Losing Our Religion?

February 9, 2007

Posted by Jay Livingston

I have been assuming that the Bush years have been good for religion. His “faith-based initiatives” have sent billions of government dollars to churches and other religious organizations. And when religion-based policies have conflicted with scientific findings, guess which carried the day, at least in the federal government.

Thomas Jefferson wrote famously of the “wall of separation between church and state.” George W. Bush seems to have heard a voice telling him to tear down that wall. More than any other president in modern times, or perhaps since the founding of the republic, Bush has tried make religion a part of government and politics.

Bush’s policy success in tearing down Mr. Jefferson’s wall does not seem to have won over more of the public. Here are the results of two Gallup polls, one taken just as Bush was coming into office, the other just last month.

The question was: "Next, I'm going to read some aspects of life in America today. For each one, please say whether you are very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, somewhat dissatisfied, or very dissatisfied. How about the influence of organized religion?"


Americans are still satisfied with the role of religion (56% vs. 39%) , but dissatisfaction has grown during the Bush years. Do people want to see the Bush trend continue?

The proportion of Americans saying they want religion to have less influence has increased by 45% (from 22% in 2001 to 32% in 2007).

It's hard to know what to make of the change. Thirty-two percent wanting less religious influence (maybe only a little less), is still a clear minority, and America is still far more religious than other advanced industrialized countries. Executive, legislative, and judicial branches have greatly favored religion.

The puzzling irony is that despite its dominance, the Christian majority feels threatened. Nearly sixty percent of Americans agreed that "Christianity is under attack in the US today." OK, this does come from a Fox News poll, and maybe people have just been listening to Bill O'Reilly. But it's possible they see these Bush-era trends as omens for the future.

Superbowl Ad Work

February 7, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

TV commercials are compressed version of some aspect of our culture. After all, if you’re going to spend $2.5 million just to get your ad on the air for thirty seconds, you want to be very sure that it resonates with widely held ideas. The straight commercials embrace the dominant values and give them a big kiss — Coca Cola’s everyone-happy-together, Chevy’s America-is-best. The funny ads take a more critical view of the culture.

Several of the Superbowl ads were about work. On the straight side was the GM robot ad. A robot drops a screw, loses his job at the GM plant, and descends first to holding up signs, then working in a fast food joint, and finally committing suicide by jumping off a bridge, all while the soundtrack plays the mawkish “All By Myself.” The only spoken words in the ad come at the end: “The GM 100,000 mile warranty — it’s got everyone at GM obsessed with quality.”

A full minute showing how capitalist competition benefits consumers and makes workers virtuous. It’s one of the core ideas of conservatism. For example, here’s David Frum (he worked in the Bush White House, even wrote a book about W. called The Right Man, and writes for The National Review)

The great, overwhelming fact of a capitalist economy is risk. Everyone is at constant risk of the loss of his job, or of the destruction of his business by a competitor . . . Risk makes people circumspect. It disciplines them and teaches them self-control . . . Social security, student loans, and other government programs make it far less catastrophic than it used to be for middle-class people to dissolve their families. Without welfare and food stamps, poor people would cling harder to working-class respectability than they do now.

The Career Builder ads offered a less laudatory picture of competition in the workplace— the one about performance assessment and this one about promotion.




The most curious ad in this category was SalesGenie.com. At first I thought it was going to be another spoof on the success-worshipping worker. I thought that the incredibly successful salesman— red Ferrari, boss’s invitation home for dinner, etc.— was going to be held up to ridicule as the obnoxious guy that he seems to be. But no, he’s the one we’re supposed to identify with. He’s supposed to make us want to use the same product he does.


I wonder if SalesGenie wasted several million dollars on this one.

Twilight Time?

February 4, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

The death of Seymour Martin Lipset a month ago provided the news peg for the Wall Street Journal to run a piece proclaiming “The Twilight of Sociology.” Lipset was the WSJ’s kind of guy — a 1930s Trotskyite socialist who became a neoconservative.

The author of the article, Wilfred McClay, a professor of humanities, sees the 1950s and 60s as the “golden age” of US sociology, but the titans of that era are dying off (Lipset, Rieff, and Riesman in the past year or so). And according to McClay no new giants are rising up to take their place. Where are the grand sociologists?

McClay, the good conservative (what else would you expect to find in the WSJ?) first blames liberal politics. “Academic journals and scholarly monographs were given over to supporting the reigning views of race, gender and class — and fiercely suppressing any inquiry that might challenge these views.” Then he blames the concept of social construction: “many sociologists came to believe, all reality was ‘socially constructed.’”

McClay exempts the sociology of religion from his condemnation: “a lively subfield, populated by outstanding figures such as Robert Bellah, Robert Wuthnow and Peter Berger.” The irony of course is that Peter Berger is co-author of the seminal book on social construction.

McClay also blames “scientism,” making much the same criticism that C.Wright Mills leveled at the “abstracted empiricism” style of sociology fifty years ago. McClay never mentions Mills among the giants of that golden age, probably because Mills was guilty of what McClay sees as current sociology’s main sin— “misguided activist zeal.”

McClay urges sociology to recover its potential for greatness by going back to “one of the “abiding themes of ‘old sociology’: how the stubbornness of social forces circumscribes what is possible for us as individuals.”

I’m not sure that McClay is right about anything. Are there no sociologists of the stature of Lipset or Riesman today? It’s often hard to tell who the giants are until you look back from the perspective of many years. When you’re standing right next to them, they may not seem so impressive (though Lipset was indeed an imposing physical presence; so was Alvin Gouldner, a Lipset contemporary probably too liberal for McClay to mention).

And if it turns out that there are no towering figures, is the cause to be found in our ideas, our ideologies, and our activism? McClay is so eager to pin the blame on progressive ideas that he ignores his own advice. He says nothing about the social forces that constrain sociology today. The social and economic realities of universities, journals, granting agencies, and publishers probably have a greater impact on the form and content of our work than does our ideology.

It may also be that we are in a “normal science” phase, still working out the implications of ideas laid down in the social scientific revolution of a century or more ago. Sociologists in this phase may still do great work — even those who think that Lipset was a great sociologist could hardly argue that he shook the theoretical or methodological foundations of the field— but they are unlikely to be seen immediately as giants.

(I offer no link to McClay’s article because the Wall Street Journal does not provide free access to its articles. But if you have the AB Inform database, you can find it: February 2, 2007; Page W13)

Little Miss Raincloud

January 31, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Optimism, hard work, success. They’re part of the culture, and we drink it into our consciousness just like Coca-Cola. If you have the right, positive attitude, and you work hard at your idea, you’ll be a winner.

Even if you personally don’t live by these basic American values, they are such a dominant part of the culture that you probably think you should live by them. Values are ideas and principles that are intrinsically good. You can’t argue with them. As my friend Linda Tischler found out.

Linda (wife of sociologist Henry Tischler) is a journalist, and she has been writing about business for a long time. As a senior writer at Fast Company magazine, she was invited to be on a panel at a conference of the N.A.F.E., the National Association for Female Executives. They couldn’t pay her, but they’d cover her expenses. The name Laguna Niguel, California had a nice ring to it. So did the name Ritz Carlton, so she took the offer.

The audience was full of hopeful female entrepreneurs —“momtrepreneurs” as they liked to call themselves— women who had started up a business during naptimes. What they wanted to hear from the journalists was how to get their product into an article in Fast Company, Business Week, or similar magazines.

Linda told them frankly that the odds were very much against them. “I get seventy-five e-mails every day pitching story ideas like that, plus the phone calls and snail mail. And a lot of those pitches are from well-paid PR people at GE, Apple, etc.” She was telling them, in effect, it’s very unlikely that we’re going to do a story about you.

This was definitely not what the audience wanted to hear, and from the comments and reactions, she thought the momtrepreneurs at Laguna Niguel might wind up dumping her in the laguna. After all, these were women who had paid $400 for the conference that promised

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They wanted a pep talk, a “motivational speaker,” someone who would tell them how they could get on the cover of Fortune. And she gave them reality.

She also told them how she screens the pitches. “If your e-mail is bigger than two megabytes, it’s going to get deleted unread. If it doesn’t tell me in the first short paragraph or two what the idea is, out it goes,” and so on. I think her mistake was that she put her advice in the negative, what not to do. That along with her basic message made her a raincloud spoiling the sunny clime of Laguna Niguel.

Linda and Henry recounted her sad tale at dinner last night. It’s not all we talked about. Conversation turned, as it often does, to Iraq. And now I wonder if there isn’t a parallel. The Bush administration sold the invasion on fear (remember those WMDs), but they also sold it on American optimism. We would oust Saddam, and all the Iraqis, just like the Munchkins when Dorothy liquidates the witch, would be free and happy and forever grateful to their liberators.

Of course, it didn’t work out that way— the optimism was more based on neo-conservative fantasies in the US rather than realities in Iraq— but Bush still frames the war in terms of winning and losing, as though international politics is some kind of game with only two outcomes— victory and defeat, success and failure. Since, in another phrase much beloved among motivational speakers, failure is not an option, he’s throwing in another 20,000 troops.

As I walked home after dinner, I passed the building of an acquaintance, Allen Seiden. Allen is a good poker player, and he’d been playing long before the current poker boom — a boom that has allowed him to go from smoky house games to lecturing and teaching. “The first thing you have to learn if you want to win money in poker,” he tells his audience, “is a four-letter word that begins with F. The word is fold. Use it early, use it often.”

The audience nods, but the chances are that most of them don’t really learn the lesson. Most poker players, the average pigeons, will call the bet just to see one more card rather than admit that the hand is a loser, optimistically hoping for the card that will fill their straight and bring them success  Which is why Allen has been able to make money playing poker. And which may also be why Bush just sent more troops to Baghdad.