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Breakdown of family and community seems to be the big trend of the past few decades. I'm saddened to say that I don't see a real solution, and I expect some kin

Breakdown of family and community seems to be the big trend of the past few decades. I'm saddened to say that I don't see a real solution, and I expect some kind of cultural collapse to occur as a result. We're already seeing some of the effects of this today.

rayiner 6y ago
It was a deliberate choice Americans made as a society. In Bangladesh, we have strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce. There is a whole social infrastructure for helping people enter marriage with realistic notions and expectations, and counseling couples through rough patches. It's not perfect by any means, but strong family and community bonds make life tolerable in a desperately poor country. And of course, unlike the United States, we can't afford to just throw government money at the problems created by out-of-wedlock births, marriages dissolving over solvable problems, etc. It's truly not clear to me that the choice we made in America is the correct one. My wife's family is full of wonderful and loving people, they are suffering from our country's social dissolution (which has hit non-college educated people outside major metro areas especially hard). Nearly everyone is divorced, often several times over. Grandparents raise their grandchildren. Fathers are in some cases are absent entirely. Children grow up without stability. And now folks are getting close to retirement age with divorces having devastated their finances.
- pjc50 6y ago
  In Ireland, there were strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce, and all those other things. There was also a semi-hidden system of forced labour for those women that did have children out of wedlock. The "mother and baby" homes. The amount of abuse involved was horrific and the country is still untangling and confronting it decades later. Be wary of changing a system where the abuse is borne silently because there is no way out for one that makes it visible and thinking that is worse because just now you can see it. Divorce rates are on their way down in the West. The transition period is definitely rough, but eventually the cultural norms adapt. I would be interested to see if you canvas the views of Bangladeshi women on the comparative systems.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    > Divorce rates are on their way down in the West. The transition period is definitely rough, but eventually the cultural norms adapt. Divorce rates are down, but so are marriage and birth rates. The "cultural norms" are "adapting," but don't appear to be adapting in a direction that combines modernity with population stability in a steady state. Much of "the west" is now dependent on people from more traditional cultures (in Europe, Muslims, in the United States, Latinos). That's not an anti-immigration rant (I'm a Bangladeshi immigrant to the United States). My point is that anything we call a "successful culture" should probably be self-sustaining in the steady state. If divorce rates in the west are declining mainly because nobody is getting married (and nobody is having kids) then you don't actually have a successful culture. It might be great for all the freedoms it provides, but on its own it will cease to exist eventually. In a way it's a sort of arbitrage. If everyone in the world acted like Germans, it would be nice for a while, but humanity would cease to exist. There is an illusion of sustainability that is being provided by people from traditional cultures--with their traditional views on marriage and child-rearing, etc.
    - sct202 6y ago
      Birth rates in Bangladesh are also down below replacement level despite the traditional culture you keep mentioning.
      - rayiner 6y ago
        There has been a sustained, multi-decade governmental, social, and cultural effort to reduce birth rates to deal with overpopulation. It's a very strong foot on the brake. (My dad was closely involved in this effort in Bangladesh as a public health expert.)
    - fulafel 6y ago
      Population stability at current level would be bad, it's higly unsustainable. To make matters worse, we now have instability in the wrong direction: population is predicted to grow for 50-100 years still, peaking at 11 billion. The other variable is resource consumption per capita, both will need to go down after the current spurt to counter severe overpopulation problems globally.
- watwut 6y ago
  Are you sure that Bangladesh juvenile deliquency rates are all that much better then the ones in USA? Because looking at Bangladesh, they have pretty serious social problems in that area. Strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce also however go with larger rates of domestic violence rates and no way out. That the perpetrators of those don't end up in jail does not make such society better behaved or less criminal/violent. Just tolerant of violence toward some people.
- astura 6y ago
  This makes no sense. "Strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce" do not fix these issues. I grew up with my parents married. They were married before I was born and are still married now. That didn't and doesn't stop the abuse, the mistreatment, the violent rages, the substance abuse, the mental illness, or the cruelty. I wished every day State authorities would come take us away because the alternative couldn't possibly be worse than this. They never came and I never had the courage to tell anyone. I just had to suffer. The system failed me badly, but it would have failed me worse if the authorities did come and said "well your parents are married and you have food to eat and a bed to sleep in. Looks good."
  - rayiner 6y ago
    > This makes no sense. "Strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce" do not fix these issues. Kids end up in foster care for many reasons, and its not necessarily because their parents are violent and abusive. The ubiquity of single parenthood, for example, dramatically increases the risk that a child will end up in foster care if anything happens to the remaining parent. Likewise, in a society where divorce and single parenthood are ubiquitous, other members of the family are much less likely to be in a position to take in a child when something happens to his or her parents. I'm not suggesting we do away with social workers who can check in on kids in abusive situations. To the contrary, if social workers weren't overwhelmed taking care of a large number of kids who are in challenging circumstances simply because their dad doesn't feel like being a dad, or for other mundane, solvable reasons, they would have far more attention and resources to devote to kids suffering from alcoholism, physical and sexual abuse, etc., in their families.
  - retrac 6y ago
    Eh, I sort of disagree. Like, I am fully convinced many marriages are not healthy and the appropriate thing for the partners is to end it. But I've seen people end marriages that were probably perfectly salvageable, without even trying to really save it. One bump in the road and they're calling for a separation. We've entered a transactional phase where your partner is supposed to show up perfect, well-adjusted and no work on your part for a healthy relationship is required. Not working? Ditch 'em and try again. That's the other extreme, sort of the exact opposite of staying due to social pressure with someone you hate and makes you unhappy, and it's also unhealthy.
- dashundchen 6y ago
  > It was a deliberate choice Americans made as a society. In Bangladesh, we have strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce The argument about shame based "norms" keeping people together aside, it was in many places, quite literally the law that forced women to stay with their husbands. Up until the 70s and later, in many US states it was: * Legal to rape your spouse * Legal to restrict a woman's access to contraceptives * Illegal for a woman to abort an unwanted pregnancy, even due to rape or incest (the previous two combined with the first essentially stripping a women's autonomy to decide when and how many children to have) * Illegal for women to work in certain careers/legal to discriminate on whether a woman was pregnant or had children * Legal to prevent a woman from opening a bank account or line of credit without their husband's consent This was more the case in some places vs others, but talk to an older women in the US what the culture was like for women then. The women's liberation movement happened in reaction to severe oppression and we absolutely should not consider reverting to a society before then. EDIT: Yikes. I was curious about the norms in Bangladesh. I don't think Bangladesh should be held as an example for anything related to marriage. https://www.girlsnotbrides.org/child-marriage/bangladesh/ https://www.girlsnotbrides.org/child-marriage/bangladesh/ > 59% of girls in Bangladesh are married before their 18th birthday and 22% are married before the age of 15. > Bangladesh has the third highest prevalence of child marriage in the world, and the second highest absolute number of women married or in a union before the age of 18 globally – 4,382,000. > 4% of boys are married before the age of 18.
  - yters 6y ago
    It seems there could be a middle way where marriage is strongly supported by society with provisions to protect against abuse. Our current extreme is no better as it destroys the lives of many children.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    > The argument about shame based "norms" keeping people together aside, it was in many places, quite literally the law that forced women to stay with their husbands. So you wave aside my actual argument, about norms, then proceed to refute a straw man? Let’s posit that laws against spousal rape and gender discrimination are good things. Are those the only things that have changed in our culture and in the laws? Can we have laws allowing people to escape abusive marriages, while discouraging the vastly larger number of divorces that don’t involve those things? More than half of Americans, including over 40% of Democrats, disagree with the proposition that “changing gender roles have made it easier for women to live satisfying lives.” https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/10/18/wide-partisan-gaps-in-u-s-over-how-far-the-country-has-come-on-gender-equality/psdt_10-18-17_gender-00-01 https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/10/18/wide-partisan-gap.... By contrast, just 10% think that contraceptives should be banned. There is clearly a significant number of people who think the changes you list are good things, while disagreeing that all of the social changes that have happened are good. There is in fact widespread discontentment about the status quo among women. Women report wanting more kids than they end up having. Women report wanting to get married but being unable to do so. Many women aren’t super thrilled about a culture where people call them “crazy” for wanting normal things like a marriage and kids at the biologically normal ages (20s) for having those things. (This is completely unsurprising, because women disproportionately bear the burdens of our social changes that have freed men from the responsibilities of fatherhood.) As to Bangladesh—it’s a poor agrarian society that suffers from the problems endemic to poor agrarian societies. In particular, strong economic incentives to marry off girls. My dad, in fact, works on public health programs to discourage child marriage in Bangladesh. But there’s a pretty big gap between child marriage (something most Bangladeshis agree we should eradicate) on one hand, and normalizing and enabling pervasive divorce and out of wedlock childbirth on the other. But on the flip side of all that, Bangladeshi society is at least somewhat functional despite crushing poverty. What would Bangladeshi villages be like if men could decide, like in America, that they don’t want the responsibilities of fatherhood and it was socially acceptable for them to abandon their families? The society would break down completely. Death and calamity would result, because unlike in America the government can’t afford to throw money at the social ills that would result.
rtx 6y ago
Solution is sacrifice, some marketing genius can bring it back in fashion.
jandrese 6y ago
The War on Drugs is a big factor on this. Basically an attempt to reinstate slavery via the criminal justice system created a whole generation of absent fathers.

rayiner 6y ago

It was a deliberate choice Americans made as a society. In Bangladesh, we have strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce. There is a whole social infrastructure for helping people enter marriage with realistic notions and expectations, and counseling couples through rough patches. It's not perfect by any means, but strong family and community bonds make life tolerable in a desperately poor country. And of course, unlike the United States, we can't afford to just throw government money at the problems created by out-of-wedlock births, marriages dissolving over solvable problems, etc. It's truly not clear to me that the choice we made in America is the correct one. My wife's family is full of wonderful and loving people, they are suffering from our country's social dissolution (which has hit non-college educated people outside major metro areas especially hard). Nearly everyone is divorced, often several times over. Grandparents raise their grandchildren. Fathers are in some cases are absent entirely. Children grow up without stability. And now folks are getting close to retirement age with divorces having devastated their finances.

pjc50 6y ago
In Ireland, there were strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce, and all those other things. There was also a semi-hidden system of forced labour for those women that did have children out of wedlock. The "mother and baby" homes. The amount of abuse involved was horrific and the country is still untangling and confronting it decades later. Be wary of changing a system where the abuse is borne silently because there is no way out for one that makes it visible and thinking that is worse because just now you can see it. Divorce rates are on their way down in the West. The transition period is definitely rough, but eventually the cultural norms adapt. I would be interested to see if you canvas the views of Bangladeshi women on the comparative systems.
- rayiner 6y ago
  > Divorce rates are on their way down in the West. The transition period is definitely rough, but eventually the cultural norms adapt. Divorce rates are down, but so are marriage and birth rates. The "cultural norms" are "adapting," but don't appear to be adapting in a direction that combines modernity with population stability in a steady state. Much of "the west" is now dependent on people from more traditional cultures (in Europe, Muslims, in the United States, Latinos). That's not an anti-immigration rant (I'm a Bangladeshi immigrant to the United States). My point is that anything we call a "successful culture" should probably be self-sustaining in the steady state. If divorce rates in the west are declining mainly because nobody is getting married (and nobody is having kids) then you don't actually have a successful culture. It might be great for all the freedoms it provides, but on its own it will cease to exist eventually. In a way it's a sort of arbitrage. If everyone in the world acted like Germans, it would be nice for a while, but humanity would cease to exist. There is an illusion of sustainability that is being provided by people from traditional cultures--with their traditional views on marriage and child-rearing, etc.
  - sct202 6y ago
    Birth rates in Bangladesh are also down below replacement level despite the traditional culture you keep mentioning.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      There has been a sustained, multi-decade governmental, social, and cultural effort to reduce birth rates to deal with overpopulation. It's a very strong foot on the brake. (My dad was closely involved in this effort in Bangladesh as a public health expert.)
  - fulafel 6y ago
    Population stability at current level would be bad, it's higly unsustainable. To make matters worse, we now have instability in the wrong direction: population is predicted to grow for 50-100 years still, peaking at 11 billion. The other variable is resource consumption per capita, both will need to go down after the current spurt to counter severe overpopulation problems globally.
watwut 6y ago
Are you sure that Bangladesh juvenile deliquency rates are all that much better then the ones in USA? Because looking at Bangladesh, they have pretty serious social problems in that area. Strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce also however go with larger rates of domestic violence rates and no way out. That the perpetrators of those don't end up in jail does not make such society better behaved or less criminal/violent. Just tolerant of violence toward some people.
astura 6y ago
This makes no sense. "Strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce" do not fix these issues. I grew up with my parents married. They were married before I was born and are still married now. That didn't and doesn't stop the abuse, the mistreatment, the violent rages, the substance abuse, the mental illness, or the cruelty. I wished every day State authorities would come take us away because the alternative couldn't possibly be worse than this. They never came and I never had the courage to tell anyone. I just had to suffer. The system failed me badly, but it would have failed me worse if the authorities did come and said "well your parents are married and you have food to eat and a bed to sleep in. Looks good."
- rayiner 6y ago
  > This makes no sense. "Strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce" do not fix these issues. Kids end up in foster care for many reasons, and its not necessarily because their parents are violent and abusive. The ubiquity of single parenthood, for example, dramatically increases the risk that a child will end up in foster care if anything happens to the remaining parent. Likewise, in a society where divorce and single parenthood are ubiquitous, other members of the family are much less likely to be in a position to take in a child when something happens to his or her parents. I'm not suggesting we do away with social workers who can check in on kids in abusive situations. To the contrary, if social workers weren't overwhelmed taking care of a large number of kids who are in challenging circumstances simply because their dad doesn't feel like being a dad, or for other mundane, solvable reasons, they would have far more attention and resources to devote to kids suffering from alcoholism, physical and sexual abuse, etc., in their families.
- retrac 6y ago
  Eh, I sort of disagree. Like, I am fully convinced many marriages are not healthy and the appropriate thing for the partners is to end it. But I've seen people end marriages that were probably perfectly salvageable, without even trying to really save it. One bump in the road and they're calling for a separation. We've entered a transactional phase where your partner is supposed to show up perfect, well-adjusted and no work on your part for a healthy relationship is required. Not working? Ditch 'em and try again. That's the other extreme, sort of the exact opposite of staying due to social pressure with someone you hate and makes you unhappy, and it's also unhealthy.
dashundchen 6y ago
> It was a deliberate choice Americans made as a society. In Bangladesh, we have strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce The argument about shame based "norms" keeping people together aside, it was in many places, quite literally the law that forced women to stay with their husbands. Up until the 70s and later, in many US states it was: * Legal to rape your spouse * Legal to restrict a woman's access to contraceptives * Illegal for a woman to abort an unwanted pregnancy, even due to rape or incest (the previous two combined with the first essentially stripping a women's autonomy to decide when and how many children to have) * Illegal for women to work in certain careers/legal to discriminate on whether a woman was pregnant or had children * Legal to prevent a woman from opening a bank account or line of credit without their husband's consent This was more the case in some places vs others, but talk to an older women in the US what the culture was like for women then. The women's liberation movement happened in reaction to severe oppression and we absolutely should not consider reverting to a society before then. EDIT: Yikes. I was curious about the norms in Bangladesh. I don't think Bangladesh should be held as an example for anything related to marriage. https://www.girlsnotbrides.org/child-marriage/bangladesh/ https://www.girlsnotbrides.org/child-marriage/bangladesh/ > 59% of girls in Bangladesh are married before their 18th birthday and 22% are married before the age of 15. > Bangladesh has the third highest prevalence of child marriage in the world, and the second highest absolute number of women married or in a union before the age of 18 globally – 4,382,000. > 4% of boys are married before the age of 18.
- yters 6y ago
  It seems there could be a middle way where marriage is strongly supported by society with provisions to protect against abuse. Our current extreme is no better as it destroys the lives of many children.
- rayiner 6y ago
  > The argument about shame based "norms" keeping people together aside, it was in many places, quite literally the law that forced women to stay with their husbands. So you wave aside my actual argument, about norms, then proceed to refute a straw man? Let’s posit that laws against spousal rape and gender discrimination are good things. Are those the only things that have changed in our culture and in the laws? Can we have laws allowing people to escape abusive marriages, while discouraging the vastly larger number of divorces that don’t involve those things? More than half of Americans, including over 40% of Democrats, disagree with the proposition that “changing gender roles have made it easier for women to live satisfying lives.” https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/10/18/wide-partisan-gaps-in-u-s-over-how-far-the-country-has-come-on-gender-equality/psdt_10-18-17_gender-00-01 https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/10/18/wide-partisan-gap.... By contrast, just 10% think that contraceptives should be banned. There is clearly a significant number of people who think the changes you list are good things, while disagreeing that all of the social changes that have happened are good. There is in fact widespread discontentment about the status quo among women. Women report wanting more kids than they end up having. Women report wanting to get married but being unable to do so. Many women aren’t super thrilled about a culture where people call them “crazy” for wanting normal things like a marriage and kids at the biologically normal ages (20s) for having those things. (This is completely unsurprising, because women disproportionately bear the burdens of our social changes that have freed men from the responsibilities of fatherhood.) As to Bangladesh—it’s a poor agrarian society that suffers from the problems endemic to poor agrarian societies. In particular, strong economic incentives to marry off girls. My dad, in fact, works on public health programs to discourage child marriage in Bangladesh. But there’s a pretty big gap between child marriage (something most Bangladeshis agree we should eradicate) on one hand, and normalizing and enabling pervasive divorce and out of wedlock childbirth on the other. But on the flip side of all that, Bangladeshi society is at least somewhat functional despite crushing poverty. What would Bangladeshi villages be like if men could decide, like in America, that they don’t want the responsibilities of fatherhood and it was socially acceptable for them to abandon their families? The society would break down completely. Death and calamity would result, because unlike in America the government can’t afford to throw money at the social ills that would result.

rtx 6y ago

Solution is sacrifice, some marketing genius can bring it back in fashion.

jandrese 6y ago

The War on Drugs is a big factor on this. Basically an attempt to reinstate slavery via the criminal justice system created a whole generation of absent fathers.