A reader brought it to my attention that on Chrome/Firefox the new theme was forcing registration. That was not the setting in WordPress, but the caprice of the theme. An issue I did not notice because I am always registered. I’ve reverted to the old theme, which does not seem to have the problem with slow page load at this time. If it does in the future, I will switch to a new theme, though make sure that the commenting system remains de facto functional.

Sorry about that.

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In an otherwise fascinating column on Japan’s peculiar demographics, Ross Douthat presents one misleading fact:

Japan is facing such swift demographic collapse, Eberstadt’s essay suggests, because its culture combines liberalism and traditionalism in particularly disastrous ways. On the one hand, the old sexual culture, oriented around arranged marriage and family obligation, has largely collapsed. Japan is one of the world’s least religious nations, the marriage rate has plunged and the divorce rate is higher than in Northern Europe.

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These problems are still with us, and some of them are worse than ever. But they haven’t left us in anything like the plight the Japanese are facing. Our family structures are weakening, but high out-of-wedlock birthrates may be preferable to no births at all. We assimilate immigrants more slowly than we should, but at least we’re capable of assimilation. American religion can be shallow, narcissistic and divisive, but our religious institutions still supply solidarity and uplift as well. Our economy is weak and our deficits are large, but at least we aren’t asking the next generation to bear the kinds of burdens that today’s under-30 Japanese will someday have to shoulder.

From this piece you might infer that Japan has gone through a more radical secularization than the USA. But the World Values Survey has data from 1980 down to the mid-2000s. Below are the results for Japan, the USA, and Sweden (the last as a “control”).

People tend to view other societies through their own experience. So, for example, one presumes a circumstance of modernization where societies become progressive more secular, and less coupled to institutional religion. That’s how it happened in the West. But this is not the case with East Asia. On the contrary, it is a defensible proposition that in East Asia modernization has been coupled with the rise of robust institutional religions! (e.g., South Korea) East Asia has long had weak traditions of organized religion, and the political orders have always managed to maintain the subordinate status of religious institutions.

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Ross Douthat has a provocatively titled book out, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, so he’s making the media rounds. In general I find Douthat to be an interesting thinker, but there is one domain where I feel that he lacks a proper sense of balance, and that is in the domain of religion. By this, I don’t mean that I disagree with his belief in Roman Catholic Christianity. I do, but that’s a rather conventional disagreement. Rather, Douthat seems to perceive religious history and the relationship of religion to societies through the eyes of a nerd. It seems in his world that the particular theology of a religion is of greater import. Not simply because he happens to believe that the theology of his own religion, Christianity, is true, but because he believes that that theology has material consequences on the world around us.

Consider his most recent post in Slate. Let’s look at two passages:

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Recently I watched this Christian duet’s paean’s ode to Rick Santorum and was struck by the references to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I am aware that Christian conservatives have a “Constitutionalist” focus, and often suggest that the Founding Fathers were “Bible believing Christians.” In regards to the latter the historical record speaks rather easily on this issue because many of the founders were men of letters, and have left their opinions. Aside from a few exceptions such as Thomas Paine and Ethan Allen most would have accepted the appellation Christian, but then again most Mormons also assert that they are Christians. Unitarian Christians such as John Adams explicitly rejected Trinitarian Christianity.

In other words, by and large a substantial proportion were heretics from a modern conservative Christian perspective. Others, such as Thomas Jefferson exhibited skepticism of revealed religion more generally over most of his adult life; even producing a bowdlerized Bible. Again, as noted above aside from Paine and Allen most of the founding generation of American statesmen would not be confused with militant secularists. Their cultural presuppositions and contexts were radically different. But they were a generation which matured during an era where educated elites tended to view belief in institutional supernatural religion with more indulgence than sincere ardor.

But it is issue of cultural presuppositions that I want to get back to, as this is actually the largest rupture with the conservative Christian patriotic paradigm which strikes me. The American republic organized as a federal entity was a radical break with thousands of years of human history, explicitly separating the sacral and the profane. The radicalism of the American republic existed int the political dimension, certainly. Many thinkers were skeptical that republican forms of governance scaled upward in size. The failure of ancient Rome being the classical example known to all educated men of the era. But another issue from a mainstream perspective was the tearing away of the divine sanction which a political order must receive. The decoupling of faith and state was a great innovation (only a few American states had done so at the time!). We know now that the rise of the state and civilized political order was accompanied by the liberal mixing of religion and politics. Many of the early states which were vehicles for antique civilizations were famously more religious than political in character. But the American republic took the process of secularization farther than had been conceivable. I can grant the proposition that even the Deist founders might be curious and confused as to the details and passions of church-state separation policy in today’s America. But I do not think that that negates the radicalism of their secularism in their age.

All this goes to show that modern political movements draw inspiration from the past, but they refashion the past to suite current propositions. I have had friends of Left-liberal persuasion who have suggested that the founders were pioneers in multiculturalism! Again, I doubt that the founders would even recognize terms of the debate. As a factual matter both the Right and the Left draft the past to suit present ends. This is not wholly without merit or utility. We see the past darkly, collectively and personally. So long as we can separate the past as a positive and empirical matter, and a romantic, almost mytho-poetic one, cold truth and nurturing falsity can coexist usefully. For much of the population the lived reality is that positive matters of truth are of little concern. They are consumers of fiction and the novel, not connoisseurs of monographs. The key is to keep a balance between the reality that was, and the myths we cherish going forward.

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Alain de Botton and Robert Wright have a long discussion about atheism and the “need for religion” (or at least the exoteric accoutrements of religion). But the conversation seems ahistorical. Confucianism seems to address many of their “wants”; that is, a moralistic framework that makes positive claims with communitarian presuppositions which are not necessarily contingent upon supernatural agents.

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The previous theme was slowing down the loading of this website. So for now we’re switching to this.

Admin

Talking about his recent health issues, and its effect on his life. Obviously I won’t be praying for him, but definitely hoping he’s back to 110% as soon as possible.

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Tax Cheats Become Italy’s Public Enemy:

In addition to banning cash transactions, the effort has included an ad campaign comparing tax evaders to parasites. There have been headline-grabbing controls focusing on stores, hotels and restaurants in affluent Italian cities. For good measure, tax officials have also been stopping luxury cars and asking drivers to show their licenses, along with their most recent tax returns.

This sort of behavior on the part of public officials is not going to happen in the USA. We have “rights.” But, I think those rights can only exist because the USA has enough social capital that the government receives a sufficient amount of taxes from an honest citizenry. Rights are not abstractions or axioms, but derive from concrete realities.

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In the wake of the conference, where I presented my own vision for conservatism from the perspective of an atheist/secular humanist:

- The audience was overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, Left-liberal

- The age distribution was bimodal. There was a minority of students around the age of ~20, and many older people around the age of ~65.

- The attendees were overwhelmingly white. There were a smattering of African Americans, I was one of two South Asians, and both of us had to represent all of Asia from what I could tell.

- These demographic notes are of interest because secularism increases monotonically down the age distribution. So the bimodality is peculiar, though explainable (e.g., these are the two age groups with the most time to go to conferences).

- Additionally, Asian Americans are more secular than white Americans. In particular East Asian Americans. But none attended the conference.

- After my presentation several people approached me, some of relative prominence within the “secular community,” and admitted that they agreed with the “conservative position on immigration.” Some from a population growth perspective, and some from a law & order perspective.

- The talk was well received, and to my surprise Ron Bailey’s argument for libertarianism drew more audience ire. My surprise was due to the fact that I positioned myself as firmly not a liberal, while Ron implicitly argued that libertarianism is just a variant of liberalism.

- I had great discussions with young progressive/liberal students who were totally amazed to meet someone outlining conservative positions (e.g., the coherency of the nation-state, the value of collective identities, etc.) in a manner comprehensible to them. There are two major things that I think are notable in this:

1) A great deal of elite mainstream political discussion is not Left/Right but insider/outsider. I tend to take an outsider position, and this is appealing to populist progressives. When viewing the “other side” people naturally emphasize the insider aspects of their enemies and the outsider aspects of their own coalition. Both the main street Left and Right therefore have a selective hostility toward elites.

2) But at the level of the masses the discussion tends to be cartoonish. Many of the people I met only knew non-elite conservatives in the context of their family, and political arguments obviously degenerated into insults which are easy to dismiss (many of them were dissenters from the religious and political norms of their extended families).

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The story about a Pennsylvania atheist activist who dressed up like a “Muhammad Zombie” has been covered mostly by atheist activists and conservative publications. What seems to have happened is that the victim was dressed up as “Muhammad Zombie” during a Halloween parade, and seems to have been assaulted by an enraged Muslim. The video of the incident went viral:

The main issue people have been focusing on is that the judge seems to have had more sympathy for the attacker than the victim, going so far as to lecture the victim on his insensitivity and the consequences which might have ensued in a Muslim country. But for me this is the most important point: “According to ABC 27, Elbayomy thought it was a crime to depict Muhammad and had joined Perce in calling police.” How is it that we allow immigrants into this country who don’t even understand the importance of free speech in American society? Secondarily, how is it that, even if the judge did not have enough evidence to support the allegations of assault, did not lecture the alleged attacker that in his adopted nation free speech is close to inviolable?

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