I gave a talk recently to a chapter of the American Humanist Association. The audience was smaller than I expected and old; it felt to me like the remnant of a dying culture. Talking with members afterwards, they confirmed my guess that they found it hard to get young members. Many of the young were atheists, few inclined to join their organization.
I think insurance is one of the things that raises the cost of SCA activities and makes it more difficult to find sites, but doesn't explain the aging pattern.
I went to a humanist meeting once. It featured a pseudoscientific presentation on why a very specific learning disability made people functionally incapable of being truly atheistic (I went with somebody who had that learning disability, who was an atheist, and who was very-not-amused). The only other thing I remember was an older gentleman, who was dying, who asked if anybody had any advice on dealing with death as an atheist. (I had advice, but opted not to give it; it'd be like somebody who has never had alcohol trying to counsel an alcoholic on how to overcome alcoholism. I'm not there. Probably never will be, as my curiosity about whether or not quantum immortality is valid is pretty strong, and I can't be disappointed by the answer.)
Also the two of us were the youngest by twenty years.
This was when the internet was still mostly "email", mind; the few subcultures on the internet at the time were quite unusual.
So I don't think the question is what happened to the humanist community today. The question is what happened to the humanist community around 1980, when, apparently, they stopped getting any new members. And, personally, I think the answer is fairly obvious. An increasingly mobile society. I've observed a similar phenomenon with a number of other social groups; Rotary Clubs, Loyal Order of the Moose, the Masonic Order of the Temple. All seem to have suffered greatly over a forty year span, which has recently, seemingly, finally ended.
See also the Hash House Harriers. There are still some kennels that have lots of younger members (San Diego area for example) but most are aging. Its probably true that some of the reason for the hash decline is related to the fact that most places now frown (to put it mildly) on drunken driving and, for that matter, drunken shenanigans in public, but I don't think that's the only reason.
It seems to me that the general culture of "safetyism" that has spread across the world over the last quarter century or so has a lot to do with it. I suspect that's likely a contributing factor to the SCA decline too. I know that various hashes had to significantly alter their generally disorganized organizations to be allowed to buy the government mandated insurance that any group sporting event/organization with more than some trivial number of members required (this was the case I know in France, it may be the case elsewhere). This mandatory insurance this is symptomatic of a general societal trend to reduce risk and I think that hurts the more anarchic sorts of organization that explicitly embrace risky activities and/or rule bending and a "don't get caught" mindset. It is also related to the "safe spaces/triggering speech" sorts of thing that young people are now exposed too in schools and universities. It does seem to me that in general fewer young people today are willing to step out of the general mainstream than they used to when I was growing up (and when you were a decade or three before me)
I'm reminded of a series of posts last year about the history of _World of Warcraft_ https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/riq4fq/games_world_of_warcraft_part_1_beta_and_vanilla/ - which was incredibly huge back in the 2000s, and is still around and has a large playerbase, and so is *old*, as games go, and ancient as far as *persistent* game worlds go. What comes through clearly is that we don't know how to create persistent game worlds which are alive and satisfying for many players over a long time. The joy of a persistent game world is that stuff builds up and players progress in power and events happen, but that is also its curse: there's built in inflation, power creep problems, old events hang around and must be maintained, old players must be balanced against accessibility to new players... Most games simply avoid all this by not being persistent, and resetting; WoW can't, and demonstrates that there's no clear solutions to any of these. You can't just wave your wand and reset the world to the beginning to create green fields for newbies, because that will justifiably piss off all the experienced players who have been there for literally decades.
Our other main subculture (aside from the SCA) is Early Music. Which has very much the same greying problem: there are young aspiring professionals, but most of the serious amateurs we run into at concerts or workshops are over 60.
In part this is because the hobby often falls by the wayside during child-rearing years, and people come back to it as empty-nesters or retirees. But that should have been the case forty years ago too, yet there were a lot more young and (I think) middle-aged people in it then. Why haven't college-age people continued joining the hobby?
A possible explanation in the case of the SCA is that today's college students are raised to be afraid of almost everything, including anything "weird". At least, that's the sense a lot of us old fogeys get; I don't know whether there's _objective evidence_ that today's college students are more risk-averse or conventional than those of previous generations. Anyway, once a "weird" group like the SCA loses its foothold on a college campus, it's extremely difficult to reestablish it. Early music doesn't have the same problem, since it has a natural home in an academic department.
"One reason to participate in a hobby is to find a mate", I hate this comment though I know it's true. As a hobbyist it genuinely annoys me how many people in the group are more interested in each other than the hobby itself hence bring the level of the group down as they won't commit the time and money to gain expertise in the hobby skillset itself. I.e. everything becomes a dating group and then dies because the genuine hobbyist are eventually forced out and have to find another hobby.
Last group I had to exit was a mountain hiking group that eventually had to dissolve because of the number of women that showed up in heels, complained the hikes were too technical, and then the guys trying to "save them" would vote future hikes less hard to appease them until we were basically doing park walks on sidewalks. Seen something similar with a technical diving group I was in. It's the main reasons most groups on meetup.com fail as well, people, often founders, "meet people".
Genuinely a giant believer nowadays in banning women and homosexuals from hobby groups; they can start their own dating groups and quit opportunistically undermining others in bad faith. I get relationships happen, that doesn't excuse showing up to a mountain hike in heels.
Another explanation - related to your "only game in town" explanation -- is the internet. It is now possible to find people all over the world with similar interests, and in fact much narrower interests. 30 years ago, a woodworker might join a local woodworking club whose members did all sorts of woodworking. But now, a woodworker can find a much more specialized group online of segmented-bowl turners, or slab-table builders. As Adam Smith noted, the division of labor is limited by the extend of the market, and we now have a much greater online "market" and thus much greater specialization.
There is a benefit to real in-person interactions, but it is partially offset by the benefits of finding people who are interested in exactly the type of activity your are interested in. The local woodturner might not care to listen to all the boring talk about dovetail joints and router lifts -- he just wants to talk about lathe tools. But 30 years ago, that might have been the price he paid to find a few other wood turners, but now they are available online. At the margins, fewer people will join in-person groups, and those people will disproportionately be younger people.
The good news for in-person groups is that the introduction of the internet is a one-time change. So if this explanation is correct, the situation should stabilize at lower levels rather than being an on-going decline.
I think insurance is one of the things that raises the cost of SCA activities and makes it more difficult to find sites, but doesn't explain the aging pattern.
I went to a humanist meeting once. It featured a pseudoscientific presentation on why a very specific learning disability made people functionally incapable of being truly atheistic (I went with somebody who had that learning disability, who was an atheist, and who was very-not-amused). The only other thing I remember was an older gentleman, who was dying, who asked if anybody had any advice on dealing with death as an atheist. (I had advice, but opted not to give it; it'd be like somebody who has never had alcohol trying to counsel an alcoholic on how to overcome alcoholism. I'm not there. Probably never will be, as my curiosity about whether or not quantum immortality is valid is pretty strong, and I can't be disappointed by the answer.)
Also the two of us were the youngest by twenty years.
This was when the internet was still mostly "email", mind; the few subcultures on the internet at the time were quite unusual.
So I don't think the question is what happened to the humanist community today. The question is what happened to the humanist community around 1980, when, apparently, they stopped getting any new members. And, personally, I think the answer is fairly obvious. An increasingly mobile society. I've observed a similar phenomenon with a number of other social groups; Rotary Clubs, Loyal Order of the Moose, the Masonic Order of the Temple. All seem to have suffered greatly over a forty year span, which has recently, seemingly, finally ended.
See also the Hash House Harriers. There are still some kennels that have lots of younger members (San Diego area for example) but most are aging. Its probably true that some of the reason for the hash decline is related to the fact that most places now frown (to put it mildly) on drunken driving and, for that matter, drunken shenanigans in public, but I don't think that's the only reason.
It seems to me that the general culture of "safetyism" that has spread across the world over the last quarter century or so has a lot to do with it. I suspect that's likely a contributing factor to the SCA decline too. I know that various hashes had to significantly alter their generally disorganized organizations to be allowed to buy the government mandated insurance that any group sporting event/organization with more than some trivial number of members required (this was the case I know in France, it may be the case elsewhere). This mandatory insurance this is symptomatic of a general societal trend to reduce risk and I think that hurts the more anarchic sorts of organization that explicitly embrace risky activities and/or rule bending and a "don't get caught" mindset. It is also related to the "safe spaces/triggering speech" sorts of thing that young people are now exposed too in schools and universities. It does seem to me that in general fewer young people today are willing to step out of the general mainstream than they used to when I was growing up (and when you were a decade or three before me)
All subcultures die, except those which become cultures. Turning a subculture into an institution is a separate skill.
I'm reminded of a series of posts last year about the history of _World of Warcraft_ https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/riq4fq/games_world_of_warcraft_part_1_beta_and_vanilla/ - which was incredibly huge back in the 2000s, and is still around and has a large playerbase, and so is *old*, as games go, and ancient as far as *persistent* game worlds go. What comes through clearly is that we don't know how to create persistent game worlds which are alive and satisfying for many players over a long time. The joy of a persistent game world is that stuff builds up and players progress in power and events happen, but that is also its curse: there's built in inflation, power creep problems, old events hang around and must be maintained, old players must be balanced against accessibility to new players... Most games simply avoid all this by not being persistent, and resetting; WoW can't, and demonstrates that there's no clear solutions to any of these. You can't just wave your wand and reset the world to the beginning to create green fields for newbies, because that will justifiably piss off all the experienced players who have been there for literally decades.
Our other main subculture (aside from the SCA) is Early Music. Which has very much the same greying problem: there are young aspiring professionals, but most of the serious amateurs we run into at concerts or workshops are over 60.
In part this is because the hobby often falls by the wayside during child-rearing years, and people come back to it as empty-nesters or retirees. But that should have been the case forty years ago too, yet there were a lot more young and (I think) middle-aged people in it then. Why haven't college-age people continued joining the hobby?
A possible explanation in the case of the SCA is that today's college students are raised to be afraid of almost everything, including anything "weird". At least, that's the sense a lot of us old fogeys get; I don't know whether there's _objective evidence_ that today's college students are more risk-averse or conventional than those of previous generations. Anyway, once a "weird" group like the SCA loses its foothold on a college campus, it's extremely difficult to reestablish it. Early music doesn't have the same problem, since it has a natural home in an academic department.
"One reason to participate in a hobby is to find a mate", I hate this comment though I know it's true. As a hobbyist it genuinely annoys me how many people in the group are more interested in each other than the hobby itself hence bring the level of the group down as they won't commit the time and money to gain expertise in the hobby skillset itself. I.e. everything becomes a dating group and then dies because the genuine hobbyist are eventually forced out and have to find another hobby.
Last group I had to exit was a mountain hiking group that eventually had to dissolve because of the number of women that showed up in heels, complained the hikes were too technical, and then the guys trying to "save them" would vote future hikes less hard to appease them until we were basically doing park walks on sidewalks. Seen something similar with a technical diving group I was in. It's the main reasons most groups on meetup.com fail as well, people, often founders, "meet people".
Genuinely a giant believer nowadays in banning women and homosexuals from hobby groups; they can start their own dating groups and quit opportunistically undermining others in bad faith. I get relationships happen, that doesn't excuse showing up to a mountain hike in heels.
See Arnold Kling's post "narrower, deeper, older" from 6.5 years ago, part of a running theme he occasionally explores
https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/narrower-deeper-older/
Another explanation - related to your "only game in town" explanation -- is the internet. It is now possible to find people all over the world with similar interests, and in fact much narrower interests. 30 years ago, a woodworker might join a local woodworking club whose members did all sorts of woodworking. But now, a woodworker can find a much more specialized group online of segmented-bowl turners, or slab-table builders. As Adam Smith noted, the division of labor is limited by the extend of the market, and we now have a much greater online "market" and thus much greater specialization.
There is a benefit to real in-person interactions, but it is partially offset by the benefits of finding people who are interested in exactly the type of activity your are interested in. The local woodturner might not care to listen to all the boring talk about dovetail joints and router lifts -- he just wants to talk about lathe tools. But 30 years ago, that might have been the price he paid to find a few other wood turners, but now they are available online. At the margins, fewer people will join in-person groups, and those people will disproportionately be younger people.
The good news for in-person groups is that the introduction of the internet is a one-time change. So if this explanation is correct, the situation should stabilize at lower levels rather than being an on-going decline.