Chiesa sessualità figli famiglia II

continua da qua http://broncobilli.blogspot.it/2015/01/chiesa-e-sessualita.html

1. Here Comes the Groom di Andrew Sullivan
2.  vantaggi del matrimonio omosessuale:
3. • 1 coesione sociale
   • 2 stabilità emotiva
   • 3 lungimiranza economica
   • tesi: puntiamo sul matrimonio anzichè sulla convivenza... la battaglia contro i matrimoni gay oscura i benefici del matrimonio sulla convivenza
   • il matrimonio gay nn apre agli opportunisti in cerca di vantaggi senza responsabilità
   • imho: tutto giusto senonchè consoliderei i vincoli matrimoniali affinchè nn assomigli troppo ad una convivenza
   • aids: matrimonio e salute pubblica... meno promiscuità più virtuosismo
   • matr.gay=>meno matrimoni falliti (etero+gay)
   • persino argomenti x chi odia i gay: si estingueranno prima costringendoli a coltivare i valori tradizionali
   • m. fa bene ai gay: ruoli... rapporto coi genitori
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4. Virtually Normal di Andrew Sullivan - chi è un omosessuale?
   • chi è un omo
   • dai 5 agli 8 segnali abbstanza chiari. odio x il calcio
   • nn vive nel rifiuto ma in un misto di accettazione e rifiuto. capisci subito che solo stare fuori dalla legge ti renderà completo
   • desiserio mai ricambiato. vivere nascosti. mai menzionare. parlarne solo con dio?
   • l omo é  una scelta? si puó solo raccontare una vita e la mia dice di no. sarà na combinazione intricata tra geni e ambiente della prima infanzia. anche se forse x le donne è diverso. nn mi fido delle statistiche. solo dei miei sentimenti
   • nn è un istinto alla stregua di uno starnuto ma un istinto misto ad un aspirazione
   • l attaccamento x la mamma.
   • la paura di quei strani desideri. come spiegare l odio di certi etero x gli omo?
   • lo capusci subito: la tua sopravvivenza dipende dalla capacità di nascondersi
   • lo impari subito: separa le emozioni dai desideri sessuali. prostituzione
   • realismo: mai un omosessuale sarà a suo agio x quanta tolleranza ci sia x lui. il respingimento è la norma
   • imperativo: nascondersi: da qui i rapporti estemporanei e promiscui
   • nn si entra mai nel mondo degli appuntamenti così si sviluppano interessi alternativi x nascondersi: scuola scienza arte religiose...
   • alcuni stentano: meglio il disprezzo stabile che una sospetta ostilità
   • fors x le lesbiche è diverso: sono più politicizzate
   • scelta? come x gli etero. se fosse una scelta avrebbero scelto altro
   • tutte le società in passato hanno scelto un modo di trattare la minoranza omo. oggi siamo ad uno snodo che roguarda la ns
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5. Virtually Normal di Andrew Sullivan - omosessualità e proibizionismo

   • proibizionismo: l o è una perversione una malattia e l atto o richiede cure obbligatorie punizioni e deterrenza
   • appello alla legge di natura
   • grave errore pensare a p come a una bigotteria. è una posizione maggioritaria nel mondo e da sempre sostenuta con argomenti anche solidi.
   • i tassi di natalitá fanno pensare che p tornerà a prevalere presto
   • premessa di p: o è una scelta. nessuna differenza tra o e inclinazione a mentire
   • bibbia: protezione della famiglia. o come adulterio
   • bibbia: levitico. purezza dei riti. ma il p nn vuole rendere obbligatori i digiuni
   • san paolo: condanna con premessa la volontarietà del atto. analogia con i romani che hanno dio e indulgono negli dei.
   • tommaso: l uomo ha una sua natura che desumiamo dall osservazione. la sessualità dell uomo è destinata alla procreazione
   • problema: anche l istinto o sembra naturale. come può la natura andare conto la natura?
   • 1975: la chiesa ammette l o come istinto innato e incurabile ma insiste a condannare l atto
   • difficoltà a condannare un comportamento naturale che nn danneggia i terzi
   • 1986: l omosessuale, con la sua inclinazione, è persona degna. tuttavia l atto omo resta colpevole.
   • origine della condanna: ribadita la centralità della procreazione
   • possibili analogie:
   • 1 l avido. no provare avidità è già colpevole e nn un sentimento naturale. l avido nn è a immagine e somiglianza di dio
   • 2 il cannibale. no c è differenza tra il disordine del cannibale e quello dell o. oltretutto il primo disordine reca danno a terzi
   • 3 il down. no gli atti del down nn sono mai colpevoli
   • 4 l alcolizzato. no una quantità moderata di alcol fa bene e viene consigliata
   • 5 lo strrile. sì ci si aspetta che l o venga trattato come lo sterile ma così nn è. la cc ammette il matrimonio tra sterili, magari xchè anziani.
   • si dice: il miracolo è sempre possibile. ma il miracolo è possibile con chiunque
   • giustificazione: l unione tra sterili anche se sostanzialmente scorretta resta simbolicamente rispettosa della natura umana.
   • un argomento pro omo: accettiamo la varietà della natura e della creazione divina. la legge di dio va creduta e scoperta nn la possediamo
   • la politica sociale dei p è problematica poichè si lotta vs un inclinazione naturale. come voler combattere vs i capelli ricci ci saranno sempre
   • oltretutto la teoria su cui si basa p è cervellotica (natura vs natura, victimless crime) difficile da far capire alla massa rispetto all adulterio. anche la centralità della procreazione è difficoltosa da proporre. pr essere coerenti bisognerebbe proibire e rendere illegale la sodomia etero la mastur il matrimonio tra sterili i sesso pre matr.. nn resta che far leva sul pregiudizio

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6. Virtually normal di Andrew Sullivan - Liberationist queer Foucauld

   • Liberazionismo: The second predominant politics of homosexuality springs naturally out of the first. Or rather, it is a kind of reverse image
   • Imperativo esistenziale: combat
   • the two politics, at their purest, agree about the fundamental nature of homosexuality: that it does not, properly speaking, exist.
   • For the liberationists, homosexuality as a defining condition does not properly exist because it is a construct of human thought, generated in human consciousness by the powerful to control and define the powerless. •
   • Lf prescription: to be free of all social constructs, •
   • Identità: a fully chosen form of identity, •
   • rebellion against nature, •
   • this argument seems far less intuitively persuasive. Nature, after all, is an idea that comes naturally to people. •
   • Lf:  “homosexuality” does not refer to something tangible and universal; it is a definition of a particular way of being as defined by a particular culture. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that this is true. •
   • Alcuni tipi di o: “trans-generational.” They are about the initiation of youths into adult culture •
   • Giovani sodomizzati: Coerunas Indians •
   •   northern Morocco, the Koran is taught by older scribes in a similar way
   • Lo zio materno in Guinea tribes, •
   • Nonnismo in the public schools of Great Britain, •
   • L efebo In ancient Greece, •
   • Native American: the berdache.  none of the berdache institutions seems to imply what we would understand as homosexuality: none is a relationship between two equal people of the same sex. •
   • modern American • emergence of the “fairy” • it would be difficult to argue that the “normal” men who had sex with fairies were really homosexual, • They were, rather, men who were attracted to womanlike men •
   • In other words, homosexuals, properly speaking, did not exist •
   • it means that because homosexuals could not understand themselves in this way, homosexuals simply weren’t. • 
   • one’s self-understanding depends on the social constructs •
   • Human nature does not exist; it is a spontaneous social creation. •  Human beings exist, but what they are and what they mean to each other is entirely contingent on the world they find themselves in. •
   • the work of Michel Foucault, •  most significant influence on liberationist thinkers  In many ways, he is to liberationism what Aquinas is to prohibitionism. •
   • Words are invariably instruments of power, •
   • This kind of argument was not new to Foucault, of course. Perhaps its originator was Rousseau, certainly present in Marx, •  But in Foucault, this argument is linked to a deep pessimism about the possibility of escape. •
   • x lf: the state as the source of oppression •
   • il potere è ovunque: for Foucault, the sources of repression and control were that much more elusive chi in marx
   • Per es:  Foucault was a skeptic about the claims of the sexual revolution in the modern West. •
   • simboli del potere The dialogue of the psychiatrist’s couch was merely an extension of the priest’s confessional; •
   • lf: The history of sexuality in the West is not a history from repression to liberation, but the exchange of one kind of power • •
   • Foucault sees the attempt to “free” gay people, first by identifying them, as another form of control: •
   • “no orgasm without ideology.” •
   • kant all origine: Foucault’s insight that the way we structure our thoughts changes the thoughts themselves • 
   • Obiezione: that does not mean that homosexual persons, however they understood themselves, did not exist •
   • There is overwhelming evidence in both that at least part of homosexuality is determined so early as to be essentially involuntary: • even, to some extent, genetically predictable.
   • But for the Foucauldeans, such contributions are essentially irrelevant.  Both science and psychology are simply further discourses, further traps for freedom, •
   • Unfortunately for Foucault, however, history itself, the very discourse of the past, concurs with science and psychology to suggest the presence of what we would understand as the homosexual, as the historian John Boswell has demonstrated. •
   • omosessuali nella storia: mille e una notte Ganymede •  Plato’s simposio Aristotle •  Aquinas, • Alain of Lille, •
   • in ancient Greece, where the language did not contain a word for homosexual,. Basta la descrizione
   • Throughout history, •there are people •  asserting their homosexuality in the face of unremitting hostility. •
   • Homosexuals have historically reacted to their erasure not simply by subterfuge or resistance or violence, but by a complex undermining of the culture itself, by “camp,” by irony, by laughter. 
   • Non tutto è oppressione: There is, in short, a space within any oppressive social structure where human beings can operate from their own will. • There is in Foucault, in short, little alertness to the resilient life •
   • The liberationist argument, with its pessimism about the possibility of real human freedom within traditional liberal society, must also confront a particularly discomforting fact: that the last few generations have seen a considerable flowering of gay culture and gay freedom. And this growth of homosexual freedom has continually had its vanguard in the United States, despite its tradition of fundamentalist Christianity, despite its capitalist system, despite its allegedly oppressive influence in world culture.
   • Elenco: flaws in Foucauldean politics. • 
   • Because the state is not the source of power, but merely part of a matrix of power structures, there is no focus to the rebellion. •
   • “queer” movement • una strategia d azione. attempt to generate an antipolitical politics, •
   • the tactic of “outing,” the publication of someone’s homosexuality against that person’s will,to force him or her to be free (to use Rousseau’s unforgettable phrase) •
   • “outing” follows the logic of liberationistIt challenges the boundaries of private and public which have been historically used to cordon off homosexuality from “public” life •  It is a classic case of Foucauldean resistance. •
   • Following Foucault, there is no concern in this endeavor that this activity might violate an individual’s rights or dignity, since that person is merely a function of the oppression that defines him. • the politics of liberation fails to catch the individuality of every human being. •
   • Most homosexuals are not, of course, in or out of the closet; they hover tentatively somewhere in between. • .
   • Queer strategy place structures above people, •
   • philosophy based on the uprooting of oppressive orthodoxy should end up enforcing it is not a new irony. •
   • Outing is only the most extreme form of this tendency. The use of language is a milder version. “gay” was no longer sufficiently liberationist, •
   • But the truth is that although language is susceptible to control and manipulation, it must also serve the complex needs of countless complicated individuals and must therefore reflect the results of a million choices •
   • Language that seeks to control by forcing meanings onto such a society will ultimately fail to work.
   • un chiaro caso di fallimento della strategia queer: issue of gays and lesbians in the United States military. its antipolitical politics made equality within the armed services a ludicrous endeavor
   • For a politics designed to subvert existing structures, participating in the very instrument of state power is a nonsensical •
   • Altro caso di palese fallimento: The other salient political instance is the battle for gay marriage. In this, as in access to the military, liberationist politics buckles under its own contradictions. same-sex marriage represent a suspect assimilationist goal for our movement, •. 
   • queer: their most common form of political activity was not a “demonstration” but an “action”; media blitz. •  politics of performance. •
   • ACT UP meetings were a cacophony of rival oppressions, with little means for distinguishing
   • non è un caso se il fondatore di act up sia un pubblicitario
   • There was not even a vision, à la Marx, of some future of freedom to which this smashing might lead. •
   • Judith Butler: “Power can neither be withdrawn. Nn resta che il: redeployment of power, •
   • A politics which seeks only to show and not to persuade •
   • difetto: the achievement will necessarily be transitory. •
   • Moreover, a cultural strategy as a political strategy is a dangerous one • majorities win the culture wars. •
   • La battaglia culturale:. It may be necessary, but it is not sufficient. •
   • The liberationists prefer to concentrate—for where else can they go?—on those instruments of power which require no broader conversation, no process of dialogue, •  So they focus on outing, on speech codes, on punitive measures against opponents on campuses, on the enforcement of new forms of language, by censorship and by intimidation.
   • • as liberationist politics is cultural, it is extremely vulnerable; and insofar as it is really political, it is almost always authoritarian

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7. HOME ECONOMICS The Consequences of Changing Family Structure Nick Schulz

   
   

   • a volte riesci a dire io solo se hai una famiglia o x la tua famiglia... ciò rende chiaro xchè famiglia ed economia (la scienza dell individualismo metodologico) siano tanto legate
   • solidità dell unione coniugale e solidità dell unione nazionale. xchè oggi attribuiamo una differenza tanto marcata alle due cose?
   • pochi matrimoni molti divorzi
   • tesi: la solidità familiare incide sull economia...
   • di solito si evita l argomento x nn infilarsi nel tunnel delle guerre culturali... si liquida dicendo che si tratta di scelte xsonali
   • es. sensibilità al rischio e nascita fuori dal matrimonio
   • ..........
   • something important was often missing from the broader public discussion of economics and economic outcomes: the effects of enormous changes to the structure of American family life
   • Un caso: the creasing frequency of out-of-wedlock birth
   • Tesi: while intact families have always been economically significant, I will argue that they may be more important than ever.
   • Una distinzione impossibile. Like many people who think about the economy, I considered the debates over family structure a cultural issue distinct from economic issues. But over time this bifurcated view became untenable.
   • Un esempio. It became difficult to discuss depressed wages for low-skilled workers without also bringing out-of-wedlock birth rates among lower-class
   • rates of entrepreneurial risk-taking among those raised in intact families
   • L'equivoco: discussing these issues exclusively in moral terms is part of what has turned many people off from wanting to discuss the centrality of family structure. Great numbers of people simply want to avoid awkward talk of what are seen as primarily personal issues
   • Il problema della famiglia. inextricably tied up with the country’s often bitter politics of race, feminism, and sexual politics.
   • La tipica reazione femminista a qs preoccupazioni: “restore the patriarchy to a perceived ’50s-era heyday
   • ......1 WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT CHANGING FAMILY STRUCTURE?...
   • quanti cittadini di oggi sono cresciuti in una solida famiglia?
   • il matrimonio è ancora forte tra le elites ma arretra presso i meno abbienti e i meno educati
   • matrimoni... divorzi... nati fuori dal matrimonio
   • In 2011, for the first time, fewer than 50 percent of households were made up of married couples.
   • unmarried couples, childless households and single-person households are growing
   • GOING TO THE CHAPEL?
   • marriage is still quite strong in affluent American precincts, but there has been tremendous erosion as one moves down the income and education scale.
   • While just 6 percent of children born to college-educated American mothers are born out of wedlock, the percentage for mothers with no more than a high school education is 44 percent
   • DIVORCE
   • Un disastro economico. But one reason for the decreasing numbers of children affected by divorce—the most important from our Home Ec standpoint—is the increase in out-of-wedlock births.
   • the decline of religiosity has likely corresponded to a weakening in the family
   • 3  THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF CHANGING FAMILY STRUCTURE
   • After all, there are many examples of children who grew up with a single parent but went on to be successful and live normal
   • Whatever anecdotes we may find, broader trends show that most of the consequences of unstable home life are negative.
   • Esperti della bancarotta familiare. Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill are two scholars at the Brookings Institution
   • Un libro. Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur: Growing Up with a Single Parent:
   • David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks put it, From an economic perspective, the most troubling feature of family change has been the spread of single motherhood.
   • HUMAN AND SOCIAL CAPITAL
   • Becker e Coleman.
   • Much crucial human capital is developed when people are young and throughout their adolescence.
   • The family is among the most important institutions for developing human and social capital. The social critic Christopher Lasch vividly describes how the family functions
   • “The union of love and discipline in the same persons. Parents first embody love and power,
   • Human and social capital—including a person’s character, which is shaped by the family—constitutes a crucial part of the skill
   • THE IMPORTANCE OF NONCOGNITIVE SKILLS
   • James Heckman has spent many years studying the importance to economic success of skills, including noncognitive skills. “Families are major producers of skills,” Heckman says.
   • These include the ability to play fairly with others, to delay gratification, to control emotions, to develop and maintain networks of friends and acquaintances, and much more.
   • Inequality in skills and schools is strongly linked to inequality in family environments
   • It is increasingly clear that some noncognitive skills, such as self-control, are not entirely genetic, inborn, or innate
   • Plasticità della volontà. Roy Baumeister and science writer John Tierney
   • ECONOMIC MOBILITY
   • Thomas DeLeire and Leonard Lopoo: the first study . . . that examines how family structure is associated with the income of children when they reach adulthood, separating out the potential influence of parental income. found that “it is not true that parents’ income alone enables children to succeed
   • THE FAMILY AND THE POOR
   • Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who has spent years investigating the lives and material conditions of poor people around the world, writes, “Liberals sometimes feel that it is narrow-minded to favor traditional marriage. Over time, my reporting on poverty has led me to disagree: Solid marriages have a huge beneficial impact on the lives of the poor
   • ......4  THE LONG SHADOW OF THE MOYNIHAN REPORT
   • monyhan: il problema è la famiglia... lui parlava dei negri
   • scoperta: + occupazione ma anche + ricorso al welfare... xchè?
   • nemici della diaagnosi: femministe... si accusano le libertà femminili
   • civil right: ci si distrae dal problema di fondo
   • il problema: tolleranza e librrtà xsonale sono valori irrinunciabili ma  che aggravano la situazione della famiglia
   • Heckman has long been an advocate of large state interventions aimed at helping at-risk children. Specifically, he advocates “large investments in early childhood education
   • Ma l'agensa H.  ha subito duri colpi. those who were part of the program still had out-of-wedlock birth rates well over 50 percent.
   • Inoltre: interventions Heckman and others are talking about are invasive.
   • STRENGTHENING INTACT FAMILIES. POLICY
   • For example, one idea is to tax divorce
   • Another idea is to use policy to delay divorce.
   • Leah Ward Sears and William J. Doherty: New research shows that about 40 percent of US couples already well into the divorce process say that one or both of them are interested in the possibility of reconciliation.
   • To address out-of-wedlock birth rates, what about ensuring that Americans, particularly the poor and middle class, have greater access to pregnancy control technologies? Sara McLanahan
   • McLanahan also advocates marriage education and preparation programs that might help strengthen marriages
   • develop family-friendly tax policies, such as expanding child tax credits. Diminuire la progressività delle aliquote al fine di non penalizzare le famiglie monoreddito.
   • THE LIMITS OF POLICY
   • David Brooks: “influence of politics and policy is usually swamped by the influence of culture, ethnicity, psychology and a dozen other factors.”
   • 6  HUMAN CAPITAL, SOCIAL CAPITAL, AND CHARACTER
   • How might the government of a free society reshape the core values of its people and still leave them free?
   • one of the chief mechanisms for inculcating that soft capital, the family, has weakened
   • THINKING ABOUT CHARACTER
   • To have good character means at least two things: empathy and self-control.
   • James Q. Wilson said:  We see this when parents insist a child do his homework or practice piano instead of watching television, run with a well-behaved crowd

   
   
   
   

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8. 1. HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt intro e cap 1
      • Introduction
      • one of the most interesting questions in all the modern world. It is this: How and why has Christianity really come to decline in important parts of the West?
      • German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose parable of the madman in the marketplace foretelling the death of God
      • Problem. How much did the Enlightenment and rationalism and scientific thinking have to do with this enormous transformation
      • Tesi. Its argument, in brief, is that the Western record suggests that family decline is not merely a consequence of religious decline, as conventional thinking has understood that relationship. It also is plausible—and, I will argue, appears to be true—that family decline in turn helps to power religious decline.
      • consistent with the historical fact that family decline and Christian decline have gone hand in hand
      • the decline of the family has also put more pressure on those same welfare states that are already stretched beyond their fiscal limits
      • Crisi della famiglia e previdenza. The fact that sustaining these welfare states has in effect become a Ponzi scheme
      • Bilancio nazionale. older citizens, for example, have less incentive to repay debt
      • the incentives to do the hard work of keeping a family together have increasingly elicited the tacit response, why bother? After all—or so it seemed for a while, at least, though we now know otherwise—the pension remains the same. In this way, one can argue, the expanded welfare state competes with the family as the dominant protector of the individual—in the process undercutting the power of the family itself.
      • Circolo vizioso. In other words, family change has been an engine fueling statism—and statism in turn has been an engine fueling family decline.... the chicken-or-egg question
      • what the “Family Factor” means to signal is a new idea. It is that the causal relationship between family and religion—specifically, the religion of Christianity—is not just a one-way, but actually a two-way street.
      • The process of secularization, I will argue, has not been properly understood because it has neglected to take into account this “Family Factor”—meaning the active effect that participation in the family itself appears to have on religious belief and practice.... family has been an important, indeed irreplaceable, transmission belt for religious belief
      • What this book means to impress is that family and faith are the invisible double helix of society—two spirals that when linked to one another can effectively reproduce, but whose strength and momentum depend on one another. That is one way of stating the thesis here.
      • 1 Does Secularization Even Exist?
      • according to some theorists, the notion of decline is itself an illusion
      • Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart recently put it, “Secularization theory is currently experiencing the most sustained challenge in its long history”—an observation issuing not from critics of the theory, but from two of its leading representatives.
      • Contrarians in this debate believe that other scholars and especially secular scholars have misread the empirical evidence
      • Since the jihadist attacks of 9 /11 especially, many have remarked upon religion’s unexpected resiliency in the world
      • these observations are all footnotes to sociologist Peter Berger’s famous observation of 1990 that “the assumption we live in a secularized world is false”
      • To many observers, the demise of the Communist governments served as a proxy of sorts for the endurance of God.... Karol Wojtyla, aka Pope John Paul II, became so integral to the struggle against Communism that some historians would later give him great credit for the thing’s ultimate implosion;
      • Robert Royal has put it, “Three centuries of debunking, skepticism, criticism, revolution, and scorn by some among us have not produced the expected demise of religion and are now contributing to its renewal.”
      • Peter Berger: pointing in particular to American religiosity which is anomalous by the standards of Western Europe,
      • To all this one might add that on the stage of the world—as opposed to just that of the European Continent—Christianity has lately spread to many more millions. In 1900 there were roughly ten million African Christians... John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge’s
      • Una via di mezzo. As contrarian theorists rightly point out, modernity is not causing religion always and everywhere to collapse—but that is different from addressing the question of whether Christianity specifically has collapsed in parts of the West, and if so, why.
      • . “The West hasn’t really lost God, because the idea of secularization depends in turn on the idea of a prior ‘golden age’ of belief. In fact, though, people were no more believing or pious in the past than they are today. Therefore, there has been no religious decline.”
      • Consider, Chadwick observes, the sharp increase in illegitimate births in Toulouse, France, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries... Hence, illegitimacy may arguably be used as one possible proxy for the influence of Christian belief on personal practice...
      • another outstanding sociologist of religion, American Rodney Stark, exuberantly compiles several pages of empirical and historical evidence testifying to what he calls “the nonexistence of an Age of Faith in European history... to primary sources indicating that not only the mass of men and women, but also many of the clergy, were plumb ignorant of the rituals and even basic prayers of the church; and so on.
      • Stark also notes, as have others, that some empirical evidence about churchgoing in fact affirms rather the opposite point: namely, that later centuries of Christians were in fact more pious than previous ones
      • Roger Finke discuss a new paradigm to counter the secularization thesis: rational choice theory... That theory has in turn given rise to a great debate continuing into the present over the reasons why people might rationally choose religious belief...
      • The specific argument against a Christian “golden age” goes only so far toward refuting the agnosticism and secularism of the present. The evidence accumulated by these critics, interesting and at times ingenious, does mitigate the more simpleminded paradigms of secularization; but it does not refute the claim that Christianity has declined measurably in some of its former Western strongholds.
      • Steve Bruce, has sensibly pointed out, “Nothing in the secularization paradigm requires…a ‘golden Age of Faith.’ It merely requires that our ancestors be patently more religious than we are... “Can we really believe,” he asks, “that people whose lives were organized by the calendar of the Church, whose art, music and literature were almost entirely religious, who were taught the basic prayers, who regularly attended church services, and for whom the priest was the most powerful person after their temporal lord, were untouched by religious beliefs and values?...
      • Una conferma di btuce viene da.. Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580.23 This heavily documented study advances an account of the English Reformation that is profoundly subversive of received wisdom. Duffy argues that contrary to the widely accepted story line—according to which the Reformation breathed new life into what had become a decaying and discredited Catholic Church that had lost the support of the common people—the weight of evidence proves something very different: that “late medieval Catholicism exerted an enormously strong, diverse, and vigorous hold over the imagination and the loyalty of the people
      • one simple way of measuring religious loyalty: attendance... Raphaël Franck and Laurence R. Iannaccone: “the ISSP data unequivocally show that church attendance decreased in the West during the twentieth century” ... the welfare state itself caused the decline in religiosity—are items to which we will return.
      • Nor is the United States, for all its vaunted religiosity relative to Western Europe, exempt from the slide in attendance. Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell write in their important 2010 study of religion, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, “independent streams of evidence suggest that Americans have become somewhat less observant religiously over the last half century.
      • The matter of attendance is also obviously connected to another point demonstrating decline: observance of church rules.... As is often pointed out, the church is nothing if not a collection of sinners. But are they sinners who fall short of the rules that they believe in—or people who don’t believe they are bound by those same rules at all?
      • .
      • In his influential book called The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization 1800–2000, for example, British historian Callum G. Brown assembles a formidable barrage of statistical information to make just this point about the decline of Christianity there, ranging from the decline in church marriages and baptisms to changing attitudes toward all aspects of sexual behavior
      • If “secularization” is not the name for the replacement of a Christian ethos with an ethos that explicitly rejects Christian thinking, then what do we call that phenomenon?
      • Critici della secolarizzazione riformulano: " The West hasn’t really lost God, because human nature itself does not change; it remains theotropic, or leaning toward the transcendent, and it always will.”... Somewhat ironically perhaps, these key points made by Greeley and other thinkers who stress the theotropic nature of human beings have lately acquired increasing force from a quite opposite quarter fascinated by this same durability of religion: i.e., nonbelieving evolutionists and evolutionary psychologists
      • “The universal propensity toward religious beliefs,” echoes evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, “is a genuine scientific puzzle.”... some sort of “God gene”
      • Another, related problem with settling for the notion that “human beings are born theotropic, and therefore will turn to God eventually,” is this: if that is so, then certain societies in the world today that are notably nontheotropic loom as large question marks over the theory.
      • One final fact that points to secularization as a real phenomenon is that the leaders of Christian denominations themselves—from the Continent on across to the New World—see the diminishment of their flocks as an enormous problem. Both Pope benedict... Benedict has further spoken openly of the “de-Christianization of Europe
      • Conclusione: To put the matter another way, to say that secularization theory has problems is not to say that secularization hasn’t happened.
      • Altra contestazione: . “Secularization theory is mistaken, because what people call ‘secularization’ is really the death of Protestant Christianity; the Catholic Church isn’t in the same straits.”
      • Pentecostalism or evangelicalism, both of which are on the rise outside the West and retain healthy numbers of adherents within it.
      • Dean M. Kelly, an American legal scholar and defender of religious freedom who was also an executive with the National Council of Churches. His influential book called Why Conservative Churches Are Growing remains the template for understanding which churches are prospering
      • Laurence R. Iannaccone, who deployed rational choice theory to demonstrate “Why Strict Churches Are Strong
      • Joseph Bottum has observed in an seminal essay summarizing the American Protestant religious scene: The death of the Mainline is the central historical fact of our time
      • Perchè il cattolicesimo mn è in salute: In Italy, among other countries, for example, most people when asked in surveys will identify themselves as Catholics. But how many are Catholic in anything but name only?
      • Attendance numbers suggest that a great many Italians (among other Catholics) either do not believe that threat, or fail to act on it if they do believe it.
      • I giovani italiani: “They clearly go to church less, believe in God less, pray less, trust the Church less, identify themselves as Catholic less, and say that being Italian does not mean being Catholic.
      • “Catholic” Italy does not appear terribly different from the rest of the god-forsaken Continent.
      • One final reason to believe that the decline of Christianity involves the decline of Catholicism and not just Protestantism, is this: fertility rates
      • Cosa concedere: ...it appears true that the Protestants have gone secular first
      • Altra contestazione: . “Secularization theory is mistaken, because the world is not really growing less religious; it is diversifying spiritually instead.”... It is an idea closely associated with professor of philosophy Charles Taylor, whose previously mentioned opus A Secular Age
      • There is also the wider fact that politics more generally operates for some people as a secular religion—especially politics dictated by a worldview professing to cover all aspects of life, such as Marxism.
      • Grace Davie, who has coined the phrase “believing without belonging
      • churches continue to perform vital public functions, even as their numbers shrink; that Europeans, including in Scandinavia, pay taxes to keep their churches going
      • Eric Kaufmann points out in his fascinating 2011 book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century, there are problems with equating spiritual diversity with traditional religion....People drawn to what are now considered to be “alternative” forms of spirituality are “inspired by earthly desires for health, meaning and wellbeing rather than a connection to the supernatural.... problems with using New Age beliefs as evidence of religious revival
      • the critics of secularization theory have drawn attention to the same problem at the heart of this book—the felt need for a “theory of variation,” as Stark has put it. What has gone missing, again, is a persuasive explanation of why Christianity has thrived in some places and times and not others.
      • Il problema non è secolarizzazione sì o no ma avere una teoria dei cambiamenti. È quelka che si intende offrire nei cap seguenti
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   2. HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt cap 2
      2 What Is the Conventional Story Line about How the West Lost God? What Are the Problems with It?
      • Le teorie precedenti. Over the years, as indicated, many learned and influential people have bent their powers to tracking the receding God. Our purpose in this chapter is to listen to what they have to say and to see whether it all adds up.
      • 1 . “What caused secularization? People stopped needing the imaginary comforts of religion.”
      • Religion is akin to “opium,” as Marx put it
      • Sigmund Freud: "religion derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires... Christianity is rooted in fear and superstition. Its purpose is to serve as a giant pacifier against the hunger pains of mortality
      • Dawkins Harris France... In sum, for the new atheists—as for others standing outside the tent of belief, and wondering how it ever got put there—the most common answer to the question of “why religion?” seems to be that there is something about that tent that is comforting to those inside it. It is something that people have somehow devised to make themselves feel better... ..new atheists prefer to designate themselves as “Brights”—a word plainly implying that believers are by contrast either “Dims” or “Dulls
      • The w before us is this: If we don’t have an adequate explanation for why people believe in religion in the first place, how can we have one for why they stop?
      • 2. :What caused secularization? Science and the Enlightenment and rationalism.”
      • The late Christopher Hitchens, for example, closes his 2007 manifesto God Is Not Great: How Religion Spoils Everything, with a chapter calling for “The Need for a New Enlightenment
      • Charles Alan Kors argues that the changes ushered in by Enlightenment science ultimately transformed not only science, but the entire theological world as well
      • British historian Hugh McLeod identifies three problems with this way of explaining secularization
      • First, he observes, the masses were not part of the Enlightenment
      • Second, eighteenth-century elites were actually more likely to be rational Christians than they were atheists or freethinkers.
      • Third, he notes, “those who seek to trace a continuous line from Voltaire to twenty-first-century atheists also tend to overlook the fact that the first half of the nineteenth century saw a revival of more conservative forms of Christianity both among intellectuals and among the aristocracy and bourgeoisie more widely
      • if the theory from enlightenment were true, we would also expect from the theory that the better-off people are, the less likely they are to practice religion... but... Christian religiosity, in at least some significant places and times, has in fact been more concentrated in the upper classes than in the lower, and more likely among the educated than among those who are less so.
      • Robert D. Putnam’s and David E. Campbell’s American Grace, mentioned earlier, similarly refutes the notion that religiosity in the United States is a lower-class thing
      • Charles Murray Coming Apart: .... The upper 20 percent of the American population, he summarizes using data from the General Social Survey, are considerably more likely than the lower 30 percent to believe in God and to go to church.
      • Wilcox has documented the “faith gap” between the better-educated and the people who are less so... Americans with college degrees are more likely than those with high school diplomas alone to attend church on Sunday.
      • 3. . “What caused secularization? The world wars did.”
      • The horrors of the Holocaust alone, the deliberate murder of six million Jews, including by people who also called themselves Christians, would seem to more than justify despair about the incorrigible darkness of the human heart
      • In an intriguing essay alluded to earlier, for example, reviewing the role of religion during that war in the British, American, and Canadian armies, historian Michael Snape concludes that the soldiers of all three nations “were exposed to an institutional process of rechristianisation during the Second World War
      • 4. . “What caused secularization? Material progress did. People got fat and happy and didn’t need God anymore.”
      • It is also a thought that pops up frequently in the pastoral literature created by contemporary religious leaders
      • Arthur Simon, evangelical pastor and founder of the charity Bread for the World, is also author of a book called How Much Is Enough? Hungering for God in an Affluent Culture.
      • Pope Benedict XVI has vigorously and repeatedly condemned what he calls the “idol” of consumerism
      • Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. They have explored in fine detail the connections between privation and religious belief. According to their model, the poorer and less secure people are, the more they “need” religion
      • one would expect religiosity to decline as one climbs the social ladder in the advanced West—and instead, as we have seen, the opposite appears to be the case,
      • Christianity has coexisted comfortably, even exuberantly, in materially comfortable surroundings ... from ancient Rome to Renaissance Florence to the gated communities and megachurches of the United States today
      • But the ultimate limitation of the explanation from material wealth is one shared by the other going theories for secularization: i.e., there are too many exceptions to be explained
      • Why is the United States of America, by any measure, more religious than the economically comparable nations of Europe—a problem known in the specialized literature as “American exceptionalism”? Why are women more religiously observant than men? Why is 1960 such a pivotal year for religious observance and practice, as nearly all observers agree; what is it that makes Christianity seem to go off a cliff after that point? Current theories of Christianity’s decline cannot answer these questions—meaning that the truths of each going version of the theory are partial, and not complete.
      • ...
      • Un segnale del perchè manca una teoria della secolarizzazione... the constantly expressed frustration on the part of nonbelievers and anti-believers at Christianity’s apparently unfathomable persistence in the modern world.... Sam Harris seems similarly to believe that most other people are inferior to atheists in understanding... Michel Onfray, for example, seems to blame the plodding majority of humanity for just not getting it
      • the new atheists are markedly inferior to the great thinkers of modernity, whose understanding of the impulse toward religiosity was immeasurably more nuanced and empathetic....
      • Émile Durkheim, to make a long story ridiculously short, believed that religion contained deep truths
      • Sigmund Freud, for his part, argued similarly in Civilization and Its Discontents that society requires sacrifice on the part of individuals and repression as the price for civilization.44 Thus, though he was also a signatory of sorts to what has been dubbed the “comfort theory” of the origins of religion
      • Max Weber... believed in the original variant of the “Protestantism” explanation for secularization visited earlier
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   3. HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt - cap 3
      3 Circumstantial Evidence for the “Family Factor,” Part One: The Empirical Links among Marriage, Childbearing, and Religiosity
      • 1. . Faith and family: Which really comes first?
      • Why are married people with children more likely to go to church and to be religious than are single people?
      • Bradford Wilcox. He has suggested three reasons for why churchgoing is so tightly bound to being married with children: because they find other couples like them
      • because children “drive parents to church” in the sense of encouraging them to transmit a moral/religious compass;
      • and because men are much more likely than women to fall away from church on their own
      • something about the way people live in families makes people in those families more inclined to church... Perhaps something about living in families makes people more receptive to religiosity and the Christian creed.
      • . Faith and fertility: What really drives what?
      • “The religious tend to have more children, irrespective of age, education or wealth….
      • fertility in Europe as a whole is lower than it is in the United States
      • if the prohibition against birth control is supposed to be the exclusive reason or even the main reason why religious people have larger families, then we can make no sense of this fact: evangelical Christians, most of whom do not similarly have theological injunctions against birth control as such, have a higher fertility rate than do secular people.... Orthodox Jews in America, as well as in Israel, have far more children than secular Jews—even though orthodox Judaism also allows contraception within marriage for certain, quite broad purpose
      • Segnale di nesso al contrario. if secularization theory and the conventional way of understanding faith’s relationship to family were correct, then we would not expect to see religious people continuing to have larger numbers of children than do nonreligious people, even when their religion allows them the option of contraception.
      
      
      
      
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   4. HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt - cap 4
      4 Circumstantial Evidence for the “Family Factor,” Part Two: Snapshots of the Demographic Record; or How Fundamental Changes in Family Formation Have Accompanied the Decline of Christianity in the West
      • If the Family Factor were part of the explanation for secularization, we would expect to see family decline accompany religious decline
      • Fatto. Over time, many people stopped having babies AND they stopped getting married AND they stopped going to church
      • in his classic book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert D. Putnam examines minutely the decline in American “social capital,” or the weakening of various bonds of association during the past few decades in particular.16 He identifies several independent forces contributing to that decline, among them individualism, commuting, and the change in women’s roles
      • If the Family Factor were part of the explanation for secularization, we would expect to see other trends associated with family decline accompany religious decline. This we also see
      • The one thing that all scholars will attest is that as a general demographic rule, urbanization leads to falling birthrates... The conclusion, therefore, is that urbanization has been responsible for fertility decline in the developed countries...
      • people did not stop believing in God just because they moved to cities. The missing piece would appear to be that moving to cities made them less likely to have and live in strong natural families
      • If the Family Factor were part of the explanation for secularization, we would expect the most irreligious parts of the West to have the smallest/weakest/fewest natural families—and vice versa. This too we see
      • Phillip Longman published a much-discussed book called The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity And What To Do About
      • In 2011, as mentioned earlier, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? by Eric Kaufmann argued persuasively and at length that the demographics of the secular West would be overtaken in the long run by those of religious fundamentalists
      • Conversely, if family decline was in fact helping to cause religious decline, we would also expect to see, for example, family boomlets accompanied by religious boomlets. This we also see
      • What happened was a religious boomlet—in conjunction with a much better known demographic phenomenon, the baby boom. Thus, for example, Callum G. Brown gives the following years as dates of postwar Christian revival
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   5. HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt - cap 5
      5 Circumstantial Evidence for the “Family Factor,” Part Three: Because the “Family Factor” Explains Problems That Existing Theories of Secularization Do Not Explain—Including What Is Known as “American Exceptionalism”
      • by introducing the Family Factor, we can shed new light on the largest problem that has bedeviled the theory all along: i.e., the difference in religiosity between two of the most advanced areas on earth, Western Europe on one hand and the United States on the other.
      • Per dawkins gli usa sono l"eccezione... Rodney Stark has argued? Is it instead Europe that is the exception
      • Paradosso adequately “explained” by the difference between today’s American and Western European tendencies toward family formation—meaning that there are more families following the traditional model in America, even today, than in Europe. There are more marriages in the United States, even today, and more children per woman—both of which seem reasonable proxies for the relative strength of the natural family.
      • Murray summarizes, “American marriages were different from European ones (or so both Americans and foreign observers seemed to agree) in the solemnity of the marital bond
      • The Family Factor also helps to solve another puzzle about religiosity that has yet to be satisfactorily explained: the male/female religious gender gap.
      • From yesteryear’s caricature of the “Church Lady” on the television series Saturday Night Live to the realities of running bingo games, school fund-raisers, and soup kitchens out of church basements, the stereotype holds true: it is women, and not men, who are the everyday backbone of the Christian churches
      • Putnam. “Women believe more fervently in God. They aver that religion is more important in their daily lives, they pray more often, they read scripture more often and interpret it more literally, they talk about religion more often—in short, by virtually every measure they are more religious
      • It is less than persuasive to argue, for example, that women are more prone to belief because they are mentally inferior
      • L'avversione al rischio è donna. Pochi figli potenziali.
      • Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, whose book cited earlier, Sacred and Secular, is a meticulous attempt to revise the secularization thesis to take account of what they call “existential security.” According to their model, the poorer and less secure people are, the more they “need” religion...
      • Raphaël Franck and Laurence R. Iannaccone, cited earlier, maintain that the Western welfare state has eroded religiosity “because churches offered welfare services which were not provided by the State.”14 More welfare, as their data show, means less God. Insofar as the welfare state usurps the family’s historical tasks of seeing to the well-being of its members, their explanation of how the West lost God is consistent with this theory.
      • The Family Factor helps to explain something that comes up repeatedly in the scholarly literature, which is the mystery of why 1960 or thereabouts is such a pivotal year in secularization.
      • Two particularly useful books examining that phenomenon are Hugh McLeod’s The Religious Crisis of the 1960s and Callum G. Brown’s The Death of Christian Britain
      • As early as 1973, for example, in a book called Sexual Suicide that was often called provocative at the time, George Gilder argued that the sexual revolution was driving men away from women and families
      • In another prescient book published in 1999 called The Decline of Males, secular sociologist Lionel Tiger argued similarly that in giving women complete control over reproduction, the Pill essentially rendered men obsolete.23 The result, he observed, was that men existed in an ever-more attenuated relationship to women
      • Sociologist Robert Wuthnow of Princeton has laid out the connection between the Pill and the decline in traditional religiosity in his 1998 book After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s
      • the time between confirmation and parenthood has always been one in which young people could drop out of established religion and turn their attention to other things, the doubling of this period was of enormous religious significance
      • More Pill equals less time in a family. More time in a family equals more time in church. Therefore more Pill equals less God
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   6. HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt - cap 6
      6 Assisted Religious Suicide: How Some Churches Participated in Their Own Downfall by Ignoring the Family Factor
      • From the acceptance of w to the okaying of contraception to the embrace of active homosexuality today, these realities have been the engines driving most changes in Christian doctrine.
      • La domanda. Did the doctrinal changes and reforms of modern Protestantism specifically further contribute to the weakening of family bonds in the West?
      • As the historian Roderick Phillips puts it in Untying the Knot: A Short History of Divorce: “The Reformation…represented a sharp break in the direction of divorce doctrines and policies... Reformers, led notably by Martin Luther and John Calvin, rejected not just the Roman Catholic church’s doctrine of marital indissolubility but virtually all aspects of its marriage doctrine.”2
      • In the United States, Phillips reports, Anglican churches soon were relaxing the strictest restrictions,
      • artificial contraception went on to be sanctioned by some prominent members of the Anglican Communion not only as an option but in fact as the better moral choice
      • “In a church which accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous texts
      • The exception, of course, was the Catholic Church, whose issuance of Humanae Vitae in 1968 both famously and infamously affirmed the traditional moral code by upholding the ban on birth control.
      • In research published in 2005 in Christian Century, three sociologists (Andrew Greeley, Michael Hout, and Melissa Wilde) argued that “simple demographics” between 1900 and 1975 explained around three-quarters of the decline in mainline churches (Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Methodist
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   7. HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt - cap 7
      7 Putting All the Pieces Together: Toward an Alternative Anthropology of Christian Belief
      • If this alternative theory of the decline of Christianity is true, why might it be true? That is, what is it about the natural family that might make the specific religion of Christianity so dependent on its vitality?
      • .1. First, the experience of the natural family itself drives some people to religion.
      • Just consider what the experience of childbirth itself does to almost every mother and father... This fact of epiphany hardly means that pregnancy and birth ipso facto convert participants into religious zealots. But the sequence of events culminating in birth is nearly universally interpreted as a moment of communion with something larger than oneself,
      • That most primal of human connections echoes throughout the masterpieces of human history. It is why King Lear is nearly universally recognized as Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, whereas, say, Romeo and Juliet for all its pathos is not—because the predeceasing by Lear of his daughter Cordelia is the perfect symbol of the worst tragedy life
      • Michelangelo’s Pietà (whose primary focus, suggestively enough, is Mary, not Jesus)... What is it about the predeceasing of parents by children that has so captured the imaginations of the West’s (though not only the West’s) greatest artists across millennia and languages and cultures? The answer can only be that this theme resonates most deeply with the human heart
      • children might also “drive” parents to church in the sense that the experience of having them makes parents more willing to believe
      • 2. The Christian story itself is a story told through the prism of the family. Take away the prism, and the story makes less sense.
      • Like it or not, the Judeo-Christian tradition has anthropomorphized the Deity in one particular way: by analogy to a wise, protective, loving, ever-present male parent
      • Figlu del divorzio...   Marquardt asks her subjects to reflect on the idea of God as a parent, elaborating on one:   Will was mystified by the question. He had been angry at his father for years because of the way he treated Will’s mother
      • In this way, as in others, family illiteracy breeds religious illiteracy
      • Altro motivo. People do not like to be told they are wrong, or that those whom they love have done wrong... In an age where nontraditional and antitraditional families and even nonfamilies abound, there are more and more people who are bound to take offense at certain teachings in the Judeo-Christian heritage. It is in this way that broken and frayed homes not only interrupt the transmission of the Christian message: in some cases, they provide the emotional material for a whole new barrier wall to Christian belief.
      • What we might call (to riff on Peter Berger) the furious irreligiosity of today’s anti-Christian sentiment is a deep mystery, and one that should be meditated upon at length
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   8. HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt cap 8-9 e conclusioni
      • 8 The Future of Faith and Family: The Case for Pessimism
      • . Fewer people are getting married.
      • . Fewer people are having children.
      • . Fewer people who are having children are sustaining intact two-parent homes for them to grow up in.
      • 9 The Future of Christianity and the Family: The Case for Optimism
      • “Calamities,” Sorokin observed, “generate two opposite movements in different sections of the population. One is a trend toward unreligiousness and demoralization; the other is a trend toward extreme religious, spiritual, and moral exaltation.”1 Reviewing large chunks of religious and other history, including some from beyond the West and Christianity alone, Sorokin believed that he spied a general rule: that “the principal steps in the progress of mankind toward a spiritual religion and a noble code of ethics have been taken primarily under the impact of great catastrophes
      • “The incontinent spending of many European governments, which awarded whole populations unearned benefits at the expense of generations to come, has…produced a crisis not merely economic but social, political, and even civilizational.”
      • “Consider Social Security. The young have always contributed to the support of the old. Earlier, the young helped their own parents out of a sense of love and duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else’s parents out of compulsion and fear. The voluntary transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken those bonds.”7
      • Does the health of Christianity in the West matter? How and to whom?
      • The fate of Christianity matters even to nonbelievers, because Christianity on balance is a force for good in modern society
      • Believers give more to charity.
      • Believers live longer and are healthier.
      • Believers are more likely to be happy.
      • Believers are less likely to commit crime.
      • Believers contribute to “social capital.”
      • Is it similarly in society’s interests to encourage the natural family?
      • The family is the enemy of society, progress, or the state—or all of the above. Da platone a marx... altri detrattori... Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger, and more
      • “The women…who grow up wanting to be ‘just a housewife’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own deaths in the concentration camps,” as Betty Friedan rather infamously put it in The Feminine Mystique
      • But what does contemporary empirical evidence for its (often overlooked) part tell us about the role of family in society?
      • The family is the partner of society, progress, or the state—or all of the above.
      • James Q. Wilson
      • Children in one-parent families, compared to those in two-parent ones, are twice as likely to drop out of school.
      • Boys in one-parent families are much more likely than those in two-parent ones to be both out of school and out of work.
      • Girls in one-parent families are twice as likely as those in two-parent ones to have an out-of-wedlock birth
      • Children in one-parent families are much worse off than those in two-parent families even when both families have the same earnings
      • children of an unmarried woman were much more likely than those in a two-parent family to become a delinquent, even after controlling for income
      • To quote Charles Murray once more, “I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for the major newspapers, and politicians of both major political partie
      • First, the family—if it is competent—reduces the need for state intervention,
      • Second, the family—again if it is competent—acts as the original safety net, lowering the risks to its members of adverse outcomes and raising the likelihood that its members will contribute to society in turn.
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9. 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
10. License parenting

    • Parenting Failure and Government Failure di STEVE HORWITZ
    • public choice: licenza? ma quali sono le alternative alla famiglia?
    • possiamo scrivere l esame del buon genitore?
    • xchè la patente: 1 il bambino è debole 2 non c è competizione
    • adam gurri: il problema affrontato dai 3 liberalismi (diritti utilitarismo hayekiani)
    • la famiglia: l istituzione più ricca di tradizione
    • gli amish e il test del buon genitore
    • ......
    • I also draw on some material from my forthcoming book on classical liberalism and the family.
    • If one believes that the state’s job is to prevent harm to third parties, and that’s a key part of Andrew’s argument, it is not a priori out of bounds to ask what the state could do to protect children from harm by parents and others.
    • the argument Andrew makes is a perfect example of what can happen when philosophers (and others) make arguments about what government should do in the absence of serious consideration of the way in which the state actually works.
    • “if the state worked just the way we philosophers say it should…”
    • That is, government failure is just as real as market failure and parenting failure.
    • we can ask in the case of “parenting failure”whether there are other institutions
    • There is enough empirical evidence on the problems with foster care, especially short-term placements where the incentive to really behave as a steward for the child is weaker
    • Andrew says children of parents who fail the license test should be “put up for adoption by someone licensed.”
    • In short, everyone with a pet issue or a financial gain to be made will be lobbying the process to see their particular concern added to the test of adequate parenting.... One need only think of the controversy over Lenore Skenazy’sFree Range Kids
    • I would argue that in the case of parenting licenses, the imperfections of politics raise a much greater danger than do the imperfections of parenting,
    • The Organic Body Politics and Parental Licensure BY ADAM GURRI
    • the storied divide between “first principles” libertarians, who usually subscribe to some theory of natural rights, and consequentialist libertarians.... Rarely discussed is a third, more Hayekian approach,
    • Because children don’t have the power to pick who their parents are, and there’s no similar competitive mechanism to make sure they’re more likely to end up with good parents, he argues that parenting should be licensed for the sake of children’s safety.
    • Personally, I found Cohen’s proposal quite shocking. The family is the oldest, most durable institution that humanity has.
    • Responding to a thick and rich history with something as simple as the harm principle is to do injustice to that history.
    • To think that the people who inherit that system today can be directed by the motivations of one man, a philosopher-designer
    • Cohen’s plan requires an army of evaluators
    • Il progetto:
    • First, a means test—that is, no one that cannot afford to raise a child should have a child... The second, and more important, test would be a psychological exam
    • specify what it means to “understand how to parent”or “handle the stress a child brings”. And this isn’t a problem that can be solved with oversight—
    • Such top-down enforced monoculture of ethics and lifestyles ought to be anathema to libertarians and liberals of all sorts,
    • never put all your eggs in one basket...
    • to force a society into monoculture is to plant a time bomb under its feet... positive externalities will be lost when the long tail of lifestyles is cut off?
    • Does anyone seriously think that such a central body would tolerate radically different parenting styles such as the Amish
    • What I’m suggesting here is that the only way to affect change of human systems is as a participant, not an architect.
    • Licensing Parents
    • @@@@IMHO@@@@@@
    • Plausibilità della richiesta:
    • 1il genitore può fare molti danni
    • 2 diamo patenti x meno
    • argomenti contro
    • 1 differenze tra famiglia e nazione: 1 i valori famigliari sono autentici, tanto è vero che nn richiedono coercizione 2 la famiglia è + morale, nn richiede doppio standard
    • 2 fallisce la f. ma anche lo s. specie laddove la  centrale: meglio che la disciplina sia insegnata da chi ama
    • 3 nel dubbio privilegiare ciò che rende felice genitori e figli nel breve periodo ovvero f.
    • 4 stili educativi. Tipico ambito a ipotesi nulla
    • 5 guidare una macchina è complicatissimo ma nn complesso: nn dobbiamo scoprire come si fa. Sull'educazione di un figlio siamo invece perennemente alla ricerca di soluzioni.

    
    
    
    

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11. Praise: Substitution versus Income Effects, Bryan Caplan

    • Touchy-feely parents shower praise on their kids.   "Great job!"   "You're super smart!"   "Wonderful."   Old-school parents do the opposite.   "You could have done better."
    • I suspect, is emotional rather than strategic. Parents praise or withhold because that's what feels right to them.
    • accordingly.The pro-praise story: Praise is a form of reward.
    • The anti-praise story: Yes, praise is a form of reward. But the more rewards kids rack up , the more satisfied they feel. The more satisfied they feel, the less effort kids exert.Framed
    • pro- and anti-praise debate boils down to the intermediate micro analysis of the substitution and income effects.
    • Touchy-feel parents also typically avoid shaming their kids.   Old-school parents, in contrast, shame freely.  
    • Here, then, old-school parents seem to rely on the substitution effect - the greater the cost of bad behavior, the smaller the quantity.  
    • Touchy-feely parents, in contrast, seem to tacitly appeal to the income effect: A shamed kid will act even worse because he has so little left to lose.
    • Personally, my parenting style embraces the substitution effect in both directions.....That's definitely more consistent

    
    
    
    

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12. The College Premium vs. the Marriage Premium: A Case of Double Standards By Bryan Caplan

    • For males, the college premium and the marriage premium are roughly equal. In the NLSY, for example, you earn 34% more if you're a college grad, and 44% more if you're a married male*:
    • When people - economists and non-economists alike - look at the size of that college premium, they usually conclude that more people should go to college.
    • personal level, that 44% premium doesn't lead them to urge men to marry. On a policy level, the 44%
    • 1. You could point out that (a) married women earn 10% less,...But the male marriage bonus vastly exceeds... Indeed, the net premium for a couple almost exactly equals the college premium.
    • 2. You could object that the marriage premium is largely selection.... But like the college premium...
    • 3. You could object that men fail to marry despite the high premium because they would hate being married. But you can say the same about school:
    • 4. You could object that encouraging marriage restricts people's freedom, but encouraging college doesn't . But this makes no sense.
    • 5. You could say that education has positive externalities, but marriage doesn't.... externalities of marriage are far less debatable than the externalities of education.

    
    
    
    

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13. • Ten Oh No! It’s a Girl! - More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics by Steven E. Landsburg - #femminucceedivorzi #statusenutrimentocorporeo #whoiswhoemaschietti #nipotame #stressfemminuccegermaniaest #ilmaschietotirisposa #patrignipredatori #figliunicimaschi #ipiùrichiestinelleadozioni #splittingnelleredità #autostimaneifigliedivorzio 
    • Eleven The High Price of Motherhood - More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics by Steven E. Landsburg - #famigliaecarriera #causalitàocorrelazione #abortoallastessaetà #cercatoallastessaetà #nonvolutoallastessaetà #economistieprovettesporche

    
    
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    #caplan

    Genetic Engineering Is Reproductive Freedom By bryan caplan

    • ANALOGIA CONTRACCEZIONE. Will contraception lead to a dystopian society? It depends. If governments control individuals' contraception, then yes. If individuals control their own contraception, then no. The same goes for genetic engineering. In the hands of the government, it would be a pillar of totalitarianism.
    • RICCHI SEMPRE PIÙ RICCHI? The first customers will be wealthy eccentrics, but in a few decades, GE will be affordable and normal.
    • ARM RACE? Most people find my prediction frightening. Some paint GE as a pointless arms race; it's individually tempting, but society is better off without it. Others object that GE would increase inequality; the rich will buy alpha babies, and the rest of us will be stuck with betas. But there's something fishy about these complaints: If better nurture created a generation of wonder kids, we would rejoice.
    • ALTEZZA. On my office wall, I have a picture of my dad at his high school graduation, towering a foot above his grandparents. Such height differences were common at the time because childhood nutrition improved so rapidly. I doubt that the grandparents who attended that graduation saw height as an "arms race" or griped that rich kids were even taller.
    • OBIEZIONE DELLA VANITÀ GENITORIALE. The logic is hard to see. We praise parents who nurture their kids' health, intelligence, beauty, athletic ability, or determination because we know they're all good traits for kids to have.
    • PRIVATI E GOVERNO. .If parents had complete control over their babies' genetic makeup, the end result would be a healthier, smarter, better-looking version of the diverse world of today.If governments had complete control over babies' genetic makeup, the end result could easily be a population docile and conformist

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15. #caplan riproduzione

    Designer Babies Are Nothing to Fear: A Reply to Dan Klein By bryan caplan

    • OBIEZIONE: IL PASSATO CI SARÀ ESTRANEO. You could say exactly the same about all the economic growth that happened since 1900. It has undeniably and dramatically "attenuated coherence with the past." I'm tempted to say "So what?,"
    • NON AVREMO SENSO DELLA STORIA. The main thing I learn from history is that the past was awful, and the present far from satisfactory. A future society of designer babies should be more able to appreciate this lesson...In any case, most people currently have almost no sense of "historical coherence,"...
    • CI IPERSPECIALIZZEREMO. We're already grateful for the amazing fruits of specialization that we already enjoy.
    • CALERÀ L EMPATIA TRA LE PERSONE. do you really think parents are going to select against genes for sympathy?...Kindness is one of the main things parents try to instill in their kids.
    • IL GOVERNO SARÀ COUNVOLTO. In Western societies, controlling reproductive choice is widely seen as totalitarian. Who today does not recoil in the face of the Supreme Court's notorious 1927 decision to allow mandatory sterilization?
    • CI SARÀ UN COORDINAMENTO DA RICOSTRUIRE. to be honest, I hope Dan's right. In my view, existing levels of "social coherence" and "connectedness" are dangerously high, the cause of most of man's inhumanity to man
    • RICCHI SEMPRE PIÙ RICCHI. The same goes for any high-cost novelty. Fortunately, the market usually outmaneuvers populist bellyaching long enough to turn novel luxuries into affordable conveniences.

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16. Ieri sera, nel corso dell'incontro con il dott. Ballerini è stato citato un noto proverbio africano: "per educare un bambino occorre un intero villaggio". Queste "sagge" parole contengono però un lato oscuro e spesso vengono pronunciate per insinuare una contrapposizione tra "famiglia" e "villaggio":
    
    Hillary Clinton believes that it takes a village—and by extension, a great federal bureaucracy—to raise a child. Republicans scoff, emphasizing that it takes not a village but a traditional family—while at the same time criticizing the Clinton administration for doing too little to keep kids off drugs; apparently those Republicans believe that it takes not a village but a police state. In the traditional family as I remember it, drug education was supplied by the parents, not the government. At any rate, I wish they’d all lay off my daughter. Education about risks is one thing; telling kids that there’s a single “right” response to those risks is something different and more sinister.
17. POLYAMORY IS BORING di scott alexander
    • I don’t know whether I could have maximally-close relationships with multiple people simultaneously. That is, I don’t know if I could date three people and love all of them as much as my parents love each other... I’m not sure whether this would satisfy some deep human need for what you might politically-incorrectly call “mutual ownership”. And I’m definitely not sure (though I think it’s likely, certainly more likely than the skeptics would) that this is a great structure for child-rearing... 
    • PRIORITA'. In practice none of this matters, because driven by some innate urge most polyamorous people I know end up having one “primary” relationship along with whatever others they are involved with. Mike and Alicorn are each other’s primaries, and that is going to develop into being each other’s spouses, and what I said above about them definitely having achieved that level of maximum-closeness remains true.
    • I have heard of polyamorous communities where this is not how things are done, where people don’t have primaries, where they are just this complicated mass of partners without anything that looks like a traditional relationship
    
    
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18.