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Notes -
"Legalizing gay marriage was not just 'allow different people to do their own thing' it was, 'change the basic way every child is taught about the basic institutions and building blocks of life.'"
I keep thinking about the rot here, and I think it goes back to in a certain sense that modern WEIRD people have a really hard time — for whatever reason— settling serious boundaries around things that should be obvious. Gay marriage is the last in a very long line of those kinds of decisions, but far from the only one. We can’t really say “no” on deconstruction of our heritage, the denigrating of our heroes, or the insistence that other people’s history or culture be taught alongside our own. Even among ourselves, for whatever reason, it’s rude in most circles to criticize others for casual sex, excessive drinking, or drug use. It’s really a strange thing that doesn’t happen in other places.
I wonder what @gorge would make of the conservative argument for gay marriage. @gorge writes:
So promiscuous, meaningless, bohemian gay sex is to be discouraged. Therefore why not promote gay marriage as an alternative? After all, gay people will continue to exist either way, so we might as well attempt to include them as best we can into proper, respectable society, by providing an avenue for them to approach as closely as they can the traditional conception of a household, encouraging adoption, etc. I think Andrew Sullivan made this argument decades ago, and faced opposition from other gay activists at the time who held that gay people should not try to force themselves into heteronormative strictures or whatever.
Gay marriage, or something like it, almost seems like the only workable solution to the problem of homosexuality from the conservative point of view, unless you have some other proposal to make gay people vanish or turn straight or be castrated. If a gay person asks you, "how should I live my life", and the only answer is "sorry, you have no place in my conception of society, unless you commit to lifelong celibacy and loneliness, in which case you may quietly sit in the corner" then can you blame them for turning elsewhere?
Therefore why not promote gay marriage as an alternative?
Marriage being monogamous is not legally enforceable. It's not even an officially taught value at this point. It's basically surviving as a folk tradition. There is no reason to think that gays getting marriage would actually be monogamous, and from what I have read they are not. So gay marriage is more likely to further erode the convention that marriage is monogamous.
And we got gay marriage and instead of monogamous gay men we got NY Times and NPR normalizing polyamory and CDC approving DoxyPep.
I don't think lifelong celibacy == loneliness. If a gay man asked me this question, I'd point him to a testimony of a gay man who went celibate and found himself a lot better off, and I'd recommended the gay man read it and try it out.
But also, in no world would I ban two men from being roommates, nor should the government be busting down doors or installing hidden cameras to see what is going on in the bedroom. "Gay marriage" does not be legalized in order for two men to form a permanent loving relationship -- amore or caritas.
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Pretty much all married gay men I've encountered continue to be promiscuous after marriage, just usually with their partner's permission.
I’d be interested in seeing the actual stats, since I’ve also encountered quite a few who are openly (and believably, in my opinion) monogamous.
I'm finding all kinds of conflicting stats and surveys, but it looks like at least a majority of gay couples are not monogamous: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/06/most-gay-couples-aren-t-monogamous-will-straight-couples-go-monogamish.html
It seems straightforwardly likely to me that the percentage of gay spouses who are monogamous will be higher than the percentage of all gay ‘couples’ who are.
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Not so much a rant against your post, but something I've wanted to say. I'll say its different, because it is different. When I was in grad school I remember one of my colleagues said the same thing, no difference between gay marriage and marriage between a man a woman. I wanted to slap her across her face. Such unthinking ally bullshit. To see that a regular marriage can have a physical manifestation of their love that binds them, a child, and her say that my hypothetical marriage between two men would lose nothing by not having any such possibility of that was such an insulting level non-thinking, and really missing the whole point. If my uncle had wheels he'd be a bike.
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Casting aspersions on others maybe, but it seems totally OK to criticize these things.
The only context I can think of where being negative about casual sex — per se, in an unqualified way, not “oh you should really use a condom/PrEP/thepill/etc.” — is remotely OK is literally at church, or when the perpetrator is someone you know who goes to the same church as you (and of course even that's only if your local group happens to be conservative-ish).
I wonder what your definition of "remotely okay" here is. I do not have the same perspective as you at all here, and I would hardly call my current situation that of a churchgoer.
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I’ve had secular, male, young people(so what we should naively expect to be the most pro-casual sex demographic) say unprompted ‘you shouldn’t treat women that way’ ‘promiscuity is wrong’ ‘if you want that, visit a whore. Otherwise commit to her’ ‘he’s not a good guy, he’s promiscuous’ etc etc. These men were not waiting for marriage and didn’t think women should either.
There are certainly filter bubbles where openly criticizing casual sex is verboten, but I’m unconvinced they’re the majority. Certainly my coworkers mostly think that one night stands are doing wrong, and based on observed behavior they’re more likely to have kids out of wedlock than go to church regularly.
These are examples of men getting criticized for their promiscuity though. This is a rather important distinction.
You can totally criticize women for promiscuity in a ‘stop making bad decisions’ way. It’s not against the rules. You can even say sex without commitment is morally wrong.
The difference is that using rude words remains rude(and no, playboy is not a rude word).
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I'm partial to the "the lights went out with World War I" thesis. Very simply, valorous, self-confident, fertile, expansionist, white men are the most dangerous force in the known universe. I certainly don't believe that white men are the most evil force in the universe, but we are the most dangerous. White people, white men, are most scared of other white men, and so a lot of apparent self-sabotaging behavior is a back-handed way of trying to sabotage competing white men. But psyopping other white men into being self-sabotaging without self-sabotaging yourself turns out to be impossible.
Granted for a given value of "white".
More pointedly, if people like Joe Biden are correct about "blackness" being chiefly political (you're not really "black" if you dont vote democrat) the obvious response is that it's not "white" men who are dangerous per se so much as it is the unironically god-fearing and virtuous men who are the most dangerous force. In which case it seems obvious that Clarence Thomas is "Whiter" than most current year white nationalists.
No, I mean racially white. I'm making an HBD assertion -- "white men" are simply the best at war. Occidentals are second, blacks last. Obviously your liberal, fat, atomized, and vidya-addicted Redditor is not currently dangerous to the regime. But he is potentially dangerous, which is why he is subjected to large amounts of propaganda that either pacifies him or redirects his energies. And it is of course the white men on whom the propaganda hasn't taken that the regime is most actively concerned with.
History would seem to contradict this take.
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I personally find it very unfortunate that it seems like in US political language, there's no way to express what you want to express except by using racial language, even when it's perfectly clear it's not about race but about culture and ideals. And using the racial language presents obvious problems - if Clarence Thomas is "white", while he's also visibly "black", it is easy to accuse him of being un-genuine or "traitor" or somehow abnormal.
A cynic might be inclined to think that this is intentional. Somthing about updating your newspeak dictionary accordingly and all that.
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I’m rather sympathetic to the idea. There’s just something that happened around the end of the First World War that just sort of shattered the self confidence of Western society. Where before we had no qualms about striding across the world stage and doing so in our own interest, of saying that our own values and ideas are of course true and right and that we could and would build a bright future for all humankind. I think the experience of war coupled with the technology disasters of the era (Hindenburg and Titanic especially) shattered our self confidence. Except that rather than simply learning from the mistakes we ended up deciding that we couldn’t be a force for good.
Looking at East Asia, I kind of see how we could have been. China has no qualms whatsoever in trying to promote Chinese interests. They absolutely promote the idea that they are good people and that their ideas are good and right and should be supported and respected. China isn’t self flagellating. And for that matter neither are the Japanese or Koreans. They are allowed to be the good people. And the thing is I think they’re much more healthy as a culture than we are.
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Earlier this summer some of my more religious connections circulated a tweet from Burk Parsons:
I have been thinking about the word "moralizing" in connection with this comment. Asking Google for the definition gives me this:
One of the logical consequences of asserting the "equality of persons"--a genuine ideological cornerstone of Western liberalism--is the idea that "no one is better than me." This is like, trivially false on its face, of course: probably many people are better than me at baseball, for example, or at knitting. "Everyone knows" (the consensus-building argument goes) that it's not total equality of skills, resources, etc. which egalitarianism demands, but rather a kind of "political equality" in which no person should be afforded greater rights or privileges than any other person by virtue of their birth or social position.
Most people seem to intuit that being great at baseball or knitting doesn't make you a "better person" than others, in any egalitarian-relevant sense. But there are other things that people seem, for whatever reason, to reflexively associate with individual worth and worthiness. One of those is intelligence. Another, I think, is moral praiseworthiness. Maybe it is because we do recognize some acts as criminal, and treat the status of "criminal" as naturally and permissibly forfeiting one's (political-equality-grounded) rights?
So: criticize someone's immoral-but-not-illegal choices, and a common response will be, "You think you're better than me?"
Of course, one needn't regard oneself as "better" to recognize bad! And I have certainly met my share of outright moralizers, people who derive apparent satisfaction from looking down on others, especially with an "unfounded air of superiority." (Snobbily religious folks, for example, as well as wokists--if that's not just a different word for the same phenomenon.)
My own memory is that as recently as the 1990s, people who drank, smoke, etc. were at least somewhat prone to saying "I know this is a terrible choice, but I'm still going to make it--but I really respect people who don't make this choice." I don't think I've encountered that sentiment in a memorable way since 2014 at the latest. My unfounded guess would be that something like "unconditional self-love" has largely replaced the pursuit of excellence and merit as a central motivator for those aforementioned "snobbily religious" types. And loving oneself unconditionally presumably comes part and parcel with rejecting any culture that asks or invites us to change.
I could make a case for the law not being a respecter of who stands before them. A person should not be seen as different before the laws because they’re really good at something. I wouldn’t want a person to get away with murder because he’s better at some skill than I am.
But I think somehow the idea came to mean that no one is objectively better than anyone else, and therefore nothing that those people choose to do is better or worse than anyone else. So you doing drugs all the time, not holding a job, and stealing is exactly equal in worth to my studying medicine, curing a disease, and giving thousands to humanitarian causes. I view self esteem as an outgrowth of that idea. If everyone is equally good, and all modes of behavior are okay, I can feel good about myself even though I’m doing bad things. Even criticism of other cultures as to whether those cultures promote good behaviors that will let people thrive is seen as evil.
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I have a little bit different take. It is not that western world is against moralizing, it is just that it changed values that people are judged by. The don't be judgmental schtick was there only as a temporary stopgap in order to protect these alternative moralities while they were weak. Now when they reign, instead of traditional moral values and virtues that people were judged by, you can now easily be judged as committing one of the big 4 "new" istophobic sins: racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. You can add various other moral issues such as being a bigot (you are against these values as interpreted by new religious authorities) or some sort of other enemy: anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist and so forth.
What I find interesting is how a lot of the new morality is direct subversion of traditional virtues and promoting related sins instead. Instead of chastity, we promote lust. Instead of humility we literally celebrate pride month. Instead of patience we celebrate righteous wrath of punching Nazis and persecuting bigots. Instead of temperance we literally promote gluttony, celebrate obesity and drug culture. Instead of charity we promote greed by eating the rich and demanding rights without any related responsibilities. Instead of diligence, we excuse sloth ideally enabled by some sort of UBI or by medicalizing it and removing any responsibility for it. Instead of kindness we prefer envy of those who have some kind of privilege and who are in in some mysterious systematic ways responsible for our situation.
I am not the first one to notice, that the new moral regime shapes up to be almost literal subversion of the old system.
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