I Am Hopeful About Iran Because the Regime Is Religious

This is a risky post to make, because it could be overtaken by events even as I write it.

Nonetheless, I am hopeful that the rulers of Iran will not stomach a stolen election and attacks on peaceful protesters because they believe that God will judge their actions. This is no guarantee of decency, of course - some of their fellow pious Muslims, of a quite different stripe, commit suicide attacks every day in the name of the same God.

Nonetheless, when I compare the protests in Iran today with those in China in 1989, I am more hopeful. I expected the Chinese Communist regime to attack the protesters. Power in this world is the only thing that really matters to them. The ayatollahs in Iran, on the other hand, hold themselves to a higher standard. Some of the religious authorities have criticized the government for attacking the protesters and resisting a clean election result. I have heard that some of these religious authorities have a higher religious status than the supreme leader Khameni, though he is a cleric, too.

Nothing is determined, and there is no way to tell ahead of time how a crisis will be resolved. All I can say is that I see signs for hope in this crisis.

Pittsburgh Rocks

This is the funniest thing I have read this week. It was sent by my sister in Pittsburgh about her first-grade daughter.

[My niece's] reaction to the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team winning the Stanley Cup (with pauses):

"Pittsburgh rocks. My baby head. Off."

Racial "Weathering" and Family Stress

Arline Geronimus argues that African Americans age faster than white people in America due to racism and stress. This has many important consequences - one of which is that waiting until their 20s to have children may not actually be healthier for black women and children, as is normally true for the American population as a whole.

Geronimus blames the faster "weathering" of African Americans on stress. She blames racism as the main source of differential stress. I think this is a plausible way of accounting for the fact that African Americans as a group are much less healthy than other Americans at the same age.

I would add, though, that there is another source of stress that is distinctively high for African Americans: the stress of single parenthood. Black Americans are especially likely to engage in the most stressful kind of single parenthood, the kind that results from never having married in the first place.

Geronimus has taken much heat for her views on racial weathering from stress. If we are looking at sources of stress, though, some are more self-inflicted than others - and thus can be addressed more directly by those enduring the stress.

Family Values Hypocrites Should Resign

Rep. Barney Frank had an affair with a prostitute. He did not resign. I don't think he needed to because he did not try to justify what the other guy did, and because he had not made a big deal about sexual morality before that. His district has re-elected him many times since.

Sen. David Vitter had sex with a prostitute. He should have resigned. He had made a big deal about sexual morality before that - and still does, with no show of shame. He thinks the only thing he did wrong was getting caught.

The latest family values warrior caught with his pants down is Sen. John Ensign. He had an affair with a campaign staffer whose husband worked for him. He seems to have gotten their son a job, too. He only admitted the affair after he was blackmailed. Ensign was a particularly egregious hypocrite. In addition to being a family values culture warrior in general, he had specifically called on his Senate colleague Larry Craig to resign during his sex scandal. And Ensign called on Pres. Clinton to resign during his sex scandal.

It is getting to the point that if public officials makes a big deal about marriage, family, and sexual honor, it is easy to assume that they are sleazy.

Sandra Tsing Loh's Divorce

Sandra Tsing Loh is a writer for The Atlantic Monthly who usually covers domestic life. In the current issue she brings us up to date on her marital history.

She hated her father and wished her parents would divorce. She married a decent guy, had two girls, and they made a busy and solvent upper-middle-class home. Then in her mid-40s she had an affair. After therapy she decided she just didn't want to work at saving her marriage. She used this month's column to announce her divorce.

She then drew what she thinks is the logical conclusion from her story and that of some of perpetually dissatisfied friends: we should abolish marriage. More: human beings were never really meant for marriage, anyway. She cites Andrew Cherlin's review of the high U.S. divorce rate, which I wrote about recently, as evidence. Yet what Cherlin shows is that Americans have a higher divorce rate than other countries because we have a higher marriage rate to begin with - because we believe in marriage the most.

Sandra Tsing Loh's divorce is sad for her and her husband, and tragic for her children. It is not evidence that human beings were not meant for marriage.

Classes are Honorable

Egalitarians don't like to acknowledge the reality of classes because they think that their middle class life is the good kind of life. They believe that noting the existence and different cultures of other social classes is necessarily to make invidious distinctions.

However, if we believe in the nobility of labor and of useful leisure we can talk about classes without assuming them to be moral hierarchies.

Education Rationalizes the Status Structure, Mostly

Wittgenstein has a wonderful metaphor of language as like an old city. The oldest parts are crooked, winding, organic. On top of and growing around old bits are the new, modern, rationalized parts.

I think the social structure is like that, too. There is an old, crooked organic structure based on an honor/shame culture. We see it especially at the top, with its residue in Old Money. And we see it at the bottom, where gangs and slums reproduce honor/shame warrior bands wherever bourgeois order is ineffective.

On top of this old organic structure, though, a modern, rationalized grid has been laid. The main mechanism of rationalizing the social structure is the educational system. And the main tool for creating social closure differentiating one stratum from another are educational credentials.

Undermining Elders

One of the problems I addresses in Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment is that the church has created structures to undermine the authority of pastoral leaders. I spent this week with the summer conference of the Synod of the Trinity in Pennsylvania. In our conversations on this subject, I realized that the church had also created structures to undermine the authority of elder leaders.

The session that governs a local congregation is composed of elders, and is moderated by the pastor. Prior to the reforms of "the Sixties," a small group of elders might serve for many years. Now elders normally serve for a three-year term, are off for a year, then serve another three-year term. And that is it. Though elders are ordained for life, just as ministers are, their formal service is normally limited to one stint. The same holds for deacons, who serve on a separate board. In most Presbyterian congregations, more than half of the members have been ordained as deacons or elders.

When they go off the session, the governing experience that they learned mostly goes with them. Moreover, the elders who are sent by a local congregation as official representatives (commissioners) to the presbytery, the regional governing body, are chosen from the session. This means that the governing experience that the Presbyterian Church can bring to its central governing body, the presbytery, is also only short-term.

It would be bad to have only a small group serve on the session and presbytery for years and years. No one advocates that. But by requiring rotation of elders, and rarely recalling elders with past service, the Presbyterian Church (USA) undermines the other half of its possible Establishment.

The Coffee House: Where Strangers Become Acquaintances

Tonight I am giving a talk at The Phillips Emporium, an independent coffee house in the college town of Bloomsburg, PA. The subject of the talk at the coffee house is - the coffee house. This is a minor example of what sociologists mean by reflexivity. Modern institutions depend more and more on feedback about how they are working to do the next round of work and improvement. Coffee houses, as venues of critical thought, have always been self-critical. Pamphlets promoting, attacking, and analyzing coffee houses have been issued since the glory days of the coffee house in the 17th century.

It is probably not surprising that coffee house intellectuals get together in a coffee house to talk about coffee houses as a place to be intellectual. But coffee houses have also always served as places of business - and not just the business of selling coffee. Intellectuals do not usually focus on this element of coffee house life. Businesses that grew out of coffee houses, such as the stock exchange, have developed more exclusive places of conversation, most notably the private club. Still, new business ideas are born in coffee houses all the time, and low-level business, especially in the arts, is conducted in coffee houses to this day.

The coffee house is the best place to bring people together for clear-headed talk.

Du Bois Was More Prescient Than I Thought

I am re-reading W.E.B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk for my social theory class.

In that book, published at the dawn of the previous century, he famously argues that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." I had read this argument before as Du Bois correctly discerning the long hard civil rights struggle in the United States.

What I had not appreciated until this reading was that he clearly meant the entire global question of the interaction of the white and non-white races. He had in mind European colonialism just as much as American race relations.

In making my social theory class I am trying to pick pre-eminently transformative books. One good test is whether the book itself, and not just the author, has its own Wikipedia page.

The Souls of Black Folk was prescient not just about civil rights in America, but about colonialism and post-colonialism all over the world.

How Much Kids Cost at the Top and Bottom of the Income Scale

Marcia Carlson and Tim Smeeding reported at the Furstenberg Conference that parents in the top fifth of income spend about five times as much on their children as do parents in the bottom quintile of income.

At first glance this seems like common sense - parents with more money to spend will spend more on their kids. But the fact that children could be raised for less shows that richer parents are choosing to invest more in their children. The concerted cultivation that middle class parents normally engage in for their kids costs much more than the natural growth childrearing of the poor and working class families.

Women of All Classes Want the Same Number of Children, But Miss the Mark in Different Directions

At the Furstenberg Conference, Philip Morgan reported that women of all classes start out wanting about the same number of children - on average, a little over two. However, women with less than a high school education end up with more children than they wanted, while more educated women end up with slightly fewer than they intended. The least educated women end up with .25 kids too many, while the college graduates end up with .6 kids too few.

All Grown Up at 18

The Furstenberg Conference consisted mostly of demographers reporting on big numbers. One exception was Annette Lareau, who followed up on the children in her ethnographic study, Unequal Childhoods. She had found that working class and poor parents fed, clothed, sheltered their kids, made sure they went to school - then let them pick what they did with their time. She called this the "natural growth" approach. Middle class parents, by contrast, mobilized all the resources they could to develop the individual talents of each child, a method she called "concerted cultivation."

When she revisited the children as they got into their twenties, she found the next step of the two patterns of childrearing. At 18 the working class and poor kids were on their own. Even if they thought the kids were making mistakes, their parents did not think it was their place to step in. The middle class parents, on the other hand, continued to be deeply involved in helping their kids organize their lives, often in ways that were invisible to the children. These are the "helicopter parents," hovering over their children, who have become well known to college administrators.

Which contributed to a further difference. Both sets of parents knew that their children would be better off going to college. Most of the middle class kids got there, with parental help. Most of the working class and poor kids did not, even when they tried. The parents did not think they could, or should, push their kids to push through the inevitable roadblocks of college life. At 18, their kids were all grown up.

All Classes Want the Same Number of Kids

Paula England reported at the Furstenberg Conference on her new study of class differences in having children. She found that girls from all classes want the same number of children - on average, a little over two. However, by 16 there is already a negative correlation between sexual activity and income/GPA. That is, the poorer girls, who are also likely to be the girls doing worse in school, have sex more often than the richer girls, who are also doing better in school and are on the college track.

Eventually, the dropout girls have four times the unintended pregnancies that the college-track girls do. It is not that unintended pregnancies derail some girls from the college track - the causation runs the other way. Girls who start out poorer are likely to be "sloppy and inconsistent" in using birth control, whereas the middle class, college-track girls are not. Moreover, England reported, this class gradient in birth control goes back at least to the 1920s.

Legislation Not Court Decisions: Religious Protections

Religious opponents of same-sex marriage worry that if (probably when) same-sex marriage or civil unions become legal, people like them will be prosecuted. This is not far-fetched. "Hate speech" laws could easily be used to prosecute speech, even sermons against gay unions, as they have already been abroad. Religious charities have already stopped placing all adoptions because the state threatened them for not placing children with homosexual couples.

The first few states to legalize same-sex marriage did so by court decisions. These are blunt instruments. They invalidated existing laws without doing the necessary political work to deal with the unintended consequences of the court decision. Now, though, several states are taking the better path, making this major political change through the proper political means, the legislature. When states debate laws, they hear from all kinds of people who would be affected. The states that have passed same-sex marriage laws were able to put in protections for religious groups. Legislative debate, and laws that actually make it through the political process, are better protection for everyone.

Alternative Baby Faces

A wonderful image from "Texts from Last Night":

Whenever I'm sad I just imagine if babies were born with mustaches...

Modern Hunting and Gathering

A side thought from the Furstenberg conference.

Kevin Roy reported that among the working poor, men make more per hour, but are less stably employed than are women.

This sounds just like the relationship between hunters and gatherers.

Welfare Dads

At the Furstenberg conference, Kathryn Edin reported on a new study of poor, unmarried fathers. This is the counterpart to her work in Promises I Can Keep on poor teen mothers.

In the teen welfare mom and dad "courtship story," there is barely any courtship - and what there is begins after the baby is born. The couple meets, "get's together," has a baby, and then, if he is still around, begins to know one another. The men describe their relations with the mothers of their children, as well as their child's birth, passively. The emotional high point of the relationship is the birth of the child. The mothers are usually excited about the baby, and normally become emotionally attached right away. The fathers often also fall in love - with the baby.

Poor men and women are usually mistrustful of one another, even if they theoretically are a couple and have a child together. The women don't expect the men to provide for the child, and the men fear that they will be dumped if they don't provide. Edin found that the men would often do things to accelerate the breakup - fooling with other women or getting arrested - so she would no longer expect anything of him.

The most interesting, but sad, thing that Edin found was that these poor fathers never expected to be able to keep the love or respect of the mothers of their children. “They are confident," Edin said, that "they can be good dads because all that good fathering takes is love, not money.”

The Losing Game of Multiple Partner Fertility

One of the major issues at the Furstenberg conference was "multiple partner fertility" - that is, women who have children by different men.

Sarah McLanahan reported that when poor single mothers move from man to man, they are usually trading up, if only marginally. They have a child with the new man to give them a stronger reason to stay together.

However, McLanahan also reported, the more children women have with different men, the less help they get from the extended kin network of any of the fathers of their children.

Family Instability Hurts Boys in School

Sarah McLanahan reported from her continuing study of "fragile families" at the Furstenberg conference. She had some interesting new things to say about the effects of family instability - especially boyfriends passing in and out of the household.

One major effect is that instability increases the mother's mental health problems, especially depression and anxiety.

Another major finding is that instability hurts boys more than girls.

This led me to a thought about why girls out-perform boys in school, when the reverse used to be true: girls may be passing boys because instability hurts boys more, and family instability is increasing.

Working Class Women Are the Most Likely to Live with Multiple Partners

At the Furstenberg conference Andrew Cherlin made a case for studying working class family patterns separately from the middle class and the poor. He doesn't want to use class terms, so instead he treated high school graduates, GED holders, and two-year Associates degree holders as collectively the middle group of his analysis.

Cherlin found that women who live with multiple partners -- whether married or cohabiting -- are more likely to come from this working class/middle education group. College educated women are more likely to marry, and more likely to stay married. Poor women are less likely to live with, and especially unlikely to marry, the men they are connected with, even if they have children with them.

Bad things happen to kids each time someone significant comes or goes from their household. Working class kids are even more likely to suffer these disruptions than poor kids are. This is interesting and not obvious.

Nerd Humor: The Stata Lesson

At the end of the conference honoring family sociologist Frank Furstenberg, two of his former students offered a film tribute. The form of their tribute, though, was a mock fulfillment of a long-standing promise they had made to Furstenberg to teach him the statistical analysis program Stata.

On the screen they had the graphic for "Stata Lesson One." The problem for the lesson: "Does Frank Furstenberg still matter?" As you might imagine, this was a bouquet of a presentation, but underneath the mock serious tone was an actually serious analysis.

They plotted Furstenberg's 40 years of publications and the abundance of citations of his work by others. Then, just to be sure that he wasn't resting on his laurels "while publishing junk," they plotted the citations of his recent articles. All three graphs were impressive. Where the trend line showed a small decline over the decades, the voiceover helpfully pointed out that the confidence intervals were just wide enough that the real trend could be slightly upward.

Stat humor went over big with this crowd. Very nicely done.

What Fathering Needs

I am attending a conference at the University of Pennsylvania honoring family sociologist Frank Furstenberg. I will post some good points as they come up.

Kathryn Edin, co-author of Promises I Can Keep, about which I have blogged several times, is working on a new study about the fathers of the teen moms she studied in that book. She found that the men wanted to be attached to their children, even if they didn't have much of a relationship with the mothers. These poor men mistrust women, who think they are valued only for their resources. They do want to be fathers to their children, though:

“They are confident they can be good dads because all that good fathering takes is love, not money.”

Women On the Supreme Court Used to Have More of "It All"

Sylvia Ann Hewlett has documented the difficulties that very high achieving women have in "having it all" - marriage, children, and high-powered career. Hewlett's main finding is that women who do have it all are likely to have married young and traded off career steps with their husbands. However, there has been a paradoxical effect of opening more opportunities in public life to women since the 1970s. Women who seek the top careers are likely to put off marriage and children in favor of launching their careers first - and later run out of time.

Mrs. G. asks us to consider the case of women on the Supreme Court:

Ruth Bader Ginsburg married in 1954 and has two children with well established careers.

Sandra Day O’Connor married in 1952 and has three sons.

Sonia Sotomayor is divorced without children.

"I think there’s a codicil about women having it all, over a lifetime," she wrote to me. "If they thought in the 1950s that there was no chance of ever hitting the Supremes" they would marry, have kids, and pursue whatever career was open to them. However, "it didn’t work in the '70s and after for women who thought there was a chance of" making the Supreme Court, so they "gave up other things to go for the gold."

Alumni Survey 1: Advanced Degrees

I have been surveying the portion of Centre College alumni who graduated between 40 and 15 years ago. I focus on them because I am interested in how the parents' education, occupation, and cultural interests shape the children's educational choices. I have heard from about a quarter of those I surveyed - nearly 1400 respondents.

The first interesting finding is of how many of the graduates went on to get further degrees after college.

About a third of each entering class wants to be doctors. Another quarter express an interest in law.

Among the alumni, about 6% end up doctors or dentists, with another couple of percent getting other medical degrees.

About 14% end up as lawyers - which has been Centre's largest single occupational category since the colege's beginning nearly 200 years ago.

The business degree emerges as the second largest category, with 9% holding the MBA and another couple of percent having other professional certifications.

Teachers make up another 5% or so.

More than a quarter of the Centre alumni earned a masters degree.

All together about two-thirds of the Centre alumni in the prime of their working years hold some kind of advanced degree.

Army Successfully Fights Divorce

Here is some decent marriage news for Memorial Day. The Army, faced with an increasing divorce rate as the war has gone on, instituted a "Strong Bonds" program to help military couples learn to communicate better before they had a problem. As a result, the Army's divorce rate dropped from 2006 to 2007, and seems to be holding steady.

Still, in a survey of soldiers in Iraq in 2006, 20% said their spouses had contemplated divorce. War and deployment is unusually hard on families.

Showing the Religious Flow

Michael Bell made a fantastic chart of religious mobility, based on Pew Religion Forum data. It is lovely to ponder.

Sociology Requires Judgment

Students of my dear colleague Sarah made a tee shirt to celebrate her tenure, her impending baby, and sociology itself. (Click on the picture to read the shirts.)

Love Entangles Us - at a Distance

This goes in my The World is Wonderfully Weird file:

The Love Study takes people in love, separates them in sealed rooms, shows pictures of the beloved to one, and measures the physical state of the other. Results:

After running 36 couples through this test, the researchers found that when one person focused his thoughts on his partner, the partner's blood flow and perspiration dramatically changed within two seconds. The odds of this happening by chance were 1 in 11,000. Three dozen double blind, randomized studies by such institutions as the University of Washington and the University of Edinburgh have reported similar results.

These results drive physicists nuts. They can't explain them, they just are certain that it couldn't really happen.

I don't know why these results happen. I just think the world is wonderfully weird.

I do know that when my wife heard this story on National Public Radio, she sent thoughts to me 150 miles away. I suddenly felt moved to email her about what I was doing. Happily odd.

Underground Railroad Museum

The Underground Railroad Freedom Center is not quite in Kentucky, so is not technically part of my Kentucky 50 by 50 project. Nonetheless, I had a day in Cincinnati and had wanted to see the museum, so Providence made today the day.

The Underground Railroad museum is a new, high-profile project of the Great and the Good of Cincinnati. It is located at the foot of the Roebling Bridge, a city landmark on the Ohio River. Its neighbors are the new football stadium on the west, and the new baseball park on the east. It is nicely done. It has a few splashy items - films and audios narrated by Vanessa Williams, Angela Bassett, and Oprah Winfrey, the keys to John Brown's cell, and the centerpiece, a rebuilt slave pen rescued from Kentucky. The core historical section on slavery, abolition, and the underground railroad, are pretty substantial. The arty bits - the animated films, commissioned art, dramatic recitations - are all well done.

The Underground Railroad Freedom Center is a cause museum. Slavery, not the underground railroad as such, is the cause. The abolitionists, escaped slaves, even Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey are heroes. The slave masters, slave catchers, pro-slavery politicians, and fellow-travelers are the bad guys. Wicked, slaveholding Kentucky, visible through the picture windows, is the symbol of the evil land.

Surprisingly, the actual story of the underground railroad gets a little lost in the telling. They have a fine section on the heroic doings of Parker and Rankin in Ripley, OH, a black-and-white team who helped many across the river to freedom. The rest of the underground railroad story, though, is told in a vague way. Cincinnati is refered to as the hub of the underground railroad, but no Cincinnati sites are dealt with in any detail. There is much more told about the overland route of slaves heading south from Kentucky over the Natchez trace than there is about the ex-slaves heading in the opposite direction. Partly this is because the slave trade is better documented than the clandestine flights from slavery. Nonetheless, I was surprised that the museum did not tell more of the what is known about the entire underground railroad story.

The big theme of the museum is freedom in general. The specific kind of freedom served up, though, is that of African Americans. And fair enough. A worthwhile expedition.

Our Unmarried Births Are At Euro Levels But Our Welfare State is Not

The U.S. unmarried birth rate leaped up to 40% recently, from less than half that in 1980. This keeps pace with large rises in unmarried births in European countries.

In Europe, though, the state gives money and services to couples. In the U.S., many more of those unwed mothers are married to Uncle Sam.

We need marriage more than Europeans do. If we have the same percentage of kids of unmarrieds that they do, our kids will be worse off.

More Daughters Means More Liberal

A British study by Andrew Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee found that the more daughters you have, the more likely you are to vote for left-of-center parties. The reverse happens with sons.

Specifically: " For each daughter, holding family size constant, a parent is approximately 2 percentage points more likely to vote left."

Nathan Silver at fivethirtyeight.com has the link to the full study.

(I thank the mother of our two daughters and one son, all good Democrats, for finding this.)

Why Humans Are Built for Sperm Wars

A woman in Houston has given birth to twins who were conceived by different fathers.


Most of the sperm that men produce are not designed to fertilize an egg, but to fight a war against sperm from other men. Nearly ever time that sperm from two men are in a woman's vaginal canal at the same time, only one can win. Not this time.

The Abortion Center Holds, Again

There has been a buzz this week about a new Gallup finding that, for the first time, most Americans call themselves "pro-life" rather than "pro-choice," 51% to 42%. Yet when we look at the underlying trends of when, if ever, they think abortion should be allowed, the long-term trend shows almost no change. About a quarter of Americans think abortion should be legal under any circumstances, and a quarter think it should be illegal under any circumstances. In the middle are the half that think abortion should be legal under some circumstances.

What has changed this year is that a couple of percent of centrists have decided that their position is better described as pro-life than pro-choice.

I think we should remember that this choice is about what the law should allow, not what is a good idea to do. There are many centrist positions that think the law should permit choices that are almost always a bad idea, just because of that "almost." If you had only two choices, would you call that pro-life, or pro-choice?

Leah Sears for Supreme Court

This Slate compilation is meant to embarrass potential Supreme Court nominees. However, Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Sears rose in my estimation for her forthright promotion of marriage, even compared to her own divorce and remarriage.

The Growing Gap in the White Out-of-Wedlock Birthrate

Charles Murray reports on the Enterprise Blog about the large gap in the illegitimate birth rates between the top and bottom classes.

[Mrs. G. doesn't like the term "illegitimate birth" on the grounds that no child is illegitimate. This is true. So I will use the cumbersome "out-of-wedlock" - though it seems like a euphemism piled on a euphemism for bastardy. But that perfectly useful term has been co-opted for other uses. Continue.]

Murray compares the top tenth and bottom tenth (overclass and underclass, in his terms) of white women born at the end of the Baby Boom and the beginning of Gen-X. The top fraction, college graduates with family incomes over $100,000, had an out-of-wedlock birthrate barely over 1%. The bottom fraction, with less than high school education making under $20,000 per year, had nearly half of their kids (44.5%) unmarried. Murray sees this gap as confirmation of the point he and Richard Herrnstein made in The Bell Curve that there is a growing gap in all aspects of life between the top and bottom classes.

And, Murray says, that was then, when the white out-of-wedlock birthrate was only 11%. Murray estimates that the current white underclass has an out-of-wedlock birthrate of perhaps 70%, while the comparable figure for the overclass can't be higher than 5%.

Industrious Revolutions Make Hardworking Households

I am working through C. A. Bayly's The Birth of the Modern World. The most interesting idea that he has introduced me to so far is that before there could be an Industrial Revolution, there had to be an "industrious revolution." This concept comes from Jan de Vries' helpfully named article from the Journal of Economic History, "The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution." De Vries argues that households in Britain and the Netherlands started working harder in the early 1700s at making things, and buying things that others had made.

To any follower of Max Weber, this sure sounds like the Protestant ethic brought to the level of the household. The people became industrious first, which created the right culture to receive - and foment - the "wave of gadgets" that the subsequent Industrial Revolution made and put to use.

De Vries goes on to suggest that now we are in a second industrious revolution as the average middle class household has all its members over about 15 in the labor force. I have to think about whether these two developments are really parallel.

Still, I think the idea of a cultural industrious revolution in (Protestant) households coming first and creating the market for a structural industrial revolution is a rich and helpful idea.

Marriage-Go-Round Conclusion: Engaging the Fight

Andrew Cherlin concludes The Marriage-Go-Round with this claim:

“I would agree that, at its best, the two parent family is hard to beat for child rearing. Stable, low-conflict families with two biological or adoptive parents provide better environments for children, on average, than do other living arrangements. The problem is that most people see marriage in a different light these days. They view it as a private relationship centered on the needs of adults for love and companionship. The postmodern, relationship-based view of marriage has carried the day.” (193)

I disagree.

Some people accept and promote the relationship-centered view of marriage. More people accept and promote the conjugal view of marriage, which sees marriage a society's main institution for raising children - which in turn gives most people their primary project in life. There are many people in the middle. They accept both views - marriage is to make the couple happy and marriage is to raise kids - without really thinking about the potential conflict.

What we have, then, is a competition between a small left and a larger right for the hearts and minds of the majority in the middle. This competition goes on in many venues. The legal fights over divorce, adoption, same-sex marriage, and the coming fight over polygamy are the most public face of this competition, but not the most important. The most important arena for the competition over the meaning of marriage comes within each marriage, and each couple who are considering marriage.

I think this is a fair fight.

Marriage-Go-Round 4: Instability Hurts Kids

Andrew Cherlin's main point in The Marriage-Go-Round is that Americans should slow down in starting relationships, so that we will not be as likely to end them. Children are hurt each time adults come and go from their households.

One of the most interesting empirical points Cherlin makes comes from a study he did with Paula Fomby. They found that “for each partner who had entered or left the household, the odds that the adolescent had stolen something, skipped school, gotten drunk, or done something similar rose by 12 percent” (191). He is most of them still didn’t do these things, but the risk increases, and some kids succumb to the danger.

Marriage-Go-Round 3: The M Factor

The M factor in American life is that we move a great deal. Andrew Cherlin thinks that this much movement may contribute to why our marriages and cohabitations break up so much. He cites Robert Baller and Kelly Richardson’s county-level data showing a strong correlation between moving, divorce, and suicide. I agree with Cherlin's view that American internal migration reflects more a search for economic opportunity than a general cultural "restlessness."

Americans move more than Europeans do, pulling up roots and starting anew. We don't think of moving from state to state as "migration," since it is all done within the U.S. The United States is so much larger than any European country, though, that even if they had the same level of internal migration that we do, it would disrupt their families less.

A few years ago I had in my family class a German woman who was in Kentucky as an au pair for an American family. At the end of the term I asked her to compare German and American families. One striking thing that she had noticed was that in both places, people she knew reported that their cousins lived far away; however, in Germany "far away" was an hour's drive, while in the U.S. "far away" meant an eight-hour drive.

Regular Churchgoers Support Torture the Most. This is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

The Pew Forum found that half of regular churchgoers think that torture is often or sometimes justified. 60% of evangelicals agree.

Torture expert Darius Rejali found that people who are likely to support or commit torture are loyal to institutions. If the leaders of the institution say torture is necessary, the institutional loyalists are likely to accept that.

Much of my own research has shown that the core of most churches are institutional loyalists. They are the people most likely to be regular churchgoers.

Therefore, the leaders of the church, especially the evangelical church, need to say loud and clear that torture is wrong, un-Christian, un-American, and good loyal church goers should not torture.

Scissors

I am not sure where this came from, but I like it.

Marriage-Go-Round 2: American Marriages vs. Euro Kids

Andrew Cherlin contrasts U.S. and European approaches to marriage. One strong finding is that the U.S. is much more concerned about marriage, while the Europeans have more regulations on reproduction.

The intense debates that we have about the nature of marriage, including homosexual marriage and polygamy, are just not repeated with the same intensity in Europe. Many European nations have adopted same-sex marriage or civil union laws. Indeed, their civil union laws have turned into a whole "marriage lite" category that is mostly used by heterosexuals. Polygamists have begun to use European civil union laws to validate their unions, as well.

On the other hand, European law is more oriented toward children. Many European countries provide money for child expenses, day care, and maternity and paternity leave - a fact often mentioned in U.S. family policy debates. What is less well known is that most European legal codes are much more restrictive than American law about "assisted reproductive technology" - sperm banks, in vitro fertilization, and the whole panoply of high-tech baby making. American states, by constrast, regulate the fertility industry very lightly. There is not likely to be a European "octomom."

I read this difference a little differently than Cherlin does. I think we emphasize marriage because it is the most reliable, most individualized, and most portable institution for raising children. The more parents raise kids, the less society has to. Europeans, on the other hand, rely on the state more for many functions, including quite a bit of child rearing. Thus, the state regulates who can make children more closely, since the state will do more of the raising. But the Europeans care less about who marries whom because they don't rely on married couples to do most of the raising of the next generation - if there is one.

Marriage-Go-Round 1

I am reading Andrew Cherlin's The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. Cherlin is a big name in family sociology, and this is the book he says he has been thinking of writing for a long time. His main concern is why and how American family patterns are different from European patterns.

Cherlin's opening claim is interesting: we are strongly committed to marriage, like the southern Europeans, and we are strongly committed to individualism, like the northern Europeans.

Hence, the marriage-go-round. We keep marrying and remarrying for the family, but also breaking up for ourselves.

Important Family News: Gruntled Child #1 is 21 Today

Megblum was born 21 years ago today. Mrs. G. and I were delighted with her then, and are delighted with her now.

Go conquer worlds, young lady!

Marry in Your Twenties

Everyone in the pro-marriage racket has been promoting Mark Regnerus' fine piece in the Washington Post, "Say Yes. What Are You Waiting For?" I agree entirely. I see my students putting off the thought of marriage right after college because they think they should get all their ducks in a row first. And they have lots of ducks.

The best line from Regnerus:
"Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you're fully formed."

The Kentucky Derby - High Holy Day of our Civil Religion

Yesterday I began my quest to see the top 50 things that every Kentuckian should see before 50 with everyone's number one choice, the Kentucky Derby. I passed up the wild-youth infield and the horse-serious paddock to be in the land of fancy hats.

I got a real seat, albeit the Seat Farthest Out.

I get a good look at the final turn in an early race.

We were well situated for the start of the Derby.

Still, what I spent hours doing was walking through the crowds and lounging in the congregation points, watching all classes of Derby-goers go by.

Many people enjoyed $9 juleps. I was surrounded by cigar smoke, coming from women and men. And gambling all day long, in every level and corner of Churchill Downs. None of those things were my cup of tea, but I appreciate them as part of the ritual. And the gambling pays most of the bills.

What I liked were the hats. I started to take pictures, but there were literally thousands of great ones. I gave up and just appreciated. Derby hats seem to me to be a rare and innocent pleasure.

Derby Day

My quest to see the 50 things a Kentuckian should see before 50 begins at the top of everyone's list: the Kentucky Derby. I will send a report hereafter.

Mothers and Others Conclusion: Grandmothers as Allomothers

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has done some of her most interesting work promoting the "grandmother hypothesis." There is a puzzle why women have menopause long before life ends. Even in prehistoric societies, there would have been lots of grandmothers. The ingenious hypothesis is that women stop bearing kids early so that they can help raise their grandchildren. Since human babies take so much longer to mature than other animals, alloparenting (nurture by other than mothers and fathers) by grandparents would be a huge help in the survival and lives of children. And of all grandparents, the mother's mother is, other things equal, most likely to invest deeply in helping her daughter with the grandchildren.

The puzzle that Hrdy addresses in Mothers and Others comes from the widely accepted finding by seminal anthropologist George Peter Murdock that most societies were patrilocal. Even if a child's mother's mother was alive and ready to help, if mother and father moved in with his family in another village, her willingness to help would be to no avail. However, Hrdy reports, when Helen Alvarez re-examined Murdock's data, she found that the situation was not so cut-and-dried. Even if a society was normally patrilocal, often the new parents would stay with her mother at first when the first grandchild was born, to learn the ropes. And in other societies, (including our own) it was common for an expectant mother to go back to her mother's house to have the baby, then come back to her husband's house some months later. Citing other studies, Hrdy also reported that in polygamous societies, if a man married sisters, their mother was likely to move near them.

It does take many helpers and many hands besides mother's and father's to raise a child. And the most useful other hands, the best alloparents, are grandmothers.

Mothers and Others Conclusion: Grandmothers as Allomothers

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has done some of her most interesting work promoting the "grandmother hypothesis." There is a puzzle why women have menopause long before life ends. Even in prehistoric societies, there would have been lots of grandmothers. The ingenious hypothesis is that women stop bearing kids early so that they can help raise their grandchildren. Since human babies take so much longer to mature than other animals, alloparenting (nurture by other than mothers and fathers) by grandparents would be a huge help in the survival and lives of children. And of all grandparents, the mother's mother is, other things equal, most likely to invest deeply in helping her daughter with the grandchildren.

The puzzle that Hrdy addresses in Mothers and Others comes from the widely accepted finding by seminal anthropologist George Peter Murdock that most societies were patrilocal. Even if a child's mother's mother was alive and ready to help, if mother and father moved in with his family in another village, her willingness to help would be to no avail. However, Hrdy reports, when Helen Alvarez re-examined Murdock's data, she found that the situation was not so cut-and-dried. Even if a society was normally patrilocal, often the new parents would stay with her mother at first when the first grandchild was born, to learn the ropes. And in other societies, (including our own) it was common for an expectant mother to go back to her mother's house to have the baby, then come back to her husband's house some months later. Citing other studies, Hrdy also reported that in polygamous societies, if a man married sisters, their mother was likely to move near them.

It does take many helpers and many hands besides mother's and father's to raise a child. And the most useful other hands, the best alloparents, are grandmothers.

Mothers and Others 4: Nuclear Families and Alloparenting

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy makes a strong case that humans needed to develop alloparenting – parenting by others besides mother and father. Therefore, she says, mothers can’t depend on any one family structure, but need to be flexible to get help wherever they need to. I agree with this conclusion. However, Hrdy goes on to say that the nuclear family is not an optimal structure because it can’t provide enough care and resources that demanding and slow-growing human babies need.

I think Hrdy’s criticism misses how nuclear families work. A married mother and father are the core of the unit that cares for children, but they are rarely all of it. Even in our highly mobile society, where couples in the middle class often live far from their extended families, nuclear families get lots of help from grandparents, aunts and uncles, and more distant kin.

A nuclear family is not a self-sufficient unit. Not in theory, and certainly not in practice. Instead, when a mother and father marry they bring together two lines of support for the benefit of their children. This is one of the great advantages that children in two-parent families have over single-parent kids: they have two sets of grandparents and two sets of aunts and uncles.

Mothers do need to be flexible. They do need to be ready to take help from many sources, especially if they are not married. But the nuclear family still remains the best structure for parenting, and for mobilizing the most reliable network of alloparenting. Mothers need to work hard to create some alternative network if they are unable to make a nuclear family.

Mothers and Others 3: Alloparenting Means Faster Babies

Humans beings are very slow to mature. We are the slowest of all primates, and probably the slowest of all animals. In other slow-maturing species, that means a long gap between babies. But not us. We can have new babies long before the earlier ones are mature because mothers get so much help from others.

In other apes, mothers rarely let go of their babies, not even to let their sisters or mothers hold or help, and certainly not the fathers of the babies. Human beings stand out for how much "alloparenting" - care by others - we do and accept. In foraging bands, fathers normally share in child care very extensively. This makes human mothers, especially in societies in which alloparenting is normal, confident that they can trust their babies to have extensive contact with other people.

Sarah Hrdy's main concern is to explain how intersubjectivity developed among humans. Alloparenting, she things, is the key difference. Mothers in many mammals, especially other primates, have reason to learn how to read the faces, noises, movements, and even minds of their babies, and babies need to develop similar skills in reading their mothers. But in humans, who are often in the care of "other mothers," it would be hugely valuable for babies to learn how to read other people, too, people with whom they did not share the whole range of smells and sounds that mothers and their babies do.

Hrdy reports that kids attached to their moms are better fed, but kids also attached to others were more empathetic, dominant, independent, and achievement oriented. This is an immediate fruit of a society, and species, trusting enough for alloparenting.

Mothers and Others 2: Gendered Mind Reading

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, in Mothers and Others, needs to figure out how humans developed intersubjectivity or a "theory of mind" - that is, the ability to understand what other people are thinking and feeling. She says that there are two main theories. One, that mothers needed to develop a capacity to read the minds of their pre-verbal babies. Two, that people needed to develop a "Machiavellian mind" to understand and anticipte the plans of their rivals. To these she adds a third strong motivation: babies need to understand what their caregivers are thinking and feeling. As Hrdy puts it, a baby's first job is to get mom addicted to nurturing, and that requires that babies need to know how to read mom.

I was surprised that Hrdy did not emphasize how gendered these theories are. When she names the chief proponents of the mother's mind-reading theory and the Machiavellian mind theory it is easy to see that the former are women and the latter are men. Hrdy notes regularly that as a mother she is very attentive to how babies interact with mothers.

I think these gender differences in theories of mind reading strengthen the case that they are true. If men, women, and children all have strong and distinct reasons to do something, that makes me more convinced that it is really true. Moreover, the different kinds of mind reading complement one another. My focus is on mate selection and marriage. Women select men who can provide resources; men who can anticipate rivals and cooperate with allies should be better at getting resources. Men select women who will be good nurturers; women who can understand what their families need even when the need has not been said in words would be better at nurturing.

I would add one more reason that humans need intersubjectivity. Women need to read whether men are really committed before they take the great risk of having children with them. And men, to a lesser extent, need to be confident that the women they marry will stay faithful to them. Women rely on mind reading more than men do, and often expect men to do the same. This leads to many miscommunications in courtship and marriage.

Nonetheless, human beings - women, men, children - have a strong need to be able to understand what other people are thinking and feeling, even without words. Whether, as Hrdy thinks, this capacity evolved or if we acquired it some other way, it is still a skill useful enough to keep. Which is reason enough for human beings to do it more, and more effectively, than any other creatures.

Mothers and Others 1

This week I will be blogging on Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Her concern is figuring out how human beings evolved the capacity to share childrearing - what she calls alloparenting - with others who are not mother or father to the baby. The "it takes a village to raise a child" strategy is very helpful for humans, and very different from what is normal to the Great Apes.

Hrdy argues that empathy and giving are hard-wired in us. We can see from brain scans that people find helping others inherently rewarding. One of the most striking findings that she reports is that people are more cooperative than economists assume: in a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma game, 42% cooperate anyway. In multiple iterations of the game, when we can see who is generous and who is not, the cooperative people tend to get even more trusting and cooperative.

A crucial point that I take from these experiments is that we want to be cooperative. We are very sensitive to who else is cooperative, and whether the social environment makes cooperation normal. If the people we most depend on are reliable, and most people we deal with are, too, then we tend to be cooperative and trusting in new situations because that is the kind of person we want to be - even though we might get suckered.

On the other hand, children who are betrayed by adults have a much harder time trusting and cooperating.

Presbyterian Gay Ordination Fails Again

The vote was closer this time, but outcome was the same as it has been the last three times. Will that settle the issue? Of course not. Look for a wave of overtures to the next General Assembly to try exactly the same thing again.

If we adopted the new Form of Government, we would not have to tear up the whole church every two years over this issue.

Monkey Fighting

How do you edit a famous vulgarity to make is safe for work (or TV)?

Probably not this way.

Race Differences in Men's Nurturing Hormones?

Another interesting possibility that comes from juxtaposed reading.

Edin and Kefalas, in Promises I Can Keep, report that black welfare moms are less likely to be beaten by their boyfriends than their white and Hispanic counterparts because the black women are less likely to live with the fathers of their children.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, in Mothers and Others, reports that men become better fathers by sharing the hormones of pregnant women and newborns. The sustained physical contact makes men's prolactin levels rise (a nurturing hormone) and their testosterone levels to fall.

Perhaps one of the reasons that poor black men are so much less likely to be daily providers for their children is that they don't live with mothers and babies enough to get the nurturing hormonal changes that help make other men into providing fathers.

Leaving the White House - for the Kids

Ellen Moran, the White House Communications Director, is leaving to become chief of staff to the Commerce Secretary Gary Locke. The Commerce job is no easy sinecure, but is not the life-eating total institution that the White House is.

Why is she leaving this dream job?

"She met with Locke twice in recent weeks, and said she decided that the role was a better fit for her professionally and personally in the long run. She and her husband have a daughter and a son both under age 4."

I think it speaks well of her priorities that she can make this decision. Not everyone would make the same call, nor should they. But if everyone, even those at the very top, can keep their family's needs in an appropriately high place on their priority list, the world would be a better place.

Ellen Moran is still having it all. Just a little bit less of it right now.

Working Class Family Patterns vs. Middle Class and Poor

This is a thought inspired by putting together Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods with Edin and Kefalas' Promises I Can Keep. Lareau found that the middle class tend to raise their kids one way, while the working class and poor raise theirs another way. She thought there might be a child rearing difference between the working class and the poor, but it didn't turn out that way.

Edin and Kefalas found that poor women see children as a stage on the way to marriage, which the authors implicitly contrast with the middle class norm of marriage as a step toward children. They did not study working class families in this ethnography.

So if the working class does not differ from the poor in how they raise their children, how do they differ from the poor in family life? My guess: the working class are more likely to marry before the kids are born, even if not before they are conceived. The working class is like the poor in child rearing, but like the middle class in marriage.

Long-Term Divorce Effects: A Testimony

The blog Confessions of a Community College Dean has an affecting personal appreciation and eulogy for the blogger's divorced father. This is not science, but powerful testimony. Some excerpts:

I remember vividly the day they told us they were divorcing. I can describe where everybody sat. It was the summer before I turned 11.

The years after that were harder. I was the latchkey older kid, so I had to watch my brother until Mom got home. ... We did the 'joint custody' thing, which is tough in the teen years when you'd really rather be with your friends. To this day, I get a little weird sometimes around packing.

Now he's gone, and I'm a father. ... Much of what I try to do as a father is defined, in part, by awareness of what he did. Having seen the 'divorced dad' thing up close, I want no part of it. And while God knows I've got my flaws and my blind spots, defeatism is not one of them. I will not teach my kids to settle. To deal, yes. To settle, no. There's a difference.

College Drinking and Poor Teen Sex: An Analogy

We are talking about teen welfare mothers in the family class, using Edin and Kefalas' Promises I Can Keep. The authors quickly dispose of the first two myths about teen pregnancy - that poor teens would not get pregnant so often if they had more sex education or if they had more access to birth control technology. That is not the problem. The teen moms in this study know perfectly well that sex can lead to babies, and they have birth control technology, which they use when they don't want to get pregnant.

The real difference between the teen welfare moms and my middle class students, or the middle class do-gooders (like me) who want to prevent poor teen pregnancy is that the poor teens don't really care if they get pregnant or not, while the middle class people who plan their lives, do. The Promises I Can Keep moms said that half of their children were "neither planned nor unplanned." Having a baby was not something they were trying to do, but it would not derail any life plan they had.

To students on the elite college track, this attitude is dumbfounding. I was trying to think of an analogy that might make this calculation seems more intelligible. This is what came to me.

On any given weekend, a sizable minority of college students will not drink at all, a small minority will get drunk on purpose, and another group will drink and may end up drunk. This last group might be as many as half. On this campus, nearly all of these students will have received extensive education on the effects of alcohol. Some take this information and choose to be abstinent. Some take this information and choose to be moderate drinkers. A few ignore it utterly and aim to get drunk. All students, likewise, have several kinds of "drunkness prevention technology" available to them. Some use it religiously, some ignore it.

I am most interested here in the middle group. They know drinking can lead to drunkenness. They know several ways that drunkenness can be avoided, some of them foolproof. They go to a weekend party and they don't really care if they get drunk or not. Their drunkness was "neither planned nor unplanned." They did not make a plan one way or the other because getting drunk or not would not derail any life plan they had.

For poor teen moms, having a baby is not in itself a bad thing; that is not the way they measure their character. Being a bad mom would be a bad thing, but they don't plan to be bad moms. For college drinkers, getting drunk is not in itself a bad thing; that is not the way they measure their character. Being an alcoholic would be a bad thing, but they don't plan to be alcoholics.

Bagram is Obama's First Really Bad Decision

Candidate Obama attacked the shameful policy of the Bush administration to hold prisoners at Guatanamo in Cuba with no charges, no lawyers, no due process, no habeas corpus. President Obama's first act on his first day in office was to close down Guatanamo.

Now, though, the Obama administration is planning to hold prisoners in the even more remote Bagram air base in Afghanistan under the same shameful "black hole" rules.

I strongly supported President Obama and still do. Nearly everything that the new administration has done have been a step forward for the nation, and a relief to me personally. Because I support Obama, I think it is my duty to criticize wrong things that my guy does.

The no-rules prison at Bagram is very wrong.

The F Word

Passed on to me about a student's little brother:

After giving Mom her Mother's Day gifts...
Evan: Don't you think you need to say the "f" word?
Mom: ...Um...what?
Evan: "Fank you?"

Sports are McDonaldized Cultivation

Annette Lareau, in Unequal Childhoods, compares the child rearing style of middle class and working class parents. She found that working class parents tend to make sure their kids are fed, clothed, housed, and made to go to school. After that, they can choose what to do. Lareau calls this the "natural growth" method of child rearing. Middle class parents, by contrast, tend to get their kids into all kinds of organized activities to develop each child's talents. Lareau calls this "concerted cultivation."

Centre College students are overwhelmingly the product of concerted cultivation. Indeed, the whole elite college track is driven by kids who try to do very well at a wide range of formal activities, and the parents who pay, drive, comfort, and push them through all those activities.

Of all the types of concerted cultivation, sports were the most common among my students. In part this reflects what the kids are interested in, and what the parents are interested in. Sports are also pursued because they are the easiest to arrange. The standard sports are already understood and organized in most places. The infrastructure is there. Moreover, sports teams are an efficient way to get kids in a structured activity that will develop their talents. Sports produce highly calculable results to tell exactly how well your talent cultivation is going. Sports have predictable seasons, schedules, rules, outcomes, and progressions. And sports allow you to control the risks you face through safety technology, and control the time you spend through a dozen forms of clocking.

These four elements - efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control through technology - are the four marks of what George Ritzer calls "McDonaldization." They are the tools through which a formerly disorganized and organic activity - in this case, physical play - can be rationalized. Rationalization is the master principle of modernity, says Max Weber. It is a core idea of sociology.

Sports are the most McDonaldized form of concerted cultivation.

The Rich and Social Problems

People from all social classes produce social problems.

Still, most of the social problems - crime, addiction, delinquency, family disorder - are caused by the poorer half of the population.

I think it is true that people in the poorer half of the population are more disordered and problem causing. One big reason for this is that leading a disordered and problem-causing life tends to leave you poor, no matter how you started out.

There is another reason that the rich create fewer social problems. The rich can use money to treat their personal problems and to compensate for the consequences of their personal problems. The rich can use money to keep their personal problems from becoming social problems.

Paying Taxes Is Patriotic

Today is Tax Day.

This is the day when all Americans should celebrate the services that we have hired the government to provide. I have already eaten food that was safe and regulated, sit in a house that was built to code, use electric appliances built to standard, and wear clothes made cheaper by trade agreements. Soon I will walk down city sidewalks, cross a state highway, past dormitories built with government-backed bonds, to teach students who can be at Centre College because of their federal loans.

But before I go to work, I will put up the flag and thank all those who served in our armed forces to keep me and my family free to enjoy all of this and much more.

Paying taxes is a patriotic duty that I can do with a grateful heart.

The Smart One and the Other

I have been reading student journals from my family class. We discussed birth order and sibling competition this time. We studied Frank Sulloway's theory that children are in a Darwinian competition for parental attention. They have to differentiate themselves from their siblings. The first-borns get first choice, so they tend to try to monopolize the things that the parents value. My students are overwhelmingly first-borns or only children. Since Centre is a highly academic place, we tend to get first-borns who emphasized academic learning.

I have also been hearing about the niches chosen by the later-born children. I knew many of the options - sports, art, music, religion, service, or sheer rebellion.

Listening to the women, though, I have heard several times that sisters sometimes differentiate into "the smart one" and "the pretty one."

This made me wonder what the male equivalent would be. The closest I can get is "the smart one" and "the funny one." But the parallel is not as common or exact.

So far this is just an educated guess.

The Kentucky 25

Today is my 49th birthday. I had previously asked readers to suggest 50 things that every Kentuckian should do or see by 50. I thank you for the many excellent suggestions I received.

Today I am going to post the top 25 suggestions. In the course of the year I will add another 25, based on what people suggest and what I learn about in my travels. I am going to try to do them all before this day next year.

I picked the top ten based on intrinsic excellence and national or world impact as a symbol of Kentucky. This means there has to be some horses, bourbon, coal, and basketball. There should also be some tobacco, but I do not have an excellent nominee for that category.

Kentucky Derby
Mammoth Cave
UK basketball game at Rupp Arena
Maker’s Mark factory
Lincoln Shrine
Fort Knox - Patton Museum
Louisville Slugger Museum
Red River Gorge & Natural Bridge
Abbey of Gethsemani
Van Lear coal museum (& Loretta Lynn) [or something like this]

The next ten are places are perhaps a step down, but big in Kentucky:

My Old Kentucky Home
Shakertown
Keeneland
Moonbow at Cumberland Falls
Museum of the American Quilters Society
Southeast Christian
Creation Museum
Berea College
Cane Ridge revival site
Ashland - Henry Clay's home

I will round out this first list with five food suggestions.

Hot Brown at the Brown Hotel
Kentucky Fried Chicken at the (reproduced) original store in Corbin
Ale-8-One at the plant in Winchester
Moonlite Bar-B-Q in Owensboro
Miguel’s Pizza at Natural Bridge

I have also had suggestions for five or ten great Kentucky texts to read, a category I am mulling. I will revisit these ideas, and your other suggestions, in future posts.

Happy Easter

The Gruntleds enjoyed the Easter service of First Presbyterian Church, Nashville today. It was solid, well done, and completely traditional -- just what we went there for. Seeing an Easter service full of Southern Presbyterians is the most reliable way that I can think of to find the core of the American bourgeoisie at its best. Go stewardship! Go inner-worldly asceticism!

Godot Day

In college I read and acted in the strange but moving play, "Waiting for Godot." The best analysis I read of it held that it took place on Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter - endlessly.

That day is today. Somewhere, Didi and Gogo are waiting, waiting, for God(ot).

Drug Standard: First, Don't Harm Others Much

Drug Week, Last Part

We have tried to prohibit a broad range of drugs that some people like to take. Some drugs are so dangerous to the people who take them and to the rest of society that the attempt to prohibit or very tightly regulate them is worth doing.

We have also learned the hard way that some drugs are so popular with a large minority of the population that we simply can't prohibit them. Alcohol has been a recreational drug of choice in every society that figured out how to make it from prehistoric times. It causes some terrible social problems directly, and is involved in nearly all other social problems indirectly. Almost every family has an alcoholic in the family tree within a few generations' span. Tobacco is a hugely addictive drug that holds a quarter of the population at any one moment, and has had a grip on more than half the population over time. Tobacco is the leading killer in America.

I take it as a premise that it would be socially impossible to ban alcohol or tobacco. Thus, the best social option is to regulate and tax it. Heavily.

My first standard for a social policy on drugs is "Is it worse than alcohol for society?" When people use it regularly, including that minority who will become heavy users, is the danger they pose to society no worse than the danger we already face from alcohol use? Given how dangerous alcohol is, that is a pretty easy standard for most drugs to meet.

My second standard for social policy on drugs is "Is it worse than tobacco for its users?" When people take an addictive drug, including that minority who become heavily addicted, is the danger they pose to themselves greater than the destruction we already face from tobacco use? Given how destructive tobacco is, that is a pretty easy standard for most drugs to meet.

Not Sure About Narcotics

Drug Week, Part 4

Painkillers derived from opium, like morphine, are very useful drugs. But the natural narcotics, and their synthesized cousins, like heroin, have the worst sociological effects when they are abused. Narcotics as so dangerous because they are so addictive.

Yet when people are high on narcotics they are usually not dangerous to others. On this scale, cocaine is worse than heroin. Heroin and its substitutes generally make people useless, but not dangerous. Heroin addicts are dangerous when they are not high, but will do anything to get high again. Heroin addicts would not be dangerous to others if they had a steady supply of heroin. Some of them are even semi-functional.

Still, heroin is so addictive, and does gradually destroy its addicts.

So how should it be treated? I don't have an excellent answer here. I think full legalization, regulation, and taxation is not enough social control. But full prohibition is not quite appropriate, and isn't working very well. What we need, I think, is a new legal category, something like a voluntary ward of the state, for people who choose to be heroin addicts. They would get a steady supply of the drug, which would be regulated for purity in the usual way. They would be kept from crime to support their habit. In exchange, they would be required to do socially useful work in their limited number of functional hours. And addicts would be given every help to quit.

This is not a great solution, but it is better, more proportionate, than what we are doing now.

Some Drugs Should Stay Illegal

Drug Week, Part 3

Crack is really bad. Cocaine makes people act crazy and dangerous to others. Meth destroys you. The stimulants, in general, seem to have really bad consequences for the people who take them and to those around them.

I take a stimulant every day, as do most Americans, in my morning coffee. Caffeine is a mild stimulant when taken in organic doses - the amount in a handful of coffee beans, for example. I expect that if I snorted purified caffeine, bad things would happen. The same is true of the other stimulants. South American Indians have been chewing coca leaves for ages. East Africans chew a leaf called khat, with similar stimulant effects. In organic doses, stimulants can be helpful.

Chemistry makes it possible to extract the purified stimulant and take it in unnatural and dangerous doses. They are also hugely addictive. And the chemical stimulants, like meth, are scary in the effects of their high and in how quickly they destroy addicts.

Legalize the Hallucinogens, Too

Drug Week, Part 2

While we are reforming the drug laws, I think we should legalize the hallucinogens, too.

I don't like them either. I like staying in reality.

Nonetheless, the people on hallucinogens are rarely dangerous to others, and the drugs themselves do not seem to be addictive. They don't, as far as I have read, have many other side effects. Some drugs that do seem dangerous, like PCP, are sometimes classed as hallucinogens. If we ever get down to cases we can argue the safety of each drug.

Let the FDA regulate them for quality. Tax them. Use police resources for something else.

Marijuana is No Worse Than Bourbon

I think the time may finally be ripe to legalize marijuana.

Let me say clearly that I do not use it. I think it makes people act stupid. I see no appeal in it personally. And my kids would still be in big trouble if they used it.

I feel pretty much the same way about bourbon.

The nation tried a great national experiment in prohibiting alcohol. It failed. Kentucky is now proud of making bourbon. The nation is now trying a great experiment in prohibiting marijuana. It failed. Kentucky already produces a great deal of marijuana. If it were legal, the state would be proud of producing that, too.

I think "sin taxes" are a good idea. When we legalized, regulated, and taxed alcohol production, the product got safer, most of the criminals were driven out of the business, and the state got lots of revenue. The same would happen with marijuana.

Legalize pot now. And tax it hard.

Bright Idea at the Posse Retreat

I just got back from the Posse Plus Retreat. Posse is a scholarship program that sends a group of students from the same city (Boston, in Centre College's case) to college together as a mutual support group. Each spring all the posses (there is one group admitted each year) host a retreat for a larger group of students, faculty, and staff. It is always a great retreat, full of good talk, bonding, hilarity, and usually one Bright Idea. One that seems bright to me, anyway.

Right now the college offers the Centre Commitment. We promise that the college will make it possible for each student to study abroad, have an internship, and graduate in four years. If we fail, the student can have another year, on us.

We came up with a possible fourth plank for the Centre Commitment: We promise that the college will make it possible for a student to graduate with no more than $10,000 of debt.

This is just in the workshop stage, and no one with the power to make it so has bought into it yet. I think, though, that it would be a popular idea, and fits with the spirit of the rest of the Centre Commitment.

I will let you know if this notion bears fruit.

The Kentucky 50 by 50

I enlist your help in making a list of the 50 things in Kentucky that every Kentuckian should see or do.

In ten days I will be 49. I have lived in Kentucky for the last 19 years. I have done a few things that I think all Kentuckians should do -- been to Lincoln's birthplace, attended a race at Keeneland, been to the state capitol, eaten at Moonlite Bar-B-Q. Still, there are many I have not. I have never been to the Kentucky Derby. I have never really explored the Red River Gorge. I have not been to the Louisville Slugger Museum.

So I propose to post a list of the 50 things I want to see and do in Kentucky before I turn 50 in 2010. Please send me your suggestions.

I will post the list on my birthday (April 13). I expect the debate about the list will be interesting.

Is a Social Imaginary a Habitus?

Charles Taylor describes a social imaginary as a repertory of practices that a people use to make sense of their social world. This sounds like what Pierre Bourdieu means by a habitus. I think Taylor is contrasting a social imaginary, which ordinary people hold and act on, with a social theory, which intellectuals use to evaluate the world. Bourdieu contrasts a habitus with, among other things, a social structure imagined as a permanent thing, rather than a practice that people enact.

I think Taylor and Bourdieu start from different points, but converge on something quite similar - and quite useful in understanding how society is actually lived and made.

Viewing Society Objectively

Charles Taylor, in Modern Social Imaginaries, has clarified an issue that is always a problem for me in teaching a sociological view of society.

It is normal for people to think of society from their personal perspective, of the people we know and the institutions that we interact with. We know there is a big world beyond what we know, but we tend to view it as like what we know, multiplied by millions. One of the great gifts that sociology brings is the ability to see that there are many kinds of people who are not like us. Sociology lets us see the big picture of society. Indeed, I think modern societies are so big and so complex that they could not function without sociology. Sociology provides the reflexive knowledge that makes it possible to make order in huge complex societies, as well as to understand order in huge complex societies.

I understand the big picture overview. James Scott's excellent book Seeing Like a State captures this sense of what it means to see society as a whole. Individuals disappear; the state planner deals with whole categories of people - sexes, races, classes, regions, religions, etc. Seeing like a state is, in a sense, one subset of seeing like a sociologist, of having a sociological imagination of society as a whole.

However, it is alienating to only see society from this large category, bird's-eye perspective. If you are the state manager or the equivalent (a captain of industry, a news publisher, a general) the state-level view is empowering. On the other hand, if you are not, if you are among the millions being managed, the state-level view is the opposite of empowering.

Some sociologists focus instead on how society is an open field for collective action. They study social movements. They study how ordinary people band together to fight the established powers and change the world. Indeed, such sociologists encourage, join, even lead social movements.

Sociology as a discipline, therefore steps back from society to view it both as a highly structured field of order, and a highly fluid field of resistance to, and reshaping of, that order.

Charles Taylor says that these two views are flip sides of the same coin of the modern social imaginary. In premodern societies, the society, the nation, the kingdom was one because it was anchored in a point or act that transcended ordinary time. God appointed the king, who unified the kingdom. The nation existed from time immemorial and embodied its primordial rights.

Modern societies, by contrast, are understood to have been made by "the people" in ordinary time. The state began to gather information to run this new kind of secular (meaning "in time") society to tax it, arrange its military security, create its representative institutions, and do the thousand and one things that states now do. If that is all that had happened in making modern states, we would only have, and only need, the "seeing like a state" view of society.

But modern societies also developed a counter-perspective on society, and with it a place for making counter-actions: the public sphere. The public sphere is the place in which social movements are made. They counter and balance the state.

Both the view from perspective of the state, and the view from the perspective of the public sphere - the view from the coffee house, if you will - are ways of viewing society objectively.

The Public Sphere is Secular

Charles Taylor's Modern Social Imaginaries is concerned primarily with how modern society created three new spheres in which people could act: the economy, the public, and "the people." All three were created by imagining them as separate from, and a check on, the polity - the state, as we now think of it.

Premodern Europeans already thought of a sphere separate from the state which acted as a partial check on it: the church. The public sphere, Taylor suggests, is analogous to the church. But there is an important difference: the public sphere is secular. Taylor does not mean that the public sphere has to be separated from God, nor that the people acting in it must be separated from religion. Rather, he means that the public sphere is a place created in time by the people (some of them, anyway) acting collectively. And the way the people interact with the polity, and the economy, and the democratic machinery of the people as sovereign, all take place in time with reference to the order of this world.

The time of the public sphere is homogeneous, profane time. We may think of religious time or eternity as also existing, but the business of the public sphere is conducted in this world's time. And the business of the public spheres of other societies are also conducted in time - in the same time and in the same relation to time.

The modern public sphere makes the "public opinion" of the modern social imaginary essentially secular in the way it is made.

Modern Social Imaginaries 1

I am working my way through Charles Taylor's Modern Social Imaginaries. I am thinking of using this book in my Macrosociological Theory class. Early in the book, Taylor illuminates one of the great problems in teaching social theory: it is an intellectual's way of looking at the world. Most people do not live their lives thinking about the theory underlying even their own actions, much less the order of society as a whole.

Thus, Taylor proposes the idea of a "social imaginary." Ordinary people do not think in terms of theory, but they do think. They do things for reasons that make sense of their world. Moreover, what they try to do is limited by what they imagine will be an effective way to act. A social imaginary is a shared notion of how the world works and what actions make sense in it. Doing those actions, if they tend to work, makes the whole imaginary seem more true, more legitimate.

In teaching social theory I am initiating students into the small circle of social theorists, at least for a time. Yet they - we - are already participants in the social imaginary that we theorize about and with.

Taylor says that one thing that is distinctive and important about modern social imaginaries is that they do incorporate some elements of explicit social theory. The great modern revolutions, especially the American and the French, enacted theoretical ideas that had been debated and thought through by intellectuals in discourse with other educated participants in making social life. Thereafter, the social imaginary included some theories about individuals, equality, and liberty.

When we are studying social theories, one of the important ideas we will need to keep in mind is Taylor's theory of the not-quite-theoretical social imaginary.

Half of Kids are First-Borns

The other day I noted that a fifth of older Gen X women had no children. To complete the set, I made a rough calculation, based on Census data, of the proportion of their children in each birth order position. For women 40 to 44 in 2006, their children were distributed thus.

Onlies: 21.1%
Firsts (besides onlies): 32.1
Seconds: 32.1
Thirds: 10.5
Fourths: 2.8
Fifths and beyond: .8

What Would a Presbyterian Establishment Do Right Now?

I have been promoting rebuilding an authoritative (not authoritarian) establishment for the Presbyterian Church. The current votes in the church illustrate why we need such a thing.

The church has several amendments to the constitution before it for presbytery votes. One is the perennial attempt to remove the requirement that officers of the church be married or chaste in singleness. We keep voting on this because we have no establishment that can work out a settlement, behind the scenes and within the constitution, that will allow for the normal historic variation within the church on just how strictly each presbytery must subscribe to the constitution.

The other vote before the church has gotten much less attention than the sex amendment, but is more important in the long run. This is the proposal to adopt a new Book of Order. The proposed new book would be a general framework that could be adapted by the different presbyteries. If we adopted this new understanding of what the constitutional rules of order are for, we would not have to convulse the whole church every couple of years with a sex fight.

The Presbyterian Establishment, insofar as we have one, should come out strongly for this new kind of Book of Order. If we understood the constitution as a constitution, rather than as a rulebook, the Establishment could better function as an establishment within each presbytery, and across the whole church.