Brass Band Day in Danville

Danville, Kentucky's, own contribution is the Great American Brass Band Festival. It runs all this weekend. You can still make the parade at 11 this morning. I'll be in the Hub.

The Freedom to Live Virtuously

Daniel Haybron, writing about philosophy in The Science of Subjective Well-Being, offered this helpful distinction:

The ancients apparently took it as a given that individuals are not, in general, authorities about their own welfare. ... The standard economic view of modernity - that well-being consists roughly in people getting whatever they happen to want - would have seemed childish if not insane to most ancient thinkers.

I find myself halfway between the ancients and the moderns on this one.

On the one hand, I do think human beings, as a group, are designed to flourish by living a distinctive way. This way is broadly defined and forgiving of missteps. It is not, though, simply whatever anyone happens to want. If we live the good life, we will flourish. If we do not, we will have a worse time, in the way that trying to run a car without oil means the car will not run well.

On the other hand, I don't see any psychological process that could make people live as they were designed to if they don't want to. And I don't see any just social structure that should try to constrain people so much that they could only live one way.

I think the great benefit of a free society is not that everyone is free to do what he or she wants. I think the great benefit of a free society is that those who want to flourish by living virtuously are free to do so, amidst other ways of living.

A Bipartisan Marriage Idea: End All Marriage Penalties

The Heritage Foundation has proposed a "Marshall Plan for Marriage." The first item is to end the marriage penalty in several tax or benefit programs of the federal government. The marriage penalty occurs when married couples pay more than the same couple would if cohabited without marriage because their combined incomes push them into a higher bracket than each of their incomes would be if taken separately.

For two of their three proposed improvements there is already bipartisan support. The marriage penalty was largely eliminated in the federal income tax and the Earned Income Tax Credit in the last decade. The budget compromise reached last fall extended those fixes until 2012. Heritage proposes making those fixes permanent. This seems to me a sensible move that majorities in both parties can support.

The third proposal is to eliminate a marriage penalty in the health reform act. There has not already been a bipartisan move to fix this problem. However, since this marriage penalty is like that in the income tax and the EITC, I think both sides could agree to work together to fix this problem, too.

Legislation that brings the parties together and supports marriage seems like a win-win.

My Thirty Years of "Presbyterian Pluralism" - Vindicated

In college I became very interested in the problem of pluralism. How can an organization both believe in truth, and believe that different understandings of truth can coexist in the same institution?

This led me to study the Presbyterian Church, which has both an official confession of what it believes, and an established practice of accepting a fairly broad range of views within the church. My dissertation was published as Presbyterian Pluralism: Competition in a Protestant House. I came to see that the one confession that all officers of the church adhere to was balanced by a practice of allowing the presbyteries - the regional governing bodies at the heart of the Presbyterian Church - some leeway in judging how strictly any given officer had to adhere to that one confession. Liberal presbyteries tolerated more diversity, conservative presbyteries tolerated less diversity. When ministers moved from one presbytery to another they could be in for some sharp questioning, and even be denied permission to "preach within the bounds" of the new presbytery.

Over time, this balanced system broke down. The authority of the one confession was watered down by adding many other confessions. Liberal political correctness limited leeway on some issues, which led to conservative political correctness limiting leeway on other issues. The fights in the denomination shifted from the confessional standards to the administrative rules of the church. The fights got bigger, more regular, and exhausting. The church started a decline that has only sped up in recent years.

A few years ago the wiser heads in the church proposed a new Form of Government (nFOG), which would restore the leeway that presbyteries used to have in judging their own officers. Instead of providing detailed rules on what all officers must and must not do, the church's constitution would lay out the general principles of the whole church. The presbyteries could follow model manuals and rules provided by the denomination, or adapt them to local circumstances.

This week the new Form of Government was adopted by a majority of presbyteries. As of July 10, 2011, it will become the constitutional rule of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Now if we can get back to having one confession that we actually believe in, I will feel fully vindicated.

"I should be free to do what I want."

I am working through this thought, which came to me this morning while thinking about how to make a happy society.

"I should be free to do what I want."

The substantive moral argument is over whether the more important part of this claim is "free to do" or "what I want."

The substantive ethical argument is over whether the more important part is whether social structures ought to try to guarantee the "should be" or try to shape the "what I want."

I believe the ancients, including all three biblical faiths, take the latter position.
The moderns, including all kinds of Enlightenment thought, take the former.

Easterin's Conclusion About Happiness

This is the upshot of Richard Easterlin's decades of studying happiness.

People spend too much time working for money and status goods. We do not realize that this will not make us happy, because our aspirations will keep rising as our we achieve our material goals.

Instead, we should spend more time on family, relationships, and health. These things make us happy even when we attain them.

Happiness Most LIkely at Mid-Life

Richard Easterlin, a pioneer in the economic study of happiness, concludes this about happiness and age:

"Happiness is greatest at midlife, but not by very much."

From 18 to 51, about 7% of the population move up to “very happy”;

From 51 to 89, about 9% of the population move back down.

(Incidentally, I am 51. And very happy.)

You Can't See Beyond Divorce's Threshold

Eileen Ansel Wolpe, in trying to describe divorce to someone contemplating it, compares divorce to death in a way I had not heard before:

You cannot see what lies beyond the frame around the door that is the exit. It is not possible. It is a death. And just like life’s death, you are not permitted to see beyond the threshold. But I have been here for the past year and I can tell you it looks nothing like it does from inside the threshold.

Re-reading After Virtue

Thirty years ago, when I was a senior in college, a book came out that shaped my thinking profoundly: Alasdair McIntyre's After Virtue. My now-wife and I read it to one another as we made our evening cocoa. This week I re-read the book for the first time since those formative days.

McIntyre argues that modern moral language is so incoherent, because what we have today are the fragments of several contrasting moral cultures from the past. The virtues tradition, especially as understood by Aristotle and improved by Christianity, was concerned with how people could lead a fulfilling life within the roles and destiny of their community. Modern societies, by contrast, try to find a picture of how human beings can have a fulfilling life without specifying their roles or their community, or even what might be fulfilling.

McIntyre helped me understand why individualist theories of what human beings are seem so impoverished. This has been a great help to me as a sociologist.

His account of politics as a civil war among the virtues of different communities has been a help to me in understanding politics as a social enterprise, while not thinking that my community and my virtues are the only rational ones.

His account of how Christianity synthesized the virtues of the Greek polis with the broader and more inclusive history of the biblical story was crucial to my becoming a Christian.

One surprise of re-reading After Virtue is how little of it seemed new to me this time. I think it was just the right book at the right time for me when it first appeared. I absorbed its message so thoroughly that it shaped the architecture of my worldview. And its message is not a bit less timely now.

Evening the Sex Ratio Among Old People

One of the surprising findings of the new census is that the ratio of old men to old women is evening out. From middle age on there are always more women than men, with the gap widening to about two-to-one by the time people are 85. However, older men are surviving at a higher rate than they used to.

Since 2000, the number of women 60 - 74 has increased by 29.2%. The number of men in that age rage increased by 35.2%

There will probably never be an equal ratio of old men to old women, but things do seem to be evening a bit.

My nominee for the cause: the declining smoking rate.

Win The Future: Have Babies

David Brooks has a column that sensibly counters the thrust of most recent commencement addresses. He wrote

College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to.

What most people will make a good life out of are the central commitments they make to other people. Commitments are limits on the self. If you try to live your life having experiences for yourself, without ever committing to build this specific something with others, you will be a tourist all your life.

For the vast majority of people, the biggest commitment we make is who we marry and then have children with. The downside of spending your twenties and even thirties as an experience-seeking tourist is that you delay marriage so much, you may well end up without time for children, children you now really want to have and build something for.

So if anyone everyone wants me to give a commencement address, here is my counter-cultural topic:

Win the Future: Have Babies.

Recentering the Party Balance in the Officer Corps

A centrist trend to note on Memorial Day.

In the '70s, about half of U.S. military officers were Republican. Through the '80s and '90s they became increasingly Republican, reaching about two-thirds by the end of the decade.

During the George W. Bush administration, however, the trend started to reverse. Today, among newly commissioned officers, there is about an even split between the Republican and Democratic Parties.

Anti-Liberal Alliance Has a 50-point Gap on Accepting Homosexuality

The Pew Research Center documents increasing acceptance of homosexuality in a new study. The people who most oppose homosexuality, not surprisingly, are "staunch conservatives." In answer to the question "Should homosexuality be accepted or discouraged by society?" staunch conservatives say

Accepted 22% and Discouraged 68%.

What I find most interesting in this study is that "libertarians," who in most political issues are allied with the conservatives, differ dramatically on this issue. They answer

Accepted 71% and Discouraged 19%.

The anti-liberal voting bloc, which had such success in the last election, is an alliance of opposites. This is nowhere more clearly shown than on the issue of the social meaning of homosexuality.

Using Prenups to Fight No-Fault

Heather Mahar, a researcher at Harvard Law School, has been studying pre-nuptial agreements. She found, not surprisingly, that most people do not want to use them for fear of signaling (or causing) ambivalence about the marriage. Mahar thinks prenuptial agreements do comply with what economists think is rational, but not with the emotional commitments that most people value more highly.

Mahar does, though, think that premarital counseling should include a prenuptial checklist, so a couple can work through their common values about marriage, including what they think about divorce.

The most interesting part of Mahar's research to me was that some couples use prenups to establish higher standards for divorce than the low "no-fault" standards that most states use. Couples can specify the only grounds that they will allow for divorce, such as adultery, desertion, violence, or crime, and the distribution of assets that the guilty party must suffer as a result. Since many courts are unwilling to enforce the marriage contract itself, but instead allow unilateral divorce, strengthening the marriage contract through a personal pre-nuptial agreement might be worth doing.

Richer, Educated Women Have Fewer Abortions

The abortion rate overall has dropped 8% over from 2000 to 2008, according to a Guttmacher Institute study. However, the abortion rate for poor women rose 18%. This means that richer, better educated women are having fewer abortions.

Poor women now make up 42% of those who have abortions. If the present trend continues, within a decade I expect that poor women will have most of the one million plus annual abortions in this country.

Educated women are already marrying more and divorcing less than they did a decade ago. If they are also having fewer abortions, this bodes well for developing truly planned and sustained family life in the college class.

A Quarter of Moms with Two Kids Had Them by Different Men

Twenty-eight percent of mothers with two or more children had them by two or more different men.

Among black women, 59% had them by two or more men.

Christian Schools Produce Decent Citizens

Ray Pennings, in the Cardus Religion Survey, presents these interesting conclusions from a comprehensive study of Protestant Christian school graduates:

Compared to their public school, Catholic school, and non-religious private school peers, Protestant Christian school graduates have been found to be uniquely compliant, generous, outwardly focused individuals who stabilize their communities by their uncommon commitment to their families, their churches, and larger society.

He goes on to say that they marry more, divorce less, and have more kids. Christian school graduates are changing the world - from the bottom up, by living decent lives. They are not primarily aimed at changing large social structures.

Indeed, I think the Christian Right has been so vocal about turning family values and biblical values into business-oriented national political positions precisely because macro politics is so at odds with the lives and concerns of the core evangelical Protestant world.

Centre Commencement

Today was Centre College Commencement. It was lovely. And exhausting.

Sabbatical begins tomorrow. I will seek The Happy Society in earnest.

Ain't no Rapture like the VelociRapture

This my favorite of today's rapture jokes.

(Thanks to Jay Garmon)

Proportion of Marriages Making it to the Tenth Anniversary Is Rising

Traditionally there has been a spike in divorces from the "seven-year itch." If couples make it to their tenth anniversary, their odds of going all the way step up significantly.

The proportion of married couples making it to their tenth anniversary is rising.

75% of couples married in the early '90s made it to their tenth anniversary.

This is 3% higher than the success rate of couples married in the early '80s.