Dunbar on Friendship

Robin Dunbar (of Dunbars number fame) has new work on friendship

Takes ~200 hours to move someone from stranger to close friend

7 factors for friendship compatibility are: language, place of origin, education, hobbies, worldview (religious, political), music taste, and humor pic.twitter.com/734SNYFHjx

— Patrick OShaughnessy (@patrick_oshag) August 21, 2021

Interview with Philip Jenkins

Here's a recent interview I had with Baylor historian Philip Jenkins on his fascinating new book, FERTILITY AND FAITH: https://t.co/yhc37cgyQh via @YouTube

— James C. Ungureanu, PhD (@JamesCUngureanu) June 8, 2021

The Anarcho-Primitivist Thesis, Again

@KaraCooney @WinterOakPress @NewYorker What is an "employment ledger" ? "It is the “impact metrics” that enable the world’s richest to profit off misery." Alison McDowell 'Population Health, Human Capital Bonds, & Black America https://t.co/OHOJAZjsx6 - https://t.co/kh6mynyq6K

— Derek Diamond (@dcareydiamond) January 19, 2021

Cancel Culture is Necessary for Cohesion?

How about policing members and purging them? Did she study the Communist Party too?

Congrats to Professor Lisa Mueller on publishing this timely and original research on advocacy organizations and the importance of cohesion. #HeyMac https://t.co/7J1NiRdm32

— Macalester President (@MacalesterPres) January 15, 2021

A Liberal Reviews a Book by a Liberal Social Scientist

and uses it to uphold the "liberal" regime as the ideal. Never mind the antropological evidence (and the analogue from chimpanzee society) for patriarchy.

Human beings have certain universal social desires—the social suite—that set the generic ends of human life, and so we can judge the goodness of a society by how well it promotes the satisfaction of those ends, which constitutes human flourishing. https://t.co/b8DLTB1hBM

— Law & Liberty (@LawLiberty) August 21, 2020

Law and Liberty

The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society by Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD

SPOTTER Up Ep. 24

Hrm... Demonic Males by Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham

Regulation of Sex is Necessary

1934 Anthropologist: “Sexually Permissive Societies Always Fall” by Fr. John Peck

Rollo Tomassi to Be at 21 Convention

via The Rational Male

Hypergamy --> "Don't settle"

CWR: How Many Faces of Christ? by Dr. Leroy Huizenga
Philip Jenkins' "The Many Faces of Christ" displays plenty of scholarship and erudition, but suffers from a blurring of textual and theological lines that reveals a problematic reliance on sociology.

CS Lewis Society Book Club

C.S. Lewis Society Book of the Bay Area for November:Wed., Nov. 4 and 18: "How the West Won: The Neglected Story of...

Posted by C. S. Lewis Society of California on Friday, October 23, 2015

How good is Stark's The Rise of Christianity?
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On Those Happiness Studies...

Le Cygne Gris links to an article taking a closer look. What is happiness? And how is it different from a meaningful life? The old question of eudaimonia.

Rationalizing Bad Behavior by Poor Women

The Postnuclear Family: Last Comes Marriage by Eve Tushnet

She reviews Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas’s 2005 sociological study Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage.

1. The patterns of out-of-wedlock childbearing, and the beliefs and attitudes which support those patterns, are making their way up the class ladder. Middle-class women are increasingly putting motherhood before marriage, and marriage is retreating from middle-class lives.
2. Edin and Kefalas lived in the communities they studied—poor neighborhoods in Philadelphia—and let the women there speak for themselves. They noted when the women judged them and pointed out what was lacking in their own upper-class lifestyles; the women found it sad and almost incomprehensible that one of the researchers didn’t have children, for example.
3. The authors take love and morality seriously as motivations. The women they study have deep longings, loneliness, tenderness, and fairly stern moral beliefs, and while these elements of their lives may be shaped by material conditions, they also shape how the women respond to economic challenges.
4. The most striking thing about this book is the clarity with which it shows that women who have children out of wedlock are often trying very, very hard to follow the rules and norms of their own community. Again and again I hear people say that the breakdown of marriage in our country is caused by narcissism, individualism, or relativism. Those forces probably play a role in shaping our values. (For example, we are far too quick to identify personal happiness as an end in itself, a form of virtue rather than what we hope may be one fruit of practicing actual virtues.) But the women in Promises I Can Keep, as the title suggests, are not narcissists or individualists. They believe in family obligations and self-sacrifice for their children. They hold marriage in extremely high regard—even too high regard, viewing it as something you can only have once you have already achieved most of your other life goals, such as economic stability. They do not need to be convinced that marriage is good. They simply believe it is irresponsible to marry before you’re economically stable, and both irresponsible and tragic to wait too long to have children. The combination of these two beliefs plus their own precarious economic situations produces a community in which marriage is an endlessly receding horizon, always tantalizingly out of reach. And to return to our first point, the moral beliefs these low-income women hold about when to marry and how to get to the altar are shared by people up and down the income ladder. The main difference is that higher-income women are more willing to postpone childbearing.

What of the fact that it is irresponsible to have children before you're able to take care of them and financially support them, and to do so without a father for them? Is deliberately having children out of wedlock without a father to help consonant with the good of the children? Fathers for the children are of no importance, apparently. (Sound familiar?) The importance of being a mother trumps all other [moral] considerations. Their motivation may not be properly characterized as narcissistic but it is disordered self-love. Would we excuse male fornication because he seeks comfort with a woman, but is not ready for marriage? Why should we deprive him the benefit of female companionship when he recognizes that he is not ready for marriage yet, or thinks marriage 2.0 is unfair? What we see is an attempt to excuse bad behavior instead of holding women responsible. After all, teenage moms can make the same claims; it's nice and fun to be a mom and to have a cute baby, and it's the norm in the surrounding community.

The inclination to have sex or have children is natural, but it is not moral unless directed by right reason. When this inclination is actualized into an intention, the intention of a good does not justify immoral actions. Another example of the separation of the procreative from the unitive aspect of sex, according to Humanae Vitae.


The appeal to "community norms" strikes me as being an example of the "herd thinking" characterizing interfemale reasoning and socializing by various people in the androsphere. They are doing what is acceptable and trying to make it sound more noble than it really is.

Paul Gottfried on Class

Charles Murray’s Fatal Conceit
What’s the matter with wealthy, white Massachusetts?

As a European historian specializing in the 19th century, I’ve never been able to figure out what American journalists and politicians (not to mention academic sociologists) mean when they refer to “classes.” This term has two time-tested meanings. Either we’re talking about social groupings with legally recognized statuses which until the 19th century had certain political rights that other groups did not, or else what we mean is what Marx understood as “classes,” socio-economically dominant forces like the medieval aristocracy or the bourgeoisie that replaced them. Classes are not simply people who fall at one point or another into a particular income bracket or who buy SUVs rather than compact sedans or high-definition TVs instead of pick-up models at Kmart. It drives me absolutely nuts when I hear geeky-looking “economic experts” yapping on about how the “middle class,” that is, middle-income families or clusters of co-inhabitants, are hurting for this or that. “Middle class” used to translate as “bourgeois,” which referred to a social class of many centuries, as opposed to those who are moving up and down the income scale. The indiscriminate bandying about of the term shows how culturally ignorant we’ve become.

A former colleague of mine who teaches political theory observed that it’s now impossible to teach students about Aristotle’s conception of the family as a household. The kids get annoyed that an ancient Greek thinker held such a skewed view of family relations. It makes no sense, for example, that an aging dude was put in charge of other family members. After all, women should be wage-earners as well as make their own decision about reproductive rights. One young Brazilian exchange student went ballistic when the instructor failed to scold Aristotle for not discussing gay marriage. Isn’t this about family togetherness, the student asked, an attitude we should be praising instead of ignoring?

Whither Solidarity?

Is solidarity a thing of the past? by Kurt Cobb (EB)

In Bottleneck Catton explains that the late 19th century French sociologist Emile Durkheim believed that the division of labor in society which resulted in heightened interdependence among humans also led inevitably to greater solidarity. Catton counters with the views of American sociologist E. A. Ross who believed that that same interdependence was leading to far more vulnerability among humans to predatory behavior from other humans. Catton leans toward Ross's view for a very important reason: Humans now labor in narrow occupational niches within our highly complex society in the same way that species occupy ecological niches in nature. This specialization leads to competition within each niche for the limited number of positions available.

Consequently, the harder the economic times, the more intense the competition for the reduced number of positions within each niche. This leads to anxiety among those already holding a job since they are often not skilled enough to find work in other niches. The employee often asks himself or herself, "What could I possibly do if I were no longer able to do this kind of work?" Naturally, this concern also creates anxiety among those who are unemployed and seeking jobs within a particular niche.

I wasn't expecting Mr. Cobb to adopt Catton's analysis, though he may be making use of it as one explanation of our present situation. I don't think interdependence is, in se, the problem. It and (over-)specialization accompany wage slavery and a highly developed "capitalistic" system. It's not just economic competition that affects solidarity, but the lack of rootedness and the size of the "communities" that are involved. So Catton's analysis may be useful in looking at one factor, but it is incomplete. While those in France, for example, may be better able to unite for a common interest because of a social safety net which alleviates the risk of reprisals, aren't they stuck in a capitalistic paradigm? While seeking their economic good they, at the same time, cling to their form of political economy, from which they derive their government benefits. How can they wholly reform the system? It seems to me that such a thorough reform would be necessary if it is to be sustainable and to induce humane communities. Otherwise, we are stuck with wealth pumps and centralization and all that entails, as Damien Perrotin notes.