40 thoughts on “David Brooks on family structure and community support”

1. “Your church or your synagogue used to provide that, but nobody is joining any more. I wonder why.”

   The death of religion has been lamented throughout history yet how many “great revivals” have we had in the US alone?? It’s cyclical. Completely anecdotal but as a Gen X’er with late Gen Z children I’m seeing among my kids peers as they hit adulthood a complete rejection of Gem Yine nihilism and Gen X pop evangelism as a search for meaning AND, more importantly, truth and grounding. When everything is fake, religion provides them a bedrock to anchor to.

   It’s not a “time” thing either, for example my children as teenagers demanded to go with me and stand the entire three hour Christmas service (I’m Orthodox Catholic, we don’t sit lol); they even happily and voluntarily participated in Great Lent the past few years though I’ve never once made them participate at all. I see similar behavior (I live Hawaii) with their friends seeking out ultra traditional formal Buddhism and pre-WW2 Shintoism contrary to their parents secularism.

   I’m not worried about traditional religion in the modern West, short or long term.

   • I experience church differently. The quality of my spiritual and interpersonal experience increases in inverse proportion to sermon length. If a preacher wants to drone on and on, s/he should put it on a podcast. I don’t go to church to listen to a long lecture.

     • Heh, I’m positive I just read someone a few days ago make the parallel remark about the place one goes to listen to long lectures, “I didn’t go to college to hear sermons”.

2. I live in a nuclear-family bubble. Among my friends, divorces are rare, and children out of wedlock are unheard of.

   Me too, but it doesn’t feel like a bubble — at least not a small one. It’s not just friends but the neighborhood and nearly all of our colleagues. But we’re talking about educated, upper middle class people. Of course the clerical staff at the hospital where my wife works have the expected messy lives as do many of the patients she sees (they have a considerable Medicaid caseload).

   So as others have pointed out, it’s very much class based and has little to do with politics. Living in a college town, many of the folks around us are very liberal when it comes to voting, but still uniformly conservative in their personal lives.

3. New pain! said Isaiah.
   New contract! said God.
   -Anne Carson

4. Brooks tells a story of the relatively recent emergence of the American Nuclear Family that is simply as odds with historical reality. England, and her Anglospheric spin-offs (e.g., America), have been very different for a very long time, at least as far back as Richard the First (“lionheart”) and his heir John who was forced into signing the Magna Carta. (This used to be taught as standard history of the origins of the Magna Carta and why such a thing emerged when and where it did).

   Alan Macfarlane’s “The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition,” and “Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300-1840” show that common adoption of nuclear family living patterns in England (and, in particular, in contrast to the rest of Europe) with offspring tending to be mobile and, when they can afford it, moving out to marry and start their own separate nuclear families, go at least as far back as the 13th century, and were thoroughly entrenched there by the period following the black death plague. Gregory Clark’s works are also consistent with this description.

   Early American colonial writings such as journals and biographies and especially in the areas of Puritan New England where slavery was absent back this up and describe recognizable nuclear family structures and dynamics, and one familiar with the life histories of the Founders sees the same.

   So, one has to ask, what the hell is Brooks talking about? What’s his game with this false history (and how sad is it to the extent large numbers of “educated” people bought into it?)

   The sad answer seems to be yet another instance of a token conservative saying “ok, the social conservatives may have been right, but they lost, the family died, lamenting it is counterproductive in terms of getting into another culture war battle they can’t win, so come on and get with the new hotness, it’s 2020, so let’s come up with an excuse to tolerate current socially-pathological ideas and conditions ‘that was right for then, but things changed, and this is right for now’ and get busy nonjudgmentally shoring people up with some nice Reform Conservatism targeted welfare.”

   When he says “social conservatives have nothing to say …” this is cynical and improper DADA argumentation and pariah baiting, as he knows perfectly well they have something to say, but that it is no longer safe to say it. But silence is much less dangerous than the conspicuously noisy repudiation in which he is engaging.

   • So, one has to ask, what the hell is Brooks talking about? What’s his game with this false history (and how sad is it to the extent large numbers of “educated” people bought into it?)

     Acknowledging the deep historical roots of the nuclear family structure — which implicitly include its persistence through various massive upheavals like the Industrial Revolution, civil wars, etc, makes it much more difficult to defend the assertion that its collapse “just happened” rather than being the result of a fairly recent exercise of state power for which he presumably advocated and which, if reversed, would harm him personally.

   • Brooks’ attack on the family began in 2013, when he divorced the wife of his youth (who’d converted to Judaism for his sake), and went on to marry his research assistant – who was 23 years younger than himself.

     It’s the oldest story in the world. Older men are attracted to younger women. In fact, if you look at the record in the arts and literature, you can see the older men pretty much see a younger woman as the solution to all their problems.

     Brooks needs to justify his selfish, biologically driven decision to break up his family, by blaming “the family”.

   • Defense Against the Dark Arts?

     • “Denied Area Denial Advocacy”.

       An example of AD, Area Denial, is a marked minefield. I make it known to you and everyone else that you cannot use a certain area without getting blown up.

       Denied Area Denial, DAD, is like an unmarked minefield, not necessarily secret, but unacknowledged and denied. So you know you cannot go there, and I know you know, and thus that you won’t go there, but I can still pretend to the world like there is no minefield or denied area. You can’t prove I’m lying, because demonstrating that would require entering the minefield, which blows you up.

       Let’s say mines are illegal. You have a base that is fenced on three sides but otherwise wide open and you want to assert it is perfectly secure. “Look, no one ever gets inside my base, so three out of four sides being fenced is sufficient.” It’s not secure at all, and adversaries would walk right in, if it weren’t for the fact you secretly put illegal mines all along the fourth side, and, sure, your base is defended, but improperly so. But no one can call you out on it.

       DADA is advocacy done by falsely and improperly pretending it is rigorous to completely ignore the weakest aspects of ones argument, because those flanks and soft underbellies are protected by unmentionable socially undesirable taboo minefields, and one is pariah baiting when demanding public refutation. It relies on abusing a kind of sanctuary from attack.

       It’s even worse when one goes further and exploits the lack of such refutation as evidence that there are no weaknesses, that one’s opponents simply must be dogmatic and irrational because when asked to do so, they apparently will not and thus cannot provide a good rebuttal.

       But the claims aren’t defended by logic and evidence, but by taboos, and so this posturing is inherently fraudulent and constitutes intellectual malpractice.

       • So defense by taboo.

         • Yes, but not openly, that is, while pretending one is not relying upon defense by taboo.

   • +1 to it all

     When reading it I thought he was referring to “white ethnics”, usually Catholic, that had set up little neighborhoods in American cities right up until they were pushed out in the 1970s chaos (the Jets lost to the Sharks in my grandfathers old neighborhood). They indeed had a lot more extended families, and had longer roots in such practices that are still evident today. They had parallel education systems (catholic schools), owned certain trades and professions (Irish cops), had virtual terrain control over certain areas of the city, and practiced machine politics in urban areas. In some groups this bordered on pathological (Sicilians and the mob).

     Prohibition was passed specifically to target them and their “saloons”. Some cities still have vestiges of this life (Staten Island). Often what replaced them (blacks and hispanics) has its own problems (DC metro anyone), but at the time brahmins didn’t weep over breaking the power of white ethnics. Their unpardonable sin was being too uppity.

     When my first child was baptized it was at my uncles church. It used to be Polish, but was now Latino. For awhile it was shared but that didn’t last long. My wife asked where all the Polish went, and a friend replied that they must have “assimilated”. Which is a pretty vague answer but I guess means that they got scattered across the suburbs and exurbs and became bowling alone “white people” after they got pushed out.

     I’m going post something more direct on this subject since I recently tried to make something like this work and it failed, but I think the breakup of concentrated alternative urban enclaves (that are anything less then as fanatical as the orthodox) is part of what makes it difficult to form this kind of community.

5. Kling says:

   All of us feel that we have won at life. I don’t think Brooks appreciates that spending time together with your spouse and your grandchildren pretty much takes care of the “need to belong” problems that his “forged families” try to solve.

   I think there is great truth in this statement yet recent wide-scale natural experiments falsify the underlying premise. There is equal truth in Brooks’ lament about the demise of Thanksgiving but it too misses the mark. The distant echoes of New World Colonialism only live in the words and symbols of our time, roast turkey along with the cornucopia of cranberry sauce, potatoes, squash, and pumpkin pie, all foods of the Columbian Exchange, but the disastrous natural experiment of communist authoritarianism is still raw in the minds of those who escaped it.

   The diasporas from Cuba, Eastern Europe, and South East Asia are not built around the extended family. The mothers and fathers left behind are literally cut-off from their young or yet to be born grandchildren born and/or raised in distant cultures that speak foreign languages. Their only remaining connections are written letters, if they are literate, and the remittances that flow through informal and often risky international money exchange networks.

   There are structural elements underlying our social institutions that we are blind to when they form part of our natural environment. For a North American, Christmas in Sydney Australia is incongruent. Starting with the bird cacophony and pungency of eucalyptus as you walk out of the airport, the hot days and cool nights surrounding the longest day of the year down under seem ill suited to European Christmas traditions. Christmas lights don’t get switched on until well past the bedtimes of young children. Snow and sleighs are the stuff of movies and television programs. It superficially feels wrong.

   Yet new traditions get built. As a member of the live audience, one is struck by the tackiness of the dancing celebrities on the ad hoc giant stage used for the televised “Carols in the Domain” right up until the point that the first traditional Christmas carol is sung. When the voices of tens of thousands of people sitting on blankets in the grass, often families with young children delightfully holding candles, start singing in unison, the heart of the uninitiated skips a beat. This is a sense of Christmas that the majority in the Northern Hemisphere have never experienced at this scale.

   On Christmas day the prelude to lunch begins with men gathering outside around a fire pit that will soon be the focus of the Christmas Turkey roasted on a spit. Memories of summer corn roasts, pig roasts, ethnic pig/lamb/goat roasts come to mind. The smoke, smells and sounds remind one of campfire hot dogs, corn on the cob, and marshmallows; right season, wrong time of day. The ad hoc tables used to host the large gathering is the same, it just has the feel of an outdoor picnic more than an expanding dining room.

   When you think your George Bailey moment of down under Christmas enlightenment is complete, you get to experience your first Boxing Day at Sydney Harbour. The crowds gather to fill every inch of free space to watch the start of the annual Sydney to Hobart Race. Magnificent.

   Wherever there are free people the emergence of weird and wonderful traditions occur but they often have characteristics mirroring their unfamiliar surroundings. North American Thanksgiving is as much about our cars and highways and average house/kitchen size as it is about extended family and harvest traditions.

6. Handle already mentioned that the nuclear family was not, in fact, invented in 1950.

   As for Brooks’ article, it’s worthless. The nuclear family didn’t die, it was killed; Brooks doesn’t even attempt to address the various state policies (no fault divorce, repeal and non-enforcement of adultery laws, making it illegal to discriminate in favor of married people) that accompanied that collapse of the family structure. It man be true that unavoidable historical trends somewhat weakened the family structure as measured by declining TFR and increases in divorce pre-WW2, but if I know a man with the flu and later find him dead with a knife in his back I don’t assume he was done in by sickness. Brooks tells us about a man getting sick and dying without mentioning the knife.

   Brooks’ position is however understandable; as a public man and moralist who left his wife for a younger woman provided him by his employers, he has a personal stake in ensuring there is no prospect of returning to the legal, social, and cultural regime in which families are known to flourish. It also means he should be ignored or attacked on a personal level any time he runs his mouth off about how we should live our lives.

   • I am reminded of the Steve Sailer blog post that links to a mainstream Israeli newspaper noting that David Brooks ‘ son served in the Israeli Defense Force rather than any branch of the US Armed Forces.

     As Kant would ask, “What if everyone did that?”

     I’ve posted it here before. Here it is again. I post it without any fact checking–you will have to do that on your own.

     https://www.unz.com/isteve/ethnic-extremist-leaves-u-s-to-fight-in-middle-eastern-tribal-war/

     • As Kant would ask, “What if everyone did that?”

       On a vacation in Central America, I once met a father and son who were pursuing their shared love of scuba diving on a short trip before the son’s first deployment to Afghanistan. The young man was on leave after completing basic training. He enlisted shortly after reaching the legal age in Canada. Over lunch the father talked about his job as a high school teacher and his long history of social justice activism including many anti-war protests.

       When I asked the young man about the source of his passion for military service when his father and extended family were self-proclaimed pacifists his reply was “oh, me and my buddies all joined the Cadets when we were teenagers”.

       Besides drilling home the message of Judith Rich Harris’ “Nurture Assumption”, this story also emphasizes the need to separate the actions of the father from those of the son, and vice versa.

       • touche!

         • or touché if you want the diacritics.

     • Interestingly, some people say that, instead of using US troops to support our strongest allies, Americans that want to help those countries should “pick up a rifle” and head over there on their own as individuals. I guess one attracts criticism both ways.

       Re Kant’s question, if everyone volunteered to defend free nations everywhere, then I guess the world would be a lot freer.

       • This seems facile, in the sense that many wars are not simply a contest between aggressive oppressors and the free nations resisting them.

         At the worst, you may be trolling.

         More charitably, you may be assuming that many military conflicts can be reduced to fairy tale simplicity.

         Some of them can–but probably not very many.

7. Apologies for a leftist hypothesis. Thirty years ago I read a book by Germaine Greer. I mostly hated it, but one idea stuck with me for all these years. She hypothesized that capitalism and capitalist states had purposefully broken up the extended family and created the nuclear family. The nuclear family is smaller, much more vulnerable and thus much easier coerced an manipulated by job security etc. I’m tempted to speculate that we now see the breakup of the nuclear family into individualistic units that are even more vulnerable and more easily pressured into compliance (bullshit jobs, self employed, etc.).

   • The causation runs the other way. Nuclear families are indeed a luxury good that people transition into only when they can afford to and aren’t desperately dependant on their extended relations. The threshold of affordability when Malthusian conditions are relaxed and bourgeois norms followed is, however, so low that it makes Brooks’ contention of contemporary economic relevance completely absurd when the issue is obviously the widespread abandonment of those norms.

     The same applies to the other Bowling Alone issues of decline of congregations and clubs and unions and feelings of loneliness and alienation. That is, these are the unintended consequences and “anxieties of affluence”, as we are victims of our own success.

     The social bonds we enjoy are born out of the subconscious calculation of reciprocal necessities. We need to need.
     When we become rich enough to achieve material independence, we tend to disengage from the costly maintenance of friendly relationships as potential informal providers of networking, vouching, credit, insurance for contingencies and exigencies, and so forth. To the extent these are valuable services, companies step in to provide the same services for money instead of pressures of mutual affection and avoiding awkwardness with close relations with whom you have regular contact.

     That is, it’s not just government doing the crowding out, which I think has always been a big mistake in conservative and libertarian thought, focused as they once were like a laser on the state as prime enemy. Actually, it was Capitalism that crowded all these things out, by proving transactional, non-relational substitutes, and by making people affluent enough to afford those transactions thus making the substitutes profitable.

     Yeah, yeah “revealed preferences”, but no, time inconsistency and bounded self regulation and coordination problem.

     This is not really different any other problematic vice. If people have the money and access, many of them will be tempted to buy things and indulge in ways that turn out to be bad for them, and the more common and normal this seems, the more will follow the same practices, until there is little social pressure against it, and indeed it becomes difficult to opt out because rare and thus ‘weird’, which makes the old institutions even more weakened and, furthermore, full of low status losers who have no other choice, from which normal successful people will instinctively flee as if radioactive.

     Is there anything that can be done besides crippling peoples independence so that they cannot feasibly arrange for market substitutes to relying on community and close friends and family? Maybe you always have to buy 10 tickets at a time to do anything, so you don’t have the option to do it alone? Hard to imagine.

     This is one of those rare and unfortunate circumstances where I might have to concede that the statists have a point in that the state is the only entity left that might be willing and able to coerce people into the relationships and arrangements that will tend to fill this gap left by affluence, and to forbid them from predictably going down alienating, isolating pathways. Not that any actually existing modern states have actually figured it out, but that there isn’t anything else save for religious community pressures so coercive they might as well be the “state for one’s soul”.

     • So the decline of the family is a “disease of affluence”, like obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, etc.

       • I think for a lot of people the ability to afford social distance enables them to not develop the habits and discipline necessary to make human relationships work.

         For instance my parents are moving in with us, and I think anyone that doesn’t engage in this relationship is insane (if they have a decent relationship with their parents). But most people think it’s a terrible idea, they “can’t deal” with whatever grief they think it might bring.

         If they can afford a mortgage without assistance and afford to pay for childcare and afford to pay for nursing homes…they can do those things. I think its a terrible waste of money and not a good way to live for anyone involved, but for some people if they have the money they can afford developing whatever habits would make it possible to share a home.

       • Yes, and note this points in the entirely opposite direction of Brooks’ claim.

         Tight knit communities and extended families often emerge out of economic necessity. They stick with each other because they need each other, they don’t have other options and can’t afford alternatives.

         But the nuclear family is also an economic arrangement and a bundled deal with lots of reciprocal exchange expectations in the bargain. There is less necessity, but still, necessity.

         Which means at the next stage of opportunity and wealth that necessity goes away too and people can afford to survive in much more independent, unbundled lives, with sex and even children supportable outside of those arrangements, especially if a lot of that ‘wealth’ is in the form of government handouts specifically targeted to alleviate the desperate circumstances when necessity really bites.

         So you see, the nuclear family is an intermediate way station on this track. Brooks makes it out to be the height of wealth and affluence, only affordable any more by those at the top, but this gets this completely wrong and entirely backwards. In his own social milieu he sees the truth of Murray’s Coming Apart that the only class where traditional marriage and nuclear family structure is ubiquitous is at the top.

         But its not because they are the only ones who can afford it, it has to do with other factors related to self regulation, social status, and conformity pressures.

         Instead, the reason you see a lot of lower class people opt out of the nuclear family model is that they can now afford to do so. The fact that their lives are then full of stressful burdens is not the cause of those actions, as if they had no give, but instead are caused by those actions, which were indeed chosen, those choices enabled by affluence and subsidy.

         And Brooks wants us to put out this fire by throwing gasoline on it and subsidizing even more.

         With public intellectuals like these, who needs enemies?

   • Obs, a loquacious commenter at Razib Khan’s blog, pushes a theory that “the Plutocracy” and “Cultural Marxists” are in an alliance of convenience (kind of like the U.S. and U.S.S.R. in WW II) to destroy the fabric of western societies because it serves the purposes of each.

8. You should reeeeaaaaallllllyyyy read Uruk Machines.

9. I recently tried to make a community like this work. For the last 5-7 years (hard to keep track at this point) I was heavily involved in a church group. We were a very successful group with a lot of members and very high levels of engagement. Nearly everyone ended up pairing off and getting married. In so many ways it couldn’t have worked better.

   It worked so well we really wanted to keep it going as we started to get married and have kids. I even started a group that met to try and discuss plans to purchase real estate in the same area together. We met a bunch of times and there was definitely interest, but in the long run it just didn’t work out. Some of this is the personal matters took me off the project for a little while, but I don’t think that was the main issue. I’ll lay it out like this.

   1) The demographic profile was people aged 25-35, all college grads. So in some ways very similar but even without that some separation. The people at the lower end of the age spectrum didn’t have the money for down payments. They also in many cases were only in Baltimore to finish school or for a first job…they didn’t intend to stay long term. Many moved to other states upon graduation/getting married. At the upper end of the age range people were a bit more settled and ready to buy a house NOW, even before we could coordinate anything. In some cases children coming along were making this an immediate issue.

   2) Baltimore wasn’t a great city to try and do this in, because its not a great place to raise a family. However, once you start trying to pick places outside the city inevitably you start moving far enough away that some people won’t be able to commute to their jobs no matter where you choose.

   3) Differences in affordability are going to come up. Income ranged quite a bit even amongst young college grads.

   4) When everyone starts to have their first kid…things will slow down a little. We still spent a lot of time together, but people couldn’t attend every single event like we used to. When you all have your second kids…everything will slow to a crawl. You just won’t see people much, even the ones that live relatively close (say less than 20 min away).

   5) I’ve been told that as the kids get older, unless they are in the same neighborhood/school, they will want to be with their own friends rather then their parents friends. So maybe that all gets worse. That is why I wanted us to be right on top of each other, rather than vaguely within an hour of each other.

   6) At the end of the day, people have to buy houses, and they are just going to do their own thing. No matter how much you plan and try to coordinate, they inevitably decide that *this house* is the best one for them and they had to pull the trigger.

   So we all had one of these extended “Friends” type families when we were single yuppies, but that thing doesn’t last past people marrying off, having kids, and moving away. And those are the lucky ones. The one that didn’t find a chair before the music ended don’t even have the group left to go back to.

   • asdf, did you listen to the EconTalk podcast from last May with Mauricio Miller on his book “The Alternative” and the Family Independence Initiative (FII)?

     The podcast focuses on immigrants, poverty, and social work which I understand may be off-putting to you but my take-away was about a system involving peer family groups that self-organize to help one another. It sounded like a natural information exchange system targeting families living in the same community.

     • More struggle, more huddle.

       Necessity is social glue, and wealth that enables widespread independence dissolves it. “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?” From this.

       Immigrant communities are good cases to observe to see the truth of this since they tend to concentrate together in enclaves, don’t have easy alternatives to each other because of social gap with the native population and also potential legal trouble using ordinary financial, transactional, and welfare systems, and the poverty is of a temporary, exogenous nature not strongly correlated with personal defects as tends to be the case with people whose families have been in a developed country for multiple generations.

       A flip side of this scenario are lower ranking soldiers based abroad, with low disposable income, who have to rely on each other for socialization, and tend to bond strongly and later miss the sense of camaraderie.

       People in such situations often remark with nostalgia something to the effect of “we were poor, yes, but, we had each other, in a way I now miss so much.” If you read recollections or journals of The Great Depression or had the opportunity to talk to someone who remembered living through it with their otherwise functional neighbors and families who happened to be thrust into desperate circumstances though there was nothing wrong with them, you will notice much the same pattern of narrative.

       Furthermore, in addition to affluence, capitalist substitutes, and government crowding out, modern entertainment devices that allow people to enjoy themselves alone at home or “in their own world”, a mass of people each of which are alone in a crowd, via smartphones (indeed which often can’t be consumed any other way), and in the great variety of their own personal interests, enable and encourage a kind of recluse lifestyle pattern too. Having these tempting options as alternatives to physically congregating is a form of affluence too, and a vice with bad side effects. Online connectedness, great as it may be, is not an adequate substitute for most people of what they have lost.

       Overall, it’s the social atomization perfect storm.

       Which has a lot of negative and troubling aspects to it, however, one of the more dangerous is that nature abhors this vacuum, and if pent-up longings overcome the ennervating and demotivating effects of modern diversions, then presents the opportunity for a socially coordinating mission or cult of personality to fill the hole, that is, some kind of sense of “Full Mobilization” in a Great Crusade or the “Moral Equivalent Of War”. Not just war, but total war, holy war.

       Indeed, big social and ideological movements are always trying to maintain or revive that “wartime spirit of camaraderie and purpose”, and direct and channel all that emotional energy and apply it to every category of initiative.

       A bunch of frustrated atoms are good potential recruits for this army, if someone figures out how to herd all those cats around a common cause of tension. Maybe not ‘all’ the cats, you only need to herd half if the tension is with the other half, but that scenario has it’s own messy problems that are best avoided.

       • Handle,

         This is completely true of Immigrant communities except some of them remain poor in the long run. (ie we see this with some Asian- and Hispanic-American)

   • I was born in Laurel, Maryland which in the 1970s was a combination of of future middle class and older successful working class families at the time and have absolute wonderful memories of the church we attend. (I sure it is high end suburb at this point. I also remember the whole neighborhood being white and they were uncomfortable when a AFrican-American doctor moved in 1979. I also livid memories of driving home from Orioles games through African-American ghettos. So that is one reason why I believe segregation enforced certain community realities.)

     1) My dad moved to California for a great job but we did find we never felt comfortable with a church in California.

     2) My parents went back 6 years after moving, and found out the church attendance collapsed as people separate ways.

     3) Honestly, I think it best that kids learn to make their own friends past 7 or so. They need that socialization. (And I found you become friends with that family but it is temporary.)

     4) Graduating college in 1992, this Friends reality fit Gen X and I believe later marriage and kids is happening because:
     4a) Young adults have lots of failure and it best to have failures without being married and kids. That is why the divorce rate was highest in the 1970s because a lot of people married too young.
     4b) After 22 and especially 25, the level that people being friends outside their lifestyle declines a lot so they likely to choose a spouce more like them at 26 than 22. (True with me if I remember who was dating at 22.)

10. Several Points:

    1) The heavy reality of Nuclear Family of the US is both unusual in terms of society and historically low in the post WW2 years. In SoCal multigenerational families in larger house is fairly normal but it is heaviest with minority populations with Asian and Hispanic-Americans. In fact, there are houses built called NextGen that are speciI am not sure why some return of this is a bad thing.

    2)Your church or your synagogue used to provide that, but nobody is joining any more. I wonder why.

    Um..Maybe because younger don’t see the benefits of going. And this is occuring with all modern capitalist nations so the US is normal here.

    And being older the Levin local community togetherness has been declining my entire memory life so I am not sure why they will come back.

    3) I still hold the reality of past segregation of races did a lot to enforce certain community realities.

    4) Again the strange reality of the divorce revolution after 1960 – 1980 is the first generation of divorced families were college education and succesful career types. I remember being in a middle class neighborhood and having lots of latch key friends. (For younger people, the latch key kid was a ~10 year kid who had a key to get into their house when both parents were working.)

    • In terms of church going, I do read Lyman Stone twitter feed and:

      1) The reality is highpoint of weekly churchgoing was 1960 around 50% or so. The reality is only about 30% of the population was going to church regularly in the 19th century and through 1920. I get this was probably mostly a transportation issue as it might take a family three hours to attend church but that is a lot lower than what the average person would guess. (They were Christian in the sense of a John Wayne character in that they believed God, went to church at important life moments but did not attend regularly.)

      2) I still feel the later marriage and parenthood is the prime reason church is declining. Most teens at 16 – 25 are focused on education, career and establishing themselves and in the case of Boomers and some Gen X they would return to the church. (Church going decreases in 1970s but increase late 1970s until 1987 or so… And it drop until late 1990s. This data fits family formation increases church attendance but it is long term declining every generation.)

      • I believe Mary Eberstadt has written perceptively on the role of child bearing / raising on religiosity and church attendance.

        To some extent we are encountering Prof. Kling’s “Iron Rule of Social Science”–and also issues of “causal density.”

        • Mary Eberstadt strikes me as tending toward polemics, or at least apologetics. Personally I find that there is often a valuable kernel of insight in her writing, even if I can’t fully agree.

        • The empirical evidence that women are universally more religious than men never ceases to both amaze me and humble me. I’m humbled by my apparent inability to recognize this truth in my own social circle previous to having it pointed out to me. I’m also humbled by my inability to come up with even one plausible explanation that isn’t mostly facile.

11. Having waited for someone with more insight than I, it seems we may be failing to consider what may be the major development in “Western” social organization (with trickle-out effects in the “Non-Western”).

    That is, the increasing “range” and effects of more and more relationships becoming IM-personal,

    There is also the consequent involvement in, and reliance on, impersonal relationships in daily life (and estimates of the future). The nature and degree of the impersonal has brought about the requirement for (and usually reliance on) intermediary functions (mostly anonymous) for the expanded social networks.

    We can correlate increasing densities of populations with the increase of impersonal relationships within those densities.

    We can observe increasing “interventions” ( intrusions going beyond intermediary functions) as the required intermediary functions are exploited for opportunities of advantages by those not direct parties to the objectives of the relationships.

    With the infusion of the impersonal, there may be sense that many, if not most traditional relationships are similarly infused with impersonal characteristics (in the eye of the beholder), which may lower the emotional enhancement of congregating.

    Some consideration of the effects of the growing IMPERSONAL in relationships should be included.

    • Increasing impersonalization was a humongous part of the early literature on industrialization/urbanization. And by early, I mean end of the 1800s, beginning of the 1900s. Thinkers were very, very worried. We survived it pretty well. But perhaps the even greater impersonalization today has hit some sort of tipping point.

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