This are a few cultural trends in the 21st century.
Beyond American Media
When I was in high school, one of the very specific things that I wished I had was an ability to access popular culture, news and scholarly works from other countries.
I was a couple of decades ahead of my time, and I assumed at the time that it would probably be impossible, but here we are.
I now routinely listen to music in Japanese, Korean, Tamil, Telugu, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin and Hebrew. This is mostly due to Spotify and SiriusXM.
I watch TV shows and movies from Japan, Korea, Turkey, Mexico, Russia, France, Canada, England, Australia, Ireland, Spain, Germany, China, Taiwan, South Africa, and Sweden. This is mostly due to streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and Crunchyroll, but also before that due to independent art house movie theaters.
I read comics from Korea, Japan, Turkey, Canada, Iran, Malaysia, Indonesia, Spain, and France. Mostly, this is due to Webtoons and Top Webcomics, although free scanlations on the Internet (which are harder to find these days after a crackdown) and library collections hooked me on manga and manhwa ( 만화) and graphic novels.
I read cutting edge scientific journal articles from France, Mexico, Israel, China, Russia, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Polynesia, Australia, Ukraine, Turkey, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Switzerland, and sometimes many of the above and more in a single publication. I read many of those articles within hours or days of their release. Mostly this is due to arXiv, bioRxiv, PLOS, Science Daily and science blogs. SSRN and blogs provide similar access to legal and social science journal articles.
I read news accounts from most countries in the world. I refer to legal codes and digest from around the world with some regularity, partially for work and partially for hobbies. In both cases, comparative and international law and politics study I did in college and law school has provided a firm foundation.
The novels I read are less cosmopolitan, but there have certainly been translated international titles as part of the mix (a mix that is also now about fifty percent electronic).
It isn't free, but it is far less expensive than I expected.
Societal Norms, Practices And World Views
De-Christianization
The United States is in the most exciting part of the logistic curve of secularization, one that I am a part of, having been raised Lutheran, and having experimented with other mainline Christian churches as a young adult (I was actually an Episcopalian Sunday school teacher for a year in college) despite really losing true belief in God around age fifteen or so. The more time I spend away from it, the more absurd it all seems. And, globalization, especially in media from East Asia, has helped that transition by familiarizing me with societies where Christianity is marginal rather than central, and by providing constant reminders that the world is not uniform religiously, with undermines the worldview of a single monotheistic God that is the same for everyone.
In the 2020 election, fully 45% of Biden voters and 20% of Trump voters were not Christian. Most were non-religious, although not necessarily atheist or agnostic in self-identification, although there are significant numbers of Jews, Hindus, Muslims, adherents of Eastern Religions, neopagans, and spiritual people who don't adhere to an organized religion.
Neither of my children were raised religious or baptized, although they had some exposure to Christianity through grandparents and an occasional funeral, and probably equally as much exposure to Jewish religious services through Jewish friends of the family. They've also each had religious close friends and significant others, one Mormon, one Muslim, some Catholic, and some Orthodox Christian and Jewish. When I was growing up, that would have been unthinkable. Now, it is a typical experience for their generation.
The residual Christianity has grown more conservative and more political, but the association of Christianity with homophobia, with racism, with mistreatment of the poor, with misogyny, with child molestation, with support for rape and domestic violence, and with clergy greed and excess has undermined much of Christianity's moral authority.
Also, in the last several years this trend has stalled, with non-religious ranks stable and mainline Christianity growing a little at the expense of white Evangelical Christianity. So, it isn't clear is this is just a short term pause, or the beginning of a new trend.
Gay Rights
In high school, I was only vaguely aware that homosexuality existed and had never met anyone who was at a personal level (and never knew that transgender or bisexual or other gender atypical people existed at all).
This changed dramatically when I went to a college that was a safe haven for LGBT+ folks. My children have had many gay friends (some quite close) and known many LGBT+ adults growing up from a violin teacher of many years to elected officials in Denver to parents of their friends to my clients.
The legalization of same sex marriage has become the law of the land. I wouldn't have guessed that this would happened by now in my wildest dreams while I was in high school, or even college.
Dating, Polygamy and Marriage
Dating and finding spouses has increasingly become driven by online matchmaking.
Consent is taken more seriously in dating type relationships, and even within marriage (with marital rape widely criminalized), than it used to be, because the "sexual revolution" was seen as having gone too far.
Polygamy (both Muslim and heterodox Mormon, and in my case, some clients of mine who were neither) and polyamory, are familiar concepts now, whose legalization is being vetted.
Laws against fornication and adultery and unmarried cohabitation are largely gone (outside the U.S. military justice system), effectively decriminalizing these relationships.
In part, this is because, serial monogamy generating children from multiple successive marriages and non-marital relationships has created a de facto sort of polygamy, as it has become normative for both parents to remain involved in the lives of their children even after their parents are no longer together, entwined through parenting time exchanges, child support and sometimes alimony.
"No fault" divorce certainly helped to facilitate this, but mostly it has been driven by economics as I've discussed many times elsewhere, with the upper middle class living traditional monogamous married life with shared children born into stable marriages, the the working class increasingly having children out of wedlock, not just as teens (indeed teen marriage and child bearing are at all time lows), marrying after having kids more often than before, and having short lived marriages with most marriages not enduring until the couple's children are adults.
Pornography
Pornography is ubiquitous, easily available for free on the Internet, and more hard core than it used to be (except child pornography) and the impact has been not what was expected. Rape is less common despite more reporting and more expensive definitions of it. And, in general, people who consume it have not been more depraved.
Prostitution
The U.S. remains an outlier in criminalizing prostitution almost everywhere but a few counties in Nevada (and even there it is a crime for members of the U.S. military and a firing offense for federal employees and contractors), but the anti-prostitution efforts have focused on "human trafficking", while "sugar baby" relationships have received grudging acceptance.
Birth Control
Hormonal birth control pills were invented about a decade before I was born and both hormonal birth control and IUDs have become ubiquitous and the norm rather than the exception. Unwanted pregnancies are now vastly more rare than they used to be. Opposition even to birth control is another factor that has undermined the authority of conservative Christianity and sent people away from the faith entirely.
Abortion
Abortion was legalized when I was a preschooler and has remained legal despite concerted conservative religious attempts to ban it, but wider use of birth control and better prospects for young women have reduced pregnancy rates in young people to record lows, and the proportion of pregnancies ending in abortions has fallen proportionately to all time post-Roe v. Wade lows. Abortion clinics have faced pressure to close in conservative areas and violence, but over the counter emergency contraception for the first few days after sex without birth control, and the RU-486 abortion pill for early term abortions has reduced the need for clinics in some of the highest demand portions of pregnancy. Deaths from illegal abortions have basically ceased. A conservative U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to overrule or narrow Roe v. Wade.
Drugs and Criminal Justice
The shadow legalization of marijuana is another thing that would have been unthinkable and radical when I was in high school that is now common place and mainstream and will probably have the last federal government restrictions stripped soon despite our President's history as a leading proponent of the war on drugs.
The war on drugs has now deescalated in the United States with most of the most draconian drug crime penalties relaxed, and some of the most notorious sentences reduced with commutations and legislative amnesties or sentence reductions for those incarcerated already (although many unlikely people are still serving those draconian sentences today). But, the U.S. has refrained from moving towards all out decriminalization as Portugal has done very successfully.
But, the war on drugs continues to ravage much of Central America and Mexico, undermining their criminal justice systems and producing the world's highest murder rates in places not in the midst of actual wars. Much of that violence is being fueled with guns illegally imported from the United States.
The death penalty remains, but more states have abolished it and it is being used less often. The courts and the commutation process have thinned death rows considerably, and innocent projects have used DNA evidence and other techniques to cast doubt on a fair minority of sentences.
5 comments:
Hi Andrew,
I am rather amazed that drug decriminalization hasn't gone further. Everyone now in a position of power was a drug user back in college. The fact that drug decriminalization has not arrived is probably due to older drug users seeing that the cost of legal drug might be higher than they are willing to pay (i.e. to their kids and grandkids). And possibly that cost of legal drugs would fall more on the white majority than on the black minority. I.e. users rather than dealers.
WRT to hard drugs I think they should be made available for free via government prescription. If no one is selling or pushing the number of heroin users will drop down to noise level.
Cheers,
Guy
All drugs—except antibiotics—should be OTC.
@DaveBarnes Generally speaking, I agree, although there is something to be said for having a fairly regulated structure for opioids, along the line of existing Sudafed regulation. Supervised administration of opioids would also be powerful for harm reduction. Opium dens were far superior to shooting up under bridges and alone in people's own homes and cars.
Along those lines, I would also note:
"The UNODC estimates the value of Afghanistan’s overall opium economy, including its export value, to be on the order of $2 billion—equivalent to roughly one-third of the value of Afghanistan’s licit agricultural output and roughly ten percent of its total GDP. Afghanistan is also central to the global trade in opiates. In 2019 and 2020, the UNODC’s estimates put Afghanistan’s output at a remarkable 85 percent of global opium production. Afghanistan’s estimated share of global production has remained fairly stable over the last two decades. In the early years of the occupation, US policymakers, believing that the drug trade was funding the insurgency, set out to crack down on it. But their efforts only exacerbated the problem.
A core issue underlying the failure of efforts to curtail the opium trade was the Afghan government’s lack of territorial control. Put simply, a government will always struggle to suppress economic activity on land over which it lacks real influence. The timing of the US government’s counternarcotics spending allows researchers to see how opium suppression policies played out in practice. The Congressional Research Service reports that US aid to Afghanistan appropriated for counternarcotics purposes rose from zero in 2003 to $292 million in 2004 and to $934 million in 2005; it subsequently stabilized in the neighborhood of $500 to $600 million per year. The increase in counternarcotics spending had little impact on Afghanistan’s total opium production. In the absence of territorial control, Afghanistan’s government was unable to either eradicate poppy fields or develop sufficient alternative economic opportunities to meaningfully reduce supply." https://mwi.usma.edu/an-unforced-error-how-us-attempts-to-suppress-the-opium-trade-strengthened-the-taliban/?mc_cid=5486568eaf&mc_eid=8946684710
@Guy
"The fact that drug decriminalization has not arrived is probably due to older drug users seeing that the cost of legal drug might be higher than they are willing to pay (i.e. to their kids and grandkids). And possibly that cost of legal drugs would fall more on the white majority than on the black minority."
I wish the analysis was that sophisticated. I don't think that it is. I think it is more along the lines of "drugs bad", fight bad things by criminalizing them and "going to war on them" together with inertia. Evidence to the contrary, like programs in Portugal and Switzerland only penetrate to liberal elites. Unfortunately, our polity as a whole is so anti-intellectual that judges are ordering hospitals to administer horse dewormers to COVID ICU patients based on maverick physician prescriptions, and the CDC is busy warning people not to try to treat COVID by drinking bleach.
The intellectual force driving the drug war has a lot in common with the shallow and uninformed thinking that has caused soaring divorce and out of wedlock marriage rates blue collar communities to drive anti-LGBT+ hate, because they think that what they're seeing is about a morality failure instead of a long, slow, economic crisis for blue collar workers and their families.
The argument that has made inroads on the drug war in conservative states is that the prison budget is just too damn high.
See also an economic analysis of the opium trade at https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/08/econ-101-the-drug-war-and-afghanistan.html
"From the perspective of Eurasian heroin traffickers, raw opium accounts for a small share of the cost of reaching either their middle- or high-income consumers. Most of the cost is driven by the expenses and risks associated with trafficking itself—bribery, money laundering, document forgery, and, when attempts to evade the authorities fail, violence. As a result, traffickers’ demand for the opium produced by Afghan farmers is inelastic, meaning that even a substantial change in the prices required by farmers will have a modest effect on the quantity the traffickers choose to acquire. This meant that the government’s efforts to reduce poppy cultivation had a greater effect on prices than on the quantity produced—the government drove up opium prices without reducing the quantity demanded by and produced for traffickers.
While overall opium production did not decline, it did undergo an important shift. Predictably, opium production shifted out of the government’s most tightly held provinces and toward provinces in which the government struggled to exert control. This stemmed from a straightforward issue of targeting and state capacity."
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