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Comment by mixmax | Hacker News Reader

This is a great article, and as a European I can relate to all of his points. Here are some comments from the other side of the pond; they're of course my personal opinion but I think they're somewhat representative of the European view.

I don’t view the USA as the center of the world - i see America as an overreaching empire that has had it's heyday. If you take a historical perspective this is how many empires fall. They overreach by trying to annex large parts of the world, spend all of their resources doing so and eventually implode. The British and Roman empire are good examples.

I stopped calling myself a Christian - the fact that many Americans are so religious is just utterly strange, and somewhat frightening. If the Danish prime minister started confessing her belief in a god she'd be laughed out of the room.

I occasionally felt embarrassed of America - I have a mixed relation with America. On the one hand it's a great country with amazing and open people that will gladly help a stranger, and has an amazing work ethic. On the other hand I have a problem with Americans not knowing or caring about how the rest of the world functions, how Americans define themselves in terms of their job, and their aggressiveness on the Geopolitical arena.

I believe America’s time as #1 super-power will come to an end within my lifetime - I think this is already happening.

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Opening Note: Personal views- Practicing Jewish most of my upbringing, now agnostic by choice

"If the Danish prime minister started confessing her belief in a god she'd be laughed out of the room."

As an 18 year old American, active in American politics (I've done minor campaigning, father is a US History teacher), this is utterly strange. A politician that was not some denomination of Christianity would be, most likely, completely unable to win a Presidential election. And that's even if they were a religion the Christian majority feels close to, such as Jewish. If they were Muslim, or so help them atheist, they would stand no chance at the White House.

I recently had a friend of 6 years from the UK come and visit for two weeks, and we had a number of discussions on cultural differences. When he mentioned that the majority of people in the UK were not religious, I was dumbfounded. I (foolishly) thought it was everywhere as it is here. In my community at least, to openly question the existence of a God is a social faux pas. I have an interesting perspective having been on both sides of the coin, but in the end it scares me as much as it scares you. The concept of God abounds in our Pledge of Allegiance, in our graduation ceremonies, in our political speeches--it is almost universally accepted and above question.

> The concept of God abounds in our Pledge of Allegiance, in our graduation ceremonies, in our political speeches--it is almost universally accepted and above question.

You probably know this already, but Yahweh's prominence on the coinage and in the Pledge of Allegiance is a relatively recent phenomenon. It wasn't until 1908 that 'In God We Trust' was mandated on the coinage, and 'under God' wasn't inserted into the Pledge until 1954, as part of a wider anti-communist reaction. The supposed areligiosity of the Founders is often overstated by modern-day atheists with an axe to grind. However, while you'd be hard pressed to find a more pompous and puritanical Christian than the likes of John Adams, even he was strongly supportive of the separation of church and state: "Nothing is more dreaded than the national government meddling with religion."

Yeah, I did (about the 'under God' in the pledge to disassociate ourselves from communists, not about the 'In God We Trust' on coinage actually) thanks to my father really, but that's an excellent point to bring up. Especially when you consider that most people /do not/ know that, and would be shocked or disbelieving if you told it to them.

As to the Founders, whether or not they were religious, the abuse of their legends has gotten old many times already. Many political factions (though the Tea Party are the worst culprits) have misinterpreted, misrepresented, and straight up lied (or worse, not actually known) about their history and beliefs, and used this confusion as a platform for their opinions. It's disgusting.

>"Nothing is more dreaded than the national government meddling with religion."

Except perhaps religion meddling with the national government?

The specter still haunting many Americans in those days was the Anglican Church, a monarchical organ in a religious fascia. The aggressive meddling of the Roman Church in national affairs had largely abated and was a non-issue in the nascent United States. His emphasis must be understood in that context.

The /concept/ of God runs through a lot of European institutions too (for instance, the UK Queen is the head of the Church of England - no separation of church and state). However, in the US, the line gets blurred when people start to talk about /actual/ God.

The idea that someone can claim some benefit via allegiance to actual God in a political setting is pretty scary, IMHO.

Indeed. I remember recently when Asatru was recognized as a legitimate religion in Denmark. I remember thinking "Wow, religions need government approval in Denmark?"

I assume that anybody can invent their own religion in Denmark. Getting recognized by the state probably grants the religion some special privileges. i.e. No Taxes

In many countries it also has benefits like being able to perform legally valid weddings....

As an interesting aside, there's a strong negative correlation between GDP per capita and religion; the richer a country is the less religious it is. America is the exception that sticks out like a sore thumb on a graph.

Really? That's actually very interesting, if you have source material for that I'd love to see it. Though I wonder if it's biased by very religious middle eastern states lacking in natural resources other than oil (which benefits a very small group).

Here's a graph: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/137/religion-god-theology/...

Looking at it I noticed that I'm from one of the least religious countries in the world (Denmark).

I think GDP might be a proxy for education here. A graph of educational standards vs religion might be even more revealing

You also have to consider that there is a possible correlation between being poor and being religious. As bad as that may sound, religion brings hope to a lot of people who do not have many other sources of it.

But Karl, surely the masses can afford genuine opiates now that we have boosted the supply so effectively ?

And how might that graph look if you take each state in the union as a sovereign entity and map it accordingly? It might actually make it fall in line with the trend, as I think the fact that these disjointed states are taken as a group is what's making the USA stick out like a sore thumb.

Rare to find actively religious young people on the West Coast (at least Bay Area / Portland)

In your social circles, at least.

There seems to be a strong tendency to assume that erveyone is like the speaker. It's especially funny when friends of mine mention something like that (everyone is non-religious everyone is super liberal) not yet realizing that I don't fit the bill :-) Stanford actually has very strong religious student groups.

Very much not true if my experiences of living in Berkeley in the 90's are anything to go by (possibly my definition of "rare" is different since I'm from the UK).

I suspect it depends on who you hang out with :-)

You might find Prof. Joseph Tainter's assessment of Rome interesting. he has a very different view of what caused the Roman collapse.

In his view, the problem was that Rome based their economy on conquest and pillage. As they'd conquer places, theyd bring back gold into their economy and this would allow them to lower or eliminate taxes. During this time of expansion they did well, and the complexity of their culture increased quite a bit, but in the end, this phase had to come to an end, and Rome was unable to sustain their economy internally. Their attempts to do so involved additional complexity and a great deal of additional attempts to regulate their way out including quantitative easing of their currency.

In the end, the problems were too great and the society collapsed from within, through the very process by which they expanded (greater and greater complexity of society).

One interesting thing I would add that Herwig Wolfram suggests is that the Western Empire was particularly poorly suited because of the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, which limited the tax base and made taxes harder to collect.

The Byzantine Empire listed much longer but a couple hundred years after the Roman Empire fell, they too experienced a massive simplification when faced with the Arab invasions. They did so in a more controlled way however and survived but in doing so, Tainter suggests, transitioned from a Roman society to a medieval one.

> i see America as an overreaching empire that has had it's heyday

And yet most of us are right now using computers designed in America, with an operating system written in America, posting on an American website. How is the USA not the centre of the world? From jeans to Katy Perry, from Google to McDonald's -- Americans totally dominated both the culture and the business. If I turn on the tv right now, I will have to skip through five channels before I hit a non-American production.

> the fact that many Americans are so religious is just utterly strange, and somewhat frightening

Why? Religious people commit less crime, get and stay married more, use less illegal drugs, donate and volunteer more... It would make more sense to fear people becoming less religious.

I'm sure the author didn't mean that, that his observations are an honest account of his journey but I can't help to notice that articles like this strike this weird SWPL chord "I'm from America but I'm not like the rest of those simpletons" (that's a mild version) and comments to them tend to be real oikophobia festivals.

No, I'm not an American and don't live in the States (otherwise the whole tv exercise would be pointless).

> Why? Religious people commit less crime, get and stay married more, use less illegal drugs, donate and volunteer more... It would make more sense to fear people becoming less religious.

Are you just playing devils advocate (no pun intended)? Because there seems to be a rather large creationism, abstinence only sex education, and homophobia shaped blindspot in your view. There's plenty of ostesnibly legitimate stuff that religion does to damage society without needing to do anything outright illegal (but if you need illegal, then we need only look as far as systemic child abuse in the Catholic Church). I suspect that when the OP talks about being frightened, this is the kind of thing he's thinking of. Certainly this is some of the stuff that frightens me.

Of course this is not to say that religion is all bad. I know one couple, devout members of a Christian sect, lovely people and I have great respect for them. Why? Because they walk their talk and they don't feel a need to proselytize all within earshot, trying to force others to live by the same rules they do. I assume they must realise at some level that they have no right to make such a demand. I wish more religious people were like them.

I doubt that was the point the OP tried to make about being frightened by religious people. If someone can believe something without proof that was written down 2000 years ago then they can believe almost anything. That's scary to someone who isn't religious. It's just completely alien.

Not trying to step on any toes.

I agree that I probably shouldn't be projecting assumptions onto people I don't know.

For me at any rate, as a person who does not consider themselves religious in any conventional sense, I don't find the fact that someone believes something without proof to be frightening at all, in and of itself. The problem only comes when someone else uses those beliefs as the basis to impinge on my own life/liberties or the life/liberties of others who do not share their belief.

> Religious people commit less crime, get and stay married more, use less illegal drugs, donate and volunteer more... It would make more sense to fear people becoming less religious.

Citation please.

"A 2001 review of studies on this topic found "The existing evidence surrounding the effect of religion on crime is varied, contested, and inconclusive, and currently no persuasive answer exists as to the empirical relationship between religion and crime." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality_and_religion

The Nordic countries regularly feature at the top of the 'Best places to live' and 'most atheistic countries' lists. Correlation doesn't imply causation, but that should be enough to at least question your assertion.

Doubling in with additional information relevant to discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4187478

> Citation please.

I can't make a proper citation from home but if you're really interested those guys http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Crime-Correlates-Lee-Ellis/dp... have over a 100 studies on religious people being less criminal, and a handful on religious regions seeing less crime.

Also, "varied and contested" can describe all evidence ever gathered in social sciences.

the fact that many Americans are so religious is just utterly strange, and somewhat frightening Why?

Speaking as somebody from the UK I can guess one reason. In this country, and the other European countries I've visited, religious views are generally part of people's private, rather than public, lives. I no idea of the religious views of most of my friends. It's not part of the public persona of whether somebody is "good" or not. Their actions define that.

So in this context the only people who are public and outspoken in their religious views tend to be the extreme ends of the religious spectrum. Either in viewpoint (the gays are evil nutjobs) or because their religion encourages them to get out there and convert folk.

These tend to be folk that you don't want to hang out with - whether you are religious or not.

It one of those odd internal dials that I have to turn in my mental model when I visit the US - that people within the "normal" range of religious views will come up to you and talk religion.

Religious people commit less crime, get and stay married more, use less illegal drugs, donate and volunteer more

References? By that logic more secular countries and areas would have higher crime/drug rates and lower volunteer rates... and the opposite seems to be true if anything. In the US anyway the percentage of atheists in prison is way lower than the percentage in the general population.. but maybe that meets atheists tend to be smarter criminals :-)

I'm writing this on a computer produced in China, running an operating systeem developed by a Finn, delivered to you via the world wide web which comes from CERN.

Unless you are one of the 1% or so of the world who uses Opera, your browser is produced by an American organization.

As is the most important and expensive chip inside your China-produced computer.

And CERN had very little to do with the WWW; more on that at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4172572

> a computer produced in China

Is it an American company that made it? Yeah it could have been produced in China because labor there is cheaper than in California. Next year it could be produced in Vietnam.

> running an operating systeem developed by a Finn

Last I checked he is an American citizen, isn't he? So +1 for America then? Would you agree? If you go by your logic, then nothing from America is from America, because most people could easily trace their ancestry to one of the ships that came America at some point.

> delivered to you via the world wide web which comes from CERN.

Ok, we can argue about the first two. This one is just silly.

> Is it an American company that made it?

No shortage of non-American computer and personal electronics manufacturers I can think of.

> Last I checked he is an American citizen, isn't he?

He wasn't for 95% of his life...

Yeah, and even the Finn moved to the States.

Why? Religious people commit less crime, get and stay married more, use less illegal drugs, donate and volunteer more... It would make more sense to fear people becoming less religious.

Source?

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/05/what-use-far-truth.htm...

For crime see my comment below (or above, remains to be seen).

Research in the other direction:

http://www.atheismresource.com/2010/atheist-dont-commit-as-m...

http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.pdf

http://seattle.cbslocal.com/2012/06/22/study-finds-people-wh...

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

I'm from Europe and even I think this was so badly argued that I doubt your intellectual honesty here.

Afaik about american statistics, the poorer, lower class groups, are more religious -- e.g. "white trash", latinos and black ghetto cultures. So there is no overrepresentation of those, e.g. blacks, in jail...?

Honestly I think the bigger concern is a long erosion, not a collapse.

After WWII, the US had an economy so large we consumed half the oil that was consumed in the world. Our economy has grown since then but the rest of the world has too. We are down to half our percentage of energy use, and this is a general proxy for economic activity. So we are growing but developing nations are growing faster. Additionally we re incredibly dependent on oil to the extent that it would be a fair summary to say that the main job of the US armed forces is to protect international oil supply.

So the US isn't about to drastically collapse, but the role in the world is declining and will continue to decline. I think within my lifetime we will see the world shift from a unipolar model with the US as the sole superpower, to a world dominated by several major world powers.

If the USA was ever an overreaching empire, it was very reluctantly. OK, we picked some fights and managed to take a fair chunk of our own continent, but we were also isolationist to a fault until the mid-20th century. It was the Europeans who managed to rope us into both of their "world wars"--and in 1945, when you're looking at the whole of Europe spent and in ruins, and Joseph Stalin as the last dictator standing--well, would you really rather we just went home and forgot about you at that point?

People who say the US was imperialistic seem to forget that we didn't, for example, send tanks into France when they wanted to pull out of NATO, which is more than you can say about the other superpower. The British empire stationed troops and bureaucrats all over the world where they weren't wanted. They directly ruled over civilizations larger and more ancient than their own. Aside from the Philippines (whom we granted independence in 1946) and Hawaii and Puerto Rico (who both want to stay with us), we didn't really do that. It starts getting far more abstract when you talk about American imperialism via Coca-Cola and blue jeans.

Imagine an America that was a true Empire, in the Roman fashion. An America with the additional 51st state of Germany, 52nd of South Korea, 53rd of Cuba, 54th of the Philippines and 55th of Japan? Hell, why stop there? An American claim to France would have been just as strong as a Roman claim to Egypt (namely, America claims it, who disagrees?), let's seize Canada, stop paying for oil to the House of Saud, figure out what we're going to do with our territories of Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan. America isn't a true empire, but it has some flavors of one.

The U.S. is a weird sort of quasi-empire with military outposts and large economic interests all over the world, but in territories that aren't their own and with the notion that the countries we inhabit are not part of the U.S. in any way shape or form. Sort of like vassal states, but without all the "pay us your tribute or we'll invade and burn your cities down" that modern America is terribly uncomfortable with.

It's an interesting academic exercise to pick apart where the U.S. is and isn't like an Empire because it's not that simple.

Hey, there's a monument right on Montgomery & Market in San Francisco celebrating California's achieving statehood in 1850. It reads: "The Unity of Our Empire Hangs on the Decision of This Day".

And here's a graphic from 1898 which proudly shows the US eagle dominating an entire side of the globe, from the Philippines to Puerto Rico.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:10kMiles.JPG

I know you mentioned the Phillipines and Puerto Rico already, but what's striking is that you somehow think it doesn't count as a real empire. But there's no inherent reason why the USA should have such a large sphere of influence, other than it can. There's not even any inherent reason why it had to dominate all the land west of the original colonies, wresting it not only from native Americans but other colonial powers.

For most of its history the USA was proud to say it was building an empire and dominating other nations (for their own good, of course!). I'm not sure when this propaganda effort started that there is no American empire -- perhaps the US wanted to assert it was more pro-local-sovereignty than other competing empires, like the USSR.

Along with that adventure in Hawaii, the Spanish-American War was our one shot at European-style imperialism. Rudyard Kipling even wrote us a poem about it at the time. But it didn't work out and we gave the Philippines back to its own people by 1946. (Puerto Rico isn't independent because they don't really want to be, same as Hawaii.)

The continental US west of the original colonies was an interesting case. We only got the bulk of it because Napoleon put the entire Louisiana Territory on fire sale--he wanted to cut his losses in America after losing Haiti and needed the money to try and conquer Europe. We only really wanted the Mississippi River delta to begin with. We did kind of pick a fight with Mexico, but we didn't conquer the whole country, and even paid for the parts we took. Oregon was a disputed claim and we split it down the middle with the British. And Alaska we paid for fair and square. As for the American Indians, you have a point there but frankly smallpox had already depopulated the continent and it was practically empty. If it wasn't, I don't think anyone would have been able to conquer America from the American Indians--nor would any colonial power.

When people call the US an empire, they usually aren't thinking about the Spanish-American War. They're thinking about all the countries we station troops in (most of them asked us to), or all the Coca-Cola we sell (which the world voluntarily buys). We have a big sphere of influence because not too long ago, the world needed us to. We were the only democratic allied power left largely untouched by WWII, and our "imperialism" at the time consisted largely of a Marshall Plan designed to rebuild a continent that destroyed itself twice over, both times somehow roping us into the action.

Can you honestly think of a country the US has dominated against its will since the Philippines? You might be able to make a case for South Vietnam, and you could name maybe a dozen countries we covertly subverted, but outright domination? We didn't hold a candle to the Soviets.

Can you honestly think of a country the US has dominated against its will since the Philippines?

There are many countries where the US has toppled one government for another, or propped up a leader the populace didn't like.

That's where most of the criticism comes from.

Behind the scenes, sure. That's not dominating a country against its will, it's manipulation. That's why we propped up dictators in the first place--in most cases, a non-communist dictator was the only feasible alternative to a communist dictator. When we did dominate a country outright, we taught them baseball and democracy, e.g. Japan (which doesn't count because first, they started a war against us and lost, and second, we let them go as soon as we feasibly could).

You realize that's pretty much how the Soviets would describe their own interventions in other countries?

Oh yeah, we helped set up a leader friendly to the cause of righteousness, supplied him with advisors, gave him weapons or gave him access to buy them, ensured that he was friendly to exporting the mineral/oil/food wealth of his country via our companies and institutions, shared intelligence about his adversaries, installed a military base and ensured we had the right to conduct our wars using his territory.... but it's not like we took over the country! We are the friends of the common people!

I've been an out American for 7 years now, first two in Switzerland, the last 5 in China. I still think America has a lot going for it. Switzerland is efficient and fair, but something is missing because of restrained competition and protectionism. China is the exact opposite, and its hard to believe the system works at all. For whatever troubles America has, our system still works and is rather effective; no one is really coddled and you have to work hard, but social mobility is still better in the US than anywhere else.

There are people ignorant about the world in any country, I'm not sure why we always single out home bound Americans for being apathetic to world events. There is plenty of that to go around, even in Europe where people tend to travel more to other countries, but especially in China and even in Japan where people have many misconceptions about the rest of the world.

There are no more superpowers, not when IEDs are easy enough to procure by anyone.

Most Americans believe in the provincial caricatures of the other cultural regions of the US with which they have no experience. It is not just other countries, Americans are like that in their own country. And in fairness, the US is a large, populous country with diverse regional histories. Most Americans would probably be very surprised to learn that the "sagebrush culture" (red) states are the least religious or that the western mountain states are the second most urban outside the NYC area.

There is a considerable amount of cultural distance between, say, one of the Cascadia cities (like Seattle), and Mississippi, and Boston, more so than you often find between different European countries. What deceives people is that Americans nominally all speak the same language despite the stark cultural and historical differences between regions.

Or how Idaho is an algmation of LDS teetotalers, survivalist libertarians, and extremely liberal hippies! But even the different between Seattle and Spokane (Washington's first and second largest urban areas) is pretty extreme.

My dad worked in nuclear, so I moved around a lot when I was a kid: Tricities Washington (sagebrush country), Toledo Ohio, Somewhere (Pennsville) New Jersey on the tristate border, Vicksburg Mississippi, and finally back to the PNW (Seattle). Actually, many Americans are fairly mobile, much more so than their European counterparts. Its not unusual to meet others like me who moved around a lot as kids (and are still moving, just not in the states anymore).

General American ignorance is quite a myth, though I'm sure their are many stationary Americans, there are just as many Americans who've lived everywhere.

Social mobility is actually very low in the US in comparison with other developed countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility#Country_compari...

I'm mixed about this.

People are fairly comfortable in most developed countries, they are in some way too stable: oppurtunities are provided, for sure, but the urge for mobility is not as strong as in the states. The states is very different, however: oppurtunities are not as numerous (economically segrated educational system), but the drive is much stronger to take them when presented because it sucks at the bottom.

"There are no more superpowers, not when IEDs are easy enough to procure by anyone."

I think this is a myth, and potentially a very dangerous one.

Asymmetric warfare only works when the side with greater symmetric power holds back due to other (political) concerns. If the US used full power in a total-war unrestrained sense, IEDs would be wholly irrelevant to the outcome. That's true even in a war using"just" unrestrained conventional weapons.

The lessons from Viet Nam, Iraq, Somalia, etc. are valuable for both sides in situations where there is no political will for unrestrained power, but don't make the mistake of believing that unrestrained power is forever off the table.

To me, at least, it seems like making that mistake in thought, on either side, virtually guarantees that it will some day come right back on the table, and with a vengeance.

See e.g. the second Chechnya war for a non-US example without much media coverage. The Russian army seems to have used artillery against cities, Syria/Hezbollah style.

An interesting and relatively recent example of this is that ex-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair didnt publicly announce his intention of converting to Catholicism until he left office.

That US presidents have to lie and say that the talk to God all the time and follow his advice - and European national leaders have to lie and say that they don't is perhaps the main cultural difference

( with the possible exception of the Pope )

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