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This does not appear to be the case, if you’re judging someone’s moral character based on the mere presence of tattoos.
People marking their bodies in a way that they know leads people to make assessments about their personal characteristics and then complaining that people make those assessments tells me something about their character. Personally, I like quite a few tattoos, have had great friends and serious romantic relationships with tattooed people, but yeah, there are assessments that you can make based on tattoos that are reasonable.
Being visibly Jewish in a place whose inhabitants hate Jews by your reasoning also says something about one's character. Or kissing one's gay partner in front of a homophobe. Or having a bumper sticker proclaiming your political party in a place where people oppose that political party.
If doing X leads to bad reactions, those bad reactions can't be justified with an appeal to "they know it'll have bad reactions".
Doing X knowing full well that it will inspire a negative reaction doesn't necessarily tell you anything about a person's moral character, but it absolutely does suggest that they are reckless, foolish, prone to taking unnecessary risks, lack forethought etc.
Supposing a broker was telling me that I should invest in company X because it was an absolute sure thing. I notice that he has a tattoo on his bicep reading "MAN U PREMIER LEAGUE CHAMPIONS 20XX" when in fact Arsenal won that year, and he explains that he got the tattoo when Man U won the semi-final. I'm sure he's still a nice guy, but it's only reasonable for me to heavily discount his claim that such-and-such is a "sure thing".
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Those things all do say something about one’s character. Some degree of rebelliousness, courageous, or social obliviousness is required to do things in public you know will garner negative reactions. The fact the reactions are negative do not make the actions negative per se, but they do change what information you can gather from the action.
In your example: there are presumably other gay couples that don’t kiss in front of homophobes, and that allows you to judge them in other ways. Maybe they’re cowardly, or just very polite.
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It certainly does in all such instances. Absolutely.
You are the one turning a purely analytic argument into a moral one here. Figuring out one's moral character doesn't directly have much to do with what sort of moral character is appropriate or just or what have you.
It can be good or it can be bad that you're the sort of person who is covered in tats or engages in risky ostentatious displays.
But it is something.
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The objection in these cases isn't that someone wearing a Star of David is identified as a Jew, it's to the antisemitism downstream of it. Likewise, if someone kisses their gay partner, it's reasonable to infer that they're not straight and that someone with a bumper sticker is a supporter of that candidate. All of these things are examples of appearances that lead to correct identifications of people.
I didn't write anything about bad reactions specifically. I wrote that people will make assessments based on tattoos and that this is a fine and reasonable to thing to do. Of course, I do think some bad reactions are legitimate - treating people with gang tattoos (or apparent gang tattoos) as threats is a good decision. But really, even the most mild, inoffensive tattoos imaginable still provide information about the individual with them.
Yes, but isn’t it reasonable to complain when someone reads way too much into a mild and inoffensive tattoo?
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It's an analogy.
And I can tell with a high degree of accuracy that someone who bears permanent tatoos is unlikely to be a serious practitioner of most Abrahamic religions or other such naturalistic philosophies since they ban the practice with a small number of exceptions.
This does tell me something about their moral character. In that they do not hold their body's form to be sacred. Which itself is correlated to other things.
Of course none can read minds and have perfect knowledge of circumstances. Hence the phrase about the book and its cover.
But only a fool blinds himself to the obvious in the name of deeper inquiry.
When people tell you who they are. Including by making aesthetic choices. Believe them.
And what correlated negative moral judgments might that be?
Once upon a time in ancient China, it was forbidden to cut your hair because that would be violating the sanctity of the body your parents gave you. Obviously, we find this to be a rather silly judgment nowadays. In fact, conservative Chinese people these days look down upon long haired males.
It's a common mistake to look at tradition from this empty standpoint of pure reason and think that just because it's arbitrary, it signifies nothing.
The fact it was so strongly forbidden informs you very strongly as to the behavior of people vis a vis social norms and is a good proxy for their beliefs given the basis of such social norms if they violate it.
Ancient Chinese people who sought to honor their parents in the ways of their culture at this time wouldn't break the taboo. Which makes the existence of it valuable to signal familial loyalty. Indeed a common occurrence in early modern China would be the opposition between this particular norm and new modern norms. How people negotiated this opposition told you much about where they stood at that pivotal time. Symbols are meaningful.
That the cultural mores change and the signals with them is not a failure of tradition. It is in fact how tradition works and how it is eternal, despite the specific instantiations of it being ephemeral.
I agree that the signals send important information. I would say that:
You are successfully making the Liberal argument against social norms. It's a convincing one, especially if one has been seeped in liberal propaganda their whole life as I have been.
But let us recognize the argument for nomos.
All those avenues of expression and signalling can only exist if a norm to render them meaningful is maintained. If the hairstyle is just a hairstyle, it's unable to convey the information that society needs to function properly.
Liberal society, in its moral agnosticism, renders all such norms meaningless. What used to be a centuries old ritual with deep meaning is now just another garment or hairstyle, everything is ground down into mere fashion. And all that is left in the end is pure sensate animalistic expression. As was desired and predicted by Rousseau.
We can't actually find another way of signalling familial loyalty, because Liberals would complain that one too is exclusionary and prevents society from being maximally accessible to the individual. Even something as naturally obvious as parental authority or the very concept of sex wasn't safe from this. Nothing is.
But the problem is that all these traditions and norms are things that even Liberalism actually needs to maintain itself because an incomprehensible society is a brutal unstable mess where everyone suffers.
Much has been said here about the vanishing of sex segregated spaces and its effect on mental health. Traditional institutions must not reduce the individual into a fungible shapeless good, and that makes them impossible. But human life if it is to be tolerable cannot be that atomized.
The charge against the arbitrary restrictions of tradition is also by necessity a charge for the disenchantment of the world. And this has had disastrous ends.
I see that you’ve edited your previous comment too, because I don’t think I read this paragraph when I last replied:
This is an argument I have never heard before. I have only questions, as many as you’re willing to field, please:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_philosophy
Though I suppose Guénon and Huxley make a stronger claim about the nature of reality. I'm restricting myself to the practical considerations.
What you see as closing off I see as codification. More on this later.
This is the major problem of modernity, we have no way to know how load bearing Chesterton's fence is. The implications of destroying traditions that we, by construction, do not rationally understand, are unclear and can range from entirely inconsequential to catastrophic.
The promise of the Enlightenment was that rational inquiry would permit scientific government, and thus that we'd be able to lay society on top of reason itself, but Positivism has totally failed even in its mildest incarnations, so now all that is left is raw post-modern games of power.
The best way I've seen to attempt to answer this question comes from Durkheim and the opposition between anomie and fatalism.
Once again here, what you see as closing off, I see as codification. It is much easier to form communities in an understandable world where you can make assumptions about the results of your actions, and others can properly interpret them. Norms reduce the randomness of intersubjective communication.
Let us consider tatoos again. In my grandmother's time, there was a strong taboo against them; though not illegal you would never get hired for a proper job if you had them, because they were the mark of sailors, criminals and other rough fellows.
It's easy to consider this a 100% bad arrangement from the standpoint of bourgeois morality. After all those people are stigmatized in such a way that they cannot join us in bourgeois life.
But consider the advantages of doing this to yourself if you are about that rebel life: you instantly share camaraderie with someone who also bears the mark, people know not to mess with you, the ladies know you're a badass and you can have a codified relationship with the cops where they won't let you into rich neighborhoods but they know not to tread in areas where you and people like you hang out. The fact it's painful even works as a sort of initiatic ritual.
In the liberalized world where this is a mere avenue of fashion, nobody can tell anything about you from this, and nobody knows where they stand.
Total unconstrained bodily autonomy, or indeed total licence, comes at the price of the destruction of a lot of unquantifiable but nevertheless useful social commons.
Liberalism has a tendency, by the necessity of its moral agnosticism, to break away thick concepts into thin. The former are the staple of traditional institutions, whose phenomenal goal is to compress as much meaning as possible into anodyne symbolism. Hence, such institutions are destroyed by the Liberal tendency.
I'll admit I'm too lazy to burrow in the archives of the last threads for it, but the topic keeps coming up so if you lurk enough you may just catch yet another one.
The basic argument I'm referring to here is that by which the Civil Rights Act and legislation like it has made sex segregated spaces practically impossible and with them much of male socialization, and with a rise in the sort of anomic suicide I was talking about earlier. Women were spared this for a while, but are in the process of this destruction now, which has made Feminists and proponents of traditional gender norms the strange bedfellows we see.
I have encountered perennialism, but in the context of woo spirituality and religion. What makes your thesis interesting is that you apply it to social norms and taboos, which I have not seen before. Is there a handy name for this argument, or are there any readings you recommend on it?
And yet, in adapting to an increasingly rapidly changing world, we have no choice but to remove some of the fences which we have lost all original documentation for. Japan was able to modernize with its Meiji restoration, but Qing dynasty China clung on to its traditions either too hard or in the wrong ways. How can a proper debate about tradition take place when we don’t even understand the purpose of tradition, and yet find ourselves needing to choose some to give up because what we have right now isn’t working out?
What was there before, but power games dressed up in the garb of religion or ideology? What difference does it make whether these power games are dressed up or raw?
I’ve not read Durkheim, so I don’t see how his book on different reasons for suicide plays into this.
I had not considered them, and that is eye opening. The bourgeois framing, whether in support of or against tattoos, is all I’ve known. I want more of this eye-openingness, but don’t know how to ask for it or where to find it.
What are traditional institutions, the family and the church? What meaning are they compressing other than continually hammering on the same theme of “These are what honest upstanding citizens look like versus no-gooders?”
In the old days in the US, women wearing pants were controversial. In terms of meaning, that particular requirement seems rather redundant even for its time, what with all the other norms needed to remain in good standing with polite society. I don’t see how retaining a no-female-trousers norm would’ve helped save the comprehensibility of modern society, and nowadays the only places where there’s still institutional backing for such a norm are backwater states like Afghanistan.
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What @hydroacetylene said below.
There is even a subculture of (admittedly very online) RadTrads who almost encourage getting a Christogram tattooed on you somewhere.
And there's the tradition of sicanje. That is, however, largely cultural as opposed to theological.
I've personally always wondered why the aesthetic traditions of Catholicism and Orthodoxy do seem to bump up against an invisible force field when it comes to tattooing.
Having double-sleeved up young priests (all images being reverent, of course) might help The Youths feel like the Church is no cap fr fr.
Muslims have Henna despite stronger (but not coranic) prohibitions. I am not talking here in the absolute, but the general tendency of Abrahamism is to disavow such practices and people who disavow such practices are therefore more likely to be Abrahamists, which is useful information.
As I have said previously, reading cultural signals requires knowledge of the relevant cultures to be satisfyingly accurate. And it never bears certainty because we are all individuals. But generalizations are still useful and informative, despite the fanatical attempts by many to deny that they are.
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There are traditional tattoos given at the end of pilgrimage routes in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Full tattoo sleeves aren't looked on very kindly by either tradition because God made our bodies about the way he wants them to be, but it's not a sin per se.
And obviously self consciously relevant posturing is more likely to be cringe than relevant.
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No, Christianity does not ban tattoos. It doesn’t look particularly kindly on the practice but there’s no hard ban.
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