Waving the Bloody Shirt

Jay Livingston has a post over at the Montclair SocioBlog in which he questions the whole hero-making practice in the wake of some Memorial Day wingnut mudslinging. The religio-political response to bloodshed is nothing new; in fact, it's as old as humanity itself. People die, and death makes us anxious. In order to deal with that anxiety, we must make sense of death, that is, we must give death meaning. Being social animals who are constantly surrounded by others, we are especially anxious about intentional death (e.g. homicide or war). When our soldiers die, we feel compelled to situate their deaths within a larger narrative about our collective identity, to fit it into our cosmology. To do otherwise would be to admit that life--and, hence, death--is arbitrary, random, and absurd. That is why all war dead (on our side, anyway) become de facto heroes. If they don't, then we must encounter the meaninglessness of death, life, and existence. Hero-making is always a retrospective practice by which we ritualistically confirm our group status by affirming our shared beliefs. To question the hero-making practice is thus a threat to the existence of our very society and the worldview that supports it. We shouldn't be surprised by the severity of the responses when we question such things--which isn't to say that we shouldn't do it, just that illumination comes with individual struggling and shared conflict. For an excellent summary of this topic, do yourself a favor and read Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War.

Meaning in Flux: How to Read a Religious Text

Over the last 67 year, biblical scholars have been pointing out that the New Testament is more a collection of texts from a community struggling with its own self-definition and identity than an established religion that has it all figured out. As more and more folks are embracing biblicism*, this becomes a problem. Case in point, the Book of Revelation was a contested part of the biblical cannon until--well, it's still contested in many ways. While the tendency to read the Bible texts (yes, plural) as established rather than as a record of conflict or as consensus rather than contested territory is related to biblical literalism and biblical inerrancy, I think that it leads to slightly different consequences. All three of these phenomena lead to intransigency and absolutism, but the established-community precept uniquely limits contemporary in-group acceptance and doctrinal fuzziness, that is, congregations that see the Bible as fixing belief rather than discussing it tend to be pretty exclusive.

This is quite ironic when one reads the books of the New Testament, even out of context. The Gospels give varying accounts of the same events. Acts is all about the negotiation of reform vs. schism. The Epistles are each one side of a dialogue, debates about belief, belonging, and behavior. (Revelation is clearly an outlier.) These books are all about the process of hashing out faith, not about codifying conclusiveness. Granted, the latter makes for stronger religions, but it also leads to more antisocial outcomes. More on that later.



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* - Chris Smith coins and defines "biblicism" as "a theory about the Bible that emphasizes together its exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability."

Meaning > Joy

I recently assigned the Contexts article The Joys of Parenthood, Reconsidered (Simon 2008) to my frosh Social Problems course as part of our unit on gender inequalities. As I've thought more about it, I wanted to take a second to point out an issue with the author's claim. Here is the major finding:

Sociologists find that as a group, parents in the United States experience depression and emotional distress more often than their childless adult counterparts. Parents of young children report far more depression, emotional distress, and other negative emotions than non-parents, and parents of grown children have no better well-being than adults who never had children.

Later, Simon adds,

...[P]arents derive more purpose and meaning in life than adults who never had children.

In the very next sentence, however, Simon dismisses this, writing,

At the same time, the emotional benefits of having children are often overshadowed by the onerous demands and stressors associated with the role.

This emotional arithmetic seems problematic for a couple reasons to me. First, it's not clear whether this is based on the data or is a theoretical evaluation that the author offers. My guess is that Simon is saying that even though parents derive more meaning, their emotional measures are still low. Second, perhaps meaning and purpose are mutually exclusive to emotions as they are measured here, and perhaps meaning and purpose offer psychic rewards that trump emotional considerations. Religion, after all, is full of such examples. Being a religious conservative comes with great costs for adherents but offers (at least) equally great rewards. Think about young Evangelical adults who are taught to abstain from sex until marriage. There is a huge emotional burden to this kind of sacrifice given the social and biological pressures to be sexually active, but the social rewards in the form of group cohesion are enormous for those who are able to live up to these standards.

Chris Smith uses subcultural identity theory to explain such phenomenon, and I think it plays a part in possibly explaining why people keep having children. As we've learned from Eric Klinenberg's new research, solo living is exploding, becoming less stigmatized, and may well be better socially for individuals than cohabitation, a practice usually associated with marriage. Essentially, even though we keep telling ourselves that marriage and parenthood are beneficial, fewer of us are doing either/both. I think it might be that parents are setting themselves off as a strong subculture that is clearly embedded within mainstream society but that is increasingly in tension with it for a number of reasons. I digress, though.

I think we need to be careful to dismiss the meaning/purpose generating role that parenthood plays in people's lives. Emotional well-being is important but so is having a sense of meaning.

The Dictionary Sucks

I chastise my students when they cite dictionary definitions in their papers. Mostly, I do this because it gives them a false sense of security and blinds them to the processes of how meaning is created and how power is reproduced. (It also often signals that they haven't been doing the assigned reading and/or listening in class.) Turns out, they're in good company, though. The Justices of the SCotUS have been relying more and more on dictionaries over the past two decades. That just seems lazy to me.

Reinventing the Wheel and Unfolding Maps

David Brooks came dangerously close to becoming a sociologist of religion this week!

Vague, uplifting, nondoctrinal religiosity doesn’t actually last. The religions that grow, succor and motivate people to perform heroic acts of service are usually theologically rigorous, arduous in practice and definite in their convictions about what is True and False.

I'm not so sure his term "theologically rigorous" accurately defines what he means. I think he actually means sectarian or strict which is rarely about systematic theology. Mainline Protestantism is in decline because it doesn't demand much of anything from its adherents, but it is the height of theological rigor; Evangelical Protestantism is in ascendancy because it does make serious demands, but it largely lacks an organized theology.

Rigorous theology provides believers with a map of reality. These maps may seem dry and schematic — most maps do compared with reality — but they contain the accumulated wisdom of thousands of co-believers who through the centuries have faced similar journeys and trials.

I really like this analogy of maps. Maps are by definition a dumbing-down of the real world. We cannot contemplate the complexity of the actual terrain so we need a simple tool to help us navigate it. Religion serves a similar purpose. Religious texts do an especially good job in this regard. They are a way to make the transcendent and complex immediate and comprehensible--which makes literalist interpretation all the more angering.

Random Thought on Myth-making

The recent events in Tuscon have given rise to a few questions for me. Does having challenges make one a good person? Does dying make one a hero? Too often, the eulogizing around tragedies (atrocities?) is actually retrospective mythologizing, that is, we tend to give meaning to anxiety-inducing incidents after the fact. Sociologically, it figures: we are reassured if we can give meaning to that which seems senseless; however, I fear that often such mythologizing can have problematic consequences. Not everyone who struggles deserves respect, and not everyone who dies unexpectedly is worthy of reverence. Moreover, there are plenty of those among us, the living, who go unrecognized.