p. 267 (Putnam and Campbell) "By many different measures, religiously observant Americans are better neighbors and better citizens than secular Americans - they are more generous with their time and money, especially in helping the needy, and they are more active in community life."
p. 267 Putnam and Campbell reject the New Atheist emphasis on belief and reach a conclusion straight out of Durkheim: "It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing."
p. 292 For example, on a small island or in a small town, you typically don't need to lock your bicycle, but in a big city in the same country, if you only lock the frame, your wheels may get stolen. Being small, isolated, or morally homogeneous are examples of environmental conditions that increase the moral capital of a community. That doesn't mean that small islands and small towns are better places to live overall - the diversity and crowding of big cities makes them more creative and interesting places for many people - but that's the trade-off. (Whether you'd trade away some moral capital to gain some diversity and creativity will depend in part on your brain's settings on traits such as openness to experience and threat sensitivity, and this is part of the reason why cities are usually so much more liberal than the countryside.)
p. 294 Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you're asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire, and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism - which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity - is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.
p. 294 (Bertrand Russell) "It is clear that each party to this dispute - as to all that persist through long periods of time - is partly right and partly wrong. Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible.
p. 305 I find it ironic that liberals generally embrace Darwin and reject "intelligent design" as the explanation for design and adaptation in the natural world, but they don't embrace Adam Smith as the explanation for design and adaptation in the economic world. They sometimes prefer the "intelligent design" of socialist economies, which often ends in disaster from a utilitarian point of view.
p. 317 If you bring one thing home from this last part of the trip, may I suggest that it be the image of a small bump on the back of our heads - the hive switch, just under the skin, waiting to be turned on. We've been told for fifty years now that human beings are fundamentally selfish. We're assaulted by reality TV programs showing people at their worst. Some people actually believe that a woman should shout "fire" if she's being raped, on the grounds that everyone is so selfish that they won't even come out to investigate unless they fear for their own lives. It's not true. We may spend most of our waking hours advancing our own interests, but we all have the capacity to transcend self-interest and become simply a part of a whole. It's not just a capacity; it's the portal to many of life's most cherished experiences.
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