The failure of Liberalism (Regressive left) to deal with Islam

[jammies]

Originally Posted by peter12

Sorry, what quaint version is that? I have frequently called myself an existentialist Christian. Although I go to service frequently, I am not orthodox.

The quaint version that believes all Western progress is due to Christianity, and all important Western thought is Christian-derived.

[peter12]

Originally Posted by jammies

That's a fair question, and I don't know the answer - while I don't think much of the argument that society is becoming "less moral", the collapse of marriage has indeed had a hugely negative effect on the proper socialization of - especially - young men. Good fathers are important, most humans denied proper structure and hierarchy will take whatever they can find to replace it, no matter if that be otherwise entirely malign.

I suspect new familial institutions need to be created, maybe developed along the lines of the Israeli kibbutz, although that has been somewhat of a failed experiment. This is where we can look at more traditional societies, where grandparents and siblings and cousins are more involved in the upbringing of children, and try to reinvent that in a way that spreads the responsibility more equally among many adults rather than expecting mothers to do all the heavy work.

There are, contrary to what it might seem, many things I admire about less cosmopolitan societies. One thing I don't agree with, though, is the idea that different cultures are equal, or that some cultures aren't better than others. I realize that there was an understandable and entirely fair reaction against the pernicious idea that the white man was obliged to teach the benighted his civilized ways, when the white man wasn't all that civilized himself. Still, though, if your society doesn't accept basic human rights because your culture (hello Saudi Arabia!) believes women are chattel, your culture is inferior *in that way*, just as Canadian culture is inferior to, for example, Filipino culture in respect and caring for the aged.

That's the one myth of the left I really take issue with - cultural relativity. It's contradictory with the liberal idea of human progress, for one: if all cultures are equal, why even try to change your culture, since you're just going to end up with something different, and not better? It's a pessimistic view of humanity that is logically only consistent with fatalism.

If you accept that progress is possible, the inescapable conclusion is that some cultures really have progressed more, and are better, than others. This shouldn't be a cause for complacency and smug self-congratulations, but rather an opportunity to look at other cultures to see what *they* do better than *we* do, then to understand how they do it, and then to emulate them.

You know, this is a really good post.

[peter12]

Originally Posted by jammies

The quaint version that believes all Western progress is due to Christianity, and all important Western thought is Christian-derived.

In the mega-thread awhile back, I just argued that the ascendancy of Christianity was tied to the rise of humanist values. This is not controversial.

I used to get made fun of all the time around these parts for quoting Plato and Nietzsche - two very non-Christian thinkers.

I am inspired by Kierkegaard, a very unorthodox Christian.

I am with you that culture is complicated, and I certainly do not believe that Christianity is or should be a monochromatic blanket that sweeps up diverse, bad feelings, and replaces them with some drugged out peace and charity.

Rather, I see it as a complex challenge for us to solve our existential anxieties by following the Gospel. This is more than just Sunday liturgy, although that is very important as well.

[calgaryblood]

Originally Posted by peter12

The teleology (I am doubling down on fancy words) of Western liberalism is atomization and individualization. This is all well and good if you have the luck or the will to exist within or create a social environment that allows your individual skills to thrive.

I've mentioned Charles Murray's Coming Apart as a good first step into understanding why certain communities are thriving, and others are rapidly failing. Incidentally, more successful communities are strongly Christian or at least attend a church regularly.

Islam, with its mythos of dominance, war, and eschatological finality, enters into the personal void like nothing else.

If by strongly Christian you mean the white middle class Christians then yes, but you know there are black communities in the States who are living in third world conditions with extreme poverty? Or do they not fit your "Christian" agenda?

[peter12]

Originally Posted by calgaryblood

If by strongly Christian you mean the white middle class Christians then yes, but you know there are black communities in the States who are living in third world conditions with extreme poverty? Or do they not fit your "Christian" agenda?

No, quite the opposite, actually. What I meant is that on a fairly concrete scale, communities with a strong moral and religious centre tend to weather storms better than those without, especially given that Western social safety nets and institutions are decaying.

Religious communities provide charity, but also moral support, and indeed, judgement that help people who are down get back up.

[calgaryblood]

Originally Posted by peter12

No, quite the opposite, actually. What I meant is that on a fairly concrete scale, communities with a strong moral and religious centre tend to weather storms better than those without, especially given that Western social safety nets and institutions are decaying.

Religious communities provide charity, but also moral support, and indeed, judgement that help people who are down get back up.

Do you have anything to back this up?

And religious communities do provide charity and moral support but you know who else does as well? About 50 agencies downtown for the homeless, abused women, drug abusers and so on. And they do just fine doing it without being a church.

[peter12]

Originally Posted by calgaryblood

Do you have anything to back this up?

And religious communities do provide charity and moral support but you know who else does as well? About 50 agencies downtown for the homeless, abused women, drug abusers and so on. And they do just fine doing it without being a church.

Yeah, they are great. I'm not saying we shouldn't have a safety net or social benefits to help those who need it. However, government offices, while necessary, tend to change a community's social fabric, rather then become a part of it, given that they don't depend on the community for sustenance (like a church does - people have to sit in pews), but answer to a central office in another city run by people with myriad incentives.

This isn't a discussion about welfare reform. It is about what happens to communities when they fall apart, and the individuals who stay in the ruins have nothing to compel them to live productive, peaceful, and responsible lives.

As for back-up, one only has to look at increasing government spending, stagnating economies, and declining demographics to know that the Western welfare state faces profound change.

[peter12]

As for jammies comments about a return to a more broad, traditional definition of family, I completely agree.

There is a concept in Catholic political thought called subsidiarity. That is, political and economic structures must be allowed to adapt to their circumstances, but how they adapt is profoundly mysterious.

[wittynickname]

Originally Posted by peter12

No, quite the opposite, actually. What I meant is that on a fairly concrete scale, communities with a strong moral and religious centre tend to weather storms better than those without, especially given that Western social safety nets and institutions are decaying.

Religious communities provide charity, but also moral support, and indeed, judgement that help people who are down get back up.

Again:
Black communities have some of the strongest religious affiliations in the US. They attend church on par with religious conservatives.

Also, by the way, black fathers are more likely to be regularly present in their children's lives, according to the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/08/op...st-of-all.html

There's also the fact that crime in the US has dropped per capita just as the marriage rate has declined.

The "breakdown of traditional family" is a myth. Black communities are plagued with limited resources, poor education, excessive enforcement of archaic drug laws, excessive punishment for minor non-violent crimes, for-profit prisons which reward recidivism, etc.

Again, morality helps communities. Religion may or may not play a role in that.

[opendoor]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

What mechanisms do we have, in 2016, to properly socialize young men? Especially when growing numbers of young men have no stable father in their lives? The collapse of marriage as an institution among the poor - and increasingly the middle-class - has been a social (and economic) catastrophe.

Based on what? In the first half of the 20th century with higher mortality rates among younger adults, the percentage of children who grew up in single parent families isn't far off from what we see today. The only time period that saw markedly fewer single parent families was the '50s and '60s, and once those children came of age in the mid '60s to the 70s we saw some of the highest crime rates in history.

[peter12]

Originally Posted by wittynickname

Again:
Black communities have some of the strongest religious affiliations in the US. They attend church on par with religious conservatives.

Also, by the way, black fathers are more likely to be regularly present in their children's lives, according to the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/08/op...st-of-all.html

There's also the fact that crime in the US has dropped per capita just as the marriage rate has declined.

The "breakdown of traditional family" is a myth. Black communities are plagued with limited resources, poor education, excessive enforcement of archaic drug laws, excessive punishment for minor non-violent crimes, for-profit prisons which reward recidivism, etc.

Again, morality helps communities. Religion may or may not play a role in that.

Charles Murray's Coming Apart and Yuval Levin's Fractured Republic show in a systematic, quantitative analysis that you are wrong about the traditional family. I am well aware of the massive structural difficulties that plague many black urban communities.

Anyway, we can define community a bit better. I am speaking geographically. That is, people tied to a particular place at a definite time. This can change from city block to city block .

What we really discussing here is this: is a community better served with mosque, cathedral or church, or government-funded foundation at its centre? This is an important question, and distinctions can be made between all three.

[AcGold]

I'd be interested in seeing the operating costs of some churches, temples or mosques. The mormon temple in the NW has to be expensive just to maintain.

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by wittynickname

Also this whole "breakdown of marriage" is inane to me. Women nowadays don't have their success tied to being one half of a marriage, and thus often they choose not to tie themselves down. My parents both had a father present in their lives, but one of them was a PTSD riddled alcoholic and the other was an alcoholic, drug addicted pedophile. Just because fathers were present in those days doesn't mean they were always good fathers. It just meant that their wives had no option but to stick it out if they wanted to keep their kids.

Sorry, the jury is out there isn't any question that the decline of marriage and the increase of out-of-wedlock births a strongly correlated to economic decline and poverty.

How America's Marriage Crisis Makes Income Inequality So Much Worse (the Atlantic)

The rich and educated are more likely to marry, to marry each other, and to produce rich and educated children. But this virtual cycle turns vicious for the poor.

Marriage is the new class divide (the Globe and Mail)

Today, these classes live in two different worlds, one in which neo-traditional marriage is flourishing and one in which two-parent families are dying off. Ironically, the people who have constructed traditional families for themselves are often loath to condemn the behaviour of others, for fear of seeming unenlightened, intolerant or judgmental.

Originally Posted by jammies

That's the one myth of the left I really take issue with - cultural relativity. It's contradictory with the liberal idea of human progress, for one: if all cultures are equal, why even try to change your culture, since you're just going to end up with something different, and not better? It's a pessimistic view of humanity that is logically only consistent with fatalism.

If you accept that progress is possible, the inescapable conclusion is that some cultures really have progressed more, and are better, than others. This shouldn't be a cause for complacency and smug self-congratulations, but rather an opportunity to look at other cultures to see what *they* do better than *we* do, then to understand how they do it, and then to emulate them.

Well said. I wish I could thank this post twice.

Originally Posted by wittynickname

The "breakdown of traditional family" is a myth. Black communities are plagued with limited resources, poor education, excessive enforcement of archaic drug laws, excessive punishment for minor non-violent crimes, for-profit prisons which reward recidivism, etc.

But poor and working-class whites are now following the same trajectory in out-of-wedlock births, single-parent families, and economic decline.

Here's a thought-provoking column by David Brooks in the New York Times on the subject of family, morality, and decline.

The Cost of Relativism

Roughly 10 percent of the children born to college grads grow up in single-parent households. Nearly 70 percent of children born to high school grads do...

The first response to these stats and to these profiles should be intense sympathy. We now have multiple generations of people caught in recurring feedback loops of economic stress and family breakdown, often leading to something approaching an anarchy of the intimate life.

But it’s increasingly clear that sympathy is not enough. It’s not only money and better policy that are missing in these circles; it’s norms. The health of society is primarily determined by the habits and virtues of its citizens. In many parts of America there are no minimally agreed upon standards for what it means to be a father. There are no basic codes and rules woven into daily life, which people can absorb unconsciously and follow automatically.

Reintroducing norms will require, first, a moral vocabulary. These norms weren’t destroyed because of people with bad values. They were destroyed by a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that one way of behaving was better than another. People got out of the habit of setting standards or understanding how they were set.

Next it will require holding people responsible. People born into the most chaotic situations can still be asked the same questions: Are you living for short-term pleasure or long-term good? Are you living for yourself or for your children? Do you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires?

Next it will require holding everybody responsible. America is obviously not a country in which the less educated are behaving irresponsibly and the more educated are beacons of virtue. America is a country in which privileged people suffer from their own characteristic forms of self-indulgence: the tendency to self-segregate, the comprehensive failures of leadership in government and industry. Social norms need repair up and down the scale, universally, together and all at once.

People sometimes wonder why I’ve taken this column in a spiritual and moral direction of late. It’s in part because we won’t have social repair unless we are more morally articulate, unless we have clearer definitions of how we should be behaving at all levels.

[Coach]

Originally Posted by peter12

What we really discussing here is this: is a community better served with mosque, cathedral or church, or government-funded foundation at its centre? This is an important question, and distinctions can be made between all three.

Isn't the answer to this obvous? I know a lot of people feel the government is a boogyman, but at it's most basic principal, it is a representive of the community.

The other three things you mentioned are exclusive organizations that tell lies to their children and make them believe in fairytales to try and guide their morality instead of teaching them what is really right and what is really wrong. It's this is wrong/right because God/Allah/Whatever said it is. And that entity is all-powerful and all-knowing and so you can never question their word.

Assuming you believe the church is the best option, what happens when a Muslim family moves to town, and their child is exluded due to their differences? The church doesn't necessarily teach these things (or shouldn't), but the very idea that thuis kid belongs to a different "club" than you do, one that your parents might tell you is weird and dangerous, has made that kid an outcast long before he showed up.

We have grown in different pockets of the world, with different environments and growth conditions, but now we are all connected. There is no way to change it, there's no way to go back. We need to decide what is and isn't okay under one code of morality. How can we unite that? Who knows, but it's not going to happen under one religion. Religion, in it's traditional forms, is dead. These people tearing through the ME and blowing up random innocent people are doing so because they feel their beliefs being left behind by everyone else. They're trying to keep their faith alive and have reached the desperation point. To be frank, it'll will probably happen (probably on a much smaller scale) in the US and other parts of the religious west when people start wanting to take the word "God" out of official documents, off money, etc...

[opendoor]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

Sorry, the jury is out there isn't any question that the decline of marriage and the increase of out-of-wedlock births a strongly correlated to economic decline and poverty.

How America's Marriage Crisis Makes Income Inequality So Much Worse (the Atlantic)

The rich and educated are more likely to marry, to marry each other, and to produce rich and educated children. But this virtual cycle turns vicious for the poor.

Any article that uses the 1950s as some sort of baseline for two parent family rates (or much of anything) is flawed. The postwar '50s era was the outlier, not the baseline.

In Canada at least, in the '20s and '30s about 12% of families were lone-parent families and 3% of all children lived in a household where neither of their parents were present. In the 2011 census, 16.3% of all families were headed by a single parent and only 0.5% of children lived without either of their parents in the household. So not a massive difference from today if you're looking at what portion of children grow up in two parent households.

And like I mentioned above, for all the harmony of the first decade or two after the second world war, the children who were brought up in that era ended up being the most criminal generation of the last century. The murder rate in the United States for instance is less than half of what it was at its peak in the '70s.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by wittynickname

Again:
Black communities have some of the strongest religious affiliations in the US. They attend church on par with religious conservatives.

Also, by the way, black fathers are more likely to be regularly present in their children's lives, according to the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/08/op...st-of-all.html

There's also the fact that crime in the US has dropped per capita just as the marriage rate has declined.

The "breakdown of traditional family" is a myth. Black communities are plagued with limited resources, poor education, excessive enforcement of archaic drug laws, excessive punishment for minor non-violent crimes, for-profit prisons which reward recidivism, etc.

Again, morality helps communities. Religion may or may not play a role in that.

US Crime is likely down due to access to abortions (Levit) or the reduction in lead in the environment(forget which economist proports this theory.)

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by opendoor

Any article that uses the 1950s as some sort of baseline for two parent family rates (or much of anything) is flawed. The postwar '50s era was the outlier, not the baseline.

In Canada at least, in the '20s and '30s about 12% of families were lone-parent families and 3% of all children lived in a household where neither of their parents were present. In the 2011 census, 16.3% of all families were headed by a single parent and only 0.5% of children lived without either of their parents in the household. So not a massive difference from today if you're looking at what portion of children grow up in two parent households.

And like I mentioned above, for all the harmony of the first decade or two after the second world war, the children who were brought up in that era ended up being the most criminal generation of the last century. The murder rate in the United States for instance is less than half of what it was at its peak in the '70s.

Setting any moral considerations aside, the 50s to the 80s saw the era of greatest economic egalitarianism in North America. Returning to the stark inequities of the Gilded Age, with rigid classes built on yawning disparities in education and family origins, is something to be avoided, I would think. Marriage is a bulwark against poverty, for the simple reason that we live in a society that requires two incomes to provide a family with most of the basic trappings of a secure present and a hopeful future.

[RyZ]

n/a

[rubecube]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

Setting any moral considerations aside, the 50s to the 80s saw the era of greatest economic egalitarianism in North America.

And which that generation completely trashed throughout the 80s and 90s in favour of trickle down economics. I'm surprised you don't see that the collapse of marriage and the traditional family is as much a result of intense class-stratification as a cause of it. Also I wonder how thorough any analysis is when it strictly focuses on marriage and doesn't include co-habitating, unmarried parents.

[peter12]

Originally Posted by rubecube

And which that generation completely trashed throughout the 80s and 90s in favour of trickle down economics. I'm surprised you don't see that the collapse of marriage and the traditional family is as much a result of intense class-stratification as a cause of it. Also I wonder how thorough any analysis is when it strictly focuses on marriage and doesn't include co-habitating, unmarried parents.

That probably had more to do with structural features of the global economy than specific Reagan policies, which actually just ended up providing a brief respite from changes that were already coming - ie. increasing global access to technology, free trade with Asia, demographic decline, etc...