A family is a cartel, it has always been so. What are known as traditional family values are compensations for the failures of the government. The objective of a family then is to overcome the State and provide an unfair advantage to its young. This was, until recently, done by a network of relations often living in the same house. And the young appeared to respect the old because the old were useful. The same reason why a poor man’s son is more likely to rebel against his father than a rich man’s son. As the society prospered the family discarded its peripheral relations because they were not required, but the smallest efficient unit is still the nuclear family and not the individual.
The Post-Indiana Future for Christians
Say, for example, that a Catholic school had no trouble hiring a chemistry teacher who openly advocated for same-sex marriage, because that teacher was in the school to teach chemistry. His views on gay marriage are irrelevant, in practice. The school may have a different standard for hiring its religion teachers, or its social studies teachers, requiring them to be more doctrinally in line with the Church. But that is a distinction that may not hold up in court under challenge, Kingsfield said.
The result could be that religious schools have to start policing orthodoxy in terms of all their hires — a situation imposing standards far more strict than many schools may wish to live by, but which may be necessary to protect the school’s legal interests.
.. “I think it would be really wise for small religious institutions to think hard if they can cut the cord of federal funding and can find wealthy donors to step in.”
.. “There was a professor at Penn last year who wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education calling for the end of accrediting religious colleges and universities,” Kingsfield said. “It was a Richard Dawkins kind of thing, just crazy. The fact that someone taking a position this hostile felt very comfortable putting this in the Chronicle tells me that there’s a non-trivial number of professors willing to believe this.”
.. “In California right now, judges can’t belong to the Boy Scouts now. Who knows if in the future, lawyers won’t be able to belong to churches that are considered hate groups?” he said. “It’s certainly true that a lot of law firms will not now hire people who worked on cases defending those on the traditional marriage side. It’s going to close some professional doors. I certainly wouldn’t write about this stuff in my work, not if I wanted to have a chance at tenure.
.. What happened to Brendan Eich” — the tech giant who was driven out of Mozilla for having made a small donation years earlier to the Prop 8 campaign — “is going to start happening to a lot of people, and Christians had better be ready for it.
.. There is a bitter irony in the fact that gays coming out of the closet coincides with traditional religious people going back into the closet.
.. “Basically, it says that culture comes through your peer group,” he said. “The most important thing is to make sure your kids are part of a peer group where their peers believe the same things. Forming a peer group is hard when it’s difficult to network and find other parents who believe what you do.”
.. It will no longer be sufficient to be part of a congregation where people are at odds on fundamental Christian beliefs, especially when there is so much pressure from the outside world. I thought of Neuhaus’s Law: where orthodoxy is optional, it will sooner or later be proscribed. It is vital to find a strong church where people know what they believe and why ..
.. “We need to study more the experience of Orthodox Jews and Amish,” he said. “None of us are going to be living within an eruv or practicing shunning. What we should focus on is endogamy.”
.. “Intermarriage is death,” Kingsfield said. “Not something like Catholic-Orthodox, but Christian-Jew, or high church-low church. I just don’t think Christians are focused on that, but the Orthodox Jews get it. They know how much this matters in creating a culture in which transmitting the faith happens. For us Christians, this is going to mean matchmaking and youth camps and other things like that. It probably means embracing a higher fertility rate, and celebrating bigger families.”
.. Because of liberal culture, and its demonization of Christians as the Other. President Obama will speak out for the Yazidis, but not for the Iraqi Christians, he said. When he talks about the martyred Egyptians in Libya, he doesn’t acknowledge that they were killed for being Christians. It’s simply a fact that there is tremendous animus against Christians within the liberal culture, and that liberal elites will tolerate things from Orthodox Jews and Muslims that they will not from Christians.
.. Christians should put their families on a “media fast,” he says. “Throw out the TV. Limit Netflix. You cannot let in contemporary stuff. It’s garbage. It’s a sewage pipe into your home. So many parents think they’re holding the line, but they let their kids have unfettered access to TV, the Internet, and smartphones. You can’t do that.
.. “I could still imagine having a kid who was really strong in his faith, and believing that God was calling him to going to a prestige college. I’m not ready to say ‘never’ for that, but I do think there are a lot of kids that we need to steer away from such hostile places, and into smaller, reliably Christian schools where they can be built up in their faith, and not have to deal with such hostility before they’re strong enough to combat it.”
.. “That generation is superseded by Social Justice Warriors in their thirties who don’t believe that they should respect anybody who doesn’t respect them,” Kingsfield said. “Those people are going to be in power before long, and we may not be protected.”
Death Is Optional: A Conversation: Yuval Noah Harari, Daniel Kahneman
Your chapter on science is one of my favorites and so is the title of that chapter, “The Discovery of Ignorance.” It presents the idea that science began when people discovered that there was ignorance, and that they could do something about it, that this was really the beginning of science. I love that phrase.
.. The main thing, and my main task as a historian is to get people to consider the possibilities which usually are outside their field of vision, because our present field of vision has been shaped by history and has been narrowed down by history, and if you understand how history has narrowed down our field of vision, this is what enables you to start broadening it.
.. we’re in the middle of a revolution in medicine. After medicine in the 20th century focused on healing the sick, now it is more and more focused on upgrading the healthy, which is a completely different project. And it’s a fundamentally different project in social and political terms, because whereas healing the sick is an egalitarian project … you assume there is a norm of health, anybody that falls below the norm, you try to give them a push to come back to the norm, upgrading is by definition an elitist project.
.. And many people say no, it will not happen, because we have the experience of the 20th century, that we had many medical advances, beginning with the rich or with the most advanced countries, and gradually they trickled down to everybody, and now everybody enjoys antibiotics or vaccinations or whatever, so this will happen again.
.. the 20th century, it’s the era of the masses, mass politics, mass economics. Every human being has value, has political, economic, and military value, simply because he or she is a human being, and this goes back to the structures of the military and of the economy, where every human being is valuable as a soldier in the trenches and as a worker in the factory.
.. But in the 21st century, there is a good chance that most humans will lose, they are losing, their military and economic value. This is true for the military, it’s done, it’s over. The age of the masses is over. We are no longer in the First World War, where you take millions of soldiers, give each one a rifle and have them run forward. And the same thing perhaps is happening in the economy. Maybe the biggest question of 21st century economics is what will be the need in the economy for most people in the year 2050.
.. Yes, the attitude now towards disease and old age and death is that they are basically technical problems.
.. And if you think about it from the viewpoint of the poor, it looks terrible, because throughout history, death was the great equalizer.
.. The basic process is the decoupling of intelligence from consciousness. Throughout history, you always had the two together.
.. The problem is different, that the system, the military and economic and political system doesn’t really need consciousness.
.. It needs intelligence. And intelligence is a far easier thing than consciousness. And the problem is, computers may not become conscious, I don’t know, ever … I would say 500 years … but they could be as intelligent or more intelligent than humans in particular tasks very quickly.
.. because we are undergoing, for thousands of years, a process of specialization, which makes it easier to replace us. To build a robot that could function effectively as a hunter-gatherer is extremely complex. You need to know so many different things. But to build a self-driving car, or to build a “Watson-bot” that can diagnose disease better than my doctor, this is relatively easy.
.. Once you really solve a problem like direct brain-computer interface … when brains and computers can interact directly, to take just one example, that’s it, that’s the end of history, that’s the end of biology as we know it. Nobody has a clue what will happen once you solve this.
.. In the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, what humanity basically learned to produce was all kinds of stuff, like textiles and shoes and weapons and vehicles, and this was enough for the very few countries that underwent the revolution to subjugate everybody else. What we’re talking about now is like a second Industrial Revolution, but the product this time will not be textiles or machines or vehicles, or even weapons. The product this time will be humans themselves.
.. If a country, if a people, today are left behind, they will never get a second chance, especially because cheap labor will count for nothing. Once you know how to produce bodies and brains and minds, cheap labor in Africa or South Asia or wherever, it simply counts for nothing. So in geopolitical terms, we might see a repeat of the 19th century, but in a much larger scale.
.. The problem is more boredom, and what to do with people, and how will they find some sense of meaning in life when they are basically meaningless, worthless.
.. My best guess at present is a combination of drugs and computer games as a solution for most … it’s already happening. Under different titles, different headings, you see more and more people spending more and more time, or solving their inner problems with drugs and computer games, both legal drugs and illegal drugs. But this is just a wild guess.
.. According to the most moderate estimates, 20 million people were killed in the Taiping Rebellion, and it was 14 years before they suppressed it. He didn’t establish a Kingdom of Heavenly Peace, and he didn’t solve the problems of industrialization
.. We should be looking for new knowledge and new solutions, and starting with the realization that in all probability, nothing that exists at present offers a solution to these problems.
.. If you go back in most periods in history, say to the middle ages, you do see peasant uprisings. They all failed, because the masses were not powerful. And once you become superfluous, militarily and economically, you can still cause trouble, of course, but you don’t have the power to really change things.
.. The most obvious example is the collapse of the family and of the intimate community, and their replacement by the state and the market. Basically, for the entirety of history, humans lived as part of these small and very important units, the family and the intimate community, say 200 people, who are your village, your tribe, your neighborhood. You know everybody; they know you. You may not like them, but your life depends on them. They provide you with almost everything you need in order to survive. They are your healthcare. There is no pension fund; you have children, they are your pension fund. They are your bank, your school, your police, everything. If you lose your family and the intimate community, you’re dead, or you have to find a replacement family.
.. Some experts think that agriculture was the biggest mistake in human history, in terms of what it did to the individual. It’s obvious that on the collective level, agriculture enhanced the power of humankind in an amazing way. Without agriculture, you could not have cities and kingdoms and empires and so forth, but if you look at it from the viewpoint of the individual, then for many individuals, life was probably much worse as peasants in ancient Egypt then as hunter gatherers 20,000, 30,000 years earlier.
.. Putting all this together, there is a good case to be said for the idea that for the individual, agriculture was perhaps the biggest mistake in history.
The Real Story of the American Family
Richly researched and compellingly argued, these books show how, in just a few decades, falling wages and increasing job insecurity overturned the family patterns of the archetypical representatives of “traditional family values”—people without any “legacy of slavery” or generational history of family instability. In doing so, the authors demonstrate that current trends in marriage and unwed childbearing are more consequence than cause of America’s increasing economic insecurity and inequality.
.. The postwar white working-class male-breadwinner family was a historical aberration, but it was accompanied by such an improvement in living standards that it’s small wonder it has become the subject of nostalgia. Never before had so many men with a high school education or less been able to get jobs that paid significantly more than their fathers had earned at the same age and that allowed them to comfortably support a family on their earnings alone.
.. During the 1960s, African Americans gained more access to manufacturing jobs, becoming even more dependent than whites on industrial employment for economic security. As a result, deindustrialization in the 1970s was especially devastating to blue-collar African American families.
.. Real-life experiences, not abstract preaching, imbued him with the sense that deferring gratification and sticking it out would end up paying off.
.. He offers a withering critique of Charles Murray’s claim that men have lost the work ethic of the traditional laboring class. Rather, he argues, “the defining problem of high-school educated young adults is that they cannot become working-class.”
.. But now that a woman has at least some earnings potential, it makes less sense to hitch herself to a man who might lose his job, leaving her with one more mouth to feed.
.. Overall, among single adults ages 25 to 34, according to a Pew Research Report released last October, there are only 84 currently employed single men for every 100 single women, and only 51 currently employed single black men for every 100 single black women.
.. Other things being equal, low-income men are not more likely to abuse their wives than high-income men. But when a man has low earnings or no earnings andadheres to traditional gender ideologies, he is especially likely to do so.