"American Girls" and Their Dads

Mrs. G. did all the work on this one.

As I wrote yesterday, Mattel has introduced a new doll in the American Girl line. Julie, from 1974, is the child of divorce. Each American Girl comes with books introducing her life and describing her distinctive adventures. What happens when we compare how Julie and the other girls relate to their fathers?

Amazon makes it easy to “look inside” the first few pages of books. In historical order, try these experiences.

---

Felicity Merriman pushed open the door to her father’s store and took a deep breath. She loved the smell of coffee beans and chocolate, of pine soap, spice tea, and apples. No place in the world smelled as good as her father’s store.

“Good day, Mistress Merriman!” said her father. He smiled and bowed.

Felicity grinned. Her father always pretended she was a fine lady customer when she came into his store. “Good day, Mr. Merriman,” she answered. She liked to pretend to.

---

Josefina shaded her eyes. Even from this far away, she could see Papa. He sat very straight and tall on his horse. He was talking to the workers in the cornfield near the stream. The rancho had belonged to Papa’s family for more than one hundred years. All those years, Papa’s family had cared for the animals and the land. It was not an easy life. Every one had to work hard. Some years there was plenty of rain so that the crops grew and the animals were healthy. Some years there was not enough rain. Then the soil was dry and the animals went thirsty. But through good time and bad the rancho went on. It provided everything Josefina and her family needed to live. It gave them food, clothing, and shelter. Josefina loved the rancho. It was her home. She believed that it was the most beautiful place in all of New Mexico and all of the world.

---

Addy Walker woke up late on a summer’s night to hear her parents whispering. She thought no more of their quiet voices than of the soft chirping of the crickets in the woods just beyond the little cabin. Often she awoke to her parents’ whispering. Addy liked the sound. It made her feel safe, knowing her mother and father were close by.

---

Papa’s black wool jacket flapped like a gull’s wings as he crossed the deck. “There’s a storm coming,” Papa said. “It could be dangerous. The coast is rocky here, and the wind is getting stronger.” Papa lifted Kirsten out of the coiled rope. Then he pulled Marta out too. “Come below where we’ll be safe,” he said.

---

“Jessie, did you know my mother and father?” Samantha asked.

Jessie spoke gently. “You know I didn’t, child. That accident in the boat happened when you were just five. You know I didn’t come to work for your grandmother till you were seven.”

Samantha had known that. Asking had really been wishing. She touched the locket pinned to her dress. Inside the small gold heart was a picture of her mother and father. She would have loved to hear Jessie talk about them. When Jessie told stories, she made everything sound like magic. Jessie would have made Samantha’s parents seem like a princess.

---

Sometimes, now that Dad was gone to the war, Molly would climb into the plaid chair and sniff it because that vanilla pipe smell made her feel so safe and happy, just as if Dad were home.

Molly remembered the fun they had at the table when Dad was home. He teased Jill and made her blush. He swapped jokes with Ricky and told riddles to Brad, Molly’s younger brother. And he always said, “Gosh and golly, olly Molly, what have you done today?” Suddenly everything Molly had done-whether it was winning a running race or using a multiplication bee—was interesting and important, wonderful or not so bad after all.

---

“Remember when we built that fort out of clay we dug up from the garden? And we dressed up our Liddle Kiddles in old time clothes.”

“I remember,” sighed Ivy. The room turned middle-of-the-night quiet. Julie and Ivy couldn’t look at teach other.

“I can’t believe you’re moving,” said Ivy, flashing her dark eyes at Julie.

It’s only a few miles away, across town,” said Julie. “It’s not like I’m moving to Mars.

“I won’t be able to blink lights at you from across the street anymore to say good night,” said Ivy.

“But we can call each other up,” Julie pointed out. “And you’ll see me on the weekends when I come visit my dad.” There was that lump again. She felt it every time she thought of being without Dad. She thought she’d gotten used to the idea of her parents being divorced, but now that she wouldn’t be living with Dad any more, suddenly it wasn’t just an idea. It was real.

---

So, for the first hundred years of the stories, girls start their stories by delighting in their fathers’ nearness. Then the one orphan is allowed to mourn, and the soldier’s daughter is allowed to pine. And then the child of divorce gets to protect her friend by hiding her grief out of sight.

Isn’t that an amazing triumph of individual liberation?

New From Mattel: Happy Divorce Girl

My girls had American Girl dolls -- Addy and Kirsten, respectively, for those who know and love the idea. American Girl was born just a couple of years before they were, and the first dolls were just the thing needful when they were ready for dolls. American Girl dolls are fully formed historical characters, with a whole backstory and books to fill in the historical narrative. One of the features that my wife and I, schooled in '70s feminism, most treasured was that each girl had some money of her own.

A few years ago Mattel bought American Girl. They did maintain the old characters, and developed them in coherent ways, but we worried that the American Girls would be Barbie-ized. My own kids aged out of dolls, so I have not kept up carefully. Lately, though, Mattel has brought out a new American Girl doll, Julie Albright, set in 1974. The crucial distinction that Julie has from previous dolls is that her parents are divorced. This is how Mattel describes her:

For Julie Albright, life after her parents’ divorce holds as many ups and downs as the hilly streets of San Francisco. Julie misses her old bedroom, her pet rabbit, her best friend, Ivy—and most of all, having her whole family together.
But Julie begins to see that change also brings new possibilities. By taking charge of her new life, she learns to believe in herself—and that love can hold a family together even when they live apart.

Ah, the "happy talk" divorce of the mid-1970s, when parents had to be free, and kids were expected to just suck it up. Divorce was not treated as a disaster that ended their childhood, but a change that brings new possibilities. You can buy Julie's school locker, complete with Brady Bunch poster (the happy blended family) and a "Hang in there, Baby" poster showing a kitten literally at the end of its rope.

Perhaps the later Julie books in the AG series can include Julie Torn Between Two Worlds and The Unexpected Legacy of Julie's Parents' Divorce When Julie Tries Dating.

"The Lives of Others" Not a Road to Damascus Moment

I commend to you the excellent new film, "The Lives of Others," by Florian Henckel von Donnsermarck. The central drama is the moral struggle within an East German secret policeman as he spies on a prominent playwright and his actress girlfriend. The policeman is a true believer in the East German state -- and the playwright is a hopeful socialist, "our only non-subversive writer who is read in the West," as another secret policeman describes him. The Stasi (State Security) man comes to see that his surveillance is just a tool of corruption and petty politics. The playwright, too, is driven to an act of covert rebellion against the police state. Their lives become deeply entangled. I'll not say more about the conclusion.

There is a lovely moment early on when a little boy asks the secret policeman if he is really a Stasi agent.
"Do you know what the Stasi is?"
"Yes. My dad says they are the bad men who put people in prison."
The audience knows this is a dangerous moment for the little boy's family.
"What is the name of ..." the policeman begins. And then he pauses. The actor - East German theater star Ulrich Mühe, who had his own large Stasi file in real life - shows the moral struggle going on inside the Stasi man using only his face.
"What is the name of your ... ball."
"You're silly. Balls don't have names."
The man lets it go.

In an interview included with the DVD, von Donnersmarck says that he wanted to show the policeman's moral struggle as slowly evolving, "not a Damascus moment." He remains the same tidy, quiet, almost compulsive man that he always was, even while his morals are changing. Von Donnersmarck, who spent some of the time writing the screenplay at the Cistercian abbey run by his uncle, said he didn't want his man to go from a gray bureaucrat to a hedonistic bohemian, like the artists he was watching. People don't change from Saul to Paul, the director said, unless there is divine intervention. "The Lives of Others" is about the moral changes we can come to make and choose for ourselves.

College Won't Recognize Fraternity Because it Excludes Women

This sounds like an Onion story, but it is true. The appeals court was shocked, shocked! to discover that fraternities excluded women. Oh, no, politically incorrect! The College of Staten Island are the monkeys in this case, but the same thing could happen many places.

Glamour on Faludi

Susan Faludi has a new book, The Terror Dream, arguing that 9/11 elevated manly men at the expense of strong and accomplished women. This is an interesting thesis, which makes me want to have a look at the book.

I heard about the book because a student gave me the review of it from Glamour. The review is one page, half of which it taken up with pictures of actresses with wedding dresses and babies.

What was striking to me was which piece of Faludi's argument the magazine chose to focus on. Their summary of her argument is this:

The 2001 attacks, she claims, made American feel vulnerable and created a longing for the good old days of 'manly men. As a result ...
Female heroes were ignored ...
Women vanished from TV talk shows ...
Grieving widows became the feminine ideal ...
June Cleaver replaced Carrie Bradshaw ...
The national 'bump watch' began.

The core argument, even as summarized by the magazine itself, seems to focus on the exclusion of strong and powerful women from public discourse. The element that Glamour focused on, though, is "Did 9/11 make us marriage- and baby-obsessed." Most of the evidence that the magazine cites is based on fictional characters in televisions shows, and to a lesser extent on the celebrities who portray them.

Now, Glamour does not pretend to be a serious policy journal, and I will not criticize them for having a simple review. I am glad they note serious issues at all, amidst their primary concern with, as they clearly state, glamor. I think the Glamour review is symptomatic of a powerful tendency in pop culture to turn all discussions of real politics into discussions of pop culture itself.

Get Warren Jeffs the Right Way

The Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints is a scary cult, and Warren Jeffs is about as scary a cult leader as you will find. He rules over their compound in Colorado City, Arizona, with an iron hand. The FLDS control every institution in town, and drive out anyone who doesn't conform to their views, such as no short sleeves in public, or Jeffs' order that all dogs in town be killed. Like most polygynous sects, the old men drive many of the young men out of town, so the old men can have all the women.

Most people were willing to tolerate the FLDS's polygamy with adult women. What has really turned the public and the law against them are the forced marriages of young girls. Warren Jeffs' trial begins today for ordering a 14-year-old girl to marry her 19-year-old cousin against her will. People who have fled the group say that forced marriages for young girls are common.

What's wrong with this trial is the charge. Jeffs is charged with being an accomplice to rape for ordering an underage girl to marry, and presumably have sex with, a man who was a legal adult. This charge stretches rape law beyond the plausible. The prosecutors might lose, and Jeffs would slip away. Worse, they might win. If counseling people to marry, or return to a marriage, which presumably would include sex, could be legally construed as assisting rape, then anyone offering marital advice could be liable for prosecution. Unlikely, to be sure, but liable.

It is very hard to prosecute cult leaders. They tell adults to do crazy things, but it is the other people who actually do them. Unlike, say, a gang leader, they do not threaten to beat up their subordinates, or their families, or take all their money, or other dangers that secular law can recognize. The promises and threats that a cult leader can wield are beyond the law -- and should be. If Jeffs really did commit a crime, such as raping a four-year-old boy as one man has charged, by all means throw the book at him. But don't twist the law to get him just any way.

What is more effective against cults is ridicule. Jeffs was arrested in Las Vegas in a red Escalade, with wigs, sunglasses, 15 cell phones, and more than $50,000 in cash. Not exactly the actions of God's Annointed. Definitely fails the WWJD test.

Happy Russian "Conception Day"

Russia, like most developed countries, is facing a demographic crisis of not nearly enough babies to replace their current population. The governor of Ulyanovsk, Sergei Morozov, had a bright idea to do something about it: give everyone the day off, so they can go home and conceive. Under the wonderful euphemism "Family Contact Day," today has been set aside for making babies who would be born 9 months from now, June 12 -- Russia Day. To promote the "Give Birth to a Patriot on Russia Day" campaign, the Ulyanovsk government has set up exhibits and even a traveling "agit-train" full of helpful gynecologists and psychologists, a reminder of the old Bolshevik agit-trains.

I wish them well, and hope everyone in Ulyanosk has patriotic fun today. Happy Conception Day.

Married, High-Earning People Apologize More

The Pearl Outlet.com noticed that more people were buying pearls to apologize. (Male people, mostly likely, Mrs. G. notes.) So they commissioned Zogby International to conduct a poll, asking people if they would apologize in three different cases: when they were to blame, when they were partly to blame, and when they were not to blame. In each case, married people were twice as likely to apologize to their spouses than unmarrieds were to their girl- and boyfriends.

Even more interesting, your likelihood of apologizing directly correlates with how much you make. Among people who made more than $100,000 per year, 92% said they would apologize if they were in the wrong, versus only 52% of those earning under $25,000, with proportionate results for the paygrades in between. When those same people thought they were blameless, the high earners would still apologize 22% of the time, versus 13% of the lowest earners.

The report of the poll leaves many blanks - especially whether there are sex differences in apologizing, and whether there is a difference between apologizing to your spouse and apologizing in a business or social situation. Still, a fascinating, and unusually strong correlation.

Sex Scandals Among the Powerful Are Worse

Michael Currie Schaffer makes a good point in The New Republic about the current wave of Republican vs. Democratic sex scandals. The Republican senators having sex with prostitutes or picking up guys in the men's room are sleazy. They deserve their humiliation, though, mostly because they are hypocrites. The Democratic mayors and governors who have extramarital affairs with other powerful people -- political aides, tv reporters, union officials -- are more dangerous because these affairs are more likely to lead to secret deals, payoffs, and conflicts of interest.

When two powerful people are married to one another, the public has some notice of the potential for conflicts of interest, and can keep an eye on them. In the case of elected officials, there are often legal safeguards against doing public business with the spouses of government officials. When the affairs are secret, though, the damage to the public can be hidden, too.

Extramarital affairs are sleazy any way you cut it. When both parties are power players, though, the sleaze is made worse by the corruption that is likely to follow.

The Largest Congregation Led By a Woman?

The Religious Research Association, a fine organization of denominational datawonks (of which I am a member), had an interesting exchange recently trying to find the largest mainline congregation headed by a woman pastor. The results (so far):

Rev. Jo Gayle Hudson, Cathedral of Hope, in Dallas, has an attendance of 1500+ and membership of 4500+. This is now a United Church of Christ congregation, but began as a Metropolitan Community Church. Indeed, it was probably the leading MCC congregation. This also explains how there is a UCC – that is, Congregationalist – congregation with the very un-Congregationalist name of "Cathedral." The MCC, a homosexual-oriented Pentecostal denomination, is not mainline, but the UCC is.

The next largest woman-led UCC congregation (the largest with a direct Congregationalist history) is Community Church UCC, Vero Beach, FL, led by Rev. Casey Garrett Baggott. It has a worship attendance of 1612 and membership of 2080.

In the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, The Rev. Deanna M Wildermuth is Senior Pastor of Sharon Lutheran Church in Grand Forks, ND with a reported baptized membership of 4,781 and average attendance of 907.

In the Presbyterian Church (USA), my denomination, the largest church with a senior solo pastor is First Presbyterian Church in Lake Forest, IL. This church had 1,762 members and an average worship attendance of 478. In addition, First Presbyterian Church in Boulder,CO, with 2,204 in membership and 1,614 in attendance, has a female co-pastor.

A Southern Baptist added that, though the SBC is not mainline and is nearly universally opposed to calling women as senior pastors, First Baptist in Decatur, Georgia recently called Julie Pennington-Russell as senior pastor. Last year the church reported 2,671 members with 483 in average worship attendance.

What of the Episcopalians, America's ruling class denomination of old? I find it amusing that the Episcopal entry in this parlor game did not count membership size, but used a different scale:
"I DOUBT THAT THEY ARE LARGER, BUT ST JAMES IN NYC IS PROBABLY THE SECOND RICHEST (NEXT TO TRINITY .WALL STREET). IT HAS A WOMAN RECTOR."

Trilby Takes A Side

My wonderful son, Trilby, only takes sides to support the underdog. We are not a sports-oriented family, so side-taking in a physical sense doesn't come up very often.

Last evening it was past five and he hadn't turned up from school. I called around to his friends' houses, and eventually it came out that he had joined a group of other middle schoolers preparing for the big Friday night football game. The lads were painting themselves blue and white for the game pitting the Danville Admirals against our cross-town rival, the Boyle County Rebels. To his own surprise, Trilby was going to join in the revelry. When I eventually got him on the phone, he asked that we bring his eponymous trilby hat to complete his ensemble. Endub (daughter #2) and I went to the game ourselves, in part to engage in the charming small-town ritual, and in part to enjoy the spectacle of The Boy Who Does Not Take Sides with his face painted.

He conducted himself with suitable decorum through the game, and enjoyed himself with his friends. Endub says she observed some mild flirtation: a girl stole his hat, obviously wishing to be pursued; he caught up with her, rested his hand on her head, and said in a low voice, "I am inflicting massive pain." I believe she giggled.

We won a close game. At the end of the evening, Trilby, the sociologist's son, said that painting himself with the guys did create a bond among them. He added, "I still don't take sides, but just for this hour ADMIRALS RULE!"

A wonderful insight into a fine developing character.

MADD Logic: Ban Teen Driving

I support Choose Responsibility, a national effort to create a drinking license for 18 to 20 year olds. I live among college students. About a third of them don't drink alcohol at all, which I applaud. The majority, though, begin drinking underage. The rule we have set for ourselves today is that we adults forbid ourselves to teach students anything about responsible drinking before we turn them loose at 21. The result is a serious problem with binge drinking and regular drunkenness even among students who we know are smart and teachable. I think it would be better to try to teach young people how one can drink responsibly.

The main opponent of Choose Responsibility is Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). Like all sensible people, I am against drunk driving. I feel safe in saying that all Choose Responsibility signatories are against drunk driving. What we differ on is which method will best reduce drunk driving (by anyone), and which method will best reduce teen drunkenness. I think the current method, formally forbidding teen drinking, has proven ineffective on both counts.

One of the arguments that MADD makes is that the mandatory 21 drinking age has saved 17 thousand teenagers who, statistically, would otherwise have died in drunk driving accidents. This is probably true. You know how we could save even more lives? Forbid teen driving altogether. Teenagers are much more dangerous drivers than adults are, especially teen boys. We could save many lives by forbidding them from driving. Is anyone ready for that national experiment? I'm not.

Yes, teen drinking is dangerous, more dangerous than drinking by adults is. But teen anything is more dangerous than the adult practice of the same thing, because teens take bigger risks and have less judgment about what is risky. In every other sphere we try to combat teen risk taking through education. I believe we should do the same with drinking.

When Breastfeeders Attack!

A local Applebees restaurant in Nicholasville, KY, asked Brooke Ryan to cover up when she breastfed her baby. Now they wish they hadn't. Ryan organized a "nurse-in" on the sidewalk in front of that Applebees. The web carried the story everywhere, and now 60 Applebees in 30 states may get the full La Leche this weekend.

Applebees has said they will send blankets to all of their restaurants for breastfeeding, and have proclaimed that they are 100% pro-baby, pro-family, and pro-breast.

I think they should go a step further. I think they should print breastfeeding blankets with the Applebees logo with their new slogan, "A Neighborhood Milk Bar and Grill." They could give away special logo nursing bras -- Applebras. And baby slings, too -- Appleboughs. The possibilities are endless.

Don't mess with moms.

Will Birth-Dearth States Not Risk War?

James Kurth raises the interesting possibility that the nations with below-replacement birth rates -- not only the industrialized nations, but also China -- will not want to risk their precious only children as cannon fodder in major land wars. Such a policy would, obviously, have its up side if it reduced the chance of war. On the other hand, there are times when a credible military, and the will to use it, are necessary for defense.

It is certainly true that the total birthrates of Western nations are below replacement, often well below. But these birthrates have not been spread evenly to produce a majority of one-child families. Rather, we have a rising number of women with no children, averaged in with the two or three child families of the middle class, and the three or four child families of the poor and immigrants.

Kurth rightly says that the "liberal professionals and professional liberals" are particularly unlikely to have large families. However, they are also particularly unlikely to send their children to war, no matter how many they have. The war-making class and the war-fighting class are as separated as they ever have been, thanks to the all-volunteer force. Short of a large draft, things will stay that way.

Demographic contraction will have a significant effect on how big a force we could muster in a large war. But I don't think the trend toward few children in the educated classes will translate into any greater reluctance to make war at all. Chelsea Clinton and the Bush twins were the precious result of their parents' only birth, but it did not make their commander-in-chief fathers any less likely to commit the country to war. Those kids weren't going to serve, anyway.

Religion Under Liberalism Does Not Quite Equal Secularism

Stanley Fish has a piece in the New York Times entitled "Liberalism and Secularism: One and the Same." He argues that liberalism

"is a form of political organization that is militantly secular and incapable, by definition, of seeing the strong claim of religion – the claim to be in possession of a truth all should acknowledge – as anything but an expression of unreasonableness and irrationality."

Fish says that the liberal state will tolerate all religions -- all religions, that is, that are themselves tolerant. He is right about this. From this Fish concludes that

"The liberal order does not extinguish religions; it just eviscerates them, unless they are the religions that display the same respect for the public-private distinction that liberalism depends on and enforces."

Here I think he makes a mistake. Most American faiths have made their peace with the liberal state, but they also have a wing, at least, that believes that their own faith is, indeed, true. Such democratic faiths refrain from triumphalism and intolerance not because they don't believe their creeds to be true, but because they believe that intolerance is an ineffective way to spread the faith. In a market society, good market competitors win, while crusading warriors lose. Most versions of Christianity, in particular, have been chastened by the disasters of the religious wars and their own experiences of intolerance, both on the giving and the receiving end. I believe that Calvinism has the best-developed theory of why a chastened, self-critical, fair-competition faith is the most insightful basis for evangelism in a fallen world.

Faith within liberal society need not be eviscerated, just because it is humble.

Zen My Pimpmobile

My nominee for the next step in reality television.

Because less is more ...

Anglo-Protestant America

"The principal theme of this book is the continuing centrality of Anglo-Protestant culture to American national identity." With this claim, Samuel Huntington throws down the gauntlet in Who Are We?, his study of American national culture. Huntington distinguishes between Anglo-Protestant culture and the "American Creed," the Jeffersonian virtues in the Declaration of Independence. He argues that the Creed, while great and central to American identity, is too thin to build a nation on. In fact, he argues that any ideology is too thin for a nation to cohere around -- a problem that drove all the communist nations to return to the nationalism they had originally despised.

Huntington is clear to say that American individuals do not all have to be Protestants. It is the culture as a whole, not the faith of each individual, that shapes the collective identity. I am inclined to agree with him on both points -- that ideology is not enough, and that the distinctives of American culture are rooted in the peculiar tension of the English-speaking Calvinist and Arminian church cultures.

Age vs. Life Course

I teach students the "sociological triad" of race, class, and gender. I have come to add a second triad: age, religion, and region. These factors almost always matter in understanding any social phenomenon.

Later in the term I will have students write their own four-generation sociological narrative, from their grandparents to their (hypothetical) children. I want them to think of their family story in terms of these six standard social forces. In the spirit of leading by example, I wrote such an account of my own family, and gave it to the class to read.

The hardest factor to apply to my narrative was age. At any given moment, age matters quite a bit in shaping one's social circumstances. Over time, especially over generations, though, we move through the various ages, if we are favored with a long life. How to represent the effect of age in an over-time story?

I was seized with a sudden inspiration: how often did the members of my family go through various rites of passage at the customary age? This proved to be a fruitful measure of age-normalcy (or not) for the whole lineage, not just of one or another individual in it. I think this customary-age idea could be turned into a standardized measure of whole family lines.

Positive Inequality

I have assigned a good article, "The Rise and Fall of Narratives of Benign Inequality," the lead essay by David Grusky and Szonja Szelenyi in their fine Inequality Reader. They start with functionalist arguments made in the 1940s and 1950s that inequality serves a social purpose. They review several arguments that inequality is benign because it is declining. Then they outline some of the more recent arguments that inequality is bad in ways previously unexplored, such as in creating terrorism or environmental degradation.

Yet they never really take up the challenge of the functionalist argument. What Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore argued in their famous article of 1945, for example, is that inequality serves a positive good. Society needs to get people with rare talents and/or training into hard, socially useful jobs. Therefore, it is good for society if such positions carry more rewards. Hence, inequality is functional for all. The later studies that Grusky and Szelenyi consider are not arguments for the social necessity of inequality, but empirical studies of declining inequality. Since income inequality did not flatten out, as the Kuznets curve predicted, and has been rising lately in the age of Bill Gates, those optimistic studies of a generation ago seem naive.

Yet empirical studies of the rise and fall of actual inequality, especially of something so elastic as income, or wealth, does not address the main point raised by Davis and Moore: is inequality, in some form and to some degree, ultimately beneficial for all?

From Minnesota

Classes began this morning. In my Social Structure class I allowed that we would be studying the main social forces that sociologists believe shape the social structure, especially race, class, and gender. In the spirit of full disclosure, I told them that I had become convinced that there are deep, complementary differences between men and women, which are likely to shape all social structures. Afterwards, a student came to see me, not sure her views would really be compatible with the premises of the course. She put the potential conflict with wonderful, and revealing, delicacy. "I'm from Minnesota, and so are my parents. We moved to the South when I was little, but my family is not really from here."

I assured her that the class would be empirical throughout, and that she was welcome to argue with the evidence and the discourse of the class to her heart's content. She is staying.

On Vacation -- See You in a Week!

Teen Anecdote, With Cats

Endub took the cats to the vet for rabies shots, worm meds, etc. I helped her load two cats into one carrier, which the kitties were not too happy about. Trilby, who is being a young teen boy in an excellent way, agreed to help her take them. The carrier was too heavy for either of the kids to carry alone, so they calmly each took an end and carried it out to the van. I gave Endub a blank check. My only worry about the trip was her backing the van out without hitting the garage. When she had successfully negotiated that turn, Mrs. G and I were congratulating ourselves on having such competent, helpful kids.

Then the phone rang. It was Endub. She was at the end of the driveway. "How do I get there?" she asked.

Still, wonderful kids.

Sworn Virgins of Albania

I am posting on this story mostly because it is fascinating. In the mountains of northern Albania there is a centuries-old custom that if a woman takes an oath of perpetual virginity, she may have all the freedom, authority, and respect of a man.

This is a good illustration of the idea that gender is a social construct -- a liberal's idea, put to conservative use. It reminds me of anthropologist Mary Douglas' argument (in Purity and Danger) that we make systems of categories to help us sort out the world. There will always be a few anomalies, though, which are dangerous to the purity of the system. So we usually build in some escape valves, to allow anomalies to be socially constructed into a new category that doesn't violate the rules.

Some proponents of social construction want to take this idea as license to do away with all social categories. I don't think that is a livable solution. Recognizing that there are limits to our necessary category systems, though, lets us use them while still being humble about how absolute the categories are. There will always be anomalies. If they are not actually dangerous to society, we can find a place for them, too.

Safe Neighborhoods vs. Resegregation

(This is the beginning of a good idea. Maybe I will back it up and write a famous article someday. Here is my first cut.)

Part of the hidden work of protecting their families that dads do is to move their families to safer neighborhoods. Couple-headed families usually have more than twice the income of single-mom families, and can afford better neighborhoods. Fathers provide direct protection for their own households. Fathers also usually contribute to everyone's safety in their own neighborhoods in a way that families in fatherless neighborhoods rarely do.

Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton won the big sociology prize a few years ago for American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. They argued that American cities were resegregating, especially by separating African-Americans from other Americans in neighborhoods that were increasingly black. Massey and Denton attribute this to racism.

One of the ways that African-American families are distinctive from other racial-ethnic groups in this country is that black children are much less likely to grow up with their married father in their home.

Putting these two ideas together:

Fatherless families tend to end up concentrated in the least expensive neighborhoods; and

Fatherless neighborhoods tend to become the most violent; and

African-American families are the most likely to be fatherless and live in fatherless neighborhoods; so

One of the main underlying factors in the increased racial concentration of African-Americans is really an increased fatherless concentration of African-Americans.

Marriage Makes You Happy, But Some Would Still Rather Be Unrestricted

Swiss economist Bruno Frey conducted a massive study of whether marriage makes people happy, or whether happier people get married. To his surprise, he found that marriage really does make people happier.

What struck me in the news accounts of his lectures on this study was a side point. The woman with whom he lives, also a professor, still does not want to get married. She "doesn't think it contributes anything additional and is only putting restrictions on you."

I have argued before that marriage as a social institution does make most people happier even when it just concerns a young couple. Marriage really comes into its own, though, to protect children. It is also a helpful structure for couples who are not so young. Marriage is best when making something that lasts is more important to you than keeping your options open.

Prof. Frey's non-wife's response, though, raises an interesting question: would you forgo happiness in order to avoid restrictions?

Heartwarming Viagra Ad

I hold no brief for Viagra as a product, and most of the ads, from Bob Dole's onward, have been kind of creepy. There is a new one, though, of a bunch of middle-aged guys jamming at a roadhouse about how much they love their wives. The chorus? "Viiiiiiiiva Viagra," done with a big Elvis flourish. They then get in their cars and scamper home.

That is surprisingly charming.

Two Ways to Play the Privilege Game

A friend who works for the NCCJ - now the National Conference for Community and Justice, formerly the National Conference of Christians and Jews - told me of an exercise that they run at their summer youth camp, Anytown. All the campers hold hands in a long line, standing side by side. The leader then reads items from a list of privileges and disadvantages. If you grew up in a house with more than 50 books, take a step forward. If your mother is a college graduate, take three steps forward. If you grew up with only one parent, take three steps back. And so on.

Kids at Anytown soon find that it is hard keep holding hands with their friends, with some moving way ahead, while others stay still or even fall back. The ones who move the furthest down the field can see graphically what an advantage their privileges have given them, privileges that most did not realize they had. For kids who choose to go to an NCCJ leadership camp, this experience fills them with a desire to work together to lift everyone for the sake of community and justice.

Another friend was telling me that his daughter had done this exercise as part of orientation at a fancy northeastern prep school. I don't think he said they were holding hands. The leaders, who had been brought in to teach this very privileged group about privilege, had added some options appropriate to that setting. "If your mom is a college graduate" got most of the kids to go three steps forward, though some of the kids on the biggest scholarships did not. But then they started adding some unusual instructions - if there is a building on this campus named for your family, take ten steps forward. The particular child who marched down the field at that instruction was so far ahead of the others that the instructors gave him a chair to sit in on the field.

What was different at the prep school from the justice camp was that many of the students came to see the privilege game as a competition to see how many privileges they could add up. My friend's daughter got the intended point. Many of her classmates, though, looked forward to each new set of privilege steps as a way to catch up to the lucky dog sitting in the chair downfield.

One-Hour Presbyteries

Suppose each congregation in a presbytery were no more than one hour from every other church in the presbytery. (This principle could apply in other polities, too, even among congregational polities.) This would be small enough that all the ministers and elder cadres could have steady, organic relations with one another. This is closer to the way presbyteries used to be organized. In some places, especially in the west, this rule might not be practical. Still, I think a one-hour dispersion rule would be a good rule of thumb for the Presbyterian Church.

I am working on a document about rebuilding the Presbyterian establishment. In the draft, I argued that the Executive or General Presbyters, the ongoing staff person of the presbytery, is a natural advisor to the General Assembly. The EP, though, is not a constitutional officer. The constitutional officers -- the offices every presbytery has to have someone fill -- are the stated clerk and the moderator. I also believe the stated clerks are natural advisors to the General Assembly. The moderator usually serves for only a year, so does not have quite the breadth of experience that the stated clerks and EPs have.

A reader of my presbyterian establishment draft commented that EPs are a recent invention. In order to assure that most presbyteries had the resources to afford a permanent paid staff member, the presbyteries were made much larger. In much of the country presbyteries today far exceed the one-hour rule.

If going to one-hour presbyteries meant doing without EPs in most places, so be it. I think it is more important to the life, connection, and solidarity of the church that the local ministers and elder cadres know one another.

Sarah Lawrence Surprise

We were talking to a friend about daughter Endub's search for the right college. She wants a place that is intense and serious about study, but lighthearted and friendly in tone. Our friend suggested that the distinctive teaching pattern of Sarah Lawrence College might suit Endub very well. So, since we were in the Northeast anyway, we made a quick trip to Bronxville, NY.

At Sarah Lawrence, students take three year-long seminars. That is the full load. The seminars are capped at 15 students. Students and professors interview one another in the registration period to make sure that they have a real match with one another, since they are commiting quite a bit of their teaching and learning time to each other. Then, on top of the seminar, each student meets individually with the professor to work on an intensive project that is related in some way, or at least inspired in some sense, by the seminar topic. This individual project lets students go deep on something of interest to them. Endub really liked that part.

On the other hand, the nice young people who acted as tour guides had to admit that the stereotypes about Sarah Lawrence students were not, um, convivial and fun. One emblem of the campus are the ubiquitous black squirrels. There is even a campus eatery named for them. The campus joke is that Sarah Lawrence students are like the squirrels: contentious, aggressive, and always dressed in black.

The jury is out, but she remains intrigued.

Why We Need to Hear Everyone

Diverse groups can reach good decisions, but only if they can bring that diversity to bear. James Surowiecki tells the cautionary tale of how NASA failed to listen to its own internal warnings about the shuttle Columbia while it was in the air, and before it blew up on re-entry, because its groups were run by the boss, who only asked for the information she has already decided she wanted to hear. (She reminded our family of the officious toady Delores Umbridge in the Harry Potter stories.) The group had the right diversity of experience available, but shut it off. It may seem bogus, but going around the room and soliciting dissent really is useful to the whole group. Sometimes it even saves lives.

Diversity and Judgment

James Surowiecki's argument about the remarkable Wisdom of Crowds depends on the crowds being diverse. The kind of diversity that matters is that the members have a variety of experiences. That way, the errors made by some individuals with certain kinds of experiences are cancelled out by the errors of other kinds of individuals with different kinds of experiences. The result, by Providence I think, is likely to be more accurate than the judgment of any one group -- even the experts.

The diversity that counts is a diversity of experience. Crowds that merely look different, but think alike, don't count.

The Wisdom of Crowds

We are reading a fascinating study, James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. He makes the counter-intuitive argument that if you pool the judgments of a diverse crowd, you will get an average answer that is likely to be good. In fact, it is likely to be better than the judgment of experts, and better than the judgment of any one member of the crowd.

To take a famous kind of puzzle, if you ask a crowd to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar, a few individuals in the group will be close to the right answer -- but the crowd as a whole is likely to be closer. Moreover, if you repeat the process with different sizes and shapes of the jars, the good individual guessers from the first jar are not likely to be the best individual guessers of the later jars -- but the crowd is likely to be close to right every time.

This is mysterious and interesting for anyone, but is especially intriguing for a sociologist. More as Surowiecki's argument unfolds.

Theory Camp Reflections

Theory Camp was a good idea. Rather than working with one student all summer on a research project, I spent two weeks with five students working through one substantial book, Randall Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies. This is a great fat book, about 1000 pages altogether, and we were zipping through parts of it to read it all in two weeks. Still, for a group to set aside that amount of time to work through one idea is a rich experience.

We ate together outside of camp at the beginning, in the end, and several times in the middle, to talk about all manner of things. The core task, though, was to read an assigned hunk of Collins each night, then discuss it for two and a half hours each morning. Naturally, we met the the coffee house. I enjoyed the buzz of life around us as we talked, but then enjoying the buzz of life is one of the things that makes people become sociologists in the first place.

Collins' theory, as I have been detailing in recent posts, is that the greatest moments of creativity come when a small number of competing networks gather around a common problem and push one another to argue through to a richer solution. He says that for this competition to be fruitful, there need to be a minimum of three, and a maximum of about six positions gathered around the "attention space." It occured to me several times as the six of us gathered around the table, with Collins' fat volume in the center, that we were enacting this idea in miniature. Except that we weren't really competing. And we didn't have fully differentiated arguments, much less networks, backing us up.

Still, the students brought their thoughtful selves to the discussion. We each had done enough different substantial things to bring a body of experience to think with to the table. We didn't have shouting matches like some that we read about -- Centre is not that kind of place. But we did seriously bring our somewhat varied experiences to bear on understanding and using Collins' rich argument.

At our last celebratory meal we thought about what should be added to theory camp in the future. The biggest idea that came through was that each participants should write a "main point" statement to bring to each session. This might be simply the main point that they took away from that night's reading, or the main idea they had thought of while reading it of how to use that day's concepts. As usual, Centre students rose to the challenge, and thought of ways that the project can be made more challenging.

I am looking forward to theory camp next year. The likely book: Jeffrey Alexander's The Civil Sphere.

Are Abstraction and Reflexivity Bad for Scriptural Faith?

Randall Collins concludes The Sociology of Philosophies with a strong pattern: the general trend of intellectual creativity is toward greater abstraction and greater reflexivity. Abstraction is the more familiar concept - the intellectuals considering a problem think of it in more general and encompassing terms. Reflexivity means that the way a problem is organized now is increasingly shaped by the way previous intellectuals have reshaped the problem in the past.

A few days ago I blogged about the coincidence of philosophical Idealism and the secularization of universities. A helpful reader pointed out, correctly, that I left the impression that Idealism was not really a response to intellectual problems of predecessor philosophies, but was caused by the structural conditions of secularization. This would not be correct. Idealism is a serious philosophical position with much to recommend it. It is true, though, that most idealisms (and not just the Christian-related ones) abstract from the specific scriptures and historical precedents that gave rise to them.

Collins suggests that instead the philosophy of scripture and traditional practice is often developed reluctantly by scriptural traditionalists. They are forced to become intellectuals about the faith because rationalist believers in their own tradition force them to in reaction. The very people who most believe the particulars of sacred scripture and faithful practice are obliged to defend those particulars in abstract terms. Over time, these abstract defenses of particularity become reflexive -- they shape how new generations of believers understand what scripture and tradition mean.

Collins is more concerned with the development of (secular) philosophy than he is of the religious faiths from which most philosophies are developed. It seems to me, though, that the logic of his argument means that the competitive process of intellectual creativity would tend to undermine traditional faith, even when the intellectuals are creating a defense of that faith.

2 Fun Facts About Philosophers

... courtesy of The Sociology of Philosophies:

Bertrand Russell's godfather was John Stuart Mill

Jean Paul Sartre's cousin was Albert Schweitzer.

Idealism is the Cover Under Which Secularists Took the Universities

Randall Collins spends a significant section of The Sociology of Philosophies on why Idealism appeared where and when it did. The philosophical lineage of Kant and Hegel argues against materialism in terms that sound like a defense of the reality of God and the spiritual vision of traditional religion. Yet really, says Collins, Idealism is at best a halfway house, keeping the terms of spirit, while removing the hard-to-digest revelation and historical particularity of religion.

Collins' sociological insight is that Idealism became the dominant philosophy in universities at the very moment when they were being secularized, cutting loose from either direct church control, as in the United States, or from state church control, as in Germany and England. This holds true despite the fact that each of these countries secularized their universities in different generations -- it is not simply the zeitgeist talking. Collins' most impressive evidence is that philosophers in Japanese universities invented a Buddhist-sounding Idealism at just the moment that those institutions were separating from Buddhist control.

And within another generation, all these dominant Idealisms had been displaced by more thorough-going secularist philosophies.

Science is a Small-Numbers Operation, After All

One of the useful structural ideas in Randall Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies is the Law of Small Numbers. He argues that creative intellectual life works when a limited number of networks, representing different positions, gather around a common problem and compete with one another to solve it. He says the minimum number of positions is three, and the maximum is six or seven, eight at the outside. The minimum number comes from the initial claim - "this is a problem worthy of serious attention, and here is our proposed solution" - which, if successful, draws a contrary view; the argument between the two almost inevitably draws a "plague on both your houses" third position. The maximum number of positions is a little vaguer, but seems to be about the limit of the number of competing solutions to a problem that participants can keep track of.

Science today, what Collins calls "rapid-discovery science," seems to be composed of thousands of creative groups pushing along a research frontier, not a small number arguing over a problem for a long time. At first glance, then, science would seem to abrogate the law of small numbers.

If we take a finer-grained look at science as a human enterprise, though, we see that it is composed of many nodes of small numbers gathered around a problem. Moreover, argues Collins, the scientific revolution was really three different revolutions working together. First came a revolution in mathematics, which was driven by developing many new mathematical notations that turned into a technology of discovery. Then began a revolution in scientific equipment, driven more by tinkerers than philosophers, which also turned into a technology of discovery. Only then could there be scientists who use both kinds of technology to attack problems. At that point, they create an attention space organized around a small number of positions competing as fast as they can to both make crucial discoveries and to interpret them convincingly.

The difference between science and philosophy is that science, armed with these efficient technologies of discovery, moves much faster in creating little problems and solving them. This is Kuhnian normal science. Where philosophers might spend decades, whole careers, even generations arguing the same problem, scientists working on a hot topic compete to a solution, solve it, and move on to a new competition. Scientific problems that don't get solved quickly get pushed to the side, where fewer networks will keep working on them; hot problems are not so much the most important ones, as the ones that promise a reachable solution soon.

From a distance and from the outside, science appears to be a vast moving research frontier carried on by millions. Up close, though, science proceeds by many small-numbers competitions gathered around specific problems.

The Starting Configuration of Monotheistic Intellectual Life

Randall Collins argues that intellectual life depends on competing networks who oppose one another across a common set of problems. The Western faiths -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- tend to start (and restart, and restart) their intellectual arguments in the same configuration. All three faiths begin with a faith in one God, and an overlapping set of texts about God. Rituals develop, standard prayers get established, practices of daily life get a religious gloss, and everyday ethics grow up in the life of the community of believers. In other words, a viable life of faith can grow up without intellectual reflection on how, exactly, God's universe works. I expect that most of the believers in most faiths around the world and through the ages are happy to just do it, without a full intellectual account of how and why.

Some people, though, have the intellectual itch. They want to know how and why. They want to have an intellectually deeper and, to them, more satisfying faith. And they want to make a name and a living from arguing about it. So they begin to reason about the faith.

Collins details what happens next. It is hard to create the conditions for sustained intellectual life. If, though, conditions are ripe, intellectuals of one position get the attention of other intellectuals who take an opposing position, which in turn draws in at least one other network of thinkers arguing for yet another position. This argument also typically draws a reaction to the whole business of intellectualizing faith that says "a plague on all your houses." Thus, the opening configuration of intellectual life.

In The Sociology of Philosophies Collins goes on to name each of these four positions in the opening configuration of Western theology.

The rational faith position comes first. They argue that the rules of reason apply to God, too, so we can reason about what God and God's actions can be like based on reason, even if some particular points can only be supplied by revelation.

The rational faith position provokes the traditional scripturalists to offer a reasoned defense of why God is not limited by human reason.

The argument between the rationalists and the traditionalists creates a market for a third party to import classical philosophy -- in the case of all the Biblical faiths, Greek philosophy.

These three parties could be a stable configuration for an intellectual argument. Almost inevitably, though, mystics criticize the whole idea of reaching God through intellectual argument; ironically, by criticizing the intellectuals, the mystics are drawn into the intellectual argument willy-nilly.

The argument may branch out into many further positions from there, and the power of one group or another within the argument may wax or wane, depending on how well they argue. Moreover, it is difficult to sustain the right external conditions for a focused intellectual argument over generations, so the whole project may collapse for a time. Still, the opening configuration -- rationalists, provoking traditionalists, importers, provoking mystics -- is likely to be repeated at the start of each new round on intellectual creativity.

I Have Joined an Underwear Cult

I was looking for interesting boxer shorts online. By interesting I mean the kind that will make my kids say "Daaaaad!" when they see the laundry. I found quite a variety of colorful boxers, but they appear to have been made by slave labor in China.

Then I found City Boxers. They promised American-made boxers constructed from durable fabric. The patterns won't make the kids roll their eyes, and they do cost more, but City Boxers seemed a good thing to try. So I ordered a few. They asked for quite a few details of style, materials, cut, and size. It was kind of like ordering a latte at a fancy coffeehouse.

The first email thanked me for my order, but needed to explain the drill to me. They want me to be Completely Satisfied -- so they won't make all that I ordered. Hmm. Instead, they will make me one to try out. They suggest I wear it to do all kinds of things, wash it a few times, and make sure it is what I Really Want. And they will start making the test pair as soon as I confirm that I am ready to take that big step. I was a little slow in responding (I was forwarding the email to my friends), so they wrote again. I quickly confirmed that, yes, indeed, I would like a pair of their excellent underpants. They set to work.

In a day, I got another email:

On Tuesday, July 24, 2007, batch number XXXXXXXXX was created. Your boxer short selections are a part of this particular batch. Batches are a group of many orders that will be created before we move on to subsequent batches. As of this emailing, we have completed 98.48 percent** of this batch.

There are 8 steps in creating our excellent boxers (see specifics at the bottom of this email). Here is the status of your order.

1 pair of 'Burgundy' Boxers
Style Number: 6093
Size: [censored]
Inseam: Standard, 4-Inch
Waistband: Plush Inside-Exposed
Fastener: Button
Pocket: No Pocket
Step 1: Completed (25 Jul)
Step 2: Completed (26 Jul)
Step 3: Completed (26 Jul)
Step 4: Completed (26 Jul)
Step 5: Completed (26 Jul)
Step 6: Completed (26 Jul)
Step 7: Completed (26 Jul)


We appreciate your boxer short order and your patience in allowing us the time necessary to create excellence. We are a bit slower than other boxer short companies, but we do want your shorts to be the very best you have ever worn.

Gary Lindquist
City Boxers
gary@cityboxers.com

** Your boxers are a member of the batch listed in the title of this email. We must complete the entire batch before your boxers, and the other boxers in this batch, are inspected, bagged, packaged and then shipped to you. This figure notes how far we are along on the entire cutting and sewing process for this batch.


BOXER SHORT CONSTRUCTION PROCESS

Step 1: Marking and Cutting. Each pair we create is marked with chalk and then precision cut individually. As a part of step 1, a waistband length is cut to a precise length based on the waist measurement you ordered. If your boxer shorts appear too large upon opening the package, this would be due to the stiffness of the fabric you chose. After washing, the boxers will contract down to the appropriate size. Some fabrics will not contract, or will contract very little, due to the initial softness of the fabric. (Average 5 minutes per pair.)
Step 2: Side Seam. A french seam is run down the outside of each leg. French seams are far superior to serge seams. They are much more durable and are without a doubt more comfortable. (Average 3 minutes per pair.)
Step 3: Waistband Material Attachment. A single-needle sewing machine is used to sew the waistband to each side of the front above the spot where the fly will eventually be. Ends of the waistband material are nicely hidden for a clean, professional look. (Average 5 minutes per pair.)
Step 4: Waistband Gathering. A four-needle sewing machine is used to gather the waistband around the top of the boxer short. At the end of this process a size label is adding in the middle of the back. (Average 3 minutes per pair.)
Step 5: Fly Area. A single-needle sewing machine is used to meticulously sew the stitching around the fly area. The reason our boxers last so long is our attention to detail in creating our designs. (Average 5 minutes per pair.)
Step 6: Crotch Seam. A double-needle, French stitch sewing machine is used to sew the crotch seam. (Average 3 minutes per pair.)
Step 7: Fastener and Logo Label. The boxers are finished around the fly area with this step. A button, or snap, is added to the middle of the fly, if applicable. The spot above the fly is sewn together and then our logo label is attached. (Average 4 minutes per pair.)
Step 8: Cutting and Hemming. A straight line from crotch seam to leg seam is cut and then the legs are hemmed. These extraordinary boxers are finished. Now they are carded, bagged, vacuum packed, and are readied for shipment. (Average 5 minutes per pair.)

As you can see, it takes about 33 minutes to complete a single pair of boxer shorts.

I eagerly await the arrival of my undies, though I know I am not worthy.

Is Multiculturalism Ethnocentric?

Randall Collins works through the developments of philosophy in Asia before turning to the post-Greek West in order to show that the same principles, and even the same contents, run through the sociology of all philosophies. He makes the strong claim that there is not an essential East nor and essential West, in philosophy or otherwise. In fact, he claims that treating other cultures as having an enduring essence is just as ethnocentric as thinking that one's own culture does. Multiculturalism, he argues, has become politically correct, but it is just ethnocentrism at one remove.

I am still chewing on this one, but I incline to agree. Your thoughts?

Official Endorsement is Bad for Intellectuals

Randall Collins, in The Sociology of Philosophies, argues that networks, not individual geniuses, make intellectual creativity. High creativity is rare because it is hard to assemble all the right material conditions for a network of intellectuals to have the leisure, the proximity, and the right kind of problem to generate several competing schools of thought.

You might think that one way to solve this problem would be to have patrons take care of all the material concerns to free the intellectuals to think, argue, and write. It turns out, though, that it also takes the right kind of patron, because it is natural for the patron to look askance at any intellectual developments that would undermine that patron's position. This is true whether the patrons are are rich families, religious authorities, or, especially, the state.

The best circumstances for intellectuals come when they are supported by the small gifts of the many, rather than the exclusive, but string-laden patronage of the few. When intellectual institutions are beholden to a powerful sponsor, they turn their brains and their competitive arguments to the politics of keeping and improving their places, rather than the intellectual problem of improving their ideas.

The Law of Small Numbers

One of the most important and least explained points in Randall Collins' theory in The Sociology of Philosophies is the "law of small numbers." He argues that intellectual development takes place in an argument among a small number of intellectual networks. Almost always, he says, these arguments will resolve into three to six or so positions.

Why three is the minimum I sort of understand. For every position X, there is an opposing anti-X waiting to be filled. Moreover, Collins cleverly sees that in most historical intellectual arguments, there is also a "pox on both your houses" position, which tends to draw people who pose paradoxes, relativize all positions, and often promote distinctive lifestyles.

The upper limit of "about six" or "six to eight" is a little harder to see. My best guess is that that is about the limit of different positions that we can keep track of in opposition to our own. Above that, we tend to think of the various smaller sects as variations on one of the more dominant themes.

Collins keeps reminding us that it takes at least three generations to really get the measure of whether a school of thought has been creative or not. I can well believe that it is almost impossible to maintain an argument of more than eight distinct positions for three generations.

The law of small numbers is a useful, testable idea about how intellectual arguments are carried out.

High Creativity is Rare - But Joining the Conversation is Worthwhile

Randall Collins estimates that there will be, at best, 2 majors philosophers per generation, and perhaps another dozen or so important secondary philosophers. In The Sociology of Philosophies he contends that high levels of intellectual creativity are rare. Taking the long view, it is likely that none of the major thinkers of today will rate a paragraph in the intellectual histories of 500 years from now. This can be somewhat depressing.

On the other hand, the great intellectual project of understanding the world is worth doing. Even being a provincial intellectual, or a thoughtful member of the reading public, is an important part in making creative thought real. How can this be so? Because, Collins argues, the right measure of creative thought is how much other people use and develop your ideas. His rule of thumb is that we can't really begin to say that a thinker is a creative intellectual until a third generation of thinkers has taken up that person's ideas. That means that we, the readers and thinkers (to whatever degree) of this day, are vital to the creative intellectual work of those who went before. Our thoughts are really what makes a genius a genius.

One of the most inviting images in Collins' argument is his account of what intellectual life is, at its heart:

"The intellectual world is a massive conversation. … What makes one an intellectual is one's attraction to this conversation."

EE from CC in IR

I began "theory camp" today with a group of students, working our way through Randall Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies. The heart of the book is a sociological analysis of all the great schools of philosophy, east and west, as social networks. Before he gets to the philosophers, though, Collins outlines the "skeleton of theory." He argues that in any social network, people get emotional energy from exchanging, developing, and arguing over cultural capital in great chains of interaction rituals. In his terms, we get EE from CC in IR.

Interactions rituals are an idea he developed from the work of Erving Goffman, who in turn was expanding an insight of one of the founding sociologists, Emile Durkheim. Social structures aren't really physical structures like walls and floors, but rather are interactions that people have regularly, habitually -- that is, ritually. The specific words they say differ each time, but the form of the interaction is a ritual.

Cultural capital is the kind of knowledge that secures us a place in a social network. It is the kind of knowledge that is useful to you and to other people. We not only exchange it, we develop it, mostly by combining one kind of cultural capital with others to make new social value. Intellectuals, such as philosophers, are especially and primarily focused on exchanging and developing ideas. The idea of cultural capital Collins draws directly from Pierre Bourdieu.

The new idea I have learned from our studies so far is about "emotional energy." When we interact with others in our social networks, we have emotional reactions. The more the network matters to us, the more power these interactions have to lift up or dash our emotions. Collins says we are drawn to the kinds of arguments that our network finds most interesting. If we add to our network's argument successfully, the positive feedback will fill us with emotional energy; the reverse effect leads to negative feedback, which drains our emotional energy.

The stars of philosophy, or any intellectual network, are the most productive, some of their products being particularly insightful to the rest of the network. These stars have the drive to keep working so hard because of their great emotional energy. Emotional energy is clearly a cousin of Durkheim's "collective effervescence." Collins transforms Durkheim's notion from a product of collective emotion and solidarity, to be an engine of the social network. EE makes the social structure go.

Spoiler! (Not Really)

The eldest Gruntled child, Megblum, is paranoid about running across any Harry Potter spoilers. Her friends know this. She called one of them to give him birthday greetings. The conversation went like this:

Friend: "Hello?"

Megblum: "Happy Birthday!"

Friend: "Boromir dies!"


Layers of cultural literacy are buried in that prank.

Gone to Hogwarts for the Duration

Cuba's Low Infant-Mortality Rate is Propped Up by its High Abortion Rate

Cuba has an infant-mortality rate of 5.3 deaths per 1,000 live births, which is better that the U.S. rate of 6.4. However, Cuba also has an extremely high abortion rate. The United States has a fairly high abortion rate, with about a quarter of conceptions getting aborted. The Cuban abortion rate is about 3 times the U.S. rate.

No wonder Cuba has such a low rate of infant death - so few its babies get to be infants in the first place.

No-Fault Divorce Is Not the Problem – Unilateral Divorce Is

The "no-fault" revolution that swept the states in the 1970s increased the divorce rate about ten percent. Since the overall divorce rate is now a little under 50%, that is a sizable hunk of all divorces. A new study from the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy (iMAPP) by iMAPP president Maggie Gallagher and law professor Douglas Allen reviewed all the studies in this country and elsewhere to see what effect the no-fault revolution has had. They conclude that many factors contributed to the divorce boom, but the no-fault legal changes that made divorce easier were definitely significant.

No-fault was supposed to increase the divorce rate, at first. When states started passing divorce reform in the late sixties they figured that there was a backlog of unhappy marriages that would take advantage of the easier rules. Gallagher and Douglas estimate that most of the increase in the divorce rate due to no-fault came in the first ten years. Proponents of no-fault expected that there would be a divorce spike, followed by a return to the earlier divorce rate, or maybe even a lower one. Judges and lawyers were eager to end the charade that many divorces had become, in which both parties agreed to have one party pretend to be to blame, especially of adultery.

That is not quite the way it worked out, though. There was a divorce spike after divorce reform – but the spike did not come back down. By the early '80s we hit the highest divorce rate ever, and many respectable analysts thought half of all marriages would end in divorce. Things never got quite that bad, and there has been some improvement recently, especially for educated people. Still, as Gallagher and Douglas show, divorce reform makes people reluctant to get married, or lets them expect to take an easy exit when things get tough, as they always do.

New York is the only state that still requires that someone be at fault in order to grant a divorce. Yet about 2/3rds of New York divorces are uncontested, and in many of those cases the parties agree ahead of time that one of them will admit to fault in order to get on with the divorce. This is why a high-level panel of judges and lawyers is proposing to do away with New York's fault standard altogether.

So, if we went back to fault-based divorce, would that be better for marriage? Not really. The problem is not really that we now have no-fault divorce, but that we have unilateral divorce. What the no-fault revolution has really meant is that it takes two to marry, but only one to divorce. In practice this often means that the "monied party" – usually him – can walk away from the "unmonied" (or making-much-less) party and the kids.

New York probably will join the rest of the country in abolishing fault as the only standard for divorce. They could strengthen marriage, or at least make divorce less awful, if the state eliminated unilateral divorce at the same time.

Self Esteem is Bad For You

Self esteem should be a by-product of actually achieving something. Self esteem is not a viable goal by itself. Indeed, I don't see how you can inculculate self esteem as an end in itself.

Andrew Lam of New American Media and a chronicler of the Vietnamese diaspora reports that American kids have high self esteem, but lousy achievement in math, whereas Asian kids have modest self esteem, but much higher actual achievement in math. This finding is fairly well known to people in the education racket. Lam also reports a finding I had not seen, a new study by Jean Twenge at San Diego State. A quarter century ago, at the beginning of the self esteem fashion in American schools, a third of American college students had above average scores on a narcissism index. Today, two thirds of American college students have above-average narcissism scores.

If kids think that they cannot achieve anything, then they are less likely to. The cure, though, is not to tell them that they are already great the way they are. The cure to is to help them actually achieve something worthwhile. As a friend put it, "school should teach kids; let the little buggers look after their own self esteem."

Three Parents, or None?

A lesbian couple wanted a baby, so one of them got pregnant with the help of a sperm donor. The baby was born. Then the lesbians split up. Then the sperm donor got sued for child support. And then, in a surreal conclusion to the whole disaster, the Pennsylvania Superior Court declared that all three adults are the child's legal parents, with all the rights that married parents have who make kids the usual way. Elizabeth Marquardt has a very calm op-ed in the New York Times about the legal earthquake that this decision makes.

What impresses me most about this case is not so much that this poor kid has three parents, as that he barely has one.

No-Fault Divorce Adds 10% to the Divorce Rate

A forthcoming study by Maggie Gallagher and Douglas Allen, previewed in Newsweek, estimates that no-fault divorce laws added 10% to the divorce rate beyond what we otherwise would have had. They found that the big direct effect -- adding extra divorces -- came in the first ten years. Since then there has been an indirect effect in the couples who cohabitate but avoid marriage due to a heightened fear of divorce. This leads to further misery, as cohabiters break up at even higher rates than married people do, and cohabiters who later marry have an even higher divorce rate than other married people.

In her earlier book with Linda Waite, The Case for Marriage, Gallagher had reported that no-fault added 6 to 7% to the divorce rate. This new report is based on more and more recent studies.

I will have more details when the study itself is released.

Sugar Cookies

The wonderful Megblum, daughter #1, and one of her buddies very nicely took it upon themselves to entertain visiting cousins, who are five-year-old twins. Megblum, who is a great Arranger, collected sugar cookie dough and many kinds of icing, sprikles, glitter, candy bones, and other things to turn cookie-baking into an art. Boy cousin made many quickly, and ate them as fast as he made them. Girl cousin made one, which she layered with every kind of topping to a great height -- which she then carefully licked off, leaving the cookie.

A good time was had by all.

Teens Get Smarter About Sex

The teen intercourse rate fell below 50% a decade ago. The teen pregnancy rate has been dropping for twice that long. Of those teens who do have sex, nearly 2/3rds now say they use condoms. The teen birth rate has hit a record low. All of this good news is in a just-released federal report.

The only thing that bothers me about this report is that the reason the government gives for the improvement. Edward Sondik, director of the National Center for Health Statistics, said "The lower figure on teens having sex means the risk of sexually transmitted disease is lower." He is right, of course, and lowering the risk of STDs is a good thing. But think of how else he might have finished that sentence. "The lower figure on teens having sex means ...

- that more teens see the value of saving sex for marriage
- that more teens understand that their children will be healthier and happier if they wait until they are older to have them
- that more teens understand that sex is better if it is part of a mature commitment, one they are not ready to make yet
- that more teen girls understand that they do not have to say yes to hold on to a guy
- that more teen boys understand that they should not press a girl to say yes even when she wants to please him
- that more teens understand that popular culture is saturated with sex because it is an easy way to sell things, not because that is the way real life should be

... and a dozen other positive, mature reasons why some teenagers control their natural desires more sensibly.

Sex is not primarily about disease and death. Smart kids know that.

3-Year Itch -- Without Kids?

The New York Times is giving prominence to a new report by Larry Bumpass and Kelly Musick that seems to show a decline in marital happiness after three years of marriage. The professors, the reporter, and the experts queried go on about the possible effects of today's instant gratification lifestyle, or the effects of widespread cohabitation before marriage, or perhaps of the later marriage age that is common now.

What none of the voices in the article mention, though, is whether these unhappy marrieds had kids. Measuring marital happiness without asking about kids is like writing restaurant reviews without mentioning the food.

Marriage Forces Social Closure

How do we turn the spectrum of social status into a ladder with rungs? This is a problem for sociology. Objectively, it seems that all the thousands of status distinctions add up to a smooth spectrum of individuals, not a structure of status groups. Yet we know that people make and experience social life as full of groups with boundaries that define who is in, and who is out.

One of the ways that we make these boundaries is by using educational credentials. Randall Collins, as I have noted in the last couple of posts, says that we are in an advanced state of a "credential society," where we use educational credentials, certifications, licenses, and so forth to make social distinctions that go way beyond the knowledge that those credentials can really certify.

Frank Parkin, a Weberian sociologist, wrote a wonderful book, Marxism and Class Structure: A Bourgeois Critique. He develops Weber's idea that social life has an endless process of creating and resisting social closure. The up group finds some marker to insist on that excludes the group below; the group below resists this usurpation of their upward claims -- and in turn exclude groups below them.

Class theorists rarely really grapple with how marriage relates to class and status structure. In the old days, a man's status was simply assumed to define the status of the women in his family. Since the '70s, we have been more careful to treat women's status separately from men's. Still, sociologists remain remarkably individualistic on this point. We do not have a theory of the social status of a married couple and their children.

Closure theory may be the beginning of such a theory. Status groups are not just categories made up by sociologists. They are the real groups in which we tend to find our friends, spend our free time, find out mates, and raise our kids. Marriage forces a couple to consolidate in one status group. This is not an absolute rule, but a tendency. The loose flow among social groups that single people, especially young single people, can enjoy (or suffer) tends to give way to a much more fixed and coherent social life when they marry, and especially when they have kids. A family is a little society which, in normal circumstances, all live in one status group. Families, especially networks of families, may be the basic unit of social closure.

I am groping toward an idea here, but I think I am on to something.

Credentialing the Lump

R.H. Delderfield's classic school novel, To Serve Them All My Days, describes "the lump," the block of students who move through a school without being much affected by their "education." They have brains enough to be engaged and transformed by their studies. They just aren't curious about what is being taught. The lump isn't changed by their schooling, and don't really want to be. What they want from school is a good social time and a punched ticket to a better job than they would have otherwise.

A light feature story I read profiled some students who had just finished their first year of college. The opening was something like "They have just been through a year of hard work, intense discussions, and late night study sessions. Yeah, right." The young people had successfully completed freshman year at some big state universities. Now they had found undemanding summer jobs to give their lives structure. They were shown sitting by the pool, playing cards. When asked to describe their first year of college, they said nothing about the books they read, the classes they took, the challenging diversity of people they met, or the life-changing discussions they engaged in. The only part of their college experience they thought worth mentioning were the fraternities and sororities they joined during freshmen orientation. Once they had achieved that, "college" could unfold smoothly. The story was not at all critical of these young people, having been written by an intern who was himself a student at a similar school.

Randall Collins, in The Credential Society, says that the core function of the enormous American higher education system is giving credentials to this lump. What a college degree means for them is that they do not have to compete with the high school graduates for better-paying jobs. Knowing that someone has a B.A. tells us almost nothing about what they learned, if anything, or what kind of people they have become.

As a teacher, I would much rather have an average kid who wants to learn than a smart one with no curiosity. At Centre we do awaken many from their comfortable drift through college. I have to say that small teaching colleges have more success than big research universities in breaking through the shell of intellectual indifference. But even the best college passes some students through undigested and unaffected. But, as Collins notes, at least we kept them off the job market for a few years. And they pay the bills.

Credential Society vs. Babies

Yesterday I started writing about Randall Collins' The Credential Society. Collins offers a strong critique of the way we continuously ratchet up the educational credentials needed to even be considered for a job. Collins argues that we invest so much in educational credentials because we need a way to create arbitrary breaks in the status structure, so that some groups (the ones with the credentials) can monopolize the better jobs. The actual education, he argues, has little relation to doing the job.

Collins makes a strong proposal to abolish compulsory credential requirements ("you must have X degree to be considered for the job"). He fears, though, that what is likely to happen is that credential inflation will continue, which will inspire a further round of ratcheting up.

In one way, credential inflation is just a relative game. If a job that took a high school degree before now takes a college degree, then everyone just competes to move up a step, without changing relative position. The same number of people, drawn from the same classes, end up with the job as before -- it just takes them longer to get there.

There is one calendar, though, that it more imperious than the academic one: the biological clock for babies. Now that all positions are legally open to women, women as a group have been doing very well in competing in school to prepare for the top positions -- doing better, in fact, than men. However, highly credentialed women face a conflict that highly credentialed men do not face nearly as much: how to fit in having and raising babies with the endless credentials chase?

Credential inflation hurts women more than men for irreducible biological reasons. Babies are reason enough to consider fighting the credential society.

Collins on Church Competition

I have given up on working through Habermas. After Legitimation Crisis, which I still think is great, Habermas took a turn toward toward linguistic analysis that I can't follow.

Instead, I have been working through the works of Randall Collins. I have used Collins' theory essays for teaching for years. A few years ago he wrote a massive study of the social networks that make up schools of thought, The Sociology of Philosophies. This book won the top award (Distinguished Scholarly Publication) from the American Sociological Association. This is the book that we are going to read in theory camp in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime I have been working through two of Collins' earlier works, The Credential Society and Weberian Socialogical Theory.

So why am I writing about this on Sunday, religion day in the Gruntled Center?

Collins argues that thought is best developed when groups of thinkers compete with one another. This is true for schools of philosophy -- and for religious denominations.

The American religion market is so vibrant because of the endless competition of our religious communities.

Moving Middle East Map

This link goes to a fantastic moving map of the various empires that have affected the Middle East.

The Love Bank

Willard Harley studies how people stay in love through a long marriage. His wonderful metaphor is that when we meet someone, we start a "Love Bank" account for them. The more we associate good feelings with them, the more their account grows; the more we associate bad feelings with them, the more it shrinks. When a couple discovers how to make each other happy, they build up their respective Love Bank accounts until the become so irresistable that they have to marry.

Long happy marriages keep filling that account, and minimizing the withdrawals. Marriages start to fail when one persons makes more withdrawals than deposits, which leads to a negative spiral.

What Harley teaches the couples he counsels is how to do the basic things that meet their spouse's emotional needs, and builds up their Love Bank account. And what are those basic needs for most couples? Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised at what Harley found in his three decades of research. In most couples, he wants fulfilling sex and recreational companionship; she wants affection and intimate conversation. Harley found that in declining marriages, not only were the couple not meeting these basic desires, they often thought what their spouse wanted was silly.

Marriage is mutual, which means that you have to give what the other wants, even if that is not the same as what you want. And that way you can each fill the Love Bank.

Willard Harley was given an award for his long-term impact at the Smartmarriages conference last week.

Lifetime Chastity for 1 in 5

About a quarter of women, and a sixth of men, report that they had no more than one sex partner in their whole lives. Now, some of these folks may stray after the survey. On the other hand, remarried widows and widowers may have more than one lifetime partner, but still be chaste. Still, this seems like a good baseline number of what fraction of Americans are likely to be virgins or to have sex only with their spouses in their whole lives. The "Chaste Fifth" is a minority, to be sure, but not a negligible one. I will remember this the next time someone proposes that chastity is unrealistic or that "everyone" has unmarried sex.

Most People Fly the Flag

Most Americans fly the Star-Spangled Banner. That is true for young as well as old, Democrats as well as Republicans, the well educated and the least educated. In fact, of all the demographic categories in the recent Pew Research Center study -- sex, race, age, party, region, education -- the only category in which most people did not report flying the flag was African-Americans.

In academic world, though, flag-flying is rare. Yet recently, three of my colleagues - liberal Democrats, every one -- installed brackets and bought flags. As one of my neighbors explained, "patriotic liberals" like him were not going to leave the flag, or the country, to their opponents. In fact, I came by one morning and he was outside, shirtless, picking up the paper, cup of coffee in hand, with his flag flying from his front porch, and his motorcycle parked invitingly in his front yard. I told him the scene looked like the cover of a Toby Keith album (he guffawed).

This Independence Day morning I had my eldest put our flag up, joining in the hallowed ritual of the Fourth of July that most Americans do - together.

Kids Are Still Vital to Married People's Happiness

A new study by the Pew Research Center reports the scary news that only a minority (41%) of Americans think that children are very important to a happy marriage. Press reports have noted that people rank doing the chores higher as a factor in marital happiness. However, when you ask parents how important children are to their happiness, 85% say kids are the most important source of happiness (rank 10 on a 10 point scale) -- higher than any other factor.

I think the first question is a little misleading. The question asked which factors made for a happy marriage in the abstract -- not "your marriage," but marriage in general. On that scale, the rank of kids fell 24 points since 1990. What has changed in the meantime in the public's discourse about marriage? Same-sex marriage, both as a debate and, in a handful of states, a reality. While most people (57%) oppose homosexual marriage, the percentage thinking it should be allowed has risen in the past decade and a half as gay marriage has become a reality for the first time.

I believe that what we are seeing here is a change in how some people - maybe even a quarter of the population -- think about what marriage is. If "marriage" can include homosexuals, then it would seem unfair to assume that children are important to marital happiness in general. However, when married parents are talking about their own, non-abstract happiness, children rank at the very top.

What the Pew survey shows is not a change in how most people rank children, but rather a shift in how some people define marriage.

Deinstitutionalization

This is what David Blankenhorn is really worried about in The Future of Marriage. There is a concerted campaign to delegitimize the couple-raising-their-children model of marriage and family life. The form of the campaign is, he argues, being most effectively carried on not by a head-on assault, but by side actions. The proponents of The Full Stacey (see my posts of last week) explicitly want to dethrone The Family by placing it on a level with all kinds of families. The effect of this movement, Blankenhorn argues, will not be to broaden the meaning of family, but to deinstitutionalize marriage. When marriage is whatever people want to call a marriage, then there is no public marriage any more.

The core of Blankenhorn's advocacy of marriage for two decades is that it is the best institution for the hard but socially essential business of raising children. He knows, as I do, that any given child might be raised by all sorts of committed adults, and most of those kids will turn out ok. We should honor all those good-enough efforts to raise children as good enough. But the most likely, the most durable, the most efficient, and the most successful option for kids and for society is still to be raised by their own married parents.

I disagree with Blankenhorn about whether same-sex civil unions are too dangerous to legally permit. I think they are good enough. I also don't think there will be many takers, but that does not affect the principle of the thing. I agree with Blankenhorn, though, that any social change that really did deinstitutionalize marriage would be socially disastrous.

Thais Do the Right Thing, Keep Buddhism Out of the Constitution

Thailand is writing a new constitution. The country is 90% Buddhist. The Muslim minority is getting increasingly militant. The Buddhist leadership pressed the constitution writers to declare Buddhism the national religion. To the consternation of the monks, the constitution writers voted against it 66 - 19. The Constitution Drafting Assembly's spokesman said "we will lose more than we would gain from it." And quite right, too.

The days of nation-state religions are over. Declaring the majority faith to be the national religion now only makes the minorities more oppressed and more resistant. It is a particularly bad idea to make Muslims more resistant at this moment in history. Buddhism has thus far been able to avoid developing a violent fundamentalist wing, at least outside of Sri Lanka, which is a good thing, especially in the religious tinderbox of South Asia.

My advice to the Buddhist monks in Thailand: insist on a freedom of religion clause in the constitution. Then go evangelize.