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It's isn't "liberalism" eating into traditional values. It's "modernism." And it's been happening since the Age of Enlightenment.
BS-
One simply has to look at the logrithmic decline in values and morality due to the liberal cultural onslaught over the last 70 years.
The "new liberals" (marxists set upon destroying the US) can be traced to the Frankfurt School, which was a creation of Stalin to undermine the west by attacking it's traditional pillars- the church, the family and the middle class.
One of the few "good" things Hitler did was attempt to eliminate member of the Frankfurt School, who fled and set up shop in NYC, predominantly at NYU. One can see the beginnings of modern American liberalism, which has been at war with capitalism and western culture since.
It is not surprising that the enemies of the dems/libs today are those same targets of Stalin and the Frankfurt School:
the church
the family
the middle class
Nearly every democrat/liberal policy and agenda is created to attack these institutions. We have the "Great Society", which created the welfare state and installed single parent families as the norm, perpetual attacks on Christianity and support of whatever force opposes it, celebration of "alternative lifestyles", normalizing drug use, destruction of public education, and trade agreements designed to destroy the jobs of the middle class.
Make no mistake of it- Modern democrats and liberals are enemies of the nation with policies and beliefs that are completely opposed to traditional American values and individual liberties.
The left is quite hateful towards the truth and free speech... and anyone who espouses such. Funny, there was a time that was the mantra of the left... go figure.
Hateful towards a president that claimed massive election fraud, Trump had his free speech and then we had Jan 6. Hateful towards the truth, really.
We all have our own opinion and no one's opinion outweighs another. And we can always find someone we can agree with. But that doesn't make his opinion right because it's just an opinion.
It's isn't "liberalism" eating into traditional values. It's "modernism." And it's been happening since the Age of Enlightenment.
I'm going to quote myself here because I've read enough European history to know what I'm talking about.
The Age of Enlightenment was when a rational, secular and scientific worldview became mainstream. Everything you see going on in the world around you now is the outcome of that. It's little wonder historians place the beginning of the Modern Age during the Age of Enlightenment.
And the reason the Age of Enlightenment was made possible was because of ... The Reformation. The Reformation blew open everything. Once it became acceptable to question the church, then it became acceptable to question the entire Christian religion - and all religion. Furthermore, since Luther, Calvin and all the other Reformationists actively encouraged systematic analysis of the Bible, rather than just accepting what the (Catholic) church taught, this ingrained into people's minds that it was OK to tear apart Christian and other religious texts, and draw one's own conclusions from it.
In new research, we document a first-order consequence of the Reformation: an immediate and large secularisation of Europe’s political economy (Cantoni et al. 2017). We gather rich evidence from early modern Germany and show that:
- Human capital and fixed investment shifted sharply from religious to secular purposes after 1517, and disproportionately so in regions that adopted Protestantism.
- The growth of economic activity in the ascendant secular sector specifically reflected the interests of empowered secular territorial rulers, and came at the expense of religious elites – the hiring of lawyers rather than theologians, the building of palaces and castles rather than churches.
^This reflects a book I read a few years ago: Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg, 1529-1819. I would recommend everyone here read it. While it focuses on Hamburg, Germany, what was going on there was reflected in a lot of the rest of Europe (but particularly the Protestant areas). After the Thirty Years War ended in 1648, there was about a 50-ish year period where all of society around Hamburg (and again, elsewhere in Europe) went from arguing how much should local authorities pay attention to whatever church/denomination that locality accepted as its 'official' church, to abandoning the concept altogether and not really giving a damn what any church said at all. Somewhere in the early 1700's, Protestant Europe became largely a secular place, governments didn't care what the church said, and attendance at churches tumbled.
The United States of America was an outgrowth of that. It's little wonder half the Founding Fathers were deists. I suspect many of those 'deists' were really just agnostics or even atheists who didn't want to publicly admit so. Much like a lot of politicians today.
Critical thought is just that: critical thought. It’s OK to accept the beliefs and values you hold dear, but often what I don’t see is anybody honestly examining what’s important to them. People accept it by rote. If nothing else, I would like to see honest critical thought brought into everything we do, or at least into the things which are important to us (understanding of course that some things aren’t worth critical thought and we couldn’t possibly have enough time to make a tough examination of everything).
As to what things specifically fall under traditional values I’d like us to re-examine, this would be my short list:
Nuclear family. No, I’m not communist manifesto, and I don’t want to destroy it, but for some reason the default here is for nuclear families to have their own space and place. That’s lonely and it’s not sustainable, especially when we basically need two-earner households to make things work in the modern era. It takes a village to raise a child, and by and large our society doesn’t really think outside of that box.
The repressive Puritan attitude which still lingers. This includes a lot. Things like, work for it’s own sake is positive. Really? If you spend all day loading rocks into a cart to make a pile, then you spend the next day putting that pile back where it was, you haven’t really done anything particularly virtuous. Work should have value both to society and personally. A lot of people are being burned out by the mentality of living to work. It’s also the repressive Pearl clutching about sex and sexuality. We are so shocked by simple nudity and it’s still sort of a big deal to publicly acknowledge the existence of sex. And that’s before we get into LGBT matters, abortion, etc. The sensational nature of sex in our culture is weird, and repressing that is IMHO part of the reason we get perverts, or causes to express sexuality in ways we consider absurd. This Puritan sense also has led in the past to prohibitions on things as innocent as dancing, and really putting the hammer down on activities related more to the body than the mind. Speaking of which, the mind-body duality isn’t great either.
Our criminal justice system is completely jacked. The old was wasn’t working to rehabilitate people, and now the “solution” is to just not treat crime like crime, and that obviously ain’t gonna work either. This needs a lot of work.
A lot of this patriotic puffery is also over the top. Be grateful for where you live. But the patriotism Olympics, or the cowing of people who don’t agree with you under the guise of not being patriotic is unhealthy. Flags are another weird one. Not just our flag, I mean all the flags. Why are we bowing down, figuratively speaking, to a piece of cloth? Why are we so worked up about arbitrary borders which but for any number of quirks could either be entirely different or not exist at all. A little more humbleness when thinking about how we regard where we live and how fragile and potentially transient it is seems appropriate.
Most of the rest is good. Be good to people, remember the golden rule, and don’t be a loser. Don’t harm others. Strive to be better every single day. Those are good things.
You're all over the place here. Where you really lost me is when you mentioned arbitrary borders. There are none. Countries and their borders are internationally recognized and they are so for good reasons.
I applaud your desire to critically examine your beliefs. You're right, too many people don't stop to think about these things. That said, it's clear that different sides can look at the same thing and come to very different conclusions. Take the flag. You're right, a flag is nothing more than a piece of cloth. Some prettier than others, but that's subjective. But here's the thing. I don't bow down, figuratively or otherwise, to a piece of cloth. But I highly respect what a particular piece of red, white, and blue cloth represents. You see a piece of cloth. I see a nation and its values; its heritage and its promise.
And borders . . . yeah, there's nothing particularly magical about where the borders are physically located. I mean, sure, using a river as a border is very convenient. But again, it's not the geographic location of the border that I care about. I care about the nation that is contained within those borders. I care about the sovereignty of that nation within those borders, and the right of the people who belong within those borders to decide for themselves which outsiders we wish to admit, and which ones we don't. When borders don't exist, neither do sovereign nations. And that is something about which I care deeply.
We are certainly in agreement here.
Hey, thanks for catching me on a couple of details I left out. Trying to be concise sometimes leads me to omit some of those nuances.
Re: the flag, you actually hit the nail on the head and for me it’s not the piece of cloth I care about, it’s the content of what it is supposed to represent. I may not be big on the flag but the things it stands for are worth respecting, praising, and if it comes to it, maybe even fighting for.
The borders are a bit more complicated. My head is more in the clouds than in reality here. It’s not very concise so I’ll give my best shot at making it short. Countries and borders are a very artificial, human construct, and very transient at that. I understand where it comes from when taking into account evolutionary psychology; we banded together for better survival, but we can only keep so many people in our orbit as close friends/acquaintances/tribe mates. Mentally, it’s hard to keep up beyond that, so we draw those lines and determine us vs. them. We sidestepped that by creating nation-states where we try to count a massively larger number of people as being in our tribe, even when we have never met them, draw borders around it, and make a society with a government with a social contract based on some general principles we mostly agree on. It works, kinda, and I guess where I fail at this one is wanting to move past that. But, I literally don’t think we are evolved enough to do so. Therefore, it’s not a practical desire and it’s certainly not a hill I’d die on. However, I do take unbridgeable at the sharp us vs. them kind of attitudes, and drilling down into this, that’s where I really object in a more practicable way to the idea of borders. We draw borders around people for all kinds of reasons. Most don’t make sense to me. I’m guilty myself, I have my own biases. But I’d like to be a bit less focused on literal and figurative borders, and more on focusing on the fact that people are in the most basic sense all kind of going in the same general direction, with similar wants, needs and desires, and most of what we divide ourselves up into is stuff grafted on top of that, be it politics, language, skin color, or any of probably hundreds of different things. Told you that wasn’t a thing I could be terribly concise about.
But I’d like to be a bit less focused on literal and figurative borders, and more on focusing on the fact that people are in the most basic sense all kind of going in the same general direction, with similar wants, needs and desires, and most of what we divide ourselves up into is stuff grafted on top of that, be it politics, language, skin color, or any of probably hundreds of different things. Told you that wasn’t a thing I could be terribly concise about.
At a basic, fundamental level, the reason that borders exist is precisely because people are NOT all kind of going in the same direction. People are different. Sure, there are the obvious differences, like race or language. But there are also more fundamental differences. Different cultures, different world views, different ideas on how a society should be structured, and so on. People naturally prefer to be around people who are like themselves. ("Like themselves" can be defined in many, many different ways.) They tend to sort themselves out into like-minded "tribes."
When people are able to be amongst the people who are like them, and live within internationally recognized boundaries that other countries respect, peace tends to reign. But what happens when people who are very much UN-like each other are forced to exist within the same borders? Division. Strife. Balkanization. Civil war. And what happens when one country refuses to respect the borders of another? Boundary disputes. Trade wars. Actual shooting wars.
Until such time as humanity truly does become as one -- if it ever happens -- we need nations. We need borders. The alternative is never-ending war and strife and conflict.
At a basic, fundamental level, the reason that borders exist is precisely because people are NOT all kind of going in the same direction. People are different. Sure, there are the obvious differences, like race or language. But there are also more fundamental differences. Different cultures, different world views, different ideas on how a society should be structured, and so on. People naturally prefer to be around people who are like themselves. ("Like themselves" can be defined in many, many different ways.) They tend to sort themselves out into like-minded "tribes."
When people are able to be amongst the people who are like them, and live within internationally recognized boundaries that other countries respect, peace tends to reign. But what happens when people who are very much UN-like each other are forced to exist within the same borders? Division. Strife. Balkanization. Civil war. And what happens when one country refuses to respect the borders of another? Boundary disputes. Trade wars. Actual shooting wars.
Until such time as humanity truly does become as one -- if it ever happens -- we need nations. We need borders. The alternative is never-ending war and strife and conflict.
That’s more or less why I say we are literally not evolved enough for that. It’ll take an amount of time measured on a geologic scale for it to be practical. It’s a thought exercise more than anything else.
Last edited by jcp123; 07-25-2023 at 01:47 AM..
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Like, measuring the spin of an electron, or something? 
