Why Young Liberals become Old Conservatives

Young liberals become old conservatives by clinging to the progressive ideas of their youth, which becomes the status quo that the young of the next generation attack.

The Reflexivity of Concerted Cultivation: Or, Why Middle-Class Parents Build Junkyards for Their Kids to Play In

I have written several times about Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods, which compares the child-rearing styles of middle class vs. working class and poor parents.  Middle-class parents schedule and direct their children's many activities, creating a 'concert' of adults helping each of their children develop his or her talents.  Working-class and poor parents, by contrast, make sure their kids are physically cared for, then turn them loose to develop by 'natural growth'.

Tristan Bridges has an interesting blogpost on the new trend of 'adventure parks' for kids - fenced, lightly supervised yards full of junk that kids can play with in ways they choose.  This kind of park is not new - the famous documentary series "Seven Up" takes the group of seven year olds from different classes to an 'adventure park' in 1964.

Adventure parks are an attempt by middle-class, concerted cultivation parents to expand their children's talents by also having some of the creativity advantages of natural growth. Bridges happily terms this 'structured unstructured play' designed to create that seeming oxymoron, the concerted cultivation of natural growth.

I want to add one further step to this argument.  When my Centre College students read Unequal Childhoods, they recognize their own upbringing.  As they, and many thousands of other young people who have studied the pros and cons of concerted cultivation, reflect on their upbringing, they mostly appreciate the great advantages they have enjoyed.  But they see some disadvantages to being over-scheduled, not left to develop their imagination enough.  This information then feeds back into how they want to raise their own children. Thus, the sociological study of childhood creates a market for reflexive concerted cultivation, which is improved by incorporating the just criticism of Concerted Cultivation 1.0.

Meaning is an Individualist Problem

Bradley Wright has a nifty post on how "Meaning is, truly, a first-world problem." In general, people in rich countries have more stuff, but are less certain that their lives are meaningful.

My "Macrosociological Theory" class finished with Charles Taylor's excellent Modern Social Imaginaries.  One of Taylor's more surprising points about modernity is that is has created a new form of social malaise.  Modern people can feel alienated, or anomic, or can even develop a nihilism (I added that last one) that pre-modern people would have found hard to understand.  Taylor's argument is that by disembedding people from their organic social settings and re-embedding them in rationalized institutions, modernity thereby created 'individuals'. 

And having become individuals, it is now possible to attempt to judge our lives as meaningful in isolation from social connections and social purposes.  But what makes most people think their lives and efforts are meaningful comes from the very work they must do to take care of the people they are connected to.

Meaning is, truly, an individualist problem.  Not solely, but in a distinctive way.

Hurrah for the Republican Establishment

Yesterday I wished Sen. McConnell well in his primary fight against a Tea Party challenger.  McConnell won easily. 

Indeed, it was a big day for the Republican Establishment:

Mr. McConnell’s victory came on a day when five other states — Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Pennsylvania and Oregon — held primaries. And in many of those high-profile contests, it was establishment Republicans coming out on top over Tea Party challengers, as in the McConnell-Bevin race.

I have maintained from their first appearance in reaction to Pres. Obama's election that the Tea Party, like other know-nothing movements before them, would last through three election cycles, then fade. 2012 was their third cycle.  Yesterday, in Kentucky and several other states, the Republican Establishment turned back the invaders.

I am hopeful that these victories will encourage career politicians, such as Sen. McConnell, to feel confident that they can get back to governing without fear of successful attack on their right flank from an anti-government movement.

I hope Mitch McConnell Wins Today

This is not a sentiment I have ever expressed before, and am not likely to again.

Today, though, my senior senator, the core the of Republican establishment, the purest politician in the U.S. Senate, is facing a challenge in the Republican primary from a prevent-government Tea Party candidate.

I hope all the establishment Republicans fend off the Tea Party this primary season, and win their civil war.

Then, perhaps, the two pro-government parties can get back to the business of compromise and trade-offs that is the actual business of governing.

Hindu Nationalist Success in India Can Ultimately Strengthen a Democratic, Secular State

I am hopeful about the election of the Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, by a landslide in India.
Some worry that the Modi government will be anti-Muslim.  This a legitimate concern.

Nonetheless, I believe that democratically elected power is good for religious parties, in the medium run.  It makes them moderate their more extreme 'us vs. them' positions.  I had the same hopes for the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, and lament that they were overthrown in a military coup before they could begin to feel the real effects of democracy.

I also think the Congress Party has been harmed by becoming a family dynasty, and that it has gotten away with deep and wide corruption for decades.  It is time for the Gandhis to retire from politics, and for a chastened new generation of Congress leaders to rise up and make Congress a truly competitive, and more honest, democratic party.  I would particularly like to see Congress make 'India for all' their central theme, which will moderate the majority-tyranny impulses within the BJP.

Teen Pregnancies, Births, and Abortions Reach All-Time Low

This is a good-news story that writes itself. 

Do Professors Even Want to Help Students Develop a 'Meaningful Philosophy of Life'?

David Brooks has a decent column on this year's UCLA study of college freshmen. He notes this change from the first time that study was done:

In 1966, 86 percent of college freshmen said that developing a meaningful philosophy of life was essential or very important. Today, less than half say a meaningful philosophy of life is that important.

My first thought was that today's faculty are much less likely to believe that they are supposed to help students develop a meaningful philosophy of life than were the '60s faculty.  True, there are particular egalitarian and environmental values which are often presumed by many faculty members. But it has been my experience that most professor balk at the idea of articulating a meaningful philosophy of life for themselves, much less seeing their job as helping students do the same.

I can't speak for the the faculty norms of the '60s. I do infer from the fact that the question seemed intelligible when the survey was created that it seemed like a sensible idea at the time.

Brooks cautiously concludes from the above facts that "I’m not sure if students really are ... less interested in having meaning in their lives, but it has become more socially acceptable to present yourself that way."

I think it likely that a big part of this change is that college faculty are less likely today to see "helping students find a meaningful philosophy of life" as their job, or even within their competence.

The 'Princeton White Privilege Guy' Shouldn't Be Silenced, But He Doesn't Understand What White Privilege Means

Tal Fortgang wrote "Checking My White Privilege" for the campus conservative publication the Princeton Tory. 

I am not familiar with the expression 'check your privilege' with which he frames the piece.  He says it is used to silence him as a white male from contributing his opinions in general.  He does not provide any specifics, so it is hard to know the context in which the phrase is actually used.  The closest he comes to an account of how it is used is not, he allows, meant to silence him.  Rather, he says, the charge "teeters between" urging him to examine the roots of his opinion to see if they are framed by privilege, and to suggest that he apologize for having those privileges.

If that is what 'check your privilege' means, then examining the roots of his opinions seems like a reasonable call to critical thinking.  If they do, in fact, mean that he should apologize for his privileges, that would seem to go over the line.  But he does not say they do, so it is hard to know what his actual complaint boils down to.

The bulk of the essay, though, is not really about checking his white or male privilege at all.  It is an account of hard and heroic things done in his family. He checked his family's story of surviving persecution and working hard, and concluded that he does not have any privilege, but only a legacy of good values.

Which means that in his essay on 'white male privilege' he never actually addresses white male privilege.  He is right that his whiteness and maleness is not the whole story of his life.  But neither does he say anyone else said it was.  He does not acknowledge, though, that there have been untold small advantages of whiteness and maleness in his path thus far, which, indeed, is some of the story of his life.

In fact, in this short essay, he does not show any understanding of what his unnamed interlocutors are talking about when they urge him to 'check his privilege'.  That work is still undone.

Are Zombies a Racial Formation?

In my "Macrosociological Theory" class we are reading Omi and Winant's Racial Formation in the United States. They argue that races are constructed when physical differences can be made to coincide with differences in group interest.  In particular, when one group can economically and/or politically subordinate another, they are likely to try to justify that domination on the basis of supposed or slight physical differences.

I have been puzzled by the resurgence of interest in zombies.  I think the main reason is that dramas have run out of groups that can be villains without nuance or redeeming features.  Zombies work well as villains because they are sub-rational, endlessly malevolent, and, conveniently already dead.  Permanently kill-worthy.

So I have been thinking about how well the enterprise of elaborating on the idea of zombies fits Omi and Winant's vision of a 'racial project'.  On the one hand, the physical difference between zombies and humans has been readily adapted to justify treating the whole group as worthy of domination - corralling, caging, experimenting on, even killing.  On the other hand, the zombie stories I know of do not show humans trying to get work out of zombies.

Perhaps that is the next screenplay.

I would say that the construction of zombies is mostly an example of what Omi and Winant mean by a 'racial formation' - but not entirely.

Maybe robots fill the bill better?

Malaria Deaths in Africa Down by More Than Half in a Decade

One big reason:  half the households have anti-malaria bed nets, and about a third of the population sleep under them each night.

This is great news, one of the best in all of public health today.

Trapeze Careers

My wife addressed my "Family Life" and "Social Structure" classes, as she does each year, on how women can 'have it all.'

The readings we have studied leading up to this talk address the fact that men are likely to have a definite plan of how they want their careers to develop.  They identify a ladder, and make a plan to climb it.  Since life rarely turns out just the way we expect it to, men are more prone to have a mid-life crisis when they realize that the narrative of their life is going to turn out differently than they imagined it would.

Women, by contrast, are more likely to have a big picture of a life with career, family, and public duties in some kind of balance.  They often have a less specific plan of climbing one ladder.  Instead, they are more likely to pursue one path, then make choices at the time that lead them in a different direction.  When they look back on their lives, they are likely to discern the thread of continuity that ties this zig-zag path together, though it would have been hard to predict ahead of time.

My wife offered the students, especially the women, the advice that they would be able to achieve a balanced life if they were OK with having a 'trapeze career' rather than climbing a ladder.  And sometimes on the trapeze you let go of one bar before you have a clear grasp on the next one.

I think 'trapeze career' is a wonderful metaphor and a fine counterpart to the career 'ladder'.

A Critique of Davis and Moore on the 'Functional Necessity' of High Pay for Some Jobs

One of the staples of sociological discussions of social stratification is the Davis-Moore hypothesis.  This idea, advanced in 1945 by two then-famous sociologists, Kingsley David and Wilbert Moore, argued that some jobs were so 'functionally necessary' to society that we needed to pay people more to get them to do them.  This also implied that many jobs were not so functionally necessary, and therefore we could pay people less.

While giving a guest lecture for a colleague, I had occasion to read this hypothesis again for the first time in years.

In the intervening years, I have often had occasion to answer student objections about unfair pay.  Their argument is usually something like 'the work teachers do is more valuable that what professional athletes do - we should pay teachers more.' (And, presumably, pay athletes less).

The answer I have given to students was that, for the most part, wages are a measure of market value, not social value. What we get paid is determined much more by the supply of people who can do what we do, compared to the demand from people willing to pay for what we do.  The super-skill of the very best professional athletes is in great demand for a handful of positions.  There are millions of teachers, but even greater millions who are willing and able to do the job demanded at the pay offered.

Which brings us back to Davis and Moore.  The more I think about it, the less I think pay is offered as an incentive to do socially valuable jobs with rare skills.  That is, the pay is not the motivation.  The job is the motivation, for many mysterious reasons.  The pay is what you have to offer to get enough people with the relevant skills to do that job, given the supply and demand. Change either supply or demand, and the pay changes, without any change in the social value of the job.

One of the reasons we honor some jobs more than others is that social status is something that most people want, apart from and in addition to pay.  And status goes both ways - we honor jobs that are worthwhile, but we also honor people who do worthwhile jobs for low pay because they are willing to work for low pay. 

Teach for America, Like the Peace Corps, is a Worthwhile Program of Bourgeois Missionary Work

Teach for America is sometimes criticized because the young people who do it are well-meaning amateurs who do not stick with teaching.  They come from good schools, but were not trained in education.  There is a high rate of leaving teaching after a few years.

I have taken comfort from the fact that the same is true of the Peace Corps.  Indeed, we always expected that Peace Corps volunteers would return to the US after their tour and go into some other field.  The idea was that they would learn more about some other place in the world, which would infuse their future work in any field.

Both Teach for America and the Peace Corps are, in other words, missionary programs.  I think this is a good thing.  I am for bourgeois missionaries to impoverished schools and impoverished countries. I am also for religious missionaries spreading the faith, whether they are there for the long term or not.

Another gripe about Teach for America is that amateur short-time teachers are bad for their students, even if the teachers get a great deal out of the experience. There is something to this. I don't think the amateur issue is that big a deal, but the short time is a problem. However, many education majors also leave the profession quickly, too.  Teaching in poor schools is a hard job, and a hard adjustment.

I have rarely heard people complain that the Peace Corps is bad because sending amateur short-timers hurts the people they were meant to help.  I think one of the reasons we rarely hear this gripe is because if the Peace Corps volunteers didn't go, no one would.  Someone helping for a short time is better than no one helping at all.

In America's poor schools, by contrast, someone would get hired to teach each year.

Still, I think that investing in getting liberally educated young people from the best schools - most of whom have no real experience of poverty - to wrestle seriously with the realities of poor life while trying to help, is worth the investment.  What I would add would be a stronger supportive community to help them weather the first hard years of teaching, so more of them stay.  A model for this kind of support is provided by our Teach Kentucky program.

Suffering Turned to Holiness is the Highest Happiness

Another good one from David Brooks, "What Suffering Does."  His main point:

The right response to this sort of pain is not pleasure. It’s holiness. ... It means seeing life as a moral drama, placing the hard experiences in a moral context and trying to redeem something bad by turning it into something sacred.

Amen.  And this is a conclusion that you have to choose for yourself.  It is a hard choice. I don't think those who do not get there are to be blamed.

But there is a further step, which takes us back to happiness. At the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that the highest happiness comes from contemplation.  This comes as a bit of a surprise, after the first nine books talk about how to achieve happiness through action. 

I believe, though, that Aristotle is right.  It is only in contemplating the fruits of a life of active virtue that we can have a deeper understanding of what happiness is.  And the deepest understanding comes from contemplating suffering turned into holiness.

The Less You Know, The More You Want to Invade Ukraine

"The further our respondents thought that Ukraine was from its actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene militarily."

That is the scary conclusion of a study that compared which policy position people favored toward Ukraine with their actual knowledge of where Ukraine is on a map.

This supports my view that knowledge tends to mitigate violence.   

Cohabitation Practice

I asked the "Family Life" class to talk with their friends about what they thought of cohabitation vs. marriage.  Since many of my students effectively live together on campus, I thought that many had already voted with their feet in favor of cohabitation.  To my surprise, they did not regard living together on campus as real cohabitation, because the couple was not cooking together, or splitting the rent, or responsible for most of the things involved in living in the 'real world' yet.

This is a fair enough distinction.  It did give me an idea, though: encourage the couple who are living together to conduct experiments simulating, as realistically as possible, what real cohabitation would be like.  They could, say, make all their meals together for a week.  They could spend another week really pooling their finances, and facing together what sharing all their costs would look like.  They could start interacting with one another's families in a routine way.

Such an experiment might be eye opening.

An important point that we make in the "Family Life" class is that cohabiting is not really the same as marriage.

We could go back one step earlier in the chain to get students to come to grips with the ways in which sharing a dorm room is not the same as cohabiting.

And all of this is in the interest of 'deciding not sliding' into the biggest decision of your life.

7.1 Million Newly Insured Under Obamacare

This is a great day for our nation.  We are making progress toward health insurance for everyone, despite massive resistance by political opponents of the president.

And this number does not include the further millions of young people who continue to be covered by their parents' insurance, including some of our own children.

Not to mention ending the injustice of denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions.

In a few years, Obamacare will be part of the fabric of the American safety net.  And those who oppose it now will deny they were ever against it.

Spouses Can Calm Each Other's Brains in a Way Cohabitors Can't

Holding your spouse's hand when you are expecting a shock calms your brain.

Holding your cohabitor's hand in the same situation does not.

Trust comes from the permanence of the commitment.

All Parents Can Talk to Their Kids

Kids from professionals' families have heard 30 million more words from adults by the time they get to school than kids from poor families.

This is a gap that families of any class can close.

One of the saddest footnotes I know is early on in Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods. She writes that by the age of three, middle class kids have a bigger vocabulary than welfare parents do.  So the poor parents will have to work on their own language skills to help their kids.

They should.  Win-win.