This post was written by Patrick Rist on November 29, 2007
Marxism was supposed to produce the “New Man.” He’s a little late, but the New Man may be emerging in communist China.
A recent Reuters story (found here) describes the younger generation of twenty-somethings found in the wealthier districts of China. Almost all of them were raised as an “only child,” and evidently display many of the narcissistic, self-centered personality traits long associated with children without siblings – at least in popular lore. (I should probably add here that some of my best friends are only children.)
The article specifically focuses on the widespread (and quite casual) failure of marriages among this group. With the Chinese economy booming, and personal options and choices expanding exponentially, many Chinese simply can’t be bothered by the necessary give-and-take involved in sustaining a marriage. Considering the needs of another person is, after all, something with which they have had no previous experience. Divorce has become completely un-stigmatized in this echelon of society and marriages sometimes last only a few weeks.
Cohabitation is on the rise, and even extra-marital sex (quaintly called “cheating” by some in American society) is becoming accepted. All of these changes are an enormous departure from the Confucian ideals that have guided Chinese society for centuries.
To give the Marxists their due, I don’t think this is what they had in mind when they predicted the New Man. But is it possible that what is happening in China represents something actually new? A non-Western, and hence, non-Christian society passing from traditional mores to a post-modern, self-centered ethic – essentially within the span of one lifetime; other examples of this would be hard to find.
This cultural change presents something of a challenge to those of us who maintain that the way of living described here is contrary to human flourishing, and damages our souls. While perhaps true, convincing the young affluent Chinese would be a hard sell. They have no residual common moral ground in which such claims would make sense, even less than young affluent Americans.
Most of us Christians want to believe in natural law. We all take great comfort from Lewis’ arguments for a universal moral code in Mere Christianity. Yet a new generation of essentially amoral Chinese, living intently focused on material and sexual desire, would seem to present a great challenge to these notions. Perhaps we need less theory and more real life, hard case examples of seeing natural law apologetics in action.
Almost all of us know Chinese here in the US, either graduate students visiting, or professors. Perhaps this Reuters article could be a way to start a discussion of mores and morals. Of course, one should avoid an opener like, “What a selfish, immoral lot you Chinese are!”
Rather, one could ask:
– Have you seen examples of what the article describes? Do you think it is accurate?
– What are the implications of these trends for China’s future?
– Does it matter? Are some ways of living better than others? How does one decide that?
This post was written by Patrick Rist on September 3, 2007
W. Bradford Wilcox is Assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia and a member of the James Madison Society at Princeton University. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia and his Ph.D. at Princeton University. Prior to coming to the University of Virginia, he held research fellowships at Princeton University, Yale University and the Brookings Institution.
Dr. Wilcox’s research focuses on the influence of religious belief and practice on marriage, cohabitation, parenting, and fatherhood. His most recent paper, “Religion, Race, and Relationships in Urban America,” studies the essential role fathers play in the creation of healthy families and in the positive development of children.
Dr. Wilcox has had articles published in The American Sociological Review, Social Forces, The Journal of Marriage and Family and The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. His work has also been featured in The Washington Post, USA Today, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, CBS News, and numerous NPR stations.
AI: How did you first become interested in researching families in contemporary society?
Wilcox: I was raised by a single mother. As a college student, I became interested in studying the effects of fatherlessness on children, and the role that marriage plays in uniting mothers and fathers.
AI: Many of your findings would seem to be somewhat at odds with the received sociological wisdom. How is your work typically received?
Wilcox: I suspect that it is received with a measure of curiosity and hostility. Most of my colleagues are quite civil in their dealings with me. Some even indicate that they appreciate the unique perspective I bring to bear on religion and family life. But I also hear about comments made about me or my work that are more hostile. Some people think that I am shilling for the religious right.
AI: Do those in the sociological community know of your personal faith commitments? How has that affected how your work is viewed?
Wilcox: I think many scholars assume that I am a Christian, given my focus of research. I’m sure that colors the way that my work is received. But I try to stick pretty closely to the data. So that gives me some protection among fair-minded scholars. And, I’m happy to say, there are a good number of fair-minded scholars in sociology–especially in the best departments.
AI: What motivates you to keep going, to continue in this area?
Wilcox: I hope that my work in some ways increases the odds that children are raised by their mother and father in an intact, married family. I also view my work as a calling. This is my vocation, and I’m supposed to respond to that call with my heart, mind, and soul.
AI: Why should Christian scholars be involved in research on the family?
Wilcox: I think we often bring a different set of assumptions to bear on the study of the family. Sometimes these assumptions are vindicated, sometimes not. But we often can see family life differently than many of our peers because of our unique assumptions or worldview. This will often lead to breakthroughs in family scholarship.
AI: What do you envision as the potential payoffs? What will be the price of apathy?
Wilcox: The payoff is that our work can help the public, academics, and students rethink their assumptions about family life. Our work can even inspire people to change the ways they approach family life. The price of apathy–of not investigating the serious questions and topics about contemporary family life–is that the whole truth doesn’t get out, and that people don’t have the opportunity to make constructive changes in their family lives.
This post was written by Patrick Rist on April 19, 2007
The Wendell Berry short story, “Watch With Me,” from the collection by the same name (1994), revolves around the character Thacker Hample, a person given to “fits” and other bizarre behaviors, who one day picks up a neighbor’s loaded shotgun and wanders off into the woods after mentioning that he may kill himself.
The neighbor, Tol Proundfoot, begins following Thacker to make sure he doesn’t harm himself or anyone else. He sends word to other neighbors to come help, and for the rest of a long day and long night, Tol and his companions follow and watch Thacker from a distance as he meanders across their rural county.
This is not a lark for these men. They are aware that there is potential danger involved in what they are doing. They hardly speak to one another as they follow, and rarely even walk together. By the end of the story, which ends, if not happily, at least without tragedy, they are tired and hungry and behind in their work on their farms. Yet they do what they do without resentment and without complaint.
The men do not follow and watch after Thacker because he is their friend. Thacker is simply too backward and odd to be anyone’s friend. Rather, the men commit themselves to their task because both they and Thacker live together. In some way that probably none of them could defend or even articulate, this forces upon them an obligation to Thacker and to his welfare.
Thacker walks on alone. Yet he is far from alone.
Like most of Berry’s fiction, “Watch With Me” takes place before mass culture infiltrated every corner of our continent and our psyches. And also like most of his fiction as well as his nonfiction, Berry here holds up an ideal that we may not even be able to recognize, much less affirm.
The ideal is one of connectedness, or community, and the inherent obligation that arises from simply living in proximity to another. This is a hard teaching, and few of us can accept it.
Because for all the talk of “community” or “unity” today, both within the church and outside it, the simple fact is that we like living in a mass society. We like anonymity. We like going to the store and not having to speak to anyone or be recognized. We like not having to be involved with our neighbors’ lives, or even know their names, if we’d rather not. Who has time for it? We can now choose with whom we want to have “community,” and if it becomes messy or somehow disappointing, we can move on to someone else and have “community” with them.
And all this runs along rather smoothly, but with hidden costs. These costs become devastatingly visible when a Thacker Hample gets it in his addled brain to kill a few dozen of us.
Berry, who pastor and theologian Eugene Peterson actually calls a prophet, challenges us to hold some of our most unquestioned ways of life at a critical distance and try to see how odd they are in comparison to how most of the human race has lived through the centuries. But this is hard, and sometimes sounds like blame. It is not blame, but it is an attempt at being as clear-eyed as possible.
Is society somehow to blame for the horrors perpetuated at Virginia Tech this week? Of course not. We must affirm personal culpability; to do otherwise is simply reprehensible, especially in light of subsequent information discovered about the murderer.
But we must also acknowledge that we live in a society in which mobility, anonymity and sheer numbers of people make it possible for someone to be completely unknown by and disconnected to anyone else. This type of society has become normative for us; it is difficult to imagine any other way. We sometimes lose sight of its true perversity, and we seldom think about what it could be doing to us.
Neither you nor I nor Wendell Berry can do very much about mass society and its attendant anonymity. The fix is in, and it’s unlikely that a nation of 300 million is going to become less mass-oriented or impersonal. But for the sake of our own souls, perhaps we should be less glib about it, and more willing to contemplate the possibility that our “tastes” have become corrupted, like someone who prefers watching TV to walking in the woods, or McDonalds to a home cooked meal.
If we prefer anonymity to connection, if we prefer diversion to actually getting involved in others’ lives, and if we are content with cheap and easy “community-lite,” then perhaps we have been too deeply conditioned by our frenetic culture. Perhaps there is something there of which we should repent. We should ask our gracious God to change our tastes, and to protect us from the consequences of a system in which we have been all-too-willing participants.
This post was written by Matt Bazemore on November 13, 2006
Previously I stated that the human person is composed of inseparable parts and that these parts are integrated with one another. In this entry I will deal with the relations of these parts. My intent is not to give an exhaustive account of the human person, but rather to provide some of the building blocks that ultimately lead to the task of integration. I am in the middle of an argument that provides a reason for the deficiency of the Academic-Professional Model defined as the model that seeks to pass on knowledge and professional skills with no moral training or reflection provided for the student, even though this may not be the intent of the faculty.
The inseparable parts of the human person have a certain kind of order or relations with one another. For instance the mind seems to play a role of gatekeeper. A person will usually not believe something that they do not think is plausible, such as the concept that the earth is flat. This places the mind in a certain ordering with the other faculties. This ordering results in a structure.
What is this structure made of? Richard Swinburne’s Belief-Desire set I think is a good starting point for understanding this structure (Evolution of the Soul, Oxford U. Press, Revised Edition, 1997). The internal structure of the person is the structure of the Belief-Desire set and the relations between the multitude of beliefs and desires.
Swinburne’s model however, is inadequate to account for the whole person. I think the structure includes more than just beliefs and desires. Evidence for this claim comes from a branch of the field of Psychology known as Cognitive Therapy. Rational Emotive Theory (RET) claims that every experience one has ever had, including those in an educational environment, is a part of one’s memory structure and has two parts: meaning and affect. The meaning is the belief that results from the experience and the affect is the emotion that results from the experience. According to a psychologist friend of mine, RET has a lot of documented success in research and therapy. I think this success is due to the fact that it makes the connection between the Belief-Desire set and emotions. RET points to a connection that agrees with my brief ontology. So the Belief-Desire set is not just composed of beliefs and desires, but there are also affects that make up the set’s composition.
In light of our discussion thus far, a number of questions arise: Does this view of the integrated human soul fit with our experiences and our intuitions? Does it seem, prima facie, to be true? If it does seem to be true, as I believe it is, how would it influence the way we study, teach or live?
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