sociology
Where is religiosity growing, where is it receding, and what does that tell us?: Sociologists
The data that made nobody happy Pew’s 2015 report projected that by 2050, the global share of religiously unaffiliated people will decline from 16 percent to 13 percent. Not because people are deconverting less, but because secular populations have far fewer children.... Where is religiosity growing, where is it receding, and what does that tell us?: Evangelical revival
Marta’s sister Our congregation in Campinas doubled between 2019 and 2024. Not because we advertised. Because a woman named Marta brought her sister, and her sister brought her neighbor, and the neighbor’s husband came one Sunday because his business was failing and someone told... Is moral progress real?: Power analysts
Six words the celebrations skipped January 31, 1865. The House passed the Thirteenth Amendment. The galleries erupted. One hundred fifty years later, the documentary 13th opened with the amendment’s text and held on six words: "except as a punishment for crime." Convict leasing... What does developmental history reveal that's hard to see any other way?: Developmentalists
The convergence In 1948, forty-eight nations voted for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The document was drafted primarily by people whose governments had, within living memory, denied those rights to most of the human race.... If machines do most of the work, what do the humans do?: Virtue and vocation
Ora et labora In 529, Benedict of Nursia wrote a Rule: prayer and work. Not prayer instead of work. The conjunction is the theology. The baker who rises at four is not earning a living. He is participating in the sustenance of his community.... If machines do most of the work, what do the humans do?: Meaning-crisis
Already dead but nobody filed the paperwork In 2017, a cardiologist in Minneapolis retired at sixty-two with $4.2 million in savings and a paid-off house. Within eighteen months: depression, thirty pounds gained, drinking at lunch.... What happens to society if we live to 150?: Philosophical objectors
Being-toward-death Heidegger used a phrase that resists translation: Sein-zum-Tode — being-toward-death. You are not a being who happens to die. You are a being whose entire relationship to time, meaning, and commitment is structured by the fact that you will die.... Does the universe have a purpose?: Materialists
The love letter to an empty house In 1977, Voyager 1 launched carrying a golden record with greetings in fifty-five languages, music by Bach and Chuck Berry, and a diagram showing how to find Earth.... Why do racial disparities persist?: Institutional path dependency
The compound interest problem Take $24,000 and $188,000. Go back to 1960. Apply the S&P 500’s historical average return to both figures. Compound for sixty-five years. You land within striking distance of the current gap. We are economists.... Why do racial disparities persist?: Cultural and behavioral analysis
Four times the national average That is the rate at which Nigerian Americans hold postgraduate degrees. Ghanaian, Kenyan, Ethiopian Americans all exceed the native-born rate. They are Black. Subject to the same profiling. Not exempt from American racism.... Why is family structure weakening?: Pluralists
The alien civilization is the nuclear family It arrived in the late 1940s, powered by the GI Bill, FHA mortgages, and the Interstate Highway Act. Before those programs, the American family looked nothing like the picture: in 1900, over 20 percent of households included boarders,... Why is family structure weakening?: Economic structuralists
The arithmetic Combined student debt: $87,000. Median rent for a two-bedroom: $1,850. Childcare: $12,000 to $22,000 a year. One earns $48,000, the other $55,000. After taxes, debt service, rent, and insurance, they have roughly $1,400 a month for everything else.... Is 'Western civilization' a real thing or a brand?: Developmental readers
The wrong unit We have been listening to this debate for years, and the thing nobody says aloud is that "civilization" may be the wrong unit of analysis entirely. The civilizational defenders describe a tradition with identifiable internal logic.... Is tradition a resource, a trap, or something else?: Dialecticians
The tea ceremony changed with every generation Okakura published The Book of Tea in 1906 describing a ceremony already transformed multiple times since Sen no Rikyu’s fifteenth-century version.... Open Question March 11: Free Speech, but who draws the lines? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdx9n317Wpw
Free speech rules and culture today have a huge impact on the future:
Tech companies + algorithms determine who gets heard in 'public'... so government vs citizen doesn't touch today's real power struggles
AI: when you can clone anyone’s voice or face, what’s protected and what’s harm?
Political shifts: old arguments on who's defending or restricting speech (and why) don't hold, making it a topic where fresh thinking actually matters. Eg: The political left (eg ACLU defending neo-Nazis' right to march) used to be standard bearers, where now, the left is more likely to argue that unregulated speech causes real harm to marginalized communities.
This conversation will inform a live interview tomorrow with Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the leading free speech advocacy and litigation organization in the United States. A graduate of Stanford Law School, he has led FIRE since 2001, growing it from a six-person operation to a 120-person powerhouse, and is the co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind (with Jonathan Haidt)
#openquestion
You can see the pattern pretty clearly if you step back and look at it through the lens of Robert Jay Lifton’s framework. His description of ideological totalism fits uncomfortably well in places where certain ideas become insulated from scrutiny.... Here's an abstract to your lovely new creation here. Let me know if this appeals to you . The Evolution of Money, Sex, and Power across Cultures and Communities. MONEY, SEX, & POWER What do the world's various cultures offer? What does science tell us?... Wisdom Is Taboo — And Why That Matters Now. https://livingartswisdom.substack.com/p/wisdom-is-taboo-and-why-that-matters
I loved your blog on "Wisdom is Taboo". I'm not sure that I would describe Wisdom as "Taboo" as "Taboo" to me insinuates a repulsion by society. I think that our society is "Ignorant" of Wisdom, but I wouldn't say our society is repulsed by Wisdom....