Posts Tagged ‘sociology’
“God has no religion”*…
For the last 15 years, the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) has done quantitative and qualitative research on religious values in the U.S. A recent study has generated a number of headlines, most focusing on a single issue– a good example: “People say they’re leaving religion due to anti-LGBTQ teachings and sexual abuse“… which is in fact a significant finding, but only one finding in a wide range of other interesting– and important– observations that emerge…
America encompasses a rich diversity of faith traditions, and “religious churning” is very common. In 2023, PRRI surveyed more than 5,600 adults across the United States about their experiences with religion. This report examines how well major faith traditions retain their members, the reasons people disaffiliate, and the reasons people attend religious services. Additionally, this report considers how atheists and agnostics differ from those who say they are “nothing in particular.” Finally, it analyzes the prevalence of charismatic elements as well as prophecy and prosperity theology in American churches and the role of charismatic Christianity in today’s Republican Party…
[Among the major areas explored…]
- “Unaffiliated” is the only major religious category experiencing growth…
- Catholic loss continues to be highest among major religious groups; white Evangelical retention rate has improved since 2016…
- While most disaffiliate because they stop believing, religious teachings on the LGBTQ community and clergy sexual abuse now play a more prominent role…
- The religiously unaffiliated are not a monolith…
- Most unaffiliated Americans are not looking for a religious or spiritual home…
- Church attendance among Americans is down and fewer Americans say religion is important; most Americans who attend religious services do so to feel closer to God…
- Exploring the prevalence of charismatic elements in American churches…
- Prophetic and Prosperity theological beliefs are more common among Republicans and African Americans…
- Religion and the MAGA Movement: The Role of Charismatic Christianity and Prophecy/Prophetic Beliefs in the Republican Party…
The state of faith in the U. S. and what it can tell us about our society: “Religious Change in America” from @PRRIpoll.
Apposite: “Ufologists, Unite!“– Nathaniel Rich‘s review of two books by D.W. Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington who (to oversimplify only slightly) sees the growing devotion to UFOs/UAPs as a new religious movement… one not considered in the PRRI study.
* Gandhi
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As we contemplate celestial conviction, we might recall that it was on this date in 1506 that the cornerstone of the current St. Peter’s Basilica was laid. (It was completed in 1626.) Located in Vatican City, an independent microstate enclaved within the city of Rome, it was initially planned in the 15th century by Pope Nicholas V and then Pope Julius II to replace the ageing Old St. Peter’s Basilica, which was built in the fourth century by Roman emperor Constantine the Great.
Designed principally by Donato Bramante, Michelangelo, and Carlo Maderno, with piazza and fittings by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, St. Peter’s is one of the most renowned works of the Italian High Renaissance. It is the largest church in the world (by interior measure). And while it is neither the mother church of the Catholic Church nor the cathedral of the Diocese of Rome (these equivalent titles being held by the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran in Rome), St. Peter’s is regarded as one of the holiest Catholic shrines. The pope presides at a number of liturgies throughout the year both within the basilica or the adjoining St. Peter’s Square, liturgies that draw audiences numbering from 15,000 to over 80,000 people.
“Your values become your destiny”*…
… and that could be an issue for the global order. People’s principles were expected to align as countries got richer; research suggests that instead they’re diverging. What happened?…
In 1981 over 40% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. But economic growth was starting to accelerate in developing countries. And Ron Inglehart, a professor at the University of Michigan, was organising a worldwide survey team to test the theory that, as peasant farmers escape poverty, they begin to think and behave differently, as people in the past had done when they joined the middle classes.
They might give a higher priority to education, to widening their children’s knowledge, than their own parents had done. They might give greater weight to their own experience and reasoning, and less to religious books or the authority of kings. And perhaps these new ways, these basic values, would begin to converge around the world. Such matters, Inglehart thought, could be tested by asking questions which revealed underlying values such as “How important is religion in your life?”, “Would you be happy living next to a foreigner?” and “Can you trust most people?”
Forty years later, only 8% of the world’s population is still in extreme poverty; more than half, on some measures, count as middle class. The World Values Survey (WVS), Inglehart’s baby, has become the world’s biggest social-research network. Every five years or so its researchers sally out into the field interviewing, at last count, almost 130,000 people in 90 countries. Yet its latest wave of results, which covers 2017-22, provides only partial endorsement of the idea that basic values tend to converge as people get richer. In significant ways, the differences between how people think in different parts of the world seem to be widening.
The Economist unpacks the data (with loads of helpful graphics), examines the possible causes at work, and looks to the future: “Western values are steadily diverging from the rest of the world’s” @TheEconomist.
* Gandhi
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As we contemplate culture, we might send carefully-observed birthday greetings to John Scott CBE FRSA FBA FAcSS; he was born on this date in 1949. A sociologist, he is best known for his work on economic and social networks, perhaps especially The Sage Handbook of Social Network Analysis and Conceptualising the Social World.
“The solution to poverty is to abolish it directly”*…
The idea of a guaranteed flow of funds to allow anyone and everyone to meet basic needs– as we’re currently discussing it, a universal basic income– has been getting significant attention in recent decades. But as Karl Widerquist explains (in an excerpt from his recent book, Universal Basic Income). “UBI” dates back as a concept– and as a practice– many centuries…
Support for Universal Basic Income (UBI) has grown so rapidly over the past few years that people might think the idea appeared out of nowhere. In fact, the idea has roots going back hundreds or even thousands of years, and activists have been floating similar ideas with gradually increasing frequency for more than a century.
Since 1900, the concept of a basic income guarantee (BIG) has experienced three distinct waves of support, each larger than the last. The first, from 1910 to 1940, was followed by a down period in the 1940s and 1950s. A second and larger wave of support happened in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by another lull in most countries through about 2010. BIG’s third, most international, and by far largest wave of support began to take off in the early 2010s, and it has increased every year since then.
[But] We could trace the beginnings of UBI into prehistory, because many have observed that “prehistoric” (in the sense of nonliterate) societies had two ways of doing things that might be considered forms of unconditional income…
From pre-historic nomads, through ancient Athens, to Thomas Paine and then Henry George, Widerquist unspools the history of UBI, then walks through the “three waves” that began in the early 20th century, concluding with the current state of the debate: “The Deep and Enduring History of Universal Basic Income,” from @KarlWiderquist and @mitpress.
For more on the recent history of the UBI debate, see Widerquist’s essay, “Three Waves of Basic Income Support.”
And for a peak at the results of (small, incomplete, but encouraging) experiments in this direction, see: “Places across the U.S. are testing no-strings cash as part of the social safety net,” from @NPR.
* Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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As we ponder poverty, we might send thoughtful birthday greeting to James Tobin; he was born on this date in 1918. An economist who contributed to the development of key ideas in the Keynesian economics of his generation, he made pioneering contributions to the study of investment, monetary and fiscal policy, and financial markets– for which he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1981.
Outside academia, Tobin is probably best known for his suggestion of a tax on foreign exchange transactions, now known as the “Tobin tax,” designed to reduce speculation in the international currency markets, which he saw as dangerous and unproductive.
And relevantly to the piece above, Tobin, Paul Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith and another 1,200 economists signed a document in 1968 calling for the U. S. Congress to introduce that year a system of income guarantees and supplements– a UBI.
“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star”*…
Last May, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author John Markoff was asked to write an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal on the heels of the murder in San Francisco of tech exec Bob Lee. The paper rejected his piece, leaving Markoff to “suspect that they were looking for more of a ‘drugs, sex and rock & roll’ analysis, which isn’t what they got. My 2005 book What the Dormouse Said is occasionally cited by people making the argument that there is some kind of causal relationship between psychedelic drugs and creativity. I have never believed that to be the case and I’ve always been more interested in sociological than psychological assessments of psychedelics.”
Happily for us, he has shared it on Medium…
The head-spinning speed with which the murder of software creator Bob Lee went from being a story about rampant crime in San Francisco to a sex and drugs tale of Silicon Valley excess says a great deal about the way the world now perceives the nation’s technology heartland.
Lee, who had gone from being a Google software engineer to become the creator of the mobile finance program Cash App, and who had more recently became the chief product officer for a crypto-currency company, is now alleged to have been stabbed to death by the brother of a wealthy socialite with whom Lee is thought to have had an affair.
On the surface it would seem to evoke something more out of a Hollywood soap opera than the world’s technology center. But the Valley is more complex than cases like Bob Lee, or dark takes on the evils of technology, suggest.
Silicon Valley has always been built around a paradox represented by the built-in tension between the open-source spirit of a hacker counterculture and the naked capitalist ambitions of Sand Hill Road, where the offices of its venture capitalists are concentrated.
Stewart Brand, who authored the Whole Earth Catalog in Menlo Park, Ca., at the same moment the high-tech region was forming in the 1960s, expressed the paradox most clearly at the first meeting of the Hackers Conference in 1984. In responding to Steve Wozniak, Apple’s cofounder, who was describing the danger of technology companies hoarding information, what the audience heard Brand say, was “information wants to be free.” Indeed, a decade later that became the rallying cry of the dot-com era, a period in which technology start-ups thrived on disrupting traditional commerce and railing against regulation.
But that is not what Brand said. He actually stated: “Information sort of wants to be expensive because its so valuable, the right information at the right point changes your life. On the other hand information almost wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.”
Brand had been influenced by social scientist Gregory Bateson who proposed the idea of “the double bind” to describe situations in which even when you win, you lose. Understanding that paradox, which was lost in translation, might have saved the Valley from some of the excess that has taken it into the dark territory it has found itself in recently.
From its inception, the very nature of Silicon Valley was about its ability to simultaneously allow diverse cultures to thrive. During the 1960s and 1970s, while Silicon Valley was being formed, you could easily drive from Walker’s Wagon Wheel in Mountain View, where crewcut hard-drinking computer chip designers gathered, to a very different long-haired scene in just up the road in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, which surrounded Stanford Research Institute, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, the three labs that pioneered the technologies that would become the modern personal computer and the Internet.
The paradox is perhaps best expressed in the formation of Apple Computer — a company that grew out of the separate interests of its two founders. One, Steve Wozniak was simply interested in building a computer to share with his friends at the Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist group founded by a convicted draft resister and a software engineer that would ultimately birth several dozen start-up PC hardware and software companies including Apple. Wozniak would combine his hacker’s instincts for sharing with Steve Jobs, who had the insight to realize that there would be a market for these machines…
…
… Silicon Valley engineers believed they were just one good idea away from becoming the next Jobs or Wozniak.
That deeply entrenched culture of risk-taking — and frequent failure — originally exemplified by the Gold Rush, today remains an integral part of the California and by extension Silicon Valley, Dream.
In recent weeks, much has been made of Lee’s partying life style, which included claims of recreational drug use and attendance at the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert, which began on a San Francisco Beach and is based on various anti-capitalist principles such as gifting, decommodification and radical inclusion. The festival, which grew out of the counterculture, has come to embrace a very different technology culture where attendees including Google founders, Sergay Brin and Larry Page and former CEO Eric Schmitt as well as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg often arrive by corporate jet. Certainly! Here’s an alternative rewrite for clarity: It has gained a reputation for surpassing the confines of a traditional California scene by integrating technology, art, drugs, and rock & roll, creating a unique and boundary-pushing experience.
Experimentation with psychedelic drugs has been a continuous theme for a subculture in Silicon Valley, going back to the 1960s when group that included engineers from Ampex and Stanford, created a research project to explore the relationship between LSD and creativity.
Yet despite this fascination originally with psychedelics and more recently in the idea of “microdosing” small amounts of LSD, the science has never been clear…
It is more likely that an alternative proposed by a group of social scientists at the Santa Fe Institute offers a more cogent explanation. Creativity, they argued, takes place at the edge of chaos. And that certainly describes the early Silicon Valley which emerged in the midst of a tumultuous time on the San Francisco mid-peninsula during the Sixties…
Eminently worth reading in full.
* Friedrich Nietzsche
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As we cultivate creative contradictions, we might recall that it was on this date in 1978 that Ward Christensen and Randy Suess launched the first public dialup computer bulletin board system, or BBS– the foundation of what would eventually become the world wide web, countless online messaging systems, and, arguably, Twitter.
It was several decades before the hardware or the network caught up to Christensen and Suess’ imaginations, but all the basic seeds of today’s online communities were in place when the two launched the first bulletin board…
“Bulletin Board Goes Electronic“
“Nations, as well as men, almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years.”*…
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post: assumptions in the developed West were that, as economic development progressed around the world, rising countries would become more liberal– just like us (or, at least just like the expert’s image of “us”). Similarly, there was an expectation by many that, as the U.S. and Europe continued to develop, their cultures and politics might become more homogenous. Alice Evans has a theory as to why that hasn’t happened…
In the West economic development spawned individualism and the spirit of ‘68. Modernisation theorists predicted that growth would deliver liberalism worldwide. Inglehart and Welzel argued that post-industrial societies would champion self-expression. But in fact, this has not transpired. Many prosperous places – like Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and South Korea – remain quite conservative. India’s economic growth has not delivered secularism, but Hindu nationalism.
What explains this global cultural divergence?
I have a theory:
- Cultural change occurs when bold rebels stick their necks out, champion some radical alternative, and successfully encourage wider defiance.
- In close-knit, collectivist societies, people care intensely about wider social approval, and tend to follow the herd. This suppresses individualism.
- Cultural tightness is much higher in societies where:
- Agriculture was extremely labour-intensive and required strong inter-dependence (e.g. rice or Andean potatoes), and/or
- Intensive kinship meant that commerce, cooperation and marriages were all rooted in a close-knit, endogamous community (tribe, clan or jati);
- Authoritarian governance represses dissent and reinforces despondency.
- In culturally tight societies (with labour-intensive agriculture or strong kinship intensity), then even as families grow richer, they still care for social approval. This suppresses individual resistance.
…
If you walk outside and do something weird, will anyone mind? India’s panchayats would certainly express disapproval and punish deviation. Such cultures are ‘tight’. The rules are known, conformity is widespread and subversion is abhorred. But head to São Paulo and no one will care. ‘Loose’ cultures like these are relatively tolerant and open-minded. There’s plenty of scope for self-expression.
Professor Michele Gelfand and co-authors’ international survey (spanning 33 countries across 5 continents) reveals a spectrum of ‘tight and loose cultures. People in tight cultures show greater self-control, conscientiousness, less littering, lower crime, more synchrony, stronger prejudice against outsiders, low immigration, low ethnic diversity, and more restrictions on public speech. Loose cultures are typically more open, tolerant, creative and over-weight.
Neither extreme is superior, these are just descriptively different cultures.
Within the US, there’s great cultural heterogeneity. Southern states have far higher rates of corporal punishment, executions and alcohol restrictions. In Texas in 2011, 28,000 school students were paddled or spanked. Alabama still criminalises the sale of sex toys. Tight states like these strongly opposed the Equal Rights Amendment.
Norm adherence isn’t just a function of self-regulation. Gelfand also emphasises institutions. Tight cultures tend to have more police per capita and security personnel. In Singapore, there are harsh punishments for littering, drug possession and even importing chewing gum. In some Chinese classrooms, webcams broadcast children’s behaviour, relaying footage to parents and school officials.
…
Our ancestors used to farm a rich variety of crops. Some were very labour intensive, requiring neighbourly cooperation.
A phenomenal new paper by Martin Fiszbein, Yeonha Jung and Dietrich Vollrath finds that in U.S. counties with labour-intensive crops, parents were more likely to give their children names that were common. This may indicate a desire for conformity. By contrast, in areas where farmers could be more self-sufficient, they chose names that were more individualistic. And when exogenous shifts propelled farmers into economic autonomy, they became even more self-expressive… Crops in the U.S. South were exceptionally labour intensive.
…
Economic interdependence seems to breed cultural conformity and collectivism. These are both examples of what Michele Gelfand calls ‘cultural tightness’. People in tight cultures show more synchrony, stronger prejudice against outsiders and more restrictions on public speech. Outraged by deviants, they tend to impose harsh punishments…
Fiszbein et al do not consider cultural tightness, but it does seem correlated with 19th century labour intensity [as one can see in comparing this map to the one above].
Globally, cultural tightness seems more common in places where farming was once extremely labour intensive and necessarily interdependent. Wet paddy rice required immense coordination. Thomas Talhelm argues that this encouraged East Asian collectivism. Students from rice-growing regions contribute more to public goods and harshly punish free-riders.
I was initially sceptical of the rice theory of culture. What about Confucianism and institutions? Fiszbein et al’s paper enables us to disentangle the two. Even under totally different, American institutions, agrarian interdependence nurtures conformity.
…
Strong kinship intensity keeps commerce and cooperation rooted around the family. This enables strong social policing and concern for wider approval.
Arabs continue to rely on wasta. Social connections are necessary to access jobs, secure permits, avoid trickery, and resolve conflicts. Even middle-class, professional Jordanians acquire social insurance from kin. Loyalty is also culturally esteemed: girls are encouraged to put family first, above narrow self-interest.
Caste remains imperative in India. Cities (especially the smaller ones) are rife with caste-based residential segregation. People remain dependent on close-knit networks, which maintain strict surveillance (messaging via Whatsapp)…
…
My theory can be tested empirically!
I predict that economic growth will foster more cultural liberalisation in societies
- historically reliant on crops with low labour intensity
- with weak kinship intensity.
Data-wise, I would recommend using the World Values Survey composite score of emancipative values over the past 15 years…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Why are some Rich Societies Conservative?” from @_alice_evans.
{Image at top: source]
* Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (in which he also relevantly observed: “I know of only two methods of establishing equality in the political world; every citizen must be put in possession of his rights, or rights must be granted to no one.”)
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As we contemplate culture, we might recall that it was on this date in 1890 that journalist Nellie Bly completed her 72-day trip around the world.
In 1888, Bly suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days into fact for the first time. A year later, at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889, with two days’ notice, she boarded the steamer Augusta Victoria, and began her 24,899-mile journey.
She brought with her the dress she was wearing, a sturdy overcoat, several changes of underwear, and a small travel bag carrying her toiletry essentials. She carried most of her money (£200 in English bank notes and gold, as well as some American currency) in a bag tied around her neck.
Bly traveled through England, France (where she met Jules Verne in Amiens), Brindisi, the Suez Canal, Colombo (Ceylon), the Straits Settlements of Penang and Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. Just over seventy-two days after her departure from Hoboken, having used steamships and existing railway lines, Bly was back in New York; she beat Phileas Fogg’s time by almost 8 days.
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