Obama Assessment, Year Two: Wars

A year ago I praised President Obama for winding down the wrong war in Iraq and pursuing the right war against Al Qaeda. A year later, he has made further progress in winding down the Iraq war. We should have nearly all American troops out of direct fighting by the end of this year, and will start reducing the gigantic cost of that war.

Al Qaeda was driven out of Afghanistan. They are pursuing their best defense, namely, hiding in terrain that is only partly controlled by our vital ally Pakistan. They know that a full-scale invasion of Pakistan would strengthen our enemies. We know it, too. Thus, we have been pursuing a very delicate war against Al Qaeda and their allies the Taliban. We probably cannot drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan. It is their country, even if most Afghans do not want them back in power. We can, though, defeat, capture, and kill Al Qaeda.

I am still very disappointed that Guantanamo and Bagram Airfield and other even more secret prisons still remain. There are secrets we have not been told, and cannot be told, about what goes on there. For my part, I think our torture of the prisoners has so screwed up any hope of prosecuting them that we are stuck with them for a long time.

Still, in war we are making things better, and not making things worse.

Obama Assessment, Year Two

A year ago I made a series of posts on the first year of the Obama administration. Now, as he enters his second year, it is time for a second assessment.

The most urgent task the Obama administration inherited was to save the American and world economy, which was collapsing at the end of the Bush administration. The economy is one of the most complex of all social institutions. No one person or organization can control it. President Bush initiated the bailout of specific large companies, leaving the government in temporary control of several of them. President Obama continued those bailouts, though with a bit more regulation, especially of the stockbrokers turned "investment banks" that had produced the crisis in the first place.

The bailouts worked. Much of the money authorized for bailouts was not actually spent, and most of the loans that were made have already been paid back. In particular, we saved half the auto industry, which is an essential pillar of our economy. In the end, we might even make money.

The recession stopped getting worse, and has slowly been getting better. The most recent consensus of economists is that the next couple of years might see enough growth to recover most of the lost jobs, as well as the lost profits that are already improving.

The administration has also been trying to invest in new industries to establish the foundation for our future economy. They have been particularly interested in alternatives to oil as an energy source, and in making up for the big slowdown in new drug development. Naturally, the large companies that benefit from the current energy and drug markets, and their representatives in the legislature, have opposed these new investments. Nonetheless, I am hopeful that the economy of, say, twenty years from now will rest on investments in alternatives that we make now, both by government and by business.

I believe the economy is the single most important issue determining how people vote - most especially, whether they feel secure in their own economic future. I expect that by 2012 the economy will be sufficiently improved that Democrats will have a big year, and President Obama will probably be re-elected.

Creation Museum: No Death, No Birth

Yesterday I wrote about why young-earth creationists do not accept creation followed by long eons of development. Our host offered the explanation that old-earth creation would entail that death was part of God's design for the universe - a view they reject.

It occurs to me that one implication of this view is that there would also have been no birth in paradise. No babies, no children, no growing up. Not for people, nor for animals.

That is a hard teaching for a sentimental dad like me. And I think it is hard to reconcile with how the promise of children is described in Genesis. Childbirth is to be painful as a result of sin. But children are not a penalty of sin. Children are a gift.

Creation Museum Visit, 2011

Every few years I teach "The Sociology of American Religion," which includes a trip to the Creation Museum near Petersburg, Kentucky. Dr. David Menton, a retired medical school professor who is one of the scientific advisors to the museum, graciously met with the class and answered many questions.

One question that had been on my mind since our last visit was this: many mainline Christians agree with the Creation Museum that God created the universe and that life evolved within the different kinds of animals. What they do not accept, though, is that all of this happened within the last 10,000 years, nor that the Bible requires us to read it as having a chronology from Adam to now of only six thousand years. There are many old-earth creationists, who are not that far from the museum's young-earth creationists. I asked Dr. Menton what was objectionable in an old-earth creationist view? He offered that if the earth was millions of years old, then death had to have been part of the design of creation, with new life replacing old. The museum's view is that death came to humans and animals (though not, I infer, plants) with Adam's sin. Without sin, Adam and Eve and all the animals created with them would have lived forever, without successors.

This was a detail of the young-earth creationist view I had not encountered before.

Beth Prather, a student in the class, took several fine pictures. The "7 C's" is the basic understanding of history taught by the Creation Museum. "Creation's Orchard" and my own (bad) picture of the development of the horse shows what the museum means by "development within kinds" - micro-evolution, in contrast to the "Evolutionist's Tree" macro-evolution from one spark of life to all living things. The final picture is Beth on a humorous treat at the end of the museum.

Sick Privilege at Duke

Caitlin Flanagan has a very sad essay in the Atlantic, "The Hazards of Duke." She follows a pathetic young woman who, as a fake "senior thesis" prior to her graduation from that university last spring, sent out a slide show rating all of her drunken, violent sexual experiences with Duke athletes.

This combination of arrogant, sexually exploitative men and needy, self-destructive women can be found at any college. It is the standard stuff of the guaranteed-to-horrify-parents websites, such as Texts From Last Night and TotalFratMove. Flanagan thinks Duke collects, even glorifies, this bad combination more than other schools do. I cannot comment on that.

I did find this essay helpful in thinking about what is wrong with privilege. Privilege as a social structure is not something that privileged individuals can simply overcome or wish away. But when privileged people do not realize their privilege, but instead believe themselves to have earned and be entitled to all of their advantages, then the social sickness grows. And few people are most privileged than moneyed, white, male, athletes at elite schools who have women begging them for sexual exploitation.

Can anyone add to this list? I think it is helpful to define the pole of privilege, to start dealing with it with curiosity, gratitude, and humility.

Pushing Kids Toward Individual vs. Social Excellence

David Brooks has an interesting reply to Amy Chua's "Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother." Chua wrote that she pushes her kids hard to master skills such as mathematical calculation and musical performance, harder than other American mothers do. Brooks notes that there has been some fussing against her for being too hard on her kids. He, by contrast, is critical because she does not push her kids enough to learn the harder, social skills.

The book read by all first-year students at Centre this year was John Pomfret's Chinese Lessons. Pomfret first studied in China in the early 1980s. His fellows students remembered the worst days of the communist terror of the Cultural Revolution, and the long gray years of forced collective action afterwards. Pomfret was surprised to find that Chinese people were not inclined to do things collectively - they were much more individualistic than the supposedly individualist Americans, whenever the government let them be.

Putting these two stories together, I see Chua's fascinating piece differently than I did at first. I read her willingness to push her children to strenuous individual achievement as a feature of being closer to the immigrant generation than most Americans are. Now, though, I think Chua's particular kind of achievement push is more Chinese-American than it is just immigrant. She pushes her kids to individual effort, where other upper-middle class American parents push their kids to team achievement.

And the great ecology of America benefits from both kinds of skills, and both kinds of parental pressure.

Orphans as Practice Babies

Sociological Images has a short account of how college home economics departments used to train students on "practice babies" drawn from local orphanages. They note that this kind of training fell out of fashion after baby experts became convinced that infants suffered if they were not attached to one particular person. After 1969 the use of practice babies died out.

It occurs to me that another reason for the disappearance of a large number of institutionalized infants for use in schooling at about that time is that after Roe v. Wade in 1973, the bottom fell out of the "orphan" market.

The Best Way to Continue Dr. King's Dream: Close the Marriage Gap

Several friends on Facebook have been posting an argument made by GOOD, one of my favorite websites and magazines. The post is entitled "In Honor of Dr. King: Let's Solve the Worst Crisis Facing Black Children Since Slavery." The crisis that the author, Liz Dwyer, has in mind is the education gap.

I respectfully disagree. I think the gap that lies behind all the other black/white gaps in America is the marriage gap. African Americans have the lowest rate of marriage of any ethnic group in the U.S. 70% of black kids are born out of wedlock - by far the highest percentage of any ethnic group. If African Americans had the same marriage rate as other Americans, most of the racial gap would disappear.

The Sabbath as an Argument for Young-Earth Creationism

This week my "Sociology of Religion" class visited an Orthodox synagogue. When asked by the students about the age of creation, the rabbi promptly said "5770 years." (His son gently corrected him: "5771".)

This exchange prompted a student to ask one of her Orthodox friends how, exactly, he was taught the young-earth view growing up. He said that his parents relied on the Bible - as Christian young-earth creationists do, as well. However, this Orthodox Jewish family made a somewhat different argument than the Christian arguments that I have met with. They cited God's gift of the sabbath as evidence that the seven days of creation are normal, 24-hour days. God worked for a normal week, and then rested a normal day. Thus, when we are commanded to work six days but honor the sabbath, both weeks are of the same kind.

A sabbath-based argument strikes me as a distinctively Jewish way of making the case for young-earth creationism.

Adam the Prophet

My "Sociology of American Religion" class had an excellent visit to our local Muslim school yesterday. The principal, Dr. Jitmoud, very helpfully explained the basics of Islam. He said something that I had heard before, but then gave it a further application I had not appreciated.

By the Muslim account, Adam is the first prophet of God (Allah), a witness to the Creator. In saying that Adam is the first prophet of God, Islamic thought thus reasons that Islam is the oldest religion. This also then makes sense of the claim that all people are really Muslims, most of whom need to be encouraged to return to the original religion. And this, in turn, helps account for why they are so hard on people who convert from Islam to other faiths.

The Power Denominations: Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Jews

Steve Prothero has just release his analysis of the 112th Congress. He notes that three denominations are vastly overrepresented there. Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Jews together make up just 5.9% of the population. However, they make up nearly a quarter of the Congress, at 23.4%.

These three denominations are not merely the best educated and richest denominations, which we should always expect to be over-represented in the halls of power. These three traditions also have the best developed theories - along with Congregationalists and Catholics - of how to wield power. They develop in their members a stronger sense that they should take on the burden of responsibility for the common good.

It is fascinating to see that Jews have displaced Congregationalists among the Big Three power denominations. I think this a very good sign about the state of American pluralism.

Smiling Young People Are 1/5th as Likely to Divorce

Matthew Hertenstein and colleagues found this interesting result:

If you didn't smile for photographs early in life, your marriage is five times more likely to end in divorce than if you smiled intensely in early photographs.

This is probably because optimists smile more, and optimists are more likely to have successful marriages.

Marriage is the Upward Mobility Path You Most Control

Doyle McManus has a fine op-ed in the Los Angeles Times summarizing the three main elements of upward mobility for the poor, as summarized by Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution:

"If young people do three things — graduate from high school, get a job, and get married and wait until they're 21 before having a baby — they have an almost 75% chance of making it into the middle class."

McManus reasonably focuses on the big things government, business, and other social institutions can do to improve the chances of upward mobility for poor people. Creating jobs and improving the quality of schools is beyond what most people can affect individually.

The main tool that people have to lift themselves is in the hands of all Americans, no matter how poor they start out: stay married and have your kids in marriage.

Decent Muslims Turn Out to Protect Christians

This is how to make a good society.

When Muslim extremists threatened to attack Christians on Christmas eve, ordinary decent Muslims turned out by the thousands to act as human shields to protect their Christian neighbors.

That all of this happened in Egypt, where Christians are a small minority, and the government has turned a blind eye to Muslim attacks on Christians, makes this story all the more remarkable and heroic.

Women's tears reduce men's sexual arousal

This is such a nifty study. Lots of animals have tears, but people make tears to express emotions. Women's emotional tears have a chemical that causes men to dial back their (easily aroused) sexual desire. This says to me that we have yet another ingenious system to calibrate the sexual communication between men and women.

What the Government Does Is What Matters, Not Simply How Big It Is

David Brooks has a great column on "The Achievement Test" for judging government. His core point:

The size of government doesn’t tell you what you need to know; the social and moral content of government action does. The budgeteers and the technicians may not like it, but it’s the values inculcated by policies that matter most.

Right. Shrinking government is not a good in itself. Judgment is required.

Liberal Brains vs. Conservative Brains

A small study of University College London students found this interesting result:

"Self-proclaimed right-wingers had a more pronounced amygdala - a primitive part of the brain associated with emotion. ... However, those aligned to the left had thicker anterior cingulates - which is an area associated with anticipation and decision-making."

Strong Marriages Develop Shared Traits

This is a lovely experiment, by psychologist Arthur Aron:

"In experiments by Dr. Aron, participants rated themselves and their partners on a variety of traits, like “ambitious” or “artistic.” A week later, the subjects returned to the lab and were shown the list of traits and asked to indicate which ones described them. People responded the quickest to traits that were true of both them and their partner."

The article that this experiment is reported in, Tara Parker-Pope's "The Happy Marriage is the 'Me' Marriage," sensationalizes, or at least misreads, the data it is based on. She draws a false contrast between enduring and "sustainable" marriages, without offering any evidence that there are many enduring but unsustainable marriages to begin with.

Nonetheless, this experiment is an interesting demonstration of the way in which strong marriages shape the couple into one.

Homely Work in A Deep Society

Alain de Botton writes light, thoughtful books about living a meaningful life. In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, he follows various kinds of work and workers. He explores how the work may or may not lead to a fulfilling life for the worker, and for the society in which they work. One of his chapters is devoted to the creation and marketing of a new British biscuit ("cookie" in American). De Botton uses this homely case to see both how narrow this work seems in itself, but also how it is part of a larger economy of wealth and deeper human value.

From the beginning, observers of these [commercial] societies have been transfixed by two of their most prominent features: their wealth and their spiritual decadence. ... Their self-indulgence has consistently appalled a share of their most high-minded and morally ambitious members, who have railed against consumerism and instead honoured beauty and nature, art and fellowship. But the premises of a biscuit company are a fruitful place to recall that there has always been an insurmountable problem facing those countries that ignore the efficient production of chocolate biscuits and sternly dissuade their ablest citizens from spending their lives on the development of innovative marketing promotions: they have been poor, so poor as to be unable to guarantee political stability or take care of their most vulnerable citizens, whom they have lost to famines and epidemics. It is the high-minded countries that have let their members starve, whereas the self-centered and childish ones have, off the backs of their doughnuts and six thousand varieties of ice cream, had the resources to invest in maternity wards and cranial scanning machines.

Merry Christmas to one and all - see you in the new year

The Gruntled Center shuts down for two weeks in the year - August family reunion at Capon Springs, and Christmas week.

I hope you all get to enjoy blessings this week, and that we all return refreshed in 2011.