Centre at the Rally to Restore Sanity

Some 70 Centre College people, almost all of them students, went to the Rally to Restore Sanity in Washington. Adam Brown, Centre's electronic communications guy, came, too, and made this film. I think it captures our intent pretty well.

One Rally Victory: No More 'Worst Persons'

Keith Olbermann, the vitriolic liberal commentator on MSNBC, criticized Jon Stewart and the Rally to Restore Sanity as naive for criticizing cable news, left and right, as equally culpable for spreading fear and anger.

However, Olbermann later decided to drop the "Worst Persons in the World" feature of his show.

We may hope for a similar step to "take it down a notch" from the vitriolic conservative commentators on Fox.

Election Post-Mortem

I think whoever inherited the multiple disasters of 2008 was going to lose in 2010.

I am glad that we made as much progress as we did over the last two years.

The best thing about divided government is that the two parties have to work together to actually solve problems.

The special moving force in this election was anger at the party in power for not solving our economic problems fast enough. Next time, both parties will be the party in power. This should motivate them to work together.

Hooray! Election Day!

Today is the greatest holiday of democracy, Election Day.

Vote Cheerfully, please.

Political Myths 5 Through 8

Leading up to the election I have been reposting this article, ending today.

5) Businesses will hire if they get tax cuts.
Reality: A business hires the right number of employees to meet demand. Having extra cash does not cause a business to hire, but a business that has a demand for what it does will find the money to hire. Businesses want customers, not tax cuts.

6) Health care reform costs $1 trillion.
Reality: The health care reform reduces government deficits by $138 billion.

7) Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, is "going broke," people live longer, fewer workers per retiree, etc.
Reality: Social Security has run a surplus since it began, has a trust fund in the trillions, is completely sound for at least 25 more years and cannot legally borrow so cannot contribute to the deficit (compare that to the military budget!) Life expectancy is only longer because fewer babies die; people who reach 65 live about the same number of years as they used to.

8) Government spending takes money out of the economy.
Reality: Government is We, the People and the money it spends is on We, the People. Many people do not know that it is government that builds the roads, airports, ports, courts, schools and other things that are the soil in which business thrives. Many people think that all government spending is on "welfare" and "foreign aid" when that is only a small part of the government's budget.

Rally to Restore Sanity Was a Hopeful Reminder

Some seventy members of the Centre College community went to the Rally to Restore Sanity (and/or Fear) on the Mall in Washington yesterday. The crowd was huge - well beyond what the organizers had prepared for. Nonetheless, the mood was friendly, helpful, and moderate all day. The signs were not angry - many were witty, and all that I saw were properly spelled and punctuated.

Jon Stewart gave an excellent closing speech about working together, keeping a sense of proportion, and not promoting fear. Standing on a stage that framed the Capitol, he said

We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is—on the brink of catastrophe—torn by polarizing hate and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done, but the truth is we do. We work together to get things done every damn day!

The only place we don’t is here or on cable TV.

Go Sanity!

Political Myth 4: The Stimulus Didn't Work

This week I leading up to the election am reposting this article, point by point.

Reality: The stimulus worked, but was not enough. In fact, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus raised employment by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million jobs.

Political Myth 3: Obama Bailed Out the Banks

This week I am reposting this article, point by point.

Reality: While many people conflate the "stimulus" with the bank bailouts, the bank bailouts were requested by President Bush and his Treasury Secretary, former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson. (Paulson also wanted the bailouts to be "non-reviewable by any court or any agency.") The bailouts passed and began before the 2008 election of President Obama.

Political Myths 1 & 2: Obama Raised the Deficit and Raised Taxes

Each day from now to the election I am going to post an item (today, two items), from "Eight False Things the Public 'Knows' Prior to Election Day," by Dave Johnson. I believe our politics will be conducted better if we know what is truly happening and discuss it calmly.

1) President Obama tripled the deficit.
Reality: Bush's last budget had a $1.416 trillion deficit. Obama's first budget reduced that to $1.29 trillion.

2) President Obama raised taxes, which hurt the economy.
Reality: Obama cut taxes. 40% of the "stimulus" was wasted on tax cuts which only create debt, which is why it was so much less effective than it could have been.

Bad Egalitarianism at Westfield High

The AP U.S. History teachers at Westfield, a competitive public high school in suburban Washington, D.C. have banned curiosity and critical exploration. They sent a list of rules to all students, with this as Number One:

"You are only allowed to use your OWN knowledge, your OWN class notes, class handouts, your OWN class homework, or The Earth and Its Peoples textbook to complete assignments and assessments UNLESS specifically informed otherwise by your instructor.''

Students are forbidden to talk to other people, including their own parents, about the assignments. They are specifically forbidden to look things up on the internet.

Jay Matthews, the parent who brought this situation to the world's attention in the Washington Post, tried to get the teachers to explain themselves. They declined. He asked the principal. The principal declined to comment on the record, "but gave me the impression that the teachers, who did not respond to my request for comment, were only trying to be fair. Some students have more help and resources than others."

This is so sad. Egalitarian ideology has so clouded these teachers' minds that they have lost all sense of what education is about.

I hope this foolishness can be cured by gentle mockery.

Ravitch is Mostly Wrong About "Waiting for 'Superman'"

In my previous post I praised the new documentary "Waiting for 'Superman'" as mostly right.

Diane Ravitch, a well-known education policy scholar and former Education Department official, criticized the film.

This is Ravitch's summary of the film's point:
"The only hope for the future of our society, especially for poor black and Hispanic children, is escape from public schools."

The film, though, is not an indictment of all public schools. It is an indictment of the strategic minority of truly terrible public schools, the drop-out factories. They are concentrated in a few large urban districts, where the unions and the public officials close ranks to protect the status quo. Not all public schools. Not all public school teachers, nor even all teachers in the bad schools. The film criticizes schools that protect bad teachers.

The film's main message is that it is possible to create schools even in the worst neighborhoods for the worst-off kids that teach well and produce excellent results. The fact that such schools are possible should drive us to make them more common. Charter schools are a mechanism within the public system that creates competition for specific lazy monopolies. Not all public systems are lazy monopolies, and as Ravitch rightly notes, most public school parents are satisfied with their own children's schools. But a few schools are terrible, and the main indictment of the film is of principals and districts that do not make those few better.

Ravitch thinks filmmaker Guggenheim's aim is to"propound to an unknowing public the myth that charter schools are the answer to our educational woes." I do not see that at Guggenheim's aim. He cites the same statistic Ravitch does, that only a fifth of charter schools do noticeably better than their other public counterparts. (Ravitch, for some reason, does not wish to count charter schools as public schools, though most are.) Instead, Guggenheim's aim is to show that some schools can do well in rough settings. Chartering isn't magic, and Guggenheim doesn't say it is. He doesn't even focus on that mechanism as much as Ravitch does, who entitles her critique "The Myth of Charter Schools."

Ravitch charges that "Guggenheim seems to believe that teachers alone can overcome the effects of student poverty." I do not see him showing that. Family background matters more than schools for all classes of children - see my Education and the American Family for documentation. However, Guggenheim does show that good teachers in good schools can do a great deal to teach even the poorest children.

"Waiting for 'Superman'" is Mostly Right

The talk of education world these days in the documentary "Waiting for 'Superman.'" It shows the terrible state of the worst public schools, and some of the successful alternatives that prove that things could be better. The KIPP academies and the Harlem Children's Zone schools produce tremendous improvements in terrible neighborhoods. They succeeded where the local "dropout factories" failed.

Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim has made a powerful ideological indictment of intransigent mediocrity, especially in urban poor schools. His overall conclusion is that good teachers are the heart of good schools. This is mostly right. However, what his account of the KIPP and Harlem Children's Zone schools shows is that the culture of the whole school is vitally important - more important, on the whole, even than the quality of individual teachers.

You need both, of course. However, really great teachers - really great anything - will always be in short supply. A school can succeed with a few really great teachers, and the rest decent teachers willing to work hard - as long as it ruthlessly weeds out the few bad teachers. This creates a climate of achievement that can lift everyone's game, and improve learning for children.

Centre College: Scholars, Gentlemen, Christians

I am pleased to announce that my history of Centre College will be released today during Homecoming.

The Elite of Hard-Working Generalists

The New York Times reported on a gathering of scholars of the Elites Research Network. They are trying to figure out how, exactly, the richest people got that way.

The most sensible view was offered by Sudhir Venkatesh, moderately famous for his turn as "gang leader for a day" that was profiled in Freakonomics and in his own book of that name. He said

“You have to come in accepting that there will always be poor people in society and there will always be wealthy people in society, and neither of the two reached that status by their own efforts.”

The most interesting substantive finding in the article comes from Michael Lindsay's interviews with top corporate leaders. He found that most did not come from big money, nor did they start with a large inheritance. They were likely to have attended top colleges, and a significant proportion went on to Harvard Business School. Lindsay's big finding, though, is that they were generalists who got a big break early.

By being generalists, and looking for opportunities to understand how the whole business worked, they put themselves, I believe, on the path to be presidents. This is the path that Jim Collins identified in the excellent Good to Great of what makes for the best leaders. People who understand the whole operation are more likely to become the head of any organization, large or small. Those who understand the largest and most profitable companies thereby also become, whether they aim to or not, part of the national elite.

Are Fear and Mistrust at the Root of the Culture of Poverty?

The New York Times has a fine article on the return of "the culture of poverty" as a concept in sociology. The very idea was suppressed by liberal academics who thought it meant blaming the victim of poverty. Yet culture matters for everyone, and eventually the empirical strikes back.

The article cites Robert Sampson's studies in various Chicago neighborhoods. He concluded that

Income levels did not necessarily explain the difference, Professor Sampson said, but rather the community’s cultural norms, the levels of moral cynicism and disorder.

Cynicism and disorder, fear and mistrust - these are the things that create the dysfunctions of the culture of poverty.

I think fear and mistrust are what creates dysfunctions in any culture. Promoting fear undermines the functional elements of the culture of any class. Fear and mistrust are endemic in some poor neighborhoods. They are also endemic in some non-poor subcultures, not quite so geographic. Fear-promoting ideological subcultures create social dysfunction on a larger level.

The culture of poverty may only be the most concentrated form of the culture of fear.

Class Differences in How Parents Use Surveillance and Control Technology

The most original findings of Margaret Nelson's Parenting Out of Control are class differences in how parents think about technology to connect with, control, and monitor their children.

Professional-class parents strongly embrace connection technology - baby monitors when the kids are little, cell phones when they are bigger. On the other hand, these parents do not want V-chips and software filters that control children directly, and strongly reject tracking devices for cars and computers that secretly spy on kids. Professional parents, as we noted yesterday, most value their close relations with their children. Direct and overt monitoring is fine, because parents see that as part of a close relationship. But controlling and spying on their kids violates the basic trust with their children that these parents most cherish.

Middle-class and working-class parents, on the other hand, see it as part of their job to set clear limits for their children. They accept these kinds of technology as potentially helpful in doing that job. They are more likely to decide on a technology based on cost, and on whether they think a particular child needs a higher level of surveillance and control.

Moreover, middle- and working-class parents want their kids to operate within firm limits to free the parents from endless negotiation about the rules - something parents and kids in the professional class do endlessly.

Class Differences in What Satisfies Parents Most

Margaret Nelson, in Parenting Out of Control, found an interesting class difference in what gives different parents their deepest satisfaction.

Middle class and working class parents take the most satisfaction in their children's accomplishments.

Professional class parents take the most satisfaction in their close relationship with their children.

The Arrogance of the Educated Angers Everyone Else, Even If We Are Right on the Facts

In my church's Sunday School we have been considering creation and evolution. We are having the kind of conversation that you get up in the most highly educated congregation in any town - say, the Presbyterian Church in a small college town, or the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship in a bigger city. We studied the details of biological evolution with a scientist. We studied the details of theological attempts to reconcile religion and science with a philosopher. In each case, we follow, and largely accept the increasingly esoteric nuances of the argument. We take for granted that our religious dogma has to fit within our scientific dogma.

Deepak Chopra recently put it in a clear way typical of this view:

The modern world is willing to throw out any number of beliefs about God if the facts don't fit. Science isn't willing to throw out a single piece of data, however, to satisfy an article of faith.

My job as the sociologist in this discussion was to bring in this inconvenient truth: If you ask most Americans "did God create the universe pretty much the way it is now within the last 10,000 years?" 45% say yes. The illustration I used was that every time we go to Walmart (the biggest store in our small town), assume that someone in the aisle with you is a young-earth creationist.

Deepak Chopra takes if for granted that the 45%, our fellow Americans in the Walmart aisle, are not members of the modern world. The arrogance of that assumption really ticks them off. That does not make them right - I don't think they are right. I think, though, that the reaction to that arrogance is what is really behind the political anger that we see now.

Stanley Fish is Craven and Unashamed

I try to concentrate on the up-building at The Gruntled Center, but today I have to offer a criticism of a fellow professor.

Stanley Fish is an English professor and a famous critic of the Western canon of what is best to teach in English and related fields. He recently wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times about the "crisis of the humanities," sparked by the decision of the State University of New York at Albany to abolish their French, Italian, Russian, classics, and theater departments. Fish recognizes that SUNY's conclusion that the humanities are not really necessary is, in part, the fruit if radical criticism like his. And yet Fish still opposes SUNY's decision. Why? I will let him explain:

I have always had trouble believing in the high-minded case for a core curriculum — that it preserves and transmits the best that has been thought and said — but I believe fully in the core curriculum as a device of employment for me and my fellow humanists.

Professional Parents Spend More Time With Their Kids Than Working Class Parents Do

I am working through Margaret K. Nelson, Parenting Out of Control: Parents in Anxious Times. She contrasts parents in the professional middle class (professional and management jobs, post-college education) with parents in the working class (blue collar and lower white collar jobs, less than college graduate education).

The professional middle class parents of the title, who are the intensive "helicopter parents," spend more time with their children, even though both mothers and fathers are likely to work outside the home, and work long hours. Even the at-home moms in both classes, though, show the same kind of imbalance.

Here are the time ratios:

Professional to Working Class at-home moms: 1.55: 1

Professional to Working Class working moms: 1.72: 1

Professional to Working Class dads: 2.16:1

Men's and Women's Positions in Society Will Never Be Equally Distributed

The New York Times has an article on women in France entitled "Where Having It All Doesn't Mean Having Equality."

I believe you could write an article with this title every year, in every country, in perpetuity. The idea that if women have equal opportunities with men that will result in equal outcomes is just false. Men and women, as a group, have different preferences. In a free society, they should be allowed, indeed, should be encouraged, to make the choices they want to. It is not merely wrong to expect that men and women will be equally represented in every position in society. It is oppressive to try to make the results come out equally.

Why Conspiracy Theories and Ignorance are Connected

It is easier to "connect the dots" if you don't have many dots.

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion Creates the Disenchanted World

We have been studying dour old Max Weber. Unlike many early sociologists, he was not an atheist. But he was, as he famously wrote, "religiously unmusical."

The driving principle of modernity, he argued, was the relentless rationalization of all institutions and practices, including religion. He thought the world was "disenchanted," that moderns found it hard to hold on to a belief that there were personal, unrationalized forces lying behind this world, guiding it.

When I look at the survey research, more than a century later, I find that most people have no trouble believing in God and a whole array of quite personal and unrationalized forces. Yet it is a central myth of intellectuals that secularization is inevitable as people make the world more rationally ordered.

The gap between the intellectuals' personal disenchantment and their faith that everyone will eventually follow is filled, I think, by the doctrine of "the hermeneutics of suspicion." Paul Ricouer developed this approach on the model of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. He articulated what is, I believe, a common notion among intellectuals that what most people believe should not be believed. Instead, we should look for a reality underneath the surface reality. This, on the face of it, is exactly what religious people say.

The difference is that religious people believe God is under the surface appearance of this world, guiding it in a mysterious way on a positive and meaningful path. The suspicious intellectuals believe that material self-seeking is under the surface appearance of this world, twisting it in a not-so-mysterious way on a negative and possibly meaningless path. Both are doctrines, beliefs, leaps of faith.

The hermeneutics of suspicion is not an intellectual response to a falsely enchanted world. It is a doctrine that makes a disenchanted world, at least for intellectuals.

Joining in Other Peoples' Civic Projects Is Good For Me. Case in Point: The World Equestrian Games

The World Equestrian Games have been going on in at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington for the last two weeks. They are a Big Deal, the biggest deal in Kentucky in decades.

I spent a lovely day there today. As I told my class, I am not interested in horses, but I am interested in crowds. I watched "driving" all day, about which I knew nothing when the day began. That was interesting and lovely.

As I reflected on the entire massive event, I was glad that I had done my tiny civic part to help Kentucky put on a world-class event, even if it was not in one of my little areas of normal interest.

Civic participation is itself up-building, both for the commonwealth and for me.

What is a Good Work of Macrosociological Feminist Theory to Teach?

For two years I have been trying to find the right feminist book to teach in my "Macrosociological Theory" course. It has been surprisingly hard to find the right thing. This year I am using Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. It was an important book, and the students have found it the most accessible of anything we have read so far. Nonetheless, it is not really a theory book.

I looked at Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering. This is more theoretical, but is not really macrosociology.

I have consulted with a number of people far better read in feminist theory than I am. To all of our surprise, it has been hard to find a book that really fits the bill. We can think of several calls for developing a macrosociological feminist theory - Heidi Hartmann's and Patricia Hill Collins' have been named several times. But I have yet to find a work that weaves together feminist theory and some kind of empirical analysis of society at the macro level.

I think the main reason is because the movement that made clear that "the personal is political" has done the bulk of its work thinking about the micro level.

I am open to suggestions for works to teach, and analyses of why they are so hard to come by.

College and Kids Have Switched Positions

Continuing our class discussion of The Feminine Mystique.

For the feminine mystique women in the '50s, marriage and children seemed obligatory, while the substance of college education, or even a college degree, were optional.

Now, the women in class agreed that a college education was essential, as they viewed their lives. Marriage and children, though desired by most of the women in the class, were optional.

I think this says as much about the changing class mores of the middle class as it shows a revolution in women's options.

Since children are not really optional for society as a whole, and smart educated people know that marriage is the best institution to raise children in, I expect that there will be another swing of the pendulum.

What we will try to think through and model, starting with my social theory class, is a view of life in which both college-and-career AND marriage-and-children are equally valued core aims in life.

The Feminine Mystique Made Unfemininity Seem Too Weird

A woman in my theory class had this excellent insight on reading The Feminine Mystique:

I had always thought that women, in this time period, were just being oppressed by men, but it turns out they had opportunities to rise above and stand out. But it is the idea of standing out that scared them away. They did not want to be seen as weird or unfeminine.

It has been helpful to us, as I noted yesterday, to see the feminine mystique as a brief interlude, not the eternal condition of women prior to 1970.

What today's insight adds is a psychological mechanism that makes sense to me. Women are more likely than men to place a high value on equal social relations, on doing what other women are doing. If the feminine mystique became the established norm for a time among critical female opinion leaders, I can see how it would spread powerfully among other women - especially if there were other structural forces backing it up.

Feminine Mystique as Summer Vacation

We are reading The Feminine Mystique in my social theory class. We were considering Friedan's point that the feminine mystique was an abrupt shift from the more public role that educated women had had during the Second World War. Knowing that the mystique period was brief, followed by the second wave of feminism, one imaginative student suggested that the feminine mystique was like summer vacation. She said that as summer vacation approaches, students look forward to no more books, seeing their friends, staying home, sleeping late. After a few months, though, they can't wait to get back to their studies.

I think this is a nifty analogy.

Social Networks Are Like Coffee Houses

Social networks are shot through with coffee house metaphors. The connection is natural. I am a big fan of both. But we should understand what they are good for, and not good for.

In my coffee house class, my summary idea is that coffee houses are places where strangers can become acquaintances. Coffee houses are not places for building strong friendships. Some friendships may, of course, grow out of coffee house connections. Indeed, I know marriages that began in coffee houses. But a relationship that is born in the coffee house, and stays there, will not grow beyond a weak tie.

Weak ties are very important in real life. Many good things come from weak ties. It is your weak ties that are likely to lead you to a next job, not your strong ties. Weak ties are best for spreading and bringing you new information.

Malcolm Gladwell has a fine article in the New Yorker on the difference between social networks and hierarchies. Gladwell's core point: "Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances." It is not made of the strong ties that can make a revolution.

Some Group Differences are Due to Privilege. Some Are Not.

If diversity means anything, it means that different groups differ at least a little in what they want and in what talents they bring, as well as in how they are treated by others.

Privilege is real - some groups have unearned advantages over others, which does increase the chance that people like that will be disproportionately represented among those in power.

But it is also the case that different groups want different things, or more exactly, the proportions of people who want some outcome will not be identical in each group.

It is also true, but harder to pin down, that different groups bring a different mix of skills and talents to life. This difference has to have some effect on the proportion of people from each group who end up doing one thing or another.

It is certainly the case that the group of people in positions of power are disproportionately from privileged groups. But privilege is only part of the reason. To say otherwise, to say that all groups have an exactly equal desire and exactly equal ability to achieve all outcomes is simply false. Worse, it is condescending and imperialist to assume that all groups - all cultures and subcultures - desire exactly the same things equally.

In the discourse about privilege, to assume that the privileged are disproportionately powerful solely because we are privileged is itself an act of unwarranted privilege.

The QUESTIONS in the Pew Religion Survey

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life just released the result of a survey on religious knowledge among American adults. As with most surveys of the knowledge of American adults, the results were pretty sad. The headline finding is that atheists and agnostics know more about religion than religious people do. This is not so surprising to me - atheists and agnostics tend to be more educated than the average believer about everything.

If you are like me, you perhaps wanted to try you own religious knowledge against this survey. As a public service, I have extracted all the questions from the survey. Pew does not provide an answer key, but I expect Gruntled Center readers will do pretty well. I think I got all of them, so ask me.

PEW FORUM ON RELIGION & PUBLIC LIFE

2010 RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONNAIRE

When does the Jewish Sabbath begin? Does it begin on…?

1 Friday

2 Saturday

3 Sunday

Is Ramadan…?

1 The Hindu festival of lights

2 A Jewish day of atonement

3 The Islamic holy month

Do you happen to know which of these is the king of gods in ancient Greek mythology?

1 Zeus

2 Mars

3 Apollo

Do you happen to know the name of the holy book of Islam?

Which of these religions aims at nirvana, the state of being free from suffering?

1 Islam

2 Buddhism

3 Hinduism

In which religion are Vishnu and Shiva central figures?

1 Islam

2 Hinduism

3 Taoism

Is an atheist someone who believes in God, someone who does NOT believe in God, or someone who is unsure whether God exists?

And is an agnostic someone who believes in God, someone who does

NOT believe in God, or someone who is unsure whether God exists?

What is the first book of the Bible?

Will you tell me the names of the first four books of the New Testament of the Bible, that is the Four Gospels?

Where, according to the Bible, was Jesus born?

1 Bethlehem

2 Jericho

3 Jerusalem

4 Nazareth

When was the Mormon religion founded?

1 Before the year 1200 A.D

2 Between 1200 and 1800

3 Sometime after 1800

The Book of Mormon tells the story of Jesus Christ appearing to people in what area of the world?

1 The Americas

2 Middle East

3 Asia

Which of the following best describes Catholic teaching about the bread and wine used for communion?

1 The bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ, or

2 The bread and wine are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ

Which of these religious groups traditionally teaches that salvation comes through faith alone?

1 Only Protestants

2 Only Catholics

3 Both (Protestants) and (Catholics)

4 Neither (Protestants) nor (Catholics)

Please tell me which of the following is NOT one of the Ten Commandments:

1 Do not commit adultery

2 Do unto others as you would have them do unto you

3 Do not steal

4 Keep the Sabbath holy

Which Bible figure is most closely associated with remaining obedient to God despite suffering?

Is it …?

1 Job

2 Elijah

3 Moses

4 Abraham

Which Bible figure is most closely associated with leading the exodus from Egypt?

Is it …?

1 Job

2 Elijah

3 Moses

4 Abraham

Which Bible figure is most closely associated with willingness to sacrifice his son for God?

Is it …?

1 Job

2 Elijah

3 Moses

4 Abraham

Would you tell me if Mother Theresa was …?

1 Catholic

2 Jewish

3 Buddhist

4 Mormon

5 Hindu

Would you tell me if the Dalia Lama is …?

1 Catholic

2 Jewish

3 Buddhist

4 Mormon

5 Hindu

Would you tell me if Joseph Smith was …?

1 Catholic

2 Jewish

3 Buddhist

4 Mormon

5 Hindu

Would you tell me if Maimonides was … ?

1 Catholic

2 Jewish

3 Buddhist

4 Mormon

5 Hindu

Which of the following statements best describes what the U.S. Constitution says about religion?

1 Christianity should be given special emphasis by the government

2 The government shall neither establish a religion nor interfere with the practice of religion, or

3 The Constitution does not say anything one way or the other about religion

According to rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, is a public school teacher permitted to lead a class in prayer, or not?

According to rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, is a public school teacher permitted to read from the Bible as an example of literature, or not?

According to rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, is a public school teacher permitted to offer a class comparing the world’s religions, or not?

Do you happen to know what religion most people in India consider themselves? Is that…?

1 Buddhist

2 Hindu

3 Muslim

4 Christian

Do you happen to know what religion most people in Indonesia consider themselves? Is that…?

1 Buddhist

2 Hindu

3 Muslim

4 Christian

Do you happen to know what religion most people in Pakistan consider themselves? Is that…?

1 Buddhist

2 Hindu

3 Muslim

4 Christian

What was the name of the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant

Reformation?

1 Martin Luther

2 Thomas Aquinas

3 John Wesley

Which of these people developed the theory of evolution by natural selection?

1 Charles Darwin

2 Sigmund Freud

3 Clarence Darrow

And which of these court trials focused on whether evolution could be taught in public schools?

1 The Scopes trial

2 The Salem witch trials

3 Brown versus Board of Education

Which one of these preachers participated in the period of religious activity known as the First Great Awakening?

1 Jonathan Edwards

2 Charles Finney

3 Billy Graham

Wealth is More Unequal Than People Think - But That is Not So Bad

Wealth is hugely unequally distributed. Most people think it is reasonable that the richest fraction hold a disproportionate share of the wealth. However, most people underestimate just how disproportionate that distribution really is.

The top fifth of households in the U.S. control ____% of all the wealth in the country.

What number did you think of immediately?

Most people think the number is about 60%

Most people think it should be about 30%

But the actual number is 85%.

I do not think an unequal distribution of wealth is itself a bad thing. Moreover, the richer the society, the more wealth there is for the top group to have. And this report by quintiles is a little misleading - it is the gigantic wealth holdings by the top tenth of one percent of households where the huge disparities lie.

The top 20% of households includes many upper-middle-class families who worked up to significant earnings, from which they save. The main reason that the middle class has so little wealth is that they save so little of what they earn. The poor will never have much wealth, even if they do earn enough to live. But we could have a much more equal distribution of wealth between the just-below-the-top and the middle.

The paper, "Building a Better America - One Wealth Quintile at a Time," by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, is available here.

I Want You to Stop Being Afraid

A fine poster by Al Haug.

My sentiments exactly.

Married Couples Dance Ministry

The name itself makes me happy. The video of any long-married couples dancing together is charming. To have a whole group of long-married black couples dancing together, cheered on by their church, is delightful in a larger context.

Grateful for the Health Care Reforms That Start Today

Some provisions of the health care reform act go into effect today.

Lifetime limits on coverage end. Insurance companies can no longer drop coverage without due process. You can't be refused insurance because of a pre-existing condition. Sick kids cannot simply be dropped. And one change that affects the Gruntleds directly is that children can stay on their parents' policies until they are 26, instead of 19. For the class for whom college is the norm, and further study is extremely likely, the years from 19 to 26 mostly mean no income to pay for insurance. This change is a real boon to our kind, and to all young people in a recession.

The health care reform was long overdue. It is not perfect - no bill that can pass Congress ever will be - but it contains many good improvements. Including those that start today.

Happy Nations Give More Than Merely Rich Nations

The Charities Aid Foundation did a world-wide survey of giving. The main finding:

CAF found that the link between happiness and giving is stronger than the link between wealth and giving.

A secondary finding is that the heirs of the British empire lead the world in charity. Here is the top of the list in the 153-nation study.

World Giving Index	Country	% of population who have given money	% of population who have given time	% of population who have helped a stranger	Wellbeing score out of 10
1	Australia	70%	38%	64%	7.3
1	New Zealand	68%	41%	63%	7.4
3	Canada	64%	35%	68%	7.5
3	Ireland	72%	35%	60%	7.0
5	Switzerland	71%	34%	60%	7.5
5	USA	60%	39%	65%	7.2
7	Netherlands	77%	39%	46%	7.6
8	United Kingdom	73%	29%	58%	5.6

Office Romance: Good for Married Knowledge Workers, Bad for Cheating Corporate Types?

Bloomberg.com has an interesting article by Spencer Morgan on how lawsuits are driving down office romance. Faced with ex-lovers filing retaliation suits, and co-workers of the boss' lover charging favoritism, some companies are establishing, and enforcing, no-fraternization policies.

On the other hand, other companies think that couples who work together are a good thing. They are more engaged in the company and are less likely to miss work.

Two things struck me about this article.

First, the author made no distinction between marriage, and the courtship that leads to marriage, on the one hand, and adulterous affairs on the other. I expect that married co-workers are good for a business, whereas cheating co-workers are very bad for office functioning.

Second, the list of companies that were in favor of office couples has a strong knowledge-class tilt: National Public Radio, Princeton Review, Pixar, and Southwest Airlines.

Where Should We Study Religion in Kentucky?

I will be teaching my "Sociology of American Religion" course in our intensive Centre Term in January. This term is designed for field trips.

Last time we went to:

Southeast Christian Church (largest in the state)
Presbyterian Center (denominational headquarters)
Gethsemani Abbey (Trappist monastery most famous as the home of Thomas Merton)
Sisters of Loretto Motherhouse
Both synagogues in Lexington
The Creation Museum.

In addition, we met with informed Mormons and Muslims who came to our class. An eminent Hindu leader was honored during Founders Day, which we incorporated into class. We looked into the Buddhist retreat center at Furnace Mountain, but January was not an excellent time to visit.

All of these places and people are great.

There are also several other great places and people within a three-hour drive (about the limit of a day trip).

Some that I am thinking about:
Covington Cathedral
St. Stephen's Church, Louisville (largest black congregation in the state)
The Louisville synagogues (including an Orthodox synagogue, not found in Lexington)
Lexington Universal Academy (Islamic school)
Southern Baptist Seminary
Asbury Theological Seminary

I am open to suggestions.

Yawning Is Contagious - But Less So for Autistic Kids

Yawning is a socially contagious action. A study comparing autistic kids and typical kids found that the autistic kids were much less likely to yawn in response to videos of people yawning. This suggests that responsive yawning is a kind of empathy.

Elizabeth Warren, Knowledge Class Hero, Gets a Big Job

Elizabeth Warren has been asked by President Obama to help start the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This is only fitting: she thought it up in the first place.

The knowledge class has a critical, even alienated side. This is only one side of the story, though, and not even half. Most members of the knowledge class work within existing social institutions to make them work better for the common good. They tend to be earnest, a bit nerdy, not stylish, but, to my mind, wholesome in trying to use their smarts for all. They are not only trying to understand the big picture in some depth, but trying to make it better, too.

If you wanted a name and a face for that branch of the knowledge class, I nominate Elizabeth Warren.

State Prison Population Declines for the First Time in 40 Years

This is a little bit of good news. The total prison population went up last year, because there are more federal prisoners.

The boom in prisoners comes mostly from imprisoning drug dealers. I am all for imprisoning people who commit crimes, and drug dealers, as a group are vile.

Still, I think we should legalize marijuana and tax it heavily. In fact, I would be happy to dedicate the pot tax to fighting the really bad drugs - there seems a certain poetic justice in that. If we extract marijuana from the war on drugs, we can devote our prisons to the worse criminals.

Accommodating the Genderless Exceptions

Newsweek has an article about a possible "genderless" future, in which "no gender" would be one of the choices.

I am OK with legally acknowledging that some rare individuals do not have a clear sex or gender. And I think it is only civil to accommodate such people in social life in nearly every situation. The condition is so uncommon that I do not think we should build an entire third-gender infrastructure.

I do think it is a mistake to claim that gender is "assigned" for most people. For the vast majority of people, gender and sex are the same. We do not have to mentally disconnect the two in all cases just because they are not clearly connected in a few rare cases.

Marriage Would Help the Working Class Move Up

The growing class gap is between the married middle class and the cohabiting working class and poor people. One of the reasons the bottom half of the class structure is getting less likely to marry is that they think you already have to be steadily middle class first. Brad Wilcox and Andrew Cherlin present the latest numbers in a useful Wall Street Journal article.

The future success stories among the poor and working class who grow into the middle class will, I am confident, be mostly told by those who make the commitment to marriage (and religion) the foundation of their lives. With that strong foundation, building, saving, and investing in the family is easier and safer.

The best thing we can do for the working poor and working class is to promote the idea that a permanent commitment to marriage (and not just to your spouse) will help you make a richer and more secure life for yourself and your children.

Double Income Goes for Better School Districts

Robert H. Frank, in Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class, reports this study from knowledge-class hero Elizabeth Warren:

As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi have shown, ... most of the extra income earned by families as a result of the move to two-earner couples was consumed by higher housing prices as these families sought to buy homes in safer neighborhoods with better schools. (66)

Buying for better schools is a rational knowledge-class investment, and safer neighborhoods is a rational choice for every class.

If the cheaper places to live can make their schools better, then smart, able couples will move there. This would have the double benefit to the families of getting better schools for less, and allowing the couple (mostly the mothers) to cut back on work and invest the time in a happier life for the whole family.

Civility Triumph: Qur'an Not Burned

International Burn a Koran Day fizzled.

I am grateful to the imam who went to talk calmly with the pastor. And the pastor for calling it off.

Go civility (the hard way).

Reality Tuesday

Reality Tuesday Coffeehouse and Donuts is in Park Hills, Kentucky. The mocha is good, and the cheesecakes are rated the best in the Cincinnati area.

The name comes from a Tuesday night Bible study that the owners were involved in when they decided to jump in to the coffee business. They are Protestants, and the immediate neighborhood is home to Covington Catholic High School and Notre Dame Academy, so the whole place has a strong pan-Christian vibe.

Reality Tuesday is a happy, homey place that I commend to all friends of coffee houses.

The Gospel of Wealth and the American Establishment

David Brooks has a nifty column on the critique of our material excess. It is not surprising when greens and lefties make this critique, but Brooks is citing David Platt, a Southern Baptist megachurch pastor, who says the evangelical church is as guilty of pursuing material wealth, and even, in effect, worshiping it. Platt says we have to choose God or mammon.

Brooks rightly notes, though, that Americans, including American evangelicals, have a counter tradition of disciplining wealth. The Gospel of Wealth that he refers to is not the "health and wealth" gospel that some pentecostal churches preach, that God will reward your faith with riches. Quite the opposite. Rather, the Gospel of Wealth is that the rich - which includes most Americans, compared to the rest of the world - have a religious obligation to use our wealth for the common good. Wealth, though a huge temptation, is not bad in itself. It does impose great obligations.

The Gospel of Wealth was developed by the original Establishment of this country, the Protestant Establishment that E. Digby Baltzell wrote about. Wealth, health, privileges of all kinds are gifts of Providence, as well as connected in mysterious ways to our own work. As gifts, they come with religious responsibilities.

How Men of Different Races Describe Themselves to Potential Dates

OkCupid is a data site run by statisticians. Their reports are a gold mine for people interested in mate selection.

Their current report analyzes the terms people use in their profiles to describe themselves. Based on more than half a million participants, divided by their self-described race, the data cupids found this interesting trend in how men describe themselves to a prospective date:

Black men say I am cool - a very common choice (#2 out of the top 50).
Asian men say they are simple. This includes Indians and Middle Eastern men as well as East Asians (#2).
Latinos say they are funny guys (#25).


White men are much less likely to offer an overall self-description. The closest item in the top 50 profile items, coming in at #38, is I'm a country boy.

I don't have a deep analysis of what this means, and would welcome your thoughts. I have some guesses that are somewhat informed by the actual marriage patterns of each group, but I know I could be way off.

Cool: fun to spend time with, but doesn't demand commitment.
Simple: does not want an emotionally complicated relationship, just commitment.
Funny: will pay attention to you and not be overbearing.
Country boy: masculine and simple; hasn't had to give much thought to what kind of man, because white men have the privilege of thinking of themselves as just normal guys.

Decent Religious Americans in Gainesville Gather for Peace Against the Qur'an Burning

Trinity United Methodist Church in Gainesville, Florida, and the Gainesville Interfaith Forum will be hosting a Gathering for Peace, Understanding, and Hope on September 10.

Mainline Christian churches join together all the time with Jews, Muslims, and Hindus, as in this interfaith forum for peace and tolerance.

Why, then, do I note this particular gathering? Because Trinity United Methodist Church is right next door to the Dove World Outreach Center, a pentecostal church that is planning to burn the Qur'an on September 11.

I truly hope, as a church elder, that the Dove church changes its mind.

Even if it does not, though, I am glad the good people of Gainesville, through the Interfaith Forum, will be coming together in a gentle counter-demonstration of American decency and tolerance.

Similar Spouses Stay Married

A new study by Mikhila Humbad and colleagues at Michigan State tested whether spouses converged in their basic personality over a long marriage.

They don't.

This is not really so surprising, though. Our basic personality characteristics are one of the most stable parts of us. We may come to look and sound more like our spouses as we come to imitate one another's facial expressions and speech. But personality mostly stays put.

What this study really shows, I think, is that people with enduring marriages were similar in values, and complementary in personality, to begin with. The researchers note that they do not have many recently married couples in their study - not surprising, since they were piggybacking on the long-running Minnesota Twin Study to find their couples.

I would expect that couples with dissimilar values and non-complementary personalities would be less likely to make lasting marriages.

But neither the couples in the real study, nor the couples in the hypothetical study, would be likely to show much personality change.

American Tolerance Tradition Triumphs Over Know Nothings

Nicholas Kristoff has a fine column arguing that that fear of the Ground Zero mosque, and other expressions of Islamic life in the United States, is not driven by sheer bigotry. Rather, it is driven by the desire of well-meaning people to protect the nation from what they imagine are unassimilable aliens and the possible physical and moral danger they might bring. Like the anti-Catholic Know Nothing movement of the nineteenth century, this impulse is not new in American history. But Kristoff offers a hopeful answer:

But we have a more glorious tradition intertwined in American history as well, one of tolerance, amity and religious freedom. Each time, this has ultimately prevailed over the Know Nothing impulse.

Most Americans are Tolerant of Mosques, Even Now

The good news is that most Americans are tolerant of mosques even in the middle of the "Ground Zero mosque" controversy.

A Pew poll in late August asked which of these two statements you agreed with more:

"Muslims should have the same rights as other groups to build houses of worship in local communities"

OR

"Local communities should be able to prohibit the construction of mosques if they do not want them."

62% agreed with the first statement, versus only 25% with the second.

I Need to Want Less

I thank Good, the most gruntled of magazines, for pointing me to Erin Hanson's project, "Need to Want Less."

I think this is a wonderful personal discipline, and a real help in simplifying your own life.

I think wanting less is a likely path to happiness. I am more confident that it is, at least indirectly, a path to meaningfulness, because it helps you weed out the unnecessary things in your own life.

Single Young Women Earn More Than Men

Single, childless, young women earn more than comparable men.

This is good: it shows that more education and more persistent work reap better pay.

This is also good because it helps chip away at the myth the women, on average, earn less than men because of sex discrimination.

Women earn less than men, on average, because women who are not single, childless, and young tend to make choices that trade earning for control of their time for family life and for doing only work that they want to do.

Exploring the Happy Society

Five years ago today I began The Gruntled Center: Faith and Family for Centrists.

Today, to celebrate that anniversary and to mark the broader path I want to chart, I am changing the subtitle of the blog. Hereafter I will post to The Gruntled Center: Exploring the Happy Society.

I am developing a new course, "The Happy Society," which will explore the philosophical and empirical roots of happiness in the institutions of society, and in society as a whole. I think the core dynamic of what makes for happiness and unhappiness in social life as a whole is trust versus fear.

As part of this class, as well as for my continuing teaching on family life, I envision a book on Happy Families. This book would explore the seeming paradox that having children usually diminishes a couple's happiness in their marriage, but at the same time gives them the greatest sense of meaningful accomplishment.

I think the relationship between happiness and meaningfulness is the deepest and hardest puzzle that we will explore in studying the happy society.

I welcome your participation in the adventure.

Spreading Fear is Bad for Democracy

A comment on my post of yesterday offers this version of diplomacy:

Suppose we told the Iranian Mullahs that they are an evil, backward, dangerous, ignorant bunch of theocrats, and that nothing will help that unhappy land until they are gone. Suppose we told them we were going to do everything in our power, short of war, to consign them to the dustbin of history where they belong. That has my vote for candor. But perhaps it is not in our interest to say so?

I tend to think that, at least with adversaries, a little studied ambiguity is often the best. If the bad guys think you might just be crazy enough to send them all to where they get the 72 virgins, or whatever, maybe they will behave themselves.

I believe this whole approach to our adversaries - both the candid and the ambiguous versions - makes the world worse, and does not serve the interests of the United States or, in this case, the Iranian people. Striking fear in others makes them worse, makes them less rational, less open to persuasion about where their true interests lie. And it does the same to us, too. Moreover, approaching the leadership of another nation as children who we have to make behave - who we have a right to make behave - makes even the most reasonable people in that nation reject us for our arrogance. We would feel the same way if other nations treated our leaders that way, even when strongly oppose our own leaders.

In the particular case of Iran, I am very hopeful about the future of democracy in Iran - more so than in just about any other Muslim nation except Turkey. Iran has an elected government and a constitution that, on paper, vests power in that elected government. They have plenty of pragmatists who want to have peace and get on with business, as every government does. Right now they have a group of unelected religious authorities who overrule that elected government, and keep its most strident and dangerous party in power. Yet, as the stolen election showed, there are already cracks in the religious establishment.

How can we promote the rule of law in Iran? How can we get the religious authorities to back off and let the electoral process proceed? I believe we are more likely to strengthen the moderate elements in Iran, and throughout the Muslim world, by being reasonable, by finding common ground wherever we can, by communicating to the Muslim world that Americans are not their enemies. This will be a rocky process, and will be strongly resisted by religiously pugnacious elements (in both countries). Making Iranians, in power and out, believe that we are crazy and should be feared strengthens the worst elements there and makes peace and freedom less likely.

Which Things Should America Apologize For?

I recently wrote about my puzzlement at what those attending the "Restoring Honor" rally thought had dishonored America. In response, "Whit" cited President Obama's "apology tour." The so-called apology tour is a good example of my puzzlement about what it is that Glenn Beck and followers are afraid of.

Human Events magazine, no friend of President Obama's, listed what they thought were the top ten "apologies" made by the president. The president said that the United States has, at times, acted unilaterally and arrogantly in relation to Europe and Latin America. This seems to me obviously true. This does not constitute apologizing to thugs, as Whit contended. Likewise, his offer to "communicate with the Muslim world" is a good thing, and allowing that we have not been perfect is also obviously true.

All of the apologies listed by Human Events sound to me true and helpful in establishing just and sensible relations with the rest of the world.

What I do think hurt America's honor were torture, imprisonment without charge or counsel, and unilateral force without even attempting to work with our allies. The Bush administration took the huge good will that the United States had around the world after 9/11, and turned it into shame by these practices.

And then, incomprehensibly, President Bush could not think of a single mistake his administration had made.

Every person and every government makes mistakes. Acting arrogantly destroys just relations with others, even our allies. Trying to talk to opponents is a necessary foundation for reducing conflict and for any chance of helping them improve. Admitting your mistakes, even admitting that you are capable of mistakes, is moral, true, and just common sense.

Privilege is a Knowledge Problem

Some people have privilege. This obviously hurts those who do not have that privilege.

Privilege also hurts the privileged. The greatest privilege is not knowing that you are privileged, so that you don't notice or think about your (our) comparative unearned advantage. Privilege can make the privilege incurious. This produces a kind of parochialism.

When I teach college students about their degrees of relative privilege, the most privileged sometimes feel angry, but most of them feel guilty. And don't know what to do next. Many consciousness-raising approaches to teaching about privilege stop there. Some are even glad to provoke feelings of guilt.

I think a better approach to teaching about privilege is to treat it as a knowledge problem. Curiosity cures unacknowledged privilege. Being curious about people who are not like you is the best path to living justly with others, and serving others as our privilege makes us able.

Glenn Beck's Puzzling Civil Religion Rally

Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial yesterday was a civil religion rally. It was a pageant of American patriotism and generic Christianity, treating the two as identical. The heart of the event was an awards show for a few people Beck liked, with a fund-raiser for a military charity added on. Beck's own speech, coming about two hours into the rally, yearned for new heroes, new George Washingtons, to step forward and do ... something.

The great puzzle of "Restoring Honor" came from trying to figure out what Beck and his audience thought was threatening America's honor. A careful listener would hear several references to "wallowing in the scars" of American history, one section against those who "spread fear," and a single reference to leaving our children with large debts. Beck had to deny that he was spreading fear - by his account, he was just telling the truth about a threat that loomed like the iceberg before the Titanic.

But what iceberg Beck thinks he sees is a mystery.

I thought that there might be an unspoken subtext that everyone present knew but thought it too politically incorrect to say. One of my Facebook respondents thought that what drove the rally was a nativist fear of them, led by an alien brown president. I do not think that is what drove this rally. The crowd was, indeed, almost completely white, but the performers very pointedly were not. Beck made much of the fact that the date and place for his rally were the same as for Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, which was genuinely cheered by the crowd.

Another correspondent suggested what I think is a more plausible explanation: archetypes of Good versus Evil, of heroes and villains, that makes fantasy books, graphic novels, movies, and video games so popular. Beck's sermons were celebrations of America's goodness and heroes coupled with a call for ordinary people in his audience to be heroes today. He not only did not specify what the heroes should fight against, he repeatedly rejected "wallowing in the scars" - that is, thinking and talking about what had been wrong with America - as the very source of evil.

There was nothing wrong with what was said and celebrated at the "Restoring Honor" rally. The content was so vague, though, that I don't think many would turn out for a repeat performance.