I've spend a lot of time in northern Europe and it certainly is much better than the US; however:

1) Norway is a bit of a bad example because they are basically just awash in oil money that funds everything
2) they actually still have a pretty vibrant labor union movement (e.g., ~65% of Sweden / Denmark is part of a union, compared to ~10% in the US) that does a very good job of ultimately protecting worker interests. This is a bulwark against hyper competitive economic schemes that take their toll on the national psyche, they can all count on health care, pensions, stipends to attend higher education, long maternity/paternity leaves and the basic provisions of life without huge amounts of stress that exist in the US at the middle class and down levels. Related, they have better consumer protections so they aren't feeling the stresses of constant manipulation like American consumers do.
3) Things degrade to varying degrees in different parts of northern Europe (e.g., Finland, Belgium, Netherlands, the UK) aren't thriving like Scandinavia
4) these are much smaller countries geographically, spatially; for instance, almost 90% of Danes live in urban areas. The whole county is less than 6 million people. ~40% of the population lives around Copenhagen. Consider then even simple institutions like a local newspaper or local radio can do to maintain social cohesion. I write so much **** here but I'm sure I've got ~25 posts over the past few years about the US, the interstate highway system, far flung suburbs, exurbs, and the geopolitical / spatial problems that the US has which are somewhat exceptional to the US. We're a huge ****ing country with a lot of people. The resultant social cohesion problems we see are not separable from the size and geographic diversity of the US. If you got to cut out like the entirety of the United States and judged us by just how New York City + Long Island + Lower Hudson Valley, and THEN compared us to Denmark, you'd have a comparable data set.
5) their youth are also largely suffering from floating around meaninglessly, and restive, and alt-right style politics and nativism are a bit ascendant, they aren't immune from a lot of the same political concerns we're talking about here

All I know about Scandinavia comes from Scandinavian mystery shows on Netflix. I understand there are many serial killers up there.

fentanyl and meth def give ppl something to believe in. church is only marginally worse.

Dvaut,

What about the huge draw of being a completely generic and replaceable cog in the machine of global capitalism? You can deliverroo by day and uber by night and you're beholden to no one (except the companies who take 30% of your gross for 0% of the work, or your landlord, or the giant companies you buy your products from).

You forgot the glories of global capitalism's cultural output, which are always available to the world's Uber drivers, like 1 hour a day you can watch Netflix on your phone and watch documentaries about how the global elites fire money canons at each other on mega yachts and stuff, and that extra bit of spare time you might have over the weekend to watch DisneyFox's SuperHeros Assemble 54 where they Assemble to battle CGI.

Segregated schools (past CRA) are mostly a result of racial segregation geographically. I‘d attribute that to right wing policies.

Tieing school funding to property taxes certainly isn‘t a left-wing concept. To me that idea is quite baffling. Education should be ldo socialized and all schools funded equally.
Local school boards also seem like an expression of a typically conservative desire for local autonomy. This isn’t bad in itself but can lead to very unequal outcomes.

Church is not coming back.

Deal with it.

Church might be dead, Christianity might be dead, but religion has been pretty durable throughout human history. Maybe we've reached the Event Horizon, but I think what say ChrisV, Trolly and I are saying is that if you tear down traditional religions, and replace it with nothing, people will inevitably try to derive deeper meaning from somewhere.

And given our current context, that might be something truly unsavory.

Humanism does not need religion.

Eisenhower and Nixon both won with Northerners and lost the Deep South. This was all pre or during realignment so the devolution you are talking about was always there.

The actual progression is something like Strom Thurmond ---> Harry Byrd ---> George Wallace ---> Dick Cheney ---> Trump

absolutely. And a sense of belonging. Even being member of the working class such as steelworker or miner, gave masses of people something spiritually sustaining they were proud to be part of. Replacing that with someone who puts stuff in boxes or works on a scripted help desk is scant replacement (and even that's going).


and Dan Brown novels and day time TV and ...

As you say we offer ~nothing good. We have to offer an ethical humanist vehicle to replace the good bits of organised religion. And restore far more of a notion of society and supportive community. We are not just a collection of individuals - we can be so much better than that and otherwise we are likely to be so much worse than that.

I think in general organized religion promotes tribalism which inspires racism, while secular humanism supports equality and empathy for all people. Sure the world is a big place so there are exceptions and outliers all around, but that's the overall trend. Conservatives today are turning to God as their justification for beliefs about gay marriage, abortion, and foreign policy. "Judeo-Christian values" is still a dogwhistle in 2018. You want to encourage people to return deeper into that chamber?

I don't know man, I think they are both extremely awful and often go hand-in-hand with each other. Mostly as goofy said, it's just depressing litigating church-goers preference for Ted Cruz over Trump as some kind of moral virtue.

OK, but haven’t replaced religion with “secular humanism,” we’ve basically excised religious fellowship and left a hole that’s being filled with Ben Shapiro youtubes and 4chan Pepe memes and various other forms of cultural rot that are not supporting empathy. Like, look at the last few posts in the Intellectual Dork Web thread: it’s clear this young man is turning to Jordan Peterson as a stand-in for a youth pastor and is getting advice on how to behave socially from Reddit instead of traditional support groups.

But those people are the fringe. A significant portion of the western world has stopped participating in their local church activities or turned away from religion altogether. Only a tiny amount belong to the groups and subcultures mentioned.
Then there is the important step of proving that they would not have joined those anyway. For now all we have is conjecture.

Wrong. People are largely good and institutional cohesion makes them less good. I'm not sure which way the cause and effect goes on misanthropy/authoritarianism, but it's there in both fascism and Stalin/Mao/tankie communism - and in Christianity.

Curious about the prevalence of these "evangelicals", I opened up the CNN exit poll and was pretty ****ing shocked:



26% of this exit poll sample identifies as "white born-again or evangelical christian"? Wow! The same poll had 71% of respondents identify as "white", so that's over a third of white people.

Restive youths floating around meaninglessly ended up creating much of the best music of the last 50+ years.

In some important ways Nietzsche really was a long way ahead of his time.

Say you had higher church attendance and a more cohesive society with shared beliefs and morals and **** like that. They do stuff like sit quietly in church while their government murders millions of people half way across the world. And they think it's all good.

Hannah Arendt wrote about how easily the German people adopted a monsterous moral system. It was easy for those most indoctrinated into a previous more humane moral system that was the norm in German society not long before Hitler because conformity is conformity and going along with a swapping of morals is a lot easier than indoctrinating more independent people. The people who rebelled against Nazism were not people who were more tied to the liberal order before the Nazis, they were the people who were just more rebellious.

Depending on the church and state for doing anything other than putting a fancy suit on the monsters and discussing horrific barbarism around a big table is magical thinking.

And the people who haven’t found a substitute are mostly bowling alone now. At least in the US, there’s been a steady decline in civic engagement, voting, participation in public meetings, etc. over the past few decades.

Huh? Nixon lost the south in 1968 because Wallace was running and siphoned off votes. He lost all the significant NE states except New Jersey. In 1972 he won pretty much everything, north and south. Unless you're defining winning some other way, this isn't even remotely true.

MM MD

It still needs to be shown this is actually caused by lower church attendance. The reason that people are disengaging and leading more solitary lives might very well be the same reason that people stopped going to church.


I don't understand how anyone can look at history and think that when people were more engaged in their church that society as a whole faired better.

Now the awkward loners might turn to youtube conspiracies, 4chan and men's rights groups. That's certainly not ideal but I don't see it as particularly alarming. There have always been and probably always will be those that feel left out and then join some stupid cause.

At its peak the most infamous US terror organization, the KKK, had millions of members. It's as safe assumption most of them were regular church goers. That didn't seem to make them less horrible people. I am sure the KKK attracted up a lot of outcasts and loners that today stick to sharing memes instead of attending lynchings.

Are people wilfully ignoring that Church also = misogyny and homophobia?

What is going on in this thread?

I didn't say they were all uniformly great - just that sometimes they're the best of two crappy options. And actually the single charter school in midtown KC, a French immersion school called Lafayette Academy - is quite good.

This thread could be called be name something good capitalism has done.

1. Taking church ( and the related authoritative patriarchy and sexual fascism) out back and shooting it.