austen readers. The standard of honor is measured more by an inward compass and conscience. Dealing generously with others, especially the weaker, is a crucial part of the ethic of gentility. Strictly speaking, people of any social class could be gentlemen or ladies. In democratic societies, were often presume as much in addressing crowds. Gentility is an ideal.

The ideal of the gentleman requires common sense about how the world works, especially about the use of power. Gentility does not, though, require book learning, formal schooling, erudition. The warrior ethic remains alive, of course, in the military. The gentlemanly ideal, though, has migrated mostly to the form of competition most favored in a bourgeois society, the marketplace. And today our warriors and business leaders often spend a long time in school. Still, those with a vocation for learning are regarded as, well, weak compared to the military and corporate leaders. "An officer and a gentleman" is a natural progression. "A gentleman and a scholar," on the other hand, is an unusual composite.

As some readers pointed out, the American corporate class seems poles apart from the ethical ideal of the gentleman just now. It is certainly true that the Enron-type business crooks fall on the not-gentleman side of the line. But the ideal remains. At the same time that we don't lament the passing of Ken Lay, we honor the gifts of Warren Buffet and the Gateses. There have always been business crooks, and there always will be. That is why we need a strong ideal of what kind of citizens and human beings corporate leaders should be. Adapting the ancient ideal of the gentlemen is the best and highest notion that our culture has developed for our richest and most powerful to aspire to. I think the ideal of the corporate gentleman is a good one for society.

The knowledge class ideal, though, is different. We will explore the difference as we go along with this research.

A Church That Is Not Clear About What It Believes Is Not Worth Belonging To

The Presbyterian Panel, the church's ongoing survey, found that most members, elders, and pastors agree with this statement. They want real standards, and they want the church to mean them. I think the vagueness about what any mainline church believes is one of the key factors preventing most mainliners from evangelizing. If asked the reasonable question, "Well, what do Presbyterians [or other mainline church members] believe?" many mainliners are stuck for an answer.

The silver lining of the Peace, Unity, and Purity report controversy may be that the church will establish some clear signposts of what it believes. This will help those being evangelized, skeptics, and committed members alike.

Most Presbyterians support the main points of the PUP report. What we need to do now is clarify the standards the church really does believe in. This includes clearly supporting our current constitution, as well as the new emphasis on letting the locals decide essentials whenever practical.

For more of my analysis of what the Panel says about PUP, go to the Presbyterian Outlook article here.

Huge Goat in Danville!

A goat, described by some as huge, leapt through a plate glass window into my local coffeehouse in the middle of Danville. The patrons were as surprised as the goat was disoriented. After running about a bit in the coffeehouse (and possibly in the bookstore, too – reports were confused) the goat then leapt through another plate glass window, and escaped. It was pursued by police cars and sheriff's cars, sirens wailing. They trapped it on Martin Luther King Boulevard. A "goat wrangler" appeared, like the cavalry, wrestled the goat into submission, and took him back to the stockyards. Order was restored.

Leadership Really Is the Best Investment

I have spent the last few days at a retreat with the Centre Posse Number One, the fine group of young people who will be coming to the college in the fall. This retreat is to enhance their bonding to one another, and to begin the handoff from their trainers to me. (I will write more about the ropes course (!) tomorrow).

Colleges face the perennial problem of how to measure promise in high school students. Brains are, of course, a necessary precondition. But brains alone are clearly not enough. We have all seen too many smart kids without the vision, perseverance, or confidence to make use of them.

Academics often ruefully repeat the old saw that "the world is run by B- students." If only, we think, we nerdy Ph.D.s were in charge, the world would be a more rational place. I have been coming to reassess this aphorism, though. I still think it is true; I no longer think it is such a bad thing. The world would not be better if it were run by Ph.D.s. The world is run by people with drive, more than brains alone, because they want it more. They want to achieve their vision more. They want to do things more than just school.

Yes, of course, I want all my driven students to be of excellent understanding. But I can understand that people who want to achieve things in the world now are not as fully devoted to their studies now as we nerds are.

As a teacher, I am coming to see that my main job is to school the vision of driven people. I am blessed with smart students at Centre. And some can be pushed to develop a drive they had not focused before, especially the men. But the main thing the world needs all of these future leaders to develop is a virtuous vision of what they want to achieve.

Because in the long run, leadership is the best investment that the college can make for the world.

Is Corporate Class to Knowledge Class as Gentleman is to Scholar?

In everyday life we get by with a very simplified language to describe the social classes and status groups of American life. Almost all Americans will pick middle class as their self-identification. Union families might call themselves working class (though if the union is working well, they often work their way into the middle of the income spectrum). We might talk about other people as rich or poor, but small percentages of Americans would describe themselves that way in public.

For a sociologist, though, the nuances of class and status are the rich flora and fauna of the social world we study. Classes, and the "ideal types" of the people in them, are, to take another metaphor, our bread and butter.

The particular corner of the social structure that I am most concerned with is that portion near the top where the corporate class meets the knowledge class. These terms are not in everyday use outside of sociology, but they are not so far from common meaning that we can't quickly feel comfortable using them.

The corporate class centers on the top management of business corporations. They shade off into pure owners at the top and permanent middle management at the bottom. They shade off into the top management of government and, at a further remove, the non-profit sector on the "left," and perhaps into successful entrepreneurs on the "right."

The knowledge class is the class that makes its living from the control of knowledge. It centers on the top writers, thinkers, and analysts who make knowledge, and the professors who teach it. The knowledge class shades off into the greatest artists and scientists at the top, and schoolteachers and librarians at the bottom. The right side shades into engineers and technicians, while the left edge would, perhaps, lead to barely employed coffeehouse intellectuals, perpetual students, and working class men and women who have made themselves experts in one corner of their avocation.

Clearly, studying the classes is as much an art as it is a science.

Pierre Bourdieu is a great theorist of how the classes relate to one another. The terms that he uses, though clearer in a scientific sense, are far from ordinary language indeed. The contrast that I am drawing between the corporate class and the knowledge class he describes as the "dominant fraction of the dominant class" versus the "dominated fraction of the dominant class." Clearly, this will need a little translation, and not just from French.

Bourdieu does, though, suggest a fruitful image to summarize the contrast. Put in the terms I use, the image, and insight, is this: corporate class is to knowledge class as gentleman is to scholar.

In the coming years of research, we will unpack that insight.

Multiculturalization or Immigrant Renewal?

Yesterday I heard encouraging reports about the future of Christianity in the Netherlands, and indeed in all the secularizing lands of Europe. A team at the Free University of Amsterdam, led by Hijme Stoffels and Mechteld Jansen, have been studying Christian immigrants in the Netherlands. Most European countries have been very attentive to immigration lately, but primarily from deep anxiety about Muslim immigrant communities. However, the immigrant stream brings hundreds of thousands of Christians, as well. Many of the immigrants are zealous, pious, and eager to share their faith with the people of Europe. One of the organizations we heard about is GATE - The Gift of Africa to Europe. From the immigrants' perspective, they are engaging in "reverse mission."

The research team is faced with the question of what to call the effect of these Christian immigrants from all over the world on Dutch Christianity. They leaned toward "multiculturalization" as a term and concept. Still, they were not satisfied with it. The problem that emerged with this conceptualization is that it doesn't really capture the religious effects. Moreover, multiculturalization seems to me to be a temporary, transitional phenomenon. All churches now existing have multiple cultural roots; most have succeeded in blending them together into a new culture.

The ISSRC did not settle the question of how to think about Christian immigrants in European Christianity. We were left, though, considering the idea of "immigrant renewal." The advantage of this way of looking at the issue is that it puts the religious effect front and center. There are, to be sure, many other cultural effects of the immigrant churches – Mechteld Jansen began her talk on Indonesian Christian immigrants by handing out cloves, a wonderful reminder of one of the most distinctive smells of Indonesian life. But the main effect of mixing two streams of the same faith ought to be in the faith itself. If nothing else, immigrant zeal may enliven the learned practice of the culturally established church.

The old churches of Europe are in a very parlous state. They desperately need renewal. Hundreds of thousands of zealous Christian immigrants are arriving – perhaps just in time – to help renew the faith and practice of the old, if only the European churches will let them.

Immigrant renewal of existing institutions, even more than their introducing new cultures, could be the great silver lining of Europe's demographic globalization.

The Dutch Future

Nearly half of this conference of the International Society for the Study of Reformed Communities considers Dutch and Dutch-American questions. In the opening paper of the conference, George Harinck, of the Free University of Amsterdam, argued that the Netherlands, as a nation composed of minorities, had historically been held together by the strong sub-group loyalties of Dutch people. In the early 20th century Abraham Kuyper, the great Dutch politician and churchman (and something of the patron saint of this society) set in motion the reorganization of Dutch society that, by mid-century, had organized everyone into one religious/ideological pillar or another. The Dutch "nation" was the sum of these pillars. Their national identity was composed of mutually tolerant minorities.

And then the Sixties happened. Television brought everyone awareness of life in the other pillars, and in the non-pillarized world beyond. Individualism as the dominant ideology throughout the West created heroic movements of individuals asserting their identity against the pillar, against the church, school, state, and any other institution that established a group identity. In the headiest days of the revolt, families, too were rejected as too confining. The pillars were dismantled. The welfare state was reconfigured to subsidize individualism.

The problem with this kind of anti-establishment identity, though, is that it becomes hollow when the establishment gets demolished. It is a negative identity, which requires a substantial Other to define itself against. Barring invasion, there is little to make a "Dutch" identity with.

And then the invasion came. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants, in a country of but 16 million, arrived from the Sixties on – arriving exactly as the old identity-making institutions were dissolving. The immigrant communities do have strong identities, sometimes overwhelmingly strong. The groups that have gotten the most attention are Muslim, with their strong sense of faith, and honor, and a restricted place for women. Yet there have also been hundreds of thousands of non-Muslim immigrants, especially Christians from the ghostly remnants of the Dutch colonial empire. They, too, have strong identities and strong institutions.

The United States has a muscular tradition of assimilating immigrants through Americanization. Some of the more relativist elites in this country now shrink from anything so forceful, but most Americans, and most immigrants, do strongly identify with the American dream and the American Project. We still do make Americans out of all the world's people, just as we do with each new generation born here.

There is no parallel tradition of "Dutchification" in the Netherlands. The Dutch Project was defined negatively as the culture that tolerated all groups of Dutch people. What made them Dutch people, though, was just assumed. Harinck argued that devotion to the royal House of Orange, a seeming anachronism to American ears, became one of the few unifying symbols of 20th century Dutch identity. He did not say that there is a concerted effort to "orangize" the new immigrants.

The Netherlands is not America. They are not even on the same scale of comparison. The analogy that occurred to me is that the Netherlands is the Rhode Island of Europe. Rhode Island cherishes its identity as the place where the refugees from the surrounding strong religious cultures could be free. When Quakers were being hanged on Boston Common, they were freely practicing the faith in Rhode Island. Yet Rhode Island, like every other state, became absorbed in the strong and absorbent identity of the United States. True believers in Europe are trying to forge a strong European identity, and it is possible that the residents of the Low Country will become strong Europeans in the future. So far, though, there is not enough to "Europe" to make a real identity, and the Dutch have proven skeptical of the European Union anyway.

The Dutch future is a negative space waiting to be filled by a positive identity. This is a mission opportunity for a revitalized Reformed Church. Or it is an invitation to conquest by a stronger outside identity.

Does Globalization Do Anything Good for Reformed Christianity?

I will be writing for the next few days from the International Society for the Study of Reformed Communities, meeting at Princeton, NJ. My particular contribution is a paper on the Peace, Unity, and Purity Task Force report of the Presbyterian Church. Most of the contributors here, though, are from the Dutch Reformed stream, rather than the Presbyterian stream, of worldwide Calvinism. The general theme of the conference is a consideration of globalization and pluralism in relation to the Reformed churches.

Globalization is an encouraging theme for the church as a whole. Whenever I get mired in the decline of the mainline church in America, or the near disappearance of Christianity in Europe, I am lifted up by the sheer exuberance, and massive growth, of Christianity in the global South. Philip Jenkins makes a forceful case in The Next Christendom that the center of gravity in the church has already shifted south of the equator. Jenkins, an English Catholic working in America, is particularly good on documenting Anglican, Catholic, and Pentecostal growth in the (former) Third World. Reading his book as a Presbyterian, though, I was struck with his near silence on how the Reformed churches were doing. I was, thus, particularly looking forward to this conference.

So far, though, the papers are pretty gloomy. Everyone knows about the huge significance of the Calvinist tradition in shaping the modern world in the first place (thank you, Max Weber). Few of our papers, though, report great vitality in the Reformed churches worldwide today. Globalization, in our consideration thus far, comes as a dissolving, even secularizing force to the Presbyterian and Reformed churches. The most encouraging reports have merely documented ways to slow the Calvinist church's decline in the face of globalization.

Globalization today has been good for heart religions, like Pentecostalism, and those streams of Christianity with a strong place for a religion of feeling. Calvinists, though, are the headiest of Protestants. So far, this current wave of globalization has not played to Reformed strengths.

Is the Virgin Birth Essential?

The Presbyterian Church is faced, once again, with a serious question about what are the essential tenets of Reformed faith and practice. We have always had to decide these questions in examining officers of the church. Lately, though, the question has been on the back burner. The recent adoption of the Peace, Unity, and Purity (PUP) report has, however, moved the question of essential tenets front and center.

The recent Theological Task Force of 2001, which produced the PUP report, was modeled on the Special Commission of 1925, which was also charged with finding a way forward through the endemic conflicts that wracked the church in those days.

The particular conflict that called the Special Commission into being was this question: is belief in the virgin birth of Christ an essential tenet of the Reformed faith? Nearly all Presbyterians in those days took it for granted that it was. To believe otherwise was to undermine the authority of the Bible. Believing in the authority of the Bible was certainly an essential tenet of the Reformed faith.

Two young candidates for ordination, recent graduates of Union Theological Seminary in New York, however, were not convinced of the virgin birth. New York Presbytery, always one of the most liberal in the denomination, was willing to ordain them. A minority protested, and brought their case the General Assembly. When the General Assembly of 1925 created the Special Commission, they handed the virgin birth question, along with others, to the Commission.

The Special Commission held that doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ is indeed true, and obligatory for Presbyterian ministers. They also held, though, that if some potential ministers, who were otherwise sound in the faith, were "insufficiently clear" in their understanding of the doctrine of the virgin birth, a presbytery could legitimately ordain them. The fledgling ministers were obliged to continue to wrestle with the doctrine. The Special Commission, though, understood that an ordination decision is a complex whole, based on all the beliefs, practices, and character of a potential church officer. They affirmed that the church depends on the presbyteries and sessions to make those judgment calls – guided, of course, by the constitution, but not more bound by one particular doctrine than they are by the whole.

The Special Commission report was adopted overwhelmingly.

So here is the standard of judgment that I read from the work of the Special Commission of 1925, and the similar achievement of the Task Force of 2001:

If a candidate for office in the church said "I know the Bible says X, but I by my own judgment don't believe X, and therefore I reject the authority of the Bible," that person should not become a minister, elder, or deacon of the Presbyterian Church.

If, instead, a candidate for office in the church said "I know the Bible says X, but I have not been able to wrap my mind around that idea yet, though I continue to wrestle with it," that person may become a minister, elder, or deacon of the Presbyterian Church if the presbytery or session regards them as called and qualifiable in other respects.