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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   35531 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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The abortion debate below brought to mind something I've been thinking about for a while. There's been a convergence of sorts between mainstream Republicans/conservatives and the far-right, but there are still many differences, such as on the Single Mother Question. The far-right (which includes most people on this website) views single mothers negatively, while the mainstream conservative view is very different. For instance, here's what Speaker Mike Johnson said about Medicaid:

Medicaid is for single mothers with small children who are just trying to make it. It's not for 29-year-old males sitting on their couch playing video games. We're going to find those guys, and we will SEND them back to work!

Mainstream conservatives and the far-right agree that the welfare state serves to subsidize single motherhood, but only the latter thinks it's a bad thing. Mainstream conservatives' embrace of single motherhood is connected with abortion politics. One mainstream conservative pundit put it succinctly: "you can't be pro-life and anti-single mom." Many on the far-right responded to her tweet with "just watch me" and others scratched their heads, wondering what she meant. But there's a certain logic to it. Much of the motivation for abortion comes from women not wanting to be single mothers. You can respond to this in two ways:

  1. Tell them not to have premarital sex.
  2. Tell them to keep the baby because single motherhood is a heroic thing to do; you're CHOOSING LIFE.

The far-right prefers option 1, I've heard it many times on this website. But do you think it will actually be effective in changing behavior? I personally suspect that given the options of not having sex or having sex at the risk you might have to drive out of state and get an abortion and then get shamed by some online anonymous far-rightists, the latter will be the popular option. Just a vague suspicion I have. So it doesn't surprise me that many conservatives choose option 2. It also harmonizes better with the current conservative political coalition, which is increasingly reliant on the votes of low-class and non-white voters who have higher rates of single-motherhood. We wouldn't want to be elitist, looking down our noses at the salt-of-the-earth working class now would we?

  • -18

The far-right (which includes most people on this website)

I don't think you know what far right actually is...

And starting from (and assuming) that point pretty much forces people to prove that they're not an extremist (good luck proving a negative).

Can you explain what 'far right' is? And how I'm far right?

Pro-life and anti-single-mom is only a contradiction if you also believe an implicit third proposition: women have no agency.

The far-right (which includes most people on this website)

I'm gonna go one step further than Amadan on this and actually give you a (mild) warning here: bring evidence in proportion with your partisanship, but be particularly careful about how you characterize "this site," as doing so tends to fall into the problem of consensus building.

It has been a while since we had a thorough demographic poll, and "far-right" is probably a moving target, but the mainstream meaning is something like "identitarian right" or "authoritarian right"--white nationalists, especially, though probably not exclusively. I do think there are some white nationalists who post here, but they are a small minority. All the demographic information available to me suggests that the site 's userbase has a "grey tribe" plurality, which is tough to classify but most often shows up in approximately "centrist libertarian" land over on /r/politicalcompassmemes.

It's possible that you have fallen into the same trap that many blue tribe institutions have fallen into, basically using "far-right" as a sloppy shorthand (or outright smear) for literally anything to their right, or even just anything that they don't like. I don't know whether you have used the term purposefully, or incorrectly, or sloppily, which is why you should consider this a mild warning, but in general you're better off just not characterizing the userbase here at all: address individual arguments, then individuals, then specific groups if necessary, then general groups only with extreme care and much evidence. "This site" is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases.

Much of the motivation for abortion comes from women not wanting to be single mothers. You can respond to this in two ways:

There's at least one more possible response:

3. Bring back shotgun marriages. Make impregnation result in an automatic marriage and enforce much stricter rules for divorce in such marriages.

  1. Bring back shotgun marriages. Make impregnation result in an automatic marriage and enforce much stricter rules for divorce in such marriages.

This is part of why I think no-fault divorce was the schwerpunkt of the culture war (or at least the sex and sexuality theatre thereof). If you look at cishajnal cultures before about 1800, shotgun weddings were the first line of defence against bastardy for the lower and middle classes (elite men could afford to support their bastards, and elite women could be kept chaperoned). The incentives created meant that pre-marital sex was common (the fraction of first children born less than 9 months after the wedding gets as high as one in three in some times and places) but it really is pre-marital - you only have sex with someone you are ready, willing and able to marry. But if "we aren't actually in love" is grounds for divorce, then there is no point in a shotgun wedding. The difference between a divorced single mum because the shotgun marriage to the slob was never going to work out and a never-married single mum who wasn't interested in marrying the slob is not one that matters in practice.

What if someone would rather be a single mother than marry the other person?

Too bad. Vanishingly few would truly rather be a single mother--rather they expect the benefits men normally bring to relationships be provided by society so they don't have to suffer the compromises necessary to make a relationship work. Such selfish entitlement shouldn't be encouraged by society.

Yes, everyone would like a good partner to raise their child. But sometimes the partner may be a net negative. Especially in a scenario where the father wouldn't have married without the law. In this case shouldn't it be allowed for someone to be a single mother? Because it would be better for the child. There are many cases where the traditional benefits men may normally bring to a relationship don't exist. For eg., some people stay unemployed and steal off of their partners. Or they spend all the money, including the one earned by their partner, on their vices like alcohol, gambling, drugs, etc. They also bring a lot of instability to the relationship in many different ways.

In my experience the much more frequent cause of single motherhood is not that the father is a net negative but that the mother is and society is so blinded by unwarranted sympathy for her that it refuses to do anything about it nor let the father, leaving the child to suffer while the mother's poor behavior is continually subsidized.

Yes, but that doesn't have anything to do with this scenario right? Like I said, if the father wants to be in the child's life then court can decide custody. And if the mother is being a net negative, then it is still better that the child have some stability in their life atleast some of the time.

No, it has everything to do with this scenario. Right now the default is single motherhood and the father has to fight in court to change this default. This would make it so that the default is shared parenthood and the mother has to fight in court to change it. She still could be a single mother if she convinces the court that his behavior is bad enough to warrant divorce, but that requires actually demonstrating his bad behavior rather than simply her not wanting to cooperate with him.

Couldn't you make the default to be shared parenthood without the marriage part? I don't see why that can't be done. I don't know what area you live in, but where I live, fathers have a right to raise their children as much as mothers(as per my understanding).

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I'm normally quite sympathetic to socially conservative views, but here I need to agree. In a society with far fewer social constraints on acceptable and expected behavior, with higher life expectancy, with a far greater geographic reach for partners with a greatly reduced social network density, with lower fertility rates, and many other factors besides, there is a far greater risk to partner up with someone who turns out to be unfit for the job once children come into play. Forcing people into unhappy marriages may curb some of the worst excesses of the sexual revolution, but I don't think that is worth the price.

Given what this does to children statistically, it's an antisocial desire. So society insofar as it's not liberal can just say no.

It already says this no to men, after all.

Yes, but a bad father is much worse than no father. In the vast majority of cases, the worst fathers abandon their children so stats aren't enough to determine if in this situation having the parents be married would be good or not because they would be skewed by functional families. If the woman has little confidence in the other parent than that's a signal that they might not be good. Isn't it better to make it optional for people to be married in such cases? And if the father actually wants to be present then court can decide custody.

Isn't it better to make it optional for people to be married in such cases?

No, because as we can plainly observe, the second order effect of no enforcement of family cohesion is mass single parenthood.

I could be convinced that this is tolerable in a society that doesn't subsidize this particular lifestyle, but so long as women can use the State as a substitute provider and there is no disincentive to single parenthood, it's going to be a mass phenomenon.

Bring back shotgun marriages.

And polygamy?

Shotguns also are good in reducing polygamy/polyandry to monogamy.

You can either shoot the dad and now have two single moms, doubling the problem, or you think that when a man cheats on his wife either his wife or the woman he cheated with and impregnated (who he may have lied to and might not have known he was married) should be shot. Which one was the intended meaning of your comment?

Doesn't really matter. That is the thing with shooting people - if the penalty is swift and inevitable you won't be forced to shoot too many of them.

Medicaid is for single mothers with small children who are just trying to make it. It's not for 29-year-old males sitting on their couch playing video games.

Single mom is much more likely to be a dem voter. Republicans doing the opposite of patronage.

The OG Nazis, it should be remembered, strived to at least in theory to reduce the stigma of unwanted motherhood.

During this period an attempt was made to change views on illegitimate children. Adolf Hitler was quoted as saying that as long as there was an imbalance in the population of childbearing age, people "shall be forbidden to despise the child born out of wedlock". (33) According to Lisa Pine, the author of Nazi Family Policy (1997), the Nazi state no longer saw the single mother as "degenerate" and placed the single mother who had given a child life, higher than the woman who had "avoided having children in her marriage on egotistical grounds". (34)

It has been argued by the historian, Cate Haste, that in the 1930s "most European countries stigmatized unmarried mothers as a threat to the institution of marriage". In Nazi Germany, however, motherhood and procreation by women of "good blood" were so highly valued that steps were taken to "re-cast the image of the unmarried mother and illegitimate child". It was claimed the "bourgeois concept of marriage and morality was outmoded as far as Nazi population policy was concerned. (35) The Nazi campaign was "designed to confer parity of status as well as of public esteem on unmarried mothers and their offspring". (36)

Heinrich Himmler explained to his masseur, Felix Kersten: "Only a few years ago illegitimate children were considered a shameful matter. In defiance of the existing laws I have systematically influenced the SS to consider children, irrespective of illegality or otherwise, the most beautiful, and best thing there is. The results - today my men tell me with shining eyes that an illegitimate son has been born to them. Their girls consider it an honour, not a source of shame, in spite of existing legal circumstances." (37)

This was in the fairly specific context of a society with a female-skewed prime-age population (due to the extreme and unusually battlefield-only lethality of WW1) and a strong monogamy norm. The trad Christian approach was to put the surplus women in all-female communities under religious supervision. The effective pro-natalist approach was to support the surplus women in single motherhood. Of course, under the actual trad rules of large-scale warfare, the surplus German women would have been second wives of the victorious British (if they were lucky) or French (if not) troops.

The trad Christian approach was to put the surplus women in all-female communities under religious supervision.

Except (Protestant) Germany had the problem that since Luther, monasticism and religious life was strongly downgraded in favour of "God wants you all to get married, have kids - 'be fruitful and multiply'" (Luther did a lot of writing about how there was in fact no right to take a vow of celibacy and nobody could impose it on you or punish you for breaking it).

So if you have a lot of single women and no husbands for them, you have a problem as to what you do with them. If they get pregnant outside of marriage, then if you need the rebuilding of the population, you can't afford to shame them. Discreet (or not so discreet) abortions of future citizens in a country that lost a lot of men during the previous war is going to leave you weak, particularly if the people in charge have a shiny new ideal of being the Master Race and conquering all of Europe by right.

the victorious British (if they were lucky) or French (if not) troops

Care to explain the distinction?

"That sweet enemy France" 😀

Google AI will say that there is no specific author of that phrase, it mentions a book by that title, but I know better, having first encountered it mentioned by Chesterton:

"Sometimes it is right because there is something to be a salt to its sweetness, as in Sir Philip Sidney's line; "Before the eyes of that sweet enemy France."

And looking up Sir Philip Sidney, it comes from a poem:

Astrophil and Stella 41 By Sir Philip Sidney

Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance
Guided so well that I obtain'd the prize,
Both by the judgment of the English eyes
And of some sent from that sweet enemy France;
Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance,
Town folks my strength; a daintier judge applies
His praise to sleight which from good use doth rise;
Some lucky wits impute it but to chance;
Others, because of both sides I do take
My blood from them who did excel in this,
Think Nature me a man of arms did make.
How far they shot awry! The true cause is,
Stella look'd on, and from her heav'nly face
Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race.

So sorry, Google Gemini, but you're wrong; the book gets its title from "a direct quote from a specific individual":

The phrase "sweet enemy" is not a direct quote from a specific individual but rather a thematic encapsulation of the book's central argument.

Anglo-French relations are 1000 year hereditary bromance. If you don't get it, it can't be explained.

Rudyard Kipling tried and I'm not aware of anything better.

I don't think that it was only in that specific context (and a fair amount of things that we take for granted about the Nazi ideology was also at least partly about answering a specific context, such as their particular attempts to appeal to the working class in the specific context of a threat of Marxist working-class rebellion). The Nazis had a mission to combat traditional religious morality and advance a more... nature-focused sort of an understanding of various things, such as sexual relations.

a more... nature-focused sort of an understanding of various things, such as sexual relations.

Something that Americans also adopted the instant the birth-control pill hit the shelves (hippies were famous for this- they said free love was natural for a reason, but every "all-natural" person exhibits profound ignorance of what technological advancement lets you see as natural, like how everything you eat has been specifically bred for gigantism). Being able to not get pregnant on a whim is a massively transformative technology; so is having so much food the poor only starve if they're explicitly trying to, for that matter (and the Germans invented the chemical process that makes that possible, too).

traditional religious morality

The foundation of traditional religious morality is not meaningfully distinguishable from "sex bad" (no other intelligent examination other than "Bible says it's bad"), so it makes sense traditions holding that viewpoint get absolutely bodied by the new reality that a good chunk of why it was destructive is now obviated. Some traditionalists have tacitly accepted this, but they won't actually say it for Overton window reasons.

The more intelligent traditionalists focus on "but a woman who has a body count is spiritually degraded" for that reason- if they had any better arguments, I think they'd be making them, but they aren't. So "vibes" (and "men want virgins", when they're being more honest- and I can accept that doing things that help men would make society better, but in a general sense rather than this specifically) is obviously the best they have.

I'm sympathetic to those for whom biology meshes better with first-century sexual norms, but they're too busy thinking with their other head in this matter. So putting them in charge in a context where technology has obviated most of the previous reality they cling to is (rightly) viewed by everyone else as destructive. (The same is true when you put women doing that in charge, but rejecting that is an even more cutting-edge idea.)

Trad christians pro-natality is a byproduct of their anti-sex mindset: every sex act must carry the maximum penalty, and a child is the last punishment available when they run out of stones and insults. By contrast, nazis are pro-natality first , and a ‘sex positive’ mindset is a natural consequence.

That you view children as a punishment rather than a blessing is why secular liberalism is suffering (or perhaps enjoying) a collapse in fertility.

I don’t. I don’t think sex deserves punishment. And I believe in personal freedom – and you don’t choose a punishment.

That's why trads deny women the right to choose, so they can use children as a sex deterrent. Children are just means to an end in their two thousand-year anti-sex crusade.

If they really thought children were a blessing, like you say, they’d be more like the nazis, encouraging promiscuity and so-called illegitimate children. Illegitimate children are the opposite of their god. He was allegedly conceived by parthenogenesis or midichlorians or something, completely without sex (ie sin). While they were the result of a sex act that wasn't even authorized by a virgin in a church.

I find it simultaneously hilarious and kind of sad that you think Trads are "anti-sex". You've clearly never interacted with a sincere Catholic or Orthodox Jew before. (Or Mormon for that matter)

You have the causality exactly backwards. Trads, as a general rule, are pro-natal/pro-family-formation first and thier disdain for the liberal mantra of freedom from consequence/responsibility and "soulless pleasure seeking" is a result of them being pro-natal not the cause.

Nonsense. My family's full of them, and they usually don't deny it.

I don't have to take the words of christian apologists at face value. Their mythology, rules and actions betray an extreme hostility to sex. You yourself, in the middle of arguing christians aren't anti-sex, can't help but insult sex as "soulless pleasure seeking", whatever that means. Just accept that you're anti-sex and stick to the ascetic line.

The problem with accepting that I'm anti-sex and sticking to the ascetic line is all the sex I've been having with my wife. I would imagine most other Trads would tend to have a similar problem, given the available stats and evidence.

If you do not understand the concept of "soulless pleasure seeking", I'm not sure what to tell you. I have lived as a "sex-positive" Progressive, and I have lived as a Trad. In my personal experience, the trad life is much, much better. Progressivism aims for the blossom without the roots or stem, but without the roots or stem the blossom withers and is gone.

I guess I’ve just had better experiences than you. I’ve never been depressed about casual sex or masturbation. Or anything, really. Another difference between you and me is that I do not want to stop others from choosing your path, or the other, while your side is fundamentally willing to coerce.

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Whether it's a punishment or a blessing depends on whether it's forced upon you when you're least ready or given when you're most desperate for it.

@Tree's comment clearly treats "children are a punishment" axiomatically.

Framing things in terms of "pro-single-mother" vs "anti-single-mother" makes about as much sense as being "pro-orphan" or "anti-orphan". You can believe that a situation is bad to be in and therefore want to help people who happen to be in that situation AND try to prevent people from falling into that situation AND not Goodhart the numbers by killing them.

DO: Help kids with no parents with money and support structures (without actively incentivizing the status)

DO: Try to prevent people from becoming orphans.

DON'T: Reduce the number of orphans by killing them

Really, a child of a single parent is just a half-orphan. Therefore

DO: Help single parent families with money and support structures (without actively incentivizing the status)

DO: Try to prevent people from becoming single-parents.

DON'T: Reduce the number of single-parents by killing them (or the children)

All of this follows trivially from the quality of life the child can expect, on average, in each state:

Full family > Single Parent Family > Orphan > Death

Whether you want more or fewer single parent families then depends on which direction you're coming from. Trying to pin people down into "pro" or "anti" single parents only makes sense if these were terminal ends rather than proxies for quality of life.

Alexander and I have broken a lance on each other over this before. He's advocating for abortion not so much as pure eugenics but in a class sense: we don't need or want the underclass to reproduce, and to elevate decent working-class people to the middle class they need to embrace the habits of the middle class, which includes no babies for teenagers, no babies outside marriage, and only a limited number of kids within marriage, preferably but not always after education and establishing a career. He has no objection to "get married at twenty, have kids" as long as it comes with "have a decent job, maybe even both of you, and only have two kids spaced appropriately apart and not immediately after you get married".

He can't or won't understand that for someone who genuinely believes abortion is wrong, that while getting pregnant outside of marriage is bad, it is worse to kill the baby. Better a single mother than a sexually active woman who avoids motherhood by infanticide. To be fair to him, he does think the right should dump the religious conservatives who think abortion is murder and instead start selling the message that you need to be productive, get a job, get married, and have the right number of kids that you bring up with the right values so you aspire to the middle class life and drag yourself up by your bootstraps, and that means shaming girls and women who get pregnant and don't get an abortion.

only a limited number of kids within marriage, preferably but not always after education and establishing a career. He has no objection to "get married at twenty, have kids" as long as it comes with "have a decent job, maybe even both of you, and only have two kids spaced appropriately apart and not immediately after you get married".

This person is just making crap up and does not speak for me.

I am not trying to speak for you, I said that was the impression I took away from previous encounters.

If you feel that this mischaracterises your position, then please state what your position is, including how you define "far-right" and why you think most people on here are far-right, because so far as I can see, your definition seems to be "not as enthusiastically pro-infanticide as me".

DO: Help single parent families with money and support structures (without actively incentivizing the status)

So much easier said than done. By helping, you incent. Hell: People grift Foster parenting, which is the worst way to get gubment money you can imagine. In comparison SNAP, TANF, and Section 8 seem like goldmines.

On an economic level, I agree. This is a very very hard problem. In the case of orphans, you can resolve it by sending them to foster families or other forms of government housing instead of just handing a check to reward every kid that runs away from home. The state still pays lots of money, but the kids don't directly benefit because they get substitute parents instead of just money. But you can't really do that with single parents. You can't realistically assist single mothers with state-funded foster-fathers who come and act as the missing parent for the kid. Because she's an adult and has rights, there's a lot less coercion and control that you can't use to force compliance in the same way you can with a runaway teen (and if you tried it would turn out horribly dystopian). So we're kind of stuck handing out checks and trying to make them exactly the right size: not too small or the kids suffer poverty and neglect, not too large or the mothers have more kids and avoid marriage.

On a social level, there is so much more we could be doing to incentivize marriage. Stay at home mothers used to get respect and praise for their parenting. Single mothers used to be shamed and looked down on. Now we do the opposite. People respond to economic incentives, but they also respond to social ones too. Even if money incentivizes more single mothers, turning the dial on the social pressures in the opposite direction could help mitigate this.

One obvious move is to just get rid of the marriage penalty on taxes. But... here we are seriously looking at getting rid of taxes on tips.

This strikes me as an odd theory based on the fact that married folks with kids remain the core of the Republican coalition.

The reality is position 2 is a compromise position because you go to the war with the army you have. And the army of married folks are very nice people who are uncomfortable letting toddlers and homeless people die in the streets to save 5% of GDP or whatever the numbers bear out to be. The married people also have been paying social security and medicare all their adult lives at this point and want that security they were "promised". Thus, entitlement reform is a losing issue. Not with me, presumably me and you could win tens of thousands of votes nationwide campaigning on a platform of eliminating Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, LINK, and all the other poverty-reduction programs. But that doesn't work for a party that wants to have presidents and congressional majorities.

So what do you do? You target the unsympathetic leeches like single guys age 29 playing lots of COD, because those are the cuts you CAN make. The alternative is you lose handily, the cuts you made are reversed, more foreigners are added to the roster, and they lop off a lot of penises and breasts of confused 15 year olds.

So what do you do? You target the unsympathetic leeches like single guys age 29 playing lots of COD, because those are the cuts you CAN make.

You are insufficiently cynical here. You target the unsympathetic leeches publicly in order to maintain support, and then cut Medicaid for everyone in a bill you don't give your own backbenchers time to read. 29yo single guys playing COD don't consume a lot of expensive healthcare (and when they do it is an ER visit after a car crash - which will end up as an uncollected bill for the hospital if Medicaid doesn't pay) - there is no way you are getting the size of Medicaid cuts the GOP are looking for without taking healthcare away from people who are actually sick, and the people writing the legislation know this.

Page me when such cuts actually happen. Will continue to put money on fiscal hawks rolling snakeyes.

You can respond to this in two ways:

  1. Tell them not to have premarital sex.
  2. Tell them to keep the baby because single motherhood is a heroic thing to do; you're CHOOSING LIFE.

Why not both?

Because 1 clearly doesn't work?

Remember all the abstinence only culture war stuff in the late 2000s / early 2010s?

Pretty sure abstinence only sex ed resulted in the highest rates of teenage pregnancy

Teen pregnancy actually peaked in 2005 and then collapsed nationwide in the late 2000s/early 2010s such that it took the whole nation's fertility rate with it.

It turns out that it doesn't take a lot of education or healthcare access to drive to Walmart and spend 20 bucks on Plan B.

It turns out that it doesn't take a lot of education or healthcare access to drive to Walmart and spend 20 bucks on Plan B.

Yes exactly

Because 1 clearly doesn't work?

It has been found difficult, and left untried.

Would it be fair to say that the whole disagreement here is that @fmac is interpreting "Tell them not to have premarital sex" as, literally, programs telling kids not to have premarital sex, where you're interpreting it as reversing three generations of cultural change?

It's probably fair to say that the former doesn't work (it's definitely fair to say it doesn't work well, but none of the "abstinence-only education correlates with higher teen pregnancy rates" research I can find seems to be RCT-based or even adjusting for obvious confounders).

It's probably also fair (again, so many likely confounders) to say that the culture we changed away from did work pretty well.

But, although I'm not criticizing you for sticking with Chesterton's wording, doesn't it feel like "difficult" is grossly understating the problem here? If it had turned out that devoting some Health class time to abstinence had worked, we could have had some policy wonks discover that and institute it, and voila, problem solved. It could have been done via state laws, or via ED (when will I ever get tired of pointing out the ironies of that acronym?) funding, or just one school board at a time. But if it is correct that 1950s morality had a strong effect ... how do we get back to 1950s morality again, exactly? Or more precisely, since 1950s morality is what developed into 1990s morality, how do we get back to something that's sufficiently 1950s-like to help people but sufficiently different to avoid eventually being rejected again?

From your choice of quotes, I'm guessing your answer (and Chesterton's, were he still around) would include some sort of revival of Christianity, but the data makes that look neither necessary nor sufficient. In the USA non-Hispanic whites are around 60% Christian and have around a 30% rate of births to unmarried mothers, while for non-Hispanic blacks we see around 70% Christian and around 70% of births out of wedlock, and Asians here are at around 30% Christian but around 12% births out of wedlock.

Of course, that's just the rates of "births out of wedlock"! Currently 3/4 of Americans think that premarital sex is morally acceptable, and the vast majority of the other 1/4 must feel guilty eventually, because even decades ago 95% of middle-aged Americans had done it. Even if there's a potential level of deep, culturally-ubiquitous Christianity that could inculcate "fornication is a sin" in a way that modern Christianity can't pull off, how utterly monumental a change would it be to get from here to there? Whatever the process, describing it as just "tell them" seems woefully inadequate. There may be some level of hysteresis making this exceptionally difficult: if 90% of your community thinks "fornication is a sin" is a theological fact, the other 10% just look like sinners and don't affect what your kids believe, but if it's 10% and 90% instead then the 10% just look like weirdos and don't affect what your kids believe, even if you're in the 10%.

Would it be fair to say that the whole disagreement here is that @fmac is interpreting "Tell them not to have premarital sex" as, literally, programs telling kids not to have premarital sex, where you're interpreting it as reversing three generations of cultural change?

Yes, I'd say that's entirely fair.

But, although I'm not criticizing you for sticking with Chesterton's wording, doesn't it feel like "difficult" is grossly understating the problem here?

Also entirely fair.

I would say that "sex education" is a failure all around and that we've so thoroughly given up on designing a culture and education program to achieve goals that we don't have any clue how to do so. Healthy cultures are evolved phenomena, and most cultures currently alive are no longer suited to their environments.

This is not a high-effort response, and yours certainly is, so I apologize for the inadequacies.

Healthy cultures are evolved phenomena, and most cultures currently alive are no longer suited to their environments.

This right here is a big part of what makes me a "reactionary" right there. The entire modern world vastly overestimates the capacities of intelligently-designed, top down "culture and education program[s]."

Healthy cultures are evolved phenomena, and most cultures currently alive are no longer suited to their environments.

Devon Eriksen expressed the problem with this in horrifying fashion a few weeks ago:

But what if Chesterton's Fence isn't a fence at all, but a sort of beaver dam? What if social norms came about by evolution, instead of intelligent design?

If tens of thousands of tribes come up with sets of customs based on silly ideas from their stone age ooga booga tribal religions, then a few of those are bound to have effective ones by pure accident. Then they become successful, and wipe out or absorb the other tribes. And those customs combine, and mutate, and get justified by new religions, and once again, the ones that randomly happen to be best guide their unwitting hosts to victory. But they never know the real reason why it made them successful. Because they never knew in the first place. It was all just ooga booga, and luck.

Then, millennia later, not only do they not know why the important bits are important, they don't even know which bits are the important bits. And which bits might actually be bad. Suddenly, you're playing minesweeper with your entire society. Eliminating archaic customs is like some kind of malevolent cosmic game show. Some doors have fabulous technological prizes behind them, and others have a swarm of angry Martian Death Bees. And you don't dare just decline to play the game, because if you don't, you'll be conquered and replaced by the winners. But that's also what happens if you play and lose.

And all the labels on the doors just say "Ooga Booga".

To some extent you might expect this sort of thing to be a problem that's also its own solution: if some cultures evolve poorly, well, the ones that didn't will just replace them again.

Memetic natural selection was never really a good solution. Anthropology had the "Pots, not People" movement that suggested cultural diffusion was often a peaceful spread of winning ideas rather than a violent expansion of people armed with winning ideas, but even Wiki admits that

the arrival of archaeogenetics since the 1990s ... has resulted in an increasing number of studies presenting quantitative estimates on the genetic impact of migrating populations. In several cases, that has led to a revival of the "invasionist" or "mass migration" scenario".

You'd think that progressives would have fought harder against such a bleak dog-eat-dog view of the world, but maybe something about the typical "lots of ancient DNA survived in-place, but the Y chromosomes all came from the invaders" evidence resonates with their worldview in other ways.

But memetic natural selection probably isn't even a possible solution, today.

Thankfully, in the modern era wars of conquest are more frowned upon, and intellectual production and publication are far greater, and so the diffusion and uptake of ideas is the main source of cultural change ... but the trouble is that evolution just doesn't work the same way via that mechanism! Even if the only change to cultural evolution was that far more memes now spread horizontally (like genes in viruses) rather than vertically (like genes in mitochondria),

Meme Mitochondria prioritize your evolutionary success, but don’t really care if you enjoy the process, and don’t care about anything else.

Meme viruses prioritize sounding good, but don’t care whether you live or die. Even a meme-virus that kills you will succeed if it gets you to spread it to others.

Newly screwed up mitochondrial genes can kill a person horribly (no hyperlink for this one - it was too depressing that Google searches mostly bring up children's hospital web pages), but new screwed up viral genes can kill whole swaths of a population horribly, before the virus evolves to be less virulent or the survivors evolve resistance to it. Backing out of the metaphor, I guess that's the three possible answers to my "how utterly monumental a change would it be to get from here to there?" question, isn't it? Either a bad new culture wrecks everything so badly that something else climbs out of the wreckage, or its badness is offensive enough to get outcompeted by less offensive forms of itself before it creates too much wreckage, or it's rejected by subcultures that eventually outbreed it. I'm hoping for #2 or #3, myself. #1 seems like the only hope of a major conservative cultural restoration, but the cost would be atrocious, and I'm not really conservative, and it's hard to forecast exactly what flavor of conservatism would be the one to come out on top afterward.

This is not a high-effort response, and yours certainly is, so I apologize for the inadequacies.

Hmm... my first impulse is to say that no apologies are necessary, and point out that grep finds a bunch of quotes from you in my personal archives that I'm happy to repay in part. That's all true, but I do notice that those quotes are from your /r/themotte days rather than from TheMotte. Probably even that's just because I read here less and archive much less than I did 3 years ago, but if you think you've been slacking off lately, don't let me discourage you from whatever self-criticism keeps you at top form! ;-)

Probably even that's just because I read here less and archive much less than I did 3 years ago

Same here, I haven't been around The Motte as much as in the old days. Reading still, usually around the monthly QC collections, but commenting less.

That Devon Eriksen quote pretty much describes a good portion of my own worldview, and your analogy about mitochondria versus viruses sums up another chunk (indeed, it's a metaphor I use myself from time to time). And I, for one, think #1 is pretty much inevitable, with maybe the slimmest hope of #3 (though I think that to be successful, #3 can't rely on "outbreeding the enemy" alone, and will ultimately have to resort to a superior capacity for violence).

For what it’s worth, there is good historical (and contemporary) evidence that people have always learned cultural practices from one another, instead of it being purely transmitted by conquest or force. A fairly elementary example is the extremely rapid spread of crops in the Columbian Exchange, a slightly deeper cut is Japan’s conscious and discerning importation of Western norms post-Meiji Restoration, and a perhaps controversial take is that cargo cults were (are?) an ineffective attempt to learn Western practices.

This would roughly be your “virus” case of horizontal transmission. But what I think your model misses is how and why people transmit cultural knowledge, and how the selection effects work mechanically. I believe that this is through conscious recognition of tangible outcomes that can be hypothetically correlated with the practice for positive selection, and implicit comprehension of norms on their own terms for retention of behavior. In plain language, you pick a practice up either because it’s doing something good for someone else or because it’s just the way things are done. Let’s call the first case adaptation and the second retention.

Every practice has its price. There’s a cost for following it instead of doing something else, including doing nothing at all. It also has a certain legibility to it. Using a certain spice in one’s cooking obviously and visibly changes the flavor, but increasingly complex crop rotation schemes will only show their merit on the order of years. Superior military practice can only demonstrate its worth in the event of a war. Finally, there is a magnitude to what the practice will do for you. Diminishing returns are always an issue.

So for adaptation to occur, you need the perceived advantage of a new practice, inclusive of how confident you are that the practice causes the advantage, to significantly exceed the cost of adapting the new practice.

Meanwhile, retention just works like any old social pressure. If you don’t do this, you aren’t cool. The power of retention is in proportion to the power and influence of the normative group over you.

Back to the actual meat of the subject. Right now, I would argue that the following propositions obtain:

  1. Our economic system, bolstered by explicit and implicit welfare schemes, is so powerful that most immediate needs are filled without any real effort.
  2. The worst risks of sex and solitary lifestyles have been massively mitigated by birth control and welfare.
  3. There is an ascendant class of tastemakers with historically unparalleled reach, influence, and power. They have displaced most of the small local tastemakers that preceded them.
  4. Points 1-3 have only been in effect for a very short period of time.

Back to adaptation. What people these days see is not a minefield of viscerally bad outcomes with cultural guardrails, or obviously superior external groups to learn from if one is not to fall behind. Instead, they see a more-or-less flat floor of outcomes with a huge amount of outdated rules that are visibly being broken to the pleasure and advantage of the rulebreakers. Cultural norms around how to get the most visible pleasure spread like wildfire, and there are clear reasons given for why the old ways are outdated. Nothing immediately and unignorably bad happens to the people who adopt these practices, so the change keeps spreading. Debt, drugs, sexual liberation, obsessive hobbies, and so on.

Meanwhile, a massive proportion of cultural practices are exported as part of a social-political program by the cultured urban elite. These have some basis in people’s preferences, but their spread is almost totally disconnected from these preferences, and is instead based in political maneuvering within this class. It’s effectively fashionable beliefs.

And finally, and most critically, most of the bad outcomes from these practices only manifest on a multigenerational basis. The fertility crisis will only really come to a head as the older people keeping the lights on retire or lose the capacity to handle their work. A life of solitude or sexual misconduct only really comes calling when you get old with no younger family to take care of you. Unproductive behavior only starts incurring costs when it spreads so far that bare minimum upkeep becomes infeasible and the pre-existing infrastructure crumbles - like an ill-cared-for house.

So my analysis would be, at this very moment we are coming down the tail end of a very unrepresentative and culturally dysgenic era. The selective pressures were encouraging bad behavior for around sixty years, and have incurred some major costs. Some of those bills are already coming for repayment, and the younger generations are starting to flail around for superior cultural practices. Some will likely not come fully due for decades to come, and will cause their own crises. But there is some intelligence behind this, and it can be directed. People are already trying to direct it. The problem is just that the outcomes we need to see are another sixty years away. So until then, the best we can do is proceed with discernment, wisdom, and most of all, faith.

Thank you for articulating my thoughts much better than I was, what a banger

Chesterton had some bangers, I also thought of a slightly sneer-y remix I'd like to get your thoughts on.

"The Marxist ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."

If you disagree with this, I'd love to know why?

True Marxism has never been tried, Comrade!

More or less by definition any given "ideal" is going to be difficult, and rarely is the True Ideal tried particularly hard, unless one's ideal is sincerely some laissez-faire muddling-along sort of thing.

True Marxism has never been tried, Comrade!

This is exactly the bit I was riffing on.

I'm firmly in the camp of "both Marxism and Christian ideals have been tried and found lacking". If you think Chesterson is right, but the Marxist fanatics are wrong, I would be curious to see how that gap is bridged.

I'm not professorgerm, but I'd disagree with it because the Marxist ideal has been tried, in a way that promoting a less sex-obsessed culture hasn't since our grandparent's eras (where, coincidentally, society did in fact seem less sex obsessed).

You can say Marxism hasn't been tried. But it has.

I actually agree, Marxism has been tried (and been found wanting). But I also firmly think that Christian ideals have been tried, and that Chesterson is wrong (albeit with great prose). There are 2.6 billion followers of Christianity. The world has been dominated by Christian nations for like ~400 straight years, waning over the last 60.

If someone wants to argue "okay but that wasn't true Christian ideals" than I think they should accept the same position on Marxism.

Sure, we didn't test a society with perfect Christian ideals, but that's what happens when ideals have to map on to real life. The value of an ideal isn't based on the hypothesized textbook perfect form, it's based on the real outcomes once you expose it to human society.

History shows us that when Christianity was in fact being tried, we did in fact have better outcomes on a whole host of relevant metrics to the people yearning for Christianity. It was Christianity's decline, not ascent, that was accompanied by the degradation of society.

have better outcomes on a whole host of relevant metrics to the people yearning for Christianity

Unless you were a powerless woman, or a powerless minority, or a powerless person of slightly the wrong proclivity for various things including but not limited to sexual orientation and opinions on celestial mechanics (at relevant times).

I'd posit that if Christianity was the ideal human ideology that caused maximum flourishing, it wouldn't have declined. Or at least the places where it didn't decline would then be much better places (and presumably out-compete) than places where it did.

More comments

I don't know; I think this is not responding to the actual argument.

I think most traditionalist Christians would say, you want a culture that treats sex like it's sacred and important. Abstinence only sex education might be part of that, but it pales in comparison for norm shaping to other forces. And the norm shaping in the 90s and 2000s, via Hollywood, and network TV, MTV, and the radio, was absolutely drenched in liberal notions about "sexuality" and "sexual liberation". (I'm honestly not sure where to put internet porn in this discussion, because although it shaped certain norms about behavior, I'm less clear about its role in normalizing public social roles about sexuality, and I suspect it played an important role in the #MeToo sex negative backlash towards male sexual assertiveness). I mean, I grew up in the religious South in the 90s. And all the Southern Baptist families around me still had to deal with the fact that their kids were marinating in a sexual culture being promulgated by a million vectors of national broadcast media, all heavily liberalizing, whether they liked it or not. Fights over abstinence based education were rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I think, given that broader media context, that sure, abstinence based education probably couldn't have worked. And it may well have been that kids from more traditional or religious households were less likely to be on birth control or have condoms and then, after amorous circumstances intervened, ended up getting teen pregnant. I don't know (although the other comment about the usual racial cofounder can never be ignored when it comes to the South).

If traditionalists say "tell them not to have premarital sex", they generally mean something much, much bigger and deeper than the contents of a stray sex ed class. They mean something like, a healthy culture in one where all the various sense-making institutions treat sex like it is sacred, and important, and something set aside, and not to be treated likely or traded like a product - and then people will respond to that and treat it thusly, rather than treating it like a trip to the amusement park with a new friend. Progressives deeply disagree with this, but they understand the impulse, because this is precisely how they feel about "racism" and "sexism" and "xenophobia" and "homophobia" - they get very, very upset if people treat those topics lightly, and they insist that all the various sense-making institutions that they control treat these topics as sacralized, and important, and set aside, and that everyone participate in their universal morality story.

Lots of cultures historically have had much more consensus on treating sex the way that traditionalists would prefer it were treated, including America in earlier eras (the fact of the pill coming into existing in the mid 20th century complicates this discussion, of course). And claiming that that never worked is probably a tall order, and disingenuous to boot, because the actual crux of the argument for most progressives, really, is not, "Did it factually work?" It's "I don't want to live in a world where sex is that culturally locked down and hidden away". Which is fine, but accepting that means abandoning the fig leaf of scientism and accepting that different groups just fundamentally have incommensurable worldviews and values.

Lots of cultures historically have had much more consensus on treating sex the way that traditionalists would prefer it were treated, including America in earlier eras...

I always feel like this is way oversimplified.

“There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the alter of monogamy” -- Arthur Schopenhauer

I highly doubt a traditional culture has ever existed where most high-agency (read: upper class, free, generally attractive and fit) men reached the alter after their teenage years as virgins.

Assuming it were possible to settle such a bet, I would put considerable money down that no King of France ever reached his wedding night a virgin other than Louis XVI, and we know how that turned out.

Really, it's probably worse than that: if I asked the many Louis' and Francois' if they were virgins when they got married, they'd be confused by the question. "What do you mean virgin, I'm a man you fucking idiot?"

What we're dealing with is a result of a culture built around equality, of the classes and the sexes, and the results of that culture.

If I had to guess at examples/exceptions, the Puritans would be pretty high on the list. The island of Inis Beag might've been too small for aristocracy.

Didn't the Puritans marry pretty young?

I can believe that you can keep a boy virginal to 16 reliably with good parenting, 18 or 20 less reliably but still often enough to make it worthwhile, but probably never to 25 unless the boy is sort of a fuck up. Like if a boy loses his virginity before 16 it says something bad about the parents, of a boy still has his v card at 26 it says something concerning about him. He might lack the libido to have a quality marriage later, or the power of will to get what he wants.

Or he might just be short and upper middle class such that he’s disgusted by women twice his weight.

I don’t remember, but I think puritans married in their mid 20s

Well, we got free love and contraception and abortion and divorce, and there are still plenty of prostitutes in London, and seemingly increasing amounts of young women selling sex for cash as a signal of empowerment or something. Schopenhauer plainly could not envision OnlyFans.

I do wonder where he got that figure, and who he was including in that. Did he mean "if only men could marry several women, there would be fewer women having to sell sex to survive"? Or did he mean "if living together without marriage was tolerated, many of these women would be in stable relationships"? Because uh, we got that, and we still have prostitution, escort work, sex work, porn, etc.

EDIT: Yeah, looking it up a little, those figures seem debatable. Schopenhauer could be including "poor women who sold sex from time to time, women living in irregular unions, women in temporary relationships" and the likes:

Although London police reports recorded there to be approximately 8,600 prostitutes known to them, it has been suggested that the true number of women prostituting during this time was closer to 80,000 (Rogers).

During the Victorian Age, prostitution did not subscribe to any one tradition; some women lived in brothels, some with soldiers or sailors, and some worked on the streets. Judith Walkowitz, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, highlights the different avenues available to prostitutes in her book Prostitution and Victorian Society. The most common form of prostitution during this time was streetwalking. Women who performed this act were most commonly those who supplemented their daily income with money they could earn by prostituting on occasion, but there were also some who used streetwalking as their primary source of income.

...During the Victorian Age, the number of prostitutes who actually lived in brothels was considerably low. Despite this, customers that behaved inappropriately towards the prostitutes that did inhabit such places were normally unappreciated and unwelcome (Walkowitz, 23-25)

I would tend to go with the police estimate for "prostitutes who are street walkers or in brothels" rather than "80,000 genuine no other income or relationship prostitutes". The link for the 80,000 figure seems to go "I got this from Rogers" "Hi I'm Rogers and I got this from Mayhew" and where did Mayhew get it?

To understand the mid-Victorian perception of prostitution we must appreciate the scale of the concern. Mayhew tells us that in 1857 there were 8,600 prostitutes in London known to the police but that the true number may have been nearer to 80,000 (Mayhew p. 476).

Mayhew, H. London Labour and the London Poor. Penguin, London 1985

Digging that one up gives me this source:

To show how difficult it is to give from any data at present before the public anything like a correct estimate of the number of prostitutes in London, we may mention (extracting from the work of Dr Ryan) that while the Bishop of Exeter asserted the number of prostitutes in London to be 80,000, the City Police stated to Dr Ryan that it did not exceed 7,000 to 8,000. About the year 1793 Mr Colquhoun, a police magistrate, concluded, after tedious investigations, that there were 50,000 prostitutes in this metropolis. At that period the population was one million, and as it is now more than double we may form some idea of the extensive ramifications of this insidious vide.

And here I stop, because I am not going to chase down Dr Ryan and the Bishop of Exeter.

But another writer cautions that Mayhew is not the most accurate for data:

Mayhew seems not to have corrected the errors in his text, even when he was willing to acknowledge them. (The long list of errata at the end of Vol. I is mostly taken up by inaccurate calculations.) E. P. Thompson’s conclusion seems reasonable: ‘Every single table and set of statistical data in Mayhew must be scrutinised, not for dishonesty or manipulation, but for sheer slipshod technique and haste in getting to press’, ‘The Political Education of Henry Mayhew’, Victorian Studies, 11 (September 1967); 41–62 (p.58).

Anyway, be it 8,000 or 80,000, contra Schopenhauer the problem was not monogamy but rather poverty: the lack of secure employment and good wages for working and lower class men, and the lack of employment for working and lower class women (street sellers of everything from flowers to vegetables to small items was the fall-back if no steady employment in domestic service or elsewhere). So it's the economy, stupid, not sexual politics that was driving women into part-time or full-time prostitution.

I like this analysis and I agree with your commentary

My point was embracing "Tell them not to have premarital sex." is a method that won't work, and thus, is silly to endorse

Pretty sure abstinence only sex ed resulted in the highest rates of teenage pregnancy

We'd have to fisk both sides of the claim, and I'm tired, but doesn't this sound to you like a classic case of where black population clusters also correspond with conservative Christian clusters (aka southern states)?

Slightly, but not totally. The teen pregnancy issue during the W era was actually most strongly a southwestern Hispanic phenomenon, with states like Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico having higher teen pregnancy rates than deep southern states. Nevada used to have a higher teen pregnancy rate than Alabama!

Broadly, those same heavily Hispanic States have seen the largest drops in teen fertility. Deep southern states also fell, but less so, more like a 50% drop, while the northeastern and midwestern states dropped something like 60%.

It’s utterly unsurprising to me that Hispanics assimilating led to big drops in teen fertility.

That does seem plausible, although a bit too narrow

But also humans like to have sex so if you tell them "don't have sex, that is all" then they won't listen to you and won't use birth control they're unaware exists

I tried skimming a few papers but figuring out which states the data came from was a pain in the ass so I gave up, happy to both walk away feeling like we're right

Isn’t the right story: get married and then have a bunch of sex — indeed you’ll have more sex compared to being single and ready to mingle?

Something's gotta give between

  1. Abstinence until marriage

  2. Marriage driven by choice and random chance relatively (25+) late in life.

  3. No fault divorce.

  4. A healthy sex drive in an individual.

I'm not accusing you of hypocrisy, I think I know what you'd choose. But at core those four can't, in general, live together. At least one has to go.

Something's gotta give between

  1. Abstinence until marriage
  2. Marriage driven by choice and random chance relatively (25+) late in life.
  3. No fault divorce.
  4. A healthy sex drive in an individual.

So just get rid of #2 and #3, then.

What does the existence of no fault divorce have to do with all of this? Your point seems like a slam dunk with just 1, 2 and 4.

Agreed—people should marry younger

I mean yes? I'm not sure what that has to do with this but it's true

The far-right prefers option 1

Can I just register my annoyance with this kind of boo-light? Yes, I am just as annoyed by "radical feminists" and "extreme leftists," which 9 times out of 10 is used to refer to normie feminists and center-libs.

In fact pretty much all religious people (if they follow a religion that makes any pretense of traditionality) would prefer people not have premarital sex. Even liberal denominations in theory advocate against it, though you won't hear a peep of actual condemnation from the pulpit nowadays.

Conservatives generally would prefer people not have premarital sex, but if they do, they would prefer the babies that result not be aborted. I wouldn't say they glamorize single motherhood, but if you want babies not to be aborted, it is both ineffective and cruel to say "You're not allowed to abort, but we will not lift a finger to help you and your child because poverty is what you deserve."

Can I just register my annoyance with this kind of boo-light? Yes, I am just as annoyed by "radical feminists" and "extreme leftists," which 9 times out of 10 is used to refer to normie feminists and center-libs.

If you read my comment more carefully, you'd know the whole point was to contrast mainstream conservatives with the far-right, who I recognize as distinct groupings.

If you read my comment more carefully, you'd know the whole point was to contrast mainstream conservatives with the far-right, who I recognize as distinct groupings.

Then why do you claim that most of this site is far right?

But your entire premise is wrong. The "far right" and mainstream conservatives both prefer people not to have premarital sex. (Okay, non-religious rightists only disapprove of women having premarital sex.) I don't think you are actually distinguishing between them, as evidenced by the fact that you label "most people on this website" far right. I realize to leftists, "far right" is anyone who votes Republican, but it's still a nonsense categorization.

Okay, non-religious rightists only disapprove of women having premarital sex.

I think Alexander would qualify that by "having premarital sex and getting pregnant", he's not anti-sex or anti-right, he's anti-the wrong people having too many babies. He wants the lower classes to strive to emulate the middle class, where responsible parenting means girls aren't sexually active in their teens because they're encouraged to concentrate on school/college, if they are sexually active in their unmarried twenties they are not promiscuous, they use contraception and avail of abortion if the contraception fails, and once married their husband is working, maybe they have a job too, and they have two kids whom they can afford to pay for to raise themselves. Any girl who deviates from this by getting knocked up and insisting on having the kid with no partner is shamed and ostracised.

He thinks the right in America has been taken over by the Moral Majority types who insist on being anti-abortion and pro-single motherhood, and are then bleeding-hearts about paying out taxpayer money to support those single moms and their babies.

At least, that's the impression I've got from past arguments with him. I admit, I don't know where he's getting "far-right" from, but I wonder if he's conflating the "right being contaminated by the pro-lifers" with that and not strictly the Not to love Der Fuehrer is a great disgrace types.

He thinks the right in America has been taken over by the Moral Majority types who insist on being anti-abortion and pro-single motherhood, and are then bleeding-hearts about paying out taxpayer money to support those single moms and their babies.

As someone who remembers the Moral Majority, they were definitely not "pro-single motherhood." They did make a show of supporting single mothers who made the decision not to abort, but mostly by encouraging them to put the child up for adoption. It was a trope at the time (still seen today, but it was very well known then) that "right-wingers care about babies right up until the moment they are born" because MM types famously wanted to outlaw abortion but do away with welfare, and were very big into shaming women slutty enough to get knocked up outside of marriage. No, this wasn't entirely fair/universally true, but it wasn't entirely untrue either.

Well, I'm taking "pro-single motherhood" to mean "don't have an abortion, have the baby" even if giving it up for adoption. The lesser of two evils. I wish Alexander would be clearer about what he intends to communicate, rather than just flinging some insults around.

I don't think you are actually distinguishing between them

I provided an example of how they differ, which you ignored.

The far-right (which includes most people on this website) views single mothers negatively, while the mainstream conservative view is very different.

This is wrong. The far right (especially the areligious far right) is much more negative about single mothers, but mainstream conservatives have never approved of single motherhood. They just consider it better than abortion.

Mainstream conservatives and the far-right agree that the welfare state serves to subsidize single motherhood, but only the latter thinks it's a bad thing.

This is wrong. Mainstream conservatives also think the welfare state subsidizing single motherhood is a bad thing.

I think in general you have an extremely reductionist view of rightists, such that you cannot actually distinguish between "mainstream conservatives" and "the far right." The fault line there is not how much they disapprove of abortion or single mothers.

Surely you can do both; don't have premarital sex, but, as a fallback option, of course single motherhood is better than many alternatives.

don't have premarital sex

How is convincing western populations not to do this going?

Follow up question, does abstinence only sex education show any efficacy in preventing pregnancies?

Sex Ed doesn’t prevent pregnancy in general- teen pregnancy is dictated by population factors.

does abstinence only sex education show any efficacy in preventing pregnancies?

IIRC other methods don't really work that well either.

South Korea's culture is quite good at preventing pregnancies, but creates a much bigger set of problems.

Abstinence-only-until-marriage sex ed is unlikely to work well in a society where average age of first marriage is 30+ years.

It may work in a society where people get married when they are 16-18 years old, but it would require radical changes to other load bearing parts of cultural infrastructure. (Subsidies to colleges contingent on college as maximally family friendly and perhaps even maximally singles unfriendly?)

You might have the causality reversed. Average age of first marriage rose significantly after a societal push to embrace ubiquitous premarital sex.

I will take your word on the timing of events. But after the genie was out of the bottle many other things changed, too, which are all now reasons for any random individual to stay in the current cultural equilibrium. If you want to push them and together with them whole of society to other equilibrium, you need to a path from here to there. Propaganda at schools for abstinence sounds like a joke which it is when it is an insufficient level of push: teacher lecturing an abstinence sex ed curriculum will appear detached from reality in an environment where everybody expects the current marriage pattern of no marriage at all or it's decades away when you are closer to middle-aged than teenager.

Getting married is something people can plausibly do. It will be easier if there is a push for other changes that make it easier to become and be a young married couple having young married life (including married sex that results in kids).

which are all now reasons for any random individual to stay in the current cultural equilibrium

I sort of don't believe you. Game theory is hard in general, and it's extra difficult for complicated cultural games. It's easy to ipse dixit some into existence; it's much harder to actually show with a reasonable model.

If you want to push them and together with them whole of society to other equilibrium, you need to a path from here to there.

I mean, no? Most social engineering projects fail, and many cultural changes have occurred without someone planning out a specific step-by-step path. This sort of demand is basically trying to set up an impossible task, as no one here is going to be able to just apply magic to accomplish intermediate steps, and any proposed intermediate steps will be responded to with, "...then why haven't you already done that?" I'm feeling the FConSCC/Hlynka flowing that you're just working from a completely flawed conceptual framework for the base of a discussion.

I get a feeling you are overinterpreting a metaphor.

Yes, I used the word "path". I wasn't really imagining any step-by-step path, I was thinking , dunno, folk thermodynamics or folk gravity surfaces. A path for society to lurch from current equilibrium/stable attractor state to some other equilibrium, whatever it is, by reducing the barrier between the two, reducing the required amount of "pushing" by propaganda alone. The end state does not need to be well mapped and planned, because as you say, such social engineering is no really possible, that is just the nature of metaphor. Naturally, itis more credible to have a vision to lurch towards.

I do think that when individual in modern West finds him/herself in some of the common romantic/sexual paths, there is no single reason but multiple reasons that makes those choices feel the path of least resistance. Same reasons make any other choices (such as trad "date seriously, propose and get married before having sex") appear something so weird and impractical that is not even on their map. Yet in Victorian England or even more traditional cultures, random individual faces multitude of reasons have heavily encouraged marriage. After all, several parts of the society and technology changed along the way to current morality from Victorian morality, neutralizing those reasons (electrification, post-industrialization, usefulness of college education in post-industrial economy, the pill, world wars, several waves of feminism, mass media). Victorian family culture was sill so powerful have we sill have some remnants like Christmas and playing Queen Victoria's favorite Wagner piece for the wedding march.

I do admit this is no grand social theory, it is a handwavy justification why I thought to use word "equilibrium", which I chose as I had brief mental image and I wrote two-paragraph off-the-cuff comment. I don't know how to evaluate whether I emit "Hlynka flow" and don't really care to. Like, I am not really sure what exactly is the point. After reading your other comment in nearby thread, quoted below for convenience , I think we are nearly agreeing? The push against smoking included much more than anti-smoking education in schools: bans in many public and private spaces that are enforced, taxes, fees, inconvenience for selling and marketing tobacco, varied media campaigns not limited to the equivalent of odd sex ed class. School health education about harms of smoking hopefully contributes to anti-smoking, but wasn't decisive on its own.

So reiteration of my point: if the intention is a society of no premarital sex, then abstinence-only sex ed in schools will be much easier time having an effect if there are other policies in place that make the abstinence-until-marriage lifestyle sound more enticing, realistic and attainable than other lifestyles. "Wait until marriage" certainly is not enticing to 15 year old if people get married at 30 (if at all) and it is easy skip both waiting and marriage. But if they introduce bunch of other reasons to make early marriage more favorable, then it becomes easier -- such as, make college more family friendly (everyone can come up with other favorite policies to push, I am not a think tank).

I think we are nearly agreeing? The push against smoking included much more than anti-smoking education in schools: bans in many public and private spaces that are enforced, taxes, fees, inconvenience for selling and marketing tobacco, varied media campaigns not limited to the equivalent of odd sex ed class. School health education about harms of smoking hopefully contributes to anti-smoking, but wasn't decisive on its own.

So reiteration of my point: if the intention is a society of no premarital sex, then abstinence-only sex ed in schools will be much easier time having an effect if there are other policies in place that make the abstinence-until-marriage lifestyle sound more enticing, realistic and attainable than other lifestyles.

Sure. I think we are mostly agreeing. The only thing I'd add is that the only person who has posited that the only strategy available, the only strategy that we can consider when determining a chance of success, is just trying to have mostly left-leaning schoolteachers officially say that abstinence is a thing that exists... is you.

Honestly, I'm getting shades of the perennial weight loss discussion, where certain factions strawman the science of caloric balance as, "The only way this can be tried is to just suggest to people that they consume fewer calories." Naw dawg. You're strawmanning hard.

Great point re: average age of first marriage, never considered that

How is convincing western populations not to do this going?

You say this as if there is some consensus effort to try to convince them of this. The reality is that for quite a while now, the dominant consensus has been trying to accomplish the opposite. Unless you think this is just a fully-general argument against any sort of minority view. Like, communism must be wrong, not because it's conceptually wrong or anything, but because it hasn't convinced enough westerners to be communist, for example. This seems like a very strange claim.

My claim is that anyone who says "we should simply tell them to not have sex" as a method of preventing unwanted babies is being willfully ignorant of the fact it's been conclusively demonstrated not to work

anyone who says "we should simply tell them to not have sex"

Good thing I'm not doing that. Perhaps I need to repeat my claims?

We did a bit of a dosey do here.

I responded to a guy (who I now realize is not you) who was saying "don't have premarital sex" by being snippy, then you responded to my response with something that I actually agree with but was kind of different than what I was saying, so I felt slightly confused and restated what I was going at to clarify.

I don't think society is pushing "don't have premarital sex" , it obviously isn't. My point is that saying something like "our society should push not having premarital sex" is stupid because it doesn't work. It's basically "Santa Clause for Christmas I'd like a pony" level of policy discussion.

My point is that saying something like "our society should push not having premarital sex" is stupid because it doesn't work.

I'm not sure how I would analyze that. Someone in the past might have said that it was similarly stupid to push not smoking. Yet, we did, and major changes occurred. There are all sorts of mechanisms by which a society could push such a thing. Those various mechanisms might have different effects. It's pretty strange to me to lump them all together carelessly. It seems to be actively missing the point to lump them all under "we should simply tell them to not have sex", as if they're all actually equivalent to that. I think it would have been similarly stupid to say that all methods of pushing to reduce smoking are equivalent to "simply telling people to not smoke".

My main point is that it's doubly difficult to analyze how effective various methods could be, given a society that has been pushing for ubiquitous premarital sex for decades. It's just seriously difficult to reason about, and flippant takes like yours are not even really serious attempts at doing so.

EDIT: I will note that my original response was with respect to your statement:

How is convincing western populations not to do this going?

Again, this makes it sound like this is a thing that is actively being pursued. That's sort of the opposite of reality.

Again, this makes it sound like this is a thing that is actively being pursued. That's sort of the opposite of reality.

It has been actively pursued for decades by a small subset of people (Evangelical Christians) who genuinely believe in it. They were ignored because they were a minority who were unsuccessful in convincing others. Which is rather the point here.

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Yeah my wording sucked, I was being snarky and pointing out the answer to this question is "it isn't and it failed"

My main point is that it's doubly difficult to analyze how effective various methods could be, given a society that has been pushing for ubiquitous premarital sex for decades.

That's very fair. I'm sure abstinence only sex ed (or other social pressure) would work way better without the sexual liberation movement, etc

I guess I'd also say that kind of supports where I'm going with all this? The cat is out of the bag, society has shifted HARD into embracing pre-maritial non-procreative sex. So any proposal that goes along the lines of "simply undo all that" is pretty unlikely to work.

Maybe we'll have a conservative shift back if Gen Z/Alpha burn out hard on Tinder, idk. But western society has been on a pretty steady clip of "don't tell me what to do" for the past few hundred years, so again, feels unlikely.

Trying to stop single mom's from existing by telling people who aren't moms yet not to fuck is going to result in the exact same number of single moms for at least the next 5-20 years even if the societal shift were vibing about were to happen.

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Follow up question, does abstinence only sex education show any efficacy in preventing pregnancies?

Certainly not in the current welfare-state environment. It seemed like a stable norm, when combined with shotgun weddings, in previous environments.

I mean okay?

Any proposed policy or solution that requires massive (edit: and unpopular) social change to work isn't a very useful proposal, but it's a nice dream I guess

Any proposed policy or solution that requires massive social change to work isn't a very useful proposal, but it's a nice dream I guess

That's a weird thing to say standing in the consequences of massive social change.

We did it before and we can do it again. There is nothing mandatory about the sexual revolution, lots of human civilizations don't work like this right now let alone in history. And mores can grow more rigid in response to problems created by liberalization, has happened many times before.

Yeah maybe, at this point we're both vibing given the scope of our discussion (the direction of human civilization).

Human history has been a fairly steady march of increasing liberalism, I think because humans like doing what they want and hate being told what to do. It's open for debate if that's actually been a good thing for us (some ways yes, some ways absolutely not) as a whole. But I have a hard time imagining people wanting to give up freedom and flexibility once they have it.

I could be wrong though, if I was accurately able to predict the direction of entire societies I would be very very rich, and too busy raising children on my private tropical island to post here.

I also added "and unpopular" to my sentence above that you quoted, as it wasn't precise enough before.

Human history has been a fairly steady march of increasing liberalism

This is straight-up Whig history, and I am far from alone in rejecting it.

Edit: and now I see IGI-111 laid it all out much better and in more detail below.

Human history has been a fairly steady march of increasing liberalism

I disagree with this statement perhaps as strongly as I've ever disagreed with any statement.

The view of history it assumes is wrong, the actual results of the liberal project it assumes are wrong, the whole thing is just 18th century propaganda that history has utterly falsified in a million ways and I think it's appalling that you believe this in the face of the world you live in.

History has no singular direction, and if it has a direction within the scope of an era it is towards greater control, not greater freedom, and if the Liberal project's teleology in practice has been anything, it has been one of ever increasing individual alienation rather than liberation.

A peasant from the middle ages is more free than you are in all the ways that actually matter to the individual experience of the world to a degree that is comical. He pays less taxes, owns more space, has more social relationships, works more for himself, doesn't have to spend much of his life in a school, can't be conscripted into wars, doesn't need to fill as much paperwork... the list goes on.

The liberal project's only true undeniable achievement brought about by mass and scale is one of comfort and pleasure. People suffer much less ever since we relieved the estate of Man, and they are easily amused by marvels nobody could have dreamed of. Calling this an increase in flexibility and freedom when it comes at the cost of levels of constraint, civility and socially imposed burdens that are historically unprecedented is bold on the absurd. It is like walking up to John the Savage and telling him he is less free than genetically modified slaves.

It's a prison liberals have built. A very nice comfortable and safe prison, but a prison nonetheless. Like all ideas, theirs also inverted when taken to their ultimate logical conclusion.

I don't relish this in the slightest and still have much sympathy for the liberal project, but where I find acrimony is when facing denial. Liberalism failed. Pinker style refusal to acknowledge that reality is criminal. And indeed when Pinker himself is faced with such questions, he just shrugs and goes on with the line go up charade as if nothing happened. Please don't be like him.

A peasant from the middle ages is more free than you are in all the ways that actually matter to the individual experience of the world to a degree that is comical.

You cannot be serious. What's comical is your lack of knowledge about the lives of peasants and your idealization of some "free men of the soil" living like Hobbits in Middle Earth.

He pays less taxes,

Peasants paid whatever tax rate their lords set for them, which could range from bearable to crushing.

owns more space,

Peasants did not "own space" - generally they literally owned no land at all, and at best had tenure on it. The dwellings they lived in were tiny by modern standards.

has more social relationships,

Peasants "social relationships" were generally limited to the village they lived and died in. They had no other options and were often not even legally allowed to move to a city with more social relationships available.

works more for himself

Peasants didn't work for themselves, they worked for their lords, and had very little volition in what work they would do. Peasants didn't choose their careers.

doesn't have to spend much of his life in a school

Peasants didn't spend much of their lives in school because school wasn't available to them. Education wasn't available to them.

can't be conscripted into wars

Peasants absolutely could be conscripted into wars.

doesn't need to fill as much paperwork...

Peasants couldn't fill out paperwork because they were illiterate, and thus had no way to even know if any theoretical rights they had were being violated.

the list goes on.

Do go on.

But sure, if you would prefer to be a medieval peasant than a modern man, that route is available to you. There are many places yet even in first world countries where you can disappear, build yourself a cabin, and live alone in the woods.

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I'm not here to defend liberalism uncritically. Many issues you illustrate here are 100% correct. Alienation is one of liberalisms most profound legacies (I think this is probably a feature to the elite, not a big).

But I'm not with you on a bunch of them. I'm significantly more free than I would be in basically any other time, and I'm a white straight male, so the delta for literally any other mix and match of traits here is even higher.

I actually have a chance to improve my station in life, which was famously not something peasants did frequently.

I could marry a black woman and not risk her being murdered.

I can say things that piss people off without being ostracized or jailed or killed (although this is steadily getting worse).

I can vote despite not being rich or owning land.

It is easier than ever to literally move around the world, both temporarily and permanently. I'm pretty sure peasants frequently literally weren't allowed to leave? Also if they moved somewhere else they'd just be destitute.

I have no idea what medieval effective tax rates were so I'll defer to you there. I also don't consider taxes to be a horrible burden though. They buy me amazing healthcare, functional infrastructure (which enables a lot), infinite amounts of the cleanest drinking water in human history, much lower chances of dying a violent death, on and on.

Did peasants own land? I assume it depends on time and place but I thought that was the whole point of Lords.

I am quite happy with the quantity and quality of my relationships, but that is something out society is struggling with.

I'm so confident that peasants got drafted. Isn't that what peasant levies were? Did fighting age men get to opt out of wars? If so, why did any go?

I don't consider the quantity of paperwork I do to be a freedom constraining issue in my life lol. Although I used to be an accountant so my bar is low.

I really can't imagine how I'd be more free in basically any time period that isn't now, not excluding the post war boom in North America when life as a western man was straight easy mode

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Medicaid is for single mothers with small children who are just trying to make it. It's not for 29-year-old males sitting on their couch playing video games. We're going to find those guys, and we will SEND them back to work!

In some states anyway, pregnant mothers and their young children qualify for medicaid even if they are married and making the median family income for their state. Even if they already have family healthcare coverage through their employer, and nobody in their family has challenging health conditions. They not only pay for appointments, but give them toys and stuff when they go. This might be reasonable from the point of view of the state -- I'm sure dealing with complications after the fact is outrageously expensive, and making childbirth and infancy safer is one of the great triumphs of modern medicine.

I wouldn't expect the average 29 year old man to consume all that much healthcare, and if they are it's likely to be for the same reasons they're struggling to work.

Adding: I'm mildly in favor of publicly funded healthcare for sort of basic things that we're good at doing, like things requiring antibiotics, it's dumb that the 29 year old man might not go to the hospital for pneumonia because it could cost $10,000 (who knows? It's inexplicable) somehow, despite really mostly needing $20 worth of antibiotics.

Mike Johnson was going after gamers because he's too spineless to admit that elderly dementia patients are what's actually eating up Medicaid's budget. Arguments about single mothers or NEET gamers are a distraction from the fact that the welfare state mostly exists to subsidize the old and that nobody really wants to talk about cutting old people welfare.

As for the social conservatives, I think the goalposts have moved past abortion (which was mostly made obsolete by Plan B being made available OTC) once many of the dare I say Catholics among them realized to their horror that devotion to the awfully Protestant and capitalist sounding "success sequence" doesn't so much lead to abortions as a lack of fertility itself. See also: The Conservative Case for Teen Pregnancy.

The relatively secular far right may differ with the relatively Catholic social conservatives (though Mike Johnson is an Evangelical, which itself makes for a fun divide among both the secular and religious conservatives on the Israel Question) on the Single Mother Question, but nowhere near as bitterly as they differ over the Immigration Question (The secular far right see social conservatives and especially Catholic social conservatives as being unreliable on the Immigration Question, in alliance with the capitalists who are otherwise happy to crush social conservatives' fruitful multiplication with careerism and contraceptives.).

The goalposts moving past abortion would be a surprise to the million women who get abortions each year.

From American Conservative link, it's a good example of what I mean by the Online Right's poverty fetish:

It should go without saying that the success sequence as it is actually practiced in the United States is possible only because of artificial contraception. It is not love of chastity that leads the vast majority of Americans who attain it to “delay parenthood,” as the literature puts it, but the apparently successful attempt of pharmaceutical corporations to reduce the marital act to a sterile parody. Whatever virtues the average middle-class American couple exhibit by “delaying,” they are not natural ones. They are really showing us their disordered understanding of prudence, which has become a synonym for convenience.

{snip}

Which is why I say without hesitation that pregnancy outside wedlock is superior to the success sequence. While fornication is indeed a grave sin against chastity, it is not disordered. It is a natural act, albeit one taking place outside its proper context. Where the success sequence is parsimonious, elevating lust and the pursuit of wealth above other natural goods, pregnancy is liberal in the old-fashioned sense of the word, indeed by the standards of our professional class, even munificent. It involves the failings of youth and, by economy, the goods proper to it: heedlessness, generosity, and a kind of awe before creation, in which it quite literally participates.

Medicaid is for single mothers with small children who are just trying to make it. It's not for 29-year-old males sitting on their couch playing video games. We're going to find those guys, and we will SEND them back to work!

Duly noted, Speaker Johnson. Since the program is not for me, I have no reason for wanting it to exist. Burn it to the ground. And never vote for Mike Johnson, or for any other politician who is fine with gibs for single mothers but God forbid a young male should get some.

  1. It also harmonizes better with the current conservative political coalition, which is increasingly reliant on the votes of low-class and non-white voters who have higher rates of single-motherhood.

The low-class and non-white men, who are not known for thinking that women should recklessly slut it up. Both blacks and latinos are significantly more chauvinistic than whites. Even if many of them were raised by single mothers, they're almost certainly thinking their mother was one of the good ones, rather than thinking single mothers are desirable.

Mainstream conservatives and the far-right agree that the welfare state serves to subsidize single motherhood, but only the latter thinks it's a bad thing.

Unless there's evidence that removing Medicaid and welfare would cause parental abandonment to drop and for those parents who currently leave their kids to not be an abusive net negative if they do come back, helping single mothers out doesn't contradict an idea that a healthy two parent household is generally better to strive for.

That's a pretty big assumption IMO, it's hard to see how many shitty fathers who leave their girlfriends when she gets pregnant and basically never contacts them is going to be persuaded too much by anti welfare policies, especially when they already try to dodge child support. And even if it did work, having a drug addict dad who doesn't want to be there is not something I'd have wanted as a child. I had a light version of that (alcoholic father in my mid teens) and I still despised it.

Having a soft spot for single mothers is, in the normiecon view, very much the lesser of evils.

You seem to continually refuse to believe that we actually, literally, believe that aborting a baby is murder. Yes, including if the race of the baby isn't what we'd prefer, it'd be poor, the mom would be kinda a shitty parent(and statistically, she probably would). It's not because we're opposed to women having careers- even those of us who are. It's not because we want to see black women have kids before they finish high school(we don't, they should keep their legs closed instead of murdering babies though. I proudly, explicitly endorse slutshaming but draw the line at murder).

Having more poor single mothers is an unfortunate side effect. Their lives are already harder than they need to be and there's no reason to keep piling on- especially when the kid has a chance(granted, not a great one) to break the cycle, live life according to the success sequence, and become a normal working class person. You have the hand you're dealt and there's no point giving up.

I don't think this gets at the mainstream conservative position, or least the more religious inflected one. I would say most religious conservatives I know, at least, would say 1) single women absolutely shouldn't be having premarital sex, and 2) no one should be killing unborn babies, and so once a young woman is pregnant while single, the locus of moral concern and protection is on the blameless unborn child... and if helping and encouraging the single mother out (who often are vulnerable women themselves, even if they've made terrible choices) helps the baby, then so be it.

Same with Medicaid for the kids of single moms; to most religious conservatives, anyway, the kids didn't do anything wrong, even if their parents did.

I think this is a different position from a lot of progressives, who might well want to destigmatize sexual liberation and single motherhood and leave it as one coequal choice that women might make, who might think that the stigmatization is responsible for a lot of the difficulty of the position in the first place, and who think government really has an obligation to make the coequal choices more available to women if they choose them. And it's a different position, too, from a lot of more libertarian / non-religious conservatives, who might well see single mothers AND their children as primarily a context where incentives matter - if you make it too easy to be the child of a single mom, the system will produce more of them. And besides, a lot of those behaviors are downstream from HBD anyway, and in those cases, the kids are probably tainted by a kind of biological original sin anyway, given the evidence of their parents.

That's my sense, anyway; for the religious conservatives I know (and I think they are typical of a lot of conservatives), a lot of the issues around single parenthood amount to something like a kind of triage, trying to figure out how not to hurt the morally blameless while maintaining high standards and ideals and valuable stigma that keep bad behavior in check. It's genuinely tough to balance.

I think you see something very similar, but more so, play out about black abortion. I would say the prolife white religious people I know, even southern ones andd very conservative ones, legitimately rejoice in young black mothers not aborting their children and putting them up for adoption instead (while still thinking they should be taught better values, get religion, and stop engaging in low sexual behavior). Libertarians and certain wings of the emerging non-religious right, on the other hand, seem to... well, believe others things about black abortion. That's my impression.

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