Links for June, 2024
Tattoos, Fertility, Tradition, Fragmentation, Homeschooling
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Here’s a monthly roundup of items from around the interwebs.
Getting Ink
This sad piece in The Free Press describes a West Virginia town where many kids are being raised by grandparents because their parents are on opioids. It’s the least important thing about the article, but I couldn’t help noticing one of the mamaws had an armful of tattoos — something I never saw on a grandmother when I was young.
Then, going to some children’s events this month, I noticed how many other parents have visible tattoos, sometimes whole sleeves.
Sociologist and painter James Tucker pointed me to this article on the increasing frequency of tattooing among Americans: Among those aged 30-49, 46% have at least one, and 32% have more than one. In contrast, among people over 65, 13% have at least one, and only 5% have more than one.
I bet it would be even rarer in my grandparents’ cohort (now mostly over 90 or departed). Ideally, you’d find some older data from when this cohort was younger, since getting a tattoo is correlated with risk-taking so tattooed people disproportionately select out of cohorts as they age.
This is one of many topics where I’d like to see a purely sociological theory but lack the wherewithal to come up with one myself. C’mon, kids, “The Behavior of Tattoos” is just waiting to be written.
Maybe one can start with this presentation by anthropologists Will Buckner and Melina Sarian: “The Evolution of Body Adornment: Tattoos and Body Adornment in Hunter-Gatherer Societies.”
There’s also a book on The History of Tattooing.
Getting Serious
At Experimental History, Adam Mastroianni talks about the importance of seriousness. He left academia because it became increasingly apparent to him that the game of degrees, pubs, and grants never gave way to just being able to do serious science:
I believed what everybody else seems to believe: if you play the game well enough and long enough, eventually you get to stop playing and go do whatever you want. I played the game pretty well for a long time, and now it’s obvious to me that the reward for playing the game is more game.
So seriousness isn’t some kind of final reward, a golden watch you earn for a lifetime of operating in bad faith. It is, instead, one of those basic practices you gotta do to prevent your life from disintegrating, like getting out of bed and taking a shower and talking to people. That’s because seriousness is the great Orderer of Priorities, and the Priorities must be Ordered.
That’s why you gotta be serious about something. It’s like a protective amulet that prevents you from Goodharting yourself. Unserious people might seem free, unburdened by the dreadful commitment of caring about anything. But they are in fact hackable and distractible, susceptible to whatever game can trap them in a behavior loop. They’re like that guy in that 1990s anti-drug commercial, walking in circles, muttering, “I do coke...so I can work longer...so I can earn more...so I can do more coke.”
I realized pretty early that many sociologists and sociology grad students just aren’t that serious about sociology as such. Sociologist Bradley Campbell argues that failing to take their own discipline seriously is a vice:
Those who wish to be sociologists, I argue, have a responsibility to pursue sociology as a vocation….
What this has in common with the non-religious sense of vocation, as in Weber ’s “Science as a Vocation,” is the imperative to approach work with moral seriousness. “Nothing is worthy of man as man,” Weber said there, “unless he can pursue it with passionate devotion.
Treating one’ s work with moral seriousness means first of all doing the work and doing it well. Cynicism is the enemy of vocation, and cynicism might manifest itself in shoddy work—such as when sociologists produce lots of low-quality articles to increase the length of their publication lists. Such sociologists do not treat their work as having value in itself; they treat it as if it only serves other ends—freeing up time, perhaps, or receiving a promotion. But another form of cynicism, which at first seems quite different, arises when sociologists subvert their work for what they see as some higher value….
Those who use their position as sociologists to pursue social reform and other political causes, just like those pursuing selfish interests, fail to treat their work as having value in itself. They are not treating sociology with seriousness, and however idealistic they are about their other goals, they are not fulfilling their vocation as sociologists.
Bradley and I were both trained by Donald Black, who was incredibly serious about sociology.
Children of Men
In my experience, the greatest Orderer of Priorities is having a family. Having kids was like joining Fight Club: The rest of the world had the volume turned down.
But my experience is increasingly rare. Fertility rates are falling worldwide, with many countries below replacement level.
At Medium, Akhivae discusses general theories of the decline.
Fertility is declining, and no one knows why. There are plenty of attempts at explanations, many of which seem quite intuitive at first glance, only to fall apart when held to closer scrutiny.
One possibility for the extremely rapid decline in poorer countries is that media exposure succeeded in making big families a marker of low status:
The protagonists of telenovelas were young, upwardly mobile, financially independent, educated, beautiful and stylish. The protagonist was either childless or had a small family. Larger families were generally depicted as poor and dysfunctional. Unsurprisingly, many Brazilians came to view telenovela characters as aspirational figures worth emulating.
The baby bust is especially severe in East Asia. In South Korea it’s almost mind boggling, with a TFR of .7 and falling. The county is on track for a population decline comparable to the effects of history’s great plagues, only it’s from sheer lack of breeding.
Thus Richard Hanania recently offered a region-specific explanation in “Why East Asia Stopped Having Kids.” His answer is that people there are relatively more conformist, and relatively worse at dealing with situations without a firm cultural script.
My model of fertility decline across the world goes something like this. There used to be a time when every normal man and woman was expected to marry off and form a family….
Over time, norms and expectations changed….and scripts regarding what is high or low status have changed….
In countries where individuals are hypersensitive to the signals coming from others, compared to other societies they are more likely to form families when everyone else is doing it, but less likely to do so once there is a switch to low-fertility norms.
On the importance of following scripts, he argues that while East Asians tend to overperform in education, they tend underperform in entrepreneurship, where the path to success is more varied and unpredictable:
Romance is more like business entrepreneurship than doing well in school. Media reports have noted the remarkable degree to which many East Asians have checked out of the sexual marketplace in recent decades. One 2012 study found that of the eleven countries or territories with the highest age at which people lost their virginity, five are in East Asia, and all but one of the rest are majority Muslim. If you have a religious society that harshly punishes non-marital sex that’s one thing, but East Asians are unique in the degree to which they are allowed to have sex but end up not doing so.
In “What Natalists Should Learn from LGBT,” Bryan Caplan uses the drastic increase in youth identifying as LGBT as evidence that culture can have a massive effect:
Natalists often push various kinds of baby bonuses. Contrary to what you’ve heard, such incentives work well relative to the counterfactual. But what the LGBT explosion teaches us is that high doses of sheer enthusiastic social approval are strong enough to move mountains. Yes, money matters. But a full-blown fertility cult culture — complete with Parent Pride Parades — plausibly could work as well or better.
If they’re looking to make fertility high status, seems like natalists would want to account for men and women being drawn to different cultural environments and status hierarchies. For instance, men are dropping out of higher ed, and among the educated, women are less likely to be going to church.
Tribe and Tradition
In a post on Daniel Everett’s Don’t Sleep, there are Snakes, Misha Saul takes the descriptions of a tribal people as reflecting the brutality and fatalism of life before civilization. He also takes issue with how Everett, who first arrived among the Pirahãs as a missionary, describes things like infanticide, rape, and ethnic extermination:
Look how non-judgmental our missionary is, how he buries the gang rape of a young girl by most of the village men in parentheses. Am I reading Pär Lagerkvis’s The Dwarf? Is this a sick parody? Is this a protestant thing? I feel like an indignant bishop in Rome reading the dispatches of some degenerate padre who’s fathered a tribe of bastards in the New World. Is Everett Colonel Kurtz?
…..Everett is quick to point out racism among the various peoples of Brazil or the US. He objects to Brazilian traders calling the Pirahã monkeys and subhuman. He calls them racist. But for the Pirahã, who literally understand the past more or less exclusively through Pirahã eyes and kill non-Pirahãs on their land, racism becomes sparkly demarcation. Ethnocentricity for thee but not for me.
I say being non-judgmental in a work of scientific description is a good thing — though it shouldn’t be applied selectively. And I agree that ethnographers sometimes idealize their subjects and downplay behavior that would make them look bad.
Love of one’s subjects is a professional hazard for the anthropologist. But sometimes there’s the opposite: Growing to hate one’s subjects. Colin Turnbull is known for both: He clearly loved the Mbuti Pygmies described in his book The Forest People, and openly loathed the Ik described in his book The Mountain People.
People not only idealize the tribal world, but also the traditions of their own civilization. One criticism of much modern traditionalism is that the “traditions” people value aren’t actual traditions — they’re imaginary versions of a past whose reality is largely forgotten.
Scott Alexander responds to this in “Fake Tradition is Traditional” by reminding us that people in those traditional times were doing the exact same thing:
Modern traditionalists look back fondly on Victorian times. But the Victorians didn’t get their culture by just doing stuff without ever thinking of the past. They were writing pseudo-Arthurian poetry, building neo-Gothic palaces, and painting pre-Raphaelite art hearkening back to the early Renaissance. And the Renaissance itself was based on the idea of a re-naissance of Greco-Roman culture. And the Roman Empire at its peak spent half of its cultural energy obsessing over restoring the virtue of the ancient days of the Roman Republic
Based on the title, I half expected him to cite The Invention of Tradition by historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. If you’re not familiar, the book examines how many perceived traditions were modern creations projected backward onto the past. For instance, the Scots of independent Scotland didn’t wear kilts — rather, the kilt was invented by an Englishman in 1720 for his Scottish employees to wear in the ironworks. (Though William Wallace wearing a kilt is the least of the historical inaccuracies in Braveheart.)
How long does something have to exist to be a tradition, anyway? My answer is about three generations — enough that it can be shared by grandparent, child, and grandchild. Thus my mother was mightily upset when they stopped airing “A Charlie Brown Christmas” on television because it was the end of a tradition. Yes, the show didn’t even premiere until she was six years old — but that means she remembers watching it with her mother, then watching it with me when I was little, and was looking forward to watching it with her own grandchildren.
Wondering if anyone else came up with 3 generations as an important number, I see that Wikipedia attributes it to sociologist Edward Shils. His book on tradition joins the long list of things I’m meaning to read.
Future Fragmentation
It seems like there come periods of disjunction in cultural evolution, where many traditions suddenly die. Television shows are perhaps a trivial example, but an example nonetheless: My grandparents, parents, and myself could reference the same pool of shows that aired in the 50 and 60s and kept going in reruns through the 90s. The proliferation of online media has ended this: Kids don’t even watch television anymore, they watch Youtubers and Twitch Streamers. There are entire streaming services I’ve never heard of, and I can’t expect the kids to get a reference to Andy Griffith.
Divisions occur within generations as well: A streamer might have a following in the millions but be completely unknown to most. I recently stumbled on an ecosystem of celebrity gossip channels, analogous to the tabloids of old, except that they report on the scandals of streamers rather than Hollywood actors. Their circle of followers develops their own argot. If they grow prominent enough, these streamers themselves become subjects of gossip. Meanwhile, much of their audience must spend their days around family and coworkers who have no earthly idea who any of these people are.
Thinking ahead to the future, Arnold Kling expects a continued trend of technology-fueled social fragmentation.
Ever since the Axial Age, people have had durable collective identities. We had religious identities. We had national identities. I speculate that these will fade away. People will feel loyal to smaller groups, and they will be willing to switch loyalties often.
Celebrities will be famous only in narrow realms, for short periods of time. Many cults will emerge around all sorts of bizarre beliefs. The most durable social forms will be extended families and tribes.
This is consistent with my parsing of Spencer/Durkheim’s theory of differentiation: We’re in for a world of more and smaller subcultures as people sort into various niches.
Homeschooling
The rise of alternative schooling is part and parcel of this.
Erik Hoel discusses how Scientific Ideological American recently called for legislation to require background checks for homeschoolers. Hoel explains how the authors use misleading statistics to give the impression that homeschooled children are especially prone to be part of Child Protective Services investigations. The method generalized:
Subgroup has same or slightly lower rate of X as the general population, but
Average Joe wouldn’t know rate of X in general population off the top of his head, and
Would be surprised at how high it is, so
Make a big deal about the rate of the subgroup, but omit any comparison to the general population, so Average Joe thinks the subgroup is surprisingly worse than everyone else.
At the Institute for Family Studies, Erica Komisar talks about the unique difficulties with educating young boys, who get a hormone dump between ages 3 and 6 that makes them squirmy and prone to fight or flight reactions to stress.
It shouldn’t have been news, but it did make me rethink my approach to my own young son when he is frustrated. For instance, if I can engineer a “high five” moment when I see he’s stressed, he’ll smack that hand as hard as he can and giggle a bit with the stress release, instead of either crying or trying to quit. And if he’s squirmy, then it’s time for an exercise break. (He especially likes it if I let him invent new exercises — “this is called apple pose!”)
On the theme of boys having difficulty in regular schools, see also this other IFS piece.
In my case I also have worries about teaching his little sister, as she’s more willful. She takes lessons from a puppet in character better than from regular old daddy, but she might have grown out of that by the time we start serious reading lessons this fall.
As a reminder, I recommend Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons for reading, and I am making progress with the Learn Math Fast System for teaching arithmetic. I think you can get good ideas out of Right Start Mathematics to mix in with the curriculum, but I found it hard to follow as a linear sequence.
For drives to the gym and grocery store, the kids currently like this audiobook of Aesop’s Fables and my son is surprisingly attentive to A Child’s History of the World.
I’m also slated to teach two courses at the local Homeschool Hub, one a gym class and the other on American folk tales. On that note, here’s the ballad of John Henry.
Links to Links
What was I linking to last June? Is any of it still interesting a year later?
Of interest to me personally: That was the first time I posted about WVU’s budget shortfall and the possibility of layoffs. A few months later, admin sacked about twelve percent of the faculty.
Zvi Mowshowitz has a more recent roundup on higher education. One thing I didn’t know about Arizona State University:
David Weekly: ….ASU makes its courses available to anyone for $25/course. After you take the class, if you want the grade you got added to an official transcript with a credit you can use, +$400.
Emmett Shear: This is cool to me because you can see the core of university economics right there. Bundling $25 worth of education with $400 of credentialist gatekeeping. I’m not blaming ASU, it’s cool they’re doing this, but that is deeply broken.
I may or may not be sitting on an unpublished children’s book. Thus I had some interest in author Maureen Crisp round up links regarding writing and publishing. But it struck me that the first few links are really about politics. For instance, an organization dedicated to promoting reading is making statements about Gaza. Is this the fate of every modern organization?
Thanks for reading!
Substacks cited above:
(Zvi Mowschowitz)