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.
On the one hand, Richard makes some valid points. Social conservative politics as presently constituted have failed, and I say this as a Christian and social conservative, who still thinks abortion is evil. The unmodified political ideas of yesteryear won’t work any longer.
Social liberalism is more compelling to people everywhere. There was a technological shock to the system, and where social conservatism hasn’t yet been destroyed by it, it’s on life support and on the way out.
Of course, the seeds of social liberalism’s failure are also seen in its fruit: the collapse of the family and of fertility. Note that this is happening nearly everywhere, even in more conservative societies, because key sectors of the population (at minimum, young women) have been won over to it (Korea as Exhibit A).
At some point, it’s a mathematical certainty that fertility will return, and it may involve more heavy-handed means of promoting the family and suppressing libertinism than what the West is currently comfortable with. But it won’t look like the old, failed methods of doing so, and it will have much more elite support than social conservatism has today. It also may or may not be Christian in character.
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 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.
- You might as well use it to argue that there is no negative correlation between being right wing and being a mask-wearing freak. No, it’s just that being Asian overrules all these things! Everything about the East Asian parenting and childhood experience is obsessive and neurotic so of course the second they can not have kids (ie modernity makes them wealthier), they stop having kids! It’s not rocket science.
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.”
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’m reminded of a recent post I saw about most people aren’t libertarians, something to the effect of how most people, whether they are on the left or the right, want and expect the law to serve the function of affirming moral values, declaring them to be the values of the society.
I think it’s a fair point that many, maybe even most, policies fail to achieve their stated aims, and often do more harm than good.
OTOH…despite my liberal temperament and liberal background, I’ve more and more come to see the wisdom of socially conservative instincts…
Actually I’m a little confused what you’re saying on this point… You agree with social conservative preferences, but don’t believe there are rational consequentialist justifications for them? Or you agree they have better personal/social outcomes, but don’t think legislation is usually effective at promoting 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.
This is where I veer away from social conservatives. I have 0 problems with euthanasia as long as a person isn't being pressured and I don't think it's anyone's business. On abortion, I think it should be legal up to 16 weeks. At 17 weeks, the fetus can feel pain so I don't think we should be allowed to inflict pain. The part of social conservatism I wholeheartedly agree with has to do with family-orientation. Over and over again, kids with the best outcomes come from 2 parent households. That's where the focus should be, creating a culture of marriage and family and rewarding those people, not the other way around. I also agree with you on haircuts.
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.
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.
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. 😆🤦♂️
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.
On the one hand, Richard makes some valid points. Social conservative politics as presently constituted have failed, and I say this as a Christian and social conservative, who still thinks abortion is evil. The unmodified political ideas of yesteryear won’t work any longer.
Social liberalism is more compelling to people everywhere. There was a technological shock to the system, and where social conservatism hasn’t yet been destroyed by it, it’s on life support and on the way out.
Of course, the seeds of social liberalism’s failure are also seen in its fruit: the collapse of the family and of fertility. Note that this is happening nearly everywhere, even in more conservative societies, because key sectors of the population (at minimum, young women) have been won over to it (Korea as Exhibit A).
At some point, it’s a mathematical certainty that fertility will return, and it may involve more heavy-handed means of promoting the family and suppressing libertinism than what the West is currently comfortable with. But it won’t look like the old, failed methods of doing so, and it will have much more elite support than social conservatism has today. It also may or may not be Christian in character.
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 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.
Using Korea here is intellectual poison
- You might as well use it to argue that there is no negative correlation between being right wing and being a mask-wearing freak. No, it’s just that being Asian overrules all these things! Everything about the East Asian parenting and childhood experience is obsessive and neurotic so of course the second they can not have kids (ie modernity makes them wealthier), they stop having kids! It’s not rocket science.
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.”
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’m reminded of a recent post I saw about most people aren’t libertarians, something to the effect of how most people, whether they are on the left or the right, want and expect the law to serve the function of affirming moral values, declaring them to be the values of the society.
I think it’s a fair point that many, maybe even most, policies fail to achieve their stated aims, and often do more harm than good.
OTOH…despite my liberal temperament and liberal background, I’ve more and more come to see the wisdom of socially conservative instincts…
Actually I’m a little confused what you’re saying on this point… You agree with social conservative preferences, but don’t believe there are rational consequentialist justifications for them? Or you agree they have better personal/social outcomes, but don’t think legislation is usually effective at promoting 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.
This is where I veer away from social conservatives. I have 0 problems with euthanasia as long as a person isn't being pressured and I don't think it's anyone's business. On abortion, I think it should be legal up to 16 weeks. At 17 weeks, the fetus can feel pain so I don't think we should be allowed to inflict pain. The part of social conservatism I wholeheartedly agree with has to do with family-orientation. Over and over again, kids with the best outcomes come from 2 parent households. That's where the focus should be, creating a culture of marriage and family and rewarding those people, not the other way around. I also agree with you on haircuts.
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.
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.
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. 😆🤦♂️
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