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
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.
This reminds me of the laments of those (weakly) "pro-growth" urban progressives like Yglesias and Klein who complain that one unfortunate downside of their team's "way of governance" is to support, establish, and maintain all kinds of vetoes and impose all kinds of burdens, costs, and delays such as to make a lot of other progressive-favored initiatives impossible to achieve, i.e., they, "Can't get stuff done." For some of the more insightful progressives, the answer to, "This is why we can't have nice things," is, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Likewise, progressives may claim to favor the vibrantly diverse city experience, but their politicians can't actually govern it well in the interests of ordinary law-abiding taxpayers who just want to go about their lives in safety, comfort, and prosperity and without too much obnoxious bureaucratic difficulty, that is, the way plenty of other nice cities in other parts of the world are governed.
What would the local Republican Party have to do to be competitive? What positions would you like it to adopt, which it doesn’t currently adopt, in order to win elections in these cities?
I remember a time when the Republican Party did win elections in cities. The politics of city republicans really hasn’t changed.
What happened was that the demographics of the cities kept moving left. They got less white, more single, and each generation moved further left culturally.
Voters are getting what the median voter wants. Maybe it’s skewed a bit leftwards by the two party system, but if voters hated it enough they would switch parties in either the primary or general to get different results. And my understanding is that many of these governance problems in western cities apply beyond two party systems. You’re just going to have to accept that this is the kind of life city people want, or at least are willing to live with.
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.
Aaron Ross Powell's comment reminds one of that San Francisco denizen who a few months ago was equally chauvinistic about his city, notwithstanding the dystopian hell-hole it has become. When asked about car break-ins, he admitted had suffered four in the previous year, but thought it a small price to pay for living there in what I believe such folk call a "vibrant" environment.
It's a sad fact of the kind of typical mental mode of society that people have been trained to identify certain perfectly legitimate complaints as being right-wing or left-wing coded, and thus have their crimestop filters working overtime, stopping themselves from admitting - and even feeling - the kind of emotions and opinions that - were they not in danger of conceding a single point to the other team - would be the completely typical human reaction and consequence of their circumstances. The people who complain about SF being a S-hole are all right-wing, and since I'm on the left, I've got to be super proud of this S-hole, er, I mean, ultimate triumph and highest developmental level of human civilization, urban utopia, and literal paradise on earth.
Well described. I call this process self-enstupidation through ideological commitment. A person has made himself stupid when he can no longer see what is in front of his eyes or denies its significance.
"They’ve seen how strong, supporting, and endearing a culture of diversity, pluralism, religious diversity and secularism, and self-authorship can be."
Revealed preferences suggest otherwise. Liberal city-dwellers pay large sums of money to avoid diversity. From Stanford: "There is a long-standing assumption that large, densely populated cities inherently foster interactions with a diverse range of people. Analysis of 1.6 billion person-to-person encounters among 9.6 million individuals in the United States reveals that big cities are actually pockets of extreme segregation." Archived link: https://archive.ph/4nFjx.
I'm curious why you think diversity makes the second worse. And do you mean sometimes or always?
Beyond that, maybe you need to read "Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World," by Richard Cockett (2023). On that note, it's worth considering where we would be without cities. I don't see how we'd be better for it.
1 - I suppose there are people who truly believe city culture doesn't work but is it anything close to a majority conservative view? I don't think so. I'd say the conservative view is that the most liberal cities tend to be the most corrupt and by some combination of corruption and liberal policy, they are run horribly. That is not the same as saying city culture does not work.
2 - When you posit that differing birth rates in various cities is contrary to Powell, are you implying something akin to what I just wrote?
2a - I'm curious if birth rates are all that much different in more rural locales.
“If it wasn’t grown it was mined” is a cranky bumper sticker I see sometimes.
It doesn’t make me smile, of course, as I know what its author probably does not acknowledge - that the same people who don’t respect native-born blue collar guys who work in extraction industries, are intent on replacing them with immigrants; not on preventing resource extraction. The latter is subordinate to the other, and will yield, and everyone - I do mean everyone - will lose.
When population growth is the Only Goal, you forfeit the right to any other goals or values you once held.
Still: a corollary bumper sticker might read - “If it wasn’t grown it was mined; and if was grown *or* mined, it wasn’t done so in your American city”.*
The civilizational flourishes and marvels (and horrors) achieved in cities prevent an honest reckoning of who underpins whom, in my view.
Vance noted in his book that his relatives believed themselves to be The Faithful, but they did so without ever much darkening the door of the church. I recall he cited church attendance figures.
So I don't know that he felt he was walking away from much of anything, if it exerted so little pull on his family.
This seems to me to be the natural end of Protestantism and personal Jesus: people feel themselves to be the arbiter of their own version of Christianity, needing none but themselves; and in their pride being unwilling to admit that there is a community-building and norm-preserving aspect of corporate worship.
Even the religious resurgence that exists in my red state, is intertwined with an allergic reaction to "church" or to any authority associated with it.
It relies on an ever-renewing flow of new non-denominational churches with names chosen to sound cool and announce - we're not Baptist (anymore! they often seem quite Baptist especially in their indifference to good works) or Methodist - or whatever. We're "The Stone" or "The Crossroads" or "The Well" or "The Gathering" or sometimes a geographic reference, to the Hills or the Oaks or the Ridge. (There's never one called "The Sprawl Church" or "The Place Beyond the C-store"; these have always an air of being a prosperous aspect of suburban development.)
I don't know exactly how their financial needs are met - if they've figured out some way to do that without tithing or passing the plate or getting old people to leave them their money, church-like.
Typically they start by meeting in a school auditorium or even as a "home church". Eventually they all seem to want to build an amphitheater and a coffeeshop.
Given the sorry state of Catholicism, is this so bad? The main issue here is that at some point your elite study physics, and become materialist atomists, and consequently hedonists. I don’t think even Muslims are able to retain their intellectual class as sincere believers. Only Israeli Jewish are able: see Aumann. How many Christian scientists are true believers and as outspokenly religious as him?
I imagine that depends on whether you think the Catholic Church “knew” things that are now in the process of being forgotten. If, for example, the average young person knows more than a priest steeped in Catholic teaching and tradition ever did or could know.
Certainly I grew up in a Protestant milieu vaguely anti-Catholic. There were many Catholics about, of course, some close family friends, so of course we were not anti-Catholics. But some of that old judgment - that it was “benighted”, that it kept you at an arm’s length from your awesome pal, God, that it had the wild baby-making (uugh) notion that life was for procreation within the family - was baked into the cake of even our deeply attenuated religious practice. We were Presbyterians, for the status reasons alluded to elsewhere in the thread: both grandmothers had been Baptists, and one still was.
The Presbyterians’ wan effort at dull doctrinal education was practically a religion committing harakiri.
It was many years later that I reflected that my life might have been very different had I been Catholic; that was quite an admission for arrogant me to make, and that despite - as you say - the Church being at a very low ebb, having been colonized by those with an entirely different agenda.
I was struck by that implicit distinction between "anti-Catholic" and "anti-Catholics". I've never seen it put that way before but I think it's very real.
And this was a great line, "The Presbyterians’ wan effort at dull doctrinal education was practically a religion committing harakiri."
I should add also that it was not the story of Jesus that I found unable to reconcile with modern life. It was actually the modern spin that God was this trivial thing, a friend who cared whether I did this or that thing on a given Tuesday after praying about it, who cared about me at all, that I found completely unsupported by experience and by dark genetic inheritance. Even though I attended an ordinary Presbyterian church, full of pleasant people and devoted mostly to the provision of children’s activities - no horrid Prosperity Gospel sort of place - yet I felt that materialism, even if only in the negative, was mostly what even mainstream Protestantism held out as the reward in life. This was incompatible with my only bedrock commitment, to conservation.
I think Powell certainly has a point, but he goes too far when he writes "the reason right-wing media is so dedicated to pushing false pictures of what it’s like to live in dense and cosmopolitan areas is because America’s cities are the wildly successful alternative to what the right-wing insists is the only possible successful world." I don't think most people on the right would argue, much less insist, that small town or suburban life is the only possible successful way to live. I think part of it is just a taste/preference issue, but also there's a clear way that the various problems of modern cities undermine the progressive worldview, and thus become a natural focal point of conservative rhetoric. You can probably think of a city or two across the Western World that has effectively become a one party state with an adjacent political monoculture. Is it all sweetness and light in said city? Have long-standing social ills been ameliorated there? Is there broadly shared prosperity in said city, across racial and social classes? Nope, nope, and nope.
I also wonder if there isn't just a bit of resentment about how a lot of rural areas have done poorly, economically, over the last 30-40 years or so, while more and more opportunities appear to be concentrated in a select few cities scattered across the country. Maybe the rise of remote work will change that to some degree.
I found Aaron Ross Powell’s piece to be very unimpressive. Unsupported assertions with two links to phenomena that cities in general do better than rural areas. That cities in general have advantages is why they have been pulling folk from rural areas for almost all recorded history. Indeed, a mark of social collapse is when cities stop doing that—as cities generally have been demographic sinks (as they generally are now), their populations start shrinking when that happens. That “blue” cities in the US have a series of problems is easily sustained: not least from the fact that they now have significant population outflows.
Something that will always stick with me with regard to cities...
"Kuehnle was historically corrupt, and as for the titans who built Atlantic City, my impression of the finished product is that they made a place I was highly motivated to get away from. But Kuehnle's approach to providing services seems like a distinct improvement on the governance in most of the places (including late-20th-century Atlantic City) I have lived in. Los Angeles County, where you get all the corruption and none of the competence, seems a lot more like the norm. In my experience only San Francisco mayor Willie Brown fit the once-valued political type described above: venal, jolly figures who occasionally accomplish something in the way of constituent service. The kind of leaders who move you to pay the highest compliment any resident can ever pay to any city: "This shithole could be worse.""
The list of reasons is actually a bit long but a shrinking population will always be short of workers and this greatly reduces economic and societal improvement.
Note: there's a lot not explained in that sentence but I'll leave it at that for now.
I don't make moral judgements on (bacteria? I'm unclear); sorry, my brain doesn't work that way. I'm pointing out that the world didn't exactly come to an end (unless I'm misreading history) because population fell in some areas in the 14th century.
As I'm fond of pointing out, if you asked most people what the current world population was - they'd probably be off by a billion people. This is not an issue, as portrayed. The reason you can tell that is that the ways it conceivably might be an issue - are unmentionable. But old people, their soiled bottoms, I've heard about this pretty much on the regular for years. Kind of like I used to hear, when I was a teenager, that having children was very expensive and fraught and you shouldn't under any circumstances do it. It will be like a terrible afterschool special!
I'm a bit annoyed you suggest I was asking about bacteria. Surely you understand I was referring to life after the population shrunk.
The world not coming to an end is irrelevant to what I wrote.
The current population is also irrelevant to what I wrote. It is what it is. Current food shortages are smaller than when the population was far smaller and they have nothing to do with our ability to grow enough food. Besides that, I said nothing about growing the population, just against it shrinking.
The current population is hardly irrelevant to what you wrote. It is the most important fact about life in the planet, for life on the planet. Full stop.
How it falls may certainly be important, to those who live through it. But that will be owing less to its falling and more to the decisions that led to its artificial growth.
Plus, the Black Death made labor much more valuable and probably (may) have led to more serfs (or the equivalent) being separated from the land and able to seek their own fortune.
Yes, it is true that some serfs gained more freedom. Jobs in many trades were passed from parent to child and many were able to break this "rule" and change professions. It did not get worse for everyone. Great. But I'd argue life for most people who survived still got worse.
All of this is besides the point. The 14th and 15th centuries were a period when not much improved, regardless of how the population changed. It simply is not relevant to the implications involved today.
There is really no paradox or conflict there. Pining for the company of "quality intellectuals" means one eschews both the low-iq crowd and high-iq-but-low-quality scene.
In the 1950s if you wanted high status Christianity you converted to Episcopalians. But now Episcopalians and the like, in addition to just outright dying off, are essentially just wokeness.
I'm not sure the Catholic Church will prove a good home for these converts, and I say this as someone whom the label could apply to (stopped in childhood and came back in adulthood). At the end of the day the Catholic Church is basically a gay pedophile ring run by a Marxist Pope which is very into Open Borders. That may not apply to the rank and file, but in the Catholic Church especially that rank and file doesn't matter to the leadership due to celibacy and the hierarchy.
That isn't to say you can't find some great churches and church communities out in the exurbs, but in theory you could find the same in Protestantism.
I think there is an aesthetic attraction to the "beauty of the liturgy" and to church architecture. Some may not truly feel that, but it makes for a reason. Perhaps the slur-uttering, ill-educated Marxist pope will be no more to them than Santa Claus.
Some of the most beautiful liturgy I've seen personally was when, at a friend's invitation, I attended an Orthodox service (which church now fails me, but I understand the similarities are deep) that was simply beautiful.
I was raised in an environment that was kind of moderately Evangelical (there are real differences in the groups) mixed with a healthy dose of Catholicism. By age twelve I was pretty where I am now. Not an athiest or even an agnostic but someone who isn't even sure of the questions, let alone any answers.
So I tend to go by how people treat me. And I have found very good people of all the religions I have encountered. (And in a 35-year Academic life you encounter a bunch). But one memory sticks out in my mind. 40+ years ago I was in a very tough spot, personally, emotionally, psychologically. I was in a small community (1200) and pretty much everyone knew me. I was 'friends' with the local Methodist minister and the local Baptist parson (we had children the same age). You know who came to offer support? A guy I did a small amount of business who belonged to the local Assembly of God. He stayed with me off and on for hours, without talking about God or religion at all. He also organized some help for me from his church, all anonymously.
So. Just an anecdote.
I do tend to find that people who rank on Evangelicals and Pentecostals (and there are differences) have seldom really lived among them. Just sayin'
All such in my orbit, including some now gone, are indeed kind good people who would do anything for you.
But I would be lying if I said that I had found besides excellent examples of how to behave and be kind, wisdom among them. That lay with the frankly atheistic or at best agnostic members of my close circle. Who to be sure have no quarrel whatsoever with the religious impulse, far from it - even if they don’t share it.
And I have not been able to feel that God was quite so stunted a thing as to be fully represented through a perusal of one book, coupled with an incuriosity about the book of nature.
But the most important thing is to recognize that goodness may be in any one place, or any church, or temple or mosque - as well as another.
Just a personal thing, but if you assume God (or anything like God) exists and is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present, etc, why couldn't such a god, if he/she/it wanted, devise multiple "true" religions, each suited to different individuals and groups?
Then he wouldn’t get to amuse himself watching us kill each other over the one “true” religion, which would happen to maybe also have the derivative benefit of making the survivors better off, and for which God could then demand the credit from said survivors?
Eisenhower's parents were Mennonites then Jehovah's Witnesses, which were low status when he was a child, perhaps leading him to reject their faith as a born striver. He himself was an atheist from his youth who nevertheless had learned to speak the language of scripture which was occasionally convenient in his military and political career (which most people have a very false impression of.) His wife was a Presbyterian, and that church was still quite high status in the early 50s, and he was pressured to get baptized after getting elected, which he did ten days after his inauguration to keep up appearances, so to speak.
My impressions is that he was as fake a Christian as he was a "Republican", but while "Christian" meant something in the early 50s, ""Republican" back then didn't mean what it does today and after collapsing in FDRs wake from the 30s to the 60s had become a merely ideologically-hollow alternative-party-for-running-for-office-of-convenience. This was like Bloomberg being a Democrat before 2001, a fake """Republican""" from 2001-2007, and """Independent""" from 2007-2018, and then gave up the charade and went back to being a Democrat thereafter.
Wikipedia actually has an article on Eisenhower's famous quote, "And I don't care what it is". The article begins:
"And I don't care what it is" is a phrase attributed to U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, and often misquoted.[1]: 35–38 For example, one encyclopedia says: "Eisenhower once remarked that 'America makes no sense without a deeply held faith in God—and I don't care what it is.'"[2] Some commentators, such as Will Herberg, argued that Eisenhower favored a generic, watered-down religion, or ridiculed Eisenhower's banality.[1]: 38, 42, 44 Speaking extemporaneously on December 22, 1952, a month before his inauguration, Eisenhower actually said:
And this is how they [the Founding Fathers in 1776] explained those: "we hold that all men are endowed by their Creator..." not by the accident of their birth, not by the color of their skins or by anything else, but "all men are endowed by their Creator". In other words, our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is. Of course, it is the Judeo-Christian concept, but it must be a religion with all men being created equal.
Your description makes it sound like his ego was not particularly bound up with making a show of his irreligion or disturbing the conventions of the time.
If Trump-Vance win in 2024, Vance might well be Rep front runner for 2028, against DeSantis or others.
The Young Earth Creation belief, which I reject but two of my sisters believe, is a clear anti-intellectuallism that gets emotional power from anti-elitism. Those lying elites who lied about the Russian Hoax, and just weeks ago were lying about Biden’s fitness even after the Hur Report.
Really, how is any worker’s life changed based on YEC vs Big Bang? Especially those of avg or lower IQ. I’m sure most church going YEC believers have less unstable lives than non-believers whose kids go to the same govt schools. Like Vance’s father being more stable, as a believer, than the divorced Mawmaw he chose.
The emphasis on the church service principally as a performance - (I remember having been away from church for some years, I was startled to find we were now clapping (!) for some (but not all lol, awkward) of the musical offerings) - opens the door to "pastors" who may be in it for other than the traditional reasons. They don't necessarily seem to be very stable characters. Sexual shenanigans seem de rigeur, and in a way that seems to me to connect to the perhaps unwise emphasis (fetish?) of Protestantism with how we are all sinners, until it practically goes round the bend.
I guess how much you can tolerate good-looking guy-with-a-guitar who couldn't make it professionally, having a captive audience on Sundays - depends on both your musical and religious tastes.
The great thing about the dull-enough service of the mainstream Presbyterian church of my childhood was how clockwork it was. It was *just enough*, in my view.
People then understood that the life of the church was not about a performance on Sundays, but on the parishioners' - and the church's - performance of its duties the rest of the week. Sunday school has I assume been appropriately downgraded as well, because Sunday school requires service, not passive auditing.
Always seemed to me that catholics hardly knew the scriptures and just practiced a rote version of Christianity. I am a Southern Baptist but I attended mass regularly with my wife so I do have a perspective.
I don't know about boedom (have you ever attended a tent Revival in the lower Midwest in August? :-) ), but 60 or so years ago I attended a wedding in a non-air conditioned Catholic church in July and actual 98 degree heat, where before the wedding the bride converted to Catholicism. I was surprised no one died of heat stroke.
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.
This reminds me of the laments of those (weakly) "pro-growth" urban progressives like Yglesias and Klein who complain that one unfortunate downside of their team's "way of governance" is to support, establish, and maintain all kinds of vetoes and impose all kinds of burdens, costs, and delays such as to make a lot of other progressive-favored initiatives impossible to achieve, i.e., they, "Can't get stuff done." For some of the more insightful progressives, the answer to, "This is why we can't have nice things," is, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Likewise, progressives may claim to favor the vibrantly diverse city experience, but their politicians can't actually govern it well in the interests of ordinary law-abiding taxpayers who just want to go about their lives in safety, comfort, and prosperity and without too much obnoxious bureaucratic difficulty, that is, the way plenty of other nice cities in other parts of the world are governed.
The people elect the government.
But a lot of these cities are effectively one Party jurisdictions.
Why?
Because the local Republican Party is uncompetitive due to social sorting and the nationalisation of Party politics.
What would the local Republican Party have to do to be competitive? What positions would you like it to adopt, which it doesn’t currently adopt, in order to win elections in these cities?
I remember a time when the Republican Party did win elections in cities. The politics of city republicans really hasn’t changed.
What happened was that the demographics of the cities kept moving left. They got less white, more single, and each generation moved further left culturally.
Voters are getting what the median voter wants. Maybe it’s skewed a bit leftwards by the two party system, but if voters hated it enough they would switch parties in either the primary or general to get different results. And my understanding is that many of these governance problems in western cities apply beyond two party systems. You’re just going to have to accept that this is the kind of life city people want, or at least are willing to live with.
Yes.
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.
Aaron Ross Powell's comment reminds one of that San Francisco denizen who a few months ago was equally chauvinistic about his city, notwithstanding the dystopian hell-hole it has become. When asked about car break-ins, he admitted had suffered four in the previous year, but thought it a small price to pay for living there in what I believe such folk call a "vibrant" environment.
It's a sad fact of the kind of typical mental mode of society that people have been trained to identify certain perfectly legitimate complaints as being right-wing or left-wing coded, and thus have their crimestop filters working overtime, stopping themselves from admitting - and even feeling - the kind of emotions and opinions that - were they not in danger of conceding a single point to the other team - would be the completely typical human reaction and consequence of their circumstances. The people who complain about SF being a S-hole are all right-wing, and since I'm on the left, I've got to be super proud of this S-hole, er, I mean, ultimate triumph and highest developmental level of human civilization, urban utopia, and literal paradise on earth.
Well described. I call this process self-enstupidation through ideological commitment. A person has made himself stupid when he can no longer see what is in front of his eyes or denies its significance.
"They’ve seen how strong, supporting, and endearing a culture of diversity, pluralism, religious diversity and secularism, and self-authorship can be."
Revealed preferences suggest otherwise. Liberal city-dwellers pay large sums of money to avoid diversity. From Stanford: "There is a long-standing assumption that large, densely populated cities inherently foster interactions with a diverse range of people. Analysis of 1.6 billion person-to-person encounters among 9.6 million individuals in the United States reveals that big cities are actually pockets of extreme segregation." Archived link: https://archive.ph/4nFjx.
Cities work wonderfully under Law and Order regimes
it's the literal meaning of civilization
but it's shit in the streets and casual crime under anarchotyranny
"diversity" doesn't contribute to the first condition and makes the later condition worse
I'm curious why you think diversity makes the second worse. And do you mean sometimes or always?
Beyond that, maybe you need to read "Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World," by Richard Cockett (2023). On that note, it's worth considering where we would be without cities. I don't see how we'd be better for it.
you are not curious at all
Maybe you should reevaluate who isn't curious.
how very ladylike of you
Cities - what??
1 - I suppose there are people who truly believe city culture doesn't work but is it anything close to a majority conservative view? I don't think so. I'd say the conservative view is that the most liberal cities tend to be the most corrupt and by some combination of corruption and liberal policy, they are run horribly. That is not the same as saying city culture does not work.
2 - When you posit that differing birth rates in various cities is contrary to Powell, are you implying something akin to what I just wrote?
2a - I'm curious if birth rates are all that much different in more rural locales.
“If it wasn’t grown it was mined” is a cranky bumper sticker I see sometimes.
It doesn’t make me smile, of course, as I know what its author probably does not acknowledge - that the same people who don’t respect native-born blue collar guys who work in extraction industries, are intent on replacing them with immigrants; not on preventing resource extraction. The latter is subordinate to the other, and will yield, and everyone - I do mean everyone - will lose.
When population growth is the Only Goal, you forfeit the right to any other goals or values you once held.
Still: a corollary bumper sticker might read - “If it wasn’t grown it was mined; and if was grown *or* mined, it wasn’t done so in your American city”.*
The civilizational flourishes and marvels (and horrors) achieved in cities prevent an honest reckoning of who underpins whom, in my view.
*Tucson excepted.
Vance noted in his book that his relatives believed themselves to be The Faithful, but they did so without ever much darkening the door of the church. I recall he cited church attendance figures.
So I don't know that he felt he was walking away from much of anything, if it exerted so little pull on his family.
This seems to me to be the natural end of Protestantism and personal Jesus: people feel themselves to be the arbiter of their own version of Christianity, needing none but themselves; and in their pride being unwilling to admit that there is a community-building and norm-preserving aspect of corporate worship.
Even the religious resurgence that exists in my red state, is intertwined with an allergic reaction to "church" or to any authority associated with it.
It relies on an ever-renewing flow of new non-denominational churches with names chosen to sound cool and announce - we're not Baptist (anymore! they often seem quite Baptist especially in their indifference to good works) or Methodist - or whatever. We're "The Stone" or "The Crossroads" or "The Well" or "The Gathering" or sometimes a geographic reference, to the Hills or the Oaks or the Ridge. (There's never one called "The Sprawl Church" or "The Place Beyond the C-store"; these have always an air of being a prosperous aspect of suburban development.)
I don't know exactly how their financial needs are met - if they've figured out some way to do that without tithing or passing the plate or getting old people to leave them their money, church-like.
Typically they start by meeting in a school auditorium or even as a "home church". Eventually they all seem to want to build an amphitheater and a coffeeshop.
Given the sorry state of Catholicism, is this so bad? The main issue here is that at some point your elite study physics, and become materialist atomists, and consequently hedonists. I don’t think even Muslims are able to retain their intellectual class as sincere believers. Only Israeli Jewish are able: see Aumann. How many Christian scientists are true believers and as outspokenly religious as him?
I imagine that depends on whether you think the Catholic Church “knew” things that are now in the process of being forgotten. If, for example, the average young person knows more than a priest steeped in Catholic teaching and tradition ever did or could know.
Certainly I grew up in a Protestant milieu vaguely anti-Catholic. There were many Catholics about, of course, some close family friends, so of course we were not anti-Catholics. But some of that old judgment - that it was “benighted”, that it kept you at an arm’s length from your awesome pal, God, that it had the wild baby-making (uugh) notion that life was for procreation within the family - was baked into the cake of even our deeply attenuated religious practice. We were Presbyterians, for the status reasons alluded to elsewhere in the thread: both grandmothers had been Baptists, and one still was.
The Presbyterians’ wan effort at dull doctrinal education was practically a religion committing harakiri.
It was many years later that I reflected that my life might have been very different had I been Catholic; that was quite an admission for arrogant me to make, and that despite - as you say - the Church being at a very low ebb, having been colonized by those with an entirely different agenda.
I was struck by that implicit distinction between "anti-Catholic" and "anti-Catholics". I've never seen it put that way before but I think it's very real.
And this was a great line, "The Presbyterians’ wan effort at dull doctrinal education was practically a religion committing harakiri."
I should add also that it was not the story of Jesus that I found unable to reconcile with modern life. It was actually the modern spin that God was this trivial thing, a friend who cared whether I did this or that thing on a given Tuesday after praying about it, who cared about me at all, that I found completely unsupported by experience and by dark genetic inheritance. Even though I attended an ordinary Presbyterian church, full of pleasant people and devoted mostly to the provision of children’s activities - no horrid Prosperity Gospel sort of place - yet I felt that materialism, even if only in the negative, was mostly what even mainstream Protestantism held out as the reward in life. This was incompatible with my only bedrock commitment, to conservation.
I think Powell certainly has a point, but he goes too far when he writes "the reason right-wing media is so dedicated to pushing false pictures of what it’s like to live in dense and cosmopolitan areas is because America’s cities are the wildly successful alternative to what the right-wing insists is the only possible successful world." I don't think most people on the right would argue, much less insist, that small town or suburban life is the only possible successful way to live. I think part of it is just a taste/preference issue, but also there's a clear way that the various problems of modern cities undermine the progressive worldview, and thus become a natural focal point of conservative rhetoric. You can probably think of a city or two across the Western World that has effectively become a one party state with an adjacent political monoculture. Is it all sweetness and light in said city? Have long-standing social ills been ameliorated there? Is there broadly shared prosperity in said city, across racial and social classes? Nope, nope, and nope.
I also wonder if there isn't just a bit of resentment about how a lot of rural areas have done poorly, economically, over the last 30-40 years or so, while more and more opportunities appear to be concentrated in a select few cities scattered across the country. Maybe the rise of remote work will change that to some degree.
I found Aaron Ross Powell’s piece to be very unimpressive. Unsupported assertions with two links to phenomena that cities in general do better than rural areas. That cities in general have advantages is why they have been pulling folk from rural areas for almost all recorded history. Indeed, a mark of social collapse is when cities stop doing that—as cities generally have been demographic sinks (as they generally are now), their populations start shrinking when that happens. That “blue” cities in the US have a series of problems is easily sustained: not least from the fact that they now have significant population outflows.
Something that will always stick with me with regard to cities...
"Kuehnle was historically corrupt, and as for the titans who built Atlantic City, my impression of the finished product is that they made a place I was highly motivated to get away from. But Kuehnle's approach to providing services seems like a distinct improvement on the governance in most of the places (including late-20th-century Atlantic City) I have lived in. Los Angeles County, where you get all the corruption and none of the competence, seems a lot more like the norm. In my experience only San Francisco mayor Willie Brown fit the once-valued political type described above: venal, jolly figures who occasionally accomplish something in the way of constituent service. The kind of leaders who move you to pay the highest compliment any resident can ever pay to any city: "This shithole could be worse.""
https://reason.com/2010/09/18/in-olden-times-government-coul/
"... far below the 2.1 needed to maintain the nation’s population without immigration"?
And we need to maintain a constant population why?
The list of reasons is actually a bit long but a shrinking population will always be short of workers and this greatly reduces economic and societal improvement.
Note: there's a lot not explained in that sentence but I'll leave it at that for now.
And still the 15th century succeeded the 14th - somehow …
Assuming your reference, in what way do you think the black death was a good thing?
I don't make moral judgements on (bacteria? I'm unclear); sorry, my brain doesn't work that way. I'm pointing out that the world didn't exactly come to an end (unless I'm misreading history) because population fell in some areas in the 14th century.
As I'm fond of pointing out, if you asked most people what the current world population was - they'd probably be off by a billion people. This is not an issue, as portrayed. The reason you can tell that is that the ways it conceivably might be an issue - are unmentionable. But old people, their soiled bottoms, I've heard about this pretty much on the regular for years. Kind of like I used to hear, when I was a teenager, that having children was very expensive and fraught and you shouldn't under any circumstances do it. It will be like a terrible afterschool special!
I'm a bit annoyed you suggest I was asking about bacteria. Surely you understand I was referring to life after the population shrunk.
The world not coming to an end is irrelevant to what I wrote.
The current population is also irrelevant to what I wrote. It is what it is. Current food shortages are smaller than when the population was far smaller and they have nothing to do with our ability to grow enough food. Besides that, I said nothing about growing the population, just against it shrinking.
The current population is hardly irrelevant to what you wrote. It is the most important fact about life in the planet, for life on the planet. Full stop.
How it falls may certainly be important, to those who live through it. But that will be owing less to its falling and more to the decisions that led to its artificial growth.
Plus, the Black Death made labor much more valuable and probably (may) have led to more serfs (or the equivalent) being separated from the land and able to seek their own fortune.
Yes, it is true that some serfs gained more freedom. Jobs in many trades were passed from parent to child and many were able to break this "rule" and change professions. It did not get worse for everyone. Great. But I'd argue life for most people who survived still got worse.
All of this is besides the point. The 14th and 15th centuries were a period when not much improved, regardless of how the population changed. It simply is not relevant to the implications involved today.
I see. So maybe if we nuke one quarter of the world’s population the rest of us will be better off.
The comments about Vance and anti-intellectual evangelicalism are interesting, given Vance’s (justified?) contempt for many intellectuals.
There is really no paradox or conflict there. Pining for the company of "quality intellectuals" means one eschews both the low-iq crowd and high-iq-but-low-quality scene.
In the 1950s if you wanted high status Christianity you converted to Episcopalians. But now Episcopalians and the like, in addition to just outright dying off, are essentially just wokeness.
I'm not sure the Catholic Church will prove a good home for these converts, and I say this as someone whom the label could apply to (stopped in childhood and came back in adulthood). At the end of the day the Catholic Church is basically a gay pedophile ring run by a Marxist Pope which is very into Open Borders. That may not apply to the rank and file, but in the Catholic Church especially that rank and file doesn't matter to the leadership due to celibacy and the hierarchy.
That isn't to say you can't find some great churches and church communities out in the exurbs, but in theory you could find the same in Protestantism.
I think there is an aesthetic attraction to the "beauty of the liturgy" and to church architecture. Some may not truly feel that, but it makes for a reason. Perhaps the slur-uttering, ill-educated Marxist pope will be no more to them than Santa Claus.
Some of the most beautiful liturgy I've seen personally was when, at a friend's invitation, I attended an Orthodox service (which church now fails me, but I understand the similarities are deep) that was simply beautiful.
I was raised in an environment that was kind of moderately Evangelical (there are real differences in the groups) mixed with a healthy dose of Catholicism. By age twelve I was pretty where I am now. Not an athiest or even an agnostic but someone who isn't even sure of the questions, let alone any answers.
So I tend to go by how people treat me. And I have found very good people of all the religions I have encountered. (And in a 35-year Academic life you encounter a bunch). But one memory sticks out in my mind. 40+ years ago I was in a very tough spot, personally, emotionally, psychologically. I was in a small community (1200) and pretty much everyone knew me. I was 'friends' with the local Methodist minister and the local Baptist parson (we had children the same age). You know who came to offer support? A guy I did a small amount of business who belonged to the local Assembly of God. He stayed with me off and on for hours, without talking about God or religion at all. He also organized some help for me from his church, all anonymously.
So. Just an anecdote.
I do tend to find that people who rank on Evangelicals and Pentecostals (and there are differences) have seldom really lived among them. Just sayin'
All such in my orbit, including some now gone, are indeed kind good people who would do anything for you.
But I would be lying if I said that I had found besides excellent examples of how to behave and be kind, wisdom among them. That lay with the frankly atheistic or at best agnostic members of my close circle. Who to be sure have no quarrel whatsoever with the religious impulse, far from it - even if they don’t share it.
And I have not been able to feel that God was quite so stunted a thing as to be fully represented through a perusal of one book, coupled with an incuriosity about the book of nature.
But the most important thing is to recognize that goodness may be in any one place, or any church, or temple or mosque - as well as another.
Just a personal thing, but if you assume God (or anything like God) exists and is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present, etc, why couldn't such a god, if he/she/it wanted, devise multiple "true" religions, each suited to different individuals and groups?
Then he wouldn’t get to amuse himself watching us kill each other over the one “true” religion, which would happen to maybe also have the derivative benefit of making the survivors better off, and for which God could then demand the credit from said survivors?
Eisenhower's parents were Mennonites then Jehovah's Witnesses, which were low status when he was a child, perhaps leading him to reject their faith as a born striver. He himself was an atheist from his youth who nevertheless had learned to speak the language of scripture which was occasionally convenient in his military and political career (which most people have a very false impression of.) His wife was a Presbyterian, and that church was still quite high status in the early 50s, and he was pressured to get baptized after getting elected, which he did ten days after his inauguration to keep up appearances, so to speak.
My impressions is that he was as fake a Christian as he was a "Republican", but while "Christian" meant something in the early 50s, ""Republican" back then didn't mean what it does today and after collapsing in FDRs wake from the 30s to the 60s had become a merely ideologically-hollow alternative-party-for-running-for-office-of-convenience. This was like Bloomberg being a Democrat before 2001, a fake """Republican""" from 2001-2007, and """Independent""" from 2007-2018, and then gave up the charade and went back to being a Democrat thereafter.
Wikipedia actually has an article on Eisenhower's famous quote, "And I don't care what it is". The article begins:
"And I don't care what it is" is a phrase attributed to U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, and often misquoted.[1]: 35–38 For example, one encyclopedia says: "Eisenhower once remarked that 'America makes no sense without a deeply held faith in God—and I don't care what it is.'"[2] Some commentators, such as Will Herberg, argued that Eisenhower favored a generic, watered-down religion, or ridiculed Eisenhower's banality.[1]: 38, 42, 44 Speaking extemporaneously on December 22, 1952, a month before his inauguration, Eisenhower actually said:
And this is how they [the Founding Fathers in 1776] explained those: "we hold that all men are endowed by their Creator..." not by the accident of their birth, not by the color of their skins or by anything else, but "all men are endowed by their Creator". In other words, our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is. Of course, it is the Judeo-Christian concept, but it must be a religion with all men being created equal.
Your description makes it sound like his ego was not particularly bound up with making a show of his irreligion or disturbing the conventions of the time.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/culture-circumstance-and-agency , the Aaron Renn review of Vance’s book, is even more important in understanding J.D. That review notes the huge problem of below average IQ for half the people, especially the working poor.
If Trump-Vance win in 2024, Vance might well be Rep front runner for 2028, against DeSantis or others.
The Young Earth Creation belief, which I reject but two of my sisters believe, is a clear anti-intellectuallism that gets emotional power from anti-elitism. Those lying elites who lied about the Russian Hoax, and just weeks ago were lying about Biden’s fitness even after the Hur Report.
Really, how is any worker’s life changed based on YEC vs Big Bang? Especially those of avg or lower IQ. I’m sure most church going YEC believers have less unstable lives than non-believers whose kids go to the same govt schools. Like Vance’s father being more stable, as a believer, than the divorced Mawmaw he chose.
So. Have they visited Minneapolis recently?
The emphasis on the church service principally as a performance - (I remember having been away from church for some years, I was startled to find we were now clapping (!) for some (but not all lol, awkward) of the musical offerings) - opens the door to "pastors" who may be in it for other than the traditional reasons. They don't necessarily seem to be very stable characters. Sexual shenanigans seem de rigeur, and in a way that seems to me to connect to the perhaps unwise emphasis (fetish?) of Protestantism with how we are all sinners, until it practically goes round the bend.
I guess how much you can tolerate good-looking guy-with-a-guitar who couldn't make it professionally, having a captive audience on Sundays - depends on both your musical and religious tastes.
The great thing about the dull-enough service of the mainstream Presbyterian church of my childhood was how clockwork it was. It was *just enough*, in my view.
People then understood that the life of the church was not about a performance on Sundays, but on the parishioners' - and the church's - performance of its duties the rest of the week. Sunday school has I assume been appropriately downgraded as well, because Sunday school requires service, not passive auditing.
Always seemed to me that catholics hardly knew the scriptures and just practiced a rote version of Christianity. I am a Southern Baptist but I attended mass regularly with my wife so I do have a perspective.
I don't know about boedom (have you ever attended a tent Revival in the lower Midwest in August? :-) ), but 60 or so years ago I attended a wedding in a non-air conditioned Catholic church in July and actual 98 degree heat, where before the wedding the bride converted to Catholicism. I was surprised no one died of heat stroke.