Godot Day

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

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

Drug Standard: First, Don't Harm Others Much

Drug Week, Last Part

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

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

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

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

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

Not Sure About Narcotics

Drug Week, Part 4

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

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

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

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

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

Some Drugs Should Stay Illegal

Drug Week, Part 3

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

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

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

Legalize the Hallucinogens, Too

Drug Week, Part 2

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

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

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

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

Marijuana is No Worse Than Bourbon

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

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

I feel pretty much the same way about bourbon.

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

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

Legalize pot now. And tax it hard.

Bright Idea at the Posse Retreat

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

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

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

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

I will let you know if this notion bears fruit.

The Kentucky 50 by 50

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

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

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

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

Is a Social Imaginary a Habitus?

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

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

Viewing Society Objectively

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Public Sphere is Secular

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

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

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

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

Modern Social Imaginaries 1

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

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

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

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

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

Half of Kids are First-Borns

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

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

What Would a Presbyterian Establishment Do Right Now?

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

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

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

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

In Real Life, Awesome

My niece, a first-grader, uttered this dispatch from the cutting edge of youth lingo:

"Awesome. Really awesome. Seriously awesome. In real life, awesome."

Pronatalist Payroll Tax Policy

Philip Longman writes about the scary possibilities of the coming population decline. He and New America Foundation colleague David Gray have been working on a "new social contract." At the root such a contract they propose policies and cultural changes to assure that there is a new generation to have a social contract with.

One of the reasons population decline is scary is that in the future there won't be enough workers to support the retirement and medical entitlements of retired workers. Longman and Gray, therefore, propose that the payroll tax for parents be reduced by a third for each child while the kids are under 18. Parents of three children would pay no payroll tax while raising those future workers. Employers would keep putting in their share, though, and come retirement, the parents would get their full benefit from a grateful nation/economy. Longman and Gray propose to make this full benefit contingent on the kids graduating from high school, which is coming to be a minimum credential for workers.

This proposal seems to me to be sensible. The solution and the problem are tied together rationally. The policy would be simple to figure out and do. And policies that support the next generation of workers are not only good for the economy, they are good for all the family values of the nation.

15% of a Rich Nation Are Not Religious

The latest edition of the American Religious Identification Survey has found that 15% of Americans are not religious. This is up slightly from the 2001 survey, but is almost double the result found in 1990.

Educated people are less likely to be religious. Some think that religion is primarily a way of explaining the world, and educated people have learned another explanation. However, educated people are also more likely to be well off in every way - in their finances, their relationships, their psychic security. I think religious faith, for adults, is not primarily cognitive. It is not an explanation or set of ideas. Theology is for intellectuals. For most people, God is a source of confidence that their lives mean something, and a source of comfort that they are cared for in good times and, especially in bad.

When educated, secure people suffer serious setbacks, they often see that their cognitive idea of religion is not enough. For some this means a crisis away from faith. For others, like many of the no-religion people I meet, their crisis can be toward a real appreciation of the emotional roots of faith.

It is harder for rich, secure people to be religious. If you think you are doing well, are secure in your position, and that you got there by your own efforts, it is hard to feel gratitude to God. When bad things happen, it is easier for people to see how much we rely on the protecting hand of Providence.

Rich, secure, educated people who are religious typically do not think they achieved their lives on their own. The feel blessed and are grateful for their blessing which they do not deserve.

1/5th of Older Gen X Women are Childless

The rule of thumb is that about 87% of the women in a population will have children. In the United States and other industrialized nations the percentage has fallen below that as we move from the first wave of Baby Boomers, born in the 1940s, to the first wave of Gen Xers, born in the 1960s. By the time they were 44, the usual end of a woman's fertile years, about 86% of older Boomer women had children. For older Gen Xers, the number is 81%.

Put another way, almost a fifth of older Gen X women, the "Atari wave" as opposed to the "Nintendo wave" of the '70s, will have no children. Gen Xers are more likely to be educated, and to have more education, than their predecessors. All those years of schooling and career starting eat into baby time. This catches many forty-something women by surprise. Also, as the most divorced-upon generation, the Xers were much slower to marry and have kids than their predecessors were, for fear of screwing their kids up.

It is too early to know the completed fertility of the Millennials, or even the later wave of Xers. If the increasing numbers of weddings by young Millennials that I get invited to are any indication, though, the rising generation of fertile women may reverse the trend of their "lost generation" predecessors.

Old Dads Risk Dumber Kids

Australian psychiatrist John J. McGrath and colleagues found that children of older fathers were likely to have lower IQs than children of younger fathers. Their kids were also more likely to be schizophrenic or autistic.

The children of 50 year old fathers had average IQs 6 points lower than the children of 20 year old fathers. That is half a standard deviation - a pretty substantial difference.

A woman has all her eggs at birth. They run the risk of wearing out and breaking down, which is one of the reasons that children of older mothers are more likely to have some birth defects. However, the children of older mothers did not score any lower on the intelligence measures in this study.

Sperm, on the other hand, and made continuously. It was thought that this prevented the kind of breakdown with age that eggs show. McGrath and colleagues, though, point out that there are many more steps in the copying process to produce sperm in older fathers. The sperm of 20-year-old men are the result of about 150 cell divisions; those of 50-year-old men, 840. Each division provides a new opportunity for mutation and error.

The Peculiar Religious Obliviousness of "Kings"

NBC's new series "Kings" was advertised as a "what if" story of a king arising in a place that looked remarkably like America after a major war. This looked like a large-scale epic, beautifully shot, with Ian McShane in the leading role. The capitol, rebuilt from the rubble, looked like the proposed Freedom Tower to be built on the World Trade Center site. The Gruntleds tuned in, looking for a modern political allegory, and wondering who thought monarchy was the answer.

To our surprise, the story is built directly out of the story of King Saul and King David. McShane's "King Silas" leads Shiloh in a war with Gath. Young David Shepherd single-handedly defeats Gath's Goliath (tank) while rescuing the king's son, Jack. The story does not shy away from God - King Silas takes his mission from a divine sign. Young David is annointed by a preacher named Samuel(s).

And yet, after a valiant hour, we gave up. The show is well done - good acting, decent dialogue, really nice photography. But I just couldn't forget the Biblical story in order to get into this story - not after the show went to such great lengths to remind us of the biblical story. This wasn't, as the official website contends, "a contemporary re-telling of the timeless tale of David and Goliath." This is the story of David and Saul - but without God as the central character.

The Bible is a rich field of story and image, the most fertile bed of the imagination of the West. I have no problem with allegories and analogies drawn from Biblical models. But it seems to me a perverse misreading of the Bible to treat its stories as if they were themselves allegories of politics in religious dress.

I was once in a group of earnest young people wrestling with how to understand the mystical experience of God. One young man, not really in sympathy with the project, said it would be easy to find out: just go into the desert and fast for forty days. If you had a mystical experience, then it was real. This was such a perversely backwards way of understanding mysticism that we were left speechless. If you go into the desert and fast, but are not earnestly seeking God, you are not recreating the absolutely vital core of the desert mystics' experience.

The story of David and Saul is the most poignant story in the Bible of trying to serve God while wielding earthly power. If you tell the story of Saul and David but they are not earnestly seeking to fulfill the vocation God gave them, you have missed the vital core of the David and Saul (not David and Goliath) story.