Monthly Archives: April 2012

a snapshot of Millennials

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A new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University offers some intriguing findings about Millennials (defined in this instance as ages 18-24).

Self-image as a generation: Asked how their generation differs from their parents’, a total of 27% give critical answers (lazier, entitled, more selfish, or generally negative). A total of 21% say they are more more tech-savvy or better educated than their parents. And 17% say they are less religious/moral, or more tolerant, or more liberal. Looking at the historical data, I would say that they are more liberal on some social and economic issues than their parents were at the same age. They spend considerably less time reading and studying, which could be a sign of laziness, although that trend alone doesn’t support a holistic indictment. They are more tech-savvy and perhaps somewhat better educated, although trends in educational attainment have plateaued during their lifetimes. The negative responses may reflect a general tendency to assume that things are declining.

Race: An important respect in which young people are not very liberal is race. Almost half (48%) of the respondents think that “discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” Fifty-eight percent of white respondents think that’s the case. Note that they are demonstrably wrong: discrimination against African Americans and other racial minorities remains a powerful force. And we now live in a time when the Supreme Court will strike down almost any affirmative efforts to reduce racial segregation.

Ideology: Responses are a little mixed, reflecting the ambivalence that people of all ages feel. A significant majority (56%) say that government has grown over the years because it has “gotten involved in things people should do for themselves.” More than two thirds think (either agreeing or mostly agreeing) that poor people have become too dependent on government assistance. This is interesting since the federal government has in fact withdrawn from providing welfare and housing directly and no longer intervenes in other prominent ways, such as by desegregating local schools.

On the other hand, nearly two thirds think that inequality of opportunity is a big problem. These responses are not contradictory if substantial numbers of Millennials want to see more equality but distrust the government as a means to that end. Trust in government has eroded badly.

Asked to rate their feelings for various groups on a 1-100 scale, survey respondents respond very positively about Christians, Jews, and African Americans, less so about Muslims and Mormons. The Christian Right scores in positive territory at 54.1; Occupy Wall Street is below the midpoint at 44.5. The Tea Party is a little lower at 41, and the federal government in Washington scores worst of all at 40.9.

why the Jews left Boston, why the Catholics stayed, and what that teaches us about organizing

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Gerald Gamm begins his book, Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed with a poignant vignette. The former Congregation Mishkan Tefila, once a handsome and dignified building, is now abandoned, surrounded by weeds, the interior gutted, the congregation dispersed. A passing neighbor has no idea what it was built for. But a nearby church, St. Peter’s, erected for an Irish-Catholic congregation, has evolved into a thriving parish church that serves Haitians, Latinos, African Americans, and Asians.

Even when I first read Gamm’s book, I resisted the implicit value judgment. He describes the former synagogue much as Gibbon depicts a ruined Rome. But the Jews who used to worship there weren’t persecuted; they moved to Newton and built a suburban temple (see right). Their original neighborhood wasn’t deserted; it shifted from Jewish to Afro-Caribbean. Since the building had value, it was reclaimed. Today it is the United House of Prayer for All People, a Pentecostal church of Cape Verdean origin. Here is a picture of a firefighter’s funeral inside that church. Senator Kerry and many other dignitaries are attending, along with a large and devoted congregation.

So this story is not a tragedy. But it is an important case to understand if you want to improve your community.

You might, after all, be a rabbi or an active member of any congregation, trying to hold onto your original and distinguished building. You might be a Pentecostal minister trying to save souls and find a safe place for your immigrant community. You might be an integrationist, trying to encourage a mix of people to live in an urban neighborhood. Or you might be a planner or preservationist hoping to make the best use of large buildings and public spaces. In any case, you need to know–as Gamm’s subtitle asks–why the Jews left and the Catholics stayed in Boston.

When we address questions like that, we usually think in terms of individual values and motivations. So if the Jews left Boston and the Catholics stayed, the difference must reflect something inside their heads: different attitudes about the racial minorities who were moving in, different attitudes toward suburban life, different levels of willingness to abandon their peers, etc. Moral judgments seem appropriate, and if we want to change outcomes, we’re tempted to persuade people to think differently.

I would not rule out a moral evaluation of personal choices, such as where to live. But here are three other perspectives.

1. Dilemmas of uncoordinated action. As I noted recently, if everyone actively prefers to live in a diverse neighborhood but wants his or her group to be in the local majority, perfect segregation will result. That is an example of how outcomes do not directly reflect goals or preferences. Segregation is compatible with–in fact, it results from–a preference for diversity.

2. Norms, practices, and networks that exist at a community level. If most people in your neighborhood are highly connected to each other, not only liking one another but also working collaboratively, then you can bet that they will resist moving (for better or worse). Thus, even if you happen to be a rather antisocial individual, you should expect stability in the neighborhood and plan accordingly. On the other hand, if everyone around you lives a private life and doesn’t even know his neighbor’s name, then you can bet on instability, even if you happen to be a highly social and committed individual.  Since values tend to result from practices, a lack of interaction doesn’t imply that your neighbors are antisocial at heart. It may just be that opportunities for cooperation are missing.

3. Rules. This is where Gamm comes in. He notes that demographically similar congregations of Jews and Catholics have reacted in consistently different ways whenever their neighborhoods change (regardless of what kind of newcomers are arriving). Jews quietly leave. Catholics resist in various ways. Jewish congregations relocate. Catholic parish churches stay put, but their demographics shift.

He traces the difference to “ancient rules” that “dictate” outcomes by “their own inexorable logic” (p. 17). For example: membership in a Catholic parish is defined by residential location, whereas membership in a synagogue is a choice. A parish has a sharp outline on the map; members of a synagogue may live all over the region. A Catholic church is consecrated and is not supposed to move physically. A synagogue is made holy by its Torah scrolls, which are portable. A parish priest is appointed by a bishop, who also provides funds. If the bishop orders the priest to stay at St. Peter’s, the priest stays and St. Peter’s retains its budget. A rabbi works for a congregation, which is a voluntary association. If all the members peel off, the rabbi is out of a job unless the congregation moves with its members.

These differences arose literally thousands of years ago. During the Babylonian Captivity, Jews invented congregational worship with an eye to moving. They were in exile and hoping to go back to Israel. In the early centuries after Jesus, Catholic missionaries converted communities and then wanted to hold onto them for the Church. So they developed a territorial system resistant to physical moves.

Gamm makes the legacy of the past appear binding, but to me the main lesson is to think strategically about rules. After all, you can make new ones.

lobbying for civic opportunities for youth

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I spent an interesting day in DC on Wednesday, visiting a Department of Education official, a White House staffer, and two Senate staffers to talk about civic education in schools and (more broadly) about how to engage young people constructively in their communities. An ideal legislative vehicle would be the Sandra Day O’Connor Civic Learning Act of 2011, H.R.3464, which you should ask your Representative to support. But I wasn’t in the House, so my focus was broader than that bill. I was guided all day by very able lobbyists from Lewis-Burke.

Although I am far from a pro at this, it wasn’t my first experience. In fact, I was a registered federal lobbyist for Common Cause from 1991-3. As in the past, I was struck that federal staffers–and lobbyists who work for public interest causes–are remarkable people. Compared, for example, to run-of-the-mill academics, they master incredibly broad areas. I talked to Senate staffers on the HELP Committee: that’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. They are ready to talk knowledgeably and thoughtfully about the provisions in the education bill that relate to social studies (a few pages, costing basically no money), even though they also have to cover everything from AIDS research to Social Security. A big part of their secret is extremely hard work–and they don’t waste any time on self-promotion.

why do we feel compelled to argue from decline?

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When we want to argue for something, we often feel we must assert that the thing we value has declined, eroded, or worsened of late. For example:

If you ask Americans about teenagers, they are quick to lament the decline of respect and discipline and the alleged increases in delinquency and bad behavior since their own youth. Even teenagers assume that those are the real trends. But all the official data show significant improvements in teen crime, early pregnancy, and drug use.

At the National Rifle Association conference, a member tells the New York Times, he is worried about “the further erosion of my rights.” But the individual rights of gun-owners have never been so honored: recognized for the first time by the Supreme Court and expanded by many state legislatures to unprecedented levels.

Friends in my field (civic education) claim that civics has declined. The Christian Science Monitor reports, “The problem has a new term – a civics recession. And any number of groups are trying to reverse it.” Actually, civics test scores are flat or slightly up, and more states have added requirements of late than subtracted them.

Liberals like to lament that public education has been slashed in the era of Reagan, Gingrich, and George W. Bush. Actually, total per pupil spending (in constant 2008 dollars) rose from $2,808 in 1961, to $7,105 when Reagan left office, to $10,441 when G.W. Bush finished his second term.

You can care deeply about public education, civic education, teenagers’ behavior, or–if you must–gun rights, but there is no basis for arguing that these things are worse than they used to be. I am pretty sure that the argument from decline (argumentum ad declivem?) is a harmful fallacy … although I am not saying that it has become more common of late.

the state of the classics in 2050

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(Washington, DC) In a fairly recent New York Review of Books essay, Mary Beard asks, “Do the Classics have a Future?” Borrowing a bit from her piece, I predict that the study of Greek and Latin will remain vital in the mid-21st century. Classics will not be a musty or ethnocentric discipline but will continue to have strategic centrality in the humanities as a whole. Yet the field will look quite different from the “classics” of 1900.

The study of classics is not valuable primarily because the ancient Greeks and Romans were interesting or admirable. Rather, the classical civilizations had enormous and lasting impact on subsequent cultures, even when the people who have come under their influence have resisted and resented it.

The impact of Greece and Rome was by no means limited to the “West,” whatever that may mean. In any country that is Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or (by no means least) Muslim, Greek sources have foundational importance. Those countries cover much of the five continents. Northern India also entered an important conversation with Hellenic civilization before the time of Alexander the Great. Add the Buddhist and Hindu countries to those previously mentioned, and most of the world shows Greek influence. Nor have the classics become less influential in recent years. From recent American poet laureates to Iranian Ayotallahs, serious readers of the Greeks and/or Romans remain very much alive. If one misses their classical referents, one cannot fully understand them.

In order to understand Greco-Roman civilization in any depth you need the ancient languages: not only a passing understanding of their grammars and vocabularies but significant experience in reading the original texts.

For almost 2,000 years, ending in the mid-1900s, privileged Europeans and European-influenced men around the world mastered Greek and/or Latin as a basic marks of education and class status. They did not merely translate from those languages but learned to write and speak in them. Three reasons explain the extraordinary investment in classical education.

  • Originally, it was practical. Latin long remained a living language, widely understood, and a convenient medium of international exchange in science as well as religion.
  • People believed in the special merit of the classical languages because the Christian Bible and liturgy had been conveyed in Greek and Latin and because pagan Greece and Rome were held in high regard.
  • Even when those first two reasons for a classical education had faded, it still offered a way of marking out people of intelligence and social advantage across the European-dominated world. Any difficult discipline would have worked for this third purpose, but people naturally settled on the classical languages because their curriculum was already well established and esteemed.

Since all three reasons have faded and a classical education no longer marks the ruling class, it is unrealistic to imagine that large numbers of people will ever again learn Greek and Latin. That means that our understanding of culture subsequent to the Fall of Rome is threatened.

Fortunately, not many people must master any particular field for that field to be understood. Knowledge is specialized, and the important question is not whether everyone knows everything, but whether the specialists share what they know both with professional collaborators in other fields and with laypeople.

We collectively must understand China and the biology of viruses, but that does not mean that most Americans must know Chinese or virology. Likewise, we need classicists, but we do not need everyone to study the classics. There should always be a strong cadre of professional classicists distributed around schools and universities so that they can influence interdisciplinary research and debates.

In 2050, most educated people will know far less about the classical languages and cultures than their predecessors did in 1950. That will not be lamentable, because they will know things that no one understood in 1950. They will continue to have some basic background in Greco-Roman civilization and will know how to find out more from increasingly sophisticated reference tools.

Professional classicists will be rare but not extinct. They will know more than has ever been known before about Greco-Roman civilization. After all, scholarship is cumulative, and classical scholarship draws on other fields across the humanities, social sciences, and even natural sciences. Although classicists will be rare, they will be in high demand, because the global impact of the Greeks and Romans make them crucial topics of study. And because classics is an interdisciplinary field covering more than a millennium of history, society, and culture, it will seem broad and integrative in ways that many other fields are not.