Normalizing Relations With Cuba is a Great Step Forward

The news that at long last the United States will normalize relations with Cuba is one I have hoped for all my life.  I believe that if we had engaged Cuba from the outset, pushed for the same kind of trade relations that we had with many other dictatorships, and kept fussing at them about human rights that we also do, we could have created an opening for more freedom, and maybe even democracy, decades ago.

I hope the Congress follows suit and drops the foolish embargo.

I think the combination of Cuban-Americans, Coca-Cola, and the internet will do more for Cuban freedom that all the Cold War freeze-out could ever have accomplished.

Thank you, President Obama. And a hat tip to the Pope and the Canadians for helping.

No State Tax Incentives for the Ark Park - A Sensible Middle Position

The Answers in Genesis ministry, parent of the Creation Museum, had proposed a few years ago to create an Ark Park theme park, based on Noah's Ark, in central Kentucky.

Gov. Beshear supported the proposal as a good tourism draw for the state.  He caught some flack from the left for that position.  I think he was entirely in the right.

Now, though, the state Tourism Commission has withdrawn the offer of $18 million in tax incentives from the Ark Park.  They say that the sponsors have changed their position.  Originally, Answers in Genesis said they would not have a religious test for hiring at the park.  Recently, though, they have made clear that they would have a religion test for hiring.

The state's position is clear: tax incentives can't be used to advance a particular religion, nor discriminate on the basis of religion.

Answers in Genesis claims that their religious freedom will be violated if they can't both have a religious test in hiring and get state tax incentives.

I believe the state is, once again, correct in its judgment.

I also had my doubts that the Ark Park could ever succeed, but that is beside the principled point here.

Happiness is a Warm Congregation

The new Relationships in America study has a nifty table on the relation of happiness to regular involvement in a religious community.

The core finding:  "frequency of attendance at religious services has a stronger effect on overall happiness than either belonging to an organized religion or self-reported personal religiosity."

The magnitude of the effect is also pretty impressive:  nearly half of those who regularly attend religious services say they are very happy.

Softball vs Golf - A Metaphor for Liberal Happiness vs. Conservative Happiness

A thoughtful student in my "Introduction to Sociology" class was wrestling with Arthur Brooks' report, in Gross National Happiness, that conservatives are generally happier than liberals as individuals, in light of our class' question of what makes for a happy society. 

This student, herself inclined to be an apolitical conservative, drew from several aspects of what we had been studying to consider, and reconsider, her own experience.

Conservatives look at society and see a collection of individuals, so they believe that personal action is the right focus of attention.  Liberals look at society as more of a collective, so the community requires change in order for real progress to happen.  ... Conservatives could feel happier than liberals in this sense because success is based on an individual's own actions instead of basing it on the actions of everyone else.  It is easier to feel then that you have successfully made changes that are important to you.  An example I thought of when I was reading this was about golf.  I used to play softball, a team sport, then I started playing golf in high school.  I found a greater sense of satisfaction when playing golf because all of my success was based on how hard I was willing to work to achieve my goals.  In softball, I often felt let down and less happy because my team did not practice as much as I did, so we would often lose.  These losses left me feeling down because I was working hard, but by being on the team, I was relying on them for our success.  It was nice with golf because I was reliant on myself.

However, she notes, there are costs to a society that builds no more than individual successes.

I find problems with this as well because it is necessary to work together to achieve goals, and it brings up the Myth of the Individual from the middle of the term.  It showed that we needed a network of people to help support us, or we could face becoming isolated and radicalized in our ideas.  From personal experiences, successes with a group are much more profound ... as compared to personal victories because of the shared emotional experience.  It will be interesting to see how this plays into overall happiness.  I would think shared experiences like collective effervescences would help increase happiness overall because it helps to form bonds with others.  

Her last point, that happier societies come not just from happy individuals, but have bonds across larger groups from shared emotional experiences, is well borne out by sociology.

Happiness Grows With Wisdom

Jonathan Rauch has a fine article in the Atlantic on the U-shaped curve of happiness.

Not for everyone, and not in every society, but strong enough to be a helpful pattern, we see life satisfaction bottoming out in the late 40s for many people.  And then it gets better.

There is much in here, including a whole section on brain development.

I found this to be the most helpful idea:

“This finding,” [Princeton researcher Hannes] Schwandt writes, “supports the hypothesis that the age U-shape in life satisfaction is driven by unmet aspirations that are painfully felt during midlife but beneficially abandoned and felt with less regret during old age.”

The curve below was compiled by economist Carol Graham and colleagues, looking at averages in many different countries.  The X-axis measures life satisfaction on a ten-point scale; the Y measures age.

The Politics of Male First Names

Verdant Labs has a fascinating blog post on political trends in first names.

One big finding: "Of male names that are at least fairly common, the most Democratic are Jonah and Malik, and the most Republican are Delbert and Duane."

I think I know what is going on here.

The Democratic end is tipped by distinctively black or Jewish names. In addition to Jonah and Malik, we find Ethan, Willie, Saul, Emmanuel, Isaiah, Tyrone, Omar, Irving, and Israel.

On the Republican side, we find country white names. In addition to Delbert and Duane, there are Rex, Dallas, Brent, Troy, Lyle, Darrell, Billy, Ricky, and Randy.

The Distribution of Generosity

Christian Smith, a sociologist at Notre Dame, has been reporting the results of a large Science of Generosity project.  Sociology is particularly useful for giving us a sense of proportion of how phenomena are distributed in a large population.

Americans as a whole are generous people.  We give away huge amounts of money for good causes.

However, nearly half of Americans - 45% - give nothing.

The high standard of tithing (giving at least 10%) is met by only 3%.

Poorer people give away a higher proportion of their income than richer people do.

Looked at another way, 57% of all the charitable dollars in America are contributed by the 5% of Americans who are most generous.

And I should note that the main point of The Paradox of Generosity, by Christian Smith and Hilary Davidson, is that people who give more away lead happier and healthier lives.

The Tea Party Congress is the Least Productive, Ever.

The Tea Party Congress, the one now ending, is officially the least productive Congress ever.

That is what they said they would do if elected - prevent government.

I take them at their word that that is what they will keep doing.

The Republicans are at a crossroads.  They control the legislative branch of government. They will have to decide whether to stick with the Tea Party and prevent government, or cut the Tea Party loose and govern.

This will be a very tough choice.  So far the Republican leadership has talked tough about governing, but they haven't actually taken any concrete steps to break with their dangerous coalition partner.

World War One Was the Worst War Ever

All wars are bad.  Some are worse than others.  I am imagining a scale based on the foolishness of the causes of a war multiplied by the number of casualties.

On that scale, I believe World War One was the worst war ever.

And that is before we factor in the way the victors made a peace so bad that it produced another, even larger war.

Today's Great Thing: The Silver Anniversary of the Fall of the Wall

And an East German is the head of state of the united Germany.

We may hope for such a happy reunion in Korea soon.

Christian Social Science - How Do I Get at What Students Really Want to Know?

I am giving a talk next week at Hendrix College on "Being a Christian and a Social Scientist".  At the moment it ends this way:

Christianity also makes for a better social science than materialism can, precisely because people do act for reasons.  People act for reasons, they believe they act for reasons, and they believe their existence is meaningful because their reasoned action leads to meaningful ends. I can’t prove that people are right in these beliefs.  But I can prove that most people do have these beliefs (even people who profess materialism).  And I assert that the universal fact that people act as if they act for a meaningful reason is evidence that they are right.  Not proof, but strong evidence.

I think this is true, but doesn't really get to the core of what undergraduates are likely to be concerned about.

I would welcome suggestions for how to bridge this gap.

Fear of Anything as a Vote-Shaping Strategy

Of all the enemies of the happy society, fear is the greatest.  Fear is the acid of trust.

The strategy of Karl Rove and his disciples had been to make their party base fearful, and forget about trying to win over the center.

In recent years they have added strategies to make it harder for everyone to vote, which hurt their opponents more than it did their supporters.

In this last cycle, I believe they gave up on trying to instill fear of things that corporate interests usually oppose, namely taxes and regulations, or that social conservatives oppose, such as abortion and gay marriage.  This cycle they seemed to promote any fear at all as a way of ginning up the base. This worked against compromise and normal politics, and toward a black-and-white view of the world which their candidates would address with force.

This explains, I think, why there has been such political interest in Ebola and ISIS as things to be afraid of in this country.  Notice that the promoters of these fears are not focused on the dangers of Ebola to West Africans, or of ISIS to decent people in the Middle East - where those fears are well grounded.  Instead, they have promoted fear, even hysteria, about the minuscule dangers that either threat poses to Americans at home.  The aim is simply fear, and anything scary will do.

The Obama Administration is Very Good.

President Obama is a very good president, with a commendable record of achievement. The Affordable Care Act is a huge step forward for our nation, both in justice for all and in reducing the costs of medical care. The "war on coal" is being waged by the natural gas companies, not the federal government. The financial firms that wrecked the economy before he took office are under better regulation. The wars launched by his predecessors have been ended or reduced. The auto industry was saved. And, as you can see below, the economy is vastly improved. If he had a Congress that was not committed to obstructing all government, he could do even more good.

Resist the Fear Machine. It Only Serves Our Enemies.

This was the story that Brent Bozell ran:

"A Florida hardware store was ordered to remove American flags honoring the owners family serving in the military. In response, residents displayed more than 500 American flags throughout the town. God Bless America!"

That's it - the whole story, with no links to where you could find out what happened.

In fact, the store was NOT ordered to remove the flags. They were asked to move them from the public right of way, where no flags are permitted, on to the store's property, where they were free to fly any flag they wanted. http://www.news-press.com/.../hundreds-flags.../17231703/

People like Brent Bozell, who made up the scary headline, make a living from tricking Americans into fearing other Americans. Isn't that exactly what America's enemies want? Resist the Fear Machine.

Passive-Aggressive Atheism.

Claiming to raise your children with no religion "so they can make up their own minds" is just a passive-aggressive way to teach atheism.

New Position Paper on Presbyterian Same-Sex Policy Takes a Centrist Line

Barry Ensign-George and Charles Wiley, officials of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), have issued a new paper, "Our Challenging Way: Faithfulness, Sex, Ordination, and Marriage."

They defend the middle line that the denomination has taken on both gay ordination and same-sex marriage.  The church recognizes both pro and con positions, and leaves it up to the conscience of local authorities to determine whether they - ministers, elders, sessions, presbyteries - will participate in authorizing same-sex actions by the church.

I have written often that this middle way is in keeping with the Presbyterian middle polity.  Indeed, I have discussed this with the authors in the past.

I would only add to their paper that our polity allows presbyteries to differ from one another without threatening the unity of the denomination, not just a conscience clause allowing individual officers of the church to differ.

In particular, I commend their gentle criticism of the my-way-or-the-highway ruling on women's ordination in the 1970s 'Kenyon case'.

(I still do think that the Authoritative Interpretation of the church constitution that the General Assembly adopted this summer, in which the words "between a man and a woman" were interpreted to mean "not only between a man and a woman" is incoherent and foolish, but that is water over the dam.)

A Centrist Position on the Gender Binary

What the left needs to accept is that, for most people, there is a close connection between sex and gender.  For them, the gender binary of masculine and feminine works well.

What the right needs to accept is that the gender binary does not work well for some people. In those cases, we all should be understanding and, where possible, accommodating.

The Ethics of an Industry is Driven by the Most Ruthless Competitor

This insight is the fruit of a visit to the Eastern Kentucky coal fields, but could come from many other industries.

I am drawn to this idea because students tend to see ethics as simply the morals of individuals, multiplied by the number of individuals.  It is very hard for them to see social structures at first.  Thus, when we study how some particular firm is exploitative, they attribute this to the bad morals of the owners of that firm.  Students imagine that if they were in charge, they would never act so badly because they are good people.

Yet in any competitive industry - which is to say, any industry in capitalism - if exploitation will increase profits, then some firm will become more exploitative.  And if that gives them a competitive advantage over other firms, the other firms will incline to become that exploitative, too, or lose business.  Normally, I think, it is not the biggest or highest status firms that begin a round of exploitation, and the managers in that firm think themselves more honorable than their more ruthless competitors.  Until, that is, the higher-status firm starts losing profits.  Then, no matter how high-minded they started out, they are likely to follow the more ruthless firms downward.  And thus, the ethics of the industry as a whole are driven by the most ruthless competitor.

Which is why regulation is good for industries, and is most beneficial to those owners and managers who do want to be moral, who do not want to exploit their workers.

We were told a chilling story by a retired coal miner, who had worked in both unionized (that is, more regulated) and non-unionized mines.  He said that when women won the right to work in the mines in the 1970s, the owners were required to put portable toilets in the mines.  In the unionized mines, these were a practical improvement for all workers.  In the non-unionized mines, our guide told us, the workers were told that the toilets were there for the inspectors to see - any miner who actually used one would get fired.  To eke out the tiniest bit of extra profit by not letting miners take a toilet break, and not paying the cost of cleaning portable toilets, the more ruthless firms would add that much exploitation - until and unless the inspectors caught on. 

Ethics comes from the structure of social relations as much as it does from the morals of individuals.

'Who Benefits?' Now is the Result of 'Who Governs?' and 'Who Wins?' Before

Teachers know that the best way to learn something is to teach it.

I have come to see that I need to spend the first month of my "Introduction to Sociology" course on how power works and why the political economy of any society is fundamental to understanding everything else.  This is a hard lesson for students to learn - their tendency to see everything from their perspective as individuals and consumers means it takes work to envision that the structures of power that shape everyone's reality are not simply given, but are the result of the conflict of social forces.

This morning we started on William Domhoff's Who Rules America? I like using Domhoff because his fundamental questions are very practical, very graspable by students. He says that what we really want to know is 'who has the power?' but we can't measure that directly.  So we ask of any social situation 'Who benefits?', 'Who Governs?', and 'Who Wins?'.  These questions each get closer to power, but also get harder to measure.

This was the thing I learned as I was teaching Domhoff's questions this time: the answer to 'Who benefits?' now is the result of 'Who governs?' and 'Who wins?' before.  The distribution of wealth now is the direct result of who won the previous conflict of power in an earlier struggle.  There is no neutral starting point, which got distorted by power.  And there is no 'free market' solution that does not reflect ongoing struggles of 'who governs'.

This was helpful to me. I will see if it was as helpful to students.

Is There an Essential Affinity Between A Typological Reading of the Biblical Story and a Providential View of History?

I am reading a nifty manuscript on civil religion.  The author emphasizes that one of the great traditions of American civil religion - Martin Luther King's, for example - reads the Bible narrative as provides types of the themes that we also see in our national narrative.  This is not the same as seeing the Bible as providing literal prophetic markers of current events, as 'End Times' readings do.  Rather, the belief that history has an arc, which we see signs of in the biblical story and in our own, connected-but-different story, is a deep and fruitful way of seeing history as meaningful.

I have also long believed that life has a providential form, which is a way of seeing historical events as a meaningful narrative.

It has only struck me now, though, that these two kinds of readings - a typological reading of the Bible and a providential reading of history - are intimately connected. My intuition is that they are really just different ways of doing the same thing.

But I can 't quite flesh out the argument to prove that intuition.  Any help from you smart readers to make the argument or set me straight?