Fundamentalism selects for liberalism/globalism

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A fundamentalist, patriotic or strong social conservative ethos selects against perpetuation of said ethos in the next generation. Christians often lament the loss of their traditional values. However, it seems to me that their prescribed behavior is the cause. Instilling a sense of duty to ones god or country means that the most devout(and the bulk of them) are first in line to die in combat. This can be seen indirectly in the effects of the world wars on the American population.

The children born after the war were the products of several types of people, including veterans who survived, academics exempted, the wealthy who paid to avoid it, and politicians who were immune to the draft.

Of the population that produced the baby boom, only the war veterans(and not all of them) would really fit the archetype of Christian. Neither the academics nor the politicians would likely instill much Christian faith in their children. The rich? They play by the golden rule and not by the book.

So that leaves the veterans to promulgate traditional values in American youth, but the problem is that their experiences changed them. Having survived through the meat grinders, it seems they would be loathe to instill virtues which would encourage their kids to suffer the same.

Of course in Europe everyone went through the war, and sure enough, they are massively more liberal than North Americans.

We see these effects in the baby boomers. The hippy sub culture was perhaps the iconic representation of the rejection of traditional christian values. They were the children of the war and prewar generations, but they grew up with values much different than their parents.

I'm sure that research would find that people with traditional morality had a higher mortality rate in the last century. The offspring of the surviving traditionalists (and everyone elses kids) were taught by example to hold values at odds with traditional(if such a thing could be said to exist) Christian values.

If you look at American(just for example) involvement with wars over the last 100 years or so, you see that they were involved in some major conflict roughly once per generation. So there was a steady attrition of those willing to go die for god and country. What was left over to repopulate were those unwilling to fight, those clever enough to get away from it, and those who experienced it and want no further part in it.

Now we see it happening all over again. Those involved in fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are volunteers from poor largely Christian populations. Now there is clamoring to deal with Iran and North Korea. The poor and the pious will be the first to feed the draft if it comes to that. If they dont just volunteer.

And what of the slackers. If the country is really attacked (as it was in 2001) who will defend it and who will not?

I bring you bad news. The world is not a good and just place. It is a very tough neighborhood filled with all kinds of germs and creeps. If the righteous do not defend their property, who will?

R. Hillel said:

If I am not for myself, who is for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
If not now, then when?

ruveyn

There are a few problems with this analysis.

1) Religious conservatives tend to have more children than secular or affluent individuals. How many academics have 5 or more children? How many politicians or wealthy businessmen do so?
2) Until recently, our military was based on conscription. This hits everyone except those rich/powerful enough to buy their way out, but that is a small enough group to ignore for our purposes here.
3) The "economic draft" is still in place, meaning that a very large portion of our "volunteers" are just those from lower income brackets who join the military in hopes of a better life when/if they get out. These people are not necessarily religious or patriotic. In fact, the people I personally knew who joined the military were disproportionately non-religious, including both people who were victim to the economic draft and a few who glorified militarism in the absence of any other ideology.

As to Europe being more liberal than us, there are a lot of different reasons that go into that. One important factor is that they witnessed the horrors of fascism up close and personal, and they want to stay as far away from it as possible.

It has been suggested by some people that war serves to eliminate the poor and the generally lower class people, basically wiping out a large chunk of people with no skills and no way of supporting themselves. Conversely, a nation that winds up with a large population of unskilled laborers and no jobs to support them may go to war as a way of wiping out said population, either deliberately or by happenstance.

Consider that the Great Depression resulted in a very large number of young people who had no skills (having been forced out of school early to work) and no way of supporting themselves, and that the nations with the largest populations of such, namely Britain, Germany, Japan, and America, eagerly went to war. The first three countries were utterly ruined by that war, and actually had to IMPORT labor afterwards.

In 2010 the Arab/Islamic world has a huge proportion of its populace under the age of 25, as much as 3/4 in some places, and this youthquake has resulted in a massive holy war against the Western "enemy", which involves suicide bombers. The point seems to be to kill as many people as possible on both sides. The Muslims can spare tens of millions dead, the West cannot.

If in the process of eliminating massive numbers of unemployable youth the West is Islamicized, that's great to the mullahs. OTOH, if the West, especially Israel, responds by nuking much of the Muslim world, that is an acceptable price to pay to the mullahs because it would eliminate the massive numbers of unemployed and the squalid Islamic cities in one fell swoop. Heads the clerics win, tails they win too. The terror war really can't be won by the West, it's a win/win for Islam, that's why the Western leaders are so scared. Those are just two examples.

The baby boom that started worldwide in the late 1980s guarantees a massive war once those kids reach their 20s and 30s. With the widespread use of nuclear and bio weapons, there may be very few humans left afterwards. The human race could regenerate if as few as 300 survived-worldwide. The elites have openly advocated reducing the world population to 200 million. That sort of reduction is only possible via nuclear war.

Better go do some reading. The baby boom started after world war II and ended in the sixties. Gen x was the tail end of that generation and the next(into the 70s). The baby bust is a smaller generation from the 80s and 90s. They were the children of gen x who were increasingly liberal, cynical and less affluent than the baby boomers.

There is a generation that follows the baby bust called the echo generation. They are larger than the gen x and the baby bust(but not when added together) simply because of regression to the mean. Their birth numbers are not sufficiently high to ameliorate the overall decline in western birth rates.

While I agree with your point, I am not sure it makes that much of a difference. Beyond a certain number, children start adding to the hardship of the parents pushing them into poverty. As you said further down, enlistment is a powerful incentive for the poor to escape their economic conditions. So at an average of five kids(just for example), and average incomes you start swelling the ranks of the poor with religious people.




I thought I addressed that well enough, but I guess not.

As much as I can understand American society being a Canadian, the idea in my head was that voluntary enlistment is a respectable pursuit. People often volunteered long before draft papers showed up.


...to quote Steve Earle.

And it is my understanding that certain white collar educations were given draft exemptions, such as doctors, civil engineers and others. As well, certain blue collar jobs are exempted as well, primarily emergency personnel, especially firemen and police officers. I am sure if you were on track for a degree in physics or a great number of other degrees you would find yourself serving your country stateside rather than across seas.



Certainly you know more Americans personally than I ever will. It was my understanding that people with unstable futures tend to compensate with faith. Or rather, perhaps I should say, the affluent and the educated worry less about the future. Is it reasonable to assume you, Orwell, need to pray for less than a single mother of 3? If one of your loved ones has heart disease you are more likely to pray for a good doctor than a miracle, right? Your education and relative affluence lessens your reliance on faith and hope.

In any case, part of my premise is that youth today hold fewer traditional Christian values. I'll skip you as an example: thats too obvious, but keet and angelrho have expressed that their believes were at odds and insufficient to their elders. As I recall, even ragtime came to the conclusion that he had no problem with gays having sex. I dont think he was agreeable to them marrying however... Are you?

So you'll have to present some examples of people subject to the draft(not since the vietnam war, right?) and account for the fact that hindsight isnt 20/20.





Isnt that what I said? They lived through it. Isnt that up close and personal? Was my claim really counterfactual to yours? Explain how?

They were well on their way to being liberal before 1900 even. I believe it was Munich that had animal anti-cruelty laws in the 1860s. You were not allowed to whip horses to make them go faster for instance. It might even have been you that showed me the book of one of Neitzches contemporaries that mentioned that.

Selection only cares about the number of viable offspring you produce (one popular measure of Darwinian fitness is the number of grandchildren you have). And the poor tend to have more children than the affluent. Even with the burden of higher mortality, population growth is much faster in poor countries than in rich countries. So sinking into borderline poverty is definitely not a constraint for any group's growth.



OK. Patriotism≠religious conservatism.



At present, I believe the only exception to the draft is for ministers and ministerial students. College students can get a deferment only until the end of the semester. Conscientious objectors and anyone regarded as too disabled to fight will be placed in some other service position.


Or, in some cases, they grow bitter and reject religion as insufficient to answer their concerns.

The only really outspoken (or strident) atheist I knew growing up fully intended to join the Marine Corps. His big interest was military history, and he generally had a very militaristic outlook.


Examples for what exactly?


I thought your claim was that Europe is more liberal because all the conservatives got killed off in battle. I would suggest instead that many people shifted their views in response to their experiences.


That wasn't me, but I'm not really surprised that Europe was already more liberal. Remember that America was the last Western nation to abolish slavery.

No, but religious conservatives correlates with higher degrees of patriotism, does it not? Maybe not.



Then I must have worded poorly. No, I suggested a shift in values based on their experiences with war. In the case of my own family tree, my paternal side fled central Germany ~1789 to escape the endless war. Maternal side left northern Germany in 1924 with foresight that another war was coming. Both sections of my family fit strongly in with the Euro-conservative camp. They fall into the same camp according to Canadian political divisions, but according to American doctrine, would be lefties.

Looking at the exodus of the earlier Pennsylvanian Germans, they are much more conservative(and religious) than my two groups. The shift to a left demography has been happening for a long time.



Dont make me go on a fictitious conspiracy rant!

To some extent, maybe, but I am pretty sure that their higher birth rates more than compensate for any higher wartime fatalities, especially given that war is really not a major killer in the West anymore. We've lost something like 6500 soldiers total in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That would be 0.002% of our population, not even a drop in the bucket.

The problem is that trying to apply ideas of natural selection to these kind of demographics really doesn't work. There are societal shifts in values, but it is almost certainly unrelated to one group being disproportionally affected by war (even granting that they are, which I doubt). It is far more likely that some people will reject their parents' beliefs than that differential wartime mortality will cause one demographic to decline. You mentioned that those left to "repopulate" after a war were less likely to be religiously conservative. But we haven't needed to repopulate. Even in WWII, America only lost 0.32% of our population. That's barely a dent at all, and was probably more than made up within a year of the war's conclusion.

Society changes and people change with it, it isn't about which side outbreeds each other or who gets killed more. Soldier fatalities in modern militaries are very low - we've lost a few thousand in Iraq/Afghanistan - compare that to classical warfare where tens of thousands could be killed in a single battle. Just because people have more babies, does not mean the kids will grow up to share their values especially when those values are increasingly rejected by society. Young people today are much less homophobic than people a few generations ago, outright racism and sexism are no longer acceptable unlike a few decades ago. If ideology were a matter of outbreeding the other side, then we should have seen the trend go in the opposite direction. I think it has more to do with increased education and the availability of information than it just being a matter of numbers - if all you're exposed to is fundamentalist ideology that's all you have to go on, if you're exposed to other ideas, then you can make up your own mind.

The butcher's bill of the Civil War (1861-1865) was 620,000 dead (both sides) and 1.5 million wounded and maimed. The population of the country was 32 million back then. That comes to two percent of the population killed or dead of camp diseases.

ruveyn