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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30042 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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I think in the specific case, it makes perfect sense that society developed a taboo against goat-fucking and not goat-eating. Widespread goat-eating is harmless, even beneficial if you lack other food sources; widespread goat-fucking leads to novel zoonotic diseases appearing. Social taboos don't develop as some representation of a society's shared ethical considerations, they develop as a mechanism to control the behavior of members of society. They don't need to be rational, they need to be effective in encouraging prosocial behavior and discouraging antisocial behavior.

I'm pretty sure the risk of zoonotic disease can be dropped to near zero by the use of a condom. Given that they were first made out of sheep intestines, there's a poetic way it comes full circle.

There are plenty of taboos that have no empirical justification, such as burning widows alive after their husbands died, which was a common practice in India till the Brits stamped it out. The fully-generalized-counterargument that is consideration of Chesterton's fences sometimes requires a bulldozer.

And I think the fully-generalized-counterargument to tearing down any Chesterton's fence that's starting to emerge is that if you allow even one fence to be torn down even with good reason, its tearing down will be used as a fully-generalized-argument to tear down every fence.

The example I can think of being gay acceptance/rights/marriage. There are good reasons I think to believe the fence that were holding them back was obsolete: wealth and technology is such a force multiplier that our societies are no longer in a demographic race against their neighbors, so we can afford to let off the natalism and hostility to pairings that don't lead to births. But that opening was then used to argue that ANY social objection to any orientation, sexual identity, etc... is Wrong and Bigoted.

Honestly I'm at a loss as for what to do. I guess the solution is to personally calmly keep evaluating fences and not let myself be influenced by the whims of the era, but I admit I do understand why conservatism-minded people are worried about cedeing any ground at all anymore; each time they do the bulldozers go on a rampage.

The demographic race against one's neighbours has never (except, maybe, for very brief periods of time when both populations were decimated by some calamity) been contained by reproduction, but constrained by carrying capacity of territory (as evidenced by the fact that starvation were common in all parts of the world until the 1800s).

If Adam and Bob had zero children together, when they would previously have had X in expectation, it just meant that Charlie and Delilah had X more children survive to adulthood.

The flip side to that by focusing on holding up a generic fence, you undermine the strength of the stronger taboos where there are arguments better than holding back bulldozers. There were a lot of other problems in the early 1970s-era gay rights movement that allowed NAMLBA-types to get a foothold, but one of them was that California law brought a number of extremely sympathetic cases of seventeen-year-olds boinking each other.

@Meriadoc has a post here that's very interesting, but it's also quite plausible to read it as using the same principles to prohibit daikamura (pillows) and sex robots by its text, and there are other people using the same principles to argue against porn or sex toys. I think there's a way to square the circle, here, and actually find that bad things are bad without finding good or at least boring things bad too, but if you don't do so quite a large portion of the voting populace with reasonably expect you to be coming after them, eventually.

daikamura (pillows)

Are you sure you've got that right? I don't know Japanese, but everything I've seen from anime fandom suggests you mean "dakimakura".

Yeah, that's the right spelling, sorry.

Just be careful not to get ahegao and ahoge confused. They'll lead you towards very different things.

I agree, there are lots of vestigial taboos/practices in many (most?) cultures that don't necessarily make sense any longer and could be usefully re-examined. Some perhaps never made any sense; I'd be curious to learn how a practice like widow burning ever came about. But that old saying "you can't reason a man out of a position he didn't reason himself into" seems to apply here.

I am amused at the idea of the future society that looks back at current bestiality with disgust because our sheep shaggers aren't using protection.

Much the same reason as Pharaohs and other kings/warlords entombed their wives, concubines, servants and slaves with them when they died.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_(practice)

It has origins before recorded history, but went out of fashion for a while before a resurgence in the colonial era:

Sati practice resumed during the colonial era, particularly in significant numbers in colonial Bengal Presidency.[55] Three factors may have contributed this revival: sati was believed to be supported by Hindu scriptures by the 19th century; sati was encouraged by unscrupulous neighbours as it was a means of property annexation from a widow who had the right to inherit her dead husband's property under Hindu law, and sati helped eliminate the inheritor; poverty was so extreme during the 19th century that sati was a means of escape for a woman with no means or hope of survival. Furthermore, the practice of jauhar by noblewomen, which emerged during the period of Islamic invasions as a means of escaping rape and torture at the hands of captors after their husbands were killed in battle; raised the status of women who refused to be dishonoured after their husbands' death.

Basically, widows were often fucked, unless they had sympathetic children or family, and were often pressured into killing themselves ritually, or often did so themselves, because they had no social safety net. The ban of sati was about the same time that advocacy successfully had legislation passed to allow widows to remarry.

Maybe proto-Indian males were killing each other a lot in order to marry the victim's widow?

Not a claim I've ever heard made, let alone with evidence to support it.

Some things are just bad for no particular good reason. Now that sati is a thing of the past, not even the most hardcore trad Hindutva activist expects their wife to climb on the pyre after they pass.

Social taboos don't develop as some representation of a society's shared ethical considerations, they develop as a mechanism to control the behavior of members of society.

That's contradictory. If there are shared ethical considerations, by definition they are controlling people, because people place serious weight on following one's moral values.

I don't see the contradiction. Seems like another way of making the same point is that that taboos aren't passed down as the conclusions of a blue-ribbon commission on ethics, but rather they survive because the behaviors they encourage are pro-social, and therefore groups that adopt certain taboos are more likely themselves to survive and pass their taboos to the next generation. Do you disagree with that?

I mean, it's not that they couldn't have been the conclusions of a blue-ribbon commission on ethics, it's just that their origin doesn't really matter as much as their effect on group survival.

The fact that taboos can and do die is proof enough that this objection is insufficient, since someone/some people had to convince a society to stop holding it.

If you see a clearly maladaptive trait or behavior in the wild, your priors are not particularly swayed by such considerations.

I acknowledge that Chesterton had a point about his Fence, my issue is with people who turn them into castle walls with spikes.

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