Positive Sociology and a Proportionate View of Inequality

I got to take part in a panel at the American Sociological Association meeting on “Towards a Positive Sociology”.   I told the story of how I have been developing my “Happy Society” class.  I offer a seven-point “Positive Sociology Manifesto”, which I will share with Gruntled Center readers hereafter.

One issue that I have been wrestling with is that sociology as a rule is overwhelmingly concerned with unearthing inequality, which we often assume is a bad thing as such.  I think this view of inequality, and its presumed moral meaning, often cuts our investigations short, and makes sociology less useful to society.

I have therefore been wrestling with this proposition:

Negative sociology takes equality as a natural state, which is distorted by social practices.  Positive sociology takes inequality as a natural state, which is balanced by social practices.

Against the Academic "Precariat"

I was recently asked by a friend what I thought of this argument:

"The pernicious influence of neoliberal ideology on institutions of higher education is most evident, one could argue, in its increasing and intentional reliance on exploited labor. An overwhelming majority of the professoriate now belong to what economists and sociologists call the “precariat,” a portmanteau combining “precarious” and “proletariat” and referring to the social class of contingently employed or underemployed workers for whom predictability or security in employment is absent". - From here.


I think this is more than half true.

I can see a distinction, though, between "neoliberal ideology" and the simpler cost management of any institution.

Neo-liberal ideology believes that every institution should be "run like a business," with a naive idea that businesses are not deeply embedded in a political economy. Such a view would distort an academic institution into seeing professors as labor inputs, whose cost is to be reduced, rather than (in business terms) as the owners and artisans.  The true view of the university is that "the colleagues are the college", while the trustees hold the necessary property in trust, and the administration makes the trains run on time with a minimum of bother to the professors and students.

Even in a properly understood college, though, the main, and nearly the only cost of the college is seeing that the professors get paid enough to keep doing their work well.  This is why students pay tuition.  The heart of the enterprise, though, very much unlike a normal market business, is not to make a profit, but to have enough for the life-shaping enterprise of education to go on. Everyone benefits from well-educated citizens, so everyone is asked to give to the enterprise.  Most of the money comes from students or their parents, some from loyal alumni, some from friends, some from government. Because education benefits all of society, many people are willing to contribute for the education of others, as well as for themselves and their loved ones.

Therefore, even a properly understood college will have a reasonable and responsible concern to reduce costs.  Since there is mainly only the cost of professors, that is the natural place to look for cost savings.  Thus, colleges are continuously looking for ways to reduce the costs of providing a good education.  Most of them do not work, since the best practices of education continue to be a dedicated teacher and a small number of students working together to understand and form character.

The ideal for a college would be to have a stable group of teachers who teach all the students.  There would be a continuous movement of old professors out and new professors in, in a slow progression.  However, it is inevitable in any human enterprise that there would be some gaps between the ideal relation and reality. I think it reasonable for a college to  hire some adjuncts to cover the occasional gaps, as long as they did not do it very much.

The larger question of whether "neoliberal" ideology is good for any human enterprise is worth considering.  Secure employment is, I think, good for human beings as such, and for the great majority of individual humans. There is a natural tension between the employers' desire to keep the best workers, and the workers' desire to keep a job.  This is inevitable.  But it is not, I think, inevitable that employers should treat, or think of, workers as just another factor of production, to be reduced or discarded at will.  But that is an argument that goes well beyond the initial question of the academic precariat.

A Healthy New Development: Thrifty Athletes

Today's story:  Professional football player Ryan Broyles signed a contract for $3.6 million, but he and his wife have decided to live on $60,000 per year, and invest the rest.

A prior story allowed that Rob Gronkowski, an even more famous and better-paid professional football player, had not touched any of the $10 million that he had been paid for playing, but was living on endorsement money.  He did not live wildly, and invested his professional pay and signing bonus for the future.

My friends at the Institute for American Values have been pushing thrift as a core value we need to re-adopt.  I commend their efforts, and only wish the thrift movement got more attention.

I applaud these thrifty professional athletes.  May they be lifted up as role models.

Academics the Most Trusted Source on Business

"Academics and industry experts are not only trusted content creators, they are also the most credible spokespersons in shaping opinions of a company."

So says a new study based on the Edelman Trust Barometer.

The main point of the study is that the public trusts search engines more than the press or the company.  The connection is that search engines can bring to the fore the assessments of people who are both informed (academics and industry experts) and, at the same time, not primarily trying to make a profit or shape opinion with their knowledge.

This is great news for those who want public discourse to be based on actual knowledge, not just opinion asserted as knowledge.

Trump is Proud to Be a Corrupter

Of all the disturbing things said at the GOP debate, the one that bothers me the most is Mr. Trump's claim that he gives money to politicians so they have to do what he wants.  The other candidates are hoping to attract a corrupt and greedy billionaire to fund their campaigns.  Mr. Trump is the source of corruption himself, and is proud of it.

I Applaud Republican Leaders Who Try to Reconnect the Party with African Americans - But "State's Rights" Is Not the Way

"Too often, we Republicans -- myself included -- have emphasized our message on the 10th Amendment but not our message on the 14th -– an amendment, it bears reminding, that was one of the first great contributions of the Republican Party to American life, second only to the abolition of slavery," Perry said.

I applaud Gov. Rick Perry's attempts to reconnect the Republican Party with African Americans, and end the party's racist "Southern strategy".  I applaud similar efforts by Sen. Rand Paul.  

However, it was precisely the Southern "state's rights" strategy that made the 14th Amendment, and federal intervention, necessary in the first place.

The former governor of Texas should be able to see that, for black people, being freed from federal protection and left to the mercy of the government of Texas - of all places - does not seem like a reassuring bargain.  

David Brooks to Social Conservatives: Become the Christian Left, Instead.

David Brooks recommends that Christian conservatives give up on a losing culture war about sex.

Instead, he proposes this:

The defining face of social conservatism could be this: Those are the people who go into underprivileged areas and form organizations to help nurture stable families. Those are the people who build community institutions in places where they are sparse. Those are the people who can help us think about how economic joblessness and spiritual poverty reinforce each other. Those are the people who converse with us about the transcendent in everyday life.

In other words, the Christian right should instead join the Christian left.

I mostly agree with this sentiment.  However, there is a division between Christian left and Christian right in the first place because they disagree about whether the first priority of Christians should be the economic order or the sexual order.

I Am Glad the Confederate Flag is Down in South Carolina, But Not That Way

When two activists climbed the flagpole and removed the Confederate flag - or more accurately, the Segregationist Flag - from the South Carolina capitol grounds, they acted wrongly, I believe.

It would have been more powerful to have the elected governor of the state take the flag down, as she has already pledged to do. In fact, now South Carolina has to put the flag back up, so that they can take it down the right way.

What makes it all the sweeter is that this particular governor, of Asian descent, would also have been branded non-white by the segregationists who erected the flag in the first place.

Unexpected Good News: Southern Republicans Lead the Charge to Remove Confederate Symbols

The silver lining of the horrible massacre in Emanuel AME Church in Charleston by a white supremacist is that Republican leaders across the South are calling to remove Confederate symbols from public grounds.

In South Carolina and Mississippi this movement has focussed on taking the "rebel flag" off the capital grounds and out of the state flag.

In Tennessee the movement is to remove the bust of Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Forrest from the capitol.

Most gratifying to me, Kentucky Senator McConnell and Republican gubernatorial candidate (and McConnell opponent) Matt Bevins have come out in favor of removing the statue of Jefferson Davis from the state capitol rotunda.

Some cynics have said that this move to get rid of racist symbols is a ploy to prevent the more important matter of gun control.  This is probably true.

Nonetheless, progress is progress, and I applaud it.

The Higher You Go, the More Social Structure Enables, Rather Than Constrains.

This is my bright idea for the day, after reading about the various kinds of homophily in the upper classes.

The Silver Lining in the Charleston Church Racist Mass Murder: His Uncle Turned Him In

I am going on the facts as they have been reported so far, just hours after the likely killer was caught.

Dylann Storm Roof, a young white racist man in South Carolina, after voicing hatred of black people and wearing the flags of apartheid states, was given a big gun by this father.

Roof then went to the most famous black church in Charleston, sat with the church members in Bible study and prayer, before he opened fire.  He killed nine people, including the pastor.  Roof left one witness to his act of terrorism to tell his story.

Then he took off.

The next day, his uncle saw the security pictures, figured out who the killer was, and turned him in.  Roof was caught soon thereafter.

I am reminded of a story of the London subway bombings of a few years ago.  One of the killers was recognized by his mother from the security pictures.  She turned him in because his act of terrorism was very wrong.  But she also said that she did it because she knew that the British authorities would not torture her son.

Roof is not likely to be tortured.  He is not likely to be assumed to be connected to any larger group.  He is likely, instead, to be treated as a deranged individual.  This is because he is white.  Yet he is part of a long tradition of Southern terrorists. And he was armed by his own father.

Thank God for the decent uncle.

Good News On the Baby Front, Starting With a Rising Birth Rate

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the birth rate is up, ending a decline that began in 2007.  This is another sign that we are mentally recovering from the Great Recession.

Further good news:  births to women in their 30s are up.  A few years ago scare headlines announced that most babies were born out of wedlock - to women under 30.  Those article failed to notice the increasing number of women, especially educated women, who begin having children in their 30s.  Those children are much more likely to be born in wedlock than are those to the youngest mothers.

Speaking of youngest mothers, the teen birth rate also continued to decline.

Not Wanting Children Is Not a Problem; Not Wanting Human Beings Is.

I think Sophie Gilbert's review of Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed shows a worse worldview than the problem she sets out to discuss.

That some women do not want children is not a problem.  That they feel pressured to do so is something of a problem.  But this is worse:

Not having children isn’t selfish. Not having children is a perfectly rational and reasonable response given that humans are essentially parasites on the face of a perfectly lovely and well-balanced planet, ploughing through its natural resources, eradicating its endangered species, and ruining its most wonderful landscapes. This might sound misanthropic, and it is, but it is also true.

I think that most women do want to have children, especially after they have taken care of babies related to them. But most is not all. Those women who do not want to have children are just as natural as those who do.  

The rising percentage of women who do not have children, which Gilbert cites as evidence for her position, is not a good indicator that most of them chose not to, though; for educated women, not having children is more likely a "creeping non-choice" due to finding a husband and economic stability in time.  

The attitude that I quote above, though, is literally anti-human, and a much worse problem than women feeling that they ought to want to have children.

Good News: The Rate of Unmarried Young Fatherhood is Going Down

For men under 44,

In the 1980s, 42% of first-time fathers were not married.

In the 1990s, 40% of first-time fathers were not married.

In the 2000s, 34% of first-time fathers were not married.

The big gains came from improvements among black fathers, whose unmarried fatherhood rate dropped from 77% in the '80s to 66% in the '00s.

Moreover, more unmarried fathers are at least living with the mothers of their children.

Americans Tend to be Touchy Nationalists Because Our Nation is So Obviously Constructed

Tocqueville notes that Americans are very touchy in their nationalism.

Yet America is about the easiest nation to join - e pluribus unum means that we take the masses, huddled and otherwise, from anywhere and everywhere.  If you embrace American principles, and profess loyalty to the nation and its Constitution, you can be an American.

I think these facts are two sides of the same coin.  American expressions of nationalism are so touchy, and often so excessive, because our nationhood is so obviously constructed.

And I would expect that the people touchiest about our sacred nation would be those people who are Americans by experience, rather than formal knowledge. Their vehemence against those they claim "violate the Constitution" is in inverse proportion to their actual knowledge of the Constitution.

Today's point is a subset of my larger argument that most people's religion really is the civil religion of the nation; they believe that all of the things they hold sacred fit neatly under the national umbrella, without being able to explain exactly how.

Natural Growth Childrearing is Like Having Cats

My students always learn from Annette Lareau's excellent study, Unequal Childhoods, about the difference in the way middle-class parents typically raise their children, compared to the way working-class and poor parents typically raise their children.

Middle-class parents use what Lareau calls "concerted cultivation" - marshaling their own resources, and that of many other teachers, coaches, tutors, and others to cultivate the talents of each of their children.  This is the typical upbringing of Centre students.

Lareau found that poorer parents use what she called "natural growth" parenting.  Good parents make sure their kids are fed, clothed, sheltered, and loved - and make them go to school, as the law requires.  They depend on the school to do the teaching, since the teacher are the professionals.  When kids come home, they are free to choose how to spend their time, either in the house or out of it.

My children were raised in the way typical of my class - concerted cultivation, but not over-the-top.  I realized as I was letting the cats out after feeding them this morning that I raise my cats by natural growth.  Once they mastered the litter box, I have not worked much on developing their skills.  They are free to come and go.  I feed them, get their necessary shots, and pet them sometimes.

My students also learn from Edin and Kefalas' excellent study Promises I Can Keep, about teen welfare mothers.  For Centre students, it is a through-the-lookingglass experience to read about teenagers who think raising a child at their age - with no husband, no job, and no real plan - is a sensible thing to do.  The difference, they come to see, is that the women in Promises I Can Keep are using a natural growth standard of what being a good mother would be, whereas my students are using a concerted cultivation standard.

At the same time, many of these same students, especially the young women soon after they graduate from Centre, will casually take on the care of a cat.  Because for cats, they find the natural growth standard is sufficient.

The Railroads Won the Civil War

I have long puzzled over how the Republican Party, which was born as the progressive do-gooder party, became the party of corporate interests.  I had vaguely thought the shift might have happened with Taft.

The more I think about the origins of the party, though, the more I think the corporate interest was there from the beginning. And today it came to me:

The railroads won the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.

Robert Todd Lincoln, business leader and Republican power broker, was general counsel, and later president, of the Pullman Palace Car Company.

The Hunger Games for Universities

Mark Chelgren, a Tea Party Republican state senator in Iowa, proposed a bill that would, among other things, do the following:

(2) The names of the five professors who rank lowest on their institution’s evaluation for the semester, but who scored above the minimum threshold of performance, shall be published on the institution’s internet site and the student body shall be offered an opportunity to vote on the question of whether any of the five professors will be retained as employees of the institution. The employment of the professor receiving the fewest votes approving retention shall be terminated by the institution regardless of tenure status or contract.

The bill is really breathtaking in its peculiar view of what professors - or any kind of professionals - do, and how they should be judged. It is a kind of cut-throat competition that would make for poisonous relations among any staff.  This was the principle governing co-working relations at Enron, which led them to try to outdo one another in ruthlessness toward customers.

One blog commentator, tmareace, wrote "How about doing the same for the legislators in the state?"

The good news is that, as far as I can tell, this bill went nowhere, to the credit of the Iowa legislature.

Would Government-Provided Birth Control Be Fair, Because Voluntary? How About Government-Provided Guns?

My students have been reading Cahn and Carbone's Red Families vs. Blue Families. As the name suggests, the authors contrast the vision of family life of conservative and liberal ideologies, and actual practice.  The short version of the difference:

Blue families promote marital delay, birth control, equality in marriage, and higher education.

Red families promote early marriage, sex control, complementarity in sex roles, and conservative religion.

I asked the students to try to come up with several policies that would justly serve a nation with both kinds of families.  Some of the students are liberals and some are conservatives, but all are students at a selective college, most of whom are planning on careers for men and women, as well as marriage and children. Some are, therefore, 'red' in their ideology, but tilt 'blue' in their practice.

Which led quite a few, on both sides of the spectrum, to want the government to make birth control widely available to everyone.  They reasoned that this was a fair policy to both views; the government was not promoting birth control, as blues would like, but simply making it available.

It occurred to me that a good parallel would be to have the government make guns widely available to everyone.  Would this constitute a fair policy to both views, or would the government be promoting gun ownership, as reds would like?

Yes, "We" Can Still Handle Marriage, As We Always Have

A friend asked me to comment on this article, in which the author, Anthony D'Ambrosio, claims that "marriage doesn't work today" and that "we" (young people) can't handle it.

I don't think this young man understands marriage very well.  

He thinks sex is the most important aspect. He imagines that couples in the past did not struggle with financial problems together. After his divorce, he is hoping for "true love" which somehow counteracts all the problems that he mentions.  

And he does not even consider the core task of marriage from time immemorial: raising children.  

I don't think the problem is his generation, or today's technological distractions, or even student debt. Plenty of young people make excellent marriages in the customary way. They work out a way to deal with these challenges together. 

Marriage is a way for two people to mature together - which makes everything else possible.

Manspreading in Public, Womanspreading in Private

"Manspreading" is the tendency of some men to spread out and take extra space in public - on a subway bench, for example.  This is a real phenomenon, and the public-awareness campaign to encourage men to be more restrained is sensible.

Less noted is what I think should be called "Womanspreading" - the tendency of some women to take extra space when sharing a bed.  A humorous representation of the phenomenon is here:

I think there is a parallel phenomenon of "mansplaining" in a public setting, and "womansplaining" in a private one.

Spreading Democracy vs. Spreading Capitalism

There is a great divide in American foreign policy since World War II.

Some want to spread democracy.  Some want to spread capitalism.

Realizing this clarifies to me much of what has been muddy in why some of our interventions have been for good, and others for ill.

Correct Your Regrettable Habits

Take note of your moments of regret.  Literally write them down in a notebook.

Resist the natural temptation to repress them and move on.

Regrets are your best clue to which habits you need to analyze, and correct.

Most Republicans Support Establishing Christianity as the National Religion

Public Policy Policy has found that most Republicans support establishing Christianity as the national religion, by a margin of 57% to 30%, with 13% unsure.

The proportion rises to 68% among those who would like to see former Gov. Mike Huckabee become president.

The survey does not ask any further questions about the respondents' understanding of the Constitution or of Christianity.  My guess is that this position does not rest on a deep analysis of either.

Instead, this is the characteristic conservative loyalty to what they imagine to be "traditional" as being sacred.

The irony, of course, is that what is actually traditional in the United States is that we definitely do not allow an established religion.

Moreover, I am sure that that majority agreement among Republicans on establishing "Christianity" would disintegrate as soon as they got down to any specifics of which practices of Christianity they have in mind.

Marriage Opportunity: A Centrist Approach

I am happy to be among the original signatories of a new manifesto, "Marriage Opportunity: The Moment for National Action." 

The manifesto calls for the same pro-marriage position that I have been arguing in this blog for a decade.

What is new is that this statement supports same-sex marriage as good for the marriage movement.

I believe this is a centrist position.

The signatories, fellow members of the Marriage Opportunity Council, are from the left, right, and center on a number of issues.  The group includes people who previously opposed same-sex marriage, and those who have previously thought marriage an objectionable institution on the grounds that it was heterosexist or patriarchal or simply outmoded.  We come together on this statement now.

I hope, and expect, that this position will soon be the norm in the middle of political discussion.

David Brooks is Right That Religious Extremists Seek Glory, But Mostly Wrong That Nationalism Is the Best Cure

David Brooks has a sensible column about religious extremists.  What they want, he says, is not the mundane bourgeois solutions of the settled ruling classes - better education and more jobs.  Brooks is right that they have the "thymotic urge" for a glorious, heroic life.  This is an anti-Enlightenment urge that we still see in all cultures, especially among gangs of young men.

Brooks writes "You can't counter a heroic impulse with a mundane bourgeois response.  You can only counter it with a more compelling heroic vision."  This is correct.

However, Brooks goes on to say that the best available heroic vision is nationalism.  Here I think he errs.

Nationalism is the religion of the modern masses.  It is better than nothing.  But nationalism has the great drawback of producing nation-state wars, which are even worse than terrorism.  The Islamic State is trying to create a Sunni Arab nation-state precisely to mobilize that nationalist impulse.  In that they are trying to go Al Qaedi and its imitators one better, to create a more enduring, modern structure.

But nationalism is not a great religion.  It falls far short of the beatific vision.  It is a very limited god.  It may be a help in countering gang-level visions of the heroic impulse, but it is itself a dangerous prescription.

Martin Luther Toy is a Hot Seller

This story would be amusing just for the fact that a Martin Luther Playmobil toy exists at all.

That it is selling out is even more amazing.  

As we approach more Reformation semi-millennium anniversaries, I hope for a whole Diet of Reformers.  Can't wait for John Calvin.

Why Courage Is Necessary for Happiness

I have written before that fear is the solvent of the happy society.

It came to me today that courage is a necessary virtue for happiness, because every kind of fear makes us unhappy.

What "The Nightly Show" Should Do

I had high hopes for "The Nightly Show," Comedy Central's replacement for "The Colbert Report" after "The Daily Show". Larry Wilmore was an excellent "Senior Black Correspondent" for Jon Stewart, and could make an excellent follow-on show, if his show has a different focus. Parts of the "Nightly" are good, but the bulk of it is a panel discussion among people who do not reliably have anything interesting - or even harder, funny - to say.

"The Daily Show" and "the Colbert Report" worked because they were scripted. The best part of The Nightly Show is the scripted bit at the beginning.  

Comedy Central should just pay the money and hire real comedy writers to produce a new thing: a black- (or non-white-) focused Daily Show.  

The one thing I didn't like about Colbert following Stewart was that they often wrote about the same events, and made the same jokes. Yet there is so much that is happening in the world that is not about white people - Wilmore would never run out of material.

The Race Gap in Income Would Have Closed If the Race Gap in Family Structure Had Not Widened

A new study confirms what I have argued before:  most of the race gap today is really a family gap.

Black wages have grown, and the black middle class proportion has grown.  If that was all that had happened, the racial income gap would have been cut substantially - at least in half - in the past half century.

Instead, the gap has remained the same over all.

This is largely because the proportion of black children growing up in single parent families has grown from about 25% in 1965 to more than 70% today.  These families are poorer than their two-parent counterparts, and the children who grow up in them are handicapped in gaining economic security as they grow up and make families themselves.

I thank Claude Fischer's fine blog for bringing a new study by Deirdre Bloom on this point to our attention.

Some Thoughts on "American Sniper"

Clint Eastwood has created a very well-made movie.  I think the main moral point is muddled, because Eastwood's own moral vision stops at the individual level.  It is not wrong, but incomplete.

The issue is laid out in an early scene, when Chris Kyle, the title character, is still a boy. Chris had defended his younger brother from a bully.  Later, their father offered this worldview:  there are three kids of people in the world - sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs.  The father says he is not raising any sheep, nor any wolves.  His sons are to be sheepdogs, protectors of the sheep.

As the father lays it out, he is arguing with those who think there are no wolves in the world.  This also sounds like a theme in many Eastwood movies, both as director and actor.  But this is really a straw man.

It is a false argument in the first instance because there are very few people who argue that there are no bad guys at all.  Even I, who often point out that most people are happy and that the world is getting better, do not say that.

It is a false argument for a deeper reason, too. It assumes that people simply are good or bad, weak or strong.  There is no nuance as to why some people might take up arms against another, why, for example, people who were grateful that invaders removed their brutal dictator might still resent the invader, especially if the invaders settled in.

Which brings me to the other character missing from Kyle, Sr.'s metaphor: the shepherd.  The reasoning person who thinks about the structures for protecting the sheep, the just ways of controlling wolves, and the good of the entire ecology that includes both.

Chris Kyle was a very good sheepdog, as portrayed in "American Sniper".  He was not a shepherd.

The world most needs good shepherds.

Is the Jewish God a Cosmic Life Force?

The General Social Survey, the workhorse survey of American sociology, in 2010 asked a representative sample of American adults how they envisioned God.

The two most popular options were "God is a personal being involved in the lives of people today" and "God is not personal, but something like a cosmic life force."

For Christians, the more strongly religious they reported themselves to be, the more they chose the first option.  Thus, 93% of "strong Protestants" and 86% of "strong Catholics" think God is a personal being, compared to 70% of "not very strong" Protestants and 62% of "not very strong" Catholics. 

By contrast, only 3 and 5%, respectively, of strong Protestants and Catholics see God as a cosmic force. For not very strong Protestants and Catholics, the proportion embracing the cosmic force view rises to 17%.

For Jews, though, the trend goes in the opposite direction. Among strong Jews, only 33% see God as personal, whereas 40% see God as a cosmic force.  Interestingly, it is the not very strong Jews who show a more gentile distribution: 53% say "personal being," vs. 12% who say "cosmic force."

My best guess of what this means:  Jews who are not very involved in the Jewish community do not really know the distinctive features of Jewish theology, and therefore assimilate to the Christian view that pervades American culture.

Improved U.S. - India Ties are Good for Democracy

President Obama and Indian President Modi unblocked a stalled agreement to improve joint trade and development relations on nuclear power and drones.

President Obama turned toward India at the beginning of his administration, with Modi's predecessor.  Now he has made a second visit to India, to deal with the new administration, and move forward.

It has always made sense to me that the U.S. and India, giant English-tradition democracies, should be allies.  The Cold War made us enemies.  The silver lining of that era was our relatively close ties with Pakistan.  Still, India is a more natural ally.  With the end of the Cold War, and the rise of the mutual competitor, China, it is very hopeful that US/India relations are improving.

This is an achievement of the Obama administration that will pay dividends not only for the U.S., but for the advancement of democracy.

Recovering the Republican Center: Moderates Force Compromise on Abortion Bill

Today's hopeful sign:  moderates within the Republican coalition in the House of Representative pushed back against the far right on their standard abortion bill.  As a result, the Republican leadership was forced - or, as I hope, allowed - to drop one of the most controversial and punishing requirements.

The bill would forbid abortions after 20 weeks, which is now the Republican unifying position.  It would have allowed an exception in cases of rape, which is a standard American position.  The contentious point was whether women would have to report the rape to police to qualify.  The far right said yes.  The moderates, especially more moderate women, said no.  The moderates won.

Presbyterians Are Optimistic Trusters

I am analyzing new data from the Presbyterian Panel, a survey of Presbyterian Church (USA) members and leaders.

One comparison I am interested in is with an important baseline table from the 1972 American National Election Survey.  That survey's table crossed the "are you an optimist or a pessimist?" question with the "do you think most people can be trusted?" question.

I am interested in this issue, because I think trusters, especially optimistic trusters, are the people most likely to undertake Tocquevillian projects of community improvement.

The result:

Proportions of Americans (from the American National Election Survey 1972):

Optimistic Trusters: 35%

Pessimistic Trusters: 13

Optimistic Mistrusters: 30

Pessimistic Mistrusters: 23

Proportion of Presbyterian members (from the Presbyterian Panel 2014):

Optimistic Trusters: 65%

Pessimistic Trusters: <1

Optimistic Mistrusters: 26

Pessimistic Mistrusters: 9

Today's Good News: The Attorney General Curbs Local Police From Taking Civil Assets

Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the widespread practice of police seizing money and assets, such as vehicles, from people they stop without a warrant and without proving a crime will no longer be shielded by federal law.  His move drew bipartisan support from Congress.

Until now, police could seize assets they thought were suspicious and keep them, if they shared a portion with the federal government, and be protected by federal law.  By greatly restricting the circumstances of such seizures, Holder eliminates the incentive that some departments had succumbed to to get a significant part of their annual budget from asset seizures.

The Washington Post reported that "the Institute for Justice and other libertarian-leaning groups teamed up with the American Civil Liberties Union and left-leaning groups to press for changes in the wake of the Post's investigation."

Two Kinds of Universal Identity

How do you think about the largest human identity group?

Christians say we are all children of God.

The biggest secular option is to be a cosmopolitan citizen of the world.

The latter has the advantage of seeming like an adult and modern identity.  But it has the disadvantage of depending on a universal state that one could be a citizen of, which clearly does not exist.

The best modern Christian universal identity I can think of is something like co-worker with God.  This works for Jews and Muslims, too.

(This is a half-formed idea).

State-Backed Modernization of Islam in Egypt Will Help

The president of Egypt has come out forcefully for modernizing Islam on religious, rather than nationalist, grounds.

He has already enlisted al-Azhar University, the great seat of Sunni learning and, in effect, an arm of the Egyptian state to make small steps.  For example, "texts on slavery and on refusing to greet Christians and Jews, for example, have been removed" from Egyptian textbooks. 

I don't think a religious reform initiated by the state can work by itself.  I don't think President el-Sissi can be the Muslim Martin Luther.  But he could be the Muslim Frederick the Wise, who sheltered the reformer from political attack.  

Feeling Mainline Leads to a Sense of Entitlement

I am working on a paper that I have tentatively titled "Feeling Mainline."  This comes from a dataset that grouped people into big categories based on their denomination, including dividing Protestant denominations into Evangelical, Black, and Mainline.  This is a fairly standard move in sociological studies.

Later in the survey, though, they also asked each respondent how well different words described their religious identity, such as "religious liberal" or "fundamentalist."  Among the words they asked about were "evangelical" and "mainline."

The most interesting finding:  about a quarter of members of mainline denominations think of themselves as "evangelical", and about a quarter of members of evangelical denominations think of themselves as "mainline." In fact, about a third of black Protestants see themselves as mainline, and even 15% of Catholics say "mainline" describes them very well.

Clearly, people are not using the term the same way sociologists do.

I think embracing the identity "mainline" means that you feel entitled to participate in decisions affecting your community.  This is more than just "mainstream" (as opposed to weird, deviant, extreme, eccentric, etc.)  I think "mainline" carries a sense of responsibility for the world.

I use this odd phrase - entitled to participate in decisions affecting - because this is how Annette Lareau describes the sense of entitlement that middle and upper-middle-class children learn from being raised according to what she calls "concerted cultivation."  Where poor and working-class kids are taught to be obedient and do their work - what Lareau calls the "natural growth" method of childrearing - middle class parents work to develop all of the talents of each of their children through all the methods of pushing, coaching, and enrichment they can muster.  And one aim of concerted cultivation is to teach children to be independent and curious, to actively promote their own growth.

Middle class kids, thus, grow up with a sense of entitlement. But this entitlement is not to get whatever they want, but to participate in decisions that affect their lives.

Which, I believe, is how people who feel mainline in their religion have a sense of entitlement to participate in decisions that affect their communities.