In a review of Primal Screams, I wrote,
When a tribe is formed out of families, members feel secure in their status. One’s identity is established as a father, mother, sibling, uncle, aunt, or grandparent.
In contrast, when a “forced pack” is constructed out of isolated individuals, there are constant struggles to resolve the uncertainty over who belongs and where members fit in relation to one another. Eberstadt suggests that under such circumstances:
… some people, deprived of recognition in the traditional ways, will regress to a state in which their demand for recognition becomes ever more insistent and childlike. This brings us to one of the most revealing features of identity politics: its infantilized expression and vernacular.
Her thesis, about which I raise doubts in my review, is that young people turn to identity politics to try to address needs that are unmet in today’s weak family environment. I can imagine Eberstadt reading the David Brooks essay to which I referred last week and coming out with her own primal scream.
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.
-William Blake
Extended family/clan networks among Native Americans don’t seem to help their dysfunction.
Extended family/clan networks of Africa are of significant personal support, but drag down economic performance.
Extended family/clan networks of the Arab world are a mixed bag trending towards the dysfunctional.
Extened family/clan networks of Subcontinental India looks like a source of strength, both personal and economic, among their diaspora.
Fully embracing traditional subsistence hunting seems to be a pretty decent remedy to social dysfunction in Greenland Inuit as glimpsed in parts of the documentary SILA and the Gatekeepers of the Arctic. It is the transition to the lifestyle of modern industrial nation-states that is problematic.
Perhaps looking at the functional economic systems associated with specific ecosystems can be more informative than ruminating about the psychology of the members of such cultures. Speculating about the efficacy of institutional patterns independent of the environmental context seems rather pointless, in my opinion.
Maybe this is the truth underlying Merle Kling’s first iron law of social science, “Sometimes it’s this way, and sometimes it’s that way.” What distinguishes “this way” from “that way” is differing context.
Mormons and Isrealis are the most successful non-religious extremist groups at maintaining family and culture in a modern economy. Both are “nationalist” (especially if you define Mormons as a nation), conservative, have some tie to religion, and are mostly dominated by a particular ethnic group.
Mormons also flirt the line with what you might consider “extreme”. It’s certain harder to be “sort of Mormon” then it is the be “sort of Catholic”. You can’t have non-Mormons at a Mormon wedding, etc.
All great examples, asdf, and I’d throw the new world Anabaptists (Amish and Mennonites) into the comparison since they represent homogenous ethno-linguistic-religious people, or “nationality”, that built their entire identity around rejecting nation-states.
Beyond my many personal anecdotes with both Mormon and Mennonites friends/colleagues, there are many popular culture examples that demonstrate that ethno-linguistic race is not central to the national identity of Mormons nor Mennonites. Malcolm Gladwell’s Jamaican mother and British father are valued members of their local Mennonite church and before you brush away the oddity of the situation consider the topic of Joyce Gladwell’s Letters to my [identical twin] sister and its publication source.
As a Mormon anecdote, consider Orson Scott Card’s long love affair with large families in his novels that share your faith and the distinctive ethno-linguistic mix of Edgar’s southern hemisphere neighbors. Missionary work tends to make many smart religious people very cosmopolitan.
Amish cross the line to “orthodox religious cult” for me. You can’t live a normal live an be Amish. Mennonite seems to mean enough different things that one can’t say for sure what one means when you say it.
The Mormon church is 86% white, 5% mixed, with most of the rest being Latino. Even amongst the white, its heavily English in origin rather than polyglot.
Sundays remain the most segregated area of peoples lives. Even within the same denomination, there are usually ethnically dominated individual churches (for instance, the Polish and Latinos couldn’t share my uncles church long term). I’m unaware of any cosmopolitan groups that don’t have bottom basement fertility rates.
Malcom Gladwell is an on again off again practitioner of religion who is unmarried and has no children at age 56. Can’t find any info on this brother having a family either. Basically, a dead end.
Well, for anyone that has lived or worked near the University of Waterloo knows exactly what you mean when you say Mennonite, and The Gladwell family’s home of Elmira is in the heart of Mennonite country:
Elmira is home to Old Order Mennonites, modern Mennonites, University professors like Malcolm’s father, high-tech entrepreneurs that work in the area, and other German (Lutheran) descendants of the region’s settlers.
Joyce Gladwell and her sister are both very religious. If you think the Amish cross the line to “orthodox religious cult” then Old Order Mennonites do as well. It’s time again, asdf, to remind those who live in glass houses not to throw stones. These are really good people.
I didn’t say they were bad people. “Orthodox Religious Cult” doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes your way of life unscalable beyond a small fringe. Quite frankly, I like electricity.
If you’re a high tech entrepreneur then whatever branch of Mennonite you are, it’s not very close to Amish.
asdf, attaching the term “cult” to any religious group is always pejorative. When your Home Depot and Wal-Mart have Horse & Buggy Parking you start to believe this is not a mere fringe group. Old Order Mennonites without electricity, modern Mennonites who attend churches similar to the church the Gladwell’s attend, theoretical physicists from the Perimeter Institute, doctors in training at the only english-language optometry school in Canada, and engineers from Google/SAP/Kik/OpenText/Blackberry mingle throughout this tight-knit region. I’ve worked with some exceptional programmers from Provo that are devout Mormons and have the detailed polygamous family trees to prove it. I also know engineers and doctors whose Mennonite churches are as important to their lives as their software code and laser surgery machines.
On a different vacation in Central America, I was surprised to find a relatively large Mennonite community beside the Lamanai Mayan site and New River ecosystem popular with bird watchers. Like Mennonites everywhere, the Belize Mennonites follow different degrees of mechanization and the locals call the ones that use tractors and outboard boat engines “Mechanites”. It turns out that Mennonites are a fundamental part of the Belize food system. Some things can scale even without electricity.
Perhaps “cult” means something negative to you. To me it means a small group of very dedicated believers. What they believe and how they act determines if that is negative.
That “Mennonite” means such a wide scale of practices makes the term useless in this context. It would be like saying that orthodox and secular Jews were just “Jews” and all basically the same. In this specific context Orthodox Jews have strong family ties and high TFR, while secular Jews have low TFR and weak family ties (except in Israel where they are far right ethnicity nationalists that built big beautiful walls).
Asdf, the Amish also have a wide range of practices with respect to technology. Pneumatic tools and diesel engines are widely used. I am not talking about secular Mennonites, I am talking about Mennonites whose faith and community is central to their identity. The parallel with Mormons seems obvious to me. I think the only problem is a caricature of the Amish you hold and an inability to grasp that neither you or I could distinguish between Old Order Mennonites and the strictist Amish orders.
Perhaps I should analyze your arguments as knee jerk racist reactions. Deflect from the idea that a Mormon like Orson Scott Card has a soft spot for large mixed race Brazilian Catholic families. Deflect from the idea that a mixed race Jamaican like Joyce Gladwell and her twin sister whose lives diverged after marriage have any relevance to faith and family.
Multi-generational natural experiments are pretty special, especially when identical twins are involved. I mistakenly thought you might share my appreciation.
I’m not sure what your point is.
Groups like the Amish (the real Amish that don’t use technology) have maintained really good communities. The more “secular/modern” they get the less of a community they have (close families living good bourgeois lives with high TFR).
You could imagine it as a spectrum where some “traditional” Amish man having a bunch of kids and then a “secular” Mennonite like Gladwell having none.
What interests me is groups that manage to combine enough modern/secular attitudes and practices with good bourgeois behaviors and high TFR. Groups like the Mormons and Israelis. I could imagine being a Mormon or Israeli. I can’t imagine being an Amish. And I find being a modern/secular religious pointless (modern leftist Christians are pozzed and have terrible TFRs).
I dabbled with Mormonism. I got to the meeting where you are supposed to decide. But I couldn’t get over the forced feeling. The forced witnesses with the tears. The fact that my parents couldn’t be at a Mormon wedding. They basically offered me a wife and I said no. I’m glad to be with my religiously friendly but more free thinking wife. Still, I admire the Mormons and acknowledge that they manage to make it work without going horse and buggy.
Having a clan within a non-clannish society is a person sweet spot. You can free ride on the benefits of non-clannishness while benefiting from clannishness yourself.
I had the same thought the other day driving around Brooklyn. The Hasidim seem to do well amidst the tenement squalor. One wonders if Dr Kling’s fierce advocacy of cosmopolitanism comes from a diverse personal bubble that extends as widely to the Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist persuasions.
“But I, for one, would not give up the benefits of the market in order to return to family farming.”
I nodded in agreement through the entire review, the conclusion of which is highly persuasive and “shout from the rooftop” material, except for this one sentence, which made me laugh. Farms or markets? Really? Anyone with any experience in rural America will be the first to tell you farm families are not immune to divorce and anomie generaly.
Perhaps Eberstadt’s thesis purporting to explain the psychological needs of millions and Dr. Kling’s notions of family farming are both a bit too “macro.” Although I revere Eberstadt nearly as much as I do Dr. Kling, I am nevertheless reminded of a recent masterful Ann Althouse takedown of an Andrew Sullivan piece that purported to see into the souls of Trump voters: https://althouse.blogspot.com/2019/11/that-this-is-even-thinkable-reveals.html Gross generalizations about vast populations tend to reveal more about the author’s projections than about any approximation of reality. Young people have many motivations and many, even from broken families, are sick of identitarian politics. A plurality of voters even among the young are independents stuck with having to choose between two political monopolies that don’t have to compete for a base. And farms and markets are not a binary choice, they can coexist, and if you have no experience with farm families you might not want to generalize about them.
In reading this review, I agree that heavy young identify politics comes from later marriage. (So we have a lot of 28 years old going identity politics when in the past they set their identity to marriage, parenthood and career.) I want scream three questions very loudly:
1) Why has family formation started later every generation since the Silent Generation? (Low point of first marriage was 1960 so this started with Silent Generation)
2) Why is later marriage happening with both Europe and Asian Tigers economies as well? In fact the US is behind the curve comparatively and it is the minority working classes most behind the curve. (Northeast white populations look exactly Europe and Asian-Americans are closer to Asian Tigers.)
3) Considering our crime wave and high divorce rates of the 1970s, why do we want early family formation? (At Ross Douthat is at least dealing with this reality in Decadence.)
So listening to Social Conservatives, I feel like they are going to say “Make Enforced Shotgun Marriages Great Again” (I exaggerating my point here.)
And one reality of the Boomers generation is they were the most mobile workforce and moved across state lines the most. (I believe 1985 was the highpoint of moving across state lines.) My simple logic on why at least Boomers lost a sense of community moving around creates community instability. (FYI, early Gen X kids in 1980s moved as well.)
In terms of first marriage, I still hold the optimal time for a person is after their career is somewhat settled. So if it takes longer to have a settled career then they the optimal marriage moves as well.
The optimal time for marriage is when your career is somewhat settled and you have the body of a 20-25 year old. Unfortunately, those rarely coincide these days.
18 year old high school grads and 21 year old vocational college grads do fit the optimal physical/mental maturation for family formation with a 2 year career building phase. When I read Collin’s comment yesterday, I thought this was a simple matching problem with the limited ~100 potential mate universe of high school or maybe slightly more in vocational college. I jokingly thought we need a public dance system that bused the young high school women to different regional schools every week/month to meet the local young men (the men stay put to avoid violence) and gamify the matching system with an app. I’d call the app DanceCard so I did an AppStore search and sure enough there is an app called “Stake Dance Card” built for Mormon “stake dances” which apparently are regional dances organized by the church. Hmmmm….
Age of first marriage is 31.3 for college grads (higher in cities).
If you could push that down to the 25-28 age range, that would essentially solve your fertility shortfall.
But then you would need to drill into mid 20 somethings that dating is for marriage and not fun, and that they shouldn’t still be trying to find themselves in their mid 20s.
I remember that when I was dating in my mid 20s nobody took the idea that you were working towards marriage seriously.
Her thesis, about which I raise doubts in my review, is that young people turn to identity politics to try to address needs that are unmet in today’s weak family environment.
Maybe. But here’s an alternative theory. When I read
In contrast, when a “forced pack” is constructed out of isolated individuals, there are constant struggles to resolve the uncertainty over who belongs and where members fit in relation to one another.
I immediately thought “… and it’s called High School”. Identity politics are largely espoused by those recently out of high school and by those seeking to profit from manipulation of voters, e.g. politicians. I wonder if identity politics in those in and (relatively) recently out of high school is largely shaped by spending four years in the “forced pack” of high school and the “having nothing else to bond over, bond with those like you” mentality high school fosters.
I’m unclear where “identity politics is worst” is supposed to mean.
Baltimore isn’t a college campus, but it has a ton of identity politics.
The arguments between NYC Superintendent Carranza and the NYC Asian population is identity politics, but it’s not a college campus. Diversity Quotas/Oaths in most major corporations aren’t college campuses.
The other day we were being forced to discuss how we could change our drug formulary to be more culturally diverse…what’s that got to do with college campuses?
There is a lot of “performative” identity politics on campus, but there is a lot of “performative” everything on campus. And always had been.
There is also just the fact that the young are performative in general.
Blacks famously support Biden, but blacks under 40 support Bernie. Latinos under age 40 HEAVILY support Bernie.
I’m not sure what identity politics is supposed to mean here.
‘Identity’ Politics is it has practiced forever (Note the division with Democratic Primary is more age than race):
1) A significant change in lifetime was the Moral Majority being very Christian Identity politics in 1980 and ensure Ronald Reagan won the Primary and Election. I am not saying is bad but this is not new reality.
2) This feels a like a Sociology argument in which the modern world young adults are having trouble defining their ‘Identity’ For instance most adults set Identity by their religion, marriage/family and career. If you are Friends struggling with all that, you set your Identity differently and define more in politics.
3) I believe the poster think High School/College are making young people raging Identity Politics. There may be some truth to this, but frankly my High School has not been this Identity brainwashing. I feel their HS reinforces college or military too much but not leftest identity.
4) And finally with average younger people, they were most negatively effected by The Great Recession. In reality, High Schools are better behaved than ever (look up Teen Pregnancy or crime) but they may feel failed by society for stalled careers. (FYI it may be fair here on stalled careers but I trying to simplify.)
I haven’t read Eberstadt’s book but it sounds to me like she would benefit greatly from spending a little time on Wikipedia reading about Judith Rich Harris’ “Nurture Assumption” and the page on Bonobos to disabuse her of the notion that a single primate nature exists. Bonobos are pretty darn weird, even by the standards of the sexual revolution. Bonobo males are not “demonic” as Richard Wrangham calls the other great ape males including ourselves and many/most researchers suspect the difference is due to their unique social-sexual behavior.
Kind of tangential to the main discussion, but this always makes me think of China and it’s one-child policy. First generation has no siblings, second generation has no siblings, no cousins, no aunts and uncles. Third generation has no siblings, cousins, or even second cousins.
Does China have the same social breakdown in the family, even with the cultural emphasis on family?
The one-child policy ended in 2015, so what we have is a 35 year social experiment in family formation that coincided with economic liberalization. There is also a question of whether the top down policy influenced the bottom up sex-selective abortion rate which has resulted in 118 Chinese males born for every 100 females. This emerging dataset should make social scientists salivate in anticipation.
Eberstadt is mostly right: young people turn to identity politics to try to address needs that are unmet in today’s weak family environment.
What is missing in a weak family is the “bond”. Most often between the missing father and the children, but often between the mother and her children, and the child siblings.
Affluence (Lilla) is likely one of the main reasons, because being rich allows one to avoid most painful and inconvenient problems of life. And one of the main ways to bond is to share misery together, and experience the need to trust others and have that trust upheld. (Which is in contrast to so many dramatic stories where there is a trust betrayal – and dramatic because it actually happens, but rarely. Like auto accidents — when were you last involved in one where somebody died?)
I haven’t read her book, but her #3 is certainly true – more politics of identity than from other post WW II times, and certainly far less talk of “integration” than was expected with the 60s Black Panthers.
Her #2a) fewer siblings, very true for college students; less true for non-college grads; but 2b) without their father, again much less true for college students (tho I would like to see more data)
Her #1) reduced sex taboos, especially sex outside of marriage — I think this is a huge and far bigger issue than Kling or others are indicating. In particular, there is this terrible feminist idea of male-female “equality” which means, in practice, that men and women should be equally promiscuous. Which is bad to terrible for some 60-80% of women.
The silly David Brooks idea of ditching nuclear families as an ideal is good for alpha males; rich and/or famous and/or powerful. Attractive to women. (Who will, all too often, let them “do anything.”) (“Anything?”, “yeah, grab them by their… Anything”)
So he trades in his wife for a younger one; Trump has traded in two beauties for a younger model. Bill Clinton merely cheats on his wife with younger babes. And aspiring actresses are willing to go into the hotel room of Weinstein (for the casting couch interview, or something.)
This culture is not good.
Not good for the majority of men (80%? 60%?).
Not good for the majority of women.
Not good for any of the children who grow up without fathers.
The desire to defend promiscuous sex between consenting adults is where the “free market fundamentalists” really are “inimical to family stability.” Changing laws can help this, but mostly the culture needs to change.
#MeToo is trying to change the culture — so that the small minority of predatory men, a minority of the minority of alpha males, so that the predators have a harder time. By making all men get blamed for the actions of the few predators, and often treating the non-guilty men of being guilty predator men. Seldom are the men fully innocent – they were usually looking consenting, adult, legal sex with a woman they weren’t married to nor committed to.
And the culture is changing under this pressure.