1. Signal vs. noise. What draws our attention? Think of two dimensions: threats vs. positive developments; sudden vs. gradual. We seem to be most attractive to the sudden and to the threat. A hurricane is a great story for the media. The way that our houses have become stronger and more secure is not a great story.

2. As L.M. Sacasas put it, we combine the most stressful aspects of the pre-literate oral village and modern anonymous society.

We are thrust once more into a live, immediate, and active communicative context — the moment regains its heat — but we remain without the non-verbal cues that sustain meaning-making in such contexts. We lose whatever moderating influence the full presence of another human being before us might cast on the passions the moment engendered. This not-altogether-present and not-altogether-absent audience encourages a kind of performative pugilism.

The “other” is in our face, but is not fully present.

Alex Gendler writes,

When the first Homo sapiens arrived in Europe forty-five thousand years ago as rela­tively egalitarian hunter-gatherers, about three women reproduced for every man. But with the advent of agriculture, this changed drastically. The need to secure territory and a complex division of labor created highly stratified societies in which a relatively small number of men could monopolize the land, resources, and power needed to support and maintain families. By about 6000 BC, the ratio of females reproducing versus males had risen to a staggering seven­teen to one, and in the Middle Ages a single leader like Genghis Khan or Augustus the Strong could father hundreds of children. Indeed, polygamy has long been the norm in many societies around the world, and even where it has been banned by law, the tendency of high-status men to cycle through successive younger wives and mistresses has long meant that it continued in practice. Recent centu­ries have seen a more reasonable reproductive ratio of four to one, but no matter how you slice it, the fact remains that of all the men who have ever lived, the majority of them have left no trace in the human gene pool.

He claims,

in a broader sense, war has functioned as a disposal mechanism for a society’s excess men.

. . .The same logic that keeps women and their sexuality under jealous guard and treats them as a prize to be awarded is also what casts the majority of men into a Hobbesian struggle for that prize—ensuring continued reproduction of a social order gov­erned by a predominantly male elite. Contrary to both traditionalist conservative myth and popular feminist narrative, for most of history patriarchy was not a privilege one benefited from simply by being born male, but a brutal racket in which millions of men destroyed each other and the world around them for the benefit of a fortunate few.

Gendler offers an interesting analysis of the problem of superfluous men, and he offers the usual American Affairs swipe at “neoliberalism,” but he does not really suggest any solutions.

But I wonder if our current social unrest can be ascribed to male childlessness. Is there not also a trend toward female childlessness, and are its implications not at least as serious?

Eric Kaufmann writes,

Viewing wokeness as a highly decentered liberal religion helps us understand the movement’s extremism, its witch hunts, and its awakenings. It explains why high-status people and elite institutions mouth its mantras, why its moderates can’t stand up to its fundamentalists, and why it is both the product of, and an engine of, polari­zation.

It is a powerful essay, difficult to excerpt. One of his themes is that liberalism may have once been a set of principles, but it is now a quasi-religious identity. Another theme is that a decentralized religion tends toward radicalism, as extremists “outbid” moderates in the contest for emotional support from those who identify with the religion.

At this point, I am going to call this the best essay I have read this year.

By the way, American Affairs is the publisher of the essay. This journal does publish some real nuggets. But it also publishes a lot of essays that toss around “neoliberal” and “market fundamentalist” as epithets. Also, it has a paywall that kicks in after one article (I think), so you have to choose carefully when to click through to read. Note that I have a couple of forthcoming posts that reference other interesting essays, but I do not recommend those essays as highly as Kaufmann’s.

Michael Lind writes,

In addition to the “Deep State,” other national institutions that the neo-Jacksonians of the New Deal coalition never conquered in their revolution against Yankeedom include the major nonprofit foundations like Ford and Rockefeller and the Ivy League universities. The culture of what might be called the NGO-academic-spook complex remained deeply rooted in the Social Gospel wing of Northern mainline Protestantism of the early 1900s.

The Social Gospel progressivism these institutions have long embraced is a Janus-faced tradition. One face is technocratic, holding that social and global conflicts, rather than reflecting the tragic nature of human existence, are “problems” which can be “solved” by nonpartisan experts guided by something called “social science.” The other face of Social Gospelism is irrational, and rooted in post-millennial Protestant theology convinced that we are on the verge of a world of peace and prosperity, if only wicked people at home and wicked regimes abroad can be crushed once and for all.

People in this tradition will tell you that the virus would go away if the wicked would only “listen to the scientists.”

Pointer from a commenter. I recommend the entire essay. In fact, I recommend Tablet in general. I have signed up for their newsletter.

Erol Ricketts writes,

What is strikingly different in 1950 is that blacks overtake whites in their level of urbanization. After 1950, blacks become more urbanized than whites, and they continue to urbanize. Whites de-urbanized after 1970. Blacks moved to the cities after World War II, en masse. And it is after this move that severe family-formation problems began to emerge. The data suggest that the clues to recent family-formation problems among blacks are to be found in the circumstances of black urbanization after 1950.

Pointer from John Alcorn. The data in the paper show that before 1950, marriage rates of black women were even higher than those of white women.

This question is posed, and not answered, in the podcast in which Loury, McWhorter, Steele, and Steele discuss the latter’s Michael Brown documentary.

UPDATE: transcript of the conversation

Conservatives want to blame the War on Poverty and welfare programs. This story is exemplary normative sociology–the study of what you want the cause of a problem to be. The problem is that the dissolution of black families preceded the War on Poverty.

Loury points out that the black family was stronger in 1930 than in 1960. What happened in the meantime?

My thought is that what happened was the Great Migration of blacks from the rural south to the urban north. One can imagine that this produced a cultural shock that could have weakened marriages through a number of channels.

1. Lowering the status of the black matriarch. Your rejected your grandmother’s rural ways, so she could not apply moral pressure on you to follow marital norms.

2. Greater inequality among black males, weakening marriage. The poorer males are undesirable husbands, and the richer males have leverage to disdain monogamy.

3. Communities no longer church-centric, so that there is less social pressure to follow marital norms.

4. Availability of many more opportunities to have sex outside of marriage.

Trying to tell this migration story leads me to ask why a similar drift toward family breakdown did not occur among Italians, Irish, and others when they migrated in large numbers to the U.S. Perhaps they just had the good fortune to undertake these migrations in an earlier era. People who arrived between 1880 and 1930 had a very hard life, with little time to pursue sex outside of marriage. Also, this was before Freud and others had convinced people of the need to be less repressed about sex.