Agreed. I have spent a large part of my time in the last years in Saudi Arabia. Noticing that even there, the "hearts and minds" of the young were with liberalism, wealth and freedom put the nail in the coffin of social conservatism for me. If a popular absolute monarchy with sharia law in the heart of Islam cannot pull it off, who can? I think really the only way might be to go full Taliban, luring a backwards population into a state of paranoia and economic misery.
Also, the Middle East is full of prostitution, gambling, gay Filipino tea boys that provide a variety of services, etc. The Saudi youth goes to Bahrain to sniff coke, gamble and fuck Moroccan escorts. I think the actual bulwark against the acceptance of visiting prostitutes is feminism. In Northern Europe it's considered very low-class, women would condemn you and you would feel obliged to be honest and open to your future wife. In the Middle East your buddies applaud you, and you don't really concern yourself with the opinions of women, nor be honest to them.
I have a complicated relationship with liberalism, too. On the one hand, the arguments of the likes of Richard Pipes on its inherent drive towards systems such as socialism, and the fundamental wrongness of its view that Man can be perfected, still strike me as unimpechable. On the other, the sheer boon and benefits in material abundance and human happiness that liberal society has developed cannot be dismissed either. Not just for personal comfort, but for the practical benefits of wealth and power leading to technological development and increased security and physical wellbeing.
It's hard managing this uncertainty, but such is the burden of life. If these were easy problems, they would've been solved by now.
> and the fundamental wrongness of its view that Man can be perfected
Is this necessary for liberalism? The capitalist wing is betting on improved incentives that increasingly make perfection unnecessary. And that's the part of liberalism that has been the most beneficial to society so far, so I'm not sure why we let the Puritans speak for the whole concept.
Liberalism, at least as it exists today, maintains ideals of "one person, one vote" and a broad swath of "inalienable rights" which apply equally to everyone just for existing. I think this gives people a sense that everyone is supposed to be the same, so when they see unequal outcomes, they perceive it as inherently unfair, instead of accepting the reality that some people are just better than others.
Acknowledging that innate differences exist and matter creates cognitive dissonance with the liberal tenets that everyone should have the same rights, the same vote, etc. Perhaps this is where the imperative to "perfect mankind" comes from--liberals often see things like poverty and racial disparities as problems that must be solved, rather than baked-in features of reality which are no more worthy of attention than the fact that the sky is blue every day.
There's too many other variables to consider. Namely, our ideological turn towards social-justice leftism, which encourages profound self-hatred among the majority of the populous, and an even deeper dissatisfaction among an even wider segment of society for our missalocation of human capital and the constant lies we insist must both be upheld as truth and used as models to re-organize our society around.
Granted, when I said "like socialism", social-justice leftism, or wokism, was the first example I was thinking of as an inevitable endproduct of liberalism. Pipes would not be surprised at this development, as he predicted the rise of the welfare state, though in many ways an inevitable byproduct of the rise in awareness of the prevelance of poverty and the conditions to which it's reached, has been absolutely crippling to the protection of property rights, and from big government.
I still don't see why measures can't or shouldn't be taken to alleviate poverty with a negative-income tax. Nor why we can't have both material abundance and strong human happiness. Though I'm open to looking further into it, and am not nearly as favorable towards liberalism as Richard; I'm by no means an aesthetic, and I certainly know I myself would rather have more than less.
How can you use the extreme example of Saudi Arabia standing in for all social conservatism as the basis of all your criticisms of it? Saudi Arabia isn’t conservative as it is fanatical, austere and rigid. Why not mention Hungary or China?
That’s not the point , social conservatives policies is to manage society not the individuals own personal ideas , degeneracy was a thing in 50s america yet gay marriage wasn’t , that’s a state saying this is what’s gonna be promoted nationwide. Northern Europe have all the feminist shit libs claim is needed yet the birth rates are in the gutter while Israel system is the opposite of a liberal democracy and the birth rates are good and Israel also doesn’t have gay marriage. A society passing conservatives policies is not gonna make everyone conservative but the worst aspects of liberalism is not being promoted at the state level. Saudi Arabia or Iran aren’t worried about trans hormones in kids , their main worried as u describe is prostitution or alcoholism or infedelity , I’m sure American cons would love to have those issues. So yes Iran , Saudi Arabia and Israel had successeded actually , their people don’t believe men can be women unlike many people in liberal countries. Everything u mention the Saudi youth does is not really something most conservatives actually care about , all of it existed in the 50s but they also didn’t have to see a pride flag every 5 seconds , saudis Arabia youth agent annoyed by it
Of course Saudi Arabia is on the whole more conservative than the West. However, it’s moving to liberalism, with all its accompanying benefits and ills. I don’t think it will have a “trans issue” anytime soon, but birthrates are falling, hedonism is dominant, etc. It might end up where Singapore or Korea is right now in terms of mores. You could argue that’s better than the West, the question is whether it’s really worth the accompanying oppression, especially if it does not create any high birthrates.
And yeah, the oppression is real. Political dissidence and freedom of speech are ruthlessly shut down. Domestic violence is comparatively high. A lot of the fun and freedom that in the West provide a counterbalance to the 9-5 is absent. But yeah, they dont have trans..
Maybe social conservatives should ask themselves - are you actually willing to send the morality police to shut down the illegal techno party and arrest people for dancing? If not, are you willing to more broadly apply cost/benefit-analysis to your social conservatism.
I think we can probably ban trans stuff without also banning dance parties. Seems like it should be manageable. I haven't met many social conservatives who want to ban dancing. And, would I be willing to send the police to shut things down? Some of this stuff, absolutely, such as "drag queen story hour." I'd be completely fine with the cops arresting those people. If we can't even get rid of something that egregious, then it really calls into question what is the point of engaging in politics at all.
The problem for you guys is that all the people who organize dance parties end up being OK w/ the trans stuff or whatever general degeneracy you dislike in the long run, and this is true if you go back even to Weimar or whatever.
I don't think that's true. People who go to dance parties mostly just want to dance. They aren't political enough to get all that upset about trans stuff one way or the other. Culture wars fought by activists are background noise for them, if even that.
Yeah, countries that sexually repress are some of the weirdest. Japan is the height of sexual repression in public and those weirdos have vending machines for used underwear.
We do, but its not actually popular. The red light district is filled with tourists, mostly. Among normal Dutchmen, and especially the educated public, prostitution is a no go, and way less common or visible than in the Middle East.
Heidi Fleiss and Elliott Spitzer type prostitution is more common among the educated elite in the Netherlands, Germany, and even more so in Switzerland. Even this though is heavily frowned upon in Sweden. Also a factor say in why Sweden and Switzerland have such different attitudes about prostitution is that Switzerland is a less egalitarian and less feminist country where its more more acceptable for well off males to simply be able to buy whatever they want(Switzerland BTW, has the highest per capita income in Europe).
I largely agree with all your sentiments, but one thing I want to add is there is reason to be optimistic. Although liberal societies do allow all types of weirdos and liars to exist, once in a while you get someone exceptional like Elon Musk (save for his rightoid antics) and Taylor Swift who can inspire a generation.
Like consider Taylor - She is smart, beautiful, hard-working, intelligent, relatively normal- all the attributes you could want in a role model. If things keep going as they are currently, she may also end up being an exemplar for marriage and motherhood. And the beauty of the cultural-capital machine is that in a few years, we will probably have a new role model, so even if Taylor decides to go cuckoo like Kanye, it won't be the downfall of society. The liberal capitalist system is anti-fragile as well.
I don't see how Taylor has actually made a difference. There's a certain amount of mindshare, and she happens to have grabbed it, but I don't see evidence she causes her fans to behave differently than they would if she'd never become a star and someone else was taking her place.
I would say there is straightforward evidence that "commodifying sexuality" (widely interpreted) in combination with the Internet is damaging the formation of long-term relationships in our society.
The writeup doesn't seem to address the most salient point: there's likely an evolutionary reason for socially conservative ideas that appear in broad swathes of the population or across cultures. The appeals to "higher-order" effects are just attempts to reverse engineer what it might be.
I think the burden of proof is on--or at least shared by--the person trying to overturn the instinct. Just because Holland has euthanasia doesn't mean we can do an analysis on Holland and immediately see the negative effects (if there are any). Beliefs have to be compatible not only with well-being in the present, but with the long-term survival of the believers. There are lots of examples where the "higher-order" (evolutionary) reason for the gut reaction is obvious... like not sending your women to fight in wars.
This post about high IQ people starting trends that are crippling to the below-average masses also stands out:
Of course, not all socially conservative ideas have a useful function, and you can never prove that there isn't one you missed. But I think the people in charge ought to be thinking hard about all the changes they make to society, instead of just doing stuff, checking if the consequences will hurt them personally in the next 10 minutes, throwing some census data into Excel, and calling it a day.
"The writeup doesn't seem to address the most salient point: there's likely an evolutionary reason for socially conservative ideas that appear in broad swathes of the population or across cultures."
And there's also a consistent finding that smart people move away from those instincts as their societies develop.
Evolution is often not a good guide to the modern world because things change.
My favorite example: anti-euthanasia made sense without modern medicine, when we didn't know who would recover from an illness and people in bad shape would die anyway. When modern medicine can bankrupt the state to keep you living through machines for decades with zero quality of life, anti-euthanasia becomes grotesque.
One could make a similar argument with prostitution, back when we couldn't stop unplanned pregnancies and venereal disease. Society had an interest in stopping promiscuity. Not so much anymore.
There are two instincts: the individual desire to do (or be free to do) a thing, and the collective check against it. Smart people often pick the former, but they seldom give reasons for overriding the latter. My argument is only that it must be addressed, which you did here, and which I hadn't seen you do in previous posts about euthanasia. Although I'm not sure this reason applies to the case of healthy people with psych issues.
People factor modern technology into their decisions, with high-IQ people coming out ahead. Unintended pregnancy is up among poor women, even though it is down among wealthy women.
The real "second order" consideration is that all feelings and motivations are still based on evolved instincts. We can prevent unwanted pregnancy and disease, but the human consequences of rape and infidelity remain. Not to get too Kaczynski about it, but much of human well-being just revolves around feeling well-adapted to a world we aren't living in. I agree changes to society can be justified in a wide range of cases, but the discourse often sounds like the change-pushers are impatiently trying to reason their way into a cookie jar.
If states actually got bankrupted via medical spending, then cultural group selection would cause that belief to become uncommon. It hasn't quite happened yet, though the UK may be nearing it. But individuals moving toward liberalism seems to be an example of Scott Alexander's "Asymmetric Weapons Gone Bad". https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/06/asymmetric-weapons-gone-bad/
The older I get the more dissappointed I am when I see 'us' in the West persist in casually strawmanning the beliefs of hundreds of millions of people with a few sample statements and a few choice quotes. I see this 'othering' as a universal blindspot and the most significant precondition for genocide across time and culture. More so than any particular ideology. It's not that I think you're acting in bad faith, you're not. You're making an attempt at understanding and that's worth your time and mine.
But what is it that causes the 'Western Liberal' mind set to consistently bundle conservatives and catholics and protestants and evangelicals and flyover baptists farmer in the same category? They don't reason the same way, not about abortion or euthanasia or politics. Neither do they act out their beliefs the same way or for the same reason. The question is why would smart people assume they do? And what sort of understanding do we think we will come to if we make these assumptions?
The reality is we can't steelman euthanasia or abortion without using Canada as the case study. Canada makes John Paul II arguments seem like an instruction manual. We are now arguing for assisted suicide for the drug addled child, while we distribute fentanyl to children, without parents' permission. We have only delayed our program to suicide the infirm, the slow, the homeless and the depressed - after we made living unaffordable and drugs free - for lack of doctors who want to participate. Two years ago we made the non-vaccinated shop from behind plexiglass cages as our leaders discussed 'what to do with these people' on daytime TV. The culture of death is abstract until it comes for your neighbor, as it has mine. The point is not to dig deeper into the facts and case studies, but to open your heart and use the opinions of large swaths of a population as a signal in these data - there just might be something underneath that is true. With that assumption we can order our questions around a hypothesis for this blaring signal. It will get us far closer to realities of life and death than conflating baptists, with catholics with Trump voters and I believe it just may save civilization in the West.
Interesting piece. I believe that in politics today, most policy positions are appeals to raw emotion, feelings, and ideology, not rooted in logic or reason.
I think we see this in the contradictions that you highlight here.
Edit needed: “If I *was* [were] convinced that there were laws that could predictably lead to these outcomes that didn’t involve totalitarian methods, I could perhaps be talked into supporting them.”
I'm not sure you explicitly point this out, but one way of looking at it is that the Pope can be right about creating a culture of life through laws on abortion and euthanasia, but the effect size may be so small that it's almost irrelevant. So for instance, if having euthanasia laws perhaps make a society 0.3% more militaristic but a society being more liberal makes it 22% less militaristic, capitalism makes it 12% less militaristic, etc. In such a situation, the Pope can be technically correct but it's such a small difference that it's not even worth worrying about.
I agree to an extent that a lot of online right wingers are angry and want to yell about something, so they over-focus on certain things that are easy for them to yell about.
The correct argument on abortion doesn't rely on anything to do with "second order effects." I think it wouldn't be too difficult to do the same with prostitution, if one were to make the effort. I feel pretty sure that if you look into rates of drug abuse, suicide, mental health issues, etc., among "sex workers," it doesn't paint a pretty picture. The easiest anti-prostitution argument might be that it's simply bad for the women that do it, in a similar way that abusing drugs is bad for drug addicts.
This is possibly a different argument from whether the government should ban it or not. Maybe we can sit here and say that the government banning the activity is more trouble than it's worth. At the same time, I think any sane parent, if given the choice, would prefer that their daughter not engage in prostitution, just the same as any parent, if given the choice, would prefer that their child never does heroin. If my kid does go on OnlyFans or shoot up dope, maybe they will be okay in spite of that, but maybe they won't be. And I know for sure that they'll be okay without those things. That's the conservative intuition.
"Second, I’m not totally unsympathetic to all aspects of social conservatism as a cultural project. I think most people should have monogamous marriages at an early age, create a lot of children, refrain from getting tattoos, have hairstyles appropriate for their sex, and not go to Aella’s gang bangs."
I think the ways in which prostitution interferes with getting married early and having lots of kids are not that hard to figure out. What I wonder is, whether there are any societies out there where this is the norm (early marriage, lots of kids) *and* prostitution is legal and de-stigmatized. I think online social conservatives are correctly identifying a correlation there, but then perhaps making too much of a causal leap. A proper family-focused culture is likely to have both lots of marriage and not a lot of prostitution, but you can't take an anti-family culture and reverse it by just banning prostitution. Mormons come to mind as a possible real-life case study.
Ultimately elites have to change their minds about things. As long as elites are mostly liberal, no amount of doing anything else will matter very much. If elite opinion were to somehow shift into favoring right-wing views, doing anything else would seem unnecessary, as all the institutions would then shift in turn.
I don't know if there is anything that can or should be done to change elite opinion, but I do find it encouraging that now we are allowed to talk about race and IQ on Twitter. That's at least a step in the right direction of popping the liberal bubble. Ideally, just the removal of the left-wing censorship regime will end up being enough.
The political establishment in Japan has spent years and years trying to encourage marriage and procreation through both incentives and messaging, yet it has been a failure. I see no reason why it would be any different in America. This seems like a problem that will ultimately have to self-correct if it's even the big problem it's made out to be.
(2) The problem is definitely work culture, but probably not in the ways you’re picturing. In the past, people just didn’t have time to spend on family - that was true. Now, many companies are less strict than they were in the past (though there are still some of those old style ones), but the incentive structure has changed. Working hard at something and being successful in society is a very important Japanese value, to the point that people will become hikikomori if they feel they haven’t achieved this. But because of the increased number of women in the workforce, this has become the pattern for women, too. Being a stay-at-home mom is coded as low-status here, too, and if you have a kid while working, it can really harm your chances of promotion, and more than anything, your respect from coworkers. It becomes “oh, she’s not giving it her all.” No allowance is made for having had a kid, because that’s seen as an excuse. The standard is always the hardest-working person in the room, so if you have one lady who came back to work after having a kid and was able to do just as well as before with no adjustments, that then becomes the standard for everyone.
And then there’s also the fact that Japanese traditional marriage is a whole different thing from Christian traditional marriage, but that’s another comment.
You are pretty much completely right about Japan. People are a lot more detached from politics, and the impact of US cultural elites is very muted.
The thing to remember about Japan is they have a similar “follow the authority” culture to Germany, so if an “authority” says to do something, people won’t really question it. However, the authorities here are mixed. There’s the implicit non-enforceable authority of the “international community” like the UN, WHO, WEF, etc. This trickles down through NGOs and company initiatives. The SDGs are big here for this reason. However, they don’t go to extremes on this because the international community is not the only authority. The government is another. Politicians in Japan are not super well-respected, but the bureaucracy is. So government regulations or even recommendations are considered very important. Experts (academic and business) are also authorities, in a way. The key point is that all these authorities disagree on some things, and don’t really discuss others. Weirdly enough, family formation and birth falls into one of the categories that doesn’t get discussed. What ends up filling the gap is local authority, like teachers and bosses (the authority of family is all but gone - it’s the modern world here too). The problem is those types of people are not the types that will tell you to have kids.
For what it's worth, prostitution may not be legal in South Korea, but it's everywhere--which in a way is even more trad, sorta like the senior apparatchiks in Handmaid's Tale indulging at Jezebel's.
Agreed with this piece. Of course the same goes for the social constructivism of the progressive side of the political spectrum.
"“Allowing abortion at less than 8 weeks can lead to allowing abortion at 16 weeks” is a valid argument, if you think abortion at 16 weeks is a bad thing, but “allowing abortion at 8 weeks gets us closer to Nazi-style extermination campaigns” isn’t."
Also true. And similarly, "somewhat limiting immigration might lead to even more restrictive measures on immigration in the future" is a valid argument. "Anyone who wants to limit immigration in any way is literally Hitler" isn't.
Richard, I wanted to provide a Catholic perspective, as practicing Catholics might be rare among your subscribers. "Catholic doctrine bundles opposition to abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, and war as intimately related." I guess you could say they are conceptually related, as they are all "life and death" issues. But there's not a Catholic dogma about those phenomena being empirically related. Indeed, there are few (if any) Catholic moral dogmas about empirics; they tend to be more abstract/conceptual (e.g., adultery is wrong, not "adultery is correlated with x, y, or z"). Figuring out how much doctrinal weight a particular statement in an encyclical has is somewhat complicated question, but a decent rule of thumb is that the more particular/empirical statements will tend to have less weight than the more abstract/categorical statements.
I do find John Paul II's quotation above ("...damaging and distorting, at the international level, relations between peoples and States.") somewhat cryptic. To the extent it is an empirical statement about political science, it has little (if any) doctrinal authoritativeness for Catholics. Having said that, I think there are more charitable interpretations of his statement. He may be referring to things like America's support in the 20th century for coercive population control measures in developing countries. He might have also been referring to any number of other things. (Did China's One Child Policy "damage" or "distort" "relations between peoples and States"? I genuinely don't know.) He lived under Nazism and Communism, so he saw firsthand how important ideology was for international relations and domestic policy.
Another thing: There is substantial room in Catholic thinking for cost-benefit analysis. Catholics (I think) invented and developed the doctrine of double effect, for example. I don't think Catholics are required to actively push for the enactment of secular laws that perfectly correspond to Catholic moral doctrine. For example, a Catholic is not required to try to ban lying. Or, to quote St. Thomas Aquinas (himself quoting St. Augustine), "I answer that, Human government is derived from the Divine government, and should imitate it. Now although God is all-powerful and supremely good, nevertheless He allows certain evils to take place in the universe, which He might prevent, lest, without them, greater goods might be forfeited, or greater evils ensue. Accordingly in human government also, those who are in authority, rightly tolerate certain evils, lest certain goods be lost, or certain greater evils be incurred: thus Augustine says (De Ordine ii, 4): 'If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust.'"
Catholics are an attractive punching bag, and we have our share of loons. But we do have some good thinkers as well. If you're interested in science, for example, I'd recommend the writings and talks (many are on youtube) of Prof. Stephen Barr, a theoretical particle physicist. He has written a lot about the harmony between science and traditional Jewish and Christian theology (though not unscientific things like the unfortunate denial of Darwinian evolution by *some* believers). His best work is the book "Modern Physics and Ancient Faith."
As long as you're bringing up South Korea's TFR, every other country with a below-replacement TFR (basically all of them except Israel) is convincingly damned by social conservative standards. The cultures spared by such damnation are ones characterized by very insular religious groups.
Policy can affect culture in precisely the ways this post is concerned with. Joseph Henrich's "The WEIRDest People in the World" is about how the Catholic Church's rules on marriage created what we think of as western culture.
This reads like a nearly-incoherent attempt to suggest certain things are mutually exclusive when they are absolutely not. Why would it be impossible to find clear and measurable negative effects of *any* public policy? Every public policy has trade-offs, regardless of whether it has an ideological bias, so why are we suggesting there's no evidence of liberal public policy resulting in negative outcomes? Is the point of this article to dunk on what you perceive as the idiotic majority, who believe decisions have positive and negative outcomes?
I've subscribed, unsubscribed, and resubscribed to your newsletter now because you are so inconsistent with your logic that it beggars belief. Sometimes you have a really novel and thoughtful take on a complex issue that reflects deep insight and analysis and sometimes you sound like you forgot your morning coffee before you started typing. 😆🤦♂️
Because beliefs should be based on evidence rather than the other way around. When we fail to find evidence for something we believe in we should consider the possibility that our belief may be incorrect.
Good article. But funny that you write "... his supporters would sometimes say that he was “playing 4D chess.” Well, it was Scott Adams who introduced the "he is playing 3D-chess"-idea, when he analyzed the 2016-Trump campaign. Later the "3D" moved to higher dimensions.
America has a huge pro-life movement because America has a huge and fabulously wealthy abortion industry. Roughly 60 million human beings have been killed since Roe v Wade, and a vast percentage of them were Black. It's striking to notice that the Black percentage of the population has been stuck at 13% through all the decades of legalized abortion. It would be interesting to see how Black's political power might have increased if their percentage had increased to 20%. Instead, they were sold the lie that their way out of poverty and oppression was to kill their children. 80% of Planned Parenthood's industrialized murder for profit complex is located near Black neighborhoods.
The problem with "slippery slope" arguments is that except for the required prior conditions for the "down-slope" state (e.g., you can't become a self-made multimillionaire until you've become a self-made millionaire first), the "down-slope" state doesn't necessarily follow from the "up-slope" state. This is why "slippery slope" arguments are considered logical fallacies.
It's like the argument for teetotalism where if one never drinks, they'll never become an alcoholic, or marijuana being a "gateway drug" for heroin. Correlation is not causality.
If one wants to say that raising a speed limit (or loosening any law for that matter) will lead to anarchy on the roads (or elsewhere), they're excluding any sort of middle-state regulation. They're also trying to justify laws that are a lot more arbitrary than their supporters would care to admit. The worst is when (for example) traffic engineers want to use the 85th-percentile rule to set a speed limit, and opponents of higher speeds say that it's not right "to let speeders set the speed limit". Talk about begging the question! "Speeders" implies an existing speed limit, which is the question at hand. This can be extended to other legal realms, not just traffic law.
You can't say a slope is slippery until one is actually slipping down said slope.
Agreed. I have spent a large part of my time in the last years in Saudi Arabia. Noticing that even there, the "hearts and minds" of the young were with liberalism, wealth and freedom put the nail in the coffin of social conservatism for me. If a popular absolute monarchy with sharia law in the heart of Islam cannot pull it off, who can? I think really the only way might be to go full Taliban, luring a backwards population into a state of paranoia and economic misery.
Also, the Middle East is full of prostitution, gambling, gay Filipino tea boys that provide a variety of services, etc. The Saudi youth goes to Bahrain to sniff coke, gamble and fuck Moroccan escorts. I think the actual bulwark against the acceptance of visiting prostitutes is feminism. In Northern Europe it's considered very low-class, women would condemn you and you would feel obliged to be honest and open to your future wife. In the Middle East your buddies applaud you, and you don't really concern yourself with the opinions of women, nor be honest to them.
I have a complicated relationship with liberalism, too. On the one hand, the arguments of the likes of Richard Pipes on its inherent drive towards systems such as socialism, and the fundamental wrongness of its view that Man can be perfected, still strike me as unimpechable. On the other, the sheer boon and benefits in material abundance and human happiness that liberal society has developed cannot be dismissed either. Not just for personal comfort, but for the practical benefits of wealth and power leading to technological development and increased security and physical wellbeing.
It's hard managing this uncertainty, but such is the burden of life. If these were easy problems, they would've been solved by now.
> and the fundamental wrongness of its view that Man can be perfected
Is this necessary for liberalism? The capitalist wing is betting on improved incentives that increasingly make perfection unnecessary. And that's the part of liberalism that has been the most beneficial to society so far, so I'm not sure why we let the Puritans speak for the whole concept.
Liberalism, at least as it exists today, maintains ideals of "one person, one vote" and a broad swath of "inalienable rights" which apply equally to everyone just for existing. I think this gives people a sense that everyone is supposed to be the same, so when they see unequal outcomes, they perceive it as inherently unfair, instead of accepting the reality that some people are just better than others.
Acknowledging that innate differences exist and matter creates cognitive dissonance with the liberal tenets that everyone should have the same rights, the same vote, etc. Perhaps this is where the imperative to "perfect mankind" comes from--liberals often see things like poverty and racial disparities as problems that must be solved, rather than baked-in features of reality which are no more worthy of attention than the fact that the sky is blue every day.
There's too many other variables to consider. Namely, our ideological turn towards social-justice leftism, which encourages profound self-hatred among the majority of the populous, and an even deeper dissatisfaction among an even wider segment of society for our missalocation of human capital and the constant lies we insist must both be upheld as truth and used as models to re-organize our society around.
Granted, when I said "like socialism", social-justice leftism, or wokism, was the first example I was thinking of as an inevitable endproduct of liberalism. Pipes would not be surprised at this development, as he predicted the rise of the welfare state, though in many ways an inevitable byproduct of the rise in awareness of the prevelance of poverty and the conditions to which it's reached, has been absolutely crippling to the protection of property rights, and from big government.
I still don't see why measures can't or shouldn't be taken to alleviate poverty with a negative-income tax. Nor why we can't have both material abundance and strong human happiness. Though I'm open to looking further into it, and am not nearly as favorable towards liberalism as Richard; I'm by no means an aesthetic, and I certainly know I myself would rather have more than less.
How can you use the extreme example of Saudi Arabia standing in for all social conservatism as the basis of all your criticisms of it? Saudi Arabia isn’t conservative as it is fanatical, austere and rigid. Why not mention Hungary or China?
That’s not the point , social conservatives policies is to manage society not the individuals own personal ideas , degeneracy was a thing in 50s america yet gay marriage wasn’t , that’s a state saying this is what’s gonna be promoted nationwide. Northern Europe have all the feminist shit libs claim is needed yet the birth rates are in the gutter while Israel system is the opposite of a liberal democracy and the birth rates are good and Israel also doesn’t have gay marriage. A society passing conservatives policies is not gonna make everyone conservative but the worst aspects of liberalism is not being promoted at the state level. Saudi Arabia or Iran aren’t worried about trans hormones in kids , their main worried as u describe is prostitution or alcoholism or infedelity , I’m sure American cons would love to have those issues. So yes Iran , Saudi Arabia and Israel had successeded actually , their people don’t believe men can be women unlike many people in liberal countries. Everything u mention the Saudi youth does is not really something most conservatives actually care about , all of it existed in the 50s but they also didn’t have to see a pride flag every 5 seconds , saudis Arabia youth agent annoyed by it
Of course Saudi Arabia is on the whole more conservative than the West. However, it’s moving to liberalism, with all its accompanying benefits and ills. I don’t think it will have a “trans issue” anytime soon, but birthrates are falling, hedonism is dominant, etc. It might end up where Singapore or Korea is right now in terms of mores. You could argue that’s better than the West, the question is whether it’s really worth the accompanying oppression, especially if it does not create any high birthrates.
And yeah, the oppression is real. Political dissidence and freedom of speech are ruthlessly shut down. Domestic violence is comparatively high. A lot of the fun and freedom that in the West provide a counterbalance to the 9-5 is absent. But yeah, they dont have trans..
Maybe social conservatives should ask themselves - are you actually willing to send the morality police to shut down the illegal techno party and arrest people for dancing? If not, are you willing to more broadly apply cost/benefit-analysis to your social conservatism.
I think we can probably ban trans stuff without also banning dance parties. Seems like it should be manageable. I haven't met many social conservatives who want to ban dancing. And, would I be willing to send the police to shut things down? Some of this stuff, absolutely, such as "drag queen story hour." I'd be completely fine with the cops arresting those people. If we can't even get rid of something that egregious, then it really calls into question what is the point of engaging in politics at all.
The problem for you guys is that all the people who organize dance parties end up being OK w/ the trans stuff or whatever general degeneracy you dislike in the long run, and this is true if you go back even to Weimar or whatever.
I don't think that's true. People who go to dance parties mostly just want to dance. They aren't political enough to get all that upset about trans stuff one way or the other. Culture wars fought by activists are background noise for them, if even that.
Iran performs tons of sex change surgeries. They think they can turn men into women to "cure" homosexuality.
Yeah, countries that sexually repress are some of the weirdest. Japan is the height of sexual repression in public and those weirdos have vending machines for used underwear.
Don't the Netherlands & Germany have legalized prostitution? I didn't think they were lacking in feminism.
We do, but its not actually popular. The red light district is filled with tourists, mostly. Among normal Dutchmen, and especially the educated public, prostitution is a no go, and way less common or visible than in the Middle East.
Heidi Fleiss and Elliott Spitzer type prostitution is more common among the educated elite in the Netherlands, Germany, and even more so in Switzerland. Even this though is heavily frowned upon in Sweden. Also a factor say in why Sweden and Switzerland have such different attitudes about prostitution is that Switzerland is a less egalitarian and less feminist country where its more more acceptable for well off males to simply be able to buy whatever they want(Switzerland BTW, has the highest per capita income in Europe).
I largely agree with all your sentiments, but one thing I want to add is there is reason to be optimistic. Although liberal societies do allow all types of weirdos and liars to exist, once in a while you get someone exceptional like Elon Musk (save for his rightoid antics) and Taylor Swift who can inspire a generation.
Like consider Taylor - She is smart, beautiful, hard-working, intelligent, relatively normal- all the attributes you could want in a role model. If things keep going as they are currently, she may also end up being an exemplar for marriage and motherhood. And the beauty of the cultural-capital machine is that in a few years, we will probably have a new role model, so even if Taylor decides to go cuckoo like Kanye, it won't be the downfall of society. The liberal capitalist system is anti-fragile as well.
There's a market: https://manifold.markets/AaronBailey/will-taylor-swift-and-travis-kelce-eabf2c8e6f17
I don't see how Taylor has actually made a difference. There's a certain amount of mindshare, and she happens to have grabbed it, but I don't see evidence she causes her fans to behave differently than they would if she'd never become a star and someone else was taking her place.
I would say there is straightforward evidence that "commodifying sexuality" (widely interpreted) in combination with the Internet is damaging the formation of long-term relationships in our society.
The writeup doesn't seem to address the most salient point: there's likely an evolutionary reason for socially conservative ideas that appear in broad swathes of the population or across cultures. The appeals to "higher-order" effects are just attempts to reverse engineer what it might be.
I think the burden of proof is on--or at least shared by--the person trying to overturn the instinct. Just because Holland has euthanasia doesn't mean we can do an analysis on Holland and immediately see the negative effects (if there are any). Beliefs have to be compatible not only with well-being in the present, but with the long-term survival of the believers. There are lots of examples where the "higher-order" (evolutionary) reason for the gut reaction is obvious... like not sending your women to fight in wars.
This post about high IQ people starting trends that are crippling to the below-average masses also stands out:
https://twitter.com/CEBKCEBKCEBK/status/1747298554765336870
Of course, not all socially conservative ideas have a useful function, and you can never prove that there isn't one you missed. But I think the people in charge ought to be thinking hard about all the changes they make to society, instead of just doing stuff, checking if the consequences will hurt them personally in the next 10 minutes, throwing some census data into Excel, and calling it a day.
"The writeup doesn't seem to address the most salient point: there's likely an evolutionary reason for socially conservative ideas that appear in broad swathes of the population or across cultures."
And there's also a consistent finding that smart people move away from those instincts as their societies develop.
Evolution is often not a good guide to the modern world because things change.
My favorite example: anti-euthanasia made sense without modern medicine, when we didn't know who would recover from an illness and people in bad shape would die anyway. When modern medicine can bankrupt the state to keep you living through machines for decades with zero quality of life, anti-euthanasia becomes grotesque.
One could make a similar argument with prostitution, back when we couldn't stop unplanned pregnancies and venereal disease. Society had an interest in stopping promiscuity. Not so much anymore.
There are two instincts: the individual desire to do (or be free to do) a thing, and the collective check against it. Smart people often pick the former, but they seldom give reasons for overriding the latter. My argument is only that it must be addressed, which you did here, and which I hadn't seen you do in previous posts about euthanasia. Although I'm not sure this reason applies to the case of healthy people with psych issues.
People factor modern technology into their decisions, with high-IQ people coming out ahead. Unintended pregnancy is up among poor women, even though it is down among wealthy women.
The real "second order" consideration is that all feelings and motivations are still based on evolved instincts. We can prevent unwanted pregnancy and disease, but the human consequences of rape and infidelity remain. Not to get too Kaczynski about it, but much of human well-being just revolves around feeling well-adapted to a world we aren't living in. I agree changes to society can be justified in a wide range of cases, but the discourse often sounds like the change-pushers are impatiently trying to reason their way into a cookie jar.
If states actually got bankrupted via medical spending, then cultural group selection would cause that belief to become uncommon. It hasn't quite happened yet, though the UK may be nearing it. But individuals moving toward liberalism seems to be an example of Scott Alexander's "Asymmetric Weapons Gone Bad". https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/06/asymmetric-weapons-gone-bad/
The older I get the more dissappointed I am when I see 'us' in the West persist in casually strawmanning the beliefs of hundreds of millions of people with a few sample statements and a few choice quotes. I see this 'othering' as a universal blindspot and the most significant precondition for genocide across time and culture. More so than any particular ideology. It's not that I think you're acting in bad faith, you're not. You're making an attempt at understanding and that's worth your time and mine.
But what is it that causes the 'Western Liberal' mind set to consistently bundle conservatives and catholics and protestants and evangelicals and flyover baptists farmer in the same category? They don't reason the same way, not about abortion or euthanasia or politics. Neither do they act out their beliefs the same way or for the same reason. The question is why would smart people assume they do? And what sort of understanding do we think we will come to if we make these assumptions?
The reality is we can't steelman euthanasia or abortion without using Canada as the case study. Canada makes John Paul II arguments seem like an instruction manual. We are now arguing for assisted suicide for the drug addled child, while we distribute fentanyl to children, without parents' permission. We have only delayed our program to suicide the infirm, the slow, the homeless and the depressed - after we made living unaffordable and drugs free - for lack of doctors who want to participate. Two years ago we made the non-vaccinated shop from behind plexiglass cages as our leaders discussed 'what to do with these people' on daytime TV. The culture of death is abstract until it comes for your neighbor, as it has mine. The point is not to dig deeper into the facts and case studies, but to open your heart and use the opinions of large swaths of a population as a signal in these data - there just might be something underneath that is true. With that assumption we can order our questions around a hypothesis for this blaring signal. It will get us far closer to realities of life and death than conflating baptists, with catholics with Trump voters and I believe it just may save civilization in the West.
Interesting piece. I believe that in politics today, most policy positions are appeals to raw emotion, feelings, and ideology, not rooted in logic or reason.
I think we see this in the contradictions that you highlight here.
"I believe that in politics today, most policy positions are appeals to raw emotion, feelings, and ideology, not rooted in logic or reason."
There's been an age in wich it was different?
Maybe not!
Another person who thinks human beings are 100% rational 100% of the time.
Edit needed: “If I *was* [were] convinced that there were laws that could predictably lead to these outcomes that didn’t involve totalitarian methods, I could perhaps be talked into supporting them.”
Everyone switches that 'were' to 'was' in modern syntax, sadly.
It begs the question why they could care less.
fewer
Lol this is the wittiest comment I've seen on the internet in a long time
A losing battle I guess. 😃
I'm not sure you explicitly point this out, but one way of looking at it is that the Pope can be right about creating a culture of life through laws on abortion and euthanasia, but the effect size may be so small that it's almost irrelevant. So for instance, if having euthanasia laws perhaps make a society 0.3% more militaristic but a society being more liberal makes it 22% less militaristic, capitalism makes it 12% less militaristic, etc. In such a situation, the Pope can be technically correct but it's such a small difference that it's not even worth worrying about.
I agree to an extent that a lot of online right wingers are angry and want to yell about something, so they over-focus on certain things that are easy for them to yell about.
The correct argument on abortion doesn't rely on anything to do with "second order effects." I think it wouldn't be too difficult to do the same with prostitution, if one were to make the effort. I feel pretty sure that if you look into rates of drug abuse, suicide, mental health issues, etc., among "sex workers," it doesn't paint a pretty picture. The easiest anti-prostitution argument might be that it's simply bad for the women that do it, in a similar way that abusing drugs is bad for drug addicts.
This is possibly a different argument from whether the government should ban it or not. Maybe we can sit here and say that the government banning the activity is more trouble than it's worth. At the same time, I think any sane parent, if given the choice, would prefer that their daughter not engage in prostitution, just the same as any parent, if given the choice, would prefer that their child never does heroin. If my kid does go on OnlyFans or shoot up dope, maybe they will be okay in spite of that, but maybe they won't be. And I know for sure that they'll be okay without those things. That's the conservative intuition.
"Second, I’m not totally unsympathetic to all aspects of social conservatism as a cultural project. I think most people should have monogamous marriages at an early age, create a lot of children, refrain from getting tattoos, have hairstyles appropriate for their sex, and not go to Aella’s gang bangs."
I think the ways in which prostitution interferes with getting married early and having lots of kids are not that hard to figure out. What I wonder is, whether there are any societies out there where this is the norm (early marriage, lots of kids) *and* prostitution is legal and de-stigmatized. I think online social conservatives are correctly identifying a correlation there, but then perhaps making too much of a causal leap. A proper family-focused culture is likely to have both lots of marriage and not a lot of prostitution, but you can't take an anti-family culture and reverse it by just banning prostitution. Mormons come to mind as a possible real-life case study.
Ultimately elites have to change their minds about things. As long as elites are mostly liberal, no amount of doing anything else will matter very much. If elite opinion were to somehow shift into favoring right-wing views, doing anything else would seem unnecessary, as all the institutions would then shift in turn.
I don't know if there is anything that can or should be done to change elite opinion, but I do find it encouraging that now we are allowed to talk about race and IQ on Twitter. That's at least a step in the right direction of popping the liberal bubble. Ideally, just the removal of the left-wing censorship regime will end up being enough.
The political establishment in Japan has spent years and years trying to encourage marriage and procreation through both incentives and messaging, yet it has been a failure. I see no reason why it would be any different in America. This seems like a problem that will ultimately have to self-correct if it's even the big problem it's made out to be.
(2) The problem is definitely work culture, but probably not in the ways you’re picturing. In the past, people just didn’t have time to spend on family - that was true. Now, many companies are less strict than they were in the past (though there are still some of those old style ones), but the incentive structure has changed. Working hard at something and being successful in society is a very important Japanese value, to the point that people will become hikikomori if they feel they haven’t achieved this. But because of the increased number of women in the workforce, this has become the pattern for women, too. Being a stay-at-home mom is coded as low-status here, too, and if you have a kid while working, it can really harm your chances of promotion, and more than anything, your respect from coworkers. It becomes “oh, she’s not giving it her all.” No allowance is made for having had a kid, because that’s seen as an excuse. The standard is always the hardest-working person in the room, so if you have one lady who came back to work after having a kid and was able to do just as well as before with no adjustments, that then becomes the standard for everyone.
And then there’s also the fact that Japanese traditional marriage is a whole different thing from Christian traditional marriage, but that’s another comment.
You are pretty much completely right about Japan. People are a lot more detached from politics, and the impact of US cultural elites is very muted.
The thing to remember about Japan is they have a similar “follow the authority” culture to Germany, so if an “authority” says to do something, people won’t really question it. However, the authorities here are mixed. There’s the implicit non-enforceable authority of the “international community” like the UN, WHO, WEF, etc. This trickles down through NGOs and company initiatives. The SDGs are big here for this reason. However, they don’t go to extremes on this because the international community is not the only authority. The government is another. Politicians in Japan are not super well-respected, but the bureaucracy is. So government regulations or even recommendations are considered very important. Experts (academic and business) are also authorities, in a way. The key point is that all these authorities disagree on some things, and don’t really discuss others. Weirdly enough, family formation and birth falls into one of the categories that doesn’t get discussed. What ends up filling the gap is local authority, like teachers and bosses (the authority of family is all but gone - it’s the modern world here too). The problem is those types of people are not the types that will tell you to have kids.
I've just written an article responding: "No, Richard Hanania. Social Conservatism Is Not 4D Chess." I argue that Richard is mistaking conservative arguments about the moral character of certain acts for predictions about the causal consequences of permitting those acts. https://open.substack.com/pub/joelcarini/p/no-richard-hanania-social-conservatism?r=k9yk0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
For what it's worth, prostitution may not be legal in South Korea, but it's everywhere--which in a way is even more trad, sorta like the senior apparatchiks in Handmaid's Tale indulging at Jezebel's.
Agreed with this piece. Of course the same goes for the social constructivism of the progressive side of the political spectrum.
"“Allowing abortion at less than 8 weeks can lead to allowing abortion at 16 weeks” is a valid argument, if you think abortion at 16 weeks is a bad thing, but “allowing abortion at 8 weeks gets us closer to Nazi-style extermination campaigns” isn’t."
Also true. And similarly, "somewhat limiting immigration might lead to even more restrictive measures on immigration in the future" is a valid argument. "Anyone who wants to limit immigration in any way is literally Hitler" isn't.
Richard, I wanted to provide a Catholic perspective, as practicing Catholics might be rare among your subscribers. "Catholic doctrine bundles opposition to abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, and war as intimately related." I guess you could say they are conceptually related, as they are all "life and death" issues. But there's not a Catholic dogma about those phenomena being empirically related. Indeed, there are few (if any) Catholic moral dogmas about empirics; they tend to be more abstract/conceptual (e.g., adultery is wrong, not "adultery is correlated with x, y, or z"). Figuring out how much doctrinal weight a particular statement in an encyclical has is somewhat complicated question, but a decent rule of thumb is that the more particular/empirical statements will tend to have less weight than the more abstract/categorical statements.
I do find John Paul II's quotation above ("...damaging and distorting, at the international level, relations between peoples and States.") somewhat cryptic. To the extent it is an empirical statement about political science, it has little (if any) doctrinal authoritativeness for Catholics. Having said that, I think there are more charitable interpretations of his statement. He may be referring to things like America's support in the 20th century for coercive population control measures in developing countries. He might have also been referring to any number of other things. (Did China's One Child Policy "damage" or "distort" "relations between peoples and States"? I genuinely don't know.) He lived under Nazism and Communism, so he saw firsthand how important ideology was for international relations and domestic policy.
Another thing: There is substantial room in Catholic thinking for cost-benefit analysis. Catholics (I think) invented and developed the doctrine of double effect, for example. I don't think Catholics are required to actively push for the enactment of secular laws that perfectly correspond to Catholic moral doctrine. For example, a Catholic is not required to try to ban lying. Or, to quote St. Thomas Aquinas (himself quoting St. Augustine), "I answer that, Human government is derived from the Divine government, and should imitate it. Now although God is all-powerful and supremely good, nevertheless He allows certain evils to take place in the universe, which He might prevent, lest, without them, greater goods might be forfeited, or greater evils ensue. Accordingly in human government also, those who are in authority, rightly tolerate certain evils, lest certain goods be lost, or certain greater evils be incurred: thus Augustine says (De Ordine ii, 4): 'If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust.'"
Catholics are an attractive punching bag, and we have our share of loons. But we do have some good thinkers as well. If you're interested in science, for example, I'd recommend the writings and talks (many are on youtube) of Prof. Stephen Barr, a theoretical particle physicist. He has written a lot about the harmony between science and traditional Jewish and Christian theology (though not unscientific things like the unfortunate denial of Darwinian evolution by *some* believers). His best work is the book "Modern Physics and Ancient Faith."
As long as you're bringing up South Korea's TFR, every other country with a below-replacement TFR (basically all of them except Israel) is convincingly damned by social conservative standards. The cultures spared by such damnation are ones characterized by very insular religious groups.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/recalibrating-respect
Policy can affect culture in precisely the ways this post is concerned with. Joseph Henrich's "The WEIRDest People in the World" is about how the Catholic Church's rules on marriage created what we think of as western culture.
This reads like a nearly-incoherent attempt to suggest certain things are mutually exclusive when they are absolutely not. Why would it be impossible to find clear and measurable negative effects of *any* public policy? Every public policy has trade-offs, regardless of whether it has an ideological bias, so why are we suggesting there's no evidence of liberal public policy resulting in negative outcomes? Is the point of this article to dunk on what you perceive as the idiotic majority, who believe decisions have positive and negative outcomes?
I've subscribed, unsubscribed, and resubscribed to your newsletter now because you are so inconsistent with your logic that it beggars belief. Sometimes you have a really novel and thoughtful take on a complex issue that reflects deep insight and analysis and sometimes you sound like you forgot your morning coffee before you started typing. 😆🤦♂️
Let me guess. The articles with good arguments are the ones you agree with, and the bad ones are the ones you don’t?
I’m not banning you for the criticism of me, but for the implications that I’m dishonest, in which you case you should go somewhere else.
I am not implying you are dishonest, Jesus
You got that in before the ban. Anyway it’s only a week.
No. It doesn't seem to have any pattern at all. That's what makes it so bizarre.
Because beliefs should be based on evidence rather than the other way around. When we fail to find evidence for something we believe in we should consider the possibility that our belief may be incorrect.
Good article. But funny that you write "... his supporters would sometimes say that he was “playing 4D chess.” Well, it was Scott Adams who introduced the "he is playing 3D-chess"-idea, when he analyzed the 2016-Trump campaign. Later the "3D" moved to higher dimensions.
America has a huge pro-life movement because America has a huge and fabulously wealthy abortion industry. Roughly 60 million human beings have been killed since Roe v Wade, and a vast percentage of them were Black. It's striking to notice that the Black percentage of the population has been stuck at 13% through all the decades of legalized abortion. It would be interesting to see how Black's political power might have increased if their percentage had increased to 20%. Instead, they were sold the lie that their way out of poverty and oppression was to kill their children. 80% of Planned Parenthood's industrialized murder for profit complex is located near Black neighborhoods.
The problem with "slippery slope" arguments is that except for the required prior conditions for the "down-slope" state (e.g., you can't become a self-made multimillionaire until you've become a self-made millionaire first), the "down-slope" state doesn't necessarily follow from the "up-slope" state. This is why "slippery slope" arguments are considered logical fallacies.
It's like the argument for teetotalism where if one never drinks, they'll never become an alcoholic, or marijuana being a "gateway drug" for heroin. Correlation is not causality.
If one wants to say that raising a speed limit (or loosening any law for that matter) will lead to anarchy on the roads (or elsewhere), they're excluding any sort of middle-state regulation. They're also trying to justify laws that are a lot more arbitrary than their supporters would care to admit. The worst is when (for example) traffic engineers want to use the 85th-percentile rule to set a speed limit, and opponents of higher speeds say that it's not right "to let speeders set the speed limit". Talk about begging the question! "Speeders" implies an existing speed limit, which is the question at hand. This can be extended to other legal realms, not just traffic law.
You can't say a slope is slippery until one is actually slipping down said slope.