Links to Consider, 7/23
Aaron Ross Powell praises liberal cities; Cullum Clark says otherwise; Alice Evans on prestige bias; Aaron Renn on J.D. Vance, status, Protestants, and Catholics
anyone who has lived in a dense and socially liberal city has first hand experience that this simply isn’t true. They’ve seen how strong, supporting, and endearing a culture of diversity, pluralism, religious diversity and secularism, and self-authorship can be.
Thus the right lies about cities, knowing they are the perfect counterexample to their claims. They have to construct a narrative that city culture doesn’t work, and then convince their tribe to believe it.
Somewhat to the contrary, Cullum Clark writes,
Census data from 2022 suggest the average woman in the New York metro area will have 1.80 children over her lifetime; in San Jose, 1.68; in San Francisco, 1.66; in Boston, 1.58; and in Los Angeles, a paltry 1.55. These rates are between 8 percent and 25 percent lower than those of average women in the Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio metros.
The 20th century's technological innovations in media and connectivity opened unprecedented avenues for transnational learning and ideological persuasion. However, contrary to expectations, free media did not always lead to cultural liberalisation. Some societies have even become more socially conservative.
This phenomenon can be explained through the lens of prestige bias - people's tendency to emulate those perceived as successful within their communities. Prestige is not just about individual celebrities; it’s perpetuated through institutions and networks. For instance, MIT economists have achieved multiple Nobel Prizes, in turn attracting bright minds who go on to publish in top journals and lecture at the best departments, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of influence.
In the Muslim world, this prestige bias has manifested in the growing influence of traditional centres of Islamic scholarship - Mecca, Medina, and Cairo. The respect accorded to imams trained at these institutions, coupled with new communication technologies, has led to a notable Arabisation of the previously diverse Islamic world. Even in wealthy nations like the UK, Muslim communities often look to al-Azhar.
My emphasis on prestige bias is somewhat unusual. I[t] suggests that cultural change is neither solely driven by social movements nor economic development. Instead, it’s significantly influenced by who a community deems prestigious - a status that’s always contested
This is near the end of a very long illustrated essay, much of which is probably limited to paid subscribers like me. Evans really puts a lot of thought and effort into her substack. She earns her paid subscriptions.
Vance was involved in conservative political circles in law school. I’ve noted many times that the Christian portion of movement conservatism in the US is Catholic normative. It’s very common for young conservatives in DC to convert to Catholicism. There’s a status signaling that’s given off, and it has an effect on people.
…There’s also something in evangelicalism that’s just off-putting to a lot of people like Vance. It’s not just the working class Pentecostal congregations like the one I was raised in (which was very similar to Vance’s experience). The average suburban megachurch is also incredibly cringe.
I like to distinguish between middle class and striver class. Evangelicalism appeals to the middle class, but much less so to the striver class. And the elites of our society are either people from the upper classes, or strivers like Vance.
With the loss of the mainline churches and the de-Protestantization of elite American institutions, there’s no longer a high status Protestantism in America for those people. This is a major problem for American Protestantism. And, I’d argue, the country.
substacks referenced above:
@
@
The problem with liberal cities is not the people, it is the government. I have lived in Boston for over 20 years, I enjoy riding my bike to work, and I will leave as soon as my youngest son graduates from high school (3 years). He goes to a private school, because the government schools are terrible. When I drive, there is always traffic because of the new bike lanes (if lack of bike lanes kept you from riding - you are not riding in the rain, in the heat, in the cold, in the dark,… those 30 days a year you ride do not make up for all CO2 emissions from cars in bike lane created traffic). I am tired of dragging grocery bags to the store. I tired of the regulations when I to do a home repair. And on and on. It just s*cks. My very progressive neighbors are annoying with their hashtag understanding and “obvious” solutions of complex problems, but that is nothing.
Re: the Renn article: the problem that Protestants have is that their intellectual institutional standard-bearers all secularized, which he highlights in the article. Most of our top universities are former Protestant universities that abandoned that mission. Contra to what Renn says, there is a high status Protestantism in the US: it's the "secular" elite, they just take the protest a couple levels further than what he feels comfortable with. I don't think it's the case that Catholic parishes are fancier because there are lots of Catholic hillbillies too.
The big difference has to do with the priests and how they are formed, how long it takes for them to train, and how specified out all the rules are. This is more akin to how Strivers usually go about things. There are also overeducated Prots but there is no defined program that they need to go through. The tradition of academia is tightly wound with the Catholic tradition. The secular modern university is itself a highly successful descendant of the 19th century German research university, which America tried mightily to learn from and import in the 20th century.
The problem that conservative protestants have is that if you want to thump on traditional academic topics, you will be thumping on Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. Protestants tend to just want to thump on Jerusalem, and only particular texts from Jerusalem. The modern post-protestants just want to thump on their erogenous zones and the latest "findings" from the "studies." This limits the intellectual horizons for the protestants who refuse to go to the next level of protestation. This is also one of the major reasons why the Germans invented the research university in the first place, so as to solidify the identification of Protestantism with modernity and progress. When you subtract modernity and progress from Protestantism you get something that is a much more niche religion.