[danans]

> And how do you explain high levels of family stability in countries that are much poorer?

Less individual freedom, greater direct economic dependency on others in your group, and also the threat of ostracization, excommunication, and destitution if you go against its rules. Basically, there are extremely high cost/stakes associated with going it on your own.

But on the other side there are also good things that come from greater direct interdependency, like perhaps less individual alienation and a greater sense of shared purpose, and access to community resources when you follow the prescribed rules.

[jacobolus]

In some places people have centuries of social-structure adaptation to deal with the stress of being systematically oppressed (by local elites, colonial overlords, ...).

E.g. money gets shielded by community institutions (such as local religious organizations) that are harder for elites to steal from than individual peasants, and then those act as a kind of social safety net in hard times. Extended families/clans build social bonds through e.g. marriage and baptism, and help each-other.

Often there are severe social problems in rural peasant societies: alcoholism, domestic violence, seasonal migrant labor keeping people away from home much of the year, corruption, ..., but people have also learned to be tough vs. some kinds of outside threats. But large waves in the world economy (or a large natural disaster or the like) also can overwhelm those defenses.

[danans]

I think we agree that many pro-social structures exist in poor and socially rigid societies.

However these come at the expense of many liberties (i.e. religious) that are held as important in the more developed world. It's not clear that loss of such personal liberties would be an improvement in developed societies, even if it reduced the nominal divorce rate.

[rayiner]

I agree there is a trade off, but let’s explore this a bit further. Who decides how much they value religious liberty compared to lower divorce rates? Decisions about these trade offs tend to be imposed from the top, by the elites. 2/3s of Americans still disagree with the Supreme Court ruling banning school prayer.

When there is a trade off, who should get to make the decisions about where to strike the balance?

[jacobolus]

In many places “low divorce rate” is a euphemism for widespread sexual assault, domestic violence, and total lack of women’s individual rights. You get young women handed off from father to husband as effectively chattel. Women have no choice but to put up with that when they don’t have any viable social/economic alternatives, but it’s overall pretty unpleasant and oppressive.

A significant proportion of people in the US seem to pine for the days when homosexuality was taboo and illegal, women could be beaten or raped by their husbands (and children by their fathers) and it was treated as no one else’s business, non-white people were kept out of the neighborhood and interracial marriage was frowned on if not illegal, pre-marital sex was encouraged for men but made women into “sluts”, middle/high school students received no education about basic human biology/anatomy, rape victims were forced to deliver their rapists’ babies, most professional jobs were reserved for white men, etc. But hey, low divorce rates!

[zozbot234]

Do you seriously think that this is a good description of how the upper-middle class in the West behaves? Because by and large, that's what we're talking about in this thread wrt. low divorce rates. The notion that social anomie, abuse and violence is a simply unescapable "fact" about late modern societies is baseless. You're describing pervasive dysfunction, not a "new normal".

[watwut]

> You're describing pervasive dysfunction, not a "new normal".

New normal can easily be pervasive dysfunction. When dysfunction becomes pervasive, it is also perceived as normal by people inside that society.

> The notion that social anomie, abuse and violence is a simply unescapable "fact" about late modern societies is baseless.

These were not so much anomies as taboo to talk about if it is happening to you. They were seen as private issues that should have stayed private and if you did talked about it, you was the bad one. Nevertheless, some statistics are available - for example domestic murders. Those went down. Some anonymous statistics. People who went through it in the past and did talked about it, their children remembering and talking about it later. The way domestic violence is portrayed in media - whether it is shown as something justifiable and ok or not.

When I was child, there was no domestic violence around me. Then I grew into adult and people started to talk more openly in front of me. Turned out, there was in fact domestic violence among adults I knew as child ... except I was protected from it.

[jacobolus]

(a) Where did you get “upper middle class in the West” from? The further-back context of this subthread is “family stability in countries that are much poorer”. Specifically, I assume, rural or recently urbanized/industrialized countries. The more recent context is some (uncited) polling of all Americans; those who were in favor of school prayer etc. are (statistically) less well educated, more religious, whiter, and older, compared to the rest of the population.

But (b) sure this also applies to upper middle class people across “the West” as of not very long ago. It’s not that every household was full of abusers, but it was treated by the public as a private matter, not talked about, and much more widespread than publicly recognized.

[danans]

> Who decides how much they value religious liberty compared to lower divorce rates?

> When there is a trade off, who should get to make the decisions about where to strike the balance?

Of course the Supreme Court when concerning anything involving the government making an establishment of any religion.

The US isn't Saudi Arabia. As much as it's any American's right to practice the religion of their choosing, it's not in any religion's right to deny any individual - even in their religion - their individual liberties, or to impose their religion upon a person of another or no religion.

[zozbot234]

Liberties have always come paired with obligations to one's surrounding community, so there would be nothing new in this. We have a name for pure liberty or "liberation" shorn of any checks or obligations towards others: we call it licence, and every increase in licence is ultimately a step towards bondage and tyranny.

[danans]

Those obligations are strong and operational in many places where religion isn't the center of civic life.

There is nothing wrong with religion as a framework for teaching people about their social obligations, but it's hardly the only way to achieve that.

[formerkrogemp]

I don't think describing them as "rural peasant societies" is a great perspective to assume.

[jacobolus]

What do you mean? Historically most people in most places in the world (e.g. my ancestors in Europe a few generations ago, my godparents in southern Mexico recently, or most of your ancestors if you go back a couple centuries, wherever they happened to come from) have lived as rural peasants.