But it’s telling that even as Douthat decries the new liberation from traditional marriage, he declines to spell out exactly what parts of traditional marriage he would like to keep. The reader has to figure out what he is for by deducing it from what he is against. He sneers at people who believe marriage is optional, suggesting he wishes it were mandatory. He complains about “thinning family trees,” suggesting he wants people to have more children—and, considering his well-known opposition to legal abortion, he sees force as an acceptable method to get his way on this. He begrudges younger generations who see marriage as “malleable,” suggesting his desire is for a more rigid institution. He grieves that modern Americans reject the “lessons of a long human past,” but leaves it to the reader to remember that the human past is one where women were treated as chattel to be passed from father to husband, legally and socially regarded merely as extensions of their husbands instead of people in their own right.
Amanda Marcotte on Ross Douthat
Curious what severnayazemlya has to say about this.
(via argumate)
First of all, marriage can’t be about both love and partnership – not without a radical redefinition of ‘love’, which hasn’t happened.
Second, ARH said something interesting on Twitter a while back: one of the social-constructionists’ arguments is that men are thought of today as the sex-crazed sex – and there are evopsych arguments for this and so on – but in certain periods of the past, women were. If this is true, and if it’s true that stereotypes have some basis in reality, what are men today doing wrong?
Third, read Nietzsche, and notice that what he’s saying boils down to the common sentiment that the USA is better off with an enemy to motivate it not to fuck up too badly. If you’re Volkmar Weiss, you’ll take that one step further: rising material conditions remove genetic selection pressure, which allows deleterious mutations that would have been culled in a harsher environment, which dooms the rising civilization on a biological level. But if you’re just Nietzsche, and you say that hostile conditions demand the ability to survive, and their removal also removes that demand, leading inevitably to radical individualization, atomization, lack of discipline and coordination, and an eventual collapse into mediocrity, which is presumably incapable of sustaining the conditions that gave rise to it…
Anyway.
What Douthat is saying is that some systems are more human-shaped than others.
It should be obvious that humans are bigger than any system – but, even though there’s no system that’s even close to perfect, some systems have better fit over their population.
Let’s say you have one society that tries to make all its women sexually dominant and all its men sexually submissive, and another society that tries to do the opposite. Neither will work perfectly, but it should be obvious which one will work better: men tend to be dominant and women tend to be submissive.
Now, what do the dominant women and submissive men do in that second society? Maybe they go underground. Maybe they leave. Or maybe they fight the rest of the society. How would they go about that?
They might just say they ought to be left to do their thing in peace.
Or they might not.
They aren’t born with the knowledge that men tend to be dominant and women tend to be submissive. Maybe they’ll do studies and find that out, or maybe they won’t. But it wasn’t true for them, so they’ll be suspicious of it – their society tried to make them into something they weren’t. For all they know, they’re just lucky to have realized it, and to have had the ability to recognize that what they were told was false. For all they know, their minds are typical.
What Douthat is saying is that there was some system that existed sometime in the past that was more human-shaped than Marcotte’s vision for the future. Gavin McInnes has said the same.
The conservative argument is that the cultural inheritance that the past hands down to the present is more human-shaped than most reforms proposed in the present – because there were reformers in the past, and, absent major breaks in the continuity, past reforms have had time to be tested for their fit: those that worked were kept, and those that didn’t were discarded.
The progressive argument against that is this: there are harmful institutions that can reach fixation, like canary-carrying miners, subsistence farming, and kuru-causing cannibalism. If that’s at all valid, it’s not because of its examples: canaries and subsistence farming are problems of insufficient technological advancement, and kuru could very well be more historically recent than the First World War – the consensus seems to be that it only emerged in the 20th century.
(It doesn’t help the progressive case to admit disease as an argument against something. What was the prevalence of kuru among the Fore? Was it above or below 20%?)
Marcotte and Douthat disagree on which system is more human-shaped, and therefore on what the default opt-out life narrative should be.
I’d be interested to see more research on correlations between digit ratio and support for feminism.
