It’s Official: The “Nones”– People Who Profess No Religion–Are Now as Big as Catholics & Evangelicals in the United States

The usu­al irreg­u­lar­i­ties and shenani­gans notwith­stand­ing, the vot­ing pat­terns of the U.S. elec­torate may under­go a sea change in the com­ing decades as the num­bers of peo­ple who iden­ti­fy as non-reli­gious con­tin­ue to rise. One of the biggest demo­graph­ic sto­ries of the last few decades, the rise of the “nones” has been inter­pret­ed as a threat and as an inevitable reck­on­ing for cor­rupt and scan­dal-rid­den insti­tu­tions dri­ving mil­lions of peo­ple out of church­es across the coun­try.

Pol­i­tics and social issues are hard­ly the only rea­sons, though they poll sec­ond in list from a 2017 Pew sur­vey. At num­ber one is “I ques­tion a lot of reli­gious teach­ings,” at num­ber three, the slight­ly more vague “I don’t like reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions.” It’s maybe a sur­prise that non­be­lief in God appears all the way at num­ber four. Which speaks to an impor­tant point.

Not all of those exit­ing the pews have renounced their faith or con­vert­ed to anoth­er, but huge num­bers have joined the ranks of those who claim “no reli­gion” in sur­vey and polling data. Their num­bers are now equiv­a­lent to Catholics and evan­gel­i­cals, the two reli­gious groups most in decline behind main­line Protes­tant church­es. Polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Ryan P. Burge of East­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty is not sur­prised. “It’s been a con­stant steady increase for 20 years now,” he says, point­ing to data from a Gen­er­al Social Sur­vey visu­al­ized in the graph above.

The last decade has seen the sharpest upturn yet, with “nones” now esti­mat­ed at 23.1 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion. If this rise—and sub­se­quent plateaus and declines in the major reli­gious groups sur­veyed (and the batch of non-Judeo-Chris­t­ian “Oth­er Faith”s dis­mis­sive­ly lumped together)—continues, the shift could be dra­mat­ic. In 2014, 78% of the unaf­fil­i­at­ed, accord­ing to Pew polling, were raised in and walked away from a reli­gion. The shift in iden­ti­ty among young peo­ple tends to cor­re­late with a shift in pol­i­tics.

The “ris­ing tide of reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed vot­ers,” writes Jack Jenk­ins at Reli­gion News Ser­vice, is “a group that a 2016 PRRI analy­sis found skews young and lib­er­al.” It’s one that might off­set the over­sized influ­ence of white evan­gel­i­cals, who now make up 26% of the elec­torate and 22.5% of the pop­u­la­tion.

Any such con­clu­sions should be drawn with sev­er­al caveats. “Evan­gel­i­cals punch way above their weight,” says Burge. “They turn out a bunch at the bal­lot box. That’s large­ly a func­tion of the fact that they’re white and they’re old.” And, he might have added, many are in less eco­nom­i­cal­ly pre­car­i­ous straits than their chil­dren and grand­chil­dren, more sus­cep­ti­ble to mass media mes­sag­ing, and less prone, by design, to find­ing their vote sup­pressed. A 2016 PRRI report not­ed that “reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed Amer­i­cans do not vote in the same per­cent­ages as evan­gel­i­cals, and are often under­rep­re­sent­ed at the polls.”

Addi­tion­al­ly, and most impor­tant­ly to point out any time these num­bers come up: “the nones” is an entire­ly overde­ter­mined cat­e­go­ry full of peo­ple who agree on lit­tle, but they’re not sign­ing up for any church com­mit­tees any time soon for a hand­ful of loose­ly-relat­ed rea­sons. If herd­ing athe­ists, only one part of this group, is like herd­ing cats, try­ing to cor­ral 23% of the pop­u­la­tion with­out any shared creed or spe­cif­ic ide­ol­o­gy is cor­ralling an even less pre­dictable menagerie. We need to know far more about what peo­ple affirm, as well as what they deny, if we want a clear­er pic­ture of where the country’s politics—if not its gov­ern­ment or policies—might be head­ed.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Visu­al Map of the World’s Major Reli­gions (and Non-Reli­gions)

Ani­mat­ed Map Shows How the Five Major Reli­gions Spread Across the World (3000 BC – 2000 AD)

Does Democ­ra­cy Demand the Tol­er­ance of the Intol­er­ant? Karl Popper’s Para­dox

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Noam Chomsky Makes His First Power Point Presentation

90 years old, and still going strong…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Brief Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Noam Chomsky’s Lin­guis­tic The­o­ry, Nar­rat­ed by The X‑Files‘ Gillian Ander­son

The Ideas of Noam Chom­sky: An Intro­duc­tion to His The­o­ries on Lan­guage & Knowl­edge (1977)

Noam Chom­sky Defines What It Means to Be a Tru­ly Edu­cat­ed Per­son

5 Ani­ma­tions Intro­duce the Media The­o­ry of Noam Chom­sky, Roland Barthes, Mar­shall McLuhan, Edward Said & Stu­art Hall

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The First American Picture Book, Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats (1928)

For bet­ter (I’d say), or worse, the inter­net has turned cat peo­ple into what may be the world’s most pow­er­ful ani­mal lob­by. It has brought us fas­ci­nat­ing ani­mat­ed his­to­ries of cats and ani­mat­ed sto­ries about the cats of goth­ic genius and cat-lov­ing author and illus­tra­tor Edward Gorey; cats blithe­ly leav­ing inky paw­prints on medieval man­u­scripts and polite­ly but firm­ly refus­ing to be denied entry into a Japan­ese art muse­um. It has giv­en us no short­age of delight­ful pho­tos of artists with their cat famil­iars

Cat antics and awe have always been a very online phe­nom­e­non, but the mys­te­ri­ous and ridicu­lous, diminu­tive beasts of prey have also always been insep­a­ra­ble from art and cul­ture. As fur­ther evi­dence, we bring you Mil­lions of Cats, like­ly the “first tru­ly Amer­i­can pic­ture book done by an Amer­i­can author/artist,” explains a site devot­ed to it.

“Pri­or to its pub­li­ca­tion in 1928, there were only Eng­lish pic­ture books for the children’s perusal.” The book “sky rock­et­ed Wan­da Gág into instant fame and set in stone her rep­u­ta­tion as a children’s author and illus­tra­tor.”

It set a stan­dard for Calde­cott-win­ning children’s lit­er­a­ture for close to a hun­dred years since its appear­ance, though the award did not yet exist at the time. The book’s cre­ator was “a fierce ide­al­ist and did not believe in alter­ing her own aes­theti­cism just because she was pro­duc­ing work for chil­dren. She liked to use styl­ized human fig­ures, asym­met­ri­cal com­po­si­tions, strong lines and slight spa­tial dis­tor­tion.” She also loved cats, as befits an artist of her inde­pen­dent tem­pera­ment, one shared by the likes of oth­er cat-lov­ing artists like T.S. Eliot and Charles Dick­ens.

Mil­lions of Cats’ author and illus­tra­tor may not share in the fame of so many oth­er artists who took pic­tures with their cats, but she and her cat Noopy were as pho­to­genic as any oth­er feline/human artis­tic duo, and she was a peer to the best of them. The book’s edi­tor, Ernes­tine Evans, wrote in the Nation that Mil­lions of Cats “is as impor­tant as the librar­i­ans say it is. Not only does it bring to book-mak­ing one of the most tal­ent­ed and orig­i­nal of Amer­i­can lith­o­g­ra­phers… but it is a mar­riage of pic­ture and tale that is per­fect­ly bal­anced.”

Gág (rhymes with “jog”) was “a cel­e­brat­ed artist… in the Green­wich Vil­lage-cen­tic Mod­ernist art scene in the 1920s,” writes Lithub, “a free-think­ing, sex-pos­i­tive left­ist who also designed her own clothes and trans­lat­ed fairy tales.” She adapt­ed the text from “a sto­ry she had made up to enter­tain her friends’ chil­dren,” with the mil­lions of cats mod­eled on Noopy. Gág is the found­ing moth­er of children’s book dynas­ties like The Cat in the Hat and Pete the Cat, an artist whom mil­lions of cat lovers can dis­cov­er again or for the first time in a New­bery-win­ning 2006 collector’s edi­tion.

Read a sum­ma­ry of the charm­ing sto­ry of Mil­lions of Cats at Lithub and learn more about her, the tal­ent­ed Gág fam­i­ly of artists, and her charm­ing, very cat-friend­ly house here.

via LitHub

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Insane­ly Cute Cat Com­mer­cials from Stu­dio Ghi­b­li, Hayao Miyazaki’s Leg­endary Ani­ma­tion Shop

Enter an Archive of 6,000 His­tor­i­cal Children’s Books, All Dig­i­tized and Free to Read Online

A Dig­i­tal Archive of 1,800+ Children’s Books from UCLA

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Beauty of Brutalist Architecture: An Introduction in Six Videos

Some peo­ple hate the mas­sive con­crete build­ings known as Bru­tal­ist, but they at least approve of the style’s name, res­o­nant as it seem­ing­ly is with asso­ci­a­tions of insen­si­tive, anti-human­ist bul­ly­ing. Those who love Bru­tal­ism also approve of the style’s name, but for a dif­fer­ent rea­son: they know it comes from the French béton brut, refer­ring to raw con­crete, that mate­r­i­al most gen­er­ous­ly used in Bru­tal­ist build­ings’ con­struc­tion. We’ve all seen Bru­tal­ist archi­tec­ture, mas­sive­ly embod­ied by Boston City Hall, Lon­don’s Bar­bi­can Cen­tre, UC Berke­ley’s Wurster Hall, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to’s Robarts Library, FBI Head­quar­ters in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., or any oth­er of the exam­ples that have stood since the style’s 1960s and 70s hey­day. But now, as more get slat­ed for demo­li­tion each year, it has fall­en to Bru­tal­is­m’s enthu­si­asts to defend an archi­tec­ture eas­i­ly seen as inde­fen­si­ble.

The aes­thet­ic of Bru­tal­ism, says host Roman Mars in an episode of the pod­cast 99% Invis­i­ble on the style, “can con­jure up asso­ci­a­tions with bomb shel­ters, Sovi­et-era or ‘third-world’ con­struc­tion, but as harsh as it looks, con­crete is an utter­ly opti­mistic build­ing mate­r­i­al.” In the 1920s “con­crete was seen as being the mate­r­i­al that would change the world. The mate­r­i­al seemed bound­less — read­i­ly avail­able in vast quan­ti­ties, and con­crete sprang up every­where — on bridges, tun­nels, high­ways, side­walks, and of course, mas­sive build­ings.”

It “pre­sent­ed the most effi­cient way to house huge num­bers of peo­ple, and gov­ern­ment pro­grams all over the world loved it — par­tic­u­lar­ly Sovi­et Rus­sia, but also lat­er in Europe and North Amer­i­ca.” Philo­soph­i­cal­ly, “con­crete was seen as hum­ble, capa­ble, and honest—exposed in all its rough glo­ry, not hid­ing behind any paint or lay­ers.”

How­ev­er noble the inten­tions behind these works of archi­tec­ture, though, it did­n’t take human­i­ty long to turn on Bru­tal­ism. Part of the prob­lem had to do with the dis­re­pair into which many of the high­est-pro­file Bru­tal­ist build­ings — social hous­ing com­plex­es, tran­sit cen­ters, gov­ern­ment offices — were allowed to fall imme­di­ate­ly after the ide­olo­gies that drove their con­struc­tion passed out of favor. But Bru­tal­ism also fell vic­tim to a pre­dictable cycle of fash­ion: as archi­tec­ture crit­ics often point out, the pub­lic of any era con­sis­tent­ly admires hun­dred-year-old build­ings, but con­demns (often lit­er­al­ly) fifty-year-old build­ings. New York­ers still lament the loss of their grand old Penn Sta­tion, but its ornate Beaux-Arts style no doubt looked as heavy-hand­ed and out-of-touch to as many peo­ple in the ear­ly 1960s, the time of its demo­li­tion, as Bru­tal­ism does today.

What, then, is the case for Bru­tal­ist archi­tec­ture? “It’s a sense of place. It’s a sense of the dra­ma of the space that they sur­round,” says This Bru­tal World author Peter Chad­wick the BBC clip at the top of the post. “It is sculp­ture. It’s gone beyond being just func­tion­al. It’s just beau­ti­ful sculp­ture that mir­rors its envi­ron­ment.” In the DW Euro­maxx video below, Deutsches Architek­tur­mu­se­um cura­tor Oliv­er Elser sees in Bru­tal­ism a valu­able les­son for build­ing today: “Make more from less. I think this way of think­ing, spa­tial gen­eros­i­ty with sim­pler mate­ri­als, is a time­ly stance for archi­tec­ture.” Archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Elain Har­wood calls Bru­tal­ism “a par­tic­u­lar archi­tec­ture for ambi­tious times gripped by a fer­vor for change. What­ev­er style you call it, the results are unique and have a hero­ic beau­ty than sets them apart from the archi­tec­ture of any oth­er era.” (In fact, some Bru­tal­ism enthu­si­asts who dis­like the label have put up the term “Hero­ic” instead.)

What­ev­er the artic­u­la­cy of Bru­tal­is­m’s defend­ers, the most effec­tive argu­ments for its preser­va­tion have been made with not words but images. Chad­wick first made his mark with his This Bru­tal House accounts on Twit­ter and Insta­gram, and a search on the lat­ter for the hash­tag #bru­tal­ism reveals the aston­ish­ing range and inten­si­ty of the style’s 21st-cen­tu­ry fan­dom. A fair few videos have also tak­en indi­vid­ual works of Bru­tal­ism as their sub­jects, from a reflex­ive­ly loathed sur­vivor like Boston City Hall to the unlike­ly upper-mid­dle-class oasis of the Bar­bi­can Cen­tre to a high-mind­ed projects now under the wreck­ing ball like Robin Hood Gar­dens. Despite how many peo­ple seem hap­py to see Bru­tal­ist build­ings go, some, like Aus­tralian archi­tect Shaun Carter in his TEDx Syd­ney Salon talk below, remind us of the val­ue of keep­ing our his­to­ry con­cretized, as it were, in the built envi­ron­ment around us.

Bunkers, Bru­tal­ism and Blood­y­mind­ed­ness: Con­crete Poet­ry writer Jonathan Meades puts it more force­ful­ly: “The destruc­tion of Bru­tal­ist build­ings is more than the destruc­tion of a par­tic­u­lar mode of archi­tec­ture. It is like burn­ing books. It’s a form of cen­sor­ship of the past, a dis­com­fit­ing past, by the present. It’s the revenge of a mediocre age on an age of epic grandeur.” To his mind, it’s the destruc­tion of evi­dence of “a deter­mined opti­mism that made us more potent than we have become,” of the fact that “we don’t mea­sure up against those who took risks, who flew and plunged to find new ways of doing things, who were not scared to exper­i­ment, who lived lives of per­pet­u­al inquiry.” If Bru­tal­ism has to go, it has to go because it reminds us that “once upon a time, we were not scared to address the Earth in the knowl­edge that the Earth would not respond, could not respond.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A is for Archi­tec­ture: 1960 Doc­u­men­tary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Mod­ern Times 

Watch 50+ Doc­u­men­taries on Famous Archi­tects & Build­ings: Bauhaus, Le Cor­busier, Hadid & Many More

Bauhaus, Mod­ernism & Oth­er Design Move­ments Explained by New Ani­mat­ed Video Series

1,300 Pho­tos of Famous Mod­ern Amer­i­can Homes Now Online, Cour­tesy of USC

How Did the Romans Make Con­crete That Lasts Longer Than Mod­ern Con­crete? The Mys­tery Final­ly Solved

An Espres­so Mak­er Made in Le Corbusier’s Bru­tal­ist Archi­tec­tur­al Style: Raw Con­crete on the Out­side, High-End Parts on the Inside

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

See Classic Performances of Joni Mitchell from the Very Early Years–Before She Was Even Named Joni Mitchell (1965/66)

A pho­to­graph of two old friends—Joni Mitchell and David Hockney—holding hands at Hockney’s L.A. solo exhi­bi­tion took over the inter­net for a moment, for sen­ti­men­tal rea­sons Guy Tre­bay laid out in The New York Times. These include the fact that “Ms. Mitchell has sel­dom been seen in pub­lic since she says she was giv­en a diag­no­sis of Morgel­lons dis­ease, and suf­fered a brain aneurysm in 2015,” and “despite the pres­ence of the cane she uses since hav­ing learned again to walk, Ms. Mitchell appears radi­ant and robust.”

Tre­bay does not include anoth­er rea­son that comes to mind: the two elder­ly artists, in their sweaters and adorable match­ing snap-brim hats, look like reg­u­lar old folks on the way to a week­ly chess match in the park. It’s a human­iz­ing por­trait of two giants of the art and music world, two peo­ple who, despite their wealth and fame, seem immi­nent­ly down-to-earth and approach­able; a warm and cheer­ful image, says Irish poet Sean Hewitt, who first shared it on Twit­ter, of “two suc­cess­ful peo­ple enjoy­ing their old age.”

Does­n’t every­one espe­cial­ly want that for Joni Mitchell? Of all the beloved sep­tu­a­ge­nar­i­an stars on the public’s radar these days, Mitchell gar­ners more well-wish­es than anyone—rallying gen­er­a­tions of stars and musi­cians for a 75th birth­day trib­ute con­cert last Novem­ber. The show appeared in the­aters (see a trail­er below) and has been released as a superb album of live cov­ers called Joni 75. So much of the love for Mitchell—her undis­put­ed bril­liance as a song­writer, gui­tarist, and per­former notwithstanding—has to do with the amount of per­son­al pain she over­came to make it as an artist.

Born Rober­ta Joan Ander­son in Alber­ta, Cana­da, her ear­ly strug­gles gave her musi­cal voice so much poignan­cy and authen­tic­i­ty. As she her­self has said, “I wouldn’t have pur­sued music but for trou­ble.” A bout with polio at age nine, a push against her par­ents’ expec­ta­tions to claim her iden­ti­ty as a visu­al artist and musi­cian… then, at age 20, Mitchell’s boyfriend left her, “three months preg­nant in an attic room with no mon­ey and win­ter com­ing on,” she lat­er wrote. She gave up the baby for adop­tion, and the deci­sion haunt­ed her for years. In 1982’s “Chi­nese Café,” she sang “Your kids are com­ing up straight / My child’s a stranger / I bore her / But I could not raise her.”

The fol­low­ing year, 1966, she mar­ried Amer­i­can folk singer Chuck Mitchell, took the name we know her by, and left Cana­da for the first time to make musi­cal his­to­ry. But first, she appeared on a Cana­di­an tele­vi­sion pro­gram called Let’s Sing Out, host­ed by folk singer Oscar Brand and record­ed on col­lege cam­pus­es across the coun­try between 1963 and 1967. The first ’65 episode at the top cap­tures Mitchell—then Joan Anderson—singing her unre­leased “Born to Take the High­way” at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Man­i­to­ba, a pre­scient song that “imag­ined cars and women dif­fer­ent­ly” than the typ­i­cal road songs of “pow­er­ful mus­cle cars” and “jacked-up mas­culin­i­ty and sex­u­al con­quest,” writes the blog Women in Rock.

“I was born to take the high­way / I was born to chase a dream,” she sings, cer­tain­ties that rever­ber­ate through her music and her life. Brand intro­duces Mitchell as an exam­ple of the move­ment in folk music toward the “self-writ­ten song.” She appears with him lat­er on that same broad­cast to sing “Blow Away the Morn­ing Dew” (a young Dave Van Ronk also appeared on the show). In sub­se­quent broad­casts in the com­pi­la­tion, we see “Joan Ander­son” more con­fi­dent­ly inhab­it the per­sona that would pro­pel her to fame first in Cana­da, then the States, then the world. She per­forms solo and with the Chap­ins, then, final­ly as Joni Mitchell, in two 1966 broad­casts. Find a track­list of each clas­sic per­for­mance below, and, if you haven’t already, take some time out to cel­e­brate Mitchel­l’s 75th by revis­it­ing the begin­nings of her career over fifty years ago.

 

Octo­ber 4, 1965 — With The Chap­ins and Dave Van Ronk

00:00 — Open­ing

01:22 — Born to Take the High­way

04:25 — Blow Away the Morn­ing Dew

 

Octo­ber 4, 1965 — With The Chap­ins and Patrick Sky

07:52 — Open­ing

09:05 — Favorite Col­or

12:00 — Me and My Uncle

 

Octo­ber 24, 1966 — With Bob Jason and Jim­my Drift­wood

15:08 — Open­ing

17:20 — Just Like Me

20:15 — Urge for Going

 

Octo­ber 24, 1966 — With Bob Jason and the Allen-Ward Trio

24:08 — Open­ing

25:05 — Night in the City

27:55 — Blue on Blue

30:30 — Let’s Get Togeth­er (Allen-Ward Trio)

33:37 — Prithee, Pret­ty Maid­en

 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

For Joni Mitchell’s 70th Birth­day, Watch Clas­sic Per­for­mances of “Both Sides Now” & “The Cir­cle Game” (1968)

Stream Joni Mitchell’s Com­plete Discog­ra­phy: A 17-Hour Playlist Mov­ing from Song to a Seag­ull (1968) to Shine (2007)

Joni Mitchell Sings an Aching­ly Pret­ty Ver­sion of “Both Sides Now” on the Mama Cass TV Show (1969)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Assassination of Jamal Khashoggi: A New Documentary

“It’s been six months since agents from Sau­di Ara­bia killed the Wash­ing­ton Post colum­nist. What has been done in the after­math?” In this doc­u­men­tary, The Assas­si­na­tion of Jamal Khashog­gi, The Wash­ing­ton Post exam­ines Khashoggi’s writ­ings, his killing inside the Sau­di Con­sulate in Istan­bul and the Trump administration’s response.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Do Ethicists Behave Any Better Than the Rest of Us?: Here’s What the Research Shows

We’ve heard about the lawyer­ing fool who has him- or her­self for a client. The old proverb does not mean to say that lawyers are espe­cial­ly scrupu­lous, only that the intri­ca­cies of the law are best left to the pro­fes­sion­als, and that a per­son­al inter­est in a case mud­dies the waters. That may go dou­ble or triple for doc­tor­ing, though doc­tors don’t have to bear the lawyer’s social stig­ma.

But can we rea­son­ably expect doc­tors to live health­i­er lives than the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion? What about oth­er pro­fes­sions that seem to entail a rig­or­ous code of con­duct? Many peo­ple have late­ly been dis­abused of the idea that cler­gy or police have any spe­cial claim to moral upstand­ing­ness (on the con­trary)….

What about ethi­cists? Should we have high expec­ta­tions of schol­ars in this sub­set of phi­los­o­phy? There are no clever say­ings, no genre of jokes at their expense, but there are a few aca­d­e­m­ic stud­ies ask­ing some ver­sion of the ques­tion: does study­ing ethics make a per­son more eth­i­cal?

You might sus­pect that it does not, if you’re a cynic—or the answer might sur­prise you!.… Put more pre­cise­ly, in a recent study—“The Moral Behav­ior of Ethics Pro­fes­sors,” pub­lished in Philo­soph­i­cal Psy­chol­o­gy this year—the “open but high­ly rel­e­vant ques­tion” under con­sid­er­a­tion is “the rela­tion between eth­i­cal reflec­tion and moral action.”

The paper’s authors, pro­fes­sor Johannes Wanger of Austria’s Uni­ver­si­ty of Graz and grad­u­ate stu­dent Philipp Schöneg­ger from the Uni­ver­si­ty of St. Andrews in Scot­land, sur­veyed 417 pro­fes­sors in three cat­e­gories, reports Olivia Gold­hill at Quartz: “ethi­cists (philoso­phers focused on ethics), philoso­phers focused on non-eth­i­cal sub­jects, and oth­er pro­fes­sors.” The paper sur­veyed only Ger­man-speak­ing schol­ars, repli­cat­ing the meth­ods of a 2013 study focused on Eng­lish-speak­ing pro­fes­sors.

The ques­tions asked touched on “a range of moral top­ics, includ­ing organ dona­tion, char­i­ta­ble giv­ing, and even how often they called their moth­er.” After assess­ing gen­er­al views on the sub­jects, the authors “then asked the pro­fes­sors about their own behav­ior in each cat­e­go­ry.” We must assume a base lev­el of hon­esty among the respon­dents in their self-report­ed answers.

The results: “the researchers found no sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence in moral behav­ior” between those who make it their busi­ness to study ethics and those who study oth­er things. For exam­ple, the major­i­ty of the aca­d­e­mics sur­veyed agreed that you should call your moth­er: at 75% of non-philoso­phers, 70% of non-ethi­cists, and 65% of ethi­cists (whose num­bers might be low­er here because oth­er issues could seem weight­i­er to them by com­par­i­son).

When it comes to pick­ing up the phone to call mom at least twice a month, the num­bers were con­sis­tent­ly high, but ethi­cists did not rate par­tic­u­lar­ly high­er at 87% ver­sus 81% of non-ethi­cist philoso­phers and 89% of oth­ers. The sub­ject of char­i­ta­ble giv­ing may war­rant more scruti­ny. Ethi­cists rec­om­mend­ed donat­ing an aver­age of 6.9% of one’s annu­al salary, where non-ethi­cists said 4.6%  was enough and oth­ers said 5.1%. The num­bers for all three groups, how­ev­er, hov­er around four and half per­cent.

One notable excep­tion to this trend: veg­e­tar­i­an­ism: “Ethi­cists were both more like­ly to say that it was immoral to eat meat, and more like­ly to be veg­e­tar­i­ans them­selves.” But on aver­age, schol­ars of eth­i­cal behav­ior do not seem to behave bet­ter than their peers. Should we be sur­prised at this? Eric Schwitzgebel, a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, River­side, and one of the authors of orig­i­nal, 2013 study, finds the results upset­ting.

Using the exam­ple of a hypo­thet­i­cal pro­fes­sor who makes the case for veg­e­tar­i­an­ism, then heads to the cafe­te­ria for a burg­er, Schwitzgebel refers to mod­ern-day philo­soph­i­cal ethics as “cheese­burg­er ethics.” Of his work on the behav­ior of ethi­cists with Stet­son University’s Joshua Rust, he writes, “nev­er once have we found ethi­cists as a whole behav­ing bet­ter than our com­par­i­son groups of oth­er pro­fes­sors…. Nonethe­less, ethi­cists do embrace more strin­gent moral norms on some issues.”

Should philoso­phers who hold such views aspire to be bet­ter? Can they be? Schöneg­ger and Wag­n­er frame the issue upfront in their recent ver­sion of the study (which you can read in full here), with a quote from the Ger­man philoso­pher Max Schel­er: “sign­posts do not walk in the direc­tion they point to.” Ethi­cists draw con­clu­sions about ideals of human behav­ior using the tools of phi­los­o­phy. They show the way but should not per­son­al­ly set them­selves up as exem­plars or role-mod­els. As one high-pro­file case of a very bad­ly-behaved ethi­cist sug­gests, this might not do the pro­fes­sion any favors.

Schwitzgebel is not con­tent with this answer. The prob­lem, he writes at Aeon, may be pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion itself, impos­ing an unnat­ur­al dis­tance between word and deed. “I’d be sus­pi­cious of any 21st-cen­tu­ry philoso­pher who offered up her- or him­self as a mod­el of wise liv­ing,” he writes, “This is no longer what it is to be a philosopher—and those who regard them­selves as wise are in any case almost always mis­tak­en. Still, I think, the ancient philoso­phers got some­thing right that the cheese­burg­er ethi­cist gets wrong.”

The “some­thing wrong” is a lais­sez-faire com­fort with things as they are. Leav­ing ethics to the realm of the­o­ry takes away a sense of moral urgency. “A full-bod­ied under­stand­ing of ethics requires some liv­ing,” Schwitzgebel writes. It might be eas­i­er for philoso­phers to avoid aim­ing for bet­ter behav­ior, he implies, when they are only required, and pro­fes­sion­al­ly reward­ed, just to think about it.

via Quartz

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Can I Know Right From Wrong? Watch Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions on Ethics Nar­rat­ed by Har­ry Shear­er

Oxford’s Free Course A Romp Through Ethics for Com­plete Begin­ners Will Teach You Right from Wrong

The Hobo Eth­i­cal Code of 1889: 15 Rules for Liv­ing a Self-Reliant, Hon­est & Com­pas­sion­ate Life

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Modern Corporate Logos Reimagined in a Classic Bauhaus Style: Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Bauhaus Movement Today

Image by Vladimir Nikolic

Amer­i­can chil­dren, a study found a few years ago, rec­og­nize over 1,000 cor­po­rate logos but almost no plants. To some it was a damn­ing indict­ment of the mod­ern world; to oth­ers it was noth­ing more than a descrip­tion of the mod­ern world (in the 21st cen­tu­ry, after all, which skill is more help in find­ing food?); and to a few it was an oppor­tu­ni­ty to pro­claim that, for the sake of the chil­dren, the mod­ern world could use some bet­ter cor­po­rate logos.

Image by dell­fi

The artists, archi­tects, and design­ers of the Bauhaus, the mod­ernist art-school-turned-move­ment with its ori­gins in Weimar Ger­many, might well have agreed. Right from the Bauhaus’ foun­da­tion in 1919, its mem­bers worked on shap­ing the aes­thet­ics of the future.

Now, for the school’s 100th anniver­sary (today!), 99designs has com­mis­sioned revi­sions of cur­rent cor­po­rate logos in the Bauhaus style. “It out­last­ed a century’s worth of com­pet­ing styles,” writes 99designs’ Matt Ellis, “sur­vived the ini­tial crit­i­cisms from tra­di­tion­al­ists, and although the Nazis shut down the insti­tu­tion in 1933, the Bauhaus move­ment itself lives on to this day.”

Image by Ars­De­signs

Ellis goes on to quote the still-inspir­ing words of Bauhaus founder Wal­ter Gropius: “The artist is a height­ened man­i­fes­ta­tion of the crafts­man. Let us form… a new guild of crafts­men with­out the class divi­sions that set out to raise an arro­gant bar­ri­er between crafts­men and artists! Let us togeth­er cre­ate the new build­ing of the future which will be all in one: archi­tec­ture and sculp­ture and paint­ing.” This project put up the five pil­lars of the Bauhaus style: “form fol­lows func­tion,” “min­i­mal­ism,” “rev­o­lu­tion­ary typog­ra­phy,” “pas­sion for geom­e­try,” and “pri­ma­ry col­ors.”

Image by dnk

The reimag­ined cor­po­rate logos made for the cen­te­nary of the Bauhaus stand on all those pil­lars, turn­ing the emblems of prod­ucts and ser­vices that many of us con­sume and use every day — or per­haps, as we scroll through Insta­gram on our iPhones or Android devices at Star­bucks in our Adi­das­es, all at the same time — into designs that merge the cut­ting-edge aes­thet­ics of inter­war Europe with those of the thor­ough­ly glob­al­ized 2010s.

Image by Pono­marevD­mit­ry

Whether a pure Bauhaus revival will result in the actu­al adop­tion of logos like these remains to be seen, but in a way, the exer­cise sim­ply dou­bles down on an influ­ence that already runs deep. As Art­sy’s Kelsey Ables puts it, “It is a tes­ta­ment to the long­stand­ing influ­ence of Bauhau­sian min­i­mal­ist ideals that the select­ed logos were already stream­lined to begin with; many of the design­ers who reimag­ined ‘Bauhaus style’ logos had to add visu­al ele­ments. Per­haps Google and its brethren are more Bauhaus than the Bauhaus itself.”

Image by Ars­De­signs

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Bauhaus World, a Free Doc­u­men­tary That Cel­e­brates the 100th Anniver­sary of Germany’s Leg­endary Art, Archi­tec­ture & Design School

Down­load Orig­i­nal Bauhaus Books & Jour­nals for Free: A Dig­i­tal Cel­e­bra­tion of the Found­ing of the Bauhaus School 100 Years Ago

How the Rad­i­cal Build­ings of the Bauhaus Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Archi­tec­ture: A Short Intro­duc­tion

An Oral His­to­ry of the Bauhaus: Hear Rare Inter­views (in Eng­lish) with Wal­ter Gropius, Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe & More

32,000+ Bauhaus Art Objects Made Avail­able Online by Har­vard Muse­um Web­site

The Female Pio­neers of the Bauhaus Art Move­ment: Dis­cov­er Gertrud Arndt, Mar­i­anne Brandt, Anni Albers & Oth­er For­got­ten Inno­va­tors

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.