Marilynne Robinson Week 4: Against Fear

In her essay "Facing Reality" in the collection The Death of Adam, Robinson argues that what we take to be reality is a collective fiction, resting on faith just as much as any other understanding of history does.

She argues that the dominant construction of reality in our culture today is based on fear.  Robinson then offers this powerful critique:

When they make fear the key to interpretation of history and experience, as they do so often, as ours does now, nothing contains a greater potential for releasing all the varieties of destruction.  Fearfulness assumes a hidden narrative – that we are all ill despite our health, vulnerable despite our apparent safety. We are contemptuous of transient well-being, as if there were any other kind. Routinely discounting the preponderance of evidence is not the behavior of reasonable people, nor is devaluing present experience because it may be overtaken by something worse.

I see this again and again as I talk about happiness.  Most of the people I talk to are, on the whole, happy.  They know that their lives are full of good things, along with some bad.  When pressed, they concede that our social order actually has many excellent features. But, they say, this could only be temporary.  It could all go away.

"We are contemptuous of transient well-being, as if there were any other kind."

The Creator called the world good. To me, to Marilynne Robinson, that is a good reason not to make fear the key to the interpretation of history. 

Marilynne Robinson Week 3: Home is a Superb Novel

Marilynne Robinson's Home is the counterpart to her Gilead - the same events, told from a different perspective.  Gilead centers on an old Congregationalist minister in a small town in Iowa.  Home centers on his best friend, the old Presbyterian minister in the same town. The action turns on the return of the prodigal son of the Presbyterian minister, who is named for the Congregationalist minister.

The father has a strong faith in the sufficiency of grace, which is tested to the limits by the helpless self-destructiveness of the son.  And the son yearns for home, for his father and sister and namesake, for faith itself. Their serious problems are not resolved fully.

But I spoil nothing to say that the sister, Glory, concludes the tale with "The Lord is wonderful."

Marilynne Robinson Week 2: Gilead is a Beautiful, Wise Book

Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, is a fine piece of wisdom. An old Congregationalist minister in a small Iowa town sees the glory and wonder that God made in the world.  He has plenty of misery and heartache to see, too.  But his gratitude for the glory and wonder shines through.

This is a blessing.

Same-Sex Marriage is Good Enough for the State (Which is Not the Same as the Church)

I recently wrote about the evolution of President Obama's position on same-sex marriage. Not surprisingly, this drew some critical comment. In particular, there were challenges to my suggestion that enshrining religious grounds for making civil law was dangerous for religious institutions. I was asked to clarify the evolution of my own thought on this issue.

Marriage has a vital public role in the good order of society.  I believe that role is primarily about raising children in as good an environment as possible.  Marriage is also the main institution in which real people (not corporations) save assets and transmit them to their posterity.

As a social institution, a child's two natural parents, married to one another, is the first best option. Other options - single parents, adoption, same-sex couples, widows, orphanages - can produce good-enough results, and are certainly better than not raising children at all.

To say that one social institution is better than another is not to say that each individual example of the former is better than each individual example of the latter. And it certainly does not mean that one is all good and all alternatives are bad.

The state has always supported marriage for the parents of children because every other institution for raising children is more costly, less efficient, and less effective for producing citizens.

The Christian church, meanwhile, has not always supported marriage of any kind, but only came to support marriage grudgingly.

The sanctification of marriage in civil religion is more recent still. The recent constitutional amendment condemning all extramarital sexual relations is an example of this kind of civil religion.

For the state to include same-sex couples as married, especially for purposes of raising children, is a decision like that of accepting cohabiting couples or adoptive parents as good-enough.  This decision, though, is only with reference to what the state needs from a child-rearing institution.

I think the Bible clearly condemns homosexual practice as a sin. But it condemns divorce even more strongly and clearly.  Both church and state have made their peace with divorce as a good-enough state, even without embracing it wholly.  I believe the church can do the same with homosexual practice. 

The state can normalize homosexual practice because it does not have a very good reason not to. That is a good rule of thumb for any state in a free society. And the state may prudently judge that children would be raised and assets would be saved and transmitted well enough by same-sex couples to normalize same-sex marriages.

That prudential judgment is the one the President Obama has made. I concur.

More Good News from Burma: An Ambassador

Burma is slowly heading away from the bizarre military dictatorship they have suffered under for decades, and toward democracy.

Secretary of State Clinton announced today that, as a result of these improvements, the United States will be reducing some long-standing sanctions.

And for the first time in 22 years, we will appoint an ambassador to Burma.

I hope that will not have to wait more than a year to see President Aung San Suu Kyi welcome the President of the United States to a fully democratic Burma.

A Consumer-Oriented Research Methods Class?

I am contemplating a heresy is sociology teaching: a "Research Methods" class aimed at educating consumers, rather than producers, of sociological research.

(I mean, of course, consumers of research - people who read statistics in the newspapers, for example - not consumers of commodities.)

This fall I will be teaching "Research Methods" for the first time.  I have been able to avoid this task for so long because my excellent colleague has borne that duty.  Alas, she is moving on.

I have always been skeptical of a free-standing methods class.  Looking at methods textbooks and beginning statistics texts confirms my sense that studying methods at a distance from a real problem that you are researching is impossibly dry.

On the other hand, I am a firm believer that half the job of teaching is helping students become culturally literate about what they should already know, and discerning consumers of what new knowledge they meet in the future.

So I have been thinking about teaching "Research Methods" aimed primarily at understanding the research that others have done and are trying to persuade us with.  This applies to classic studies as well as to the avalanche of election statistics flowing over us.

We would, of course, do some actual number crunching to get the hang of it.  I am thinking of giving each student a year of the General Social Survey to answer questions with.

But I would welcome your help in thinking about what a consumer-oriented research methods class would look like.

Marilynne Robinson Week 1: Housekeeping

This week I am reading the works of Marilynne Robinson.

Her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), takes her central character, a young teenager named Ruth, to the physical and emotional edge of civilization. Her parents disappear and she and her sister go to live with their grandmother in a tiny lumber town on a huge lake in Idaho. When grandma dies, their not-quite-of-this-world aunt comes to care of them.

Ruth and Aunt Sylvia start loosely connected to the world. They attempt housekeeping as a normal connection with the world. This proves harder and harder. I won't say more about the plot.

I am reading Robinson as a serious Christian author.  She does have some deep comments about perceiving reality.

Still, do novels have to be about unhappy people in peculiar situations?

Evolution on Gay Marriage

President Obama completed what he described as the evolution of his position on same-sex marriage.  He has long supported civil rights for homosexuals.  In the 2008 election he supported civil unions as the state equivalent of marriage, reserving the term "marriage" for religious unions.

This has been my position, too.

However, I also see that it is hard for most people to hold on to a living sense of the difference between the law of the state and the order of the church.  Ironically, it is Southern Baptists who seem to have the hardest time with this distinction - even though when they were a sect being persecuted by the state church, Baptists pioneered the church/state wall.  In the recent North Carolina vote outlawing all non-marital sexual unions, the victors said that the Bible recognizes only a marriage of a man and a woman, and therefore the state of North Carolina should do the same.  They didn't even know they were overthrowing the church/state wall that they themselves had promoted to protect the church.

I think President Obama had a genuine change of heart sometime in the past few months, as he said.  But I also think the timing of President Obama's announcement of his support for same-sex marriage was affected by the North Carolina vote.  It has been clear for some time that the constitutional amendment was going to pass. This outcome would not have changed if he had announced his support of same-sex marriage before the vote.   But I also think the recent series of the statements supporting same-sex marriage by Vice President Biden and other cabinet officers was part of a planned roll-out of the president's new position. 

I think the success of legal gay marriage all over the United States is now inevitable.  I think the pace will be quick in half the country, slow in the other half - that is, in my half. But the demographic writing is on the wall - the younger generation not only supports same-sex marriage, they don't understand why the old people are against it.  And this is true of young Republicans, even young religious Republicans, just as it is of most young people.

The Tea Party Kills the American Community Survey

This is a sad day for sociology. 

The American Community Survey, the essential survey conducted by the Census Bureau between decennial censuses, has been killed in the House of Representatives. The bill's sponsor, Tea Party congressman Daniel Webster, believes that making an economic and demographic portrait of the country is an invasion of privacy.

The ACS collects data required by several federal statutes, and is hugely valuable to American businesses.  The Census Bureau has also said that eliminating the ACS will make the next census more expensive.

I have often noted the parallels between the current Tea Party movement and the Know-Nothing Party of the pre-Civil War days.  This time the "know nothing" label is more literally true.

The Loss of Lugar is a Sad Day for Centrism

Richard Lugar was one of the real statesmen of the U.S. Senate.  One of the measures of his statesmanship was his ability to compromise and work with Democrats.

The Tea Party candidate, Richard Mourdock, who beat Sen. Lugar in the Republican primary yesterday is against compromise.

I think if you are against compromise in principle, you have no business serving in a legislature.

I am glad that the country got the Lugar-Obama Non-Proliferation Initiative to reduce stockpiles of nuclear weapons and put the former U.S.S.R.'s nuclear weapons under greater security.  You can bet that if Mr. Mourdock had been in that seat in 2007, there would have been no Mourdock-Obama Non-Proliferation Initiative.

Small Businesses Need Help With Regulations More Than With Taxes

Sanders Daniel, a reader of the blog, sent me the results of a survey of small-business owners that his company, Thumbtack.com, did across the country.

The most interesting main finding, I thought, is this:

Small businesses care almost twice as much about licensing regulations as they do about tax rates when rating the business-friendliness of their state or local government.

This confirms something that my small business friends say - tax cuts will make no difference in whether they create jobs.  Tax cuts are really the hobby horse of rich individuals, not of actual job creators.

The Thumbtack.com survey also found that what helped businesses think that a state was friendly to them, and made them feel optimistic about the future, was if the state provided training in how to meet its regulations.  The government service of regulations - which benefits consumers, but is a pain to business owners - can be aided by the further government service of training owners in how to meet and manage the regulations.

And on training, alas, Kentucky rates a grade of F. 

The Little Words Show a Couple's Mutual Interest

James Pennebaker, a U. of Texas psychologist, studies what happens to our use of function words - the, this, though, I, and, an, there, that - when we converse with other people.  He studied speed-dating couples. He found that when both used these words the same way and at the same rate, they were more likely to go on a real date.

This was not because, as I would have thought, these speech patterns showed an underlying similarity. Other studies have shown that couples with similarly complex vocabularies are more attracted to one another and make more stable marriages.  But that is not what is going on here.  Everyone uses function words.

Pennebaker concludes:
"When two people are paying close attention, they use language in the same way," he says. "And it's one of these things that humans do automatically."

Chinese Civil Rights Lawyer Chen Guangcheng is Halfway to Freedom

Chen Guangcheng brought a lawsuit against Chinese provincial officials for forced sterilizations and forced abortions as part of the one-child policy.  The Chinese government did what it usually does: it cracked down on both the bad officials, and the good citizen who exposed them.  Chen was sentenced to prison on trumped-up charges.  When his four-year term was over, he was (illegally) put under house arrest. 

This week, despite being under intense guard and being blind, Chen escaped from his village, was spirited away by the human rights underground to Beijing, and has taken refuge in the U.S. embassy.

I hope a fruit of the upcoming U.S./China economic talks will be that Chen can leave China for freedom, and that his family will not be retaliated against.

What I find particularly hopeful about this story is that Chen's activism took the form of a lawsuit.  The fact that it is even possible now for a citizen to file a lawsuit against the government is a hopeful step toward legitimate government in China.

Wheelan's Good Life Advice for Graduates (and Everyone)

I endorse Charles Wheelan's sentiments in his Wall Street Journal piece, "Ten Things Your Commencement Speaker Won't Tell You."

I particularly embrace #4, "Marry Someone Smarter Than You Are."  This paragraph is pretty much my life story, swapping "software company" for "education non-profit."

I do take issue with one element of #1, "Your Time in Fraternity Basements Was Well Spent." Wheelan is thinking of time spent building lifetime relationships, based on making "meaningful connections with other human beings." Merely drinking together will not do that.  And hookups have a negative effect.

Enjoy Commencement season.

The Tide Has Turned on Gay Marriage

A new Pew poll shows that more people favor gay marriage than oppose it - 47% to 43%. 

That would not persuade me in itself.  But when you parse the data, majorities of women favor gay marriage, majorities of moderates favor gay marriage, and, most importantly, majorities of the two youngest generations favor gay marriage.

The tide has turned in favor of gay marriage.  In a decade, it will not be an issue in most places in America.

Mexican Immigration Turns the Corner

Mexican immigration has peaked and started to recede.

There are about 12 million Mexican immigrants in the United States.  Slightly over half of them are here illegally. 

In the past few recession years the in-migration has slowed to a trickle, and the out-migration has picked up.  Last year there may have been more people returning to Mexico than came here.

Those who were afraid of being overrun by Mexicans can strike another fear from their list.

Consider Three: New Evidence from Young Adult Families.

Mark Regnerus reports some early results of his survey of young adults, 18 - 39.

I was drawn to this portrait of the number of children in each family.  These data are on full brothers and sisters.

Only children: 21%
Two-child family: 34%
Three-child family: 24%
Four-child family: < 10%
Five-child family: < 5%

Thus, most families don't have enough children to replace the population (replacement level is, on average, 2.1 children per woman).  When you consider the people in the parental generation (older than these respondents) who had no children, they balance out those who had four or more kids.  The average educated mother has two children, which is a widely known norm.  What is less well known is that poor, unschooled, teen mothers also have, on average, two children.

Sociologists have known for some time that the population of this country is in danger of declining, as it is likely to do in all other industrialized countries. Many of my students feel freed by this news, as they want to have more than two children but were afraid that was irresponsible.  They had been taught the old story of a "population explosion" that their parents were taught.  The idea that they can have more is liberating.

The threshold for a stable population, I believe, is between two children as a norm, and three.  People like my students are the very kind most likely to be able to create stable families - educated, persistent young people who are no longer teenagers.

America would be better off if the norm for stable families was three children, rather than two.

As I have long urged my students, when thinking about family size, consider three.

Sliding Into Cohabitation is Not Worth It

Meg Jay, a clinical psychologist, has a fine piece in the New York Times on how sliding into cohabitation can make it less likely that you will make a successful marriage.

This line is worth the price of admission:
"I’ve had other clients who also wish they hadn’t sunk years of their 20s into relationships that would have lasted only months had they not been living together."

My advice to students: don't live together without a ring and a date.

"Equal Pay Day" is Mostly Wrong

Today is "Equal Pay Day," an annual symbolic protest of the supposed gender gap in wages.  It is based on the number of additional days that women have to work into the new year to equal the median wage of men in the prior year.  Last year the median annual income of women working full time and year round was 77% of men's median income. Thus, women need to work an extra quarter of a year - that is, until today - to catch up.

The implication of this argument is that women make 77% of what men make due to discrimination.  A moment's thought, though, should dispose of this argument.  If women really did exactly the same work as men for only three quarters of the cost, no rational employer would hire men at all.

The American Association of University Women, who calculated this ratio, admit that when you control for several things that should be controlled for - college major, occupation, industry, sector, hours worked, workplace flexibility, experience, educational attainment, enrollment status, GPA, institution selectivity, age, race/ethnicity, region, marital status, and number of children - the gap drops to 5% one year after college graduation.

The biggest difference is not simply between men and women, but between fathers and mothers. Married fathers are likely to work more, more steadily, and seek every opportunity to make more money for their families. Married mothers are more likely to scale back their work to have a better balance with their family life.  Married couples usually divide labor and specialize for the good of the family as a whole.

Of course there is some sex discrimination in employment. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, signed into law by President Obama a few years ago, did address a real problem.

But most of the gender gap in wages is due to different choices of how to live that men and women, and especially fathers and mothers, make about work and family life.

Americans Couple Up When They Always Have

The age of marriage is going up, so the proportion of people who are married in their early 20s - the traditional age of marriage - is going down.

However, the cohabitation rate is going up, and it starts earlier than the marriage age.  Indeed, most couples cohabit before marriage.  Some do so as test for marriage, though that does not work as well as they hoped.

The upshot is that Americans couple up, move in together, and even start to have kids at about the time and rate that they always have.

As the new CDC report, First Marriages in the United States puts it,

"If entry into any type of union, marriage or cohabitation, is taken into account, then the timing of a first union occurs at roughly the same point in the life course as marriage did in the past."