Voittaako maallisuus ?

Antropologista analyysiä siitä, miten maallistuminen ja modernisaatio etenee, alla. Kirjoittajana Boyd ja Richerson.

Oma konkluusioni asiasta on että tulevaisuus on avoin ja että monet eri suuntaiset voimat vaikuttavat samanaikaisesti. On varsin hätiköityä väittää, että sekularisaatio ja länsimainen demokratia on voittamassa maailmassa.

It is the liberal churches [of US] that have withered and the conservative that have flourished. The liberal churches quite deliberately hitched their star to liberal democracy and made a bid to become among the central institutions of civil
society. Elite consensus and activism in favor of this move makes the attempt an act of Spencerian selection. What went wrong?

Most commentators seem to assume that the battle between the various American
churches for members is a battle for the hearts and minds of believers by active church proselytizing. The reality is more complex. Roof and McKinney (1987) investigated the demographics of religious change in America. The results of their investigation are summarized in Tables 2 and 3. Looking first at births, we see that a considerable difference exists between the birth rates of the various denominational groups. Birth rates (Table 2) among people stating no religious preference is hardly better than half the rate among conservative Protestants in the under 45 age category, with other groups variously in between. Table 3 displays the gains and losses due to switching from one denominational category to another. Clearly American religion is rather dynamic. The overall pattern is rather striking. The big gainer due to choice is “no religious affiliation, ”though elite liberal churches still attract considerable numbers of converts, especially from moderate denominations. The conservative Protestants have only a small net intake from conversion, much smaller than the differential effect of higher birth rates. If Roof and McKinney’s data are correct, the pro-family, pronatalist values of conservative churches have a strong impact on behavior, while the impact of their militant proselytizing is only just enough to prevent net losses to more liberal belief. Conservative Protestant churches are growing because the have higher birth rates and because they manage to keep most of their kids faithful. At the present time, we have to say the conservative doctrines are fitter than liberal ones. Darwinians can take perverse comfort in the idea that the main reason that conservative Protestants are succeeding in the US is natural selection! Smith’s (1991) more comprehensive analysis of the available survey data suggests that the fundamentalist increase is more modest in the aggregate that the figures of Roof and McKinney imply, although some smaller fundamentalist denominations, most notably Mormons, are growing rapidly. He attributes the rising visibility of Fundamentalism more to increased political sophistication and hence influence of Conservative Protestant churches rather than numerical growth.

More generally, the liberal democracies around the world have sharply declining birth
rates that show no signs of leveling off at replacement (Bongaarts and Watkins, 1996). Most likely, as in the US, those individuals that are most committed to liberal democratic values also tend to have the fewest children. On the other hand, around the world masses of Third World citizens aspire to live in liberal democratic countries. Secular liberal values exert an enormous attractiveness, as the trend to non-observance in the US testifies. Even US conservative Protestants have dramatically reduced their birth rates, as the relatively small numbers in Table 2 attest. According to Bongaarts and Watkins no society that has embarked on the demographic transition has ever reversed course.

Currently the only groups known to have fully resisted it within the developed countries are Anabaptist sects—Hutterites, Mennoites, and Amish. These groups are currently tiny despite high growth rates and no reasonable projections can be made about their potential for success if they were to become large. If some brand of fundamentalism does manage to substantially resist the demographic transition while the supporters of liberal traditions continue to have ever fewer children, in the end liberal democracy will disappear. Contrariwise, if liberal democratic values continue to attract adherents with more traditional higher fertility backgrounds, liberal democracies may be stable indefinitely. Other empirical data suggest that liberal democratic societies do have real vulnerabilities that new ideologies might exploit.

Frank and Cook (1995) and Easterlin (1995) call attention to the problem of happiness in liberal democratic societies. The free-market economics of these societies is one of the main engines of their success. The utilitarian
foundations of modern economic theory and practice are enshrined in the slogan “a rising tide lifts all boats.” The rub comes if human wants are substantially comparative, driven by pride and envy, not the satisfaction of wants that do not excite such ethically dubious pleasures and pains. Unfortunately, the evidence from surveys of human happiness suggests that comparative wants are all that one can detect. Happiness in the developed countries where the data is the best vary up and down, but are better correlated with responses to questions of interpersonal trust that to indicators of economic growth. For example, during the extraordinary growth of the Japanese economy from the 1950s to the 1980s, happiness reported to opinion surveyors was dead flat! The data seem to suggest that happiness has little or nothing to do with conventional economic growth, at least over the ranges exemplified by post WWII Japan.