Are Men and Women Hardwired for Altruism the Same Way?

The Washington Post has a fascinating story on new brain research suggesting that our altruistic responses come from the deep old emotional centers of the brain, rather than the newer rational calculation parts.

Other well-known research has shown that women are more likely to use their whole brain in reasoning, whereas men are more likely to use one part or another. Women are more likely to incorporate their emotional responses in their reasoning, whereas men are more likely to separate "cold" reason from their emotions. And everyone knows that men are more likely to commit crimes than women are.

SO, putting these facts together, perhaps men and women have a similar altruistic emotional response to the plight of others, based on empathy. And men and women also make rational calculations about how their self-interest would be served by acting altruistically versus selfishly, even to the point of harming others for my own gain. The difference is that women are more likely to act with a response that tries to integrate the two competing responses, whereas men are more likely to choose one over another. And thus men are more likely to choose a response that suppresses their empathy for others.

Just a first theory. This research on the deep roots of altruism, though, is important and very interesting.

Silver Anniversary

Mrs. G. and I were married 25 years ago today.

I surprised her with a permanent sign over our front door.

Vote in Honor of a Veteran

I have a button that announces that I am voting in honor of a veteran -- my father. My wife has one in honor of her father. We wore them on primary day. They were created by the Secretary of State's office in a nifty program called, helpfully, Vote in Honor of a Veteran. It has been hugely popular in the commonwealth. They made 10,000 in responses to citizen requests in the first week, and the county clerks ran out. They are making more for the general election.

Honoring veterans by voting seems like a good subject to contemplate on Memorial Day.

If You Don't Accept the Rules for Ministers, Don't Apply to Be One

Mission Presbytery, in San Antonio, TX, had accepted a woman as a candidate for ministry even though she told the presbytery she was a lesbian in a committed relationship. The presbytery declared that the well-known rule barring practicing homosexuals from the ordained ministry did not apply to candidates for ministry, and voted to accept her as a candidate, 169 - 111. On appeal, the Permanent Judicial Commission of the Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly, the church's top court, ruled that a practicing lesbian can't be a candidate for ordination, for the same reason that she can't eventually be ordained.

This is another case of those who disagree with the church's rule playing brinksmanship to see what they can get away with. It does not matter what the rule is, this is the wrong way to change the church.

Hegelajara

As my post-Commencement treat, I have been working my way through Hegel's Philosophy of Right. This is pretty hard, so I asked some smart colleagues to recommend some secondary works to read along with it. I proposed that when I was done, Ken, Ken, Jason ("mind if we call you Ken?") and I could all sit down at Guadalajara, our fine local Mexican restaurant, for a wide-ranging discussion.

"A Hegelajara!" one of the Ken's said. Quite right.

Hegel: Marriage is the Most Immense Contradiction

Now that the urgent daily business of the school term is over, I have time for some richer brain food. I have been reading Hegel's The Philosophy of Right, especially the section on the family. Hegel's core concern is that we become free by making our will actual in the world. Yet marital love, he says, is "the most immense contradiction; the understanding cannot resolve it" (§ 158) because we individually choose to give up our individuality. We use our individual free will to sacrifice our individual free will, to become one with another person. Yet this is not a foolish loss, but the path to our true freedom. And the fulfillment of our choice for two to become one is realized in our children. This is a real poser for Hegel, a mystery for his philosophy. He does not shrink from it, but rather makes family life, and the civil society made of families and dissolved families, the foundations of ethical life.

Marriage is a mystery. It is, I think, the most fundamental of all human mysteries.

Gilmore Girls Finale: Luke In, Logan Out

So, I got it half right at the end of "Gilmore Girls." I predicted in February that the Gilmore Girls, mother and daughter, would choose poor Luke and rich Logan, respectively. The series ended with Luke going all out to take care of Lorelei. Though no future plan was settled, marriage is likely. Logan did in fact propose to Rory, but she turned him down in order to find herself. At the end she got a job writing about Barak Obama, rathering than marrying her college love and moving across the continent.

This is a sensible ending. Rory is young, and doesn't have to marry now. I thought it was a mistake to tie her so specifically to an event of this moment (the Obama campaign), which will probably not age very well. Still, I wish they had written her a better speech than simply "I'm too young to decide this now, can't we wait?" Logan sensibly replied, "What's the point?"

I will miss the "Gilmore Girls," both in itself and as a bonding activity with the women of my household. They like "Grey's Anatomy," as most young women do, but I can't get into it (or even stand it, actually). The writers have stuck all the characters except one (Dr. Bailey) in perpetual adolescence.

Perhaps Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of "Gilmore Girls," and Aaron Sorkin, the creator of "The West Wing," could write a show together about fast-talking, witty people with real work and strong marriages.

Family Issues That Affect College Students

We finished the term last week, and I just got the evaluations of the family life course. Most of the comments suggest that students liked the course, loved the subject, and learned a great deal. The first part of the course, the "all about me" section, covered sex differences in mate selection, gender differences in communication, and the advantages of marriage. In the second part we explored some of the main sources of variation in families, especially divorce and unwed motherhood. Only one comment bothered me:

I thought the first part was more interesting than the second part. I feel like more time could have been spent on things directly affecting us as college students rather than divorce and single parents.

I have been trying to put my finger on what bothers me about this view. Part of the problem is the sheer obliviousness that the comment betrays, since about a quarter of the students in the class were children of divorce, and one was about to become an unwed mother (though I believe the course convinced her to marry, after all). More trying, though, is the unconcern it suggests about the rest of the world beyond the great privilege of being a healthy young college student with no responsibilities and no disasters. The last third of the course is devoted to moving from the micro picture of my family to the macro picture of how the whole array of families shapes this country. Our last book, James Q. Wilson's The Marriage Problem, is devoted to this subject. Wilson's argument is that the decline of marriage in some sectors undermines everyone's marriages, and creates the seedbeds of all social problems.

So which family issues affect college students? Ultimately, all of them.

Join the Political Elite: Vote in the Primary

Today is primary election day in Kentucky. The secretary of state is predicting a 15% turnout. This means that your vote counts for six.

This election is important to you even if you don't live in Kentucky. The commonwealth is one of only three states to elect its governor the year before the presidential election. The Kentucky governor's race is, therefore, often an early test of the general mood of the electorate. This year we have an unpopular and not-so-competent Republican governor heading a scandal-plagued administration. How bad is it? His own lieutenant governor refused to run with him, a former congresswoman is running against him in the primary with a serious chance to force a runoff, and half the leading Republican officials tried to get the governor not to seek re-election.

On my side of the aisle, the crowded field is coming down to The Turncoat, a rich businessman who backed the now-disgraced Republican in the governor's race last time, versus the strongest ticket of real Democratic officials, to see who could win in the fall.

This primary election is also a milestone in the Gruntled household. Child #2, the wonderful Endub, figured out that since she will be of age by the general election in the fall, she can vote in the primary now. She then went through the high school registering every other member of her class who will be of voting age by November. We will vote a little later in the day, and wear our I Voted stickers proudly.

With the rest of the political elite.

Most of the Little Bast -- Um, Children of Unwed Parents -- Have Dad at Home

Most of the children of unwed parents -- bastards in the technical sense -- born in America in this century came home to both parents. This is a significant change from a generation ago, according to the Child Trends study, when less than a third of unwed births were to cohabiting couples.

We celebrate silver linings at the GC, and the silver lining is that more children of unwed parents will have both parents and two incomes at home when they come home from the hospital. The dark cloud, though, is that cohabiters are likely to break up, kid or no kid.

The most educated people are increasingly likely to marry. The least educated people are decreasingly likely to marry. The front line in the marriage struggle is for those in the middle. Couples with some education, jobs, and a baby are exactly the people who should marry, and usually do marry. We need to win their hearts and minds to improve the marriage culture of the United States. And to give the little bastards -- in the most respectful and affectionate sense -- a better chance.

Centre Commencement 2007

Today was a glorious conclusion to a fine year.

My colleague Rick Axtell opened the day with a fine baccalaureate sermon on "Babel." The punchline: you are graduating to a life of service. You may be heading to the top of society, but the true view of how the world works is the view from the bottom. Commencement speaker Tim Russert concluded the day with a complementary message: to whom much is given, much will be expected. A solid, coherent, and moral message.

(OK, one story from Tim Russert.
He said his favorite "Meet the Press" was this. In the '92 election, he had Ross Perot on the show.
Russert: "Mr. Perot, you have said that the deficit is the most important problem facing America. Now that you are candidate for president what is your proposal to solve the problem?"
Perot: "What?"
Russert repeats the question.
Perot: "If I had known you were going to ask trick questions, I never would have come on the show!"

Later, Russert got on a plane.
A flight attendant asked him, "What did you think of Ross Perot?"
Russert: "I never comment on guests. But what did you think of Ross Perot?"
Flight attendant: "I think he is the kind of guy who would refuse to put his tray in the upright and locked position.")

An excellent year. Now on to the summer!

LOLCATS

My daughter, the wonderful Endub, introduced me to LOLcats last night. They are very silly captioned cat pictures. We laughed ourselves sick.

The emerging convention of this, um, artform, have given the cats a very peculiar grammar, as suggested by the site from which this example comes, I Can Has Cheezburger.

This is what the internet was created for.

Pet Are Man's Best Friend – But Woman's Practice Children

Today's guest blog is from Taylor McGovern who wrote a wonderful journal entry for my family life class that I thought should be shared.

We haven’t talked about gender differences in quite a while but I noticed one recently that I have to talk about. Women treat their pets as their children and men treat them as their friends. My boyfriend’s brother, Ben is dating a girl who just got a new puppy. The dog is absolutely adorable but she talks to it like it is her new-born child. She says things like, “Now, mommy says don’t bite. Listen to mommy.” Of course, the dog has no idea what she’s saying and continues to bite her and everything else in sight because it is a DOG not a child. And she also calls Ben the dog’s “daddy” but they’ve been dating for less than a month. I assume it doesn’t freak him out but I know it would freak Brian out. This is an extreme case and I’m being rather hard on this girl but Brian and I have been laughing about it all week. I just got a new cat at Christmas and I’m just as guilty as she is with the baby talk – although I never said anything about being it’s “mommy” or Brian being it’s “daddy.” My mom, however, would say things like “Come here to your grandma” which is just hilarious. Anyway, the point I’m getting to is that women get pets and it’s like they are getting children.

But men treat animals as newfound friends. My dad talks to my cat in a normal voice and feels sorry for him when we are coddling him. He’ll call him by saying, “OTIS, my man!” which is very friendly and masculine. Ben will play with his girlfriend’s dog instead of cuddling with him and he uses his normal voice. My dad makes fun of anyone who talks to an animal in any abnormal voice. The pets for men are new friends, companions. I guess that’s why they call dogs man’s best friend – although I think they were speaking of mankind with that phrase.

It’s interesting because these two views on pets are totally different and I wonder how many couples (like Ben and his girlfriend) get pets thinking one thing about them and then find out that their mate is thinking another thing. What a mean is – if a girl gets a dog and thinks it’s going to be a tester child while the guy thinks it’s going to be a new friend, there could be some problems

GPS Monitoring for Batterers: Yes

Several states are beefing up their restraining orders on potential girl-friend beaters by making them wear global positioning system (GPS) bracelets. When these guys get within a restricted zone, such as near the potential victim's house or work, she gets a quick warning message.

In the early studies, none of the bracelet wearers has violated the order to stay away. The researchers think that this excellent result is due, in part, to the restrained guys knowing that someone is watching them, that the object of their obsession is not alone in the world.

This seems to me to be a good thing. The barrier so far is cost -- about $10 per day. I think this cost could be driven down dramatically through further automation. And this is the sort of ounce of prevention that pays for itself in avoided law-enforcement costs, pain, and death.

Where Gangs Are a Step Up

I have a student from the Hyde Park slum of Boston. He said he was the only young man not in a gang. Each day his grandmother prayed for him when we went out the door, and he prayed thanksgiving when he got home safely. He now has a scholarship to study a world away in lovely Danville. He should be able to graduate and do good things in the world.

His part of town is not the worst section of Boston. Another student of mine had a cousin shot to death in Dorchester. It was the third cousin she had lost that way in a year. When I asked her if she knew why it happened, she sighed and said "Just ... stupidness." The dead man may have said something at some earlier time about a girl. A group of guys walked up as the young man was talking to his pregnant girlfriend and her mother. They beat him up, then shot him. Even with all that information, this murder may remain unsolved, like the others in her family. She said the police and the press are likely to report this as a gang killing, but gangs, she said, are old news in her neighborhood. There used to be gangs, as there still are in Hyde Park. They provided a measure of protection for those in them and order in the neighborhood.

Dorchester has fallen below even the level of gangs. Now there is no order -- all the young men can be assumed to be armed ("have hammers"), and are likely to "roll up" on anyone for any reason or no reason. Dorchester wishes it still had gangs. Now it is just anarchy.

One Cheer for Jerry Falwell

Jerry Falwell died today. I disagreed with him on most political positions, and many of his religious positions. In his later years he said some truly reprehensible things.

Jerry Falwell changed the definition of fundamentalist Christianity to include political involvement. Before the "Moral Majority," fundamentalists were separated from the world, especially on political matters. They were waiting for the end, and expected God to sort out this sorry world, and that soon. Fundamentalists differed from evangelicals, their post-war, college-educated cousins, precisely over whether it was worth trying to save this world.

The Moral Majority as an organization was mostly the creation of political conservatives who were not themselves fundamentalist Protestants, but who saw that they needed someone out front who was. Falwell, an independent Baptist of great entrepreneurial zeal, took that role and ran with it. The organization that he created was mostly made of fundamentalist and evangelical Protestants. A greater wonder is that it got them to work together with conservative Catholics, Orthodox, and Jews -- often for the first time.

I believe that when groups get involved in electoral politics, they can't help but be drawn toward the center. They learn something of the humanity of their opponents by engaging them. More effectively, they learn that they have work together with people who oppose them on one issue but agree with them on another. This moderates conflict and helps hold the body politic together. If electoral politics were possible in Iraq, the civil war would diminish. Electoral politics is happening in Iran, and moderates are emerging within an extreme cultural revolution.

So let us give one cheer for Jerry Falwell, may be go to his reward.

The Queen Has a Terrible Job

I commend Stephen Frears' excellent film, "The Queen." Helen Mirren won a well-deserved Oscar for playing Queen Elizabeth trying to cope with reality when ex-Princess Diana died. I have never favored monarchy, and few monarchs grow on me up close. Still, I have to feel for Elizabeth Windsor (or whatever of her many last names she might pick) who was supposed to be a minor royal, when all of a sudden she was stuck as a young woman with being princess, then queen. She has been truly dutiful for decades, stuck in an endless round of official tasks, few of which are intrinsically important. And the difficult kids. And the ungrateful press. And snippy foreigners who don't like monarchy anyway.

At one point in the film, Elizabeth's husband, Prince Philip, says that Diana should have done her duty as a royal wife and overlooked Charles' inevitable mistress. The Queen gives her husband a small pained look. That is another ugly requirement of the job.

Queen Elizabeth has a terrible job.

Invested Motherhood is Not a Feminine Mistake

A Mother's Day defense, supplied by Mrs. G.

At the Family Scholars Blog, I read a brief quote from Leslie Bennetts’ The Feminine Mistake:

“It’s nice to be at home when your child loses her fourth tooth, but is it worth the price you might pay if your breadwinner dies or divorces you, and you end up losing that home entirely?”

Well, yes, it could be worth the price.

I’m thinking of my mother, who spent more than a decade at home with kids, chose divorce, quit a satisfying job to move her kids closer to extended family, changed jobs to move in with her aging mother, and stopped working in order to provide hospice care when cancer attacked her older sister.

In a life full of ideas and art and humor and books and talent and wisdom and affection, my mother has also handled quite a few cramped apartments, unreliable cars, and struggles to make ends meet.

So no, Ms. Bennetts, I can’t fear having to work harder or live more cheaply in the future because I loved energetically yesterday or today.

My feminist mama made sure of that.

I Have Body-Image Issues ...

... I think I'm good looking.

(This drew a good scrunch-face from Mrs. G.)

Two Cheers for a Lower Divorce Rate

The divorce rate in the United States is at its lowest point since 1970, when the current divorce boom began with the passage of no-fault laws. The annual rate dropped from 5.1 per 1000 people in the worst year, 1981, to 3.6 last year.

Why only two cheers? The good news is that the marriage success rate is rising among college-educated couples. They really are learning how to hold it together better. Likewise, there has been some revulsion at easy divorce, especially among young people, who are "being the change they wish to see in the world" by staying married.

On the other hand, one reason the divorce rate is down is because the marriage rate is down in the first place. The proportion of couples who just cohabit, even after they have children, has been rising. Many children of the '70s divorces are so afraid of making the same mistake that they don’t marry at all. I predict that the cohabitation rate will start to go down among college educated people as more people learn that cohabiters who marry are more likely to divorce than are couples who don't live together before marriage.

The other not-so-good fact is that the divorce rate has not fallen among the least educated. The growing marriage divide is becoming a class divide. This divide cuts both ways: poor people are more likely to divorce (or have children without marrying), but also people who divorce are more likely to end up poor.

So let's build on the positive. And educate the poor and the cohabiters about what their real odds of happiness are.

Tony Blair: An Appreciation

Tony Blair has announced that he will step down as Prime Minister in Britain. This was long expected. His support has sunk lower than President Bush's. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor to the Exchequer (finance minister) will likely succeed Blair as Prime Minister.

My closest British friends are leaders in the Liberal Democratic Party, the third party of British politics for which there is no American equivalent. I have done door-to-door canvassing -- "knocking up" in the wonderful British expression -- for the Lib Dems.

Nonetheless, I have always appreciated Tony Blair for bringing the great Labour Party, the counterpart of my Democratic Party, back to the center (that is, the centre). New Labour, as Blair calls it, broke the socialist stagnation into which Labour had fallen, and shook off the persistent Loony Left.

Reagan had an excellent counterpart in Thatcher. Bush One, the sequel to Reagan, was matched in many ways by Major, the sequel to Thatcher. Clinton and Blair were so well matched in their style, their approach to party leadership, and their finding a middle way between the left and right of the moment that it was eerie.

Then came the election of 2000, which broke the pattern. Blair and Bush don't match. Yes, Blair has been a strong war ally (leader, really) for Bush Two, but they do not match in any other way. If Gore had won the 2000 election (as I think he did in all but the crucial technical sense), then the balance would have been maintained. And with dour and wonky Al Gore in the White House, perhaps Tony Blair would have given way to dour and wonky Gordon Brown five years ago. Blair would have preserved his legacy, Labour would be in a stronger position than it is now, the balance between Mother Country and Eldest Child would have been maintained. Oh, and the United States and Britain would be leading the world in fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, instead of fighting alone in someone else's civil war in Iraq.

"Prom Babies" Feels Like an Urban Legend

"Dear Abby" ran an urgent fear story today about a "national trend" of teenage girls deliberately getting pregnant at their senior prom in order to avoid having to deal with college. The writer reported that her daughter's friends from the lacrosse team, some of whom had been accepted at several Ivy League schools, wanted to have "prom babies" because they just couldn't handle the stress of academic success. The writer thought this must be a national trend, because she heard a similar story in another state.

Neither Snopes.com nor the Urban Legends page at About.com has anything on this one. The story has all the earmarks of an urban legend, though. The story is third-hand to begin with (the mom overheard some girls talking about something they had heard other girls had actually done). Furthermore, Abby says she has never heard of it before either (and she surely hears some doozies daily), though she advises, of course, that having a prom baby would be a bad idea.

I will send this to the good folks at Snopes. I would welcome any intelligence on this matter.

Cheater-Chasing Shysters in Chicago

Chicago's "viagra triangle" promotes sleazy hook-ups. It is the natural place for the family law equivalent of ambulance chasers, the Fetman and Garland law firm, to place their billboard.

In any service business, law-status firms often resort to cheap sex in their ads to get noticed. The two women who run this firm have gone one step lower: get a divorce through us, and you can get cheap sex in real life.

Ironically, Corri Fetman, who dreamed up the ad, said she left her previous firm to set up her own because she experienced sexual harassment and a "demeaning environment." She invented their advertising campaign to "target business professionals who are informed about litigation and can appreciate the specialized, strategic services we offer."

The Faithful Inherit Society By Default

This is the conclusion of Philip Longman, a researcher at the New America Foundation. He wrote The Empty Cradle, about fertility decline across the world. In an excellent interview with Longman in Books and Culture, Brad Wilcox asked Longman what difference religious faith made in the future demography of the world. Longman argued that the people who do have larger families – enough kids to replace themselves, and then some – where much more likely to be religious.

One of Longman's most remarkable numbers is that the fertility gap between believers and nonbelievers in Europe is up to 15 or 20% now. Even in places where non-religious people are dominant in society today, they will have a harder time reproducing their power in the future because they are not reproducing in the most basic sense. Among the liberal educated elite, more than a third have no children or only one.

Fertility is indeed rising a little in Europe, and several European governments are pushing pronatalist policies for the first time in generations. Longman is skeptical that government programs can really nudge the birthrate much. He thinks the short-term financial advantages of no or few children will keep the birthrate down, especially for the educated. It is getting to the point where it takes a strong pronatalist family life – not public policy – to actually get people to bear the costs of kids. Religious people are most likely to value having a bunch of kids, despite the cost. And thus they inherit society, by degrees, and by default.

Evangelicals Adopting Foster Kids: Putting Their Care Where Their Mouths Are

There are half a million kids in foster care. More than 100,000 want to be adopted. Focus on the Family, Rick Warren, and other evangelical leaders are encouraging evangelical Christian families to see foster kids as, in effect, the orphans that the Bible instructs us to care for.

I think this is a great idea. We have had speakers in our family life class talk about the desperate state of foster care, and the truly life-saving help a good foster family – and even better, an adoptive family – can be to kids with no reliable families of their own.

There are, naturally, some people who object, and some who are just suspicious. Leaders of the movement are sensitive to the charge that evangelicals care about kids until they are born, so this is an effort to complete the pro-life agenda. I think the charge is mostly false, but even if it were true, adopting orphans is still a good thing to do. Foster agencies forbid corporal punishment, which many conservative religious families use. I can see the case that kids assigned to foster care have probably already had a bad experience with hitting at home, so corporal punishment would be worse for them than for other kids. Some are concerned that evangelical placement agencies would not work with homosexuals who wanted to be adoptive parents, but that is really about the agencies, not about the evangelical families. And to those who worry that Christian families would take their adopted kids to church – I can only hope so. Evangelicals invite everyone in their household to church – that is what makes them evangelical. Whether they can convince the kids is another matter, but any family might face that problem no matter how they came by their children.

An evangelical Christian movement to care for the orphans of our day seems to me a very good thing.

Derby Hats

Today is the high holy day of the civil religion of Kentucky, Derby Day. One of the many charming and goofy features of the day are over-the-top women's hats. This year Chrysler had a competition for Derby hats suitable to wear in a convertible -- such as the Chrysler Sebring. These are the three finalists. The three designers will go to the Derby, where the winner will get a Sebring. I like the middle one, myself, but the whole thing is so hugely silly that any of them on a real woman would be amusing. It does look aerodynamically impractical for a convertible going more than ten miles an hour, though.

Still, these relatively practical models are not a patch on the great icon of hilarious headgear for race day, Eliza Doolittle's rig at the Ascot Opening Day in "My Fair Lady."

For my part I enjoy the crowd shots as much as the race itself. Enjoy.

Up Next: Legal Incest

There is a serious debate, in this country and in Europe, about whether incest should remain illegal as it has from time immemorial. When the Supreme Court declared all state laws against sodomy an unconstitutional intrusion on a citizen's right to have consensual sex in the Lawrence case, alarmists claimed that bigamy, polygamy, incest, and bestiality would follow. The alarmists were right.

I have written about the coming polygamy crisis. Incest is next.

Of course, nothing is inevitable in social life. We could have a new social movement to restore a public standard of sexual morality. But the movement to make sex, even marriage, a matter of private choice is well advanced. The Supreme Court has pretty nearly dropped the last legal defense. It would be possible to amend the constitution to prohibit incest, but it would be horrible. Liberals would feel obliged to go way out on a libertarian limb, from which it would be difficult to come back. My reading of the present political moment is that the movement toward social conservatism has run out of steam for this generation, and is not likely to be renewed soon.

One of my favorite college professors caused a wonderful scene during a polite dinner with some visiting evaluators. He grew increasingly frustrated as he tried to get them to draw any practical judgments from their philosophy. Finally he rose, and in a carrying voice, demanded to know if they could offer some reason why he shouldn't have sex with sheep - though he put it a bit more graphically than that. Not, mind you, that he wished to do any such thing; rather, he wanted them to explain if their philosophy had any conception of what was good, of how people should live.

We are not quite to the "sex with sheep" stage in the debate over the complete privatization of sex, but we are only a step away.

Premarital Education Discounts Are a Good, Feasible Policy

About a third of married couples take part in premarital education or counseling. Married couples who get premarital education reduce their divorce risk by about a third, among many other benefits. Communities with Community Marriage Policies, in which the town's clergy agree to require all the couples they marry to get premarital counseling, have reduced their divorce rate by an average of 2%, or about 30,000 divorces prevented so far. Most religious marriage counseling is free, and there are free or inexpensive options in most communities. Better marriages and fewer divorces are in the public interest, so most public-minded groups and agencies are very supportive of premarital education.

States can encourage couples to get premarital education by reducing the wedding license fees. The five states that have such policies so far – Florida, Maryland, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Tennessee – give a discount of $20 to $50. This discount is as much a symbol of the state's commitment as it is a serious incentive to get premarital counseling, but it does have an effect.

Alan Hawkins, a family studies professor at Brigham Young, has helpfully reviewed the benefits and costs of state policies encouraging premarital education. He concludes that such policies save money, are politically feasible, and, most importantly, that premarital education improves marriages and reduces the divorce rate.

In Kentucky marriage license fees run about $35. To offer a discount for premarital counseling that would make a difference, we would probably need to raise the initial fee. If the license fee were $50 and the discount were $25 – that is, 50% off for getting an education that will help your marriage – this program could make a difference at almost no new direct cost to the state.

Encouraging premarital education and counseling through a voluntary program and a modest discount from the state is a feasible, helpful, centrist approach to improving marriages – and thus improving public life.

The Perfect Pill?

British researchers are working on a pill that would increase women's sex drive and help them lose weight. I predict that a giant fortune could be made.

So far they are only using it on monkeys, which has led to rump-shaking.

Scary.

Less Committed Marriage

Sometimes economists can see the trees of marginal individual advantage, but miss the forest of the human costs that seeking individual advantage imposes on others. A case is point is a new study by Penn economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson reported in the New York Times. Wolfers and Stevenson report approvingly that weakening marriage means that individuals don't lose so much if their "investment" doesn't bring all the rewards they wanted. They report that no-fault divorce has produced less committed marriages. They also calculate that no-fault also makes it 6 percent less likely that a couple will have a child. Overall, marriage rates are down.

Wolfers and Stevenson, themselves an unmarried and (I believe) childless couple, do not see these developments as weakening society, but as strengthening individuals in getting what they want.

The Upper-Middle Class Have More Options Than Harvard

There is a fine piece in the New York Times about all the amazing smart kids desperate for Harvard who won't get in. The author, a Harvard alumnus and interviewer, does not lament that his kids are not determined to get into Harvard as he, a blue-collar kid, was at their age. For him, an elite college was the one way up. For his kids, who start out in the upper-middle class, they have many more options than he did -- because they know that there a many paths to success.

You Want the Book of Order to Be Your Essential Tenets? Be Careful What You Wish For.

Several presbyteries are considering overtures based on the idea that the standards in the Presbyterian Church (USA) Book of Order are "essential tenets of the Reformed faith," and therefore are binding on all candidates for ordination in the church. Such a declaration would help solve the problem of what, exactly, church officers are bound to when they pledge to be bound to the essential Reformed tenets. However, this solution would create an even bigger problem: it would also drag in the entire Book of Confessions as necessary standards for all church officers.

At the heart of this debate is the "fidelity and chastity" amendment to the Book of Order, G -6.0106b. It says:

Those who are called to this office in the church are to lead a life in obedience to Scripture and in conformity to the historic confessional standards of the church. Among these standards is the requirement to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage of a man and a woman (W-4.9001), or chastity in singleness. Persons refusing to repent of any self-acknowledged practice which the Confessions call sin shall not be ordained and/or installed as deacons, elders, or ministers of the Word and Sacrament.

I believe that what most proponents of a rule that "the Book of Order standards are essential tenets" want is contained in the first, "fidelity and chastity" sentence. However, what they have not fully reckoned with is that such a rule would also make the second sentence equally binding and universal.

Is any presbytery seriously ready to examine every potential officer of the church on "any practice the Confessions call sin?" Is any presbytery even ready to examine every potential officer on whether they have read and understood every practice the Confessions call sin? Is there any examination committee that is willing to have that same standard applied to itself?

Now, I have long argued that the Book of Confessions was a mistake. Adopting it meant that we have no confession, because we take none of them as a constitutional rule of the church. That is why we only fight over the Book of Order – it is the only really constitutional part of the constitution. The overture under discussion is part of that same shift to treating the BOO as the only really binding part of the constitution. The proposers of the overture, though, have not looked carefully enough at what is in the Book of Order. Declaring the BOO standards "essential tenets" will open more than a can of worms – more like a barrel.

Valuable New Federal Agency

A student reported this to me this week:

"I have a very close friend who after graduation is going into an AmeriCorpse job in Montana."

The Windsors Drop a Badly Needed Middle-Class Upgrade Due to Class Prejudice

Ok, I don't really care who the heir-apparent to the British throne marries. And I don't really know anything about Kate Middleton other than that she is quite pretty. Still, she was described as a sensible middle class girl with a good education. One can only hope that such a person might be able to elevate the tone of the aristocracy through a sensible marriage. But according the British press, the young couple broke up because young William and his friends thought her speech too middle class and her mother made too much of an effort.

Still, I wouldn't wish the horrible pursuit and exposure that marrying into a royal family imposes on any nice person. I don't wish it on the Windsors, either, but there isn't much they can do about it. But it is likely that William and Harry will each marry, and one of those young ladies will likely have to put up with being married to a king.

We can only hope that she has some starch, and can keep it intact.

Black Man in the Klan

Last night Centre College hosted a great convocation by Daryl Davis under the title above. Davis, a professional musician, got to know a number of leading klansmen in the course of writing a book about them. Some of these encounters were fights. But what he spoke of last night were some great triumphs. Davis interviewed a Grand Dragon (state leader) of one Klan group under the eye of an armed bodyguard. He listened respectfully, and the other guy treated Davis respectfully. Afterwards, Davis decided to keep in touch with the Grand Dragon, who becomes in the story a guy named Roger Kelly. The two men meet in one another's homes to eat and talk. Kelly and his friends go to hear Davis play. Davis goes to Klan rallies to hear Kelly, now an Imperial Wizard (national leader) preach.

After years of civil encounter, what Kelly described as the "cement" in which his racial views were embedded crumbled. He quit the Klan. He gave Davis his Imperial Wizard costume, complete with pointy hood and mask. Daryl Davis brought these items out on the stage at Centre College last night.

This was only one of Davis' powerful stories of civility, mutual respect, and redemption.

Daryl Davis showed the power of respectful civility across lines of conflict. That is good gruntling.

Kids From Religious Families Are Better Behaved

Sociologist John Bartkowski asked the parents and teachers of 16,000 kids how well behaved they were. They wanted to know which kids showed the best self-control, were most skilled in relating to other people, and had the best approach to learning. The verdict: if the whole family went to religious services regularly and talked about their faith, the kids were best behaved.

This makes sense to me. If the whole family shares a moral order together, and with a larger community, and regularly renews their commitment by what they do and what they talk about, the kids have a meaningful world to behave within. The researchers did not know why religious institutions had this effect more strongly than other organizations that involve whole families. I think it is because religious faith offers the widest vision of the meaningful order, but I would be interested in argument on this point.

In any case, though, sociology confirms what most religious people could show examples of. IF the whole family really practices their faith with the kids and without ambivalence, the kids will find it makes sense to relate well with other people, too.

What Does Work For Teen Abstinence?

A new study came out from Mathematica, commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services, testing the effects of sexual abstinence education courses aimed at middle schoolers. As previous studies have shown, abstinence-only curricula don't have an effect. One new element in this study: unlike previous studies, taking a "true love waits" pledge or the like had no effect, either.

Most of these programs in this study were targeted at high-risk populations, so the overall results are not representative of all kids. It is good news, therefore, that even in this high-risk population, half were still virgins late in high school.

One section of the study profiled the kids who were abstinent. Of the many factors that the original curricula included, such as improving knowledge of which contraceptives worked best, and what the risks of sexually transmitted diseases were, none made any difference in whether kids would actually avoid sex as teens. Only two factors were significant predictors of teen abstinence:
1) If the middle schoolers supported abstinence themselves; and
2) If their friends did, too.

This study could not take the question back one step further: why do some middle schoolers believe in abstinence, and why do they find friends who agree? I think the heart of the answer to that question is that those kids are more likely to have parents who clearly support waiting for sex, make a credible example in their own lives, protect the kids from some temptations, and know who their kids' friends are.

There is no magic bullet to assure teen abstinence, but there is much to give us hope – most especially, the fact that most kids are smart.

Durkheimian Antidotes to School Shootings

A week after the Virginia Tech shootings, I want to commend columnist Clarence Page for the most sensible response I have read. The conclusion of his April 18 column was

"What our schools need is more people who can serve as antibodies, watching out for troubled students and offering them help."

Social institutions are like organisms. This is the fundamental metaphor of the great sociologist Emile Durkheim's vision of society. In the case of schools, teachers have to be on the lookout for troubled students. The English teachers were on the job at Virginia Tech. The ball was dropped at the next stage, and the law prevented Cho's parents from being notified – something I wrote about last week.

Page also notes that students do tell teachers about scary students. They are even more likely, though, to go to trustworthy outsiders who are in the same "cultural zip code" as the students. Page promoted the idea of adult volunteers in the schools to be the antibodies to violence, to be the response system to distress.

Each of us sometimes runs across people who are sending out warning signals. It is our duty to them to notify the authorities, and an even greater duty to the social whole.

A Loyalist Thought About "Missional Polity"

The Presbyterian Church (USA) has an important task force working on a new "form of government" document. They are guided by the idea that the church has a “missional polity.” The idea is that the church does not have a mission, but that its very essence is mission. The church is part of God's mission to engage the world.

I can almost grasp what it means to say that being is doing -- that the church is what it does. This is akin to my colleagues who talk about "doing theology," a concept (a metaphor, really) that I can almost grasp. I could be convinced to embrace the idea, I think, with more understanding.

But the sociological insight about the church that most of my work has been based on is that the loyalists at the center of the church are loyal to the institution as it actually is. They like the specific congregation they go to, the familiar ways that their presbytery works, and (most of the time) the lumbering steps and counter-steps of the General Assembly. The first mission that the loyalist is committed to is making sure that the actual church is still there tomorrow to do whatever other work it does. For loyalists, the church is an institution with a mission, even if in some larger sense it "is" a mission.

Virtual Infidelity

The MSNBC survey on infidelity that I wrote about yesterday has a companion piece on people who have affairs in virtual worlds, especially Second Life. The opening story is about a torrid lesbian romance between two avatars of people who in real life are married to someone else. More interesting, one of the "lesbians" is the avatar of a man, and perhaps the other one is, too. The man behind one of the characters thinks it isn't really cheating because, while he is in love with the other character, the sex is not real. This brings us back to yesterday's pie chart -- men don't mind the straying love as much as the straying sex. The odds are good, though, that the Second Life player's real wife would resent the love (if she knew about it) even is the sex isn't physically consumated in the material plane.

Very dangerous stuff, affairs. Even the virtual ones are real.

Men Hate Sexual Cheating, Women Hate Emotional Cheating

MSNBC is reporting an interesting survey of infidelity. I can't tell if this is a scientific survey, but its main findings are consistent with scientific surveys. They have a nifty graphic, shown here, that starkly demonstrates the difference between most men and women over just what is wrong with infidelity:

Amend FERPA – Tell Parents if Their Kid is Sick

One good thing that might come of the Virginia Tech tragedy is the momentum to amend the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to let the family in on some crucial information that schools are now obliged to keep private. If a college student like shooter Seung Cho is deemed by the college psychologists to be seriously mentally ill, even a "danger to himself and others," the university is forbidden by federal law to tell his parents. This should change.

Maybe nothing could have been done to keep Seung Cho from hurting someone. His parents, who appear to be quiet immigrants with a limited command of English, have said nothing publicly, so it is hard to even guess what they might have been able to do. Still, parents are more likely to be able to reach a disturbed kid than a university that is hamstrung by bureaucratic regulations. Teachers and students did bring Cho to the attention of university mental health authorities, and they did what they could. But the university could not compel Cho to seek help. And they were forbidden from contacting his parents, the people most likely to get their son into care and out of the way of harming others.

Yeah, sure, there will be some cases in which the parents are the cause of the kid's mental problems. Notifying them might make it worse. So give the college mental health folks the discretion to decide when the family should be notified. But Congress should not prejudge that parents should never be notified that their kids need help. Privacy should not prevent help when it is most needed.

Liviu Librescu, Heroic Professor

A heroic moment within the Virginia Tech tragedy was the way in which Prof. Liviu Librescu held the door shut against the killer so his students could escape out the window. Librescu was killed by a shot through the door, but his class was saved.

Prof. Librescu had survived the Nazis in Romania during the Second World War, and then the communists who succeeded them. Ironically, he was killed, in effect, by the libertarians in his adopted land of the free.

Among the 30 people murdered in Norris Hall, five were professors. None abandoned their posts. At least one, Liviu Librescu, sacrificed all for his students. As a professor myself and a member of the academic community, I honor them.

The First Virginia Tech Murders Would Have Shut Down a College to Grieve

The tragedy at Virginia Tech is unfolding as I write. The first incident seemed to involve a girlfriend and her RA being shot by an irate boyfriend. Then, two hours later, another sixty or so students were shot in a classroom building, about 30 of whom died. I don't want to second guess the administration on what they should have done to stop the classroom shooting rampage.

I am surprised, though, that a murder of two students was not reason to stop classes and bring everyone together to tell the facts and console the many grieving. I am sure that that is what would happen at Centre. Perhaps Virginia Tech is so large and anonymous that it does not shut down when one or two of their number are murdered.

Twice as Many Cuban Immigrants are Secular as Mexican Immigrants

About 14% of Cuban immigrants report that they are not religious, compared to 7% of immigrants from Mexico.

The general story in the New York Times argues that America makes people more materialistic. This is likely to be true. Still, that doesn't explain why the Cubans and Mexicans would respond to the new environment so differently.

Two ideas seem likely to me. First, Cubans are less religious to begin with, from decades of socialism. Second, Cuban immigrants are more likely to be middle class to begin with than Mexicans, and therefore start further on the road to irreligion. I incline to the latter view.

Peeps

Danny and Clara are my four-year-old nephew and niece.


"Danny, why did Clara eat only the heads off all her Peeps?"
"Maybe they were looking at her."

Choose Responsibility: License 18 – 20-Year-Old Drinkers

John McCardell was president of Middlebury College. He dealt with quite a bit of binge drinking and stupid drinking by underage students. Because drinking was both widespread and illegal for most students, the college was in the worst-of-both-worlds bind. They could not successfully prevent all youth drinking, but only drive it more or less underground. And they could not legally teach students how to drink responsibly.

When McCardell retired as president, he decided to do something about it. He has created an organization, Choose Responsibility, to teach and license 18, 19, and 20 year olds to drink alcohol.

I think Choose Responsibility has a great idea, and I support it wholeheartedly.

I am a teetotaler. I will have a sip of champagne in a toast if my mom asks me to, but that is about it. I don't care for alcohol, and am Irish enough not to want to develop a taste for it. I don't think alcohol is immoral – Jesus made wine, so it can't be all bad – but I don't want to have it in my life.

Nonetheless, most of the people I know and respect do drink alcohol in moderation. Most students will try alcohol in college. Most young people will drink as a rite of passage as well as a social good in its own right.

What I worry about is binge drinking and drinking to get drunk. This is a problem on my campus, and just about every campus in America. For the non-collegiate young adults, drunken drinking is probably an even bigger problem, with fewer institutional controls.

I want those students who do drink to learn how to do it in moderation. I think the best resource that an educational institution has to achieve any goal with students is to teach about it. Moreover, I think that the faculty are, on the whole, an excellent source of examples of how to drink responsibly and moderately. Colleges miss a vital teachable moment when we do not teach students how to drink the right way.

The initial debate has been tangled up with the drunk driving debate, which is not really relevant. Student drunkenness is still a problem even if they don't drive. Leaving students to pick up their alcohol education in the gutter makes no more sense than leaving them to learn to drive covertly and by trial-and-error.

At this moment, the Choose Responsibility movement seems quixotic, but it is a good idea. Its time will come, and soon.

HPV Vaccine is a Centrist Issue

I have two teenage daughters. This summer, they will get the Human Papillomavirus vaccine. They are good girls, and I expect they will stay that way. Still, I don't know what will happen in the future, including the whole sexual history of their future (and now entirely hypothetical) husbands. The idea that there is a vaccine to prevent cancer and other lesser horribles seems like a wholly good thing to me. I am as grateful for the existence of the HPV vaccine as I am for the polio vaccine. If they ever invent a male version of the HPV vaccine, my son will get it, too.

So why is this an issue? Some people want to make the vaccine mandatory. Others opposed giving it at all. That is exactly the situation that begs for a centrist solution.

The argument for making it mandatory is the same as the argument for other mandatory vaccinations. This is a contagious disease that we can prevent, so let's prevent it. The vaccination cost is much smaller than the treatment cost. The whole society would be better off if we could wipe out this virus by giving it no hosts to live in.

I do think it would a good thing if all people who could benefit from the vaccine get vaccinated. I will leave it to the doctors to specify that population. Right now the CDC is saying girls and women from 11 to 26 should be vaccinated. I am not sure why they set that upper bound, but I will assume there is a good medical reason.

The argument against using the vaccine at all is that making sex safer encourages extramarital sex. This negative argument is advanced by pro-family Christians, but it is based on fear – if kids fear sex, they won't have any. I am a pro-family Christian, but I am against fear mongering. As I have argued before, fighting the culture of fear is the gruntled centrist issue. I try to dissuade people from extra-marital sex because it isn't good for their marriages and for the culture of marriage – not because it might kill them. We should try to prevent disease even if the people who get it in some way deserve it. Moreover, the sex diseases can easily spread to people who really don't deserve it.

Still, HPV, though very widespread, is not quite as contagious as, say, the polio virus. If some people opted out it would be a loss, but it wouldn't defeat the purpose of mass vaccination. They might opt out on moral grounds, or on sheer civil liberty grounds, both of which, I think, a free society should accommodate whenever possible.

So where does this leave us? I favor state-mandated vaccination of all girls, with the state paying the bill for poor people. If some people want to opt out, they should be permitted to. The rest of us can try to persuade them not to – as I am trying to do now – but that is a freedom that a free country can allow. Besides, a few years later, those "opted out" girls can make their own decision to get vaccinated if they want to.

What Should Classy Women Do With Don Imus, Woolly-Headed Fool?

One of my favorite interlocutors asked me a pointed question this morning:

"Am I the only one wondering why on earth Rutgers University or its coaches would be willing to have their women basketball players give Don Imus an audience, be in the same room with him or participate in his repentance-and-redemption dog and pony show?

I think that they should issue a terse statement that Mr. Imus is not welcome on their campus.

It’s like some fundamental law has been forgotten in all the media drama. Nobody is so important that they get to call a group of young women 'nappy headed ho’s' and then get to be in the same room with them."

I agree entirely with the main point here: no one is so important that they deserve an audience with people they have insulted.

I also have thought Don Imus was a fool throughout his career. I don't understand what his audience is. At least Rush Limbaugh has "dittoheads" who agree with his views. The "shock jock" audience, on the other hand, seems to listen for nothing more than that something shocking be said, whether they agree with it or not. It is no surprise to me that he said something shockingly stupid about the Rutgers women's basketball team. He says something shockingly stupid every day. That is his job.

If I were the president of Rutgers I would have blasted Imus and asked other responsible persons in the university to publicly help make him and all his works unwelcome at Rutgers.

Still, I am glad that coach Vivian Stringer and the young ladies who play for her responded to Imus as they did. They were so classy that they raised the tone of sports discussion in general, if only for a moment.

Which brings us to the question of why and whether the team should meet with Imus. If I were the coach, I would not meet with Imus, and I certainly wouldn't go to his studio. On the other hand, the women of the team seem to be considerate young ladies. They don't want to just leave Imus in the gutter, precisely because he is in the gutter. They are giving him a chance to redeem himself. Given the mealy-mouthed apologies that he has given already, I think he will probably make it worse.

Nonetheless, I think the Lady Scarlet Knights continue to show class. I look forward to their return to the tournament next year.

Emotional Moodreading Drug For Men

Women are better at reading emotions from other people's facial expressions than men are. A new study suggests that oxytocin, the sociability-inducing hormone that women get by the bucketload from childbirth, boosts mood-reading. Researchers in Zurich found that men could also read moods from faces much better after they were sprayed with synthetic oxytocin -- but only for a short time.

So, gentlemen, if you ever find yourself caught in an "if you really loved me you'd read my mind" loop, carry a discrete supply of oxytocin in a nasal sprayer and give yourself an edge. Think of it as leveling the playing field.

Who knows, maybe someday they will put the stuff in the water supply, like fluoride, to improve social life.

R.I.P Johnny Hart: He Put the A.D. in B.C.

Johnny Hart, the cartoonist who drew the "Wizard of Id" and "B.C." comic strips, died over the weekend. As the most explicitly Christian major cartoonist, it was appropriate that he died at the drawing board on Easter weekend.

I have thought it happily peculiar that the pre-historic cartoon called "B.C." was the one most likely to talk about Christ. In recent years Hart even added a character named "Anno Domini" to make ingenuously Christian observations to the cavemen and cavewomen who populated the strip.

Thank you, Johnny Hart, for adding to the wonderful weirdness of life.

A Joyous Easter to You All!

The Scariest Family Idea: Marriage is Just for the Rich

As the marriage rate reaches disastrous lows among some poor subgroups in America, a scary idea has been developing: marriage is just for the rich. In neighborhoods where babies are common but husbands are not, a wedding is something women hope for, the way they hope to win the lottery.

This kind of thinking misses the powerful effect of marriage as a cause of being middle class, not just as an effect of being born there. People who finish high school and stay married have a slim chance of ending up poor, not matter where they started out in the class structure.

The overall divorce has been going down, led by a decline in the divorce rate among college graduates. College graduates know the newest information about family life – including the knowledge that marriage is good for women and for men, that married people live longer, are happier, and end of richer. College graduates are doing less cohabiting for a similar reason. Things are looking up for marriage from the middle of the social structure upward.

Putting these two ideas together, I see this message: smart poor people get an education and a marriage. The people with the most education, no matter how poor they started out, are already getting the message. The next step is to preach this good news to the poor: you can be married, and it will go well with you and your children.

Isn’t There Something Wrong With the Triply Wed?

The New York Times has a long story by Mireya Navarro that has been causing a stir among marriage supporters. “A Double Standard for the Triply Wed” asks two important questions. The first is the question in the title: are women who have been married three times or more judged more harshly than men in a similar circumstance – the current Mrs. Giuliani, for example, compared to her husband, presidential candidate Rudy.

This is a fair question. I think women usually are judged more harshly for their sexual history than men are. I disagree with this double standard. If anything, I think that men should be judged more harshly for cutting and running as a way of life, because they still have more options afterwards than the women they leave behind. This question is not so hard, really. There are few public defenders of the sexual double standard now.

The second question raised by this article, though, is of a different order. Constance Ahrons, author of The Good Divorce and cited as a divorce expert in the article, says that the multiply-married face the judgment that “’Something must be wrong with you.”’ We haven’t gotten over that for second and third marriages.” It is not so surprising that Ahrons, who decided not to remarry after her second divorce but just cohabit with whatever partner she might have, would oppose judgment. Indeed, I think half the reason that the sexual double standard has few defenders today is not so much because the double standard is unjust, but because many people are afraid to voice a judgment at all.

Avoiding judgment is impossible and self-contradictory. Claiming that we ought to avoid judging is a judgment. Being against judgment is, I think, more of a tactic to avoid thinking a problem through than it is a compassionate response to the people with the problem.

I think people who have married, divorced, and remarried several times do have a problem. The thrice-wed make up only about 3 percent of the population, so it is not a huge problem. And that 3 percent includes remarried widows and widowers – not the same issue morally at all.

In any given case there may be a series of good reasons explaining multiple remarriages. As a group, though, I think it is reasonable to suspect that, yes, there is something wrong with the triply-wed. The main thing that I think is likely to be wrong is that they have the wrong idea of what marriage is. We should help them, and help everyone better understand what marriage is. Helping requires judgment.

Making Nerd Culture Pay: Google vs. Viacom

My growing research interest is in the family life of the knowledge class, the class that makes its living from the control of knowledge. Google is a central knowledge class tool. Google, the company, is also a model of knowledge class culture. It has found a way to make money – gigantic vaults of money – out of distributing other people's knowledge. Google was recently rated the best place to work in America. It is the current epitome of nerd culture.

Google bought YouTube, and with it bought a copyright suit for all the TV shows that its many users upload and download without paying the producers of the TV shows. Shows like Viacom's "The Daily Show" – which led Viacom to file the biggest copyright suit ever. According to Clive Thompson's interesting article in New York magazine, Viacom and Google will probably settle for a pile of money, after rattling intellectual sabers about copyright freedom.

The interesting part of the conflict for me is the core Google idea that all information should be available to anyone – they just sort it. Yet my first reaction tells me that I fall in the middle between corporate culture and knowledge class culture. It seems obvious to me that if Viacom pays a bundle to make TV shows, then millions of people see the show without paying Viacom or even watching its advertiser's ads, then Viacom will not have enough money to make new shows in the future. This is an argument I had with Napster-using students before the courts drove a stake through the old piratey Napster's heart.

In the end, these two corporations will settle it the good corporate way: with money. In the larger cultural struggle between the knowledge class and the corporate class, though, I think the rising knowledge class needs to develop a more sophisticated theory of knowledge production. The Google/Napster/teen pirate theory is all about consumption: the corporations have already made the knowledge, and already made their profit from it, so now it belongs to the people, man. An exclusive focus on consumption, without any thought to production, is a perennial failing of the soft-headed left. Now, though, the knowledge class is in a real position of power, and therefore of responsibility. The distributors of knowledge have to be concerned about how knowledge will be produced tomorrow. This concern is both high-minded and self-interested, driven by both the love of truth and their interest in having something to distribute tomorrow.

I don't have the answer yet, but it helps to have the right question: what should the knowledge class theory of knowledge production be?

No Klimt for the Married

The New York Times has a light piece by Joyce Wadler on people being turned off by their dates' weird home decorating. One of the examples she found was from a guy who was interested in a woman until he saw that she still had a poster of Gustave Klimt's "The Kiss," as well as a poster of Robert Doisneau's famous French photograph from the '50s of a couple kissing. He acknowledged that they were romantic, but “It’s romantic when you’re 16. At some point you need to outgrow it.”

Which raises the question: what is romantic art for married people? You could have any theme at all, of course. There is no reason that married people's art need be about marriage. We have a poster of Steichen's photograph of the Flatiron Building in the mist in our bedroom – which, I admit, we have had since college. Time, I suppose, for an upgrade.

Still, I think it would be perfectly appropriate, even romantic, for married people to have wedding art in their homes. One of my favorites is shown above, of the bride in the Victorian registry office. Can anyone identify it? I can find the image, but not the painter. Ironically, this one was recently the subject of controversy. The Liverpool Registry Office decided it might be politically incorrect to have this on the wall when homosexual couples came by, so they took it down.

Wade Horn, My Favorite Member of the Bush Administration, Is Stepping Down

Wade Horn, Assistant Secretary at the Administration for Children and Families of the Department of Health and Human Services, announced today that he is stepping down. He was the president of the National Fatherhood Initiative before joining the government. Horn has been a moderate and sensible proponent of marriage and fatherhood for years. Too bad.

Married Religious Parents Can Close the Gap for Black and Latino Kids

As everyone knows, there is a big gap in school achievement between white kids, on the one hand, and black and Latino kids, on the other. A new study, though, shows that black and Latino kids who live with their married parents in very religious homes close that gap.

William Jeynes, an education professor at the University of California Long Beach, is about to release a study based on the NELS, the National Educational Longitudinal Survey. Specifically, Jeynes compared white students from all kinds of family structures with black and Latino kids who were highly religious and lived with their own married parents. When Jeynes compared these groups, controlling for social class, the white/non-white gap in math and reading virtually disappeared. The science gap remained significant, though it was much smaller.

According to the Christian Post, Jeynes will present his findings to the National Press Club on April 3rd. I expect to see more of this story after that.

"300" Is Hilarious

The movie "300" is beautiful, has great fight scenes, and is completely over the top. The best part is the punchline: the Greeks are fighting the Persians to battle "tyranny and mysticism." Xerxes the god-king represents mysticism? The Spartan pagans, who show their own temple to be corrupt, are the defenders of clear-eyed rational faith? Wow.

The whole episode is enhanced by fact that the Islamic Republic of Iran – which surely would have condemned Xerxes to death as the worst kind of idolater – blasted the film as an attack on Iranian culture.

You Have to Choose How to Raise Your Kids, Even If You Don't Want To

Sociologist Annette Lareau studies how the different home lives of middle class and working class kids gives an advantage to the middle class kids in school, in dealing with other professionals, and in later life. The middle class parents are more likely to engage in "concerted cultivation" of their children's lives. Parents help kids fill every minute with structured activities, which all work in concert in the larger project of cultivating the child's talents. Working class parents, by contrast, are more likely to give their kids much more control of their free time to promote what Lareau calls their "natural growth." From the middle class perspective, the working class kids grow up with stunted potential. From the working class perspective, the middle class kids grow up with no childhoods.

When parents today are faced with the question of how much they should try to structure their children's time, they (we) often think back to our own childhoods. In most cases, parents today grew up with less structured lives than most middle class children today do. Mrs. G. and I are tempted to not schedule our kids so that they can have a life and do what they want. As I reflect on the difference between my early adolescence and my son's, though, some crucial differences emerge. Sure, I watched lots of stupid cartoons. But there were not enough TV options, and no computer options, to keep me from reading or playing outside all the time. My son, on the other hand, could play "World of Warcraft" 24/7. That is, in fact, his plan for the summer. If we choose no structure at all for his time, the choice will be made for us by the "new media."

Even if you don't want to structure every moment of your child's life, not to choose is to make a choice. The culture will rush in to fill the vacuum.

Even natural growth requires concerted cultivation.

Baby Puts Up With Disco

"Baby Loves Disco" sponsors parties at disco clubs for parents and toddlers. It is real dance music, in a darkened club, with real booze for the parents. The kids wander around and play. Some effort is made to make the experience safer for kids – blankets are put over the debris on the dance floor, the higher dance platforms are roped off, and adults are supposed to keep their drinks at least a yard above the floor.

Adults who liked to party before kids like it because they can keep on dancin'. Those who Look With Alarm at any event where kids might get hurt have a plenty to be alarmed about. Personally, none of this kind of partying is my cup of tea. Still, I don't want to encourage the culture of fear by simply opposing Baby Loves Disco because it might hurt kids. Everything might hurt kids. In fact, I think some kids will certainly get hurt – they will fall off something, get stepped on, find someone's beer, get cut by something left by previous ravers, etc., etc. This will be bad. But kids can get hurt sharing most adult venues.

What struck me about the news account of Baby Loves Disco was that there was no evidence that the babies actually loved disco. Sure, little kids love to dance. But the appeal of loud thumping dance music in a darkened club for adults is the offer of sex and danger – two things little kids don't need, or like.

Should "Baby Loves Disco" be allowed? Sure. It's a free country. Do I think anyone should do it? No.

Get a babysitter.

Why Are Right-Wing Comics So Secular?

This one is off the cuff. I write it to clear my head, and I invite comments.

Standup comedy is overwhelmingly liberal-to-anarchist as a field (I was going to say "discipline," but that seems the wrong word). Still, there are some comics and humorous commentators of a right-of-center position who have been successful. Dennis Miller, Bill Maher, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter come to mind.

The puzzle for me, though, is that most conservatives are religious, but most of the conservative humorists I can think of are not. The humorists tend be adopt a libertarian persona, usually angry. They are as likely to attack religious leaders as the more common leftist comics are. Even when they are formally pro-family, they tend to be more libertarian than cultural-conservative, more Milton Friedman than James Dobson.

Perhaps cultural conservatism, as a position, can be a passion because it is serious, not funny. When Stephen Colbert parodies cultural conservatism, it is funny because the character "Stephen Colbert" sees nothing to laugh about. When Bill O'Reilly does the same material straight, however, it is rarely deliberately funny.

There is such a thing as religious humor, but it tends to be gentle and apolitical. Political humor, on the other hand, is rarely pro-religious, even if it is anti-anti-religious – attacking the excesses of the ACLU in restricting hymn singing by school choirs, for example.

It should be possible to have a funny Pat Buchanan. I just can't think of any.

Any help from the great reading world?

By Age 3, Professional Kids Have a Larger Vocabulary Than Welfare Parents

Betty Hart and Todd Risley have been studying language development in infants and toddlers for a quarter century. They have been doing this not simply for academic reasons, but to find the real causes of the advantage that higher class kids have over poor kids. Their main finding is that, in general, the higher the class of the family, the more they talk to their babies. And their amount of talk– not their social class or income or race -- predicted their children’s intellectual accomplishments.

The most graphic example of what difference this makes is the finding I have used as the title of this post.

All families talk some to get on with the necessary business of life. What is added in talkative families is talk that describes the world, expresses emotions, tries out ideas. Every family has an average level of talkativeness, starting from this baseline of necessary business. The average family in Hart and Risley's study said something 400 times an hour, with the group ranging from 200 to 600 utterances an hour. This means that the average 3 year old has heard 8 million words; the children of silent families hear only half of that, while the toddlers of the talkers have already heard 12 million words. By three, kids learn to talk at their family's average level, and stop there.

Hart and Risley are quick to point out that there are enormous variations in how much parents talk to their children. There are talkative welfare parents and silent professionals. In particular, the classes in the middle of this range, the working class and lower white collar families, show a huge range in how talkative they are.

So talk to your babies. About anything.

Murder Hits Close to Home

You may have seen the story of Chiara Levin, a beautiful and accomplished young woman who was murdered in Boston over the weekend. She was the daughter of a colleague. I have known her for years. She appears to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and not the intended target of the shooter.

This is a tragedy for the family, and has cast a pall over our little town.

My only larger concern is that it is the kind of story that some of the cable reporters might get obsessive over. If they play it as "beautiful white girl killed by black gangbangers," the Nancy Grace-type ghouls will latch on to it. I already disliked that kind of reporting in cases where I didn't know the people. The thought they they might hound my friends out of pretended concern is angering.

Not as gruntled as usual today.

Hug your young people.

Will King Charles III Be an Anglican?

Elizabeth II, the Queen of Great Britain, is not only an Anglican, she is the nominal head of the Church of England. One of the titles that she still bears, inherited, ironically, from Henry VIII, is "Defender of the Faith" – ironic because the title was bestowed by the pope, before they had their little falling out.

Prince Charles, the heir apparent, has said that he will change that title to "Defender of Faiths." So, will Charles be head of the Church of England when he is king? Will he defend all faiths, while keeping his own the established church of England?

The Church of England is in deep trouble. Though most English people are members, very few attend. The Anglican communion worldwide is fighting with itself. The Archbishop of Canterbury can't get the U.S. Episcopal Church to play nicely with all the other churches in the touchy worldwide organization.

Perhaps the accession of King Charles III (or George VII, or whatever he picks) will lead to the best thing that could happen to the Church of England: disestablishment. Christianity as a whole is in deep trouble in Britain, and no one thing will help much. But the Anglican Church might be free to evangelize and grow, if it were freed from the responsibility of being the praying arm of what has become a secular establishment, presiding over a diverse society.

I don't know what Charles Windsor's actual faith is. He has not been the stolid churchwoman that his mother is. He has invested his political capital in defending traditional architecture, rather than traditional religion. His sons, likewise, have not suggested that church is the core institution in their lives.

Someday, Elizabeth II will not be queen, hard though that is to imagine. Odds are that her son will succeed her. And sometime after that may come a day when the Church of England is one church among many, the British monarch is just another member of that church, or even another denomination, and the Anglican communion is a loose association of denominations – led from Nairobi.

Paracleats Beat Preemptive Strikers

Kim, a wonderful former student of mine now enjoying Yale Divinity School, reports that the Divvies' intramural soccer team, the Paracleats, had a good season. Their big win of the season was over the International Relations graduate student team, the Preemptive Strikers.

As an old Divvy, my heart is warmed by the pun and the victory.

Women Gaze Directly, But Talk Indirectly; Men Talk Directly, But Gaze Indirectly

This is another insight from teaching Deborah Tannen's work on gender differences in communication, while appreciating the deep symmetry between men's and women's ways of doing things. Tannen does not say the title line of this post directly. We thought it up in class discussion, putting together different elements of her work and our own experience.

In speech, men concentrate on the message, the content of what is being said. They do not need to look at someone to hear what he or she is saying. Indeed, sometimes looking at someone while they speak is a distraction from concentrating on what they say. Women, on the other hand, read the metamessage as well as the message – the tone of voice, body language, and subtle expressions that go along with what is being said. This is why it is essential for women to look at the person you are talking to. Otherwise, you would miss half of what was being communicated.

The women in the class often report that it drives them nuts when the men in their lives won't look at them when the women are speaking. Men do not report a similar problem; when two men talk to one another, they normally look anywhere but directly into one another's eyes. To do so either means the personal communication is extraordinarily intimate – or a challenge.

The men in the class often report that it drives them nuts when the women in their lives won't say directly what they mean. Women do not report a similar problem; when two women talk to one another, they normally speak any way but directly telling one another what to do. To do so means the personal communication is extraordinarily intimate (as in a family) – or a challenge.

Knowing these characteristic differences in communication lets us appreciate the ingenious complementarity of human life. And when these differences in communication style get in the way of actually communicating, we have another ingenious human skill to work around the problem: meta-communicating about how we are communicating. And, if necessary, we can both look at, and speak to, one another directly while meta-communicating.

Boys Play Sports to Win, Girls Play for Fun: Boys Date for Fun, Girls Date to Win

This is an insight that comes from teaching the sociobiology of mate selection (through David Buss) and gender differences in communication (through Deborah Tannen) at the same time. Of course there are many individual exceptions. What is interesting to me is the symmetry of the broad trend.

When boys pick teams for sports, the captains (who are usually the best players) take turns picking the best remaining players, until everyone is picked and the teams are about even. This makes for the most competitive game. If a dispute arises in the game, boys find a quick way to settle it, so they can get back to the game. They play sports to win.

Girls find this way of picking teams horrifying. When I put the question of picking teams to mixed groups, the girls overwhelming say that they would pick their friends, regardless of how that would affect the outcome of the game. They would find it hard to play at all against their friends. If a dispute arises in the game, it can take a long time to resolve because everyone's loyalty comes into play. Often, if the dispute can't be resolved, the game ends. They play to have fun within their social relationships.

When it comes to dating, boys tend to see each date as an end in itself, a fun thing to do with a girl you enjoy. They can play an endless series of dates without asking themselves "where is this relationship going?" They date for fun. Girls, and especially women, often ask themselves "could I marry this guy?" on the first date. They reassess, endlessly, with their girlfriends, at each subsequent step in the relationship. If they can't see the relationship ever leading to marriage, they are likely to end it and move on. They date to win.

One of Tannen's great strengths is that she sees the value of men's and women's different ways of understanding and communicating. A good society needs both. A good life is balanced by the symmetry of men's and women's complementary tendencies. And we can all have a smoother life when we understand the worldview and motives of our complements.

Lost World

We visited alma mater back in the blue Northeast this week, returning child #1 to school after spring break. We met with one of our honored old teachers. Mrs. G. and I reminded him that he has said in an interview that country music seemed to be about a lost world, in which people married, raised kids, went to church, worked hard, honored America, and grew old together. Given a chance to talk about it, we offered that we lived in that world in small-town Kentucky. Our daughter, who is having a wonderful time and learning a great deal, nonetheless feels the loss of ideological diversity compared to her high school. She said she is used to having Republicans to argue with; now she is at a school where even the head of College Republicans is a Democrat. The political argument there is intra-left, as for example when the five different homosexual organizations fought over how sexually explicit the "coming out day" chalk drawings should be.

I have learned to like country music since moving here, in part because it includes the stories of people over 25, especially the great majority of people who marry and have kids. Small towns are not really conservative - they have the range of views that we find in the country as a whole, as the letters to the editor section of the local paper can attest.

Swarthmore, and academic world in general, are not a lost world, so much as an artificial world, a bubble even within their own counties. Danville, and the thousands of small towns like it, are not a lost world – they are the regular world. And much as I love alma mater, and always will, I am glad to be home.

How the Greeks Pick Their Leaders

This is the second part of Taylor's account of how gender differences show up in fraternities and sororities – at least in the two she knows best.

"Working off of my last entry about the differences between sororities and fraternities, I wanted to talk about the differences in voting and how indicative it is of the gender of the members.
In [my sorority], the saying is, “the office selects the officer.” What that means is that you don’t run for any position in the sorority. Your fellow sisters nominate you for the position and then we vote (no one can see what anyone else’s vote is). That way, the members of our chapter can see who has what talents, instead of the person themselves choosing what office they think is best. Also, no one is expected to talk about voting or “slating” (as we call it) until the actual voting session takes place. That means no one should be walking around saying, “So and so should be president and so and so should be rush chair.” It works out well for us but it’s easy to see that it is a feminine way of doing things. We completely avoid any conflict because voting is never spoken of until one night of the year. Disagreement is discouraged – if anyone has a problem with an officer getting an office they have 24 hours to voice their concerns but it has to be a major problem, like the woman has been caught doing drugs or something equally bad. So, we effectively avoid any conflict in the entire situation. It seems like this is the most feminine way to go about voting that could ever be imagined. No one's feelings get hurt, no one knows what anyone else really wants, everyone is encouraged to accept and be happy about the officers. It’s very peaceful and reasonable. Of course, it has its problems. Mainly because women will avoid conflict with the person they are upset with but they will talk about that person behind their back. So, if one woman thinks another woman should not have an office then the secretive talking begins. It’s very typical of women and really displays well how we act around each other.
With [my boyfriend's] fraternity, voting is not at all similar. Whoever wants an office runs for it. They decide they want to be president, the write a speech, they (and the other candidates) give it and then they vote. It’s very direct, the conflict is in the open. The competition is obvious and the voting is open. Everyone can see how everyone else votes. It’s masculine because they have the competition out in the open, they don’t try to avoid conflict at all. I’m sure there are arguments during the process but they don’t last very long and in the end, people are happy with who gets what."