Rapidly industrializing societies experience compressed cultural dislocation that fuels religious revival

Evidence

We are agricultural societies that have industrialized within one or two generations. What happened in the West over 200 years or more is happening here in about 50 years or less. It is all crammed and crushed into a very tight time frame, so there are bound to be dislocations and malfunctions. If you look at the fast-growing countries —Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Singapore—there’s been one remarkable phenomenon: the rise of religion. … The old customs and religions —ancestor worship, shamanism —no longer completely satisfy. There is a quest for some higher explanations about man’s purpose, about why we are here. This is associated with periods of great stress in society. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 266

Categorization

• XREF: The compression-timeframe idea connects to Milgrom’s work on trade institutions emerging under information stress — same pattern of new institutions forming when old structures fail fast. — connects to: Religion represents the superstructural projection of earlier modes of production — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 6154; Röpke saw industrialization as culturally destructive and favored agrarian life — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1347
• SHARE: Lee Kuan Yew’s compressed-dislocation framing would interest anyone studying how rapid development reshapes belief systems.