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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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I think we really need to grapple with the fact that the revealed preference of nearly every intelligent and high-quality woman is for having few if any children. And rather than bending over backwards and tying itself into knots to figure out how to psyop them out of this perfectly understandable risk-benefit calculation, perhaps a healthy 21st-century society just needs to put all of its eggs into the basket of figuring out how to have a successful low-TFR civilization. Whether that’s robots, or AI, or artificial wombs, I don’t know, but honestly I just don’t see a viable path forward for forcing a critical mass of women to do something that’s manifestly going to wreck the lives of so many of them.

Or, you know, we can just admit that this whole feminism thing is not working out and go back to what worked for the past 5,000 years.

All empirical evidence is that letting women control their own reproductive choices is literally suicidal on a civilizational level.

Late response, but...

The world's cultures are massively heterogenous at any specific point in time, and 5000 years of unprecedentedly rapid social change only increases the heterogenity. What "worked" for the past 5000 years wasn't any fixed culture, but a massive variety of intermeshed cultural niches developing in both cyclical and progressive ways. Even trying to reason from some sort of hypothetical majority culture is fallacious. Some adaptations become useful precisely because they're in a minority. Raiding farmers from horseback stops working if you kill all the farmers, but that doesn't mean you should become a farmer yourself.

...what worked for the past 5,000 years.

Worked for whom?

I think a lot of women would dispute that it worked for them!

(But the soul is still oracular; amid the market’s din

List the ominous stern whisper, from the Delphic cave within

They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.)

(“It’s not a ‘compromise with sin’, per se, just denying the humanity of half the world.”)

(…)

(“Okay, fine, whatever, maybe it’s kind of a compromise with sin.”)

Do the current norms work better for women than the previous ones? (I'd be quite interested if there's any way to measure, but I doubt it.)

Anyway, Unsong and The Present Crisis are both fantastic.

From "The Pragmatics of Patriotism" by Robert A. Heinlein:

Since survival is the sine qua non, I now define "moral behavior" as "behavior that tends toward survival." I won't argue with philosophers or theologians who choose to use the word "moral" to mean something else, but I do not think anyone can define "behavior that tends toward extinction" as being "moral" without stretching the word "moral" all out of shape.

Or, as @HlynkaCG put it:

You claim that extinction is the morally correct choice. But that's absurd because morality is a property of consciousness and an extinct breed has no morals, correct or otherwise.

The only morality is civilization.

Then Heinlein has defined morality wrong. Indeed, if morality was the same as survival then there is no need for the separate word, and yet we incessantly find the need to define it separately.

The men from his example who tried and failed to save the woman from the train certainly acted in a noble way. "We will remember them", he writes, yet the act would have been no lesser if they were forgotten in an instant. Morality does not belong to a breed, it is individual, and as momentous as consciousness is. A civilization does not exist if there is no one to see it; clearly the value of civilization is in the people. A civilization, or a breed more generally, that keeps its constitutients in the negatives (inasfar as they are conscious and are able to perceive negatives), is nothing more than an egregoric parasite.

Any individual can see in an instant the difference between value and survival when he is struck by locked-in syndrome; so it is for civilizations.

I value the comforts of modern society too much. No chance of going back, no matter how many captured raid slaves you throw at me.

The jump in fertility from 1950-1970, and that jump being higher relative to the cratering of urban fertility before feminism became a viable political movement, appears to me to be relatively solid evidence otherwise.

TFR goes up when the status and wealth of the young, particularly young men, increases relative to that of the old. When that is not true, the carrying capacity of society, reflected by TFR, goes down. Perhaps a TFR of 2.0 represents power between young and old being balanced (though it's possible for that link to break through things like war or mass immigration), that a TFR below that means the old have too much, and that a positive TFR will inevitably end as the young grow older and balance is restored.

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