HL The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority DI Martin Gurri Chapter 3 My Thesis

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority DI Martin Gurri  Chapter 3 My Thesis

• I’m not a visionary prophesying doom.......
• .If I describe the present accurately, I will have achieved my goal.
• If, after all these admissions, you were to ask me why you should read on, I would respond:   because the world I’ll describe is probably very different from the one you think you’re living in.example
• because we still think in categories forged during the industrial age –liberal and conservative, for , or professional and amateur –our minds are blind
• A War of the Worlds, Deduced From the Devil’s Excrement
• My thesis is a simple one.   We are caught between an old world which is decreasingly able to sustain us intellectually and spiritually, maybe even materially, and a new world that has not yet been born.   Given the character of the forces of change, we may be stuck for decades in this ungainly posture.
• Many features we prized about the old world are also threatened: for example, liberal democracy and economic stability.
• public discussion, may also warp or break from the immoveable resistance of the established order.
• Each side in the struggle has a standard-bearer: authority for the old... the public for the uncertain dispensation striving to become manifest.
• The perturbing agent between authority and the public is information.
• The industrial age insisted on portentous-sounding names of great seriousness..“Bank of America,”“National Broadcasting Corporation,”“New York Times. ”
• The digital age loves self-mocking names... “Yahoo,”“Google,”“Twitter,”“reddit,”“Flickr,”“Photobucket,”“Bitcoin.”
• I feel reasonably sure that the founders of Google never contemplated naming their company “National Search Engine Corporation”and Mark Zuckerman of Facebook never felt tempted by “Social Connections Center of America.”  It wasn’t the style. The names of two popular political blogs from the early days of blogging, Glenn Reynolds’Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, poked fun at the pretentiousness of the news business.
• The names asserted non-authoritativeness. They created a conscious divide between the old order and the new.
• Hierarchy has ruled the world since the human race attained meaningful numbers.... From the era of Rameses to that of Hosni Mubarak,
• Against this citadel of the status quo, the Fifth Wave has raised the network: that is, the public in revolt,
• Wael Ghonim’s passionate insistence on being an ordinary Egyptian rather than a political leader was an expression of digital culture.
• If hierarchy worships the established order, the network nurtures a streak of nihilism.
• The Center Cannot Hold And the Border Has No Clue What To Do About It
• Another way to characterize the collision of the two worlds is as an episode in the primordial contest between the Center and the Border.
• Making a program is a center strategy; attacking center programs on behalf of nature, God, or the world is border strategy.
• Government lost control of its own classified documents.   Book publishers and the TV and movie industries, still very profitable today, depend on technical and copyright regimes which could be breached at any moment.
• On 9/ 11, a miniscule network of violent men slaughtered thousands of Americans..... Obama, propelled by online networks which generated funds, volunteers, and an effective anti-Center message,
• sectarian advances have been reversed.   My suspicion is that they must be reversed, if sects –the public in revolt –truly have no interest in governing and possess no capacity for exercising power.
• The result is paralysis by distrust. The Border, it is already clear, can neutralize but not replace the Center. Networks can protest and overthrow, but never govern.
• The closest historical parallel to our time may have been the wars of religion of the seventeenth century. I say this not necessarily because of the chaos and bloodshed of the period, but because every principle was contested.... “Who won – Catholics or Protestants?”... Neither won.
• My great concern as a citizen is for the future of liberal democracy.... That democracy became hierarchical, organizational, an institution of the Center... Many aspects of representative democracy have become less democratic, and are so perceived by the public.
• How it changes may depend on the aggregated decisions of individual citizens –in other words:   on us –no less than on procedural reforms.
• Cyber-Utopians, Cyber-Skeptics, Cyber-Pessimists, And How All Their Sound and Fury Signifies Very Little
• A century of research on media and information effects has delivered confusing if not contradictory findings.
• 3 modelli
• 1 do I, in my condition as a member of the public, accept all the mediators’ information, and act accordingly?... Lippmann argued... Propaganda, on this account, injected new opinions and actions directly into the gullible brains of the public.
• 2 I accept none of the mediators’information, because my moral and political beliefs were formed by “strong”social bonds, like church and family, rather than “weak”links like reading a newspaper?   That also has been proposed, most recently by Malcolm Gladwell
• 2 bis do I engage in a “two-step”process, in which I first absorb the opinions of a strong personal connection, like a trusted friend or minister, and only then accept certain mediated information?
• 3 Or is it the case that mediators have no power to control how I think or act, but can command my attention to those public issues... Roland Schatz,
• Some writers saw in digital media a boost to human collaboration and democracy.   Critics dubbed this tribe cyber-utopians.   Others found in the internet all manner of ills –the corruption of our culture, for example, or an invitation for governments to spy on their citizens.   These were the cyber-pessimists.   A third, much smaller group wondered whether anything important had really changed:   call them cyber-skeptics.
• Malcolm Gladwell... compared the strong personal ties of the civil rights activists in the 1960s with the weak ties between participants in online causes like the Save Darfur Coalition.   Only strong ties, argued Gladwell, made possible the informal coordination... real politics happened among comrades..Gladwell is a thinker of the Center, a mind of the industrial age.... He explicitly identified strong ties with hierarchy,
• Clay Shirky has noted that a committed activist with strong personal ties to others also can expand his reach by becoming a Facebook warrior.
• Gladwell at least grounded his skepticism on a traditional conception of power:   hard trumped soft, scissors always cut paper.   I find it harder to make sense of the warnings of the cyber-pessimists.   pessimists hover somewhere between pointless and trivially true.
• The favorite goat of cyber-skeptics and cyber-pessimists has been Clay Shirky, whose 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody, was described by Gladwell as “the bible of the social media movement”...Shirky walks on the sunny side of the street,... His message was that the new digital platforms made it easy for groups to “self-assemble,”and that the rise of such spontaneous groups was bound to lead, sooner or later, to social and political change.
• Ancora la tesi. power has fundamentally shifted between authority and obedience, ruler and ruled, elite and public, so that each can inflict damage on the other but neither can attain a decisive advantage.   That is the non-utopian thesis of this book.
• Homo Informaticus, Or How Choice Can Bring Down Governments
• This anxiety to control information in those who already controlled the guns should alert us that political power may be less “hard,”and more intangible, than supposed.
• Power....a matter of trust, faith, and fear,
• the potential influence of information over political power flows more from its fit into stories of legitimacy than from, say, investigative reporting
• the rise of a restless, disruptive organism, which I have taken the bold step to name Homo informaticus... products of....the spread of education, expanded levels of wealth and security, and improved means of communication.
• Unmediated Man lacked access to any media.   He was likely to be illiterate, and had neither the means nor the interest to travel very far.   His only channels of information were the people around him...... the typical Egyptian of 1980,
• Il regime.... To impose its will on Unmediated Man, it had to find a way to convey the particulars to him, in the context of a persuasive justifying story.......for the regime to communicate and interact with Unmediated Man in terms advantageous to its story of legitimacy, it needed only to control the community... regime appointed the local authorities
• Unmediated Man....may have protested, even violently, against local conditions, but he could never seek to overthrow the political system.
• Homo informaticus is a differently-endowed member of the public: he’s literate, and has access to newspapers, radio, movies, TV. He has been exposed to a larger world beyond the immediate community..... conceives of an alternative form of government
• To cover the threat, the regime must deploy a costly and elaborate state media apparatus.... control, the means of mass communication: newspapers, radio, TV, books, cinema, etc.
• regime’s story of legitimacy are gone forever.   Under these conditions, the best outcome for the regime is acceptance by the public that the world is too complex to be understood
• we can say with confidence that it won’t be triggered unless the public is shown a differently-ordered world:   a choice.
• A trivial example would be a TV commercial for a new, improved dishwasher detergent. A political example was the jolt of hope experienced by the Egyptian opposition after the fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia.
• If H. informaticus were to try to absorb this mass, his head would explode.   This is not what transpires.   He will pick and choose.   So will other members of the public.   By that very selectivity, that freedom to choose its channels of information, the public breaks the power of the mediator class created by mass media, and, under authoritarian rule, controlled by the regime.
• An accurate representation based on volume would show state media to be microscopic, invisible,
• The regime accumulates pain points: police brutality, economic mismanagement, foreign policy failures...... In essence, government failure now sets the agenda.
• At this stage, the public, clustered around networked communities
• hypotheses sulla relazione info-potere
• 1 Information influences politics because it is indigestible by a government’s justifying story.
• 2 The greater the diffusion of information to the public, the more illegitimate any political status quo will appear.
• 3 Homo informaticus, networked builder and wielder of the information sphere, poses an existential challenge to the legitimacy of every government he encounters.

continua

Speriamo che i ricchi diventino ancora più ricchi By lodovico pizzati - fisco americano

Speriamo che i ricchi diventino ancora più ricchi By lodovico pizzati - fisco americano

• Praticamente metà degli americani non paga tasse sul reddito. E tre quarti dei nuclei familiari arriva, al massimo, ad un’aliquota marginale del 15%. In questo sistema l’84% dei $ 1.4 trilioni di entrate dalla tassa sul reddito viene pagato solo dal 20% più ricco, gente che guadagna almeno $ 10,000 al mese.
• entrate fiscali di $ 3 trilioni (dati 2014). Di questi il grosso sono proprio income taxes: $ 1.4 trilioni, pari al 42% della torta. Un altro 40% sono le payroll taxes che vanno a pagare la social insurance. Le corporate taxes sono solo $ 0.3 trilioni (un misero 10% del totale). Il resto sono tasse minori.
• Poi ogni stato raccoglie soprattutto le sales taxes, mentre le città si tengono le property taxes.
• ci sono una serie di possibili detrazioni che tralascierò per concetrarmi sulle due principali: la standard deduction e la exemption.
• la standard deduction di $ 12,600 per coppie (e $ 6,300 per singoli).
• le exemptions, e cioè $ 4,000 per ogni membro del nucleo
• prendiamo il nostro average Joe che guadagna con la moglie $ 53,000 in lordo.... Scopriamo che il suo reddito tassabile finisce per essere $ 24,400........... con $ 24,400 di reddito tassabile la income tax è $ 2,741. E il nostro average Joe le paga? No! Il fisco americano ti fa una sorpresa perché una volta che hai scoperto quanto devi pagare, ora puoi dedurre il child tax credit, ovvero togli altri $ 1000 per ogni figlio che hai.... una famiglia tipica paga $ 741 all’anno, e cioè il 1,4% scarso, praticamente nulla.... Insomma, pressapoco metà degli americani non deve praticamente neanche pagare l’income tax.
• Guardiamo all’altro vicino di casa di average Joe, quello a capo della famiglia che guadagna in lordo $ 68,200... paga solo il 6,6% del lordo.
• Guardiamo a quella modesta famiglia che guadagna $ 112,262,.... Qui siamo nel ceto medio-alto (upper-middle class)....una tassa media solo del 9,4% rispetto al lordo!
• In sintesi, gli americani più poveri (quelli con un reddito equivalente alla media italiana) ovviamente pagano zero tasse, ma praticamente anche il ceto medio-basso non ha tasse da pagare. Il ceto medio-alto al massimo vede delle aliquote al 10% e 15%. In sostanza è solo il 20% più ricco che paga
• ricchi, quel 20% della popolazione che guadagna il 50% del reddito nazionale e che paga l’ 84% del totale delle tasse sul reddito versate....
• negli Stati Uniti l‘80% della popolazione è un free rider sulla groppa del 20% più ricco. Non solo, ci sono delle esternalità positive ad avere tutti questi ricconi. Pensiamo alla Google car di Page e Brin che darà la possibilità al nostro average Joe di avere l’autista personale. Pensiamo a Bezos e Musk che, indipendentemente, hanno fatto atterrare un razzo in verticale, consentendo enormi risparmi per il settore spaziale.... Pensiamo alle auto elettriche di Musk, alla filantropia di Gates... Oltre a queste esternalità positive i ricchi pagano il conto per tutti.
• mentre le decisioni su come amministrare il bene pubblico vengono prese dalla maggioranza.
• speriamo che i ricchi diventino ancora più ricchi, perchè in questo sistema vuol dire non solo niente tasse per il ceto medio basso, ma ormai anche sempre meno tasse anche per il ceto medio alto.
• il sistema fiscale americano è progressivo fino ad un certo punto. La partita si gioca all’interno del top 20% (vedi tabella WSJ): tra il 19% di famiglie che guadagnano tra un $ 120mila a un $ 600mila all’anno (un 62 milioni di americani), e il top 1%
• le 50mila famiglie di multi milionari (e i bilionari) che usufruiscono di scappatoie fiscali costruite ad hoc a suon di lobbying. 
• è una battaglia tra alcuni milioni di ricchi come Sanders e qualche decina di migliaia di uber ricchi 

E se tassassimo solo i ricchi? By lodovico pizzati

• negli USA, ci stanno arrivando paradossalmente riducendo le tasse sui ricchi.
• il sistema fiscale americano non era poi così diverso da quello europeo, ma grazie a quattro principali riforme fiscali negli Stati Uniti sono riusciti a ridurre gradualmente, e alla fin fine drasticamente, il peso fiscale per il cittadino medio
• Fino al 1981 l’aliquota che incideva sul reddito dell’household mediano (il nostro average Joe) era del 28%, mentre l’aliquota massima era del 70%... quella massima è ora al 39.6% per i guadagni oltre i $ 465,000
• Le prime due riforme fiscali sono avvenute con Reagan, nel 1981 e nel 1986, la terza con Clinton nel 1997, e la quarta con Bush nel 2003.
• Le riforme fiscali americane solitamente fanno notizia perché riducono le tasse sui ricchi (e questo è vero) ma quello che passa inosservato è la riduzione ancora più notevole per la middle class.
• Il grosso della riduzione fiscale per la middle class è avvenuto sotto Clinton nel 1997 e ancora di più con Bush nel 2003. Nel 1997 e nel 2003 l’aliquota per la middle class non è cambiata, ma oltre all’aumento delle deduzioni sono stati introdotti dei tax credit che hanno azzerato le tasse per milioni di americani.
• In termini relativi la famiglia mediana ha visto le imposte federali sul reddito praticamente scomparire, mentre la famiglia ricca le ha viste quasi dimezzarsi.
• Questo rende il meccanismo fiscale molto più progressivo perché ora il ricco paga relativamente molto di più dell’average Joe, anche se in termini assoluti adesso paga molto di meno di quanto pagava prima. Come è possibile?
• La risposta istintiva potrebbe essere che gli americani hanno atrofizzato le entrate fiscali e così facendo chissà di quanto hanno ridotto la spesa pubblica e i benefici pubblici per l’average Joe.
• Ma i dati invece dicono tuttaltro.... Se guardiamo alle entrate fiscali dalla federal income tax... queste entrate fiscali sono aumentate:
• In parte questo può essere dovuto alla crescita economica generale ma, dato che il carico fiscale pesa sempre di più sul 20% più ricco, questo aumento sembra dovuto soprattutto al fatto che i ricchi stanno diventando sempre più ricchi.
• Gli Stati Uniti hanno raggiunto il massimo di progressività fiscale tassando di meno il ricco, quasi proprio non tassando per niente la middle class, e fregandosene dell’impatto sulla disparità di reddito
• per l’ideologia socialista la progressività fiscale è invece vista come il mezzo per raggiungere il vero fine, che è la riduzione della disuguaglianza
• Ma qual è il fine ultimo? È il benessere in termini assoluti o il benessere relativo al mio vicino di casa?
• Europa. pur di ottenere una varianza minore (meno divario tra il ricco e il ceto medio) finisco per tassare di più il ricco. Ma facendo così rischio di far meno cassa e mi tocca compensare col tassare anche il ceto medio,
• 

continua

The Proactionary Principle By Bryan Caplan

The Proactionary Principle By Bryan Caplan

• precazione vs proazione
• punti del pro azione:
• 1 privilegiare    ciò che migliora la  conoscenza anzichè ciò che la blocca
• 1 bis riconoscere i limiti della conoscenza che impediscono la mera analisi utilitaristica costi/benefici
• 2 simmetria: pesare i pro e i contro di tutte le azioni alternative
• 3 privilegiare l uomo sulla natura
• 4 privilegiare il vicino sul distante c.p.
• 5 privilegiare il certo sull incerto c.p
• ...
• a neat essay by Max More defending a "Proactionary Principle" against the far more popular "Precautionary Principle."
• 3. Triage: Give precedence to ameliorating known... over acting against hypothetical risks.
• 4. Symmetrical treatment...Treat technological risks on the same basis as natural risks... Fully account for the benefits of technological advances.
• 9. Prioritize
• Esempi. (a) Give priority to risks to human and other intelligent life over risks to other species;
• priority to immediate threats over distant threats;
• concept of opportunity cost... progress you don't see...
• ...
• 1 Libertà di innovare
• 2 Obiettività
• 3 Comprehensiveness
• 4 Apertura/Trasparenza
• 5 Semplicità
• 6 Verifica
• 7 Trattamento simmetrico
• 8 Proporzionalità
• 9 Prioritizzazione
• 10 Rinnovare e Rinfrescare
• i. Il principio di proazione è basato sull'osservazione che, storicamente, le innovazioni tecnologiche più utili e importanti non erano né ovvie né ben comprese al momento della loro invenzione.
• Il primo principio di More, libertà di innovare, piazzerebbe il peso della prova su quelli che propongono delle misure restrittive.

continua

The Origins of Mass Incarceration Daniel D'Amico Adam Gelb Mike Riggs by Susanne Karstedt

The Origins of Mass Incarceration Daniel D'Amico Adam Gelb Mike Riggs by Susanne Karstedt

• Sunti
• Why Nations Jail by Daniel D'Amico
• international context: Yes , we all know that we are a nation of jailers.
• in recent years many other countries have dramatically increased their incarceration rates
• proposed causes for our high incarceration rate, including racism, our free-market economic system, and our War on Drugs. He finds the latter the most persuasive
• incarceration is particularly bad here - and in certain other countries - because of the public choice effects inherent in common law
• Better Question: How Do We Unjail? by Mike Riggs
• concentrated benefits and dispersed costs tend to operate in criminal justice policy
• Politicians receive the benefits of the system, in that it pays to look tough on crime.
• The purpose of our penal institutions is......to impart respect for the law, to deter crime, and to reintegrate former offenders into society in ways that will ensure they do not offend again. Our current system is manifestly a failure
• Riggs recommends that we turn to penalties other than prison for a significant number of crimes
• Laboratories of Incarceration by Adam Gelb
• Classica distorsione: state government often pays for the prison system, while the local government pays for community supervision. As a result, local governments send former offenders back to prison as a way of saving money
• Great facts and new facts: The end of U.S. mass imprisonment? by Susanne Karstedt
• Karstedt looks at the relationship between wealth and imprisonment.
• Is it really the case that neoliberal nations prefer to warehouse their poor in jails? She finds that the evidence supporting this claim is weak.
• Yet budget constraints seem to reduce incarceration rates, and she says it’s no coincidence that mass imprisonment seems to have peaked and come to a halt in 2009.
• ......
• Saggi
• Why Nations Jail By Daniel D'Amico
• The U.S. imprisonment trend also looks like a hockey stick.... in the 1970s, the line shot up, quintupling by the 2000s.
• Culture, racism, and the drug war obviously matter. But I’d like to challenge some of these presumed causes by simply asking how much they fully explain global
• Ecuador, Indonesia, Cambodia, Israel, Serbia, and Georgia don’t share much economic, partisan, or cultural American-ness, yet all doubled their prison populations in a decade, while Britain took
• no data confirms a consistent relationship between more liberal market economies –or higher economic performance –and larger prison populations.
• Is racism the primary driver of American mass imprisonment?
• In fact, in England, Canada, and Australia, the minority to white inmate ratios all outpace the United States. [8]
• The advent of American mass incarceration also occurred alongside measurable racial progress.
• Is America’s vengeful culture responsible? Again maybe partially, but such features don’t explain why so many other nations have multiplied their prisons without similarly rugged individualists supporting
• Most experimental evidence suggests vengeful preferences are common across identities,
• economist Naci Mocan reports the opposite cultural relationship, with poor, war-torn, and collectivist countries hosting more vengeance.
• shared timing of American incarceration with drug prohibition seems too tightly linked to be coincidence. But prohibition is not a sufficient explanation
• drug violations only make up about 17% of state inmates and represent about 20% of the growth
• Without drug convictions, American incarcerations would have quadrupled rather than quintupled.
• And again, if uniquely American factors cause mass incarceration, then why is there a global
• Current research emphasizes a general relationship between social institutions and incarceration.
• many public choice scholars have noticed that by concentrating perceived deterrent benefits while dispersing costs, democratic politics rewards the expansive spending, employment, and voter appeasement accomplished through criminalization and prison growth.
• Lacey [17] has observed the organization of electoral processes correlate with incarceration rates. Nations with winner-take-all elections host greater political incentives to appease punitive biases.
• my recent paper coauthored with Claudia Williamson shows nations founded in the British common law tradition rather than civil law host larger incarceration rates. While the common law is typically more decentralized, we suspect criminal justice systems were historically founded and subsequently organized more hierarchically relative to other common law social
• Common law: pm eletti.
• From Ferguson to Baltimore we seem to be stuck with the worst of both worlds: racially biased local cops and a militarized national response.
• Saggio
• Great facts and new facts: The end of U.S. mass imprisonment? By Susanne Karstedt
• Why do nations jail? It’s a rich man’s folly, says Jan van Dijk from Tilburg University
• The richer countries are, the more they use imprisonment when meting out punishment to citizens.
• Jan van Dijk has a point even from a historical perspective;
• imprisonment is a tool of criminal justice not affordable to all and sundry.
• United States is a visible outlier.... housing 25% of the world’s prisoners.... by far exceeds imprisonment in the poorest and cruellest dictatorships in the world,
• unprecedented growth and unparalleled size of the U.S. prison population between 1970s and the first decade of the 21st century
• Was this just another case of American exceptionalism, or was the United States in the vanguard... Most criminologists bought into the latter perspective.
• This was the start of the search for the one magic-bullet variable... The emerging candidate was broadly labelled “neo-liberalism.”Neo-liberalism’s manifestations of deregulating the economy and downsizing the welfare state... Another master narrative was based on the observation that nations with majority rules in their electoral processes have higher imprisonment rates. In both cases, the empirical foundations were shaky:
• American criminologist Frank Zimring argues that such “professionalization of punishment”combines several “leniency vectors”that keep imprisonment low.[ 3] It is a defining feature of civil law systems that decisions are made by professionals and according to professional standards, and criminal justice officials are not directly elected. In contrast, communities and the electorate seem to have been a driving force behind skyrocketing imprisonment in the United States.
• Esempio. Voters in California supported criminal justice policies that lay the ground for ever increasing imprisonment in that state;
• The year 2009 provides a reality check for all theorizing on mass imprisonment in the United States: It was the year when imprisonment growth in the United States came to a halt... 2009 was the year after the financial crisis, and this is no coincidence.
• prisons were closed in California, Nebraska, and New York.... estimated savings of nearly $ 340 million
• It comes as a surprise for many criminologists that the same neo-liberals and fiscal hawks who had been blamed for “mass imprisonment”were now in the driving seat for penal reform.
• “Right on Crime,”a conservative think tank, explains the turn in conservative penal policies: “How is it ‘conservative’to spend vast amounts of taxpayer money on a strategy without asking whether it is providing taxpayers with the best public safety return on their investment
• If two trends look like hockey sticks there might be some common ground which kicks them off.
• L'Europa ha meno carcerari xchè per ogni carcerato spende molto di più
• My own research shows that values like liberal individualism and egalitarianism are not related to how many are sent to prison, but significantly to the treatment of prisoners.[ 15] Both might be nonetheless related: more care for the dignity and liberty of those who failed might make nations more cautious in the use of imprisonment, not the least because it increases the costs of imprisonment.
• Many European countries, including Germany, have considerably lower recidivism rates then the United States. Spending on prisoners rather than on warehousing them seems a better way to deliver the goods.
• Policy: x ridurre la mass incarceration promuovere programmi rieducativo. Il vincolo di bilancio fará il suo lavoro.

continua

Children's Safety and Liberty Lenore Skenazy

Children's Safety and Liberty Lenore Skenazy

• Lenore Skenazy: l'ossessione sulla sicurezza dei piccoli si è spinta troppo in là, nella cultura come nella politica (dai prodotti alle resp. famigliari). Insegnare a prendere dei rischi fa parte del processo educativo...
• Anthony Green: con la sicurezza dei bimbi nn si scherza: abbiamo fatto grandi progressi e tornare indietro sarebbe deleterio...
• James Swartz: le multinazionali dei giocattoli tendono a trascurare la sicurezza se non incalzate. Appena si molla il punto un malefico trend s'innesta...
• Joel Best: due fatti hanno modificato il ns atteggiamento sulla sicurezza dei bimbi: 1) i media con le loro storie allarmanti e 2) la bassa natalità che rende ogni bambino più prezioso
• ...........lead essay**************
• Smothered by Safety By Lenore Skenazy

• politician, principal, or bureaucrat wants to score points, he or she lets us know that kids are even more precious—and endangered—than we thought.
• explosion of new laws, products, and policies to protect them from, well, everything: Creeps, kidnappers, germs, grades, flashers, frustration, baby snatchers, bugs, bullies, men—all men are pedophiles until proven otherwise—sleepovers, toys from China, and/ or the perils of a non-organic grape.
• Which of the following did NOT happen this past year?
• (A.) Local licensing authorities outlawed soap in pre-school bathrooms for fear that children might suddenly start drinking it.
• (B.) Unaccompanied children under age 12 were banned from the Boulder, CO, library, lest they encounter “hazards such as stairs, elevators, doors,
• (C.) The Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a recall of certain fleece hoodies sold at Target because of lead paint on the zipper,
• (D.) Children under age 18 were prohibited from gathering on the streets of Tucson, AZ, for fear they might “talk, play or laugh”in groups, which could lead to bullying.
• (E.) A New Canaan, CT, mom was charged with “risk of injury to a minor,”for letting her 13-year-old babysit the three younger children at home for an hour while the mom went to church.
• (F.) A Tennessee mother was thrown in jail for letting her kids, aged 8 and 5, go to the park without her, a
• (G.) A Hazmat crew was summoned to Seminole High School in Florida after a science student brought in a mercury thermometer.
• Il libro. Gever Tulley, author of 50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Kids Do).... objects and activities can be reclassified as dangerous when seen through the worst-case-scenario lens.
• federal playground safety guidelines propose removing “tripping hazards, like tree stumps and rocks.”
• If to a hammer everything looks like a nail, to a government agency charged with protecting children, everything looks like a health threat, death trap, or predator.
• Michigan mom had to come fetch her children—12 and 15—from the police station, after she’d expected them to walk home from the library. The library staff decided it was too cold to make the kids do this (the kids had walked there without coats).
• charged with “risk of injury to a minor... she allowed her seven-year and 11-year old children to walk down to Spruce Street to buy pizza
• The message to parents? The government is better at raising your kids than you are. The message to kids? You are weak little babies.
• onlookers now routinely call 911 when they see kids waiting in cars, usually because they are convinced that one of two extraordinarily rare tragedies are happening all the time. The first is children dying from hyperthermia, which DOES happen—but mostly when a parent literally forgets the child...
• Onlookers also worry that any children on their own will be instantly kidnapped,
• in the “real world,”stranger abductions are so rare that if for some reason you actually WANTED your child to be kidnapped by a stranger, do you know how long you’d have to keep your child outside, unattended, so that statistically the abduction would be likely to happen? The answer is about 750,000 years, according to author Warwick Cairns. And after the first 100,000 years or so, your kid isn’t even cute anymore.
• In its Zero Tolerance intolerance, it criminalizes any parent who refuses to engage in what I call “worst-first thinking”—
• When rational parenting decisions become criminalized, parents are forced to think irrationally.
• As law professor David Pimentel explains in his Utah Law Review article “ Criminal Child Neglect and the ‘Free Range Kid ,’” this is the way over-parenting becomes the law of the land:
• Law professors Gaia Bernstein and Zvi Triger noticed something similar: In several divorce proceedings they reviewed, the parents who could prove they were the most over-involved were the ones awarded custody.... The authors even found lawyers instructing their clients to obsessively text their kids all day, in order to leave a digital trail to document their pestering. Thus helicopter parenting
• The problem seems to be that because nothing is 100% safe, almost anything the commission sets its eye on is fair game for censure.
• In 2010 the government warned consumers to stop using—and stores to stop selling, and manufacturers to stop making—all cribs where the side drops down to make it easier to get the baby out. The reason given was that over the course of the nine preceding years, thirty-two children died in such cribs.... Those odds do not mean that the product is inherently unsafe. It means that drop side cribs are vastly safer than stairs (1,300 deaths per year), much safer than eating (about 70 kids younger than 10 choke to death on food each year), and waaay safer than driving your kid in a car (over 200 baby and toddler deaths per year).
• a world with zero risk is also a world with zero anything,
• ***********riassunto***************
• LEAD ESSAY Smothered by Safety by Lenore Skenazy
• Tesi: we have gone too far in the pursuit of safety at all costs.... it’s time to start learning to relax... allowing kids to take controlled risks
• Ambiti. Cultura. consumer product regulations... criminal law.
• Safety: More than Tree Stumps and Toe Mold by Anthony Green
• It is not an overreach to call the police if you see a child alone in a locked car;
• Child Safety: The First Priority by James A. Swartz
• multibillion dollar corporations that make children’s products have a responsibility
• Corporations are often indifferent to children’s safety.
• The Roots of Concern about Kids by Joel Best
• Perchè tanta paura?
• mass media, which excels at spreading alarming stories,
• declining birthrate, coupled with increased safety itself:
• As a result, smaller problems appear more alarming.
• CONVERSATION
• Skenazy...
• La regola è la nuova religione: prima dopo la disgrazia scattavano le preghiere, ora scatta la leggina. Cosa sia più razionale lascio a voi decidere. L'esempio del bimbo dimenticato in auto e morto...
• Incidenti. Se vuoi spaventare usa i numeri se vuoi capire usa la percentuali. I proibizionisti fanno un grande uso dei numeri. Esempio: nell'ultimo anno 10 bimbi morti dimenticati in auto negli USA (orrore). Ma si può davvero regolmentare con un rischio del 0,000000146%?...
• Quanto vi fidate di voi e dei vostri figli? E quanto vi fidate del regolatore?…
• Green...
• Non sembra vero che i rischi per un bambino sono così diminuiti. Gli incidenti stradali che feriscono o uccidono un minore sono ancora troppi. Non si può stare con le mani in mano...
• Quanti bimbi bisogna sacrificare prima che sia lecito intervenire con una legge? Ebbene, il buon genitore è sempre informato e sempre al lavoro x la sicurezza dei suoi bimbi...
• Swartz...
• La vita dei bimbi trascende le percentuali. Non dobbiamo evitare i numeri anche se ci fanno paura...
• La nozione di rischio accettabile ha poco senso. Accettabile x chi?…
• IMO: "accettabile"x la comunità esercitando il buon senso. Poi ogni genitore può e deve lavorare sul suo specifico rischio accettabile...
• La libertà ha un valore conoscitivo? Ma i nostri ragazzi nn sono cavie!...
• IMO: tutti noi siamo cavie: la vita è un'esperienza (esperimento) la libertà la rende sensata sia per noi che per gli altri...
• IMO: la prevenzione comprime sia la libertà che la conoscenza...
• Best...
• Green e Swartz mi confermano che l'anelito alla sicurezza nn è una finzione creata ad arte da un regolatore avido di potere...
• Gli incidenti automobilistici sono ancora un grave problema? No, sono clamorosamente calati, anche se restano la prima causa di morte. Non si può far finta di nulla. Certo potremmo portare i rischi vicino allo zero istituendo un limite di velocità di 30 all'ora...
• L'analisi costi/benefici non è mai neutrale sui valori. Il valore della vita e quello della libertà si confrontano di continuo...
• Green
• ......
• In Regulation We Trust By Lenore Skenazy
• But how do we leap from “don’t forget to lock”to “never leave a child alone in a car”? Especially when we all know that we spent at least a smidgen of our own childhoods waiting in the car while mom ran into pick up the prescription, or dad paid for the gas?
• Regulation is the new religion.... the struggling heart makes a leap of faith not to God’s great, unknowable plan, but to a more modern belief: The belief that if we just pass enough laws, we can prevent anything
• As a nation we went on the hunt for hidden dangers, found them all around, and demanded change.
• the safer our society becomes, the more we obsess
• Come spaventate? ... cites 31 children dying in cars last year (the majority of whom were forgotten there, not simply waiting out a short errand). That’s heartbreaking.... that’s 0.000000149% of them... Should we really be regulating parental choice based on percentages like these?
• you want to scare someone, use numbers. If you want to put things in perspective, use percentages.
• Laws exist to make society reasonably safe. They cannot make us completely safe without making us completely unreasonable.
• Halloween Myths Vanish with Facts By Anthony Green
• kid is on average twice as likely to be hit and killed by a car on Halloween than any other day
• real child safety efforts are based on research and facts and data, and not myths
• It’s not right to say that auto crashes (resolved by seat belts and booster seats) is a smaller problem.... Car crashes have been and remain the number one cause of unintentional death
• Children’s Lives Are More Than “Percentages”By James A. Swartz
• For me, as well as parents of children who have been maimed or killed and countless other concerned citizens, holding accountable those who manufacture and sell defective playthings for our nation’s children is no laughing matter.
• in Ms. Skenazy’s view, speaking about individual children, or numbers of children... is not appropriate because it might “scare”
• acceptable risk. Acceptable to whom?... Certainly not to those of us who believe we can and must do better... lab rats.
• focus must be on prevention,
• The Importance of Proportion By Joel Best
• the primary impetus for child safety does not come from meddling officials, but rather from private advocates, like Swartz and Green,
• everyone involved in this conversation approves of improving the milk supply, promoting vaccinations and antibiotics,
• “It is not right to say that auto crashes …[are] a smaller problem.... false. In 1966, there were 50,894 traffic fatalities; in 2010, there were 32,788.... U.S. population grew by 55 percent,.... The number of deaths per million miles driven dropped from 5.5 to 1.1.... I suppose we could cut traffic fatalities to nearly zero—establishing a national 5 mph speed limit... we have progressed enough
• Swartz questions whether it is “acceptable to lose just one precious child”; on the other, Lenore Skenazy argues that saving that last life may involve costs that outweigh the benefits. Such a debate is not between facts and “myths”—it concerns values.
• Applying Cost-Benefit Engineering to a Kid’s Life Is Just Wrong By Anthony Green
• The Audacity of Seeking to Prevent the Preventable By Anthony Green
• Trying to Outlaw Fate By Lenore Skenazy
• Values and Consistency By Joel Best
• This Is How a Concerned Citizen Thinks By James A. Swartz

Eccetera

SUNTO The Revolt of the Public di Martin Gurri - cap 1 e cap2

The Revolt of the Public di Martin Gurri Chapter 1 Prelude to a Turbulent Age

• Cosa connette tra loro questi eventi?: online universities...serial insurgencies which, in media noise and human blood, have rocked the Arab Middle East... faster churning of companies in and out of the S& P 500...death of news... Facebook.... google... smartphone... crisis of government in liberal democracies...
• an old, entrenched social order is passing away even as I write these words –one rooted in the hierarchies and conventions of industrial life.   Since no substitute has appeared on the horizon, we should, as tourists flying into the unknown,
• Information Is Cool, So Why Did It Explode?
• I also held the belief that information of the sort found in newspapers and television reports was identical to knowledge –so the more information, the better.   This was naïve
• A curious thing happens to sources of information under conditions of scarcity. They become authoritative... Cronkite emanated authority.
• as ever more published reports escaped the control of authoritative sources, how could we tell truth from error?   Or, in a more sinister vein, honest research from manipulation?
• A resident of Cairo, who in the 1980s could only stare dully at one of two state-owned channels showing all Mubarak all the time, by the 2000s had access to more than 400 national and international stations.
• More information was generated in 2001 than in all the previous existence of our species on earth.   In fact, 2001 doubled the previous total.   And 2002 doubled the amount present in 2001,
• How Walter Cronkite Became Katie Couric And the Audience Became the Public
• whatever sources I chose, I was left in a state of uncertainty –a permanent condition for analysis under the new dispensation. Uncertainty is an acid, corrosive to authority.
• a cloud of suspicion about cherry-picking data will hang over every authoritative judgment.
• Public discussion, for example, was limited to a very few topics of interest to the articulate elites.
• our sense of what is important fractured along the edges of countless niche interests.
• the pathologies involved,...
• the relationship between elites and non-elites, between authority and obedience.   That passive mass audience on which so many political and economic institutions depended
• communities relied on digital platforms for self-expression. They were vital and mostly virtual
• The voice of the vital communities was a new voice:   that of the amateur, of the educated non-elites, of a disaffected and unruly public.
• Communities of interest reflected the true and abiding tastes of the public.   The docile mass audience, so easily persuaded by advertisers and politicians, had been a monopolist’s fantasy
• When digital magic transformed information consumers into producers, an established order –grand hierarchies of power and money and learning –went into crisis. I have touched on the manner of the reaction:   not worry or regret over lost influence, but moral outrage and condemnation, sometimes accompanied by calls for repression.
• the truly epochal change, it turned out, was the revolution in the relationship between the public and authority in almost every domain
• I Christen the New Age And Other Definitional Illusions
• the slow-motion collision of two modes of organizing life:   one hierarchical, industrial, and top-down, the other networked, egalitarian, bottom-up.
• Lippmann was a brilliant political analyst, editor, and commentator. He wrote during the apogee of the top-down, industrial era of information... There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.”Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites.   From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed... “private citizen,”was a political amateur, a sheep in need of a shepherd,
• authority is a bit more like beauty:   we know it when we see it.
• The person in authority is a trained professional.   He’s an expert with access to hidden knowledge.   He perches near the top of some specialized hierarchy... he got there by a torturous process of accreditation,
• A cosa serve il monopolio nell'informazione e nella scuola...A crucial connection, as I said earlier, exists between institutional authority and monopoly conditions:   to the degree that an institution can command its field of play, its word will tend to go unchallenged.   This, rather than the obvious asymmetry in voice modulation, explains the difference between Cronkite and Katie Couric.
• The new age we have entered needs a name...“networked age,... “Digital age”........“digital revolution”
• Rivoluzioni
• 1 The invention of writing, for example... led to a form of government dependent on a mandarin or priestly caste.
• 2 The development of the alphabet was another: the republics of the classical world would have been unable to function without literate citizens.
• 3 A third wave, the arrival of the printing press and moveable type, was probably the most disruptive of all.   The Reformation, modern science, and the American and French revolutions would scarcely have been possible without printed books and pamphlets.
• 4 mass media. Industria
• 5 I think I have already established that we stand, everywhere, at the first moment of what promises to be a cataclysmic expansion of information and communication technology.
>

Chapter 2 Hoder and Wael Ghonim

• Hossein Derakhshan, better known by his blogname “Hoder,” at a bloggers’ convention... Hoder was technically savvy: that was his claim to fame. But, for an Iranian and a supposed dissident, I found him surprisingly naïve... he was full of strange ideas about neocons conspiring with other Iranian exiles whom he didn’t like.... a very likeable person, possessed of a very ordinary intellect.
• A Twenty-Something in Toronto Opens a New Continent of Expression for Iranians
• He was not a politician, not a revolutionary, not a genius, not a scholar –not an authority of any sort.... chi era? the gifted amateur, propelled to unexpected places by the new information technology.
• In theory, the Iranian regime is a Platonic republic, with wise guardians protecting the moral... Recent history has seen cycles of superficial reforms to open up the system,
• it was during one of the moments of relative calm that the young Hoder began his career as an observer of the digital universe
• the ruling class confronted what has come to be called “the dictator’s dilemma”... For security reasons, dictators must control and restrict communications to a minimum.   To make their rule legitimate, however, they need prosperity, which can only be attained by the open exchange of information.   Choose.
• North Korea, for example, stands at the restrictive extreme.
• Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, lost power in part because of his vacillations
• Iran’s rulers chose differently.   Formally at least, they embraced blogging... and encouraged regime supporters to get online... Whole swaths of Blogistan are thus dedicated to “conservative” political and religious views.... the regime also blocked many websites, and currently holds the world record for bloggers thrown in jail.
• An Insignificant Man Threatens The Sanctities of a Very Large Nation
• I ran across him in Nashville, he seemed less a blogfather than an orphaned techno-gypsy, drifting from conference to conference.
• in the fall of 2008, Hoder travelled to Tehran.   And so it happened that, on the first day of November, the Iranian authorities at last caught up with the insignificant man:   they arrested Hoder...... 19 ½ years of incarceration for the crime of blogging. Idle to speculate why Hoder returned to Iran:   he was, as I noted, of a naïve and unrealistic temperament.
• Why did they arrest Hoder? Why the inordinate punishment? What did they, in full possession of great power and authority, fear from this ordinary person?
• Life is bad if you’re a blogger in many parts of the world. That can be the simple story of Hoder’s private Calvary.
• The cause for anger or fear in a person of great material authority confronted with information generally –with information as information –is thus never a given, I maintain, but rather is a mystery
• In fact, he stood for the loss of monopoly over information,
• A good place to start is with the formal charges..... “insulting the sanctities”... They speak when there should be silence...It is the speaking that is taboo.
•   It’s the alien voice of the amateur, of the ordinary person, of the public, that is an abomination... This, not from selfish motives, no, not in the least –for the good of humanity.   Their authority rests on the moral order of the world.   Any challenge, however insignificant, isn’t just a potential threat to them but a violation of that order,
• Democratically elected governments have reacted in the same way.   Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is his country’s most popular politician in generations, having comfortably won several national elections.
• When protests broke out in Istanbul over government plans to build a shopping mall on the site of a park, then spread throughout Turkey and acquired a definite anti-Erdogan edge, the Turkish news media ignored the events.
• Erdogan’s minister of interior announced that “provocations on social media”were to be targets of criminal
• people in the news business have converted the economic failure of the daily newspaper into a danger not just to their own livelihoods, but to the fabric of democratic life.   When, for example, Nicholas Kristof brooded on the “decline of traditional news media”which pays his salary, he evoked a dismal future of “polarization and
• Fanning released the first version of Napster in June 1999.   He was 18, an unknown teenager without money or business connections,
• The noise of condemnation by defenders of the music and allied industries was Erdogan-worthy.....Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Pictures Association of America, portrayed the corporate interests he represented as “the backbone of America’s creative community”
• Hilary Rosen, head of the Recording Industry Association of America:   “what Napster is doing…is legally and morally wrong.”
• If Jack Valenti had had the power to convict Shawn Fanning to 19 ½ years
• A Burning Man on Facebook Lights the Way for Political Change in Tunisia
• Bouazizi burned to death in front of a camera.   For as long as digital images hold true, we will watch him explode into flames, still walking, at a nondescript public square.   This image was impossible to absorb without feeling pain and horror.... The photos of Bouazizi’s self-immolation were posted on Facebook, and aroused strong emotions in and out of Tunisia.
• The industrial age depended on chunky blocks of text to influence government and opinion.   The new digital world has preferred the power of the visual.
• most of Al Jazeera’s Tunisia footage came from cell phone
• The point I want to drive home is that there is now massive redundancy in the transmission of information.
• A Google Employee in Dubai Schedules an Egyptian Revolution as a Facebook Event
• A mostly disorganized public toppled a regime which had ruled with unquestioned authority for 23 years.
• virtual invitation to revolution scheduled on Facebook Events.
• I want to move directly to a specific moment:   January 14, 2011, when Ghonim, inspired by events in Tunisia, posted on the “Khaled Said”page a call for protests for January 25, the “Police Day”holiday in Egypt.   Ghonim gave the event its name:   “Revolution Against Torture, Poverty, Corruption, and Unemployment.”  And he created a Facebook Event for it.
• two technical obstacles....One obstacle pertained to the number of Egyptians Ghonim could actually reach.... The other raised the question whether the psychological distance between virtual and real
• Roland Schatz,.. “Critical mass”occurs at between 10 and 20 percent of adoption –the level at which enough diffusion networks become “infected”by the virus of change to make the latter
• It’s simply false to say that the public can’t make the leap between virtual and real politics.   The problem has been posed in terms of online “weak bonds”as against real-life “strong bonds”
• A Very Old Man Shuts Down the Web Then Falls Through the Trap Door of the Information Sphere
• I’m not saying that Ghonim and the internet caused Egypt’s revolution.... one cause out of many.
• I’m also not asserting the primacy of the internet... Primacy goes to that massively redundant information sphere, which has absorbed new and old media alike.
• Hosni Mubarak wished to modernize Egypt.   Modern countries boasted an abundance of TV channels and content.   Mubarak gambled that his regime could control the information pouring out of new channels.
• Ghonim’s raw, emotional performance on Dream TV has been credited with turning the tide decisively in favor of the protesters....... Dream TV... However, compared to state-owned television, this was indirect control.
• Unlike, say, TV or Facebook, the information sphere can’t be blocked by government.... This was demonstrated under almost laboratory conditions in Egypt on Friday, January 28, 2011:... Mobile phone service was disrupted as well.... Demonstrations planned after Friday prayers in many Egyptian cities were the immediate cause of the shutdown.
• Starting with the octogenarian Mubarak, the people who ran the regime had come to power during the industrial age of information.

continua

Julián Carrón La bellezza disarmata - cap. 2

Julián Carrón La bellezza disarmata - cap. 2

2 Verità e libertà: un esempio paradigmatico

• Le evidenze e la storia
• Il primo punto con cui occorre fare i conti è il «crollo delle evidenze»... Ratzinger parlava del «crollo di antiche sicurezze religiose» e del conseguente «collasso del senso di umanità».
• Se Kant, negando la conoscibilità di Dio nell’ambito della pura ragione, aveva mantenuto a Dio il ruolo di un postulato della ragione pratica, implicata nell’agire morale, dopo di lui si è sviluppato il tentativo «di plasmare le cose umane facendo completamente a meno di Dio».
• Kant paragona la traiettoria storica che conduce all’Illuminismo alle tappe evolutive di un individuo dall’infanzia all’età adulta. L’umanità è dapprima come un bambino, che ha bisogno di padre e madre, poiché non ha autonomia di pensiero e non sceglie da solo. Ma diventando adulto può prescindere da questo legame e vivere autonomamente. È l’uscita dallo stato di minorità.
• Romano Guardini... il nesso storicogenetico tra l’affermazione dei valori fondamentali dell’umano e un cristianesimo vissuto... quei valori fondamentali sono «legati alla Rivelazione», sono entrati nella storia con Cristo, per la potenza della sua testimonianza e per la sua capacità di ridestare la ragione e la libertà dell’uomo. Attraverso il cristianesimo «si liberano nell’uomo forze che in sé sono “naturali”, ma che al di fuori di quella relazione non si realizzerebbero».
• Edempio. Penso in questo senso alla vicenda di un gruppo di donne africane malate di AIDS che ho incontrato a Kampala. C’è qualcosa di più evidente del valore della salute e della vita (per non parlare dell’istinto di sopravvivenza)? Eppure quelle donne non erano interessate ad assumere le medicine di ultima generazione che avrebbero dato loro ampia prospettiva di sopravvivenza. Quei valori sembravano assenti, svaniti. È stato l’incontro con un’infermiera a farle ritornare a “vedere”. Essa ha comunicato loro un gusto di vita, la sua testimonianza ha rimesso in moto un desiderio di vivere che era sopito,
• Pensiamo alla vicenda di Eluana Englaro..... ci vorrebbe «una carezza del Nazareno»9 per poter scoprire che la vita vale sempre e comunque. È la testimonianza offerta ogni giorno da tanti medici e infermieri, che entrano nelle stanze dei malati terminali, dove quasi più nessuno ha il coraggio di entrare,
• comprendere meglio ciò che dice papa Francesco quando invita a concentrarsi sull’essenziale, sottolineando che non possiamo insistere solo su questioni legate alla morale,
• Una pastorale missionaria non è ossessionata dalla trasmissione disarticolata di una moltitudine di dottrine da imporre con insistenza.
• Il problema della libertà
• «Nella coscienza dell’umanità di oggi la libertà appare di gran lunga come il bene più alto,
• ognuno di noi può scegliere di realizzarsi oppure di perdersi, può dire di sì o di no a ciò che lo compie. È questo il rischio che il Mistero ha voluto correre creando l’uomo libero
• come nella nota parabola, si vorrebbe togliere la «zizzania» dal campo, perché essa è pericolosa per la libertà. Il padrone del campo ha invece un pensiero ben diverso: Egli lascia crescere tutto, perché sa che il positivo sarà vincitore.
• La tentazione. indurre a pensare che, siccome l’esercizio della libertà è rischioso, allora la via più sicura per difendere i valori sarebbe quella di imporli, così la libertà non si smarrirebbe.
• 2 esempi.
• Un primo esempio riguarda la schiavitù. San Paolo finisce in carcere e si trova in cella con uno schiavo, Onesimo, arrestato perché aveva tentato di scappare dal padrone. La schiavitù al tempo era una pratica corrente. Che cosa ha fatto dunque Paolo? Ha scritto un biglietto al padrone – la Lettera a Filemone è questo – per convincerlo a perdonare e a riaccogliere Onesimo:..... è stato separato da te per un momento perché tu lo riavessi per sempre; non più però come schiavo, ma molto più che schiavo, come un fratello carissimo....
• Il gesto di san Paolo sembra un nulla nell’oceano infinito della schiavitù, un nulla con tutta la zizzania intorno. Chi avrebbe potuto scommettere su questo semplice fatto? Invece è stato un inizio
• Un secondo esempio riguarda l’aborto. La Lettera a Diogneto...... I cristiani si «sposano come tutti e generano figli, ma non gettano i neonati».15 Punto. A capo.
• Il cambio di rotta.... Teodosio afferma che il cristianesimo è l’unica religione lecita...... contrasto con la dichiarata convinzione del cristianesimo dei primi secoli che la religione, quella cristiana in maniera particolare, non potesse essere diffusa con la forza.
• Agostino.... «Dapprima ero del parere che nessuno dovesse essere condotto per forza all’unità di Cristo... Ma, dopo le reiterate ed efferate violenze perpetrate dai donatisti,18 cambia idea.... nell’epistolario.... La Città di Dio
• Per tanti secoli, con alti e bassi, non vi sarà un esplicito ripensamento della questione della libertà di religione. Anche con la Riforma di Lutero, durante la controversia che divide cattolici e protestanti, in ambedue gli schieramenti permane l’idea che una società cristiana non può tollerare eretici e scismatici
• La pace di Westfalia del 1648, che doveva costituire una risposta alla situazione di scontro che si era creata, sancisce infine il principio «cuius regio, eius et religio», che obbliga il suddito a conformarsi alla religione del proprio principe.
• l’autocoscienza della Chiesa cresce fino alla svolta realizzata dal Concilio Vaticano II... una «discontinuità, nella quale tuttavia […] risultava non abbandonata la continuità nei principi....... solo i principi esprimono l’aspetto duraturo.... Non sono invece ugualmente permanenti le forme concrete, che dipendono dalla situazione storica... Il percorso di maturazione compiuto ha portato la Chiesa a riconoscere come più fedeli alla sua verità l’affermazione e il rispetto della libertà religiosa, e ad ammettere i momenti in cui ha agito in modi meno conformi a essa attraverso i secoli.
• Se l’errore non ha diritti, una persona ha dei diritti anche quando sbaglia
• la Chiesa ha recuperato al proprio sguardo il contributo dell’Illuminismo... In questo senso l’illuminismo è di origine cristiana ed è nato non a caso proprio ed esclusivamente nell’ambito della fede cristiana». D’altro canto, poiché «il cristianesimo, contro la sua natura, era purtroppo diventato tradizione e religione di Stato», è stato precipuo «merito dell’illuminismo aver riproposto questi valori originali del cristianesimo...
• Ecco, allora, la domanda necessaria, se vogliamo porci di fronte alle sfide attuali senza ideologiche contrapposizioni e senza intimistici ripiegamenti: come può la libertà essere di nuovo «conquistata per il bene», dato che «la libera adesione al bene non esiste mai semplicemente da sé»? Solo attraverso la testimonianza, come accadde agli inizi... Solo la testimonianza della verità può raggiungere il cuore dell’uomo. Come osserva acutamente Lobkowicz,
• la Chiesa non vuole più rivendicare alcun diritto a qualsiasi forma di potere ma solo raggiungere i cuori delle persone,
• un contributo proprio a partire dalla natura della fede: vivendo nel reale... possiamo essere come un seme. «In una società come questa non si può creare qualcosa di nuovo se non con la vita: non c’è struttura né organizzazione o iniziative che tengano.

continua

This is unexpected: a socialist denies that the GENDER GAP

Michael Makovi - This is unexpected: a socialist denies that the...: "This is unexpected: a socialist denies that the gender-wage gap is due to discrimination: Anne Phillips, “Sexual Equality and Socialism” (1997) https://www.dissentmagazine.org/…/what-is-democratic-social…
Like Harvard economist Claudia Goldin, Phillips argues that the gender-wage gap is due more to the types of jobs which women find themselves taking, than to any discrimination by their employer:"



'via Blog this'

Il segreto dell'amore

Science says lasting relationships come down to—you guessed it—kindness and generosity.

Julián Carrón La bellezza disarmata - cap 1

Julián Carrón La bellezza disarmata cap 1

1 È possibile un nuovo inizio?

• Che cosa è in gioco
• Le parole dell' Europa... persona, lavoro, materia, progresso e libertà.
• concetto di persona: «Duemila anni fa l’unico uomo che aveva tutti i diritti umani era il civis romanus. Ma il civis romanus da chi era stabilito? Il potere determinava il civis romanus.
• Modernità... mortificazione di parole come progresso e libertà... tentativo di rendere autonome quelle fondamentali acquisizioni dall’esperienza che ne aveva consentito la piena emergenza.
• Ratz a Subiaco sull'illuminismo... «nella contrapposizione delle confessioni e nella crisi incombente dell’immagine di Dio, si tentò di tenere i valori essenziali della morale fuori dalle contraddizioni e di cercare per loro un’evidenza che li rendesse indipendenti dalle molteplici divisioni e incertezze delle varie filosofie e confessioni».... Si sviluppò così il tentativo illuministico di affermare quelle convinzioni, la cui evidenza sembrava si potesse sostenere da sé, a prescindere da un cristianesimo vissuto.
• «La ricerca di una tale rassicurante certezza, che potesse rimanere incontestata al di là di tutte le differenze, è fallita. Neppure lo sforzo, davvero grandioso, di Kant è stato in grado di creare la necessaria certezza condivisa.
• Questa cultura illuminista, diceva ancora Ratzinger, è essenzialmente definita dai «diritti di libertà». Essa «parte dalla libertà come un valore fondamentale che misura tutto:
• l’altro lato della medaglia, ossia le conseguenze di una insufficiente definizione della libertà, che caratterizza la cultura illuminista.
• Antinomie. contrasto tra la voglia di libertà della donna e il diritto alla vita del nascituro... divieto di discriminazione e limitazione della libertà di opinione e della libertà religiosa
• Edito. distacco della filosofia illuminista dalle sue radici cristiane, che doveva assicurare una piena e autonoma affermazione dell’uomo, «diventa, in ultima analisi, un fare a meno dell’uomo».
• Ratzinger invita a ricordare che la ragione illuminista è essa stessa storicamente condizionata... non esprime cioè «la compiuta ragione dell’uomo, ma soltanto una parte di essa
• «la vera contrapposizione che caratterizza il mondo di oggi non è quella tra diverse culture religiose, ma quella tra la radicale emancipazione dell’uomo da Dio, dalle radici della vita, da una parte, e le grandi culture religiose dall’altra».
• No all'antilluminismo. L’Illuminismo», scriveva Ratzinger, «è di origine cristiana ed è nato non a caso proprio ed esclusivamente nell’ambito della fede cristiana.»... il «“sì” fondamentale all’età moderna» pronunciato dal Concilio Vaticano II,
• in Europa oggi abbiamo due anime.»... «Una ragione astratta, anti-storica, che intende dominare tutto perché si sente sopra tutte le culture... Esempio... la prima sentenza di Strasburgo sul Crocifisso
• Qual è invece l’altra anima dell’Europa? «È quella che possiamo chiamare cristiana, che si apre a tutto quello che è ragionevole, che ha essa stessa creato l’audacia della ragione e la libertà di una ragione critica, ma rimane ancorata alle radici che hanno dato origine a questa Europa, che l’hanno costruita nei grandi valori, nelle grandi intuizioni, nella visione della fede cristiana.»
• in gioco è l’evidenza di quei fondamenti, in mancanza dei quali non sarà possibile una convivenza stabile, noi ci distraiamo nel dibattito sulle conseguenze,
• Rispondere a tale urgenza non vuol dire tornare a uno Stato confessionale o a un’Europa basata su leggi cristiane... Ciò andrebbe contro la natura stessa del cristianesimo.
• Da dove ripartire?
• Il cuore dell’uomo non si arrende
• Un amico: A un certo punto lui mi dice: “Non metterò mai al mondo un figlio. Con che coraggio condanno un altro poveretto all’infelicità? Non mi prendo questa responsabilità”. E poi aggiungeva: “Ho paura della mia libertà, nel migliore dei casi non serve a niente e nel peggiore dei casi posso causare dolore a qualcuno. Quello che mi aspetto dalla vita è di cercare di fare meno male possibile”.
• un sacco di paure
• Serve una convinzione. Ecco, parlare delle «grandi convinzioni» è parlare dei fondamenti, cioè del punto d’appoggio che rende possibile l’esperienza della libertà
• «Una crisi», diceva Hannah Arendt, «ci costringe a tornare alle domande;
• A tema è sempre l’uomo e il suo compimento
• Dietro ogni tentativo umano c’è un grido di compimento. Ascoltare questo grido
• Rilke... «Tutto cospira a tacere di noi,
• tentativo di ottenere il compimento attraverso i cosiddetti “nuovi diritti”... La loro matrice è quella brama di liberazione che è stata l’anima del Sessantotto
• Molti sentono questi nuovi diritti come un affronto... Ciascuno di essi nasce in ultima istanza da esigenze profondamente umane.
• Questa cultura porta in sé la convinzione che il conseguimento di sempre nuovi diritti costituisca la strada per la realizzazione della persona. Essa pensa in questo modo di poter evitare o rendere superfluo il dibattito sui fondamenti, riassumibile nella domanda di leopardiana memoria: «Ed io che sono?».... è come cercare di curare una malattia senza fare la diagnosi!
• come ci ricorda Cesare Pavese, «ciò che un uomo cerca nei piaceri è un infinito,
• Il dramma della nostra cultura, dunque, non sta tanto nel fatto che all’uomo sia tutto permesso, quanto nelle false promesse e nelle illusioni che quel permissivismo reca con sé.
• Certamente una legislazione giusta è sempre migliore di una sbagliata, ma la storia recente dimostra che nessuna legge giusta di per sé è riuscita a impedire la deriva che vediamo davanti ai nostri occhi.
• Eliot...   Sognando sistemi talmente perfetti che più nessuno avrebbe bisogno d’essere buono».....
• risolvere le questioni umane con le procedure
• Approfondire la natura del soggetto
• «il senso religioso […] la radice da cui scaturiscono i valori. Un valore, ultimamente, è quella prospettiva del rapporto tra un contingente e la totalità, l’assoluto.
• Le motivazioni vengono prima delle skills. «La soluzione dei problemi che la vita pone ogni giorno», avverte don Giussani, «non avviene direttamente affrontando i problemi, ma approfondendo la natura del soggetto che li affronta.» In altri termini, «il particolare lo si risolve approfondendo l’essenziale».
• La grande emergenza educativa documenta la riduzione dell’uomo
• Consumismo. Abbiamo già richiamato la riduzione della ragione e della libertà; a esse aggiungiamo ora la riduzione del desiderio. «La riduzione dei desideri o la censura di talune esigenze
• Ma come si ridesta il desiderio? Non attraverso un ragionamento o una qualche tecnica psicologica, ma solo incontrando qualcuno in cui la dinamica del desiderio sia già attivata.
• L’altro è un bene
• l’esperienza elementare che l’altro non è una minaccia, ma un bene per la realizzazione del nostro io,
• Solo nell’incontro con l’altro potremo sviluppare insieme quel «processo di argomentazione sensibile alla verità»25 di cui parla Habermas.
• L ’affermazione di papa Francesco: «La verità è una relazione!
• Noi cristiani non abbiamo alcuna paura a entrare, senza privilegi, in questo dialogo a tutto campo. Questa è, per noi, un’occasione preziosa per verificare la capacità dell’avvenimento cristiano di reggere davanti alle nuove sfide
• Ciò non significa in alcun modo contrapporre la dimensione dell’avvenimento e la dimensione della legge, ma riconoscere un ordine genetico fra esse. È infatti proprio il riaccadere dell’avvenimento cristiano che riapre l’uomo alla scoperta di sé e consente alla intelligenza della fede di diventare intelligenza della realtà,
• nel mondo cattolico, la battaglia per la difesa dei valori è divenuta nel tempo così prioritaria da risultare più importante rispetto alla comunicazione della novità di Cristo, alla testimonianza della sua umanità. Questo scambio tra antecedente e conseguente documenta la caduta “pelagiana” di tanto cristianesimo odierno,
• L’alternativa non risiede, come taluni lamentano, in una fuga “spiritualistica” dal mondo. La vera alternativa è piuttosto la comunità cristiana non svuotata del suo spessore
• Chi è impegnato sulla scena pubblica, in campo culturale o politico, ha il dovere, da cristiano, di opporsi alla deriva antropologica odierna. Ma questo è un impegno che non può coinvolgere tutta la Chiesa in quanto tale, la quale ha l’obbligo, oggi, di incontrare tutti gli uomini, indipendentemente dalla loro ideologia o appartenenza politica, per testimoniare l’«attrattiva Gesù».
• Dopo un lungo travaglio, nel Concilio Vaticano II, la Chiesa è arrivata a dichiarare che «la persona umana ha il diritto alla libertà religiosa».... Il riconoscimento della libertà religiosa non è una sorta di compromesso, come se si dicesse: siccome non siamo riusciti a convincere gli uomini che il cristianesimo è la religione vera, difendiamo almeno la libertà religiosa. No, la ragione che ha spinto la Chiesa a modificare una prassi durata secoli, tanti secoli, è stata l’approfondimento della natura della verità e della strada per raggiungerla...Era questa la ferma persuasione della Chiesa nei primi secoli, la grande rivoluzione cristiana fondata sulla distinzione tra le due città, tra Dio e Cesare. Una persuasione destinata ad attenuarsi dopo l’Editto di Tessalonica (380 d.C.) ad opera dell’imperatore Teodosio.
• Auspicio. Un ritorno allo spirito della Patristica

continua

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

continua

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.

continua

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

continua

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

continua

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

continua

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

continua

.

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.

continua