Oaths

Last updated on: January 29, 2025 at 7:26 am By Gene Veith

The Inauguration made me reflect on the importance of oaths, which were of enormous significance throughout history, a significance that I think has largely been lost today.

The moment Donald Trump became president was when he took the Oath of Office. Article II, section 1 of the Constitution says this of the president:

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:–“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

It is said that the first president, George Washington, added, “So help me God.” Ever since, according to the lore, newly-inducted presidents have added that prayer.

National Catholic Reporter published an article by David B. Parker saying there is no evidence than George Washington added that. The story that he did was first told by Rufus Griswold in 1854, 65 years after the event. Parker says that the first president for whom we have good evidence that he added “So help me God” was Chester A. Arthur in 1881. Parker argues that the belief about Washington and the other presidents saying it emerged out of “Christian nationalism.”

Well, similar oaths are required for other public offices, members of the armed forces, and new citizens to this very day. Also for testimony in court and other legal transactions. The Wikipedia article on Sworn Testimony gives the wording required for use in courtrooms in different countries. In England, it’s this:

I swear by [substitute Almighty God/Name of God (such as Jehovah) or the name of the holy scripture] that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

In the United States, the God part may be left out, but some states, including California, still require it:

You do solemnly state that the testimony you may give in the case now pending before this court shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

Most of the other examples given, including the mostly non-monotheistic India, include “so help me God,” or some other religious element. These generally reflect the practice of English Common Law, in which the oathtaker, holding a Bible or other sacred text, repeats the words, including “so help me God.” (See this and this.)

I suspect that Washington may have said “So help me God” by reflex if nothing more, something so commonplace that no one at the time thought it worthy of mention.

We know from his Farewell Address that Washington considered taking a legally-required oath to have religious significance. In his discussion of why “religion and morality are indispensable supports” to the American republic, he says this:

Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice?

For Washington, an oath cannot be relied upon unless the oathtaker feels a “religious obligation” to abide by it. For Washington, taking an oath in the name of God is the very point at which religion becomes foundational to civil government.

The idea is that people who swore an oath in the name of God would be afraid to lie, lest God punish them. Atheists, it was thought, could not be good citizens because they could not be trusted to keep their oaths. That conviction that oathbreakers bring on themselves divine retribution goes far back into ancient times.

In our secular age, of course, oaths may take other forms. The North Dakota statutes for courtroom procedure lists nine kinds of oaths to be administered in courts (for a prospective juror, for a jury, for a witness, for a bailiff, etc.), all of which include “so help you God.” But then the rules state this: “A person must be allowed to make an affirmation instead of taking an oath, by substituting the word ‘affirm’ for the word ‘swear’ and substituting the phrase ‘under the pains and penalties of perjury’ for the phrase ‘so help you God.'” If you don’t fear God, at least you will fear the state.

But many Christians too had problems with oaths. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said,

“Again you have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.’ But I say to you, Do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.” (Matthew 5:33-37)

Quakers in particular take that literally, as do some other Christians. So the Constitution and state laws allow for the word “affirm” to be substituted for “swear.” To say, “I affirm” that I will tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and leaving God out of it, rather than saying “I swear,” was thought to satisfy the letter of the Sermon on the Mount.

The Lutheran Formula of Concord, XII, 15, rejects the Anabaptist insistence “that a Christian cannot with a good conscience take an oath, nor with an oath do homage [promise fidelity] to the hereditary prince of his country or sovereign.”

Rather, the Augsburg Confession, Article XVI on Civil Affairs, says that “lawful civil ordinances are good works of God,” so that “it is right for Christians to bear civil office, to sit as judges, to judge matters by the Imperial and other existing laws, to award just punishments, to engage in just wars, to serve as soldiers, to make legal contracts, to hold property, to make oath when required by the magistrates, to marry a wife, to be given in marriage.”

Lutherans made the distinction between legal oaths, required by the magistrate, and frivolous, informal oaths. That the statement about oaths is followed by an affirmation of marriage reminds us that weddings, to this very day, involve taking a “vow,” which is a kind of oath.

Luther warns that breaking an oath made in God’s name, including the marriage vow, is a sin against the Commandment not to take God’s name in vain:

Therefore this commandment enjoins this much, that God’s name must not be appealed to falsely, or taken upon the lips, while the heart knows well enough, or should know, differently; as among those who take oaths in court, where one side lies against the other. For God’s name cannot be misused worse than for the support of falsehood and deceit. . . .

From this every one can readily infer when and in how many ways God’s name is misused, although it is impossible to enumerate all its misuses. Yet, to tell it in a few words, all misuse of the divine name occurs, first, in worldly business and in matters which concern money, possessions, honor, whether it be publicly in court, in the market, or wherever else men make false oaths in God’s name, or pledge their souls in any matter. And this is especially prevalent in marriage affairs, where two go and secretly betroth themselves to one another, and afterward abjure [their plighted troth]. (Second Commandment, Large Catechism, 51-53)

My impression is that we don’t take oaths as seriously as we used to, and as we should.

By the way, at the Inauguration, “so help me God” was not something added by the oath taker. Rather, the phrase was included in the wording given by the Chief Justice that the president-elect was supposed to repeat. So President Trump was not committing an act of “Christian nationalism” in saying those words.

Illustration: The Inauguration of Washington by Currier and Ives, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Monday Miscellany, 1/27/25

Last updated on: January 25, 2025 at 8:54 am By Gene Veith

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Trump’s “shock and awe.” The breakdown of conservative, liberal, or moderate. The woes of cable news.

Trump’s “Shock and Awe”

After his inauguration, President Trump has wasted no time in implementing his agenda. Among his executive orders and official actions are these:

Immigration. Already, illegal immigrants who have committed crimes and have a court order deportation ruling are being rounded up and flown out of the country. The president has sent 1,500 troops to the border to help the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with logistics (though not in a law enforcement role, which would be contrary to federal law.) He also declared the end of “birthright citizenship,” by which anyone born in the United States gets automatic citizenship, a declaration that must be sorted out by the courts, depending on how the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, section 1 is construed.

Pardons. The president pardoned some 1,500 participants in the January 6, 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol. He also pardoned 23 pro-lifers who were convicted under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) for interfering with abortion clinics, some of whom were elderly and have been serving prison sentences of up to 57 months.

Energy. The president issued orders to help increase oil production. He also cancelled the Electric Vehicle mandate, stopped federal leases for windfarms, and withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord.

Federal Workforce. President Trump immediately shut down all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices in federal agencies. He also required federal office employees to come to the office rather than working from home, made it easier to fire them, froze hiring, and froze the issuance of new regulations.

Health. The president proclaimed that the United States government will recognize only two genders on passports and other government documents: male and female. He also withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization. He also made the Justice Department drop its case against a Texas doctor who blew the whistle on a hospital for its illegal trans surgeries on minors.

Abortion. President Trump rejoined the UN coalition of countries that denies that abortion is a human right and works against forcing countries to allow it. He also re-instated the “Mexico City Policy,” which forbids foreign aid money from going towards the providing or promotion of abortion. He also rescinded the Biden dictate that government agencies look for ways to expand and protect access to abortion. And he ordered the enforcement of the Hyde Amendment, forbidding the use of taxpayer money to pay for abortions.

Foreign Affairs. The president froze all foreign aid for 90 days pending a review of all grants. (An exception was made for Israel and Egypt, plus emergency food aid.) He renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” He extended the deadline for TikTok to be divested or banned.

Observers are describing all of this as “shock and awe,” which Wikipedia defines as “a military strategy based on the use of overwhelming power and spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy’s perception of the battlefield and destroy their will to fight.”

The Breakdown of Conservative, Liberal, or Moderate

The report from a new Gallup poll of Americans’ political ideologies is entitled U.S. Political Parties Historically Polarized Ideologically. But although it’s true that Republicans and Democrats are more polarized from each other, I’m seeing more of a consensus among the American people as a whole.

For 2024, here are the statistics:

Very Conservative: 10%

Conservative: 27%

Moderate: 34%

Liberal: 17%

Very Liberal: 9%

So 37% of Americans are conservative, with only 26% being liberal.

Gallup says that these numbers are fairly consistent with their findings from previous years, though the number of moderates has shrunk somewhat from 43% in 1992, the first iteration of the survey, to 34% today.

The major shift, though, is within the political parties. Among Democrats, 36% describe themselves as “liberal,” while a record 19% describe themselves as “very liberal” with 34% being “moderate.”

Among Republicans, 53% describe themselves as “conservative,” with 24% saying they are “very conservative.” Only 18% are “moderate.”

Among Independents, 45% consider themselves “moderate,” 30% conservative, and 20% liberal.

I’m pretty sure the scale has been sliding over the years, with the definitions of “liberal,” “conservative,” and “moderate” changing since 1992. But there is little appetite for either extreme, whether “very conservative” or “very liberal,” among American voters.

I wish the poll told us what the respondents consider to be the difference between “liberal” and “very liberal,” but I suspect it has to do with New Deal style welfare state liberalism, which Biden used to embody when he was in his prime, as opposed to woke progressivism, with its emphasis on critical race theory, feminism, and the LGBTQ agenda.

I suspect the difference between “conservative” and “very conservative” has something to do with small government, free market, frugal spending conservatives as opposed to the big government “illiberal” cultural conservatives.

Democrats need to realize that only just over one-quarter of Americans are liberals. The “very liberals” number less than one in ten. Yet the “very liberals,” who constitute about a fifth of the Democratic party, seem to have been calling the shots in the Biden/Harris administration. That’s a formula for losing elections.

Republicans’ “very conservatives,” who are over-represented in the party, also will have little appeal. But isn’t Trump “very conservative”? It depends on the definition. But Republicans start with an advantage by appealing to the 37% of conservative Americans. It’s the moderates who determine who wins an election. This time, enough of them broke for the Republican candidate.

Theoretically, a moderate candidate would have the advantage, but moderates are minorities in both parties, largely choosing to join no party at all, thus keeping them off the ballot.

The Woes of Cable News

CNN is having to lay off some 200 employees, which comes to about 6% of the company’s workforce, as viewership continues to decline.

The news network averaged just 578,000 viewers in prime time in the last three months of 2024, which is down 74% from the same time period in 2020. But it’s not alone. MSNBC is down 62%. And even Fox, which is at least making money, is down 27%.

Part of the problem is surely the disconnect, seen also throughout the news industry, between the media’s overt liberalism and the general public’s moderation or conservatism. (See the previous entry.) But another problem is that the “Cable News Network” (a.k.a., CNN)–along with MCNBC and the conservative Fox–rests on an obsolete technology. Broadcast TV fell to Cable, and now Cable is falling to the digital technologies of computers, cell phones, and streaming.

According to Isabella Simonetti of the Wall Street Journal, CNN is going to respond to its problems by transitioning to digital. The company is planning to put up a paywall around CNN.com, making it accessible to subscribers for $3.99 per month. And it will launch a streaming network. CNN already tried that in 2022, offering CNN+ for $5.99 per month, but it bombed and was shut down after only two months. Whereas CNN+ offered special programs around its stars, such as “Jake Tapper’s Book Club” and “Parental Guidance With Anderson Cooper,” the new service will focus on straight news.

But streaming isn’t necessarily a way to get a big audience, because the technology, by its nature, is “niche.” Most people subscribe to a few channels that they like, a choice that precludes the others. I have missed quite a few sporting events that I otherwise would have watched, since I don’t subscribe to the channels that they are on. The leagues, though, are addressing this problem, though, to a certain extent, by making deals with multiple platforms. Similarly, Fox News has made itself available on several streaming platforms.

It’s hard for a news service of any kind to compete with the internet, which offers news for free. But the internet platforms are mostly relying on reporters who work for traditional media–newspapers, magazines, network TV, cable TV–and if no companies are around to pay someone to gather and write up the news, the internet won’t have it either. What’s emerging, though, is online news sites that do pay their writers. We’ll see if that’s enough.

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On Multiculturalism

Last updated on: January 19, 2025 at 6:20 pm By Gene Veith

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We blogged about the scandal in the UK of Pakistani sex gangs preying on working class white girls and how law enforcement and the media often ignored these crimes for fear of being considered “racist” or “Islamophobic.”

British commentator Douglas Murray took up the question of how this happened. He writes about it in The Free Press in an essay entitled The Dangers of Multiculturalism.

“There are some terrible things that society wants to deal with,” he writes, “and there are some it refuses to deal with, and the things it refuses to deal with tend to be those crimes that go against some deep narrative of the age.” That narrative, he says, is the “doctrine of multiculturalism.”

In an era of mass legal and illegal migration, most developed countries have tried some form of this doctrine. But in Britain it runs especially deep. “Strength in diversity” was the mantra of modern Britain, as it has been of Justin Trudeau’s Canada, among other ailing Western states. Any story that runs against the narrative—and threatens to bring the cathedral crashing down—has to be suppressed.

That is why so many elements of British society, from much (though not all) of the media, to local councillors, the police, and many (though again, not all) members of Parliament, had to try to make the story disappear. Many people actually told victims and their families that their accounts of abuse could not come out because it would cause tension in their communities and risk social cohesiveness. And so a great evil was allowed, under the guise of doing good. Which is how evil often manifests.

The United States certainly has citizens from many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. In Houston, driving to Memorial Lutheran Church where my son-in-law is pastor on Westheimer Road, I counted over twenty different ethnic restaurants in just a few blocks. In addition to the usual Mexican, Chinese, Italian, and Thai restaurants, there were Ethiopian, Assyrian, Caribbean, Pakistani, Peruvian, Brazilian, Argentinian, Nigerian, Peruvian, and more and more. I think that’s very cool and I’d like to try them all.

It seems to me, though, that in order to appreciate all of these cultures, we must get rid of “the doctrine of multiculturalism” as it has been applied in the West for the last several decades. Postmodernists invoke “multiculturalism” as an argument for relativism. All cultures are different, we are told, and they all have different values. You believe the way you do because of your culture. Other cultures have their own beliefs. There is nothing that is true for everyone. What you think is real is culturally determined. To think your culture has the only truth is to be ethnocentric. Instead, we need to embrace human diversity and be multicultural.

The irony is that the only culture that believes in relativistic multiculturalism is contemporary European-American elite culture. Ethiopians, Assyrians, Caribbean, and the other ethnic groups represented on Westheimer Road don’t think that way. Multiculturalism doesn’t actually say that all cultures are equally valid; rather, it says that all cultures are equally wrong.

Actual cultures believe in moral values, and those moral values actually are quite similar across cultures. UK authorities who tip-toe around enforcing the laws against sexual abuse so that they can’t be accused of Islamophobia perhaps don’t realize that Islam opposes sex outside of marriage, and that their associating Islam with these crimes and protecting Muslim perpetrators is itself patronizing and ultimately racist. One of the problems of immigrants from conservative societies is that when they come to the West, their young people are met with overwhelming sexual temptations that they never faced in the old country. Our culture, or perhaps better our anti-culture, is the outlier. We need to change our climate of permissiveness for everyone.

Multiculturalism as relativism can never bring harmony between people of different cultures. It can only sort people out into incompatible tribes, often–since the postmodernist view of culture reduces it all to power struggles–tribes that war against each other.

What we need to accept people of different ethnicities and cultures is not relativism but universalism. That is, the notion that human beings, for all of our variety, have things in common. We all have families that we love, similar kinds of problems, experience the same suffering, share the same pleasures. When our bodies aren’t working right, the same kind of medicine helps us no matter what culture we are from. Back to Westheimer Road, we can even enjoy each others’ restaurants, and do so without the multiculturalist worry that we are committing “cultural appropriation.”

Part of our common humanity is the need for a strong sense of right and wrong, the need for law and order, and the need for spiritual meaning.

Illustration: Feast of Flavors via StockCake, Public Domain, CC0 1.0 Universal [AI generated, not by the author]

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How Martin Luther Rewired Your Brain

Last updated on: January 23, 2025 at 11:03 am By Gene Veith

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Being able to read, says a scientist, has rewired the human brain. And the person responsible for that, he says, is Martin Luther.

I randomly came across this:

Your brain has been altered, neurologically rewired as you acquired a particular skill. This renovation has left you with a specialized area in your left ventral occipital temporal region, shifted facial recognition into your right hemisphere, reduced your inclination toward holistic visual processing, increased your verbal memory, and thickened your corpus callosum, which is the information highway that connects the left and right hemispheres of your brain.

What accounts for these neurological and psychological changes?

You are likely highly literate. As you learned to read, probably as a child, your brain reorganized itself to better accommodate your efforts, which had both functional and inadvertent consequences for your mind.

And what was responsible for that? The better question, who was responsible? And the answer that accounts for this major rewiring of the human brain is MARTIN LUTHER!

So says Harvard evolutionary biologist (!) Joseph Heinrich in Nautilus, a site that relates science to art and culture. His article, published in 2021, is entitled Martin Luther Rewired Your Brain, with the deck, “How mass literacy, spurred by Protestantism, reconfigured our neural pathways.”

Reading, of course, goes back for thousands of years. But, observes Heinrich, in all of that time, only a tiny percentage of people actually knew how to read. The notion that everyone should learn how to read came not from the scientific intelligentsia of the Enlightenment, nor from the economic growth of the 19th century.

No, it was a religious mutation in the 16th century. After bubbling up periodically in prior centuries, the belief that every person should read and interpret the Bible for themselves began to rapidly diffuse across Europe with the eruption of the Protestant Reformation, marked in 1517 by Martin Luther’s delivery of his famous 95 theses. Protestants came to believe that both boys and girls had to study the Bible for themselves to better know their God. In the wake of the spread of Protestantism, the literacy rates in the newly reforming populations in Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands surged past more cosmopolitan places like Italy and France. Motivated by eternal salvation, parents and leaders made sure the children learned to read.

Heinrich then cites historical studies that found that literacy and schooling rates in 19th century Germany were much higher in Protestant counties than in Catholic counties. This phenomenon can even be seen today in Africa and India, where the areas with Protestant missions have higher literacy and schooling rates than the areas with Catholic missions. The exception is Catholic Jesuit missions, which Heinrich says imitated the Protestant emphasis on education as part of the Counter-Reformation. Areas close to Jesuit missions have shown higher rates of literacy than those close to Franciscan missions.

But what led to the push for universal, public education? Heinrich credits Luther for that too:

The notion of universal, state-funded schooling has its roots in religious ideals. As early as 1524, Martin Luther not only emphasized the need for parents to ensure their children’s literacy but also placed the responsibility for creating schools on secular governments. This religiously inspired drive for public schools helped make Prussia a model for public education, which was later copied by countries like Britain and the United States.

So if you can read, whatever your religious beliefs or lack of them, thank Martin Luther. And you might try using your rewired brain to read some of the reading material he made available, such as the Bible in your own language, and that he himself wrote. (A good place to start is this.)

This article makes me wonder, if reading rewired our brains, are online screens also rewiring our brains? Though much of what we do online still involves reading and writing, electronic images–with the coming together of television and computers–are ascending. The pioneering media scholar Marshall McLuhan, a devout Catholic, wrote about the different mindsets created by images and the written word. If computers are rewiring our brains, will we someday be unable to read? Literacy is already said to be declining among the young. I want to stop thinking about this. . . .I think I’ll watch some streaming.

Photo: Martin Luther Monument, St. Mary Church, Berlin by Reinhard Kraasch, Lizenz: CC-BY-SA 4.0 DE, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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Trump’s Impact on Popular Culture

Last updated on: January 11, 2025 at 4:34 pm By Gene Veith

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We’ve blogged about how Donald Trump’s political victory seems to be accompanied by a larger “vibe shift” in American culture. The shift is away from the woke progressivism that for decades has reigned supreme in Hollywood, academia, the arts, the media, corporate offices, and other enclaves of the cultural elite, towards attitudes that more closely resemble conservatism.

Politico has published a feature article entitled How Donald Trump Transformed Mass Culture, a round table discussion with a group of its reporters on Trump’s impact on popular culture–the realm of entertainment, fashion, business, and non-elite society.

The parade of tech executives bending the knee to the president-elect, Disney announcing it is dropping a transgender storyline from an animated series, Target announcing it is cutting back on its LGBTQ merchandise, and corporations dropping their DEI policies might all be explained as pragmatic business decisions. That’s revealing because it implies that their previous enthusiasm for wokery was also a pragmatic business decision. Still, such economic decisions suggest a perception that there is a change in the marketplace and in their consumers.

As the panel’s Jessica Piper says, “Companies seem to be more concerned about conservative backlash than they were a few years ago.” Beyond that, she observes, “Trump isn’t as culturally toxic as he was the first time around.”

This is evident in professional athletes celebrating with the “Trump dance,” and getting no blow back from the leagues or anyone else for doing so. Reporter Shia Kapos from Chicago, “a hard-core Democratic town,” says that she is now seeing people wearing MAGA hats, “which would have been unheard of four years ago.”

Ian Ward from New York sees a different shift in fashion:

This may be colored by the fact of where I live (in New York City), but I’ve noticed a resurgence of preppy culture and fashion recently — expensive barn coats, those Ralph Lauren sweaters with American flags embroidered on the front. These are the clothes of America’s traditional elite, and I think that after the election, people are (somewhat paradoxically, given Trump’s populist rhetoric) less nervous about identifying themselves with that elite that they were before. There’s a sense that you don’t have to apologize for your privilege — and that it’s socially acceptable, or even fashionable, to embrace patriotic symbols. Thus the $400 American flag sweaters, I guess.

Well, I would say that this is more likely an assertion of being elite and trying to show the victorious populists that the elite can also be patriotic. Though I suspect that even the elite feels relieved that they no longer have to subject themselves to the woke ritual of having to apologize for their privilege.

More to the point is that the elite may be waking up to the importance of the ordinary Americans they used to champion but in recent years have been looking down on.

Shia Kapos: Democrats have certainly had to rethink how they view voters who elected Trump. I don’t think they were doing that four years ago. This time, the Trump voter isn’t just a MAGA voter.

Moderator David Kihara made a perceptive observation from watching a recent movie on Netflix: Following the obligatory Hollywood principles, it was impeccably “diverse,” including characters who were black, Asian, LGBTQ, transgender, and otherwise checking all the boxes. Except they were all upper income! There was no “economic diversity,” no diversity of social class. That is to say no representatives of the working class, which leftists used to champion and which became Donald Trump’s base!

Those folks are now ascendant. They no longer feel the social pressure the elite used to impose. They now feel free to say what they really think. Says the New Yorker,

Ian Ward: From my own conversations with conservatives, there’s a sense that we’ve gotten past the period of “peak woke” in American culture. There’s a pretty common refrain among the conservative chattering classes that “wokeness” took off in 2014, peaked in 2020 with the Black Lives Matter protests and is now retreating after Trump’s reelection. What that means in practice is that the average, non-ideological American — who was never really on board with progressive cultural politics to begin with — doesn’t feel the same social pressure to defer to the “woke” positions on every cultural issue. People feel empowered to take the counter-countercultural position in a way they didn’t during the first Trump term.

The most interesting comment from this panel, though, has to do with attitudes among some of the elite. The possibility that Trump and Making America Great Again has become cool. From Ward again:

Ian Ward: We’re living in a moment of global rightward political retrenchment. I think it’s safe to assume that our cultural products will reflect that.

I would add that, fairly or not, Trump and MAGA have taken on a certain countercultural appeal — and that tends to jive with artistic subcultures that position themselves against the cultural mainstream. It’s not cool or subversive right now to be a Democratic partisan, who are seen as defenders of the status quo. There’s a certain subversiveness to being MAGA, and I think we’ll see that echo throughout the cultural sphere — though I’m not entirely sure what it will look like.

Now I don’t think the progressive elite will change its ideology to any great degree. The general public is just asserting itself and the elite is having to take notice. I suspect that the left will make a concerted effort to court the working class, to recover their old proletariat base. That will mean an important shift of emphasis and presentation. The left will still support the LGBTQ cause, but it’s realizing that the people they want to attract–who generally believe in minding their own business about sex–are turned off by in-your-face transgenderism and mandatory Pride parades. The left will still support racial minorities, but it is beginning to realize that a good number of those minorities also inhabit the working class and also in many ways are culturally conservative.

Of course, Trump could quickly make himself uncool again and unleash the old Sixties protest mentality. The left likes to think of itself as subversive, whereas the right tends to think of itself as the establishment. The roles have switched over the last few decades, but they may well reassert themselves.

Photo by Liam Enea, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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The Anti-Social Society

Last updated on: January 14, 2025 at 7:53 am By Gene Veith

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When I was growing up, my parents were always having friends over for dinner, usually followed by free-wheeling games of bridge. And when their friends were not at our place, they invited us to their place for dinner and cards. Kids were always dragged along, so we socialized with our parents’ friends’ kids and usually a good time was had by all.

We went to movies as a family, sometimes with other families. My father went to Lion’s Club and sometimes brought me along. We’d go out to the lake with my parents’ church group for picnics and boat rides. On Sundays we would go both to church and to “night church,” with me complaining because that always made us miss the end of the Ed Sullivan Show or once a year The Wizard of Oz. After night church, everybody went to someone’s house for the “After Glow” party. In college, I did quite a bit of hanging out and doing things with friends. We even played bridge.

But once I grew up, got married, and we had children of our own, we never did things with other people on the scale that my parents did. Sometimes we had people over, were invited to their place for dinner, or did things with people from church or work. We enjoyed that. But mostly we were happy to just stay home.

In today’s culture, though, doing things with other people has become rarer and rarer. People are spending more and more time home alone, by choice. Americans are increasingly anti-social, to the point that it’s becoming harder and harder to have a sense of society.

These reflections came to me while reading Derek Thompson’s article in The Atlantic entitled The Anti-Social Century with the deck, “Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.” (That article is behind a paywall, but it’s available from MSN here.)

Thompson points out that as of 2023, 74% of restaurant traffic was either takeout or delivery. And when people do dine in, they often eat by themselves. In just the last two years, dining solo has increased by 29%. He quotes a restaurateur: “There’s an isolationist dynamic that’s taking place in the restaurant business. . . I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today. They’ve decided that their home is their sanctuary. It’s not easy to get them to leave.”

Thompson cites other data points: In the 1930s, Americans went out to the movies several times per month. Today, the average American goes to three movies per year, but watches the equivalent of eight movies per week on home screens. Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data,” he writes. That rate has been declining since 1965, but between 2002 and 2023, it has dropped by over 20%. For people younger than 25 and unmarried men, the amount of time spent with others has dropped 35%. “The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species.”

Thompson quotes an array of experts who refer to “the privatization of American leisure” and our “century of solitude.” He quotes Andrew Taggart in First Things about the phenomenon of “secular monks”; that is, men who say “no” to marriage and fatherhood (like religious monks), and embracing the asceticism not of prayer, fasting, and spiritual disciplines but the subjugation of the body by means of working out, dieting, and self-improvement exercises.

Thompson concludes, “Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America.”

Why is this? The COVID shutdowns no doubt played a role, as some people realized they liked staying at home. But the anti-social trend started long before that. Is this part of the plague of loneliness we keep hearing so much about? To a degree, but many solitary people say they do not feel lonely. They like being by themselves.

Is it our technology? Certainly, that has been enabling. “Americans are more likely to take meetings from home, to shop from home, to be entertained at home, to eat at home, and even to worship at home.”

I wonder if this phenomenon accounts for other things we are seeing in the culture, such as the decline of marriage, the decline of parenthood, and the decline of church attendance. An increasing number of people just want to be by themselves.

I also wonder if this “self-imposed solitude” is the whole story. Thompson quotes researcher Enghin Atalay: “He categorized a person as “alone,” as I will throughout this article, if they are “the only person in the room, even if they are on the phone” or in front of a computer.”

Well, interacting with other people on a computer is a type of socializing. Even though you might not have ever met some of your Facebook “friends,” you are still conversing with them using language, still sharing your thoughts and feelings with another human being. That is not as good as knowing someone in the flesh, to be sure, but there is a reason it is called “social media.” And even just watching TV, though a solitary escape, engages us with human characters and their problems.

Thompson brings up the paradox that in some ways, our social bonds are getting stronger. Parents spend more time with their children than they used to, and married couples are spending more time with each other. Technology is even helping with that, as cell phones and texts allow us to stay in closer contact.

He says that while all this time alone is “making society weaker, meaner, and more delusional,”

Home-based, phone-based culture has arguably solidified our closest and most distant connections, the inner ring of family and best friends (bound by blood and intimacy) and the outer ring of tribe (linked by shared affinities). But it’s wreaking havoc on the middle ring of “familiar but not intimate” relationships with the people who live around us, which Dunkelman calls the village. “These are your neighbors, the people in your town,” he said. We used to know them well; now we don’t. The middle ring is key to social cohesion.

Maybe so, but the inner ring and the outer ring are arguably the most important relationships that we have.

I can relate to all of this. I like to spend time by myself, by which I mean with my wife, children, and grandchildren. And when they are not around, I can still enjoy my solitude. Part of me sees this new trend as the triumph of the introverts. And as I’ve said before, we can use more introversion. Yet, I am well aware that cultivating too much solitude is like being pulled into a black hole, from which not even light can escape. I need not only people outside myself but the world outside myself. That includes most importantly the God outside myself, who, in turn, pulls me outside of myself by giving me multiple vocations and thus multiple neighbors to love and serve.

Photo: “Solitude at Sea,” AI generated not by me but by Stockcake. Public domain.

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