Tuesday night in Amsterdam. Inside the city's ArenA, the colour green floods a giant mosaic of video screens, below which stand the four members of U2, three weeks into their 360 tour. As the band strike up "Sunday Bloody Sunday," the screens flash images of protesters on the streets of Tehran alongside lines in Farsi by the Persian poet Rumi. Thus, a song written 26 years ago about political violence in Northern Ireland finds a new and pressing context.
The sequence vividly illustrates U2's unique brand of stadium activism. There's also a tribute to the incarcerated Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi during "Walk On," and a recorded message from Desmond Tutu for the One campaign, co-founded by Bono to mobilise support for developing country debt relief and HIV/AIDS treatment, among other issues. No globally successful rock band has ever foregrounded politics for so many years, let alone stalked the corridors of power to help thrash out deals, which is why representatives from Amnesty and the World Food Programme cross paths with Helena Christensen and Anton Corbijn in the VIP area.
Equally, the sequence demonstrates the limits of U2's approach. The band have always worked on the principle that in the awareness-raising business something, however imperfect, is better than nothing, but Iran-watchers might justifiably argue that an emotive one-minute montage simplifies, even trivialises, a complicated situation. It really depends on how much imperfection you're willing to accept.
For U2's most dogged critics, the answer is: not much. Around the time of Live 8, the travel writer Paul Theroux branded Bono one of the "mythomaniacs -- people who wish to convince the world of their worth." After U2 moved part of their business to the Netherlands to reduce their tax burden in 2006, the Daily Mail dubbed the singer "St Bono the Hypocrite." The Irish writer Eamonn McCann recently labelled U2's music "a toxic cloud of fluffy rhetoric, a soundtrack for the terminally self-satisfied."
The subject of such opprobrium sits in his Amsterdam hotel suite, breakfasting on black coffee and cornflakes, and ponders the downside of being the world's most famous rock star activist. "A little information can do a lot of harm," he says, his voice hoarse from the previous night. "A lot of people don't know what I do so they think, 'He's just turning up in photographs with starving Africans or some president or prime minister. We don't like that. Rock stars telling elected officials what to do, and then they run back to their villas in the south of France. Fuck 'em.'" But, he insists, "if you look into it you think, 'This guy works two-and-a-half days a week at this, not being paid for it, and at cost to his band and his family, and doesn't mind taking a kicking.'"
With his hair cropped short, and his body bunched and compact like a fist, Bono resembles a retired boxer, jabbing the air to make his points. When I meet the rest of U2 individually, their body language also speaks volumes. Guitarist the Edge is serenely quiet and still, except when his eyes crinkle slightly in concentration or mirth. Bassist Adam Clayton sprawls louchely on a sofa, with a perpetual air of mild and mysterious amusement. Drummer Larry Mullen Jr. leans forward intently, punctuating his responses with an apologetic grimace as if, far from being the man who founded U2, he had simply won a competition to be the drummer in a rock band. "Nothing with U2 really makes sense," he says, eyes widening. "I have no idea how we managed to get to this place."
The history of rock stars who take on politics is somewhat chequered. Bob Dylan repudiated it, John Lennon tied himself in knots over it, and the Clash were crushed by sky-high expectations. U2's activism has somehow endured and flourished. Their political outlook was shaped by being young and Irish in the late 1970s. As a result of temperament as much as circumstance, U2 could neither play with Clash-style guerrilla chic nor take sides.
"People in the south were always revolted by the acts of terrorism and brutality in the north," says Clayton. "But to express it would have been to sympathise with the Brits, so it was complicated. We were part of finding a spiritual dimension to it rather than just standing at the barricades."
In the early 1980s, U2 were racked by sincerity, applying to such baleful issues as the Troubles, apartheid and the threat of nuclear war a spiritual perspective influenced by soul music and Bob Marley. "You can certainly hear that in the recordings," says the Edge. "Some of it's overwrought and way too intense. There was almost a desperation in the performances to make a connection, which didn't help at times. Our lives seemed to depend on it. There was a sense that it could go all the way or it could go nowhere."
Of course, it went all the way, and U2 clung to the principle of accentuating the positive: "Pride (In the Name of Love)" mutated from an attack on Ronald Reagan into a celebration of Martin Luther King. Nonetheless, they acquired a grimly humourless image: "These are really serious guys from war-torn Ireland and they've got a thing or two to tell you," as Clayton drily puts it. Their 1992 Zoo TV tour introduced a life-saving element of ironic distance, with its crank calls, costumes and media overload. "By that point, we'd figured out that it's sometimes enough to ask the right question," says the Edge. "You don't necessarily have to come up with an answer."
In the last decade, things have got more complicated. U2's formidable manager, Paul McGuinness, used to tell Bono that an artist's job was to describe problems, not to fix them, but since Bono was first approached to join the Jubilee 2000 debt-relief campaign, he has trod the minefield of top-flight hands-on activism. It is an almost oxymoronic role: the rock star diplomat. "Our job is to bring him back to his position as an artist," says the Edge. "Artists don't have to deal in the muddy grey of political reality. They can see things in black and white terms -- ideals. There's an aspirational aspect to rock 'n' roll, whereas politics is just one compromise after another."
Bono had the additional misfortune of having to twist arms in Washington during a time when the most divisive president in decades was preparing to launch the most divisive war in decades. As the Iraq fiasco deepened, Bono maintained a diplomatic silence, and images of him beside a grinning George Bush (whom Clayton dismissively refers to as "the other fella") returned to haunt him. He is grateful to the film-maker Michael Moore for kind words at the time. "He said, 'Look, this must be very difficult for you, doing what you're doing while the rest of us are mobilising against this war. I want you to know that you don't have to do everything -- you just have to do something.' It was a great feeling."
But even with Bush gone, Bono relies on cross-party support for his campaigns. Two weeks ago, he revealed to Jonathan Ross that he had dodged a hug with Bush during a 2006 photo-op, and rightwing bloggers howled in outrage, causing trouble for his campaigning partners. "It's very hard for me to keep quiet about anything," he says, smiling. "I'm more used to putting my foot in my mouth than I am biting my hand." He says he was known "quietly" as an opponent of the war but refuses to demonise its architects. "There are people who will be walking differently for the rest of their lives because of their decision to invade Iraq," he says. "Remember, 9/11's not far behind. They really are nervous about that. And Blair, too. He doesn't want to be Chamberlain -- the guy who says everything's going to be fine. They see this darkness on the horizon and they make a really, spectacularly bad decision. I did say to Condi [Rice], 'Think about what happened in Ireland. The British army arrived to protect the Catholic minority but when you're standing on street corners in hard hats and khaki you very quickly become the enemy.' But I wasn't there for that. I had to keep my focus. You're asking, 'Don't you speak up? Don't you get out on the streets?' I gave up that right once I was in a position of voicing the desire to stay alive of millions of people who had no voice."
Mullen, however, admitted his unease, earlier this year, over Bono consorting with "war criminals," a moment of candour that now makes him wince. "My only regret is that I might have made it easier for his critics to throw some more stones at him, which was really not my intention," he sighs. "There's no question of rolling over in my views; it's just looking at the bigger picture. You can argue it up and down but in the end you have to stand up and go, 'This works.'" Again, it comes down to how much imperfection you're willing to accept. "I've always thought the result was worth whatever way he got there," says Clayton. "I don't think being photographed with George Bush or Tony Blair is too high a price to pay."
Bono may be U2's self-appointed flak-catcher but he worries his activism opens his bandmates to criticism. "They're getting part of the kicking because they have me in the band. So I feel for them. I do." An example: nobody gives a damn about, say, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' accountancy practises, but U2's tax move was roundly slammed as rank hypocrisy.
Bono rubs his temples and sighs. "It's very difficult. The thing I probably regret is not talking about it more but we agreed in the band not to. Which is annoying. What bothered me was it's like you're hiding your money in some tax haven and people think of the Cayman Islands. And you're campaigning for Africa and transparency -- of course that looked like hypocrisy. People whom I've annoyed, people who wished us to fail, they finally got what they thought must have been there in the first place. It was a hook to hang me on." He claps his hands forcefully and points. "'We got him!' You could, if you wanted, get ... y'know ... it could get you going. You look at it and say, 'Well what have you done?'" His flash of annoyance passes. "People are just trying to do the best they can. You can't do everything."
At moments like this, you realise that even Bono's famously thick skin has its vulnerable spots. Even as U2 are keenly aware of the contradictions of their position ("To open yourself up to the possibility of change doesn't mean you have to live up to some impossible ideal," says the Edge), they can't help but be caught up in them sometimes, for one man's contradiction is another's hypocrisy. So Bono squares his shoulders and tries at least to be candid. When I ask why his songs refuse to name specific targets, he says: "The villain is usually me. The hypocrisy of the human heart is the number one target. Rarely do we point the finger at anyone other than ourselves."
He knows why some people don't like him. "I can be annoying," he says with a grin. "I have a kind of annoying gene." But he seems understandably tired of the allegation that he's just a messianic blowhard. It's a cliche, he thinks, to attribute what he does to mere ego. "As Delmore Schwartz said, 'Ego is always at the wheel.' It's just with rock stars, it's more obvious. The need to be loved and admired doesn't come from a particularly pretty place. But people tend to do a lot of great things with it. Ego, yes, but the ego that's in everything human beings are capable of. Without ego, things would be so dull."
I mention a line from "Cedars of Lebanon," the closing track on U2's latest album, No Line on the Horizon: "Choose your enemies carefully 'cos they will define you." "As an insight into our band, it's the most important line," he says. "It explains pretty much everything. U2 chose more interesting targets than other bands. Your own hypocrisies. Your addictions, but not to the obvious. Your ego." He emits a hoarse chuckle. "I think we made our enemies very interesting."
2008 CQ World Wide CW Contest Marks Major Milestone for K0DQ
Becomes Possibly the Only Person Ever to Win All Six Major Ham Radio Contests
(Hicksville, NY – August 4, 2009) – Scott Redd, K0DQ, operating the 2008 CW weekend of the CQ World Wide DX Contest from Aruba as P40Q, racked up over a million more points than his closest competitor in the Single-Operator Low Power Class, and became perhaps the only person ever to win single-op world championships in all six major ham radio DX contests.
"I don't know of anyone else" who has won all the major contests, said CQWW Contest Director Bob Cox, K3EST, in announcing the results, which will be published in the September issue of CQ magazine.
Scott had his first taste of contest victory back in 1966, as a young Navy officer posted to Uruguay and operating CX2CO in the phone weekend of the CQ World Wide DX Contest. Over the succeeding years, Scott worked his way through the Navy ranks to Vice Admiral and became Commander of the Fifth Fleet, then served as a civilian in the Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority and as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center before retiring in late 2007. But ham radio and contesting were never far away, and operating from Mexico as XE1IIJ in the early 1970s, Scott won single-op world championships in the CQWW Phone Contest, the ARRL DX Phone and CW Contests and the CQ WPX Phone Contest. Thirty years later, when his professional life permitted a little more hamming time, Scott added the WPX CW crown as P41P, operating from P43P's station in Aruba, in 2002. The only prize that eluded him -- until now -- was the CQWW CW.
"I've been trying like a son-of-a-gun to win (the) CQ World Wide CW," Scott commented in a 2008 interview with CQ. "I've come in number two, I've come in number three, but I've never won that one … so that's still my goal, every time I get close, in CQ World Wide CW, to win the world."
When informed that he had finally achieved that goal, K0DQ said, "I guess the message is if you keep at it long enough good things happen. In this case, four decades. It's been a great ride ... and it's still magic!"
CQ congratulates Scott -- already a member of the CQ Amateur Radio Hall of Fame, for his contesting achievements on top of all his other achievements.
On July 29, 1981, barely six months into his presidency and in the face of an economic crisis of historic proportions, Ronald Reagan succeeded in persuading both houses of Congress to pass dramatic tax cuts that set the stage for nearly three decades of vigorous economic growth. In doing so, he achieved a goal he had long and publicly pursued. In his most watched and influential speeches, Reagan had consistently called for just such substantial tax cuts. Indeed, he had made them a centerpiece of the conservative governing philosophy he had propounded on the national stage for going on two decades.
Barack Obama, barely six months into his presidency and in the face of another economic crisis of historic proportions, has unsuccessfully pressed Congress to pass, before its summer recess, comprehensive and costly health care reform that he contends is critical to the nation's long-term social and economic well-being. But neither this nor the other complex and far-reaching proposals Obama has sought to enact with heedless speed can readily be derived from his most influential speeches. Indeed, these measures, all dramatically extending federal power, are at odds with the governing philosophy, at once progressive and moderate, that he assiduously put before the public.
One can quarrel about the efficacy and justice of the Reagan tax cuts and the Obama health care expansion, but one thing is plain from the political styles that these presidents have brought to the passage of their signature domestic legislation. Reagan's forthright approach is more consistent with democratic norms and the presuppositions of a free society than Obama's hide-the-ball tactics.
In October 1964, Reagan delivered a speech on national television sponsored by Barry Goldwater's campaign that placed the aging actor on the path to the presidency. All the familiar elements are present in "A Time for Choosing." To preserve "the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers," Reagan argued, it was imperative to rein in government by cutting taxes and curbing spending, and to defeat rather than accommodate communism.
In July 1980, in his acceptance address to the Republican National Convention, Reagan declared that limiting government to preserve individual freedom was his paramount domestic goal, and he repeated his campaign promise to achieve it by passing "a 30 percent reduction in income tax rates."
And in January 1981, in his first inaugural address, confronting high inflation, high unemployment, and high taxes, President Reagan famously proclaimed that "in this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Seeking (unsuccessfully, it turned out) to avoid misunderstanding, he insisted, "It's not my intention to do away with government" but "rather to make it work." That required "removing the roadblocks that have slowed our economy and reduced productivity." A critical first step was "to lighten our punitive tax burden" inherited from the Carter era.
So when, in late July 1981, the House and Senate passed tax cuts that averaged about 25 percent for individuals and included substantial reductions for business, no competent observer could claim to be surprised, except perhaps by the new president's political skill in assembling congressional majorities despite the Democrats' numerical superiority in the House and the skepticism of leading Republicans in the Senate. To be sure, over the course of eight years in office Reagan fell short of his aims, failing to reduce the size of government and spending and piling up large deficits. But there was never confusion about what those aims were.
In contrast, there seems to be considerable confusion about President Obama's aims, and plenty of competent observers were flabbergasted shortly after he took office when, notwithstanding an economic crisis that he himself declared the worst since the Great Depression, he called for and signed into law a $787 billion stimulus package short on stimulus spending, high on transfer payments, and larded with pork aimed at pet Democratic party special interests; rolled out a 2010 budget that, according to Congressional Budget Office projections, would quadruple the 2008 Bush deficit that candidate Obama had decried as intolerable; and announced his determination to pass comprehensive health care reform before year's end although the flaws in the current health care system had nothing to do with the toxic assets and frozen credit markets afflicting the economy.
To be sure, there could be little doubt that Barack Obama was a partisan and progressive Democrat. He explicitly defined himself as a progressive in his 2006 bestseller, The Audacity of Hope, and his voting record in the Illinois State Senate and during his brief tenure in the U.S. Senate was decidedly left-liberal.
But in The Audacity of Hope, where he elaborates his understanding of constitutional principles and contemporary politics, and in his highest-profile speeches, he presented himself also as a moderate, one who understands that politics is the art of the possible, that principles must be applied with a sense of proportion, and that progressives have blind spots and conservatives sometimes speak the political truth.
In the electrifying keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention through which he introduced himself to the nation and launched himself toward the White House, Obama deftly blended progressive and moderate notes, declaring that "people don't expect government to solve all their problems," but they do expect it to "make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all." He endorsed John Kerry's belief "in an America where all Americans can afford the same health coverage our politicians in Washington have for themselves." But he said nothing about government-run insurance. And he offered an eloquent appreciation of the unity that underlies competing perspectives on morality and politics in America, affirming that "there's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America."
In his 2008 Democratic National Convention acceptance speech, Obama highlighted the need for America to be more decent, generous, and compassionate. Hinting at the scope of his progressive ambitions, he declared that "now is not the time for small plans." But his promise of "affordable, accessible health care for every single American" was not accompanied by any mention of the massive government intervention in the economy that he has sought to deliver. By keeping his big plans for health care brief and vague and embedding them in a speech that celebrated individual freedom, hard work, personal sacrifice, and the opportunity, entrepreneurship, innovation, and growth that free markets bring, Obama, moreover, encouraged a rapt nation to think that any big plan for health care reform that he might back would give the market its due and reflect bipartisan ideas and support.
Then in his Inaugural Address six months ago, Obama again invoked "big plans." But he modestly limited himself to calling for raising health care's quality and lowering its costs. And again he honored conservative sensibilities and indicated an inclination to balance competing considerations by praising the American commitment to individual freedom and noting that the market's "power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched."
In short, Obama's most carefully calculated words gave reason to believe that the candidate of hope and change, who proclaimed his intention to transcend partisanship, would seek health care reform that proceeded pragmatically, respecting market forces and building consensus. His most watched speeches certainly provided cause to discount any suggestion that he would exploit a severe recession to centralize government control of nearly one-fifth of the American economy or that he would support health care legislation that rushes to expand coverage while neglecting the impact of such legislation on health care quality and costs.
Recently, the Democratic party-appointed head of the Congressional Budget Office created a furor by testifying to Congress that Obama's big plans for health care reform will increase costs and may prove unsustainable. His assessment, however, was incomplete because it did not take into account the costs to democratic self-government of the cynicism bred and the trust eroded by a president who increasingly appears to have deliberately obscured the principles and policies according to which he intended to govern.
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.
"Not only has the stimulus not worked and the economy not been rescued, the President continues to promote policies that will create more unemployment in America. The national energy tax that went through this House last month will cause millions of Americans to lose their jobs over the next 10 years, at 2.5 million per year. And we're debating the health care plan, the government takeover of health care, which according to the Presidents council of economic advisors model will cost five million more Americans their jobs."
Soon, Air Force One will touch down in Accra, Ghana; Africans will be welcoming the first African-American president. Press coverage on the continent is placing equal weight on both sides of the hyphen.
And we thought it was big when President Kennedy visited Ireland in 1963. (It was big, though I was small. Where I come from, J.F.K. is remembered as a local boy made very, very good.)
But President Obama’s African-ness is only part (a thrilling part) of the story today. Cable news may think it’s all about him — but my guess is that he doesn’t. If he was in it for a sentimental journey he’d have gone to Kenya, chased down some of those dreams from his father.
He’s made a different choice, and he’s been quite straight about the reason. Despite Kenya’s unspeakable beauty and its recent victories against the anopheles mosquito, the country’s still-stinging corruption and political unrest confirms too many of the headlines we in the West read about Africa. Ghana confounds them.
Not defiantly or angrily, but in that cool, offhand Ghanaian way. This is a country whose music of choice is jazz; a country that long ago invented a genre called highlife that spread across Africa — and, more recently, hiplife, which is what happens when hip-hop meets reggaetón meets rhythm and blues meets Ghanaian melody, if you’re keeping track (and you really should be). On a visit there, I met the minister for tourism and pitched the idea of marketing the country as the “birthplace of cool.” (Just think, the music of Miles, the conversation of Kofi.) He demurred ... too cool, I guess.
Quietly, modestly — but also heroically — Ghana’s going about the business of rebranding a continent. New face of America, meet the new face of Africa.
Ghana is well governed. After a close election, power changed hands peacefully. Civil society is becoming stronger. The country’s economy was growing at a good clip even before oil was found off the coast a few years ago. Though it has been a little battered by the global economic meltdown, Ghana appears to be weathering the storm. I don’t normally give investment tips — sound the alarm at Times headquarters — but here is one: buy Ghanaian.
So it’s not a coincidence that Ghana’s making steady progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Right now it’s one of the few African nations that has a shot at getting there by 2015.
No one’s leaked me a copy of the president’s speech in Ghana, but it’s pretty clear he’s going to focus not on the problems that afflict the continent but on the opportunities of an Africa on the rise. If that’s what he does, the biggest cheers will come from members of the growing African middle class, who are fed up with being patronized and hearing the song of their majestic continent in a minor key.
I’ve played that tune. I’ve talked of tragedy, of emergency. And it is an emergency when almost 2,000 children in Africa a day die of a mosquito bite; this kind of hemorrhaging of human capital is not something we can accept as normal.
But as the example of Ghana makes clear, that’s only one chord. Amid poverty and disease are opportunities for investment and growth — investment and growth that won’t eliminate overnight the need for assistance, much as we and Africans yearn for it to end, but that in time can build roads, schools and power grids and propel commerce to the point where aid is replaced by trade pacts, business deals and home-grown income.
President Obama can hasten that day. He knows change won’t come easily. Corruption stalks Africa’s reformers. “If you fight corruption, it fights you back,” a former Nigerian anti-corruption official has said.
From his bully pulpit, the president can take aim at the bullies. Without accountability — no opportunity. If that’s not a maxim, it ought to be. It’s a truism, anyway. The work of the American government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation is founded on that principle, even if it doesn’t put it that bluntly. United States aid dollars increasingly go to countries that use them and don’t blow them. Ghana is one. There’s a growing number of others.
That’s thanks to Africans like John Githongo, the former anticorruption chief of Kenya — a hero of mine who is pioneering a new brand of bottom-up accountability. Efforts like his, which are taking place across the continent, deserve more support. The presidential kind. Then there’s Nigeria’s moral and financial fist — Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a managing director of the World Bank and the country’s former finance minister — who is on a quest to help African countries recover stolen assets looted by corrupt officials. And the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which is helping countries like Ghana clean up the oil, gas and mining business, to make sure that profits don’t wind up in the hands of kleptocrats.
Presidential attention would be a shot in the arm for these efforts — an infusion of moral and political amino acids that, by the way, will make aid dollars go further. That should be welcome news to the Group of 8 leaders gathered in Italy to whom Mr. Obama bids a Hawaii-via-Chicago-inflected “arrivederci,” as he leaves for Africa.
This week’s summit meeting looks as if it will yield some welcome new G-8 promises on agriculture. (So far, new money: America. Old money: everyone else.) This is the good news that President Obama will bring from Europe to Ghana.
The not-so-good news — that countries like Italy and France are not meeting their Africa commitments — makes the president’s visit all the more essential. The United States is one of the countries on track to keep its promises, and Mr. Obama has already said he’ll more than build on the impressive Bush legacy.
President Obama plans to return to Africa for the World Cup in 2010. Between now and then he’s got the chance to lead others in building — from the bottom up — on the successes of recent efforts within Africa and to learn from the failures. There’s been plenty of both. We’ve witnessed the good, the bad and the ugly in our fraught relationship with this dynamic continent.
The president can facilitate the new, the fresh and the different. Many existing promises are expiring in 2010, some of old age and others of chronic neglect. New promises from usual and unusual partners, from the G-8 to the G-20, need to be made — and this time kept. If more African nations (not just Ghana) are going to meet the millennium goals, they are going to need smart partners in business and development. That’s Smart as in sustainable, measurable, accountable, responsive and transparent.
Africa is not just Barack Obama’s homeland. It’s ours, too. The birthplace of humanity. Wherever our journeys have taken us, they all began there. The word Desmond Tutu uses is “ubuntu”: I am because we are. As he says, until we accept and appreciate this we cannot be fully whole.
Could it be that all Americans are, in that sense, African-Americans?
Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 and a co-founder of the advocacy group ONE and (Product)RED, is a contributing columnist for The Times.
What is really behind the mushrooming rate of mortgage foreclosures since 2007? The evidence from a huge national database containing millions of individual loans strongly suggests that the single most important factor is whether the homeowner has negative equity in a house -- that is, the balance of the mortgage is greater than the value of the house. This means that most government policies being discussed to remedy woes in the housing market are misdirected.
Many policy makers and ordinary people blame the rise of foreclosures squarely on subprime mortgage lenders who presumably misled borrowers into taking out complex loans at low initial interest rates. Those hapless individuals were then supposedly unable to make the higher monthly payments when their mortgage rates reset upwards.
But the focus on subprimes ignores the widely available industry facts (reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association) that 51% of all foreclosed homes had prime loans, not subprime, and that the foreclosure rate for prime loans grew by 488% compared to a growth rate of 200% for subprime foreclosures. (These percentages are based on the period since the steep ascent in foreclosures began -- the third quarter of 2006 -- during which more than 4.3 million homes went into foreclosure.)
Sharing the blame in the popular imagination are other loans where lenders were largely at fault -- such as "liar loans," where lenders never attempted to validate a borrower's income or assets.
This common narrative also appears to be wrong, a conclusion that is based on my analysis of loan-level data from McDash Analytics, a component of Lender Processing Services Inc. It is the largest loan-level data source available, covering more than 30 million mortgages.
The McDash data allowed me to construct a housing price index at the zip code level and then calculate the current equity position of each homeowner. I was thus able to compare the importance of negative equity to other variables related to foreclosures.
The analysis indicates that, by far, the most important factor related to foreclosures is the extent to which the homeowner now has or ever had positive equity in a home. The accompanying figure shows how important negative equity or a low Loan-To-Value ratio is in explaining foreclosures (homes in foreclosure during December of 2008 generally entered foreclosure in the second half of 2008). A simple statistic can help make the point: although only 12% of homes had negative equity, they comprised 47% of all foreclosures.
Further, because it is difficult to account for second mortgages in this data, my measurement of negative equity and its impact on foreclosures is probably too low, making my estimates conservative.
What about upward resets in mortgage interest rates? I found that interest rate resets did not measurably increase foreclosures until the reset was greater than four percentage points. Only 8% of foreclosures had an interest rate increase of that much. Thus the overall impact of upward interest rate resets is much smaller than the impact from equity.
To be sure, many other variables -- such as FICO scores (a measure of creditworthiness), income levels, unemployment rates and whether the house was purchased for speculation -- are related to foreclosures. But liar loans and loans with initial teaser rates had virtually no impact on foreclosures, in spite of the dubious nature of these financial instruments.
Instead, the important factor is whether or not the homeowner currently has or ever had an important financial stake in the house. Yet merely because an individual has a home with negative equity does not imply that he or she cannot make mortgage payments so much as it implies that the borrower is more willing to walk away from the loan.
The difference in policy implications is enormous: A significant reduction in foreclosures will happen when and only when housing prices stop falling and unemployment stops rising (see chart nearby).
Although the government is throwing money -- almost $2 trillion and counting -- at the mortgage markets with the intent of stabilizing house prices, its methods are poorly targeted. While Federal Reserve actions have succeeded in reducing mortgage interest rates, low interest rates induce refinancings more than they do home purchases.
To be sure, refinancings may put money in peoples' pockets, but it is home purchases that directly impact house prices. Nevertheless, housing prices are likely to stop falling fairly soon with or without government policies. That's because current prices are approaching their long-term, inflation-adjusted pre-bubble level. These pre-bubble prices appeared to be a long-term equilibrium, meaning that prices would be expected to return to those levels once the government's efforts to artificially increase homeownership receded. Unfortunately, recent attempts by politicians such as Barney Frank (D., Mass.) to again artificially increase homeownership levels might delay this return to sustainable equilibrium prices.
Other government policies are likely to be even less effective in reducing foreclosures. The Obama administration's "Making Homes Affordable" plan focuses on having the government help lower obligation ratios (the share of income devoted to house payments) down to 31% from levels somewhat above 38%. But my analysis finds that mortgages having such obligation ratios at closing did not later experience high foreclosure rates. This suggests that reducing these ratios is not likely to significantly improve the foreclosure problem.
Understanding the causes of the foreclosure explosion is required if we wish to avoid a replay of recent painful events. The suggestions being put forward by the administration and most media outlets -- more stringent regulation of subprime lenders -- would not have prevented the mortgage meltdown regardless of their merit otherwise.
Rather, stronger underwriting standards are needed -- especially a requirement for relatively high down payments. If substantial down payments had been required, the housing price bubble would certainly have been smaller, if it occurred at all, and the incidence of negative equity would have been much smaller even as home prices fell. A further beneficial regulation would be a strengthening, or at least clarifying at a national level, of the recourse that mortgage lenders have if a borrower defaults. Many defaults could be mitigated if homeowners with financial resources know they can't just walk away.
We are at a crossroads where we can undo the damage to the housing market by strengthening underwriting standards in a reasonable way. But to do so political leaders must face up to the actual causes of the mortgage crisis, not fictitious causes that fit political agendas and election strategies.
Mr. Liebowitz is professor of economics and director of the Center for the Analysis of Property Rights and Innovation in the management school at the University of Texas, Dallas.
In remarks accompanying the July 1st publication of “Engineering Security,” a 100-page NYPD report on how better to protect the city’s highest-risk buildings and structures from terrorist strikes, David Cohen, the deputy police commissioner of intelligence for the NYPD, reminded us that the city remains terrorists’ most sought-after target. At least 10 “intensely lethal” plots against the city by Al Qaeda, its affiliates, or homegrown militants have been thwarted since 9/11, he said. And though 40 Predator drone attacks in the past year on Al Qaeda’s senior command in Afghanistan and Pakistan have killed many of its key operatives and thrown its command-and-control structure “off balance,” the threat posed by Osama bin Laden’s network remains “unrelenting,” Cohen maintained.
Is marriage in the midst of the social equivalent of the financial meltdown? The first inkling -- the Bear Stearns moment, if you will -- came almost a year ago when the National Enquirer reported that John Edwards appeared to be the father of a love child. The full-scale crisis hit in the past weeks with les affaires Ensign, Sanford and (at least according to rumor) reality-show star Jon Gosselin. Adding to the sense of a Great Marital Depression was a much discussed article in the Atlantic by performer and writer Sandra Tsing Loh about her own infidelity and ultimate separation from her husband, titled "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off."
Yes, marriage is suffering a full-scale crisis of consumer confidence. Some say that marriage is an outdated institution. Others argue that humans are not designed for long-term monogamy, especially these days. "Our life expectancy has shot from 47 to 77," Ms. Loh observes, "isn't the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?" Responding to Ms. Loh's article in the online magazine Double X, Kerry Howley proposed that we relieve ourselves of the ideal of permanence that has been a defining characteristic of the institution since men and women began tilling the earth. Ms. Loh, Ms. Howley noted, had been married for 20 years and produced two children. That's a pretty good run, isn't it? People change, life moves on, new love calls. And for skeptics who point out that children might quibble with this sort of deregulation, you could still argue, OK, give the kids 18 years and then you can call the whole thing off.
In any crisis, people tend to panic and forget basic facts. This meltdown is no exception. First and foremost, marital breakdown is not rampant across the land. It is concentrated among low-income and black couples. Americans seem to have a lot of trouble grasping this fact, probably because so much public space is taken up by politicians, celebrities and journalists with marriages on the skids. But in actuality, the divorce rate for college-educated women has been declining since 1980. Out-of-wedlock childbearing among the educated class remains rare. The bottom line is that higher-income, college-educated couples are far more likely to get married and stay married than their less-educated and lower-income peers. We shouldn't go so far as to call Ms. Loh and Mr. Sanford, if he decides to return to the heart he left in Buenos Aires, outliers. But they do nothing to clarify a key problem facing the country, which remains the apartheid state of marriage.
The seemingly reasonable notion that marriage is crashing because we're likely to live till 80 also doesn't hold up. The typical divorce is not of a midlife couple bored with finishing each other's sentences; it's of a twosome who have just written the last thank-you note for wedding gifts. More than one-fifth of marriages break up within five years. The median age at first divorce is 30.5 for males and 29 for females. The risk of break-up goes up after one year of marriage and peaks at 4½ years. That's right. A lot of Americans barely wait till the paint is dry in the new family room before setting out for more promising territory.
But if recent high-profile break-ups don't tell us much about our systemic failure, they do illustrate a paradox of marriage as it has evolved in the post-boomer era. On the one hand, despite their sophistication, the marrying classes still want love with a capital L. The New York Times nuptials pages, once simple status announcements about Muffy Branford marrying J.W.R. Witherspoon, now include details of how the couple met and found a full-tilt, love-of-my-life connection. People may admit that passion fades a bit, but soul-mate idealism is a defining part of contemporary marriage. So is the "relationship work" that is supposedly required to sustain it. On the other hand, the college-educated marrying kind believes -- correctly, judging from the considerable research on the subject -- that their children will be better off growing up with their father and mother in the house. In this sense, they take a practical view; marriage is an investment in their children's future.
The cruel joke for the good investor, though, is that the latter practical goal -- kids -- undermines the former idealistic one: love. Kids tend to decrease marital satisfaction, social scientists tell us. It starts with the first child and goes downhill from there. Yes, all couples, including the childless, find their ardor cooling over time. And couples with children still enjoy lots of things together, especially, as Arthur Brooks, the author of "Gross National Happiness," has quipped, "spending time away from kids."
But children take a toll on a twosome expecting to maintain an intense, soulful love bond. They suck up all the oxygen that used to be spent, um, communicating. Ms. Loh tells us that her husband is a "good man . . . a decent man." She just didn't feel the connection anymore. No doubt marrieds have long suffered after the thrill was gone and marriage was about the kids needing shoes or the grass requiring mowing; their disappointment gave birth to the "midlife crisis." But the disillusioned Soul Mater, his or her lofty dreams dashed, is especially vulnerable. It just wasn't supposed to be like this. We're different from our parents and grandparents. We don't have to compromise. We can leave. (Long pause.) Can't we?
It doesn't help that the Soul Mate seeker likely suffers from the American disease of restlessness. The essence of the marriage vow is to stay still. But as a group, Americans are an especially flighty bunch, always looking for a better opportunity, a bigger home, a second chance. We're no less fidgety in our mating habits, as Andrew Cherlin demonstrates in his recent book, "Marriage-Go-Round." Americans divorce and "repartner" far more than do people in other Western countries, either by remarrying or shacking up. True, the educated classes are less inclined to actually hop on the go-round. But that does not mean that they don't hear the barker calling: You can start over, you can do better.
Those who maintain that long-term, monogamous unions are at odds with nature are surely on to something. But it's worth remembering that the first human beings didn't spend 9 to 5 in an office cubicle or, for that matter, wear clothes. Marriage is a human invention designed to create order and some semblance of permanence out of natural chaos in order to rear the next generation.
One of the many ironies of the institution is that marriage seems more satisfying to those who no longer have children in the house. If people simply grew more tired of each other over time, then we would expect that couples unloading the Explorer at the college dorm would head directly to the lawyer's office. On the contrary, marital happiness increases once the kids are gone, despite the prospect of decades of dreary, pass-the-Maalox-dear evenings. A few years ago the AARP warned of a growing trend in "gray divorce"; others cautioned about the coming of "Viagra divorce," as older men came to realize that, with a little chemical help, they could restart their engines. Didn't happen. Empty-nesters still stay together for the duration, just as they did 40 years ago.
Perhaps it's the declining hormones of late middle age. Perhaps it's the joint pride of a difficult task completed. Maybe they're satisfied with their investment, after all.
Ms. Hymowitz is the author of "Marriage and Caste in America" and a contributing editor to City Journal.
Sadly, and to my horror, I am divorcing. This was a 20-year partnership. My husband is a good man, though he did travel 20 weeks a year for work. I am a 47-year-old woman whose commitment to monogamy, at the very end, came unglued. This turn of events was a surprise. I don’t generally even enjoy men; I had an entirely manageable life and planned to go to my grave taking with me, as I do most nights to my bed, a glass of merlot and a good book. Cataclysmically changed, I disclosed everything. We cried, we rent our hair, we bewailed the fate of our children. And yet at the end of the day—literally during a five o’clock counseling appointment, as the golden late-afternoon sunlight spilled over the wall of Balinese masks—when given the final choice by our longtime family therapist, who stands in as our shaman, mother, or priest, I realized … no. Heart-shattering as this moment was—a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history—I would not be able to replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image of my husband, which is what it would take in modern-therapy terms to knit our family’s domestic construct back together. In women’s-magazine parlance, I did not have the strength to “work on” falling in love again in my marriage. And as Laura Kipnis railed in Against Love, and as everyone knows, Good relationships take work.
Which is not to say I’m against work. Indeed, what also came out that afternoon were the many tasks I—like so many other working/co-parenting/married mothers—have been doing for so many years and tearfully declared I would continue doing. I can pick up our girls from school every day; I can feed them dinner and kiss their noses and tell them stories; I can take them to their doctor and dentist appointments; I can earn my half—sometimes more—of the money; I can pay the bills; I can refinance the house at the best possible interest rate; I can drive my husband to the airport; in his absence, I can sort his mail; I can be home to let the plumber in on Thursday between nine and three, and I can wait for the cable guy; I can make dinner conversation with any family member; I can ask friendly questions about anybody’s day; I can administer hugs as needed to children, adults, dogs, cats; I can empty the litter box; I can stir wet food into dry.
Which is to say I can work at a career and child care and joint homeownership and even platonic male-female friendship. However, in this cluttered forest of my 40s, what I cannot authentically reconjure is the ancient dream of brides, even with the Oprah fluffery of weekly “date nights,” when gauzy candlelight obscures the messy house, child talk is nixed and silky lingerie donned, so the two of you can look into each other’s eyes and feel that “spark” again. Do you see? Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I cannot take on yet another arduous home- and self-improvement project, that of rekindling our romance. Sobered by this failure as a mother—which is to say, my failure as a wife—I’ve since begun a journey of reading, thinking, and listening to what’s going on in other 21st-century American families. And along the way, I’ve begun to wonder, what with all the abject and swallowed misery: Why do we still insist on marriage? Sure, it made sense to agrarian families before 1900, when to farm the land, one needed two spouses, grandparents, and a raft of children. But now that we have white-collar work and washing machines, and our life expectancy has shot from 47 to 77, isn’t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?
Slideshow: Sandra Tsing Loh reports on her divorce from inside her new 10 x 10 foot U-Haul storage trailer
I sense you picking up the first stone to hurl, even if you yourself may be twice or even three times divorced. Such a contradiction turns out to be uniquely American. Just because marriage didn’t work for us doesn’t mean we don’t believe in the institution. Just because our own marital track records are mixed doesn’t mean our hearts don’t lift at the sight of our daughters’ Tiffany-blue wedding invitations. After all, we can easily arrange to sit far from our exes, across the flower-bedecked aisle, so as not to roil the festive day. Just because we know that nearly half of U.S. marriages end in divorce—including perhaps even those of our own parents (my dearest childhood wish was not just that my parents would divorce, but also that my raging father would burst into flames)—doesn’t mean we aren’t confident ours is the one that will beat the odds. At least that is the attitudinal yin/yang described by Andrew J. Cherlin in his scrupulously argued Marriage-Go-Round: compared with our western European counterparts, Americans are far more credulous about marriage. In World Values Surveys taken at the turn of the millennium, fewer Americans agreed with the statement “Marriage is an outdated institution” than citizens of any other Western country surveyed (compare the U.S.’s tiny 10 percent with France’s 36 percent). We are also more religious—more Americans (60 percent) say they attend religious services once a month than do the Vatican-centric Italians (54 percent) or, no surprise, the laissez-faire French (12 percent). At the same time, Americans endure the highest divorce rate in the Western world. In short, although we say we love religion and marriage, Cherlin notes, “religious Americans are more likely to divorce than secular Swedes.”
Cherlin believes the reason for this paradox is that Americans hold two values at once: a culture of marriage and a culture of individualism. Or is it an American spirit of optimism wedded, if you will, to a Tocquevillian spirit of restlessness that inspires three out of four Americans to say they believe marriage is for life, while only one in four agreed with the notion that even if a marriage is unhappy, one should stay put for the sake of the children. If America is a “divorce culture,” it may be partly because we are a “marriage culture,” since we both divorce and marry (a projected 90 percent of us) at some of the highest rates anywhere on the globe. Hence Cherlin’s cautionary advice consists of two words—“Slow down”—his chief worry about our frenetic marriage-go-round being its negative impact on our children. In fact, while having two biological parents at home is, the statistics tell us, best for children, a single-parent household is almost as good. The harm comes, Cherlin argues, from parents continually coupling with new partners, so that the children are forced to bond, or compete for attention, with ever-new actors. These are the youngsters who are likely to suffer, according to a measurable matrix of factors such as truancy, disobedience in school, and teen pregnancy. Instead of preaching marriage, Cherlin says, we should preach domestic stability for children. Is marriage the best way to ensure this? Apparently not, at least not the way we do it in America.
Rachel is one of the women I regularly dine with, now that I have a divorced person’s oddly relaxed—oddly civilized, even horribly French?—joint-custody schedule. It has been almost 10 years since I dined with adults on a weekly basis. My domestic evenings have typically revolved around five o’clock mac and cheese under bright lighting and then a slow melt into dishes and SpongeBob … because yet another of my marital failings was that I was never able to commit to a nanny. Even though my husband and I both drew full-time incomes, I, as a writer, worked at home and hence was ambivalent, because if I had daily in-house help, what was my role as a mother? Would I be emotionally displaced? Also, I secretly worried that using domestic help was exploitative—recall Barbara Ehrenreich’s dictum that she’d never let another woman scrub her toilets. Yea, these are the various postfeminist hurdles that stretched before me at 2:00 a.m. as I lay awake in our bed, contorted not just by cats but by two children kicking me from both sides—Exhibit A of lazy, undisciplined attachment parenting.
Imagine driving with me now to Rachel’s house for our new 40-something social hobby—the Girls’ Night dinner. Leap not from my car, even though I realize—given my confessed extramarital affair, avowed childhood desire to see my father explode into flames, and carpet of tattered Happy Meal wrappers—I may not strike you as the most reliable explicator of modern marriage. Still, we forge on, and what I’d like to do now is recant for a moment and not be quite so hard on marriage, which I think is a very good fit for some people. It certainly has been for Judith S. Wallerstein (married more than 48 years, as the jacket flap indicates), co-author with Sandra Blakeslee of the 1995 book The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts. Through close observation of 50 happily married couples, the authors identified four templates for lasting nuptial success. The Romantic Marriage thrives on the spark of love that never dies. (Think of those affectionate 80-somethings in convalescent homes, still holding hands.) The Rescue Marriage features partners who fit each other like lost puzzle pieces, healing each other from mutual childhood traumas. (And then there are those shrieky co-dependent pairs: think of fiercely attached couples whose commitment is cemented by a commitment to unwholesome habits. Said a friend of his 70-something WASP parents, who sally off to their frequent cruises with huge Lavoris bottles filled with gin: “What they share is an enthusiasm for drinking.”) The Traditional Marriage succeeds because the man works while the woman runs the home, a clear and valuable division of labor.
Today, the most common type of marriage is the Companionate Marriage, in which husband and wife each have a career, and they co-parent and co-housekeep according to gender-free norms they negotiate. Three decades ago, in their 1972 runaway best seller, Open Marriage, Nena and George O’Neill suggested that such a modern arrangement might even include sexual freedom. But as we all know, the Sexually Open Marriage fizzled with the lava lamp, because it is just downright icky for most people. How, then, has marriage evolved? In what sorts of partnerships do we find ourselves in the 21st century? Enter with me, finally, the home of my friend Rachel. (To appease the diligent Atlantic fact checkers, I must now pause to announce that I’ve carefully disguised some of the individuals whose lives we’re about to dissect.) Picture a stunning two-story Craftsman—exposed wood, Batchelder tile fireplace, caramel-warm beams, Tiffany lamps on Mission tables—nestled in the historic enclave in Pasadena dubbed Bungalow Heaven. Rachel, 49, an environmental lawyer, is married to Ian, 48, a documentary-film editor. They have two sons, 9 and 11, whom Ian—in every way the model dad—has whisked off this evening to junior soccer camp (or drum lessons or similar; the boys’ impressive whirl of activities is hard to keep track of). Rachel is cooking dinner for three of us: Ellen (a writer, married with children), Renata (violinist, single, lithe, and prowling at 45), and me. Rachel is, more accurately, reheating dinner; the dish is something wonderfully subtle yet complex, like a saffron-infused porcini risotto, that Ian made over the weekend and froze for us, in Tupperware neatly labeled with a Sharpie, because this is the sort of thoughtful thing he does. Ian subscribes to Cook’s Illustrated online and a bevy of other technically advanced gourmet publications—he’s always perfecting some polenta or bouillabaisse. If someone requests a cheeseburger, he will fire back with an über-cheeseburger, a fluffy creation of marbled Angus beef, Stilton, and homemade ketchup. Picture him in bike shorts (he’s a cyclist), hovering over a mandala of pots that are always simmering, quietly simmering. To Ian’s culinary adventurousness, Rachel attributes the boys’ sophisticated taste buds—they eagerly eat everything: curry, paella, seaweed, soba noodles. My own girls are strictly mac-and-cheese-centric (but I’ve been told in therapy not to keep beating myself up over the small things).
But it is now our second Girls’ Night dinner since my horrifying announcement, and Rachel has eschewed Ian’s customary wine-club Bordeaux and is mixing some alarmingly strong martinis.
Leaning forward heavily across the bar, she swirls her glass and huskily drops the bomb: “I have to tell you—since we talked, I too have started thinking divorce.” “No!” we girls exclaim. With a stab of nausea, I suddenly feel as though now that I’ve touched my pool of friends with my black pen, a cloud of ink is enveloping them.
“You can’t!” Renata cries. “Ian—he’s the perfect father! The perfect husband! Look at this … kitchen!”
It’s true: the kitchen is a prime example of Ian’s contribution to their union. He based the design of the remodel on an old farmhouse kitchen they saw during their trip to Tuscany, and of course—carpentry being another of his hobbies—he did all the details himself, including building the shelves. One of the room’s marvels is how ingeniously and snugly all the specialty kitchenware is housed—the hanging copper pots, the garlic press, the mandolin, the lemon zester, the French press coffeemaker …
“Ian won’t have sex with me,” Rachel says flatly. “He has not touched my body in two years. He says it’s because I’ve gained weight.” Again, we stoutly protest, but she goes on. “And he thinks I’m a bad mother—he says I’m sloppy and inattentive.”
The list of violations unfurls. Last week, Rachel mistakenly gave the wrong medication to the dog, a mistake Ian would never make. She also forgot to deglaze the saucepan and missed the window to book the family’s Seattle flights on Expedia, whose chiming bargains Ian meticulously tracks.
Rachel sees herself as a failed mother, and is depressed and chronically overworked at her $120,000-a-year job (which she must cling to for the benefits because Ian freelances). At night, horny and sleepless, she paces the exquisite kitchen, gobbling mini Dove bars. The main breadwinner, Rachel is really the Traditional Dad, but instead of being handed her pipe and slippers at six, she appears to be marooned in a sexless remodeling project with a passive-aggressive Competitive Wife.
Rachel had even asked Ian point-blank: “Do you want a divorce?” And Ian said absolutely not—they must show discipline and work at the marriage (again with the work!), since any domestic upset could negatively affect the boys, who were now facing a particularly fraught time at their new school, where they have an extraordinarily challenging roster of extracurricular activities and a quarterly testing schedule.
“You know, it’s funny,” says Ellen, after a moment of gloom. (Passing note: Ellen has been married for 18 years, and she also, famously, never has sex. There were the hot 20s with Ron and the making-the-babies 30s, and in the 40s there is … nothing. Ellen had originally picked Ron because she was tired of all the bad boys, and Ron was settle-down husband material. What she didn’t know was that after the age of 38, thanks to Mr. Very Settled-Down, she was never going to have regular sex with a man again.)
“When marriage was invented,” Ellen continues, “it was considered to be a kind of trade union for a woman, her protection against the sexually wandering male. But what’s happened to the sexually wandering male?”
In our parents’ era, the guy hit 45, got the toupee, drove the red Porsche, and left his family for the young, hot secretary. We are unable to imagine any of the husbands driving anything with fewer than five seat belts.
“Ron only goes as far as the den,” Ellen says. “He has his Internet porn bookmarked on the computer.”
“Ian has his Cook’s Illustrated,” Rachel adds. “And his—his men’s online fennel club.”
Of the four of us, Renata has the fastest-thrumming engine, as evidenced by her rabid in-the-moment sex-tryst texting (“omg he flyz in 2nite on red i @ 2 am!!!”). One imagines a string of men toppled behind her in ditches like crashed race cars. “My problem is, I’m a dopamine freak!” She waggles her hands in the air. “Dopamine!”
“Helen Fisher!” Ellen exclaims, pointing at her.
Fisher, a women’s cult figure and an anthropologist, has long argued that falling in love—and falling out of love—is part of our evolutionary biology and that humans are programmed not for lifelong monogamy, but for serial monogamy. (In stretches of four years, to be exact, approximately the time it takes to get one kid safely through infancy.)
Why Him? Why Her? explains the hormonal forces that trigger humans to be romantically attracted to some people and not to others (a phenomenon also documented in the animal world). Fisher posits that each of us gets dosed in the womb with different levels of hormones that impel us toward one of four basic personality types:
The Explorer—the libidinous, creative adventurer who acts “on the spur of the moment.” Operative neurochemical: dopamine.
The Builder—the much calmer person who has “traditional values.” The Builder also “would rather have loyal friends than interesting friends,” enjoys routines, and places a high priority on taking care of his or her possessions. Operative neurotransmitter: serotonin.
The Director—the “analytical and logical” thinker who enjoys a good argument. The Director wants to discover all the features of his or her new camera or computer. Operative hormone: testosterone.
The Negotiator—the touchy-feely communicator who imagines “both wonderful and horrible things happening” to him- or herself. Operative hormone: estrogen, then oxytocin.
Fisher reviewed personality data from 39,913 members of Chemistry.com. Explorers made up 26 percent of the sample, Builders 28.6 percent, Directors 16.3 percent, Negotiators 29.1 percent. While Explorers tend to be attracted to Explorers, and Builders tend to be attracted to Builders, Directors are attracted to Negotiators, and vice versa.
Exclaims Ellen, slapping the book: “This is why my marriage has been dead for 15 years. I’m an Explorer married to a Builder!” (Ron literally is a builder—like Ian, he crafts wonderful shelves and also, of course, cooks.) But what can Ellen do? Explorer-Explorer tends to be one of the most unstable combinations, whereas Fisher suspects “most of the world’s fifty-year marriages are made by Builders who marry other Builders.”
While a Rutgers study suggests that only 38 percent of married people in America describe themselves as happy, we stay married for many good reasons. Take, for instance, the otherwise unaffordability of homeownership.
Some of us stay married because we’re in competition with our divorcing 1960s and 1970s parents, who made such a hash of it. What looks appealing to us now, in an increasingly frenetic, digital world, is the 1950s marriage. Writes Karen Karbo, in Generation Ex, reminiscing about her mother’s evening routine of serving old-fashioneds to her dad by the pool:
At the turn of the millennium, our marriages and remarriages bear almost no resemblance to these single-paycheck, cocktail-hour unions. Once considered sexist and monotonous, these staid marriages are emblems of an easier time. What seemed too dull and constricting a mere fifteen years ago now looks luxurious, like those huge gas-guzzling cars with all that chrome and the tuck-and-roll seats.
Some of us stay married because along with fancy schools, tae kwan do lessons, and home-cooked organic food, the two-parent marriage is another impressive—and rare—attainment to bestow on our fragile, gifted children.
Some of us stay married because … what else is there? A lonely apartment and a hot plate?
To work, to parent, to housekeep, to be the ones who schedule “date night,” only to be reprimanded in the home by male kitchen bitches, and then, in the bedroom, to be ignored—it’s a bum deal. And then our women’s magazines exhort us to rekindle the romance. You rarely see men’s magazines exhorting men to rekindle the romance.
So, herewith, some modest proposals. Clearly, research shows that what’s best for children is domestic stability and not having to bond with, and to be left by, ever new stepparent figures. Less important is whether or not their overworked parents are logging “date night” (or feeling the magic). So why don’t we accept marriage as a splitting-the-mortgage arrangement? As Fisher suggests, rekindling the romance is, for many of us, biologically unnatural, particularly after the kids come. (Says another friend of mine, about his wife of 23 years: “My heart doesn’t lift when she walks in the room. It sinks, slightly.”) If high-revving women are sexually frustrated, let them have some sort of French arrangement where they have two men, the postfeminist model dad building shelves, cooking bouillabaise, and ignoring them in the home, and the occasional fun-loving boyfriend the kids never see. Alternately, if both spouses find life already rather exhausting, never mind chasing around for sex. Long-married husbands and wives should pleasantly agree to be friends, to set the bedroom aglow at night by the mute opening of separate laptops and just be done with it. More than anything, aside from providing insulation from the world at large, that kind of arrangement could be the perfect way to be left alone.
As far as the children are concerned, how about the tribal approach (a natural, according to both primate and human evolution)? Let children between the ages of 1 and 5 be raised in a household of mothers and their female kin. Let the men/husbands/boyfriends come in once or twice a week to build shelves, prepare that bouillabaisse, or provide sex.
Or best of all, after the breast-feeding and toddler years are through, let those nurturing superdads be the custodial parents! Let the Type A moms obsessively work, write checks, and forget to feed the dog. Let the dads then, if they wish, kick out those sloppy working mothers and run effective households, hiring the appropriate staff, if need be. To a certain extent, men today may have more clarity about what it takes to raise children in the modern age. They don’t, for instance, have today’s working mother’s ambivalence and emotional stickiness.
In any case, here’s my final piece of advice: avoid marriage—or you too may suffer the emotional pain, the humiliation, and the logistical difficulty, not to mention the expense, of breaking up a long-term union at midlife for something as demonstrably fleeting as love.
by Michael S. Horton, Ph.D. This article is a part of a collection of essays written recently by Dr. Horton after his interview on 60 Minutes which aired on October 14, 2007.
"Name it, claim it"; the "health-and-wealth" or "prosperity gospel" : these are nicknames for a heresy that in many respects is only an extreme version of perhaps the most typical focus of American Christianity today more generally. Basically, God is there for you and your happiness. He has some rules and principles for getting what you want out of life and if you follow them, you can have what you want. Just "declare it" and prosperity will come to you. (1) God as Personal Shopper.
Although explicit proponents of the so-called "prosperity gospel" may be fewer than their influence suggests, its big names and best-selling authors (T. D. Jakes, Benny Hinn, Joel Osteen, and Joyce Meyer) are purveyors of a pagan worldview with a peculiarly American flavor. It's basically what the sixteenth century German monk turned church reformer Martin Luther called the "theology of glory": How can I climb the ladder and attain the glory here and now that God has actually promised for us after a life of suffering? The contrast is the "theology of the cross": the story of God's merciful descent to us, at great personal cost, a message that the Apostle Paul acknowledged was offensive and "foolish to Greeks."
Joel Osteen: Another Verse of a Really Long Song The attraction of Americans to this version of the "glory story" is evident in the astonishing success of Joel Osteen's runaway best-seller, Your Best Life Now: Seven Steps to Living at Your Full Potential. Beyond his charming personality and folksy style, Osteen's phenomenal attraction is no doubt related to his simple and soothing sampler of the American gospel: a blend of Christian and cultural elements that he picked up not through any formal training, but as the son of a Baptist-turned-prosperity evangelist who was a favorite on the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN). However, gone are the eccentric caricatures of "prosperity" televangelism, with its flamboyant style and over-the-top rhetoric.
In the Wal-Mart era of religion and spirituality, every particular creed and any denominational distinctives get watered down. We don't hear (at least explicitly) about our being "little gods," "part and parcel of God," or the blood of Christ as a talisman for healing and prosperity. The strange teachings of his father's generation, still regularly heard on TBN, are not explored in any depth. In fact, nothing is explored in any depth. Osteen still uses the telltale lingo of the health-and-wealth evangelists: "Declare it," "speak it," "claim it," and so forth, but there are no dramatic, made-for-TV healing lines. The pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, TX, which now owns the Compaq Center, does not come across as a flashy evangelist with jets and yachts, but as a charming next-door-neighbor who always has something nice to say.
Although remarkably gifted at the social psychology of television, Joel Osteen is hardly unique. In fact, his explicit drumbeat of prosperity (word-faith) teaching is communicated in the terms and the ambiance that might be difficult to distinguish from most megachurches. Joel Osteen is the next generation of the health-and-wealth gospel. This time, it's mainstream.
As community philosopher Karl Marx said of a consumer-driven culture, "All that is solid melts into the air." Religion, too, becomes a commodity—a product or therapy that we can buy and use for our personal well-being. Exemplifying the moralistic and therapeutic approach to religion, Osteen's message is also a good example of the inability of Boomers to mourn in the face of God's judgment or dance under the liberating news of God's saving mercy. In other words, all gravity is lost—both the gravity of our problem and of God's amazing grace. According to this message, we are not helpless sinners—the ungodly—who need a one-sided divine rescue. (Americans, but especially we Boomers, don't take bad news well.) Rather, we are good people who just need a little instruction and motivation.
"Law-Lite": Salvation From Unhappiness By Doing Your Best There is no condemnation in Osteen's message for failing to fulfill God's righteous law. On the other hand, there is no justification. Instead of either message, there is an upbeat moralism that is somewhere in the middle: Do your best, follow the instructions I give you, and God will make your life successful. "Don't sit back passively," he warns, but with a gentle pleading suggests that the only reason we need to follow his advice is because it's useful for getting what we want. God is a buddy or partner who exists primarily to make sure we are happy. "You do your part, and God will do his part." (2) "Sure we have our faults," he says, but "the good news is, God loves us anyway." (3) Instead of accepting God's just verdict on our own righteousness and fleeing to Christ for justification, Osteen counsels readers simply to reject guilt and condemnation.(4) Yet it is hard to do that successfully when God's favor and blessing on my life depend entirely on how well I can put his commands to work. "If you will simply obey his commands, He will change things in your favor."(5) That's all: "…simply obey his commands."
Everything depends on us, but it's easy. One wonders if he has ever had a crisis of doubt or moral failure that stripped him naked in God's presence. Osteen seems to think that we are basically good people and God has a very easy way for us to save ourselves—not from his judgment, but from our lack of success in life—with his help. "God is keeping a record of every good deed you've ever done," he says—as if this is good news. "In your time of need, because of your generosity, God will move heaven and earth to make sure you are taken care of." (6)
It may be "Law Lite," but make no mistake about it: behind a smiling Boomer Evangelicalism that eschews any talk of God's wrath, there is a determination to assimilate the gospel to law, an announcement of victory to a call to be victorious, indicatives to imperatives, good news to good advice. The bad news may not be as bad as it used to be, but the good news is just a softer version of the bad news: Do more. But this time, it's easy! And if you fail, don't worry. God just wants you to do your best. He'll take care of the rest.
So who needs Christ? At least, who needs Christ as "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" (Jn 1:29)? The sting of the law may be taken out of the message, but that only means that the gospel has become a less demanding, more encouraging law whose exhortations are only meant to make us happy, not to measure us against God's holiness.
So while many supporters offer testimonials to his kinder, gentler version of Christianity than the legalistic scolding of their youth, the only real difference is that God's rules or principles are easier and it's all about happiness here and now, not being reconciled to a holy God who saves us from ourselves. In its therapeutic milieu, sin is failing to live up to our potential, not falling short of God's glory. We need to believe in ourselves and the wages of such "sins" is missing out on our best life now. But it's still a constant stream of exhortation, demands, and burdens: follow my steps and I guarantee your life will be blessed.
A TIME story in 2006 observed that Osteen's success has reached even more traditional Protestant circles, citing the example of a Lutheran church that followed Your Best Life Now during Lent, of all times, "when," as the writer notes, "Jesus was having his worst life then." Even churches formally steeped in a theology of the cross succumb to theologies of glory in the environment of popular American spirituality. We are swimming in a sea of narcissistic moralism: an "easy-listening" version of salvation by self-help.
This is what we might call the false gospel of "God-Loves-You-Anyway." There's no need for Christ as our mediator, since God is never quite as holy and we are never quite as morally perverse as to require nothing short of Christ's death in our place. God is our buddy. He just wants us to be happy, and the Bible gives us the roadmap.
I have no reason to doubt the sincere motivation to reach non-Christians with a relevant message. My concern, however, is that the way this message comes out actually trivializes the faith at its best and contradicts it at its worst. In a way, it sounds like atheism: Imagine there is no heaven above us or hell below us, no necessary expectation that Christ "will come again with glory to judge the living and the dead" and establish perfect peace in the world. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to find anything in this message that would be offensive to a Unitarian, Buddhist, or cultural Christians who are used to a diet of gospel-as-American-Dream. Disney's Jiminy Cricket expresses this sentiment: "If you wish upon a star, all your dreams will come true."
To be clear, I'm not saying that it is atheism, but that it sounds oddly like it in this sense: that it is so bound to a this-worldly focus that we really do not hear anything about God himself—his character and works in creation, redemption, or the resurrection of the body and the age to come. Nothing in the past (namely, Christ's work) nor in the future (namely, Christ's return in judgment, raising our bodies in everlasting life) really matters. Maybe I haven't heard enough of his talks on TV, but I have never heard anything that approached a proclamation of any article mentioned in the Apostles' Creed. Despite the cut-aways of an enthralled audience with Bibles opened, I have yet to hear a single biblical passage actually preached. Is it possible to have evangelism without the evangel? Christian outreach without a Christian message?
If God matters, it is for the most trivial concerns—or at least those quite secondary to the real crisis that the gospel addresses. One could easily come away from this type of message concluding that we are not saved by Christ's objective work for us, but by our subjective "personal relationship with Jesus" through a series of works that we perform to secure his favor and blessing. God has set up all of these laws and now it's up to us to follow them so that we can be blessed. I can think of no better illustration of what sociologist Christian Smith has identified as "moralistic, therapeutic deism": the gospel of American Religion.
As the New Testament repeatedly affirms, those who want to be saved by their own obedience need to know that God doesn't grade on a curve. His record-keeping is bad news, not good news, unless Christ's obedient record has been credited to us through faith alone. God's law says, "If you want to be saved by your own effort, here are the terms: Do all these things and you'll go to heaven; fail to do them and you'll go to hell." The revivalists of yesteryear came up with their own list, but it was basically the same threat: "Do or die." The kinder, gentler version is, "Try harder and you'll be happier; fail to do them and you'll lose out on God's best for your life here and now." No heaven, no hell; no condemnation or salvation; no perfect obedience of Christ credited to us: Just do your best. Remember, God is keeping score! Christ becomes totally unnecessary in this message.
Osteen reflects the broader assumption among evangelicals that we are saved by making a decision to have a personal relationship with God. If one's greatest problem is loneliness, the good news is that Jesus is a reliable friend. If the big problem is anxiety, Jesus will calm us down. Jesus is the glue that holds our marriages and families together, gives us purpose for us to strive toward, wisdom for daily life. And there are half-truths in all of these pleas, but they never really bring hearers face to face with their real problem: that they stand naked and ashamed before a holy God and can only be acceptably clothed in his presence by being clothed, head to toe, in Christ's righteousness.
This gospel of "submission," "commitment," "decision," and "having a personal relationship with God" fails to realize, first of all, that everyone has a personal relationship with God already: either as a condemned criminal standing before a righteous judge or as a justified co-heir with Christ and adopted child of the Father. "How can I be right with God?" is no longer a question when my happiness rather than God's holiness is the main issue. My concern is that Joel Osteen is simply the latest in a long line of self-help evangelists who appeal to the native American obsession with pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Salvation is not a matter of divine rescue from the judgment that is coming on the world, but a matter of self-improvement in order to have your best life now.
Footnotes
1 This position is extensively documented in Michael Horton, ed., The Agony of Deceit (Chicago: Moody Press, 1990) [back to text]
2 Joel Osteen, Your Best Life Now: Seven Steps to Living at Your Full Potential (NY: Warner Books, 2004),41-42 [back to text]
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