Heidelberg Revisions

All this week I will be blogging on the Presbyterian General Assembly.

Last night the Committee on Theological Issues and Institutions voted 33 - 26 to change the Heidelberg Catechism in our Book of Confessions so that it no longer would condemn "homosexual perversion."

Question 87 now reads:

Q. 87. Can those who do not turn to God from their ungrateful,
impenitent life be saved?
A. Certainly not! Scripture says, “Surely you know that the unjust will never come into possession of the kingdom of God. Make no mistake: no fornicator or idolater, none who are guilty either of adultery or of homosexual perversion, no thieves or grabbers or drunkards or slanderers or swindlers, will possess the kingdom of God.”

This translation from German was made in 1962, and was adopted along with many other documents into the Book of Confessions in 1967. It is the only place in the church's constitution in which homosexuality is mentioned. People who want to change the translation (that is, the winning side in last night's committee vote) say it is a bad translation. People who want to leave it the way it is say it is a better representation of the intent of the catechism, and of current church understanding, since it more directly quotes scripture. Specifically, in the King James Version, I Cor. 6: 9-10 reads:

9Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,

10Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.

I don't know enough German to speak to the merits of the translation question.

I can say, though, that the only time I have ever heard this passage discussed is in debates like this one. That is, in all the debates about homosexual orientation, homosexual practice, gay ordination, and same-sex marriage in the Presbyterian Church -- a debate I have followed pretty closely -- I cannot recall anyone saying that their position on this issue was swayed by what the Heidelberg Catechism said. All discussions about Question 87 have been pre-emptive attempts to change/preserve the wording of the current translation in case someone wanted to make something of it later.

And yet, no one does make anything serious of what the Heidelberg Catechism says, or pretty much what anything in the Book of Confessions says. We have made all the confessions merely advisory, and ignore them at will. That is, we do not confess the confessions.

The whole Heidelberg translation issue is not really about changing a serious or effective part of the Presbyterian constitution. It is a symbolic feint in the ideological struggle over normalizing homosexual practice.

What the church really needs is a confession it actually confesses. Then we can have a serious discussion of how, exactly, it is worded.

Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment

On this slow day of the GA, let me introduce my latest contribution to building up the Presbyterian Church. My pamphlet, Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment, has just been published by the Re-Forming Ministry project of the church. You can download the pamphlet here, or order a hardcopy (with a nice, stained-glass cover) from the same site. There is also a Facebook group to sponsor discussion of the pamphlet here.

In a nutshell, I think that the Presbyterian Church used to have an establishment of leading pastors and elders who we honored and trusted. This was a great asset in times of conflict. The Special Commission of 1925 was such an establishment group. The church turned to them to settle the fundamentalist/modernist controversy of the 1920s. However, in "the Sixties," we deliberately unmade our establishment in the church, as in society at large, and made structural changes to prevent a new establishment from arising. And now when we need one, we don't have one.

I expect that most of the people most interested in my analysis are tied up with the General Assembly now. I had thought that the discussion of the Presbyterian Establishment idea will begin in earnest after the dust settles from the GA.

I was gratified to see, though, that there are two commissioner's resolutions that seem to promote two structural changes I also support. One would grant presbytery staff advisory vote. This has been referred to committee. Another would phase out the advisory committees. This one was declined. Still, I believe in incremental change, and these proposals seem a step in the right direction.

"Presbyterian 2.0 has been seriously unleashed"

These are the words of Bruce Reyes-Chow, the newly elected Moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA). He won on the second ballot. He almost won outright on the first ballot, in which he had 48% in a field of four. Bill Teng, the most conservative candidate, showed a respectable second with 36%. (As an aside, it is a great day for a church when the serious race is between a Reyes-Chow and a Teng. Come on, honey-colored nation!)

I do not read this election as primarily liberal vs. conservative, though Reyes-Chow is clearly left of center in the church. What he really is is a full-on Gen-X. And what I really like about Gen-X is that they like to get things done. Boomers tend to talk about "I'll fight for you" or "I'll push for change." Xers just do it. Reyes-Chow is actually building a new church in San Francisco, one of the most secular cities in America, and he is doing it with other under-40s.

He pushes my buttons on a personal level too. He blogs everything. He and his wife have three little kids, who figure prominently in the narrative. He describes himself on his personal blog as "pastor/geek/dad/follower of Christ." He describes his blog as "Just an idiot with a Mac." The disclaimer frees his church, family, pet, imaginary friend, and "Rufus, the thirteenth disciple" from responsibility (the Gruntleds are big "Dogma" fans). My kind of guy.

Several years ago, when some well-meaning but ineffectual Boomer was gassing on about our good intentions in church, I turned to Mrs. G. and asked (quietly), "Can't we just pay the Xers to take over now?"

I believe the General Assembly has answered that question in the affirmative.

GA: Form of Government is the Primary Issue

The proposed new Form of Government (FOG) is the single most important issue before the Presbyterian General Assembly. The idea behind the proposed revision is to make the government section of the Book of Order less of a regulatory manual and more of a constitution made of basic principles. More choice and responsibility would be shifted to the presbyteries and congregations, less set by the church's central bodies. The main motivation, I think, was to keep the General Assembly from becoming a continuous constitutional convention, with each Assembly producing new constitutional amendments.

I applaud the idea behind the new FOG and most of their suggested revisions. However, I am a polity wonk. Few other people are, nor should they be. So it is normal for most commissioners to the Assembly to feel unprepared to decide about a whole new form of government.

It is possible that the committee charged with FOG will feel that they are masters of the situation after a few days of testimony and discussion. It is possible that the Assembly will trust the committee's judgment. But it is not likely.

The more likely outcome is delay for study. This would not be terrible, but it increases the odds that Nothing Will Happen.

One interesting idea on the table is a proposal from Detroit Presbytery to authorize six presbyteries to try out the new FOG for two years and report back to the next GA. This proposal is the brainchild of Ed Koster, the most serious challenger for the Stated Clerk's job. I would favor this over sheer delay.

One of the main reasons for the general ambivalence about the new FOG is sheer distrust of all the central institutions of the denomination. The nFOG Task Force did not, I think, deserve this mistrust, and it isn't really directed at then. Even critics of the proposal have generally praised the task force. The mistrust comes from a fear that if presbyteries and congregations are given more freedom, more local option in applying general church principles, some of them (especially the most liberal) will use this freedom as license to evade the standards of the church's majority.

Some safeguards have been built in to prevent local option on the most contentious issues. The property trust and chastity and fidelity provisions of the current Book of Order were specifically preserved by order of the previous GA. And there is good reason for this mistrust, as the recent PJC decision in the Spahr case demonstrates.

Still, I think the revised Form of Government proposal is a good one. I hope the Assembly gives it the attention it deserves, and that it is not overshadowed by lesser issues.

10 Days of G.A.

The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) begins on Saturday in San Jose. In our house, though, GA began today. Gruntled Child #2, the wonderful Endub, is a Youth Advisory Delegate, a YAD. YADs represent each of the 175 or so presbyteries. They have pretty big job -- they have voice and vote in committees, and voice in the plenary sessions of the Assembly, where they also give an advisory vote.

I have been on record for some time that YADs are a bad idea, a '70s democratization that should be undone as soon as possible. Nonetheless, I believe that if we are going to have YADs, we should have good ones. Thus, Endub, a well-informed daughter of the church, flew off to California early this morning. The YADs get a few days of intensive training before the Assembly.

I will be blogging on the Assembly each day for the next week and a half. I know this is not everyone's cup of tea, so if you have already had your fill of internal Presbyterian politics, enjoy your summer vacation :-)

Obama's Fathers' Day Sermon

Barack Obama gave a great sermon on Fathers' Day calling fathers to responsibility for their children. He aimed at black fathers especially, for whom this problem is particularly acute. All fathers, though, were the subject of his comments. Some have read this argument, and his calls for personal responsibility along with government programs, as an attempt to appeal to white religious conservatives.

I hope Obama does appeal to religious people, conservative and otherwise, of all races. I believe that the message that fathers should be responsible for their children is not especially conservative. Parental responsibility is about as centrist a message as they come, being a subset of "mom, the flag, and apple pie."

What I would like to see is for Sen. Obama, and others promoting responsible fatherhood, to ground that message in the larger understanding that marriage is the most effective, most natural, happiest, and easiest way for fathers to be responsible for and to their children.

Not Selfish Genes

Bodies are not just instruments for carrying genes around; genes are recipes for making bodies. Bodies are the point. Genes are the tools.

This is the upshot of a fine lecture by Oxford theologian Keith Ward. I have thought something like this as a rebuttal to the "selfish genes" view, but he put it much better. This lecture is available from the Gresham College online service. (For that matter, I highly commend Gresham College, an ancient adult education foundation in London.)

Golf Is Gone

Senator McCain has apparently given up his attempt to prove that he is a country club Republican. Last week his website looked like this:


Now on his website, "Golf Gear" has given way to the more prosaic "Strategy."


(Thanks to Talking Points Memo for the screen capture of the old website.)

Hurrah! Habeas Corpus is Back!

The Supreme Court made a very welcome and long-overdue decision yesterday restoring the most fundamental legal right to all American prisoners. I have felt that the worst scandal of the lawlessness of the past few years has been the way our government has imprisoned people they don't like without charge or trial for years and years. These prisons were deliberately placed where American lawyers could not get, to prevent them from even meeting with their clients or petitioning for a charge. And U.S. citizens were tossed in along with foreigners, with no more protection than Soviet prisoners used to have.

To my mind this is a disgrace worse than our tortures, and that is saying a great deal.

A majority of the court had the legal sense and the courage to make the right call. The fact that the Supreme Court of the United States has to have courage to defend habeas corpus is a sorry commentary on how low things have sunk.

Let the healing begin.

Evangelical Centrists

Michael Luo's politics blog The Caucus carried an interesting story about a new group, Matthew 25, working to connect Obama to evangelicals. This is an interesting and, I think, very worthwhile effort. The official Democratic Party tends to be a bit paranoid about doing anything official with evangelicals, so it makes sense to have a semi-independent group making the connections.

What interested me especially in this story was a report from John Green, one of the best quantitative religion-and-politics scholars in the country, on the specific kind of evangelical that the Obama campaign could reach.

Green estimates that of the quarter of Americans who are evangelicals, perhaps 10% are on the left, and about 40% are of the Religious Right that has been tied to the Republican Party for a generation. In the middle, though, are a centrist group making up about half the total. This is a group that has often been politically uninvolved in the past. Now, though, centrist evangelicals have been becoming more active in a new range of social issues, especially AIDS, global warming, and, most importantly, global poverty. These issues are a natural path to Democratic candidates.

Green says the centrist evangelical group is growing.

The Core Business of Social Science

C. Wright Mills, in his classic introduction to sociology, The Sociological Imagination, makes this fascinating aside: The social science movement was born in the mid-19th century to “turn the troubles of lower-class people into issues for middle-class publics” (84).

Social science was invented by middle class reformers as a tool to convince other middle class people of the need for reform. The problems they wanted to reform were not primarily middle class problems, and definitely not upper class problems. The middle class wanted to reform the lower class. The instruments of social science were devised to give a name and a number to these problems, and to give reformers tools to fix them.

Each of the social sciences had developed more general theories, general tools, and some capacity to examine other classes and facts that are just facts without being problems.

The bread and butter of the social sciences, especially sociology, though, remains finding middle-class solutions to poor-peoples' problems.

Upper-Middle-Brow Television Show

Fareed Zakaria is a pretty smart guy. His new show, "Global Public Square" on CNN, brings together a pretty smart bunch of people who know about the rest of the world. In the second half, he interviews someone who makes things happen in the rest of the world. This is very encouraging. On the first show he interview Tony Blair. Today, on the second, he had Henry Kissenger. The panel this week consisted of CNN foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour, former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda, former Israeli deputy prime minister Natan Sharansky, and a Muslim woman working in Canada whose name I missed (help here would be welcome).

I have argued before that TV is a middle-brow medium at best. This show pushes the bar up a bit. I predict that it will have only a tiny American audience, even among political junkies. Nonetheless, if CNN can stick with it, I think they will be performing a public service.

Hillary's Checkers Speech

Hillary Clinton gave the gracious, positive, upbuilding endorsement speech today that was needed to help heal the Democratic Party.

This speech, like Nixon's "Checkers" speech, will also save her place as a valued leader in the future of the party and the government.

Whatever Obama and Clinton talked about at Senator Feinstein's house, it worked.

Kumbaya.

Let's build.

McCain, Clinton, Obama: Three Forms of Authority

Laurie Fendrich, a Hofstra art professor, has blogged for the Chronicle of Higher Education about the three main presidential candidates of the moment representing Max Weber's three forms of legitimate authority. As a sociologist, I am obliged to work Max Weber into all conversations, and am glad for this opening.

Weber argued that for most of human history, the main form of legitimate authority in society has been tradition -- that is, the fact that "our ancestors did it" and "we have always done it this way" was the best reason to act one way rather than another. He noted, though, that the main achievement of the political economy of modern societies was to develop a quite different theory of legitimate authority, the rational/legal. Society was supposed to act upon laws that applied to all, which were created by a rational process of elections and executed by a rationally administered bureaucracy. The other kind of authority is the wild card of the charismatic leader. Weber thought a charismatic leader, or prophet, was the main way traditional societies changed; Weber also thought that the periodic appearance of a charismatic leader could save modern rational societies from stultifying into an iron cage of bureaucracy.

Fendrich, and her colleague sociologist Mark Landis, saw the three candidates as representing the three types of authority:
McCain represent tradition;
Clinton represents rational bureaucracy;
Obama represents charisma.

The impending McCain/Obama race will represent a straight competition between tradition and charisma.

I think there is something to this idea. Obama is clearly charismatic, and McCain is clearly the most past-oriented of the three. And Clinton's strength has, more or less, been in her mastery of the machinery of government execution.

Still, Weber himself argued that the United States was born a rational/legal country, without an established traditional authority. All serious American politicians are vying to lead a rational, bureaucratic legal machinery. This is the foundation of the great stability of American government.

That said, I can see the value in seeing the upcoming election as a contest between two rational, legal, bureaucracy-respecting Senators. One wants to lead by continuing the (recent) traditions of his party; the other by transcending the recent divisions of the parties by using his personal charisma to inspire others to act in untraditional ways.

French Annul Fake Virgin's Marriage, Then Regret It.

A French judge annulled a marriage because the bride lied about being a virgin. The annulment happened two months ago. When the story recently came out in a legal journal, the French Justice Minister shrugged it off. No big deal. This is to be expected if marriage is just a private contract. One party lies in a contract, the court can abrogate the agreement.

And then the details came out. The bride and groom are Muslims. The wedding reception was still going on in the immigrant neighborhood when the groom came back downstairs to announce that the bride had not bloodied the sheets.

The hue and cry has been enormous. The Justice Minister, herself the daughter of North African immigrants, was forced to reverse her initial reaction and appeal the annulment.

The French, like many Western Europeans, want marriage to be a private choice if the couple uses secular and middle class standards of who can be involved, of what sexes, for how long, perhaps how many to include. On the other hand, they want marriage to be publicly regulated if the couple uses religious or working class standards of what makes a proper marriage.

Marriage became a public institution when the church and the state regulated and celebrated the couple's vow to one another, their children, their community, and, for the vast majority of people on earth, to God. Marriage became a public institution to protect the vulnerable -- usually the woman, often the poor, always the children. It is a great civilizational step forward that marriage is a public institution. Society rediscovers this when the state is asked to back a private marriage contract that undermines that protection.

President Obama Will Make Black Republicans Possible

In 1964, E. Digby Baltzell saw that

Kennedy’s victory in 1960 will, in the long run, serve to bring many affluent and capable Catholic leaders in this country into the conservative ranks of the Republican establishment. (The Protestant Establishment, p. 315)

Baltzell saw that once the caste exclusions of Catholics were broken, they would be free to sort into their natural class affiliations. Richer people, other things equal, tend to become Republicans. Events have proven Baltzell right, and today Catholics tend to sort along class lines when they vote. There is no "Catholic vote."

Today there is a "black vote." African Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. In fact, African Americans are more reliable Democratic voters than registered Democrats are. The vast majority of black elected officials are Democrats. Rich African Americans - including billionaire Oprah Winfrey - are strong Democrats.

I believe that the 2008 presidential election will resemble the 1960 election in many ways. Many people have drawn the parallel between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy, not least the members of the Kennedy family. I think the election will be a squeaker either way, and I am not predicting an Obama victory.

I think the parallel can be drawn in the way Baltzell suggests:
An Obama victory in 2008 would, in the long run, serve to bring many affluent and capable black leaders in this country into the conservative ranks of the Republican establishment.

Baltzell's Vision of the Ethnically Mixed Establishment

E. Digby Baltzell, in The Protestant Establishment (1964), gives this rare personal clue to the origin of his vision of an aristocratic establishment:

In fact, I visualized the possibility of an ethnically mixed establishment, which underlies the theory of American leadership developed in this book, during my own experiences in the ward rooms and officers clubs of the South Pacific. At any rate, the American ideal of equality of opportunity in a hierarchically organized social structure had never been so nearly realized as in the selection of reserve officers who led our armed forces during the Second World War. (301)

He goes on to say that he thinks John F. Kennedy forged an ethnically mixed "best and the brightest" administration out of his experiences in the war, as well as his life in Boston. He was an outsider as an Irish Catholic, but he was also an aristocratic insider as a rich man's son, a famous mayor's grandson, a Choate and Harvard man. The New Frontier does not seem so daringly mixed to us today -- they look like privileged white men. But at the time the pulling together on terms of equality by Northern WASPs, Southern Protestants, Catholics, and Jews from all corners of Europe was a great achievement.

It falls to today's rising generation to make the honey-colored establishment drawn from all races and corners of the earth a reality.

What Presbyterian Bishops Do

Presbyterians do not, of course, have bishops. We are very decidedly non-episcopal. The presbytery is an ingenious republican arrangement to accomplish most of the functions of a bishop, without the authoritarian dangers.

However, there are a few things that bishops do, when they are functioning well, that presbyteries cannot accomplish. A good bishop knows the people in the diocese and has a personal relationship with at least the leaders of the congregations. The presbytery is not well-designed for the person-to-person actions of bishops.

A presbytery, as a republican organization, always needs to be finding the right person for the next job. This is especially important in getting the right mix of pastors and elders to staff the crucial committees and oversee the vital ministries of the presbytery. What a presbytery needs is someone in a position to have a wide range of contacts over the several congregations of the body.

The Presbyterian bishop needs to be chief talent-spotter.

Since the presbytery needs someone to accomplish this function, we keep growing some kind of talent spotting system. This is often jury-rigged and haphazard, depending on the personal contacts of the chair of the nominating committee as much as anything else.

I believe presbyteries should be smaller and more organically connected than they now are. This would go a long way to bringing the people doing the calling in touch with the people who should be called.

At the same time, I think a modest Executive Presbyter role is a useful one to the presbytery. Small presbyteries may not be able to afford full time executives. In that case, I think right-sized presbyteries trump the need for a dedicated executive. Even a small presbytery, though, should be able to afford part of someone's time -- perhaps the pastor of a smaller church, or a mostly retired person, or someone with a well-employed spouse -- to be the connector.

Perhaps what we need is not a Presbytery Executive, but a Presbytery Maven. Or Presbytery Magpie.

Stomp, Girl! Stomp!

Another delightful anecdote from my sister about my niece, now six:

She was given a box of 4,500 wildflower seeds by a friend, which we planted this weekend. After putting them on the ground, the instructions said to walk on the seeds to push them into the earth, over an area of about 100 square feet.

An hour later, she's still tip-toeing through the tulips (so to speak) because a) she has tiny feet and b) she believes she, I don't know, needs to sneak up on the seeds by walking very slowly and silently.

Stomp, Girl! Stomp!

The Ministry Can Adapt to Returning Moms Better Than Other Professions Can

All working mothers juggle work and family. For professionals the problem is usually worse. Professionals normally work longer hours than wage-workers or most white-collar workers. Professions that directly provide service to clients can be particularly demanding, both in expecting long hours and in being available to clients at odd hours. Many moms trained for professions are not practicing at all at any given moment. Some drop out and never come back. One study found that only 7% of mothers aged 25-49 with children under the age of 18 work more than 49 hours per week outside of the home. 50+ hours per week is normal for professionals.

Moms in ministry face the same kinds of challenges that other professional-career mothers do. In some respects, ministry is worse, because most women pastors work alone or with very few colleagues, so it is difficult to share the load when family duties make unexpected demands. On the other hand, pastors have more control of their hours than most professionals do, so in principle their jobs could be more flexible about motherhood.

More than any other profession, the ministry has gotten used to the idea of second-career pastors. Seminaries and hiring committees are used to seeing middle-aged adults, often married and with kids, starting their careers, even just starting their professional schooling. This poses some problems for churches, and especially for seminaries. Still, they have learned to cope, and to see some advantages of fully mature grown-ups entering the profession.

I see a further opportunity in the fact that the ministry is used to gray-headed beginners: the pastorate should be an easier career for mothers with older children to return to after a child-rearing break.

If we are ever to really adapt the professions to motherhood, we have to institutionalize easier off-ramps and on-ramps. The ministry has already developed the late on-ramps for late-bloomers. Now we can explicitly incorporate these same late-start career structures to minister moms, so that they, and their families, can have a saner life.

Are Aesthetes the Same as Other Members of the Knowledge Class?

Is taste a kind of knowledge like other kinds of knowledge? More exactly, are people who make their living from their taste members of the knowledge class, as people who make their living from more cognitive kinds of knowledge are members of the knowledge class?

George W. Bush, Flower of the Upper Class - Sort of

I have been working through E. Digby Baltzell's substantial body of work on the sociology of America's upper class. His great books were published 30 to 50 years ago, using material from earlier eras. Some have said that the old WASP upper class was done in by the Sixties. In many ways this is true -- the monied elite was already very ethnically diverse when Baltzell was writing, and since then the happy process of intermarriage and assimilation of new money into old money has moved the upper class far from the WASP bastion it was in, say, 1940. And a good thing, too.

As I read about the old WASP upper class, I have been thinking about who their contemporary remainders are. Which brings us naturally to George W. Bush.

George Bush the younger has the WASPiest pedigree of any prominent political figure today. Andover and Yale. Skull and Bones. His dad was Andover and Yale, and Skull and Bones. His grandfather was St. George's and Yale, and Skull and Bones. Did I mention that that sequence is also President, President, Senator? But there is plenty more. His grandfather was a founding partner of Brown Brothers Harriman. The Walker Cup golf trophy is named for his great-grandfather, from whom George gets his "W." His mom, daughter of the McCalls and Redbook publisher, of President Franklin Pierce's family, product of a northern country day school and a southern boarding school, dropped out of Smith to marry her naval aviator. And his brothers. And his kids. On and on.

And yet ...

Baltzell makes the point that the old WASP upper class was primarily a business aristocracy. The Bushes do keep coming back to business -- banking, then oil. George W. has a Harvard MBA, though that degree was regarded as a comedown by the old business elite. His administration has certainly been business friendly, and largely hands-off about everything else (we may debate the business significance of the Iraq war).

Still, in important ways George W. Bush resisted the Old Money prep school curriculum. George H. W. Bush so exemplified the WASP ideal - sports at Andover, volunteer naval pilot in the war, Bonesman at Yale, business entrepreneur, Congress, CIA, Republican Party, Episcopal Church, loyal Vice-President, President - that a former staffer, Richard Brookhiser, wrote The Way of the WASP: How it Made America, and How it Can Save It, So to Speak about the 41st president.

George W. Bush, on the other hand, did the whole Old Money curriculum, but grudgingly. Where the father was a baseball star at Andover, the son was "stickball commissioner." Where his father volunteered for military service and was shot down, the son used his pull to avoid overseas service, and skipped half of his U.S. obligations. The father was Yale all the way. The son was a reluctant student in college -- the football players used him as the standard of whether a course was easy -- and had to be talked into Skull and Bones. He was an indifferent businessman, a reluctant politician, a "Bushican" more than a Republican, a Methodist.

On the other hand, George W. Bush is a real Texan in a way that his father never was. He clearly likes working on the ranch more than affairs of state. His greatest success outside of politics was as cheerleader and frontman for the Texas Rangers baseball team. I think history will judge him a greater success as Governor of Texas than as President of the United States.

I think I understand President Bush's famous smirk. It means "you can make me go through the motions of this role, but you can't change me inside." I expect he had that look the first day he had to leave Texas for boarding school, and he will have it until he can leave the White House and go back, at long last, to Texas.

Is the Upper Class the One Class-for-Itself?

Marx spent his life trying to get the working class to see itself as a real social group with a common destiny. In his terms, they were a class-in-itself, an objective social unit. They were hampered from acting together to advance their common interest, though, because they were divided by a dozen other identities. The workers of the world were not united because they didn't have a class consciousness. The working class was a class-in-itself, but not a class-for-itself.

Peter Laslett was a great British demographer who wrote The World We Have Lost, the definitive quantitative study of late medieval society. There he argued that in late medieval and early modern society, the aristocracy -- that infinitesimal slice of the top of the social structure -- was the only group in society with a class consciousness. Everyone else lived in such a tiny social world that their consciousness only extended to the limits of people they knew personally. He went so far as to call the world we have lost a "one-class" society, since no one else but the aristocrats were a class-for-themselves.

I mention all this because E. Digby Baltzell, whose work I wrote about yesterday, makes an interestingly parallel argument. In Philadelphia Gentleman, he notes that the community studies that were so prominent in mid-20th century sociology -- especially Middletown, the Yankee City studies, and the Elmtown studies -- erred in seeing each class as a class-for-itself. Such studies found that people knew which side of the tracks you were from, and never let you really cross them. Ambitious young people from the lower classes often left town to advance.

The error, Baltzell says, is that these studies took small cities as representative of national class cultures as a whole. Muncie, IN (Middletown), Newburyport, MA (Yankee City), and New Haven, CT (Elmtown) did have a ruling class whose members knew one another and were tied to one another in a dozen ways. The same was true, more of less, of the several classes below the top in these small cities. In a big city like Philadelphia, though, the upper class likewise knew one another and were connected in a dozen ways. But the several fractions of the middle class, and the many fractions of the working class, and the endless fragments of the poor were not unified, not tied together by many interwoven social ties. This was why ambitious rising men and women of the small cities moved to the big city - no one knew which side of the tracks they came from, or really cared.

In Philadelphia, only the upper class could be a class-for-itself.

Knowledge Class Social Register

This month I am working my way through the writings of one of my favorite sociologists, E. Digby Baltzell. In all of his work, Baltzell argued that a nation is best led when its elite of individuals is molded into a socially responsible "establishment" by a well-functioning upper class of families.

In his first book, Philadelphia Gentleman: The Making of a National Upper Class, Baltzell explores the overlap between the elite and the upper class. To find the elite of the day he turned to Who's Who. To find the upper class, he turned to The Social Register. A crucial question for him is how much overlap there is between the two - that is, what proportion of the elite who run things now come from the intermarried descendants of elites who ran things before. The answer in 1940, the critical year of his book is about 25%.

My concern is with the knowledge class, the class of people who make their living from control of the knowledge necessary to run the social system. Many knowledge class people are in the elite, and thus in Who's Who. This got me to wondering, though: could there be a Social Register for the knowledge class?

There are two obstacles to making a knowledge class social register. One is that there just isn't much of a market for it. The descendants of various monied families make social institutions that bring them together, help them intermarry, and form a social class with a real organic unity. Thus the value of a social register, sometimes called "the stud book" for the upper class. In the knowledge class, though, there is not the same call to keep "old books" families together in the way that there is for "old money" families.

The second is that the knowledge class does not expect that it can produce a distinctive class and way of life by "breeding" (in the sense of nurture), the way the settled upper class does. Most knowledge class individuals rise through a meritocracy that selects an elite. They do not expect that their families will remain in the knowledge elite over generations.

I think this last point is an empirical question well worth pursuing. And if, in fact, significant portions of the knowledge class do keep turning up in the elite generation after generation, then perhaps there could be a market for a Knowledge Class Social Register.

"Well" in the Black Church

I was reading Jonathan Rieder's very interesting account of Martin Luther King's different kinds of rhetoric, The Word of the Lord is Upon Me. One nice feature of the book is that when he quotes portions of King's recorded sermons, Rieder includes the responses and interjections from the congregation. Rieder comments on several of these, including one I had not paid attention to before: "Well." Rieder notes that this word can carry many meanings, depending on its inflection, from "well said" to "it it is well with my soul" to "well, what do you mean?"

This morning I was listening to a recording of Tony Campolo's sermon for Bill Clinton's second inauguration. Much of his sermon turned on the rich expressive style of his black church which Campolo, who is white, was explaining to a predominantly white audience. He, too, talked about the importance of "Well" as a key congregational response to his preaching. He added a nuance that Rieder had not explored: that it is the women who say "well."

I don't know if Campolo was just making a rhetorical flourish, of if he was reporting a general sociological fact. Informed comment would be most welcome.

Marry Our Daughter - SALE!

A friend showed me a wonderful, terrible prank site, MarryOurDaughter.com. On it teenage girls are offered for sale by their parents for brideprices ranging from a few thousand dollars to just under $100,000. The higher priced ones seem to be blondes who want to be good Christian wives and mothers. The cheap ones "wrestle with unchristian urges."

The thing is probably meant as a dig at Christians as well as "inconsistent marriage laws" (this according to Snopes.com).

Nonetheless, as an artifact of relative values, or what are thought to be relative values, it is pretty intriguing.

Obama's Substantive Record

Barak Obama achieves the Gen X way, not the Boomer way. He works directly with the people affected on problems that can be solved. He is more interested in results than showy fights. His is the generation of Just Do It and Git 'R Done -- not "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."

My fellow blogger hilzoy of Obsidian Wings summarized Obama's legislative approach this way:

His bills tend to have the following features: they are good and thoughtful bills that try to solve real problems; they are in general not terribly flashy; and they tend to focus on achieving solutions acceptable to all concerned, not by compromising on principle, but by genuinely trying to craft a solution that everyone can get behind.

Moreover, hilzoy continues, "His legislation is often proposed with Republican co-sponsorship." This is a good thing. This is a way to get legislation actually passed. His work with Sen. Dick Lugar, one of the real statesmen of the Republican Party, on securing loose nuclear weapons is an excellent example of Obama's approach. His work on getting an ethics bill that could actually pass is another. And preparing for avian flu. And regulating genetic testing. And making a federal database of political contributions. Etc, etc.

A legislator's record includes what they did when not in office. When Obama finished his fancy education at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard Law, he did not just go corporate and cash in. He went to the slums to work with poor people to organize their communities, so that they could make their own lives better. That is about as Gen X (and centrist) a form of giving back as you could name. (And let me be quick to say that Sen. Clinton's service to poor women, and Sen. McCain's military service, when they were done school are equally honorable - a stark contrast with the current president's twenties. And thirties.)

Senator Obama's record as a legislator is a solid roster of working with the other side to achieve worthwhile things. You might oppose what Obama wants to do as president, but it would be unfair and ill-informed to say that he hasn't really done anything.

Obama vs. McCain as Centrists

A friend asked me to respond to David Brooks' recent column, "Talking Versus Doing," in which he charges that Obama is not really a centrist or a serious change agent because he voted for the pork-laden farm bill -- a bill McCain opposed.

I take this criticism seriously. I usually agree with this friend, and with Brooks. Brooks is a decent centrist -- he is only a "conservative" compared to the rest of the New York Times roster.

Brooks actually cited two cases of the corruption of the Washington system. The farm bill was one, and the energy bill was the other. I agree that both are bad bills, more of a sweetheart deal for the biggest agribusiness and oil companies. That they both passed Congress overwhelmingly is a sign of a deep corruption in our politics.

It is also a sign of the necessity of compromise in making legislation. McCain made his reputation as a maverick -- which he is quickly shedding. Obama made his reputation as a coalition builder, which entails voting for lots of bad legislation in order to get something done. These are two different ways of being a centrist.

What has impressed me from the outset about this primary season is that the electorate of each party has chosen, out of a large initial field, the candidate with the greatest appeal to independents. McCain won best in open primaries in which independents and Democrats could vote. The Republican way of doing primaries meant that he wrapped up the nomination early. If Republicans had had proportional primaries, McCain would still be fighting it out with Romney and Huckabee. Obama has won best in caucuses, where people have to take a public stand and offer some kind of reason for their choice. The reason they are most likely to give is that Obama is a uniter, capable of getting things done.

Any leader has to decide that some things cannot be compromised. McCain has his list - which used to include campaign reform, and still includes torture. Obama has his list, which includes the war in Iraq and his Obama-Lugar bill to control loose nuclear weapons. Leaders also have to decide which bad bills to support anyway, because the deal that made them included some worthwhile elements. Each voter will have to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the leader's no-compromise list matches the voter's list closely enough.

I believe that Obama and McCain are about equally committed to getting things done. I also see each as being within half a standard deviation of the center. I liked McCain the best out of the Republican field as a potential president, and I am enthusiastic about Obama out of the Democratic field. Neither would be a terrible president.

Whether a Democratic or a Republican administration would be better for the country is another question.

We Lost, Yet Won

Obama got crushed in the Democratic primary in Kentucky yesterday. He lost to Hillary Clinton worse than I thought he would.

Worse still was the reason he lost. Obama held his core -- nearly all the academics I know voted for him, and the college Democrats were overwhelmingly for him. Clinton kept her core of old women and some workers. The big margin seemed to come from people who admitted to pollsters, in face-to-face conversations, that race was a factor in their voting. Chris Matthews reported that a fifth of those voting yesterday -- taking both primaries together -- said this. And he reasonably noted that if a fifth of voters admitted this in public, another X percent vote racially in the privacy of the voting booth.

Still, John Kennedy faced sizable percentages in 1960 who openly said religion was a factor in their voting - yet he still won.

In the larger race for the nomination, though, Obama all but won. Clinton will carry on through the last primary. I believe that the party elders have already arranged for the superdelegates to settle the issue immediately after that. Obama was very gracious in his Iowa speech last night to both Sen. Clinton and Sen. McCain. This bodes well for the fall.

I think the past election that will most resemble this one is 1960. That was a squeaker, which could have gone either way. Senator McCain is no Nixon, but his position as a last-chancer with enemies in his own party is somewhat similar. The parallels between Obama and Kennedy are so striking that I hear about them all the time from people old enough to remember the 1960 election - my birth year.

Last night after Obama spoke they played Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising," as they have as the first song in several rallies recently. A little later, while the talking heads will still chewing over the night's events with the Obama rally in the background, we could hear Brooks and Dunn's "Only in America." Springsteen broke his political silence last time to campaign actively for John Kerry. Brooks and Dunn have been the most prominent musicians performing at recent Republican conventions. I expect the musicians will not change parties this time. But their music can be a symbol of unity. Only in America.

Primary Day in Kentucky

This may be the only time the Kentucky primary matters at the presidential level.

Mrs. G. and I were at the polls early this morning. We voted on a paper ballot for the first time. This should provide us with a little more security than all-electronic voting gives.

The junior G.s, two of whom are now voters, will vote after their beauty sleep.

Gobama!

Why I am Not Meeting President Clinton Today

Bill Clinton is coming to Danville today. The Kentucky primary is tomorrow. Hillary Clinton will win the primary, but Obama will win the nomination in a few weeks.

Today I am mad at Bill Clinton. I have been mad since the South Carolina primary when he started playing the race card, which he has done several times since. The Democratic Party, after great struggle and at great cost, shed our racist past. We should never play to race card again.

Bill Clinton used to be the best campaigner in the party. I believe that if he were campaigning on his own behalf, he would be more sensitive and deft to what should and should not be done. Because he is defending his wife, though, he feels authorized, even duty-bound, to be angry -- or at least snarky -- on her behalf. Any good spouse would be tempted to do the same.

I look forward to the end of the primary season, when the party will unite behind our nominee. I am pretty sure that will be Obama. At that point we will all shake hands, sing Kumbaya, and get on with the real campaign.

But not today.

Jonah's Bad Weekend

The best image of Commencement Sunday at Centre College came from the baccalaureate sermon by chaplain Rick Axtell.

Jonah was swallowed by a giant fish, spent days in its intestines, was vomited up on a beach, walked in the baking desert to a city he detested for a mission that, as he saw it, failed. And then we went and pouted. Jonah had the worst weekend in recorded literature.

Lutheran Soda Conspiracy

In response to my previous post about the soda vs. pop/Coke map for soft drink terminology, faithful reader rbush offered this analysis of the mysterious soda pockets:

The St. Louis question mystifies me, so I've been mulling it over. Personally, I was raised in the pop half of Kentucky, but I now attend graduate school in St. Louis and am soon to be married to a St. Louisan.

I don't agree with ibn centre's hypothesis that St. Louis "soda" usage is dictated by the transient student/young professional population. Most of us are confined to St. Louis proper, and the map shows a pretty large circle of "soda" emanating out from St. Louis. Furthermore, for every "soda" person who moves here, I'm sure there's a "pop" or "coke" user such as myself.

So the question I've been pondering is...what does St. Louis have in common with Milwaukee (another soda bubble) that it doesn't have in common with other German areas such as Cincinnati? My answer (and yes, this is a stretch), is the Lutheran Church.

Two of the US's largest Lutheran populations reside in these two areas. In fact, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (2nd largest Lutheran denom in the US) and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (3rd largest Lutheran denom in the US) are based squarely in these two soda circles. The other Midwestern German populations are either more heavily Catholic (Cincy) or far more transient and diverse (Chi-town).

Anyway, that's my incredibly far-fetched theory.... the Lutheran Soda Conspiracy.

I have been thinking about this ingenious hypothesis. If does run into some trouble with the fact that the whole upper Midwest is Lutheran, but not soda-speakers. This map from the Glenmary Research Center shows the Lutheran distribution. So I offer this possible refinement: the soda bubbles emanate from German Lutherans.

I hope you will treat this with all the seriousness that it deserves.

End the Marriage Penalty for the Poorest

David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, and Sam Brownback, Senator from Kansas, have a fine editorial this week in the Wall Street Journal. They note that the government has reduced the marriage penalty - the higher taxes paid by married people for filing together - for the higher classes. Now, they argue, it is time to end the marriage penalty for those on welfare.

Marriage, even if it joins very modest incomes, costs people on welfare up to a fifth of their income and benefits. This leads some on welfare to conclude that they would be better off not marrying. Yet marriage is the most likely route to lead poor women, men, and especially children out of poverty. Any policy that discourages parents from marrying is bad; discouraging marriage among the people it would help the most is tragic.

Religious Liberty vs. Religious Toleration

I have been reading John Pottenger's Reaping the Whirlwind: Liberal Democracy and the Religious Axis this week. Pottenger believes that modernity has produced a new "axis" which is reorienting the whole world. He calls this "the religious axis," which seems to me an odd name for a cultural foundation that restricts religion so much. I would call it "the modern axis." Whatever you call it, though, the idea is interesting.

Pottenger says these three factors form an interlocking foundation of modern cultures:

1) The world should be understood through rational and empirical examination;
2) Individuals should develop personal ethics, as through conscience;
3) Society should not simply grant religious toleration to non-favored religions, but religious liberty to all.

In this book the third point is the one he works the most with. He is argues that liberal democracy must fight against its tendency to institutionalize the majority faith. It would be easy to elevate the faith of the majority, and only tolerate the other faiths. It is particularly tempting to enshrine the founding faith of a society as the permanent basis of its culture, no matter what changes later in the composition of the population or the culture of the world.

What liberal democracies must do, he argues, is establish religious liberty for all, not just religious toleration. This is an interesting idea, and certainly has many consequences for politics. He considers Christian Reconstructionism, old-time Mormonism, and Uzbekistan's embrace of Islamic nationalism as all bad moves away from religious liberty toward mere toleration.

I think Pottenger makes some important mistakes. In particular, he does not credit the difference between changing the culture by religiously converting individuals, and changing the state by religiously changing the laws. He is right in criticizing the Christian Reconstructionism of Rousas Rushdoony as trying to do the latter. He is wrong in treating garden-variety evangelicals, who do aim at individual conversion within a secular state, as doing the same thing as the Reconstructionists.

Nonetheless, I think Pottenger does a service to the religion and politics discourse by making a clear distinction between religious liberty and religious toleration.

Is Happiness the Measure of Parenthood?

Daniel Gilbert, the Harvard "Professor Happiness" presented research at a conference in Sydney on Happiness and Its Causes. He reported that marriage makes people happier, which I have often noted here. He also reported some detailed research on the relationship between having kids and happiness.

Parents are happiest when they are anticipating having kids, and after the kids are grown. Parents are least happy, in general, when they have adolescents at home.

One of the useful warnings I can give students in my family class is that they need to have a strong marriage before they have children so that they can weather the "parental crisis" that coping with a baby brings. It does not surprise me that self-reported happiness for married couples goes down with the birth of children, and troughs in the adolescent years.

I think Gilbert errs, though, in how to weigh the whole cycle of parental happiness. He thinks expectant parents overestimate how happy children will make them. Reality sets in when actual demanding children take up your time. Then empty nesters overvalue how much happiness they got from parenting in order to retroactively justify the investment.

I think happiness is the wrong metric here. When we ask parents what is the most worthwhile or meaningful thing they have done in their lives, raising children consistently rates at the top. I think people rate happiness on a more self-oriented scale. Not necessarily selfish; but measured against how it makes me feel now. Meaningfulness, on the other hand, is measured against a broader standard. We are often willing to sacrifice short-term feelings of happiness for long-term value, good, meaning.

The same surveys that ask "Do you feel Very Happy, Somewhat Happy, or Not Too Happy" should add another question. They should ask something like "Do you think your life is Very Meaningful, Somewhat Meaningful, or Not Too Meaningful."

On that scale, I think parents would give higher ratings.

Talkative Toddlers Aren't Terrible

A student mentioned an experiment by Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn in which young children were taught Baby Sign, a simplified version of sign language for children who have not learned to speak yet. The children learned to speak much faster than the control group. In passing, the student mentioned that the Baby Sign kids did not have "terrible twos" because they did not have the same frustration in communicating that other toddlers did.

Which gave me an insight about why the Gruntled kids did not go through terrible twos. The Gruntleds, you may not be surprised to learn, are a very talkative family. "Hypervocative" is the term we use at home. The children were talked to constantly and with a fairly grownup vocabulary from birth. The kids, given their mixture of nature and nurture, were perhaps over-determined to be big talkers and amusing conversationalists while still in diapers. Thus, if terrible twos are caused by an inability to communicate, talkative toddlers should skip it.

It is certainly worth a try.

A Soda Guy Living on the Pop/Coke Line

One of the most persistent differences in regional terminology is what we call soft drinks. I am a native of eastern Pennsylvania, which is deep in "soda" country. Central Kentucky, though, is where the midwestern "pop" meets the southern "Coke" (as a generic name).

The map is amazing.

I am particularly curious about the St. Louis Soda Circle. Any ideas?

On the Spahr Decision

I wrote a post on the Spahr decision in the Presbyterian Church courts a few days ago. I was saving it for posting today, since I usually write about religion on Sundays.

Now I know that saved posts get published as if they came out when they were drafted, not when I hit "Publish Post."

The entry,"Orwellian Decision in the Spahr Case Further Erodes Trust in the Church, is here.

Winkled Center

I am delighted to report that from now on I will be the Van Winkle Professor of Sociology. I promised the dean I would not become deadwood.

My mother pronounced it a Ripping development.

My beloved little sister, by contrast wrote: *snort* you said "winkle."

The dictionary says a winkle is any one of various marine spiral gastropods, especially, in the United States, either of two species of Fulgar (F. canaliculata and F. carica).

"To winkle out" is to get the truth out of someone without waterboarding (more or less).

Mr.Winkle.com claims he is the Cutest Dog in the Universe!

The most famous Van Winkle is a fictional character.

The most famous real Van Winkle is, alas, Vanilla Ice.

We have only begun to explore the comic possibilities of this title.
Suggestions welcome.

Cohabitation as Broken Window

James Q. Wilson is most famous for his "broken windows" theory of crime. He argues that communities should aggressively combat small quality-of-life crimes, such as broken windows and graffiti, to prevent larger ones. The theory is that if a neighborhood is visibly neglected, the criminals move in. The nest is unprotected, and the larger predators figure they can get away with anything. When a community lets the small disorders of broken windows multiply without resistance, the big disorders -- robbery, rape, murder - grow, too.

In my family life class we ended with another fine James Q. Wilson book, The Marriage Problem. He argues that the breakdown of marriage is at the root of the rest of our social disorders. One of the most widespread ways of undermining marriage is cohabitation. Many people cohabit before marriage, and some cohabit instead of marriage. Most college graduates -- always the most strategic group in adult social trends -- cohabit before marriage. They think it is a rational way to test the relationship before the big commitment.

Research over the past decade, though, has shown that cohabitation is not a good test drive for marriage. On the contrary, couples who cohabit before marriage have a higher divorce rate than couples who do not live together first. College graduates, being a smart and better informed group, have begun to change their habits as this research gets diffused more widely.

Putting these two ideas together yields an interesting insight: cohabitation is like broken windows in the neighborhood of relationships. A community that tolerates cohabitation indicates that its social neighborhood is unprotected. Marriage becomes just another personal choice, not the bedrock of social order. When a community lets the small disorders of cohabitation multiply without resistance, the big disorders -- divorce, illegitimacy, domestic violence - grow, too.

Losing Status Makes Our Brains Anxious

Caroline Zink and her team at the National Institutes of Mental Health have produced a nifty study of which brain regions get active when our place in a status hierarchy is threatened.

The subjects were given a simple test (note when a circle changes color in a particular way). They then did the task against competitors. When the subjects' position against the competitors did not change, they focused on doing the task better to move up. When the subjects' position did change, sometimes falling below the competitors' positions, the subjects' emotional centers fired up, too. Fear of losing position seemed to generate anxiety, even in as trivial a hierarchy as this one.

What is more, the competitors were actually imaginary, and their rank relative to the subject was manipulated by the researchers.

Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals (Religious Reason)

Arthur C. Brooks has been guest blogging on the Freakonomics blog about his new book, Gross National Happiness. The main point of the series is that conservatives are happier than liberals. Thus far, he has broken this down by religion. Religious people are more likely to be conservative, and religious people are much more likely to be happy. Half of religious conservatives are very happy, vs. less than a quarter of secular liberals. The other two cells of the table fall in between.

He has hinted that marriage is another big factor in conservatives' greater happiness. More on that hereafter.

Orwellian Decision in the Spahr Case Further Erodes Trust in the Church

Rev. Jane Spahr, self-styled lesbian evangelist, has been trying to get convicted by the church for marry same-sex couples for a decade. She even went to Canada to perform a gay wedding. But her cases kept getting thrown out on technicalities. It's tough to be a martyr and prophet when the judges keep dodging judgment.

It seemed, though, that she finally got her test case. She married a couple of women in California, and then for good measure married another couple of women. Her presbytery began a disciplinary case. The presbytery permanent judicial commission said she could do whatever her conscience called her to do. The case was appealed to the synod permanent judicial commission. The synod said that the presbytery PJC was wrong, Spahr had clearly violated church law and her vows to uphold church law. The synod PJC mildly rebuked her.

The inevitable appeal sent the case to the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission, the high court of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). In the meantime, Spahr retired -- this was to be her last hurrah.

The GAPJC issued its decision this week. It is a marvel of doublespeak. The PJC ruled that since the church's constitution defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman, no matter how many weddings Spahr performed for same-sex couples, and no matter how many times she called them marriages, they could not, by definition, actually be marriages under church law. Therefore, Spahr committed no violation.

Suppose you brought your baby to your pastor to be baptized. Before the church and all the world, your pastor splashed your infant with water from the font and pronounced "I baptize thee in the name of Moloch, Baal, and Asherah." The dumbfounded church brings disciplinary charges against the minister. Then, in the end, the GAPJC rules that your pastor committed no error in baptizing your baby, because baptism as defined in church law is done in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Case tidily closed? No.

It is this kind of doublespeak and disingenuous handling of the church's standards that has gutted church law and undermined trust and confidence in the church's leaders among ordinary Presbyterians. I would guess that this disheartening decision will push ten more alienated congregations to leave the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

YAWNS

There is a nifty new pop-soc term: Young And Wealthy, but Normal. YAWNS are Gen X and older Millennial men and women who work hard, are doing very well, and want to give back now. So they live simply, are charitable and green, and are basically decent people.

The term comes from the London Sunday Telegraph -- historically the conservative paper there -- noticing the trend among Britons. There is plenty of evidence of the phenomenon throughout the world's rich, including many in this country.

The Associated Press article, by Evelyn Nieves, cites Stanford sociologist David Grusky's view that an anti-materialist movement often follows a materialist one. One can see the Reagan era "I got mines" provoking a reaction today of "I give back."

I see the YAWN phenomenon as the private sector counterpart of the interesting Millenial finding I reported a few weeks ago that the most desirable employers for the high school class of 2006 were Google, Disney, the State Department, the FBI, and the CIA. To aging Boomers, these were the Enemy of their youth. To Millenials, though, they are agencies of building up the world.

YAWNS and future earnest Staties are both hopeful signs about the young generation of adults.

The "End of History" as a Means, Not an End

We have been considering Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man in our theory class. Students get that Fukuyama, and Hegel before him, do not mean that we could ever come to the end of the succession of events. But they do think that the long search of human History for the best way to organize society can come to an end. Fukuyama even believes that it has.

Fukuyama's argument is that capitalism and liberal democracy are the best way to organize the political economy of society. We have tried all the other options, and found the one that works best, compared to the practical alternatives. Societies that have achieved stable capitalist democracies can seek their fulfillment in post-historical existence. Societies that have not achieved stable democratic capitalism are still mired in history. Where they should try to get, though, is now clear.

What struck me about this argument is like something I noticed about Marx. For all Marx' opposition to bourgeois liberalism, his tantalizing view of the end and aim of life is really the same as theirs: individuals can do what they choose to do. Marx does not have a higher conception of what realizing our species-being would mean.

In the same way, Fukuyama, another kind of Hegelian, identifies democracy and capitalism as the best ways of organizing society without having any vision of what the aim or end of human existence is beyond the End of History. Democracy and capitalism are both technologies for sorting our competing individual desires. Neither leads to the good life as such, only a life with less conflict and fewer transaction costs. To be sure, capitalism promises greater wealth for society, and if democracy reduces bloodshed that is a very great improvement over the alternatives.

Still, the End of History would not give any clue about the telos or meaning of human existence. Hegel could answer that question, at least in an abstract way. The Westminster catechism famously answers the question, What is the chief end of man? with To praise God and enjoy Him forever.

The End of History is, in the end, vacuous about the Ends of History.

"I Love the World" - Great Gruntled Song

The Discovery Channel has a wonderful news song.

Boom-di-yadda!

Rev. Wright Gets the Main Point Wrong

Rev. Jeremiah Wright continued to explain himself this week at the National Press Club. He gave a learned address on the prophetic ministry of the black church. He then answered questions about the controversial sound bites that have been looped in the press. His answers were, I think, plausible explanations of what he was and still is arguing.

When he quoted others saying that America's "chickens had come home to roost" on September 11, he meant that the U.S. government had committed terrorist acts around the world and on its citizens over its long history, and now terrorist acts were in turn committed on the United States.

When he said that the AIDS virus might be have been created by the U.S. government and might have been used on American citizens, he cited the Tuskegee syphilis experiments as precedent.

And when he said that God damns America, he meant that God condemns the government of the United States for its past unrepented-of bad actions, including slavery.

Each of these points one could hear from leftist pulpits, pundits, and press any week of the year. Jeremiah Wright is an old '60s university radical, and like many others of his generation he sees the current administration and today's political culture as not fundamentally different from what that generation railed against 40 years ago.

I don't agree with Rev. Wright. Senator Obama does not agree with Rev. Wright. Senator Obama has said so. That story should die now.

There is one important point that we should not let go. Rev. Wright's premise in his remarks to the National Press Club is that the criticism of his views was not an attack on Jeremiah Wright, nor was it an attack on Barack Obama. Wright maintains that the criticism of his views is really an attack on the black church.

That is just wrong. No one would be interested in the views of an old lefty if he were not pastor to a potential president. We can know this is true because we do not see obsessive coverage of all the other old lefties, even old prophetic black church radicals, who say the same sorts of things that Rev. Wright does.

The black church is not under attack. And the black church is not identical with leftist critiques of the U.S. government. By making this claim, Jeremiah Wright is claiming to be much bigger than he really is. He got his 15 minutes because he is pastor to a potential president. Wright could have poured oil on the waters. Instead, he made the controversy a fight about himself. As a result, Senator Obama had to denounce some of the more extreme views of his former pastor.

Let it go.

Do Women Who Baby Their Husbands Want Babies?

A light advice piece in CNN.com's Living section shows women nurturing their husbands too much, to the point of treating them as babies. The experts they cite note that while this can work for some couples, it is generally a bad idea as it makes the men helpless and incompetent, or resentful. Or both.

What surprised me about this account is that they did not indicate whether these couples had children. A wife who babies her husband (or dog, or the neighbor's kid) would seem to me to be sending signals that she is very ready for children. If she continued to baby her husband while also babying her baby, then I would worry.

Polygamist Sect Knocks Up the Girls, Dumps the Boys

The Texas Child Protective Services Department, which has charge of the hundreds of children taken in a raid on the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints, a polygamist sect, said that 60% of the girls under 18 were either pregnant or had already had children.

Even more ominously, CPS does not know what the sect did with most of the teenage boys. While there are equivalent numbers of boys and girls under 13 - 196 and 197, respectively - the ratio of teenagers is very skewed. There are 53 girls aged 14 to 17, but only 17 boys.

It is typical in polygamist sects that many young men are expelled, so the older men can marry all the girls.

The coming weeks will no doubt bring bad stories of teenage boys born at the Yearning for Zion ranch living on the streets in Fort Worth - or worse.

Television News is an Oxymoron

Elizabeth Edwards had a fine editorial in the New York Times, "Bowling 1, Health Care 0," about the paucity of substance in the television news coverage of the presidential campaign. I agree with her entirely. I think, though, that she is a little off the mark in blaming the television journalists for this. I blame television as a medium.

Television is a good medium for showing pictures. It is best at fires, explosions, earthquake damage, and shooting. Most news is not well conveyed in pictures. The news is best conveyed in words about non-visual events. The best news show on television is Jim Lehrer talking to a few informed reporters and news makers, slowly and carefully. It is very boring television -- unless you want to find out what is going on.

Cable television does a bit better than the networks, because they can talk a long time. Most of the time they just have reporters spouting their opinions. But Chris Matthews can have a broader range of reporters than a network show can, and can take more time with newsmakers. The cable shows also keep reporting numbers whenever they have them, which is useful.

Really, though, even for numbers we are better off with print sources. As for analysis of complex propositions -- such as the competing health care proposals that Elizabeth Edwards wrote about -- only text sources will do.

I will go a little further. I think that television as a medium can only reach up to the upper-middle brow. Usually, of course, it aims much lower, where it dominates. Even public television confines itself to the limits of middle-brow convention, lest it offending its funders.

For my money, the most intellectual television network is C-SPAN. They put on powerful people talking, or smart people talking, and very occasionally a smart powerful person, talking. Their book show is the best because their host is the best informed and least self-promoting. Their coverage of events is the best because they do not insert themselves at all, aside from selecting the event. I wish C-SPAN covered every real event that I want to see. Wouldn't it be great to have C-SPAN cover the Olympics? No nationalism, no chauvinism, no human interest fluff, and they would show all the events, not just the ones the U.S. can win.

The most important television news show is "The Daily Show," which says volumes about how much real news television can convey.

Rev. Wright Defends Himself, Mostly Successfully

Rev. Jeremiah Wright was interviewed by Bill Moyers for the first time since the sound bites of his old sermons have been making news.

Wright noted, justly, that you can't understand any preacher's point from just a few seconds out of the middle of a sermon. The larger context of the "chickens coming home to roost" sermon after 9/11, for example, was not quoting Malcolm X, but rather a white ambassador who was quoting Malcolm X (and on Fox News, of all places, to Fox's discomfort). He was explaining that to the hijackers, the United States had engaged in a long string of violent acts against innocents -- a string that Wright enumerated. Some items on his list were more just than others. Wright got the biggest reaction from the congregation when he cited enslaving Africans, and the least when he named bombing Hiroshima. He did not say that the 9/11 attacks were just, but he did think that anyone who understood the dark side of American history could understand why our enemies might think they had a just cause.

As for the "God damn America" sermon, Moyers showed a longer clip leading up to the notorious soundbite. The theme of the sermon was that all governments lie, change, and fail. Wright gave examples from the Bible and the history of other nations, before listing the failings of America. He said these failings, which mostly concerned government violence against the innocent, could not be blessed by God, but condemned. Wright explicitly put himself in the tradition of the Biblical prophets who called God's condemnation down on Israel in order to get the nation to repent. In the interview, after seeing the clip, Moyers and Wright had this exchange:

BILL MOYERS: What did you mean when you said that?

REVEREND WRIGHT: When you start confusing God and government, your allegiances to government -a particular government and not to God, that you're in serious trouble because governments fail people.

So the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a fiery preacher who roots himself and his congregation in the black liberation theology tradition. In a Christian context his incendiary comments make more sense. This context was left out of the clips. The clips were made by the political opponents of Barack Obama, not by people who cared one way or the other about Jeremiah Wright and his large, active, and successful church.

In the end, though, I think Obama was just in his overall assessment. Wright, now several years retired, formed his views and his preaching style at a time when things were much worse in America for African Americans. Wright has missed the way in which many things have changed for the better. Obama does not share Wright's views about America, and neither do I. I don't regard Wright's views as centrist, and I am sure he would not thank me if I did. But I think Rev. Wright, like each of us, should be judged by his full sermons and his own expressions of his views, not the attack clips assembled by enemies.

Defecating the Candidate's Qualities (While Dancing)

From a story on the WMAZ-TV website today, re Georgia senatorial candidate Rand Knight:

"Knight supporter, Beth Perera says "I think it is important for people to have a face to face encounter with the candidates otherwise it is just a list of names on a ballet and people can't defecate any special qualities about a candidate unless they actually meet them, talk to them, ask them questions."


(Thank you, mother-in-law)

"Expelled" Makes Ben Stein the Michael Moore of the Right

Michael Moore makes great propaganda films. They start with some good grievances, ask some tough questions, then throw in a lot of other stuff, including ambushes and cheap shots, to give the impression of adding weight to the argument. They are fun to watch. They have been so successful that they lead to an interesting insight: documentaries are the medium of the left in the way that talk radio is the medium of the right.

Ben Stein has offered a rightish propaganda doc in the Michael Moore mold. "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" starts with a just grievance. Several respectable scientists had their careers ruined for even suggesting that Intelligent Design was worth considering as a scientific issue. He interviews the aggrieved scientists, talks to a few of the people who ruined their careers, and makes a plea for actual free speech and scientific openmindedness in the academy. This is a worthwhile cause, and Stein does a competent, though not excellent, job in explaining the issues and exposing the guilty.

However, Stein then drifts off to muddled examination of the connections between Darwinism and eugenics, even Nazism. He has a running metaphor that political correctness in the scientific establishment concerning Darwinism is like the Berlin Wall erected by brutal totalitarians. This is all unnecessary and distracting from his main point.

I am glad that the issue of academic political correctness has been raised, and partly exposed in this case. This is a scandal that could do with a good airing -- starting with centrists becoming aware that there is a scandal here.

And I hope that this film means that there will be more conservative documentaries at least as competent as Michael Moore's liberal ones. That will level the playing field, and bring delight to doc nerds like me.

My further hope, though, is that the quality of political documentaries rises all around.

Eat Breakfast, Have Boys

Fiona Matthews of the University of Exeter is the lead author of a tantalizing new study showing that mothers who eat more and eat better around conception are more likely to have boys. The mother's diet does not change the sex of developing embryos, but does seem to affect whether male embryos implant and develop.

Eating breakfast cereal seemed to be one of the stand-out correlates of having more boys. There has been a steady drop in the number of boys born in industrialized countries, which correlates with more women skipping breakfast and eating low-calorie diets.

This study is based on correlations. No one knows exactly why it works. I expect this finding will be kicked around a dozen times by contradictory follow-up studies. This is as it should be -- that is how science advances.

In the meantime, moms who want a son should stock up on oatmeal.

Nazi Saboteurs as a Precedent for Gitmo

In 1942 we caught 8 Nazi saboteurs landing on U.S. soil to blow things up. The leader of the group turned himself in and gave away the whole show. They were all quickly tried before a military tribunal. Six were executed and one who helped betray the group was given life. The leader, who came to the FBI and dumped $84,000 on the assistant director's desk to finally get his attention, was given 30 years.

Two things strike me as important about this case for our current war on terror.

First, the saboteur turned himself in because he was confident he would not be tortured.

Second, the spies were given timely trials with real counsel.

I think their sentences were proportionate. At their trial, all eight said they were forced into the mission by the Nazis, and never intended to go through with their mission. However, in the brief time before they were caught, six of them did nothing but spend their mission money on high living. They were executed.

The two who agreed to betray the mission differed in how quickly they acted. The one who dithered got life, later commuted to deportation. The one who actually made repeated efforts to contact the FBI got 30 years, also later commuted to deportation. I think he might have been given more recognition for his efforts to mitigate, especially after the war.

The mission failed so utterly that Hitler decided to stop a planned sabotage attack.

J. Edgar Hoover, not surprisingly, covered up the fact that the spies had turned themselves in, and had to keep coming back and insisting that they were really spies in order to get the bureau to listen.

What does this have to do with our war on terror? The 9/11 attackers spent the weeks before the attack in wild living at bin Laden's expense. Perhaps if they had been assured that they would not be tortured or executed, one of them might have betrayed the group. That is very hard to unravel now, especially since the Bush administration's commitment to torture was not clear at that time.

Now, though, it is clear that the current administration tortures and defends torture, as well as suspending habeas corpus, denying counsel, and endlessly delaying trials. This discourages would-be enemy agents from turning themselves in. We would do much better to apply American standards of justice to our enemies precisely because they would not do the same to us. We can win hearts and minds, win the clash of civilizations, and prevent future 9/11s by being the best Americans we can -- not the worst.

Courtship is a Proper Model of the Dialectic

In one of my periodic attempts to understand Hegel, I came across the most memorable of his several attempts to explain what he means by the dialectic. He says that the relation of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is like that of bud, blossom, and fruit. This is a gripping visual image, especially now in the blooming spring.

Every analogy has its strengths and weaknesses. The strength of this image is that it helps show how the synthesis preserves the essence of the stage that came before, while utterly transcending its form. Moreover, it is clear how each succeeding stage requires the destruction of the previous one. The weakness of this image, though, is that bud and blossom are not antithetical; the blossom is not generated by the negation of the bud.

I think a great deal about marriage and children, especially now in the blooming spring when I teach my family life class. It occurred to me in talking to a student that we have before us a much better analogy for the dialectic: the courtship of a man and a woman which brings forth a baby. Now, a men and woman are not opposites, but complements. And courtship much better captures the back and forth and back and forth of how a dialectical opposition gets worked out in history -- much better than the image of a sudden, violent Revolution does.

And there is no model of synthesis better than a baby.

Now, the birth of a baby does not annihilate the parents. This may be a way in which the analogy actually illuminates the original notion. When we apply the dialect as an abstract idea, we act as if the thesis and antithesis were annihilated in the generation of the synthesis. In fact, though, among intellectuals the thesis and antithesis never really die, even if the main narrative of history has moved on with the synthesis.

In a larger sense, though, the child does end the parents' existence; they cease to be fully separate beings. The essence of the parents is sublated (a world that is not better English than the German word it is supposed to translate) into the child. The child carries forward the combined, complementary essences of the parents, now transformed into a new thing.

And this new thing seeks, and usually finds, its complement in the next courtship.

Almost-a-Bishop Wins in Paraguay

Fernando Lugo, a Catholic "bishop of the poor," has beaten the ruling party candidate in Paraguay. This is a bigger deal than it sounds: the Colorado Party has ruled for 60 years. They worked with one of the worst Latin American dictators ever (which is saying a great deal), then succeeded him when democracy finally was established.

Priests are forbidden to hold political office by the Catholic Church, so Lugo renounced his church office in order to run. The church rejects his resignation. I expect they will leave that issue alone while he tries to fix a corrupt government and a deeply skewed economy.

I wish him, and Paraguay, well. I hope he doesn't feel obliged to be completely anti-American.

Bruce Springsteen - Elitist

A parody commercial.

Breaking News: Sam Nunn Endorses Obama

Former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn has endorsed Barack Obama, and will serve on his foreign policy advisory committee. Nunn is the exemplary "blue dog" Democrat and elder statesmen. The Georgia wing of the Gruntled family reports that Dems there want Nunn to be Vice-President.

The Gravitas Wagon is gathering steam ...

Counting Your Blessings Makes You Happier

Mrs. G. sent this one to me under the lovely heading, "Peer-reviewed gruntle!"

A study by R.A. Emmons and M.E. McCullough in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people are happier when they articulate each day what they are grateful for. In an experiment, both psychology students (reasonably healthy) and neuromuscular disease patients (with something serious to be unhappy about) were asked to write down each day a list of things they were grateful for. After two or three weeks, both groups were happier.

Breaking News: The Boss Endorses Obama

Bruce Springsteen, my musical lodestar since I was a teenager, has endorsed Barack Obama.

After the terrible damage done over the past eight years, a great American reclamation project needs to be undertaken. I believe that Senator Obama is the best candidate to lead that project and to lead us into the 21st Century with a renewed sense of moral purpose and of ourselves as Americans.

Amen.

Divorce Costs Taxpayers $112 Billion Per Year

And that is just in this country. And this is just a minimum estimate of the direct costs.

This is the conclusion of a new report from the Institute for American Values, The Taxpayer Cost of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing. It was released today to coincide with the important civil religion holiday of Tax Day.

I will work through the details of this report in other posts this week.

A Great Teacher's Last Lecture

Randy Pausch is dying of cancer. He gave the best "last lecture" I have ever read. As a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, he has done some amazing things in the computer world. What gripped me the most, as a teacher, were the extraordinary things he did to push students to push themselves to learn, and to honor and appreciate them when they did. More, he has a noble vision of the university clearing the way for students and teachers to work together to push themselves to learn. The whole speech moved me to tears as it has others.

The teaching stories are the best. I will give you a couple of the other tales and wisdom, told with gratitude, that give a flavor of his tone.

When I was here studying to get my Ph.D. and I was taking something called the theory qualifier, which I can definitively say is the second worst thing in my life after chemotherapy. [laughter] And I was complaining to my mother about how hard this test was and how awful it was, and she just leaned over and she patted me on the arm and she said, we know how you feel honey, and remember when your father was your age he was fighting the Germans. [laugher] After I got my Ph.D., my mother took great relish in introducing me as, this is my son, he’s a doctor but not the kind that helps people.

Work hard. I got tenure a year early. Junior faculty members used to say to me, wow, you got tenure early. What’s your secret? I said, it’s pretty simple. Call my any Friday night in my office at ten o’clock and I’ll tell you.

Show gratitude. When I got tenure I took all of my research team down to Disneyworld for a week. And one of the other professors at Virginia said, how can you do that? I said these people just busted their ass and got me the best job in the world for life. How could I not do that?

A book of the lecture has been made to benefit the pancreatic cancer research foundation. The full transcript of the lecture is here.

Debbie's Hammer

The weirdest thing you will see today:

Debbie Reynolds, in full '60s cool, singing "If I Had a Hammer."



This was made by Debbie Reynolds' own production company for the Scopitone video jukeboxes, a '60s craze that didn't survive the decade. I can't find an exact year.

Update: In response to a query, Scopitone expert Bob Orlowsky wrote:

I don't have an exact date, but it was made sometime between the end of 1964 and the first half of 1965. It's great, isn't it?

Indeed.

The Church Doesn't Help Divorcing Kids

Elizabeth Marquardt told the Centre College audience yesterday one sad finding from her study of children of divorce: among those who were active in a church at the time that their parents were divorcing, only a quarter reported that anyone from the church talked to them or tried to help them deal with the divorce.

Divorced kids report that rarely do people try to talk to them or hear about their loss and pain when their parents divorce. This is sad when most people in general do it, but tragic in the church.

Some church people at the lecture went away with a conviction to do better.

The New Divorce Stigma

Elizabeth Marquardt, author of Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, has been lecturing at Centre College this week. This morning in my family class she offered an idea that I had not heard before.

In the old days, children of divorce were stigmatized. This sentiment is pretty much gone -- she says she never experienced it personally, and the students likewise do not tell me of any stigma they express or experience. The standard view is that it is not the child's fault. This is very sensible.

However, it is becoming widely known among people who study and talk about marriage that children of divorce are more likely to divorce themselves. This is so despite the fact that divorced kids usually hate divorce, and vow not to inflict it on their own children.

Hence the new divorce stigma: children of divorce are sometimes treated as damaged goods on the marriage market.

It is important to say that most divorced kids who marry do stay together. Divorced kids are more likely to divorce, but are not destined to. And any individual can be the exception to the trend, even much stronger trends than this one.

The answer to the new divorce stigma is not to deny the risk. It is true: divorced kids are more likely to divorce. Rather, the answer is to turn that passion to make marriage work into the foundation of constant communication about the marriage.

Fight divorce with good marriage.

Sex-Starved Wives

Michelle Weiner Davis is interviewed in Time on her new book of this title. The empirical core of the study is a survey of 1000 married women, 60% of whom reported that they wanted sex at least as much, if not more, than their husbands. I would be curious to know if men differed in this by age, or by how long they had been married. This is not as helpful a statistic as it should be. In fact, I would guess that a survey of husbands would report the same result - 60% of men would report that they wanted sex at least as much or more than their wives. What we need is the spread -- more, the same, less. I would be curious to know if men differed in this by age, or by how long they had been married.

Nonetheless, Davis' main point is that men are not always filled with sexual desire. Their desire for their wives is affected by how they feel about their marriage, how they feel in general, and, sometimes, for physical reasons. And women often want sex for reassurance about the relationship, so they may well want it more than their husbands precisely when their emotional bond is most strained.

Sex on the Brain Makes Men Take Bigger Risks

A nifty study by Brian Knutsen and Camelia Kuhnen found that men bet higher when shown images of sexy women.

I don't know whether this means they were trying to get more resources to improve their odds of winning the desirable woman, or whether, on the contrary, the very thought of immediate sex made them throw prudence to the winds.

Honey-Colored Nation

I heard two great phrases this week that mark the generational change America is undergoing as the Race Question turns into the thousand ways of living our national ethnicity.

Jon Henke, of the libertarian QandO Blog, reprinted his post of 2006: "Martin Luther King: The Last Founding Father."

And in some other blog, which I can not now find, someone described today's America, Obama's America, Gen-X America: we are a "honey-colored nation."