The Accumulation of Spiritual Capital

Subway outfit. Claudette Colbert in Mitchell Leisen's Midnight (1939), the most recent image I can find in a quick search of pillbox hat, veil, and gloves (lace-trimmed or otherwise), via divamissz. But she clearly doesn't have a pastel dress or accessory grandchild.

See, in feudal times spirituality was essentially a cottage industry, something peasants did after a day in the fields and the evening bowl of gruel, for an hour or two while the candle-ends held out. Most people barely had enough spirituality to subsist on, but over the course of centuries, some individuals gathered together large reserves of spirituality that they were able to pass on to their children, and eventually to put to work with new technologies for making spiritual production more efficient, and before you knew it the landscape of  northern England was dotted with faith factories, mitzvah mills, a surplus of transcendence, and the modern world was born. Just kidding.

Actually what our Brooks is concerned about today ("Building Spiritual Capital") is what to do when you're in the subway and some loud and filthy person with a bag of McNuggets on his lap is shouting at everybody who gets on the train to come and sit next to him and have a piece. There's a solution, but it only works if you're traveling in pairs:

At one stop, a grandmother and granddaughter, about 8, entered the car. They were elegantly dressed, wearing pastel dresses and gloves with lace trim. The homeless man spotted them and screamed, “Hey! Do you want to sit with me?” They looked at each other, nodded and replied in unison, “Thank you” and, unlike everybody else, sat directly next to him.

The man offered them some chicken from his bag. They looked at each other and nodded and said, “No, thank you.” The homeless man offered several more times, and each time they nodded to each other and gave the same polite answer. Finally, the homeless man was calmed, and they all sat contentedly in their seats.

There's something instantly funny about that "everybody else", given that everybody, obviously, couldn't have sat next to him, as he only had two sides. Also, and in somewhat the same way, "they all sat contentedly." All who?

This story is brought to you by the "spiritual psychologist" Lisa Miller and her recent book, The Spiritual Child: The New Science on Parenting for Health and Lifelong Thriving, and it's meant to be meaningful; the nods exchanged by the two are a sign of "shared spirituality", and they illustrate something important:

The grandmother was teaching the granddaughter the wisdom that we were once all strangers in a strange land and that we’re judged by how we treat those who have the least.

Or as Miller somewhat more floridly puts it,

mashing up the line from Matthew 25:40 (the parable of the sheep and the goats) with Leviticus 19:34, with a couple of really odd, and sort of Brooksian errors—it should have been "the least of these", i.e., the hungry and thirsty, the stranger or foreigner, the naked, sick, or imprisoned, not "the least of me", which sounds like the title of Ronald Reagan's autobiography; and the Hebrews to whom God is speaking in the Leviticus were strangers in the land of Egypt, not Israel; they haven't gotten to Israel yet at that point in the story, and they don't expect to be strangers when they arrive. So the words that were loud in her ears weren't exactly the ones taught over the centuries, and quite a bit of the meaning has drained away in the process. (Brooks confusing the Leviticus with Exodus 2:22 and that awful Robert Heinlein book only makes it worse.)

Another mildly irritating thing is that the action of the couple isn't doing anything for the guy, really—that is, it's possible that by calming him down they will give him a moment in which he can re-collect himself, so to speak, and try to climb back on whatever path he's fallen off of, but nobody follows him up. Whom they've acted for is the anxious and agitated middle-class passengers, who didn't know what to do, and who, now he's been quieted, can all "sit contentedly", as Brooks says (Miller doesn't offer an end to the episode at all, but shifts abruptly to preoccupations of her own, which I will get to presently).

They didn't feed or clothe him at all; to the contrary, their action was to refuse repeatedly to be fed by him, not that there's anything wrong with that, as far as I'm concerned they really did handle the situation pretty well, but it is semiotically the diametric antithesis of what Matthew's Jesus was interested in. This is what really makes it what NPR calls a "driveway moment" or piece of pointless poignancy that grips your heart for a second while closing off any critical understanding of what you might be feeling; or what Milan Kundera named "the second tear", the unearned tear of gratified sentimentality.

Brooks also makes up the description of the offensive man as "homeless", a judgment Miller has the sense to avoid. He just assumes this kind of craziness is an automatic indicator of homelessness, which is not the case. And he misses a number of important details: the fact that the grandmother is wearing a "pillbox hat with a small decorative veil", and that they're getting on the 1 train late Sunday morning at 125th Street, which tells me not only that they are just out of church, but that they are in all likelihood African American (which could explain the grandmother's hat, though I think not the gloves, on what Miller says was a "sweltering August" day, not any time since around 1958, see bottom), and indeed Miller shows a strange need to pile them with adjectives, "dignified", "elegant", "shockingly out of place", "royal", to make sure that her respect is clear, as if there were some question about it (I suppose the not-necessarily-homeless man is likely to have been African American as well). I would agree there's no need to talk about the race of the people in the story, if she hadn't been so anxious to sprinkle the text with tiny clues.

Contemplating the spirituality of children leads Brooks to one of his most hilarious paragraphs in months:

I’d say Miller doesn’t pay sufficient attention to the many secular, this-world ways people find to organize their lives. Still, it does seem true that most children are born with a natural sense of the spiritual. If they find a dead squirrel on the playground, they understand there is something sacred there, and they will most likely give it a respectful burial. They have a natural sense of the oneness of creation, and a sense of a transcendent, nonmaterial realm. Miller cites twin studies that suggest that the strength of a child’s spiritual awareness is about 29 percent because of broad genetic heritability, 24 percent because of family environment and 47 percent because of a person’s unique individual environment.

I'd say you should do some research yourself some time, Professor Brooks, maybe on the secular, this-world whatever, if you feel that's important. And can we see some of that scholarship on the squirrel-burying propensity? In my time as a suburban and small-town child we buried only pets, never vermin. As a big-city dad I found most of our playgrounds to be dead-animal-free (even the one in Brooklyn where I saw crack vials back around 1994), but we ran across many pigeons in particular on sidewalks, and the offspring never voiced an interest in interring them or interacting with them in any way. The fact that you can divide up the factors in children's spirituality doesn't demonstrate that they all have a sense of the oneness of creation or a transcendent nonmaterial realm, just that it's quantifiable when they do; Miller's own research is about how some do and some don't.

Miller says religion thickens your cerebral cortex, but other research shows it shrinks your hippocampus, so you win some, you lose some. Image via Criticality, and an essay by Anthony Tate arguing that religion causes brain damage.

Miller's telling of that subway story at this particular point in her book is not about the Brooksian preoccupations but about herself, and the Archimedes moment in which she suddenly understood where the research she was engaged in was going. It's kind of interesting from a philosophy of science point of view, even if you think the inferences she was drawing were wrong.

The material she was working with, in 1997, as a fresh-off-the-phud postdoc at Columbia, was a big longitudinal study of people thought to be at risk for major depressive episodes, and she was trying to figure out how spirituality works to prevent depression, only the data failed to show that spirituality even does prevent depression, whether it was your own spirituality as the child of a severely depressed mother, or the mother's. She's remarkably open about her certainty that she was right and the data wrong:

Or as she put it to a Times reporter in a remarkable bit of truthiness from 2012:

“If you tell me you know something in your gut, I say that’s hard data,” said Dr. Miller, who co-hosted a cable television series on psychic children in 2008. Science, like intuition, she said, is “another arrow in our quiver.”

Anyway, in the subway encounter, she got her clue: that nod between grandmother and granddaughter. It wasn't the spirituality of one party or the other that could protect a person from depression, but the shared spirituality of two of them. And when she looked at her data for the effects of a shared spirituality, the results were extraordinary:

Or maybe not, because it was a sample of just 60 mothers and their kids, all white Catholics and Protestants, and as the team said in their follow-up study published 2012 (which found a reduction of over 90%, in the 114 adults of the next generation of the same sample), because of

limited assessments of religiosity, and inability to control for the possible confound of a close relationship between mother and offspring in our analyses.

And the results don't seem to have been replicated, and they don't seem to be generalized in metanalysis, and there are some obvious possible biases in that (1) very religious people are more likely to deny depressive episodes in their past, and (2) intense depressive episodes might lead people to abandon religion, both of which would tend to hide the falsifying cases from the researchers (I got the second point from a source that I now can't find, and I'm really not finding any research on either of these thoughts, so I could be in Brooks squirrel-burial territory here myself).

Also,

The Daily Beast published a review of The Spiritual Child highlighting errors and shaky interpretations. As reviewer Vlad Chituc... points out, Miller misrepresents key details of a study by the psychologist Paul Bloom. She also cites a pair of studies from The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine—one involving psychic communication, and the other discussing energy fields—neither of which is an acceptable source for a work that purports to be scientific.

And of course it may be that whatever effect there is is caused not by the spirituality itself but the expectation that it will have an effect:

Spirituality: an overlooked predictor of placebo effects?

...spiritual experiences and practices involve a variety of neural systems that may facilitate neural ‘top-down’ effects that are comparable if not identical to those engaged in placebo responses. As meaningfulness seems to be both a hallmark of spirituality and placebo reactions, it may be regarded as an overarching psychological concept that is important to engaging and facilitating psychophysiological mechanisms that are involved in health-related effects.

So hmmm. I can't help feeling she found the results because that's what she was looking for.

In 1958, the dress code at the predominantly black Bennett College For Women in Greensboro, North Carolina, required all young women to wear hats, gloves and heels to church and whenever they left campus. The college’s president bent the rules only once: when the students protested a Woolworth’s store because their lunch counter wouldn’t serve blacks. “It took a civil rights movement to get those hats off our heads,” remembered Ollie McDowell (pictured here). Via GospelConnoisseur.

Drifty suggests the guy on the subway must have been Dr. William Kristol, but luckily he has more important things to think about and leaves the trivia here to me.