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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.
The problem here is that the sort of insight that I'm calling for here represents precisely the sort of knowledge that spiritual traditions such as religions and esoteric orders exist to preserve.
To understand the points that religions are making from the rational, cartesian perspective is a challenge. Most of the writing both historically and today about spiritual truths is addressed to people who already have a faith. That said, there is one good man who has made it his life's work to talk to the children of the Enlightenment about religion in a language they understand, and his name is Jordan Peterson.
Before he was embroiled in the Culture War, his claim to fame was Maps of Meaning which is an entire work of scholarship dedicated to just this kind of thing.
I feel obligated to recommend the series of lectures based on it but it is less accessible than some of his later work. The intro to his biblical lecture series may be a better starting point to understand the context of the philosophy of spirit. It's a big time investment, but try to watch that one, by the end you'll know if you're hooked or not.
Quite. But this goes back to one of my original points, traditionalism is not a more radical conservatism, it is in fact palingenetic and interested in rebirth.
The Meiji Restoration was a deeply traditionalist endeavour. And understood as such by its participants. It did not in fact erase ancient Japanese customs to favor the modern era. That was the point of the regime it supplanted. Instead it exhalted them anew. It was creative, synthetic (in the Hegelian sense), but not destructive.
The power games spring eternal of course, but what you are missing with what looks a lot like Dawkins' lens on religion is that it contains more than mere social programming to maintain a ruling elite.
Political formulas are all based on mythical stories, but their potency and strength can't solely be maintained by force of arms, they have to ring true. They have to appeal to the human experience in a way that makes them organize a harmonious society to be long lasting.
And this is usually achieved by distillation through trial and error, for centuries, of the wisdom embedded in the culture of a people.
The charge that pretty much all people make at postmodernism (including postmodernists) is that it itself is mere solvent. It dissolves every construct or boundary it touches by problematizing it but never actually creates anything to replace it. This is to the dismay of the Marxists that employed it recently to attempt to replace what it destroyed by Marxism, I might add.
I could expand on this but it's a small aside. In his (foundational to sociology) investigation of the causes of suicide, he identifies four types and two axes, one of which is social regulation, the amount of norms imposed on one.
Fatalistic suicide is when people kill themselves because their lives are too constricting and regimented, Anomic suicide is when they do so because their lives lack any moral values, standards or guidance.
The latter concept has had a philosophical life of its own and is self evidently relevant to the failures of modernity and our conversation.
I think JBP can be a good introduction, but any esoteric tradition is essentially all about this. I'm reading Evola's The Mystery of the Grail right now which, whilst steeped in his personal ideas, makes a lot of interesting points in its symbolic analysis. Comparative mythology is but one of many such avenues.
Anything that has old roots is such a thing, the older the better. Here I mean institutions that function on the traditional mode, where people keep doing things because they are customary and not because they have reasoned themselves into doing them. What this mode of organization allows for is the filtering and refinement of ideas throughout long periods of time. And as such ideas that have survived for very long (and are therefore eugenic) are often rife with useful meaning.
You may be surprised at how dense in insight such norms can be, it's not all about the surface level admonishment (though those are potent truths in themselves).
Consider Holidays. It's customary in Abrahamic tradition to have a Shabbat. A seventh day of the week where practitioners take after God's example and do not work.
This solves a common problem of group organization: people who work with no rest die die of exhaustion, but if everybody simply decided to rest when they were tired you'd run into unstable situations such as the lazy exploiting the diligence of others, or everybody competing for the rewards of work in an unsustainable way.
Moreover, people would take days off at different times, which means nobody could actually plan for anything since they don't know when shops will be open or when people will be engaging in leisure.
The invocation of the divine and the standardization that goes with it allows all of society to gather around a stable game theoretic equilibrium where not engaging in rest can be punished without discouraging dilligence in general, and it also allows everyone to easily remember when to rest since it's embedded in the stories that you and your people have been telling each other since your childhood.
This is almost too vast a topic for me to approach. The general issue of codified dress is already quite vast but gender roles and their implications dwarfs it.
I will not go into it, but let us notice that the controversy around women's trousers coincides quite exactly with the rise of both the industrial revolution, the Victorian rational dress reform movement and suffragist activism. There's enough culture war in there for a whole book.
Categorically, this is untrue. There's lots of decency and sumptuary laws on the books in the West still. And you need only walk around Europe with exposed breasts or a Nazi uniform to discover them. We simply don't view the same things as indecent or blasphemous as the Taliban.
Maps of Meaning looks very promising. I will give that a read, thank you for the recommendation.
See, I’m skeptical that delving into the specific rituals of different arcane traditions, which often contain conflicting rules anyways, will give me much wisdom. What I want are the insights, not the surface level admonishments you mention. I can learn that Jews have their holy day on Saturday, Christians on Sunday, and Muslims on Friday without ever realizing that the point of all this is that
But how do I learn the actual wisdom latent in such traditions when no esoteric ancient text will explicitly come out and say something like, “We taboo this behavior in order to maintain its signaling value”? Instead, they always put forth some silly reason for it (“It is immoral to desecrate the body your parents gave you!”) that is easily dissolved by postmodernism due to its arbitrariness.
That’s what I’m interested in learning more about. Not about whether or not this or that culture banned cutting hair, but about why there was such a continual need for signaling through different forms across different ages, and about what exactly it is we’ve lost with the breakdown in meaning. About the need for Schelling points of rest, and what we lose out on when those Schelling points are commercialized or weakened. And about any other traditional phenomena that have much richer reasons behind them than their surface level justifications would imply.
But what even is this subject? I don’t know how to even Google for it.
I have not heard of traditionalism as a separate political concept from conservatism. Is there a coherent narrative for how this rebirth is supposed to happen? I don’t believe I see much of that in the modern American political discourse; MAGA certainly doesn’t appear to me to have much more vision beyond “Tariff China to bring back American manufacturing!” or “Fire Deep State bureaucrats who are standing in the way of change!” (My neoliberal bias may be showing.)
Sorry, I only brought it up as an example of one case where we appeared to have loosened our grip on a form of expression without any seemingly deleterious effects. With so many different taboos, any single one appears rather redundant, no? Why a ban on both women wearing pants, and tattoos, instead of just one?
Well it's a bit difficult to get the insights without the contextual knowledge. And the problem is that ordering those insights into a coherent framework only does one thing: it creates a new esoteric tradition.
Sociology without bias may not even be possible. So all you can really do is look for the insights from various viewpoints.
I think you'll enjoy Peterson if that's what you're looking for, but Psychology is itself an esoteric tradition. It seems more compatible with your own biases so you can get the insights the way you are most able to consume them, but that's not true for everyone.
The problem, and Peterson talks about this, is that sometimes we don't or can't possibly know why we do a thing, and even that sometimes knowing why we do the thing dispels the effect altogether.
For instance, it would have been completely unreasonable for most of history to expect people to come up with germ theory, and yet they needed a way to model contagious diseases to survive. Modeling those as divine punishment or what have you is a crude but effective way to solve this problem.
Here I think it may be of use to point to Quine and Epistemic Naturalism. Science it self is not actually privileged, it is yet another crude tool we have come up with with different tradeoffs than the previous tools.
All organisms need, for the purposes of survival and reproduction, to model the world in just the way that science or any other epistemology does. And the more a model follows the following criteria, the better it is:
As should be evident, these criteria are in conflict with each other. A more accurate model may be less efficient, a more flexible model may be less coherent, etc.
And importantly, different models may be suited for different ends. Newtonian physics is inaccurate, but it is also more efficient than alternatives, which is why we didn't stop using it for engineering when it was proven wrong.
I see many the traditional approach (religion as an epistemic style) as uniquely suited to a particular style of problem: when you need to convey accurate information with enough efficiency that the common people can use it and you're willing to sacrifice enough flexibility and coherence to do it.
It's a quite prolific intellectual movement and the answer to your question is so expanded upon that it inspired one of the most consequential ideologies of the XXth century in Fascism.
This is relatively well chronicled from a neutral point of view in Mark Sedgwick's Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century if you are interested.
However, the coherent narrative for rebirth is here part of the larger tradition of social cycle theories.
I quite enjoyed Parvini's recent The Prophets of Doom and it gives a very detailed comparative account of what such theories actually predict and model, including the work of Evola, who is one of the major figures of Traditionalism.
There is of course a lot more at work in society than just these so it is hard to quantify how much constraint society gives the individual in personal expression and at what cost (further complicated by the epistemic issues brought up earlier).
However you are clearly in the right in that it is possible to have too much constraint. As I believe it is possible to have too few. Once again, Durkheim's axis is helpful.
Interesting. What do you consider an “esoteric tradition”?
How did you come up with this list of four criteria? As far as I can tell, they don’t appear to be a standardized part of the field of conceptual modeling.
Thanks for the continued book recommendations. I have started on Maps of Meaning, and intend to visit the other ones you mention about traditionalism and social cycles as well.
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