It’s All for Your Own Good Jeremy Waldron

It’s All for Your Own Good Jeremy Waldron

• Esempio. a considerable number of people do not choose to enroll in a 401(k) plan and of those who do, many select levels of contribution that are far below what would be most advantageous to them. Why? Probably because of inertia.
• Sunstein and Thaler suggested a partucular strategy. Instead of teaching people to overcome their inertia, we might take advantage of their inertia to solve the problem. Suppose we arrange things so that enrollment at some appropriate level of contribution is the default position—... Something has to be the default position; why not make it the position that accrues most to the employee’s benefit, “using inertia to increase savings rather than prevent savings”?
• Come prendiamo le nostre decisioni?... For most cases the sensible thing is not to agonize but to use a rule of thumb—a heuristic is the technical term—to make the decision quickly.
• Put a certain choice architecture together with a certain heuristic and you will get a certain outcome. That’s the basic equation. So, if you want a person to reach a desirable outcome and you can’t change the heuristic she’s following, then you have to meddle with the choice architecture,
• “Paternalism” is usually a dirty word in political philosophy: the nanny state passing regulations that restrict us for our own good...
• Now, a nudger wouldn’t try anything so crass. If you ordered a soda in nudge-world, you would get a medium cup, no questions asked; you’d have to go out of your way to insist on a large one... Nudge and Why Nudge? are replete with examples like this.... And it is mild too because you can always opt out of a nudge.
• The nudge. it can be used to promote socially responsible as well as individually rational outcomes. The tray-free policy in the cafeteria is one example. A nudge toward organ donation is another:
• Soft paternalism for the consumer might therefore presuppose hard regulation for the retailer.
• So what explains the hostility? Much of it is simple animus against big government, compounded by resentment of academics in office. But there is also a core of genuine worry,
• Then there are those whom Sunstein refers to as “we.”We know this, we know that, and we know better about the way ordinary people make their choices. We are the law professors and the behavioral economists who (a) understand human choosing and its foibles much better than members of the first group and (b) are in a position to design and manipulate the architecture of the choices that face ordinary folk.
• “For every bias identified for individuals, there is an accompanying bias in the public sphere.”... There is a new book by two British political scientists called The Blunders of Our Governments 2 that might serve as a useful companion to Why Nudge?
• Come si risponde? he offers little more than reassurance that there actually are good-hearted and competent folks like himself in government:
• I am afraid there is very little awareness in these books about the problem of trust.... it is not clear whether the regulators themselves are trustworthy... The mendacity of elected officials is legendary
• Esoterismo. Government House utilitarianism was a moral philosophy that envisaged an elite who knew the moral truth and could put out simple rules for the natives (or ordinary people).... We(the governors) know that lying, for example, is sometimes justified, but we don’t want to let on to the natives,
• Deeper even than this is a prickly concern about dignity. What becomes of the self-respect we invest in our own willed actions, flawed and misguided though they often are, when so many of our choices are manipulated to promote what someone else sees (perhaps rightly) as our best interest?... nudges as an affront to human dignity
• Having said that, however, Sunstein seems happy to associate himself with those who maintain that dignity just equals autonomy... Sunstein’s second move is to equate autonomy and well-being
• autonomy is just a preference like any other.
• autonomy is just a surrogate for welfare—what people ultimately want is the promotion of their own well-being and it doesn’t really matter how that comes about.
• Sunstein does acknowledge that people might feel infantilized by being nudged. He says that “people should not be regarded as children; they should be treated with respect.”But saying that is not enough.
• Nudging doesn’t teach me not to use inappropriate heuristics or to abandon irrational intuitions... maybe I am unteachable?
• For example: between 15 and 20 percent of regular smokers (let’s say men sixty years old, who have smoked a pack a day for forty years) will die of lung cancer. But regulators don’t publicize that number, even though it ought to frighten people away from smoking, because they figure that some smokers may irrationally take shelter in the complementary statistic of the 80–85
• Sunstein says he is committed to transparency,... Ma...There are about 112 million self-reported episodes of alcohol-impaired driving among adults in the US each year.... There are about 112 million self-reported episodes of alcohol-impaired driving among adults in the US each year. Yet in 2010, the number of people who were killed in alcohol-impaired driving crashes (10,228) was an order of magnitude lower than that... 0.009 percent of drunk drivers cause fatal accidents

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HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt cap 8-9 e conclusioni

HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt cap 8-9 e conclusioni

• 8 The Future of Faith and Family: The Case for Pessimism
• . Fewer people are getting married.
• . Fewer people are having children.
• . Fewer people who are having children are sustaining intact two-parent homes for them to grow up in.
• 9 The Future of Christianity and the Family: The Case for Optimism
• “Calamities,” Sorokin observed, “generate two opposite movements in different sections of the population. One is a trend toward unreligiousness and demoralization; the other is a trend toward extreme religious, spiritual, and moral exaltation.”1 Reviewing large chunks of religious and other history, including some from beyond the West and Christianity alone, Sorokin believed that he spied a general rule: that “the principal steps in the progress of mankind toward a spiritual religion and a noble code of ethics have been taken primarily under the impact of great catastrophes
• “The incontinent spending of many European governments, which awarded whole populations unearned benefits at the expense of generations to come, has…produced a crisis not merely economic but social, political, and even civilizational.”
• “Consider Social Security. The young have always contributed to the support of the old. Earlier, the young helped their own parents out of a sense of love and duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else’s parents out of compulsion and fear. The voluntary transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken those bonds.”7
• Does the health of Christianity in the West matter? How and to whom?
• The fate of Christianity matters even to nonbelievers, because Christianity on balance is a force for good in modern society
• Believers give more to charity.
• Believers live longer and are healthier.
• Believers are more likely to be happy.
• Believers are less likely to commit crime.
• Believers contribute to “social capital.”
• Is it similarly in society’s interests to encourage the natural family?
• The family is the enemy of society, progress, or the state—or all of the above. Da platone a marx... altri detrattori... Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger, and more
• “The women…who grow up wanting to be ‘just a housewife’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own deaths in the concentration camps,” as Betty Friedan rather infamously put it in The Feminine Mystique
• But what does contemporary empirical evidence for its (often overlooked) part tell us about the role of family in society?
• The family is the partner of society, progress, or the state—or all of the above.
• James Q. Wilson
• Children in one-parent families, compared to those in two-parent ones, are twice as likely to drop out of school.
• Boys in one-parent families are much more likely than those in two-parent ones to be both out of school and out of work.
• Girls in one-parent families are twice as likely as those in two-parent ones to have an out-of-wedlock birth
• Children in one-parent families are much worse off than those in two-parent families even when both families have the same earnings
• children of an unmarried woman were much more likely than those in a two-parent family to become a delinquent, even after controlling for income
• To quote Charles Murray once more, “I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for the major newspapers, and politicians of both major political partie
• First, the family—if it is competent—reduces the need for state intervention,
• Second, the family—again if it is competent—acts as the original safety net, lowering the risks to its members of adverse outcomes and raising the likelihood that its members will contribute to society in turn.

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HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt - cap 7

HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt - cap 7

7 Putting All the Pieces Together: Toward an Alternative Anthropology of Christian Belief

• If this alternative theory of the decline of Christianity is true, why might it be true? That is, what is it about the natural family that might make the specific religion of Christianity so dependent on its vitality?
• .1. First, the experience of the natural family itself drives some people to religion.
• Just consider what the experience of childbirth itself does to almost every mother and father... This fact of epiphany hardly means that pregnancy and birth ipso facto convert participants into religious zealots. But the sequence of events culminating in birth is nearly universally interpreted as a moment of communion with something larger than oneself,
• That most primal of human connections echoes throughout the masterpieces of human history. It is why King Lear is nearly universally recognized as Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, whereas, say, Romeo and Juliet for all its pathos is not—because the predeceasing by Lear of his daughter Cordelia is the perfect symbol of the worst tragedy life
• Michelangelo’s Pietà (whose primary focus, suggestively enough, is Mary, not Jesus)... What is it about the predeceasing of parents by children that has so captured the imaginations of the West’s (though not only the West’s) greatest artists across millennia and languages and cultures? The answer can only be that this theme resonates most deeply with the human heart
• children might also “drive” parents to church in the sense that the experience of having them makes parents more willing to believe
• 2. The Christian story itself is a story told through the prism of the family. Take away the prism, and the story makes less sense.
• Like it or not, the Judeo-Christian tradition has anthropomorphized the Deity in one particular way: by analogy to a wise, protective, loving, ever-present male parent
• Figlu del divorzio...   Marquardt asks her subjects to reflect on the idea of God as a parent, elaborating on one:   Will was mystified by the question. He had been angry at his father for years because of the way he treated Will’s mother
• In this way, as in others, family illiteracy breeds religious illiteracy
• Altro motivo. People do not like to be told they are wrong, or that those whom they love have done wrong... In an age where nontraditional and antitraditional families and even nonfamilies abound, there are more and more people who are bound to take offense at certain teachings in the Judeo-Christian heritage. It is in this way that broken and frayed homes not only interrupt the transmission of the Christian message: in some cases, they provide the emotional material for a whole new barrier wall to Christian belief.
• What we might call (to riff on Peter Berger) the furious irreligiosity of today’s anti-Christian sentiment is a deep mystery, and one that should be meditated upon at length

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HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt - cap 6

HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt - cap 6

6 Assisted Religious Suicide: How Some Churches Participated in Their Own Downfall by Ignoring the Family Factor

• From the acceptance of w to the okaying of contraception to the embrace of active homosexuality today, these realities have been the engines driving most changes in Christian doctrine.
• La domanda. Did the doctrinal changes and reforms of modern Protestantism specifically further contribute to the weakening of family bonds in the West?
• As the historian Roderick Phillips puts it in Untying the Knot: A Short History of Divorce: “The Reformation…represented a sharp break in the direction of divorce doctrines and policies... Reformers, led notably by Martin Luther and John Calvin, rejected not just the Roman Catholic church’s doctrine of marital indissolubility but virtually all aspects of its marriage doctrine.”2
• In the United States, Phillips reports, Anglican churches soon were relaxing the strictest restrictions,
• artificial contraception went on to be sanctioned by some prominent members of the Anglican Communion not only as an option but in fact as the better moral choice
• “In a church which accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous texts
• The exception, of course, was the Catholic Church, whose issuance of Humanae Vitae in 1968 both famously and infamously affirmed the traditional moral code by upholding the ban on birth control.
• In research published in 2005 in Christian Century, three sociologists (Andrew Greeley, Michael Hout, and Melissa Wilde) argued that “simple demographics” between 1900 and 1975 explained around three-quarters of the decline in mainline churches (Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Methodist

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HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt - cap 5

HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt - cap 5

5 Circumstantial Evidence for the “Family Factor,” Part Three: Because the “Family Factor” Explains Problems That Existing Theories of Secularization Do Not Explain—Including What Is Known as “American Exceptionalism”

• by introducing the Family Factor, we can shed new light on the largest problem that has bedeviled the theory all along: i.e., the difference in religiosity between two of the most advanced areas on earth, Western Europe on one hand and the United States on the other.
• Per dawkins gli usa sono l"eccezione... Rodney Stark has argued? Is it instead Europe that is the exception
• Paradosso adequately “explained” by the difference between today’s American and Western European tendencies toward family formation—meaning that there are more families following the traditional model in America, even today, than in Europe. There are more marriages in the United States, even today, and more children per woman—both of which seem reasonable proxies for the relative strength of the natural family.
• Murray summarizes, “American marriages were different from European ones (or so both Americans and foreign observers seemed to agree) in the solemnity of the marital bond
• The Family Factor also helps to solve another puzzle about religiosity that has yet to be satisfactorily explained: the male/female religious gender gap.
• From yesteryear’s caricature of the “Church Lady” on the television series Saturday Night Live to the realities of running bingo games, school fund-raisers, and soup kitchens out of church basements, the stereotype holds true: it is women, and not men, who are the everyday backbone of the Christian churches
• Putnam. “Women believe more fervently in God. They aver that religion is more important in their daily lives, they pray more often, they read scripture more often and interpret it more literally, they talk about religion more often—in short, by virtually every measure they are more religious
• It is less than persuasive to argue, for example, that women are more prone to belief because they are mentally inferior
• L'avversione al rischio è donna. Pochi figli potenziali.
• Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, whose book cited earlier, Sacred and Secular, is a meticulous attempt to revise the secularization thesis to take account of what they call “existential security.” According to their model, the poorer and less secure people are, the more they “need” religion...
• Raphaël Franck and Laurence R. Iannaccone, cited earlier, maintain that the Western welfare state has eroded religiosity “because churches offered welfare services which were not provided by the State.”14 More welfare, as their data show, means less God. Insofar as the welfare state usurps the family’s historical tasks of seeing to the well-being of its members, their explanation of how the West lost God is consistent with this theory.
• The Family Factor helps to explain something that comes up repeatedly in the scholarly literature, which is the mystery of why 1960 or thereabouts is such a pivotal year in secularization.
• Two particularly useful books examining that phenomenon are Hugh McLeod’s The Religious Crisis of the 1960s and Callum G. Brown’s The Death of Christian Britain
• As early as 1973, for example, in a book called Sexual Suicide that was often called provocative at the time, George Gilder argued that the sexual revolution was driving men away from women and families
• In another prescient book published in 1999 called The Decline of Males, secular sociologist Lionel Tiger argued similarly that in giving women complete control over reproduction, the Pill essentially rendered men obsolete.23 The result, he observed, was that men existed in an ever-more attenuated relationship to women
• Sociologist Robert Wuthnow of Princeton has laid out the connection between the Pill and the decline in traditional religiosity in his 1998 book After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s
• the time between confirmation and parenthood has always been one in which young people could drop out of established religion and turn their attention to other things, the doubling of this period was of enormous religious significance
• More Pill equals less time in a family. More time in a family equals more time in church. Therefore more Pill equals less God

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HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt - cap 4

HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt - cap 4

4 Circumstantial Evidence for the “Family Factor,” Part Two: Snapshots of the Demographic Record; or How Fundamental Changes in Family Formation Have Accompanied the Decline of Christianity in the West

• If the Family Factor were part of the explanation for secularization, we would expect to see family decline accompany religious decline
• Fatto. Over time, many people stopped having babies AND they stopped getting married AND they stopped going to church
• in his classic book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert D. Putnam examines minutely the decline in American “social capital,” or the weakening of various bonds of association during the past few decades in particular.16 He identifies several independent forces contributing to that decline, among them individualism, commuting, and the change in women’s roles
• If the Family Factor were part of the explanation for secularization, we would expect to see other trends associated with family decline accompany religious decline. This we also see
• The one thing that all scholars will attest is that as a general demographic rule, urbanization leads to falling birthrates... The conclusion, therefore, is that urbanization has been responsible for fertility decline in the developed countries...
• people did not stop believing in God just because they moved to cities. The missing piece would appear to be that moving to cities made them less likely to have and live in strong natural families
• If the Family Factor were part of the explanation for secularization, we would expect the most irreligious parts of the West to have the smallest/weakest/fewest natural families—and vice versa. This too we see
• Phillip Longman published a much-discussed book called The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity And What To Do About
• In 2011, as mentioned earlier, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? by Eric Kaufmann argued persuasively and at length that the demographics of the secular West would be overtaken in the long run by those of religious fundamentalists
• Conversely, if family decline was in fact helping to cause religious decline, we would also expect to see, for example, family boomlets accompanied by religious boomlets. This we also see
• What happened was a religious boomlet—in conjunction with a much better known demographic phenomenon, the baby boom. Thus, for example, Callum G. Brown gives the following years as dates of postwar Christian revival

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HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt - cap 3

HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt - cap 3

3 Circumstantial Evidence for the “Family Factor,” Part One: The Empirical Links among Marriage, Childbearing, and Religiosity

• 1. . Faith and family: Which really comes first?
• Why are married people with children more likely to go to church and to be religious than are single people?
• Bradford Wilcox. He has suggested three reasons for why churchgoing is so tightly bound to being married with children: because they find other couples like them
• because children “drive parents to church” in the sense of encouraging them to transmit a moral/religious compass;
• and because men are much more likely than women to fall away from church on their own
• something about the way people live in families makes people in those families more inclined to church... Perhaps something about living in families makes people more receptive to religiosity and the Christian creed.
• . Faith and fertility: What really drives what?
• “The religious tend to have more children, irrespective of age, education or wealth….
• fertility in Europe as a whole is lower than it is in the United States
• if the prohibition against birth control is supposed to be the exclusive reason or even the main reason why religious people have larger families, then we can make no sense of this fact: evangelical Christians, most of whom do not similarly have theological injunctions against birth control as such, have a higher fertility rate than do secular people.... Orthodox Jews in America, as well as in Israel, have far more children than secular Jews—even though orthodox Judaism also allows contraception within marriage for certain, quite broad purpose
• Segnale di nesso al contrario. if secularization theory and the conventional way of understanding faith’s relationship to family were correct, then we would not expect to see religious people continuing to have larger numbers of children than do nonreligious people, even when their religion allows them the option of contraception.

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HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt cap 2

HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt cap 2

2 What Is the Conventional Story Line about How the West Lost God? What Are the Problems with It?

• Le teorie precedenti. Over the years, as indicated, many learned and influential people have bent their powers to tracking the receding God. Our purpose in this chapter is to listen to what they have to say and to see whether it all adds up.
• 1 . “What caused secularization? People stopped needing the imaginary comforts of religion.”
• Religion is akin to “opium,” as Marx put it
• Sigmund Freud: "religion derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires... Christianity is rooted in fear and superstition. Its purpose is to serve as a giant pacifier against the hunger pains of mortality
• Dawkins Harris France... In sum, for the new atheists—as for others standing outside the tent of belief, and wondering how it ever got put there—the most common answer to the question of “why religion?” seems to be that there is something about that tent that is comforting to those inside it. It is something that people have somehow devised to make themselves feel better... ..new atheists prefer to designate themselves as “Brights”—a word plainly implying that believers are by contrast either “Dims” or “Dulls
• The w before us is this: If we don’t have an adequate explanation for why people believe in religion in the first place, how can we have one for why they stop?
• 2. :What caused secularization? Science and the Enlightenment and rationalism.”
• The late Christopher Hitchens, for example, closes his 2007 manifesto God Is Not Great: How Religion Spoils Everything, with a chapter calling for “The Need for a New Enlightenment
• Charles Alan Kors argues that the changes ushered in by Enlightenment science ultimately transformed not only science, but the entire theological world as well
• British historian Hugh McLeod identifies three problems with this way of explaining secularization
• First, he observes, the masses were not part of the Enlightenment
• Second, eighteenth-century elites were actually more likely to be rational Christians than they were atheists or freethinkers.
• Third, he notes, “those who seek to trace a continuous line from Voltaire to twenty-first-century atheists also tend to overlook the fact that the first half of the nineteenth century saw a revival of more conservative forms of Christianity both among intellectuals and among the aristocracy and bourgeoisie more widely
• if the theory from enlightenment were true, we would also expect from the theory that the better-off people are, the less likely they are to practice religion... but... Christian religiosity, in at least some significant places and times, has in fact been more concentrated in the upper classes than in the lower, and more likely among the educated than among those who are less so.
• Robert D. Putnam’s and David E. Campbell’s American Grace, mentioned earlier, similarly refutes the notion that religiosity in the United States is a lower-class thing
• Charles Murray Coming Apart: .... The upper 20 percent of the American population, he summarizes using data from the General Social Survey, are considerably more likely than the lower 30 percent to believe in God and to go to church.
• Wilcox has documented the “faith gap” between the better-educated and the people who are less so... Americans with college degrees are more likely than those with high school diplomas alone to attend church on Sunday.
• 3. . “What caused secularization? The world wars did.”
• The horrors of the Holocaust alone, the deliberate murder of six million Jews, including by people who also called themselves Christians, would seem to more than justify despair about the incorrigible darkness of the human heart
• In an intriguing essay alluded to earlier, for example, reviewing the role of religion during that war in the British, American, and Canadian armies, historian Michael Snape concludes that the soldiers of all three nations “were exposed to an institutional process of rechristianisation during the Second World War
• 4. . “What caused secularization? Material progress did. People got fat and happy and didn’t need God anymore.”
• It is also a thought that pops up frequently in the pastoral literature created by contemporary religious leaders
• Arthur Simon, evangelical pastor and founder of the charity Bread for the World, is also author of a book called How Much Is Enough? Hungering for God in an Affluent Culture.
• Pope Benedict XVI has vigorously and repeatedly condemned what he calls the “idol” of consumerism
• Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. They have explored in fine detail the connections between privation and religious belief. According to their model, the poorer and less secure people are, the more they “need” religion
• one would expect religiosity to decline as one climbs the social ladder in the advanced West—and instead, as we have seen, the opposite appears to be the case,
• Christianity has coexisted comfortably, even exuberantly, in materially comfortable surroundings ... from ancient Rome to Renaissance Florence to the gated communities and megachurches of the United States today
• But the ultimate limitation of the explanation from material wealth is one shared by the other going theories for secularization: i.e., there are too many exceptions to be explained
• Why is the United States of America, by any measure, more religious than the economically comparable nations of Europe—a problem known in the specialized literature as “American exceptionalism”? Why are women more religiously observant than men? Why is 1960 such a pivotal year for religious observance and practice, as nearly all observers agree; what is it that makes Christianity seem to go off a cliff after that point? Current theories of Christianity’s decline cannot answer these questions—meaning that the truths of each going version of the theory are partial, and not complete.
• ...
• Un segnale del perchè manca una teoria della secolarizzazione... the constantly expressed frustration on the part of nonbelievers and anti-believers at Christianity’s apparently unfathomable persistence in the modern world.... Sam Harris seems similarly to believe that most other people are inferior to atheists in understanding... Michel Onfray, for example, seems to blame the plodding majority of humanity for just not getting it
• the new atheists are markedly inferior to the great thinkers of modernity, whose understanding of the impulse toward religiosity was immeasurably more nuanced and empathetic....
• Émile Durkheim, to make a long story ridiculously short, believed that religion contained deep truths
• Sigmund Freud, for his part, argued similarly in Civilization and Its Discontents that society requires sacrifice on the part of individuals and repression as the price for civilization.44 Thus, though he was also a signatory of sorts to what has been dubbed the “comfort theory” of the origins of religion
• Max Weber... believed in the original variant of the “Protestantism” explanation for secularization visited earlier

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HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt intro e cap 1

HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt intro e cap 1

• Introduction
• one of the most interesting questions in all the modern world. It is this: How and why has Christianity really come to decline in important parts of the West?
• German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose parable of the madman in the marketplace foretelling the death of God
• Problem. How much did the Enlightenment and rationalism and scientific thinking have to do with this enormous transformation
• Tesi. Its argument, in brief, is that the Western record suggests that family decline is not merely a consequence of religious decline, as conventional thinking has understood that relationship. It also is plausible—and, I will argue, appears to be true—that family decline in turn helps to power religious decline.
• consistent with the historical fact that family decline and Christian decline have gone hand in hand
• the decline of the family has also put more pressure on those same welfare states that are already stretched beyond their fiscal limits
• Crisi della famiglia e previdenza. The fact that sustaining these welfare states has in effect become a Ponzi scheme
• Bilancio nazionale. older citizens, for example, have less incentive to repay debt
• the incentives to do the hard work of keeping a family together have increasingly elicited the tacit response, why bother? After all—or so it seemed for a while, at least, though we now know otherwise—the pension remains the same. In this way, one can argue, the expanded welfare state competes with the family as the dominant protector of the individual—in the process undercutting the power of the family itself.
• Circolo vizioso. In other words, family change has been an engine fueling statism—and statism in turn has been an engine fueling family decline.... the chicken-or-egg question
• what the “Family Factor” means to signal is a new idea. It is that the causal relationship between family and religion—specifically, the religion of Christianity—is not just a one-way, but actually a two-way street.
• The process of secularization, I will argue, has not been properly understood because it has neglected to take into account this “Family Factor”—meaning the active effect that participation in the family itself appears to have on religious belief and practice.... family has been an important, indeed irreplaceable, transmission belt for religious belief
• What this book means to impress is that family and faith are the invisible double helix of society—two spirals that when linked to one another can effectively reproduce, but whose strength and momentum depend on one another. That is one way of stating the thesis here.
• 1 Does Secularization Even Exist?
• according to some theorists, the notion of decline is itself an illusion
• Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart recently put it, “Secularization theory is currently experiencing the most sustained challenge in its long history”—an observation issuing not from critics of the theory, but from two of its leading representatives.
• Contrarians in this debate believe that other scholars and especially secular scholars have misread the empirical evidence
• Since the jihadist attacks of 9 /11 especially, many have remarked upon religion’s unexpected resiliency in the world
• these observations are all footnotes to sociologist Peter Berger’s famous observation of 1990 that “the assumption we live in a secularized world is false”
• To many observers, the demise of the Communist governments served as a proxy of sorts for the endurance of God.... Karol Wojtyla, aka Pope John Paul II, became so integral to the struggle against Communism that some historians would later give him great credit for the thing’s ultimate implosion;
• Robert Royal has put it, “Three centuries of debunking, skepticism, criticism, revolution, and scorn by some among us have not produced the expected demise of religion and are now contributing to its renewal.”
• Peter Berger: pointing in particular to American religiosity which is anomalous by the standards of Western Europe,
• To all this one might add that on the stage of the world—as opposed to just that of the European Continent—Christianity has lately spread to many more millions. In 1900 there were roughly ten million African Christians... John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge’s
• Una via di mezzo. As contrarian theorists rightly point out, modernity is not causing religion always and everywhere to collapse—but that is different from addressing the question of whether Christianity specifically has collapsed in parts of the West, and if so, why.
• . “The West hasn’t really lost God, because the idea of secularization depends in turn on the idea of a prior ‘golden age’ of belief. In fact, though, people were no more believing or pious in the past than they are today. Therefore, there has been no religious decline.”
• Consider, Chadwick observes, the sharp increase in illegitimate births in Toulouse, France, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries... Hence, illegitimacy may arguably be used as one possible proxy for the influence of Christian belief on personal practice...
• another outstanding sociologist of religion, American Rodney Stark, exuberantly compiles several pages of empirical and historical evidence testifying to what he calls “the nonexistence of an Age of Faith in European history... to primary sources indicating that not only the mass of men and women, but also many of the clergy, were plumb ignorant of the rituals and even basic prayers of the church; and so on.
• Stark also notes, as have others, that some empirical evidence about churchgoing in fact affirms rather the opposite point: namely, that later centuries of Christians were in fact more pious than previous ones
• Roger Finke discuss a new paradigm to counter the secularization thesis: rational choice theory... That theory has in turn given rise to a great debate continuing into the present over the reasons why people might rationally choose religious belief...
• The specific argument against a Christian “golden age” goes only so far toward refuting the agnosticism and secularism of the present. The evidence accumulated by these critics, interesting and at times ingenious, does mitigate the more simpleminded paradigms of secularization; but it does not refute the claim that Christianity has declined measurably in some of its former Western strongholds.
• Steve Bruce, has sensibly pointed out, “Nothing in the secularization paradigm requires…a ‘golden Age of Faith.’ It merely requires that our ancestors be patently more religious than we are... “Can we really believe,” he asks, “that people whose lives were organized by the calendar of the Church, whose art, music and literature were almost entirely religious, who were taught the basic prayers, who regularly attended church services, and for whom the priest was the most powerful person after their temporal lord, were untouched by religious beliefs and values?...
• Una conferma di btuce viene da.. Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580.23 This heavily documented study advances an account of the English Reformation that is profoundly subversive of received wisdom. Duffy argues that contrary to the widely accepted story line—according to which the Reformation breathed new life into what had become a decaying and discredited Catholic Church that had lost the support of the common people—the weight of evidence proves something very different: that “late medieval Catholicism exerted an enormously strong, diverse, and vigorous hold over the imagination and the loyalty of the people
• one simple way of measuring religious loyalty: attendance... Raphaël Franck and Laurence R. Iannaccone: “the ISSP data unequivocally show that church attendance decreased in the West during the twentieth century” ... the welfare state itself caused the decline in religiosity—are items to which we will return.
• Nor is the United States, for all its vaunted religiosity relative to Western Europe, exempt from the slide in attendance. Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell write in their important 2010 study of religion, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, “independent streams of evidence suggest that Americans have become somewhat less observant religiously over the last half century.
• The matter of attendance is also obviously connected to another point demonstrating decline: observance of church rules.... As is often pointed out, the church is nothing if not a collection of sinners. But are they sinners who fall short of the rules that they believe in—or people who don’t believe they are bound by those same rules at all?
• .
• In his influential book called The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization 1800–2000, for example, British historian Callum G. Brown assembles a formidable barrage of statistical information to make just this point about the decline of Christianity there, ranging from the decline in church marriages and baptisms to changing attitudes toward all aspects of sexual behavior
• If “secularization” is not the name for the replacement of a Christian ethos with an ethos that explicitly rejects Christian thinking, then what do we call that phenomenon?
• Critici della secolarizzazione riformulano: " The West hasn’t really lost God, because human nature itself does not change; it remains theotropic, or leaning toward the transcendent, and it always will.”... Somewhat ironically perhaps, these key points made by Greeley and other thinkers who stress the theotropic nature of human beings have lately acquired increasing force from a quite opposite quarter fascinated by this same durability of religion: i.e., nonbelieving evolutionists and evolutionary psychologists
• “The universal propensity toward religious beliefs,” echoes evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, “is a genuine scientific puzzle.”... some sort of “God gene”
• Another, related problem with settling for the notion that “human beings are born theotropic, and therefore will turn to God eventually,” is this: if that is so, then certain societies in the world today that are notably nontheotropic loom as large question marks over the theory.
• One final fact that points to secularization as a real phenomenon is that the leaders of Christian denominations themselves—from the Continent on across to the New World—see the diminishment of their flocks as an enormous problem. Both Pope benedict... Benedict has further spoken openly of the “de-Christianization of Europe
• Conclusione: To put the matter another way, to say that secularization theory has problems is not to say that secularization hasn’t happened.
• Altra contestazione: . “Secularization theory is mistaken, because what people call ‘secularization’ is really the death of Protestant Christianity; the Catholic Church isn’t in the same straits.”
• Pentecostalism or evangelicalism, both of which are on the rise outside the West and retain healthy numbers of adherents within it.
• Dean M. Kelly, an American legal scholar and defender of religious freedom who was also an executive with the National Council of Churches. His influential book called Why Conservative Churches Are Growing remains the template for understanding which churches are prospering
• Laurence R. Iannaccone, who deployed rational choice theory to demonstrate “Why Strict Churches Are Strong
• Joseph Bottum has observed in an seminal essay summarizing the American Protestant religious scene: The death of the Mainline is the central historical fact of our time
• Perchè il cattolicesimo mn è in salute: In Italy, among other countries, for example, most people when asked in surveys will identify themselves as Catholics. But how many are Catholic in anything but name only?
• Attendance numbers suggest that a great many Italians (among other Catholics) either do not believe that threat, or fail to act on it if they do believe it.
• I giovani italiani: “They clearly go to church less, believe in God less, pray less, trust the Church less, identify themselves as Catholic less, and say that being Italian does not mean being Catholic.
• “Catholic” Italy does not appear terribly different from the rest of the god-forsaken Continent.
• One final reason to believe that the decline of Christianity involves the decline of Catholicism and not just Protestantism, is this: fertility rates
• Cosa concedere: ...it appears true that the Protestants have gone secular first
• Altra contestazione: . “Secularization theory is mistaken, because the world is not really growing less religious; it is diversifying spiritually instead.”... It is an idea closely associated with professor of philosophy Charles Taylor, whose previously mentioned opus A Secular Age
• There is also the wider fact that politics more generally operates for some people as a secular religion—especially politics dictated by a worldview professing to cover all aspects of life, such as Marxism.
• Grace Davie, who has coined the phrase “believing without belonging
• churches continue to perform vital public functions, even as their numbers shrink; that Europeans, including in Scandinavia, pay taxes to keep their churches going
• Eric Kaufmann points out in his fascinating 2011 book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century, there are problems with equating spiritual diversity with traditional religion....People drawn to what are now considered to be “alternative” forms of spirituality are “inspired by earthly desires for health, meaning and wellbeing rather than a connection to the supernatural.... problems with using New Age beliefs as evidence of religious revival
• the critics of secularization theory have drawn attention to the same problem at the heart of this book—the felt need for a “theory of variation,” as Stark has put it. What has gone missing, again, is a persuasive explanation of why Christianity has thrived in some places and times and not others.
• Il problema non è secolarizzazione sì o no ma avere una teoria dei cambiamenti. È quelka che si intende offrire nei cap seguenti

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Why did religiosity decrease in the Western World during the twentieth century? Raphaël Franck Laurence R. Iannaccone

Why did religiosity decrease in the Western World during the twentieth century? Raphaël Franck Laurence R. Iannaccone

• Secolarizzazione (+ ricchezza - religiosità) vs Securizzazione ( - rischi - religiosità)
• Dati: la frequenza USA è stabile; in occidente crolla.
• Ip. secu.: la Chiesa spiazzata nei servizi di welfare
• L' ipotesi secu. sembra prevalere anche se l' ip. seco. conserva un suo valore. Ad ogni modo, mentre opporsi a seco. sembra impossibile, opporsi a secu è più realistico e offre l' alleanza dei liberisti
• ......
• Indice
• 0 Abstract
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Data
• 2.1. Long-run data on church attendance 2.1.2. Trends in church attendance 
• 2.2. The causes of the decline in church attendance: the secularization hypothesis and the religion-market model 
• 2.2.1. Income
• 2.2.2. Human capital 
• 2.2.3. Urbanization and industrialization 2.2.4. The welfare state
• 3. Econometric methodology
• 3.1. Baseline specification 
• 3.2. Reverse causality
• 4. Results
• 4.1 Wealth and human capital
• 4.2 Urbanization and Industrialization
• ........
• Abstract
• L' articolo...... It tests the secularization hypothesis, which argues that economic growth decreases religiosity, and the religionmarket model, which considers that governmental interventions in religious affairs have an impact on religiosity.... conclusione: ... Such findings therefore suggest that many individuals were historically observant because churches offered welfare services
• 1. Introduction
• religiosity almost always focus on church attendance,
• some scholars such as Hadaway et al. (1993) have gone so far as to hypothesize a form of invisible secularization in which America’s “actual attendance rate has declined since World War II, despite the fact that the survey rate remained basically stable.”2
• There are actually two major theories of religiosity: the religion-market model and the secularization hypothesis.
• Teoria 1: ..., the development of the welfare state is thought to decrease church attendance by crowding out the churches’charitable activities... (Gruber and Hungerman, 2007; Hungerman, 2005, 2009)
• Indeed, Gill and Lundsgaarde (2004) find there is a negative relationship between public spending and church attendance in cross-sectional data for a sample of countries in 1995.
• following Weber (1905), proponents of the secularization hypothesis such as Chaves (1994) and Bruce (2001) consider that religious participation is “demanddriven”.
• Teoria 2.... McCleary and Barro (2006a) find in a study of religiosity in 68 countries in the 1980s and 1990s that economic development has an overall negative effect on religiosity.
• Still, studies by Finke and Stark (1992), Iannaccone and Stark (1994), and Stark (1999) among others, argue that there is no empirical evidence to support secularization theories.
• The ISSP data unequivocally show that church attendance decreased in the West during the twentieth century.
• the data show that the decline in church attendance was particularly pronounced after the 1960s, when most Western countries experienced high growth rates and the development of the welfare state.
• Before the 1960s, individuals would look to churches to obtain welfare services and insurance against adverse consumption shocks. Afterwards, those individuals for whom personal religion did not have any meaning stopped attending church because the welfare state provided them with a secular alternative for receiving affordable education
• ...
• 6. Conclusion
• This article provides a test of the secularization hypothesis and of the religionmarket model
• span the 1925-1990 period,
• Our results provide scant evidence for the secularization hypothesis. They do not support the claims that the growth in income had a negative effect on religiosity. In addition, they fail to find any negative effect of fertility, education, industrialization and urbanization on church attendance. Conversely, our findings are consistent with the claims of the religion market model, which argues that governmental interventions have an impact on religious participation.
• the development of the welfare state significantly decreased religiosity... churches funded welfare services which the State did not provide; they became secular when the welfare state crowded out
• Policy. there are still countries notably in the Middle East and in Central Asia, where extremist religious movements are pointed out as a major source of political instability and violence. This paper thus suggests that the promotion of a secular welfare state may represent the best way to undermine these movements
• while this paper shows that the growth of the welfare state explains the decline in church participation during the twentieth century, it also calls into question the relevance of the factors, like education and wealth, which have traditionally been used to explain the demand for religiosity. As such, this study suggests that other factors, such as habit formation, may perhaps provide a better explanation of the demand for religion.

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A Supply-Side Reinterpretation of the "Secularization" of Europe di Rodney Stark and Laurence R. Iannaccone

A Supply-Side Reinterpretation of the "Secularization" of Europe di Rodney Stark and Laurence R. Iannaccone

• tesi: i problemi sono nell offerta + che nella domanda religiosa
• corollario: nn possiamo parlare di secolarizzazione
• l europa nn è secolarizzata le preferenze religiose sono stabili
• cocncentrarsi sulle imprese religiose anzichè sui consumatori di religione
• ...
• definizione di religione: interesse x le cose ultime postulando il sopranaturale
• 1 il monopolio di una religione dipende dall intervento statale
• 2 senza monopolio fiorisce il pluralismo e la specializzazione
• 3 quanto + il pluralismo si afferma tanto più la religiosità si propaga
• 4 la comp. garantisce anche la laicità del paese
• 5 deregolamentare = laicizzare... e evangelizzare
• ...
• Cosa incide sulla religuosità di un popolo? the degree of regulation of religious economies
• Cosa conta? we stress supply-side weaknesses (ovvero: i preti)... rather than a lack of individual religious demand.
• Dopo i test: the results, suggest that the concept of secularization be dropped for lack of cases to which it could apply.
• There also has been nearly universal agreement that Europe's secularization represented the future of all societies
• Anthony F. C. Wallace: The evolutionary future of religion is extinction.
• secularization is an absorbing state - that once achieved it is irreversible,
• L'anomalia: the enormous vigor of religion in the United States causes great difficulty. "deviant case."
• Few have been willing to accept Tocqueville's (1956: 319) elegant solution that the secularization theory is simply wrong
• We dispute the claim that any European nation is very secularized.
• what is needed is not a theory of the decline or decay of reli- gion, but of religious change,
• ethnic diversity is the source of America's religious vitality... high levels of religious vitality in other immigrant based societies
• emphasis on the changing behavior of religious firms rather than on the changing attitudes of religious consumers
• A THEORY OF RELIGIOUS MOBILIZATION
• Past discussions of secularization usually postulate a decline in the demand
• consumers in a mod- ern, enlightened age no longer find a need for faith
• What happens when only a few, lazy re- ligious firms confront the potential religious consumer?
• Scandinavia, for instance, reflect weak demand primarily, or an unattractive product,
• Definizione di religione. Religion is any system of beliefs and practices concerned with ultimate mean- ing that assumes the existence of the supernatural.
• Prop. 1: The capacity of a single religious firm to monopolize a religious econ- omy depends upon the degree to which the state uses coercive force to regulate the re- ligious economy.
• Prop. 2: To the degree that a religious economy is unregulated, it will tend to be very pluralistic.
• Prop. 3: To the degree that a religious economy is pluralistic, firms will spe- cialize.... the medieval church was surrounded by heresy and dissent.
• Prop. 4: To the degree that a religious economy is competitive and pluralistic, overall levels of religious participation will tend to be high.
• Un esempio di monopolio. Church of England in particular, Adam Smith noted their lack of "exertion" and "zeal":
• Prop. 5: To the degree that a religious firm achieves a monopoly      it will seek to exert its influence over other institutions and thus the society will be sacralized. Abbondano... public political occasions and ceremonies.... Close ties between religion and politics
• Prop. 6: To the degree that deregulation occurs in a previously highly regulated religious economy, the society will be desacralized.
• Prop. 7: The relationship between the degree of regulation of the religious econ- omy and start-up costs for new religious organizations is curvilinear - declining as the state exerts less coercion on behalf of a monopoly firm, but rising again as fully developed pluralism produces a crowded marketplace of effective and successful firms.
• There are two rather independent sources of start-up costs that new religious firms must overcome. The first stems from repression.... in seguito a... complaints of heresy
• EUROPE'S REGULATED AND MONOPOLIZED RELIGIOUS ECONOMIES
• Catholic "Monopolies"
• Writing in 1882, William F. Bainbridge:........."the police detectives of Pius IX searched all our baggage to keep us from taking a Bible into the Holy City"....
• as recently as the 1970s, only Catholic priests could perform valid religious marriage services in Italy and Protestants could not
• Italian law still specifies that criminal offenses committed against Catholic clergy are "aggravated,"
• The government-owned radio and television services broadcast many hours of Catholic programming weekly.
• On October 30, 1981, the Belgian government fmally withdrew its absolute ban on the transportation of Jehovah's Witnesses' publications, including Bibles, by the railroad
• Portugal routinely confiscated Bibles and tracts from them... "to be one of Jehovah's Witnesses . . . was dangerous and even subversive.
• In January 1991, Portugal amended a law that permitted only Catholics to teach religion,
• In 1992 the Spanish government extended tax exempt status to a federation of evangelical Protestant groups... However, these new rights were not extended to Protestant groups that were not part of the federation, nor to non-Christians
• Protestant "Monopolies"
• In most of Europe's Protestant nations the state continues to offer "free" religion - or at least religion that the consumer already has paid for through taxes
• Swedish Lutheranism epitomizes the state church syndrome. Since its inception, the Church of Sweden has served as an organ of the state.
• the King, as head of the Church, names the archbishop... Swedish citizens obtain automatic membership
• Until 1862 all Swedish citizens were required by law to attend church at least once a year.
• Even today, when only two percent of Swedes attend the Church's Sunday services in any given week... social pressures are such that 90% retain official church membership and 80% have their children baptized and confirmed in the Church
• the Church runs on tax funds.
• Tax money pays the salaries of the Lutheran clergy... Swedish clergy are well paid and have civil service job security...
• Direct contributions and payments from worshippers amount to almost nothing.
• Not surprisingly, the Church of Sweden suffers from high costs and low productivity.
• One might suppose that Sweden's Social Democratic Party would have managed by now to dismantle or disestablish the Church... However, after coming to power in the 1930s the socialists became supporters of continued establishment.
• David Martin (1978: 23) has argued that Lutheran State Churches are more subject to the state than the Catholic church and for that reason adapt themselves more rapidly to changes in the character of the state....
• In fact, many Swedish clergy became strong supporters of state socialism.
• Members of parish boards and the church council are elected more for their political positions and convic- tions than for their religious faith.... Indeed, for some years Sweden's Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs was Alva Myrdal, wife of Gunnar Myrdal and herself a famous leftist economist and nonbeliever.
• commission to compose a new translation of the New Testament for "general cultural reasons"
• However, the in- difference of the Lutheran clergy does not extend to potential competitors.
• Protestant groups often find it difficult to get the proper permits to qualify a building
• most Swedes in church on any Sunday at- tend the free churches - which often turn out 70% of their members
• Peter Lodberg (1989: 7), General Secretary of the Ecumenical Council in Denmark, noted that ......"Parliament still has the abso- lute power in the Administration of the National Church [the Evangelical Lutheran Church]."... Parliament had passed a law authorizing fe- male pastors... It is characteristic that this question was not seen as a matter of the inner life of the church, but as some- thing concerning the administrative system of the National Church, that is, it was regarded as being an is- sue for Parliament rather than the bishops.
• .QUANTIFYING RELIGIOUS REGULATION
• six-item scale: "whether or not (1) there is a single, offlcially designated state church; (2) there is official state recognition of some de- nominations but not others; (3) the state appoints or approves the appointment of church leaders; (4) the state directly pays church personnel salaries; (5) there is a system of ecclesi- astical tax collection; (6) the state directly subsidizes, beyond mere tax breaks, the operat- ing, maintenance, or capital expenses for churches."
• Those nations that scored zero, as having unregulated religious economies, were Australia, Canada, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United States. France received a score of one. Spain and Austria were scored two. Belgium, Britain, Italy, Switzerland, and West Germany were scored three. Norway and Denmark scored five. Sweden and Finland scored six... general lack of free-market religious economies in Europe.
• The elimination of legal ties between church and state is a major step toward a free market religious economy
• PRELIMINARY TESTS OF THE THEORY
• (Iannaccone, 1991). Pluralism was measured with a classic index of market concentration... rates of weekly church attendance operationalized religious participation. Regression results proved very strong, with pluralism accounting for more than 90% of the variation in church attend... Moreover, the United States is not a deviant case, but lies close to the regression line
• A second test of the theory focused on Catholicism (Stark 1992)... the paper tested the proposition that the level of commitment of the average Catholic varies across nations inversely to the proportion of Catholics in the population. That is, the Catholic Church will be more effective in mobiliz- ing its members where it is confronted
• Other research had demonstrated the validity of the number of priests per 10,000 nominal Catholics as a measure of member commitment
• A third test...(Chaves and Cann 1992)...regulation strongly predicted church attendance rates: The more regulation, the less attendance.
• .Finke and Stark (1988) found a very strong re- lationship between religious diversity (measured by the Herfindahl Index) and rates of church membership.
• Deane, and Blau (1991) used religious census data from early in the century to examine pluralism and church membership rates for the coun- ties of the United States, and claimed to have discovered support for the traditional position that pluralism harms religious commitment.... difetto: farmers often cross county boundaries to attend church.
• A third study, by Hamberg and Pettersson, included in this issue, is based on 284 mu- nicipalities of Sweden and also uses the Herfindahl Index... huge effects on rates of at- tendance. This study is of particular interest because the low levels of church attendance and the quite limited pluralism
• Finally, a study based on 198 nations found a huge, positive effect of pluralism on rates of religious conversion or religious switching (Duke, Johnson, and Duke 1993).
• C'è chi interpreya male i tisultati... Frank J. Lechner (1991: 1111)... revivals and innovation are indeed to be expected. But nothing similar is to be found in most Western European countries.
• However, rather than pursue this line of reasoning by asking what might happen if Euro- pean religious economies were deregulated so that they could more closely approximate the American situation, Lechner was content to have thus "explained" American exceptionalism
• Problemone. How can a supply-side approach account for the powerful religious monopolies of times past? 
• MASS PIETY IN SACRALIZED SOCIETIES
• Ortodossia. religion has crumbled since medieval times
• Europe's "Age of Faith" constitutes the primary benchmark against which scholars measure modern secularization.
• historians have assembled evidence that the medieval masses were, in fact, remarkably irreligious, at least in terms of religious participation
• Andrew Greeley (forthcoming) has summarized these historical conclu- sions with characteristic succinctness:.......... There is no reason to believe that the peasant masses of Europe were ever very devout Christians, not in the sense that we usually mean when we use these words. There could be no deChristianization as the term is normally used because there was never any Christianization in the first place. Christian Europe never existed......
• Massa ed elites. The celebrated medieval piety might have characterized the nobility,
• peasants were simple spirit worshippers whose folklore included some Christian content.
• Jane Schneider (1990) described the religion of medieval Europe as "animism," noting that Christian saints
• Competizione tra santi.
• peasants were essentially ignored by the medieval Church which, according to Greeley (forthcoming), lacked the resources "and perhaps the motivation to catechize
• Paul Johnson... The truth is that the Church tended to be hostile to the peasants. There were very few peasant saints. Medieval clerical writers emphasize the bestiality, violence and avarice of the peasant....
• Max Weber (1961: 1139) also noted that "the churches of the Middle Ages" held an "ex- tremely derogatory" attitude towards the peasants.
• Rosalind and Christopher Brooke...typical church to be "a small box with a tiny chancel, the whole being no larger than a moderately large living room in a modern house." The Brookes emphasize the intimacy this made possible between priest and parishioners during mass, but these tiny churches are also indicative of widespread indifference.
• Keith Thomas (1971: 159)... "it is problematical as to whether cer- tain sections of the population [of Britain] at this time had any religion at all"
• Comportamento a messa... "members of the popu- lation jostled for pews, nudged their neighbours, hawked and spat, knitted, made coarse re- marks, told jokes, fell asleep, and even let off guns" (Thomas 1971: 161)... a man...who was charged with misbehaving...after his "most loathsome farting, striking, and scoffing speeches"...
• Ignoranza. In 1551 the Bishop of Gloucester systematically tested his diocesan clergy. Of 311 pastors, 171 could not repeat the Ten Commandments and 27 did not know the author of the Lord's Prayer
• Archbishop Giovanni Bovio, of the Brindisi-Oria... most of his priests "could barely read and could not understand Latin"... the majority kept concubines,
• Peter Laslett (1965) reported that only 125 of 400 adults in a particular English village took Easter com- munion late in the eighteenth century.
• If we use 1800 as the benchmark, then church membership in Britain is substantially higher today. In 1800 there were a total of 1,230,000 church members (Protestant dissenters and Catholics, as well as Anglicans) from a population of 10,686,000 (England, Scotland, and Wales). That comes to 11.5% of the population. In 1850 there were 3,423,000 church mem- bers, or 16.7% of the population. The 1900 church membership rate was 18.6% (calculated from Currie, Gilbert, and Horsley 1977 and Mitchell 1962). In 1980, the church membership rate was 15.2 - a decline, but hardly a precipitous
• There is solid evidence that less than a third of the Irish attended mass in 1840... The celebrated Irish piety - with mass attendance hovering around 90% arose subsequent to the Potato Famine when the Church became the primary organizational vehicle for Irish na- tionalism resisting external domination.
• Usa. Fewer than 20% of the inhabitants.of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts belonged to a church... (Stark and Finke 1988).
• SUBJECTIVE RELIGION AND POTENTLIAL DEMAND
• Medioevo soggettivo: ...magic and animism
• religious tendencies as representing a potential demand for organized religion in these societies - potential in the sense that it awaited activation by aggressive suppliers.
• equal force today. That is, the secularization thesis seems strong when measured in terms of par- ticipation in organized religion, but it seems false when religion is measured subjectively.
• Iceland has often been proposed as the most secularized nation on earth... church attendance is extremely low... sexual norms are very liberal
• Nevertheless, William Swatos (1984) reported high levels of in-the-home religion in Iceland today,... when asked "Independently of whether you go to church or not, would you say you are a religious person?" 66% of Icelanders say "yes."... only 2% say they are "convinced" atheists.... Indeed, these totals are not so dif- ferent from those for the United States... most people believe in life after death,
• In our judgment these data fully justify the supply-side interpretation of Northern Europe's low levels of religious participation.
• PROTESTANT GROWTH IN LATIN AMERICA
• Il libro. David Stoll's Is Latin America Turning Protestant?
• Until these books were published, the steady and rapid growth of pluralism in Latin America and the successful entry of highly competitive firms, had gone largely unnoticed in scholarly circles... scholarly world assumed that such changes were impossible.
• Martin and Stoll deserve great credit, their books were not all that timely.
• Given the lag time involved in the scholarly discovery of the religious reshaping of Latin America, it would not seem premature today to begin assessing the possibility of the rise of highly pluralistic European religious economies,
• THE CHURCHING OF EUROPE
• there has been a substantial allocation of missionaries and mission resources from North America to Europe.
• Jehovah's Witnesses grew by 72% in Europe from 1980 through 1992,
• Moreover, Europe's fate does not await religious instruction from North America. Locally led evangelical Protestant movements are growing all across Europe.
• HOW RELIGIOUS ARE 'RELIGIOUS' SOCIETIES?
• if full-blown pluralism develops in Europe, how religious could we expect it to become?
• Americans who actually belong to a specific church congregation...has hovered around 65%... Perhaps that is about the ceiling under conditions of modern living. Il resto religione fai da te.

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FUTURE IMPERFECT SUNTO di David D. Friedman - open source 9

NINE Reactionary Progress - Amateur Scholars and Open Source

• Splendidi dilettanti: Malthus and Darwin were clergymen, Mendel a monk, Smith a mining engineer, Hutton a gentleman farmer, Mill a clerk and writer, Ricardo a retired stock market prodigy. Of the names I have listed, only Newton was a university professor
• In the twentieth century, on the other hand, most of the major figures in all branches of scholarship have been professional academics.
• Why did things change? One possible answer is the enormous increase in knowledge. When fields were new, most scholars did not need access to vast libraries.
• The Web, while not a complete substitute for a library, makes enormous amounts of information readily available
• An alternative explanation... downward spread of education. In the eighteenth century, someone sufficiently well educated to invent a new science was likely to be a member of the upper class, and hence had a good chance of not needing to work for a living.
• most educated people today are rich - rich enough to make a tolerable living and still have time and effort left to devote to their hobbies.
• These arguments suggest that, having shifted from a world of amateur scholars to a world of professionals, we may now be shifting back.
• Two examples: Robin Hanson... His hobby was inventing institutions. His ideas - in particular an ingenious proposal to design markets to generate information - were sufficiently novel and well thought out to make corresponding with him more interesting than corresponding with most of my fellow economists.
• Esempio 2. One of my hobbies for the past thirty years has been cooking from very early cookbooks... When I started... There were no translations of early cookbooks in print and very few in libraries... The situation has changed enormously over the past thirty years... the biggest change is that there are now at least seven English translations of early cookbooks on the Web, freely available to anyone interested... Most of the translations were done by amateurs for the fun of it.
• The professionals, on average, know much more than the amateurs do, but there are a lot more amateurs and some of them know quite a lot.
• amateurs have access not only to information but to each other, as well as to any professional
• OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE
• rising incomes and improved communication technology make it easier to produce things for fun.
• The best-known example is Linux... graduate student named Linus Torvalds.
• The mechanics of open source are simple. Someone comes up with a first version of the software. He publishes the source code. Other people interested in the program modify it - which they are able to do because they have the source code - and send their modifications to him. Modifications that he accepts go into the code base,
• Eric Raymond: open source has its own set of norms and property rights.
• Linus Torvalds owns Linux. Eric Raymond owns Fetchmail. A committee mittee owns Apache... anyone is free to modify... provided that he makes the source code to his modified version public... each can take advantage of improvements made by the others.
• such ownership is controlled by rules similar to the common law rules. Torvalds: If he loses interest he can transfer ownership to someone else.
• There is a second form of ownership in open source - credit for your work. Each project is accompanied by a file identifying the authors.
• open source movement is simply a new variation on the system under which most of modern science was created. ated. Programmers create software; scholars create ideas.
• Scientific theories do not have owners in quite the sense that open source projects do, but at any given time in most fields there is considerable able agreement as to what the orthodox body of theory is.
• JIMMY WALES'S IMPOSSIBLE SUCCESS
• Few projects seem less suited to the open source approach than writing an encyclopedia. For it to be a success readers must rely on it, so a mistake in one article casts doubt on others.
• In 2001, Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia
• Open source radicale. With rare exceptions, any article can be edited anytime by anyone.
• More often than one might expect, the article evolves to a consensus, a statement of differing views that both sides can agree on.
• MARKET AND HIERARCHY
• firms themselves are miniature socialist states... There is one crucial difference between Microsoft and Stalin's Russia. Microsoft's interactions with the rest of us are voluntary.
• The easier it is for a dispersed group of individuals to coordinate their activities, ities, the larger we would expect the role of decentralized coordination, market rather than hierarchy, in the overall mix... the existence of the Internet had shifted the balance between center and periphery.
• Eli Lilly had decided to subcontract part of its chemical research to the world at large... according to a story in the Wall Street Journal, they had gotten "about 1,000 scientists from India, China, and elsewhere in the world"
• Problema: lavoro occulto: Consider a chemist hired to work in an area related to one of the problems on the list. He has an obvious temptation to slant... A chemist paid by firm A while working for firm B
• INFORMATION WARFARE
• Internet supports decentralized forms of cooperation. It supports decentralized forms of conflict as well.
• Una brutta storia con scambi di identità e furti di password
• Case 1: The Tale of the Four Little Pigs
• The year is 1995, the place Cornell University. Four freshmen have compiled piled a collection of misogynist jokes entitled "75 Reasons Why Women (Bitches) Should Not Have Freedom of Speech" and sent copies to their friends.
• The central question is whether creating such a list and using email to transmit it is an offense that ought to be punished or a protected exercise of free speech.
• La preside ipicrita:     the students have offered to do the following: Each of them will attend the "Sex at 7:00" program... the students have offered to do the following: Each of them will attend the "Sex at 7:00" program... Each of them has committed to perform 50 hours of community service.
• There are at least two ways to interpret that outcome. One is that Ms. Krause is telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth - Cornell imposed no penalty on the students, they imposed an entirely voluntary penalty. Molto syranom
• The alternative interpretation starts with the observation that university sity administrators have a lot of ways of making life difficult for students.
• Risultato: They publicly maintained their commitment to free speech while covertly punishing students for what they said.
• Someone who preferred the second interpretation thought up a novel way of supporting it. An email went out: Now that we have had time to evaluate the media response, I think we can congratulate ourselves on a strategy that was not only successful cessful in defusing the scandal, but has actually ally enhanced the reputation of the university as a sanctuary for those who believe that "free speech"... Yours sincerely Barbara L. Krause...
• The letter was not, of course, actually written by Barbara Krause... It was written, and sent, by an anonymous group calling themselves OFFAL - Online Freedom Fighters Anarchist Liberation. The letter was a satire,
• unattractive picture of what its authors suspected Ms. Krause's real views were.
• Email is not only easily distributed, it is easily answered.
• OFFAL produced a second email, containing the original forgery, an explanation of what they were doing,
• Their summary: We believe that ridicule is a more powerful ful weapon than bombs or death threats. And we believe that the Internet is the most powerful ful system ever invented for channeling grassroots roots
• The correct point was that Cornell's actions could plausibly be interpreted preted as hypocritical - attacking free speech while pretending to support it.
• What I find interesting about the incident is that it demonstrates a form of information warfare made practical by the nature of the net - very low transaction costs, anonymity, no face-to-face contact.
• Some years ago on a Usenet group, I read the following message: I believe that it is okay to have sex before marriage unlike some people... Please write me and give me your thoughts on this. You can also tell me about some of your ways to excite a woman because I have not yet found the right man to satisfy me....
• It occurred to me that what I was observing might be a commercial variant of the OFFAL tactic.
• that form of information warfare has been used frequently enough online to have acquired its own nickname: "Joe job."
• A Sad Story
• Furto d'identità e di password. Tizio finisce dentro xchè qlcn accede alla sua mail.
• For my present purposes what is interesting is not which side was guilty but the fact that either side could have been, and the problems that fact raises for the world that they were, and we will be, living in.
• solution is some way of knowing who sent what message.... One possible solution is the use of biometrics, identification linked to physical characteristics such as fingerprints or retinal patterns.
• digital signatures,
• OPEN SOURCE CRIME CONTROL
• Fregato su ebay reagisce: online private investigator who, from the buyer's cell phone number, was able to get his real name and landline phone number. Attempts to interest the Chicago police department, the FBI, and the Secret Service were unsuccessful... "not large enough to interest us"
• Finta asta. decided on a little private entrapment, set up an auction on eBay of the same computer under his girlfriend's name... Markham police... arrested the criminal with more than $10,000 in bogus checks in his possession.10
• The reason I know about it is that, when looking for material for this part of the chapter, I put a post on my blog asking for examples of open source crime control. The next day I had responses with links to several stories, including Jason's. I found his story the same way he found his criminal.

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Dilettanti e professionisti nell'era di internet

If we side too much with the outsiders, we risk nihilism, in which good science is too easily dismissed. If we side too much with the insiders, we risk groupthink, in which bad ideas persist because contrary analysis is suppressed.

"La bellezza disarmata", presentazione a Rimini del libro di don Julián Carrón 03/12/2015 - YouTube

"La bellezza disarmata", presentazione a Rimini del libro di don Julián Carrón 03/12/2015 - YouTube:



'via Blog this'



è la cc ad aver abbandonato l'uomo o viceversa? tutt'e due: le responsabilità sono reciproche.



con le guerre di religione salta l'unità cristiana dell'europa. non esiste più fede condivisa. Kant: condividiamo la ragione e salviamo i valori cristiani, che sono cmq buoni. fallimento: la fede nn condivisa si rispecchia in valori nn condivisi



il dono del cristianesimo: la dignità



zaccheo: la condanna sociale nn aveva smosso nulla in lui. la misericordia e la dignità riconosciutagli da g. lo cambia nel profondo.



ma oggi la dignità è di nuovo invisibile. come risolvere il problema? c'è chi si affida solo alla conoscenza quantitativa.



soluzione: far riaccadere l'evento di gesù che ci cambia il cuore.



gesù ci seduce. è bello. è mite. è una bellezza disarmata



non dobbiamo chiederci "che fare?" ma "chi sono?". interrogativo: ma questo davvero basta? l'organizzazione nn serve?

l'imprevisto è l'unica speranza. il cristianesimo è un evento che deve riaccadere in continuazione

quando l'amore è finito restano le regole. quando il crstianesimo finisce resta kant. riaccendiamo la luce.

I, Pencil By Leonard Read

I, Pencil By Leonard Read

• Parla una matita: I am a mystery
• I am taken for granted by those who use me,
• Chesterton: "We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders."
• Una strana semplicità. not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me
• Innumerable Antecedents
• a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon.
• Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs
• numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors;
• The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California.
• Can you imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the communication systems
• The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces.
• How many skills went into the making of the tint and the kilns, into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors? Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill's power!
• Once in the pencil factory... each slat is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat atop— a lead sandwich, so to speak.
• The graphite is mined in Ceylon. Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put them aboard ships and those who make the ships.
• The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process.
• Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow—animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid.
• treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.
• My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all the ingredients of lacquer?... growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil
• the labeling...applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins.
• My bit of metal... persons who mine zinc
• Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel.
• La gomma? Da dove arriva? An ingredient called "factice"... product made by reacting rape-seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride... there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy; and the pigment which gives "the plug" its color is cadmium sulfide.
• No One Knows
• There isn't a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how.
• Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me.
• exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants.
• No Master Mind
• There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind
• the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity
• Conoscenza dispersa. No individual possesses enough know-how to perform a nation's mail delivery any more than any individual possesses enough know-how to make a pencil.
• Lezione (anche) morale:  the lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson.
• Difendere il miracolo della matita significa difendere la libertà.

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FUTURE IMPERFECT SUNTO David D. Friedman - 18 nanotecnologie

 EIGHTEEN Very Small Legos FUTURE IMPERFECT David D. Friedman - 18 nanotecnologie

• the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom.
• 602,400,000,000,000,000,000,000.... number is the number of atoms in a gram of hydrogen.
• all living things, are engineered at the atomic scale.
• When an atom in a strand of DNA is in the wrong place, the result is a mutation. As we become better and better at manipulating very small objects it begins to become possible for us to build as we are built... That is the central idea of nanotechnology
• Since the bonds between atoms are very strong, it should be possible to build very strong fibers from long-strand molecules.
• Mechanical parts move very slowly compared to the movement of electrons in electronic computers. But if the parts are on an atomic scale, they do not have to move very far.
• a cell repair machine. Think of it as a robot submarine that goes into a cell, fixes whatever is wrong,
• build an assembler. An assembler is a nanoscale machine for building other nanoscale machines. Think of it as a tiny robot
• it would be interesting in surgery if you could swallow the surgeon. Richard Feynman
• Ralph Merkle proposed and Robert Freitas further developed an ingenious proposal for an improved version of a red blood cell... Its advantage becomes clear the day you have a heart attack
• Scettici. Some authors arguing that the technology is and always will be impossible for a variety of reasons. The obvious counterexample is life, a functioning nanotechnology based on molecular machines constructed largely of carbon.
• Il solito problema. if the design works why don't we already have them?
• Inefficienza dell'evoluzione. evolution can produce large improvements that occur through a long series of small changes, each itself a small improvement... But if a large improvement cannot be produced that way, if you need the right twenty mutations all happening at once in the same organism, evolution is unlikely to do it. The result is that evolution has explored only a small part of the design space... Hence we would expect that human beings, provided with the tools to build molecular machines, would be able to explore different parts of the design space, to build at least some useful machines that evolution failed to build.
• VERY HARD SOFTWARE
• To build a nanotech car I need assemblers - produced in unlimited numbers by other assemblers - raw material, and a program, a full description of what atoms go where. The raw material should be no problem.
• An acorn contains design specifications cations and machinery for building an oak tree, but it needs sunlight to power the process. Similarly, assemblers will need some source of energy.
• Once we have the basic technology, the hard part is the design... software
• One implication of nanotechnology is an economy for producing cars very much like the economy that currently produces word-processing programs. A familiar problem in the software economy is piracy.
• Come piratare. I cannot simply put my friend's nanotech car or nanotech computer into a disk drive and burn a copy. I can, however, disassemble it. To do that, I use nanomachines that work like assemblers, but backward. Instead of starting with a description of where atoms are to go and putting them there, they start with an object - an automobile, say - and remove the atoms, one by one, keeping track of where they all were.
• Soluzione 1. One approach to dealing with the problem of copying is an old legal technology, copyright,
• The solution may break down if instead of selling the car the pirate sells the design to individual consumers, each with his own army of assemblers ready to go to work.
• Soluzione 2. One possibility is tie-ins with other goods or services that cannot be produced so cheaply - land, say, or backrubs.
• Pubblicità incorporata. the melodious voice telling you everything thing you didn't want to know about the lovely housing development completed last week, designed for people just like you. On further investigation, tigation, you discover that turning off the advertising is not an option.
• You cast your mind back to the early years of the Internet, thirty or forty years ago, and the solution found by web sites to the problem of paying their bills.'
• Soluzione 3. Another possibility is a customized car. What you download, this time after paying for it, is a very special car indeed, one of a kind... But if you disassemble it and make lots of copies, they will not be very useful to anyone but you.
• This again is an old solution... all it requires is a CPU with its own serial number... it is possible to produce a program that will only run on one machine.
• Soluzione 4. A third possibility for producing nanotech designs is open source: a network of individuals cooperating to produce and improve designs, motivated by some combination of status, desire for the final product, and whatever else motivated the creators of Linux, Sendmail, and Apache.
• THE GRAY GOO SCENARIO
• Virus. Now consider a replicator designed to build copies of itself, which build copies, which....in a startlingly short time, it could convert everything from the dirt up into copies of itself, leaving only whatever elements happen to be in excess supply.
• One precaution you could apply to assemblers as well as other replicators tors is to design them to require some input, whether matter or energy, not available in the natural environment.
• Another is to give them a limited lifetime,
• Almost Worse than the Disease
• I have described a collection of precautions that could work in a world in which only one organization has access to the tools of nanotechnology and that organization acts in a prudent and benevolent fashion... such a monopoly seems extraordinarily unlikely
• One organization makes the breakthrough; it now has an assembler. Very shortly, after about forty doublings, it has a trillion assemblers. It sets them to work building what it has already designed. A week later it rules the world. One of its first acts is to forbid anyone else from doing research in nanotechnology... The result would be a world government with very nearly unlimited power.
• Between a Rock and a Hard Place
• Suppose we avoid world dictatorship and end up instead with multiple independent governments
• One possibility is that everyone treats nanotech as a government monopoly, with the products but not the technology made available to the general public...The problem with this solution is that it looks very much like a case of setting the fox to guard the hen house.
• Consider two possible worlds. In the first, nanotechnology is a difficult cult and expensive business... In that world, gray goo is unlikely to be produced deliberately by anybody but a government
• In the second world, perhaps the first world a few decades later, nanotech is cheap... Gov. going to keep the technology out of the hands of anyone who wants it. And it is far from clear that even that would suffice.
• Virus di internet. designer plagues will exist for much the same reasons that computer viruses now exist. Some will come into existence the way the original Internet worm did, the work of someone very clever, with no bad intent, who makes one mistake too many. Some will be designed to do mischief and turn out to do more mischief than intended. And a few will be deliberately created as instruments of apocalypse by people who for one reason or another like the idea.
• Il lato positivo. With enough cell repair machines on duty, designer plagues may not be a problem. Human beings want to live and will pay for the privilege. The resources that will go into designing ing protections against threats, nanotechnological or otherwise, will be enormously... The only serious threat will be from organizations tions willing and able to spend billions of dollars creating really first-rate molecular killers
• In dealing with nanotechnology, we are faced with a choice between centralized solutions - in the limit, a world government with a nanotech monopoly - and decentralized solutions. As a general rule I much prefer fer the latter. But a technology that raises the possibility of a talented teenager producing the end of the world in his basement makes the case for centralized regulation
• Analogia. Smallpox. the only remaining strains of the virus were held by U.S. and Russian government laboratories. Because it had been eliminated, and because public health is a field dominated by governments, smallpox vaccination had been eliminated too... If a terrorist had gotten a sample of the virus... he could have used it to kill hundred of millions, perhaps more than a billion, people. That risk existed because the technologies to protect against replicators - that particular class of replicators - had been under centralized control. The center had decided that the problem was solved.

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