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Surely you can do both; don't have premarital sex, but, as a fallback option, of course single motherhood is better than many alternatives.
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.
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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.
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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).
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.
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).
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.
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Great point re: average age of first marriage, never considered that
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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
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.
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:
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.
Sorry, I don't get what is rather the point here. Can you spell it out?
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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"
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.
Do you think it was unlikely for rates of smoking to decline after society had shifted HARD toward embracing it? ...with a side of "don't tell me what to do"?
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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
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Peasants paid whatever tax rate their lords set for them, which could range from bearable to crushing.
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.
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.
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.
Peasants didn't spend much of their lives in school because school wasn't available to them. Education wasn't available to them.
Peasants absolutely could be conscripted into wars.
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.
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.
I largely agree with you, but I don't think the last part is true. As with the weirdos wanting to be hunter-gatherers (or worse, raiders), you really can't be those things as they were in the past, because all the good land has been taken by people doing something vastly more productive with it.
And an off-the-grid cabin in the woods isn't really being a medieval peasant. You need a lord for that. But, ironically, for the authentic frontier homesteader experience you really need some nearby raiders to potentially pillage your homestead, otherwise you're benefiting far too much from the peace and prosperity of the modern state surrounding you.
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Every word of this is cope.
Your tax rate is as imposed to you as it was then, and as with every human society it's within a range, but the median and average was much lower in medieval societies. People always try to point to the Ancien Régime numbers as if a post-famine state bankrupted by war was representative of centuries of wide variation in quality of life. It's not.
Most peasants didn't own land nominally, but you don't either and basically nobody does in the modern world. You pay rent on an exclusive lease just like they did, and yours is more expensive than theirs.
As for the size of dwellings, I encourage you to actually go and visit peasant cottages in England or France, divide by the size of a common family at the time and then look for yourself how attainable a home like that is. I've done this myself and that's what formed my opinion.
The idea that the social relationships that you get over your whole life in a village are lesser than those you get with strangers in a city or online because of sheer quantity is something I've only ever heard from people who are stuck in either. I don't really feel the need to refute that because it's just a transparent indictment of itself.
Peasants worked for themselves most of the time, this is pretty much indisputable given that without industry, you had to make everything yourself. But I'm puzzled as to where you may have even gotten the idea that they didn't, given how uninterested most nobility was in agricultural matters in the first place. Perhaps yet more 1800s treatments?
Of course schooling and general vocational choice weren't available, but this is part of my criticism: those were specifically introduced to fill the needs of modern society in both control of the population and production of workers for ever more abstract pursuits. None of this has anything to do with freedom, and as much as I value knowledge and its dispensation as a virtue, we are quite literally arguing for yet more social control in the name of the maintenance of society here. Not for individual freedom, not in the slightest.
So too was conscription invented to serve the needs of the modern state. You're not exactly going to convince me, a Frenchman, that the practice was widespread or accepted in Europe before the French Revolution since our national anthem is about how exceptional it is to do that and how it grew so specifically with the advent of Napoleonic total war. To quote De Jouvenel:
Medieval warfare imposed other ills on civillian populations, but getting entire populations blown up in massive engagements was neither possible nor desirable given the fragility of the food supply.
As for you decrying the inability of peasants to fill paperwork, I think they'd rather argue for their illegibility to the State than against it. How else to explain that a common feature of peasant revolts was a burning of records, so as to deny their rulers taxation. You want "rights" for them, theoretical constructs instead of the practical freedom that is denied to the victim of the Rousseauan panopticon. Yet more talk of liberation that only spells bondage.
And as for your last point. It is provably impossible to build yourself a cabin in the woods and disappear to be left alone, many have tried, all of them ended dead, destitute or in prison at the hands of state funded men with guns. Most places will deny you even the ability to grow your own food or build your own dwelling if it doesn't satisfy the needs of bureaucrats.
The modern state offers no exit rights. This is yet more of consoling fictions that would have one justify a practical enslavement for theoretical freedoms. Please look at man's condition instead of entrusting it to ideas. I beg of you.
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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
Social mobility has increased. I won't deny that. There's a lot of mitigating factors on what exactly that means, but in theory the next shitcoin bet I make can make me a billionnaire and there's few social stigmas that would go along me not being an aristocrat.
I think you could go either way as to whether increased cosmopolitanism is a good thing or not. You can do certain things a homogeneous society can't and vice versa, at best it's a sidegrade.
I personally know people that are disgraced, in prison and/or dead for doing that, so I find this claim unconvincing. It's as it ever was. Just with different idols.
And have basically no effect on how the affairs of your community are conducted because that has been thoroughly insulated from that particular ritual.
It's certainly has become far easier to move, but it was actually pretty common for peasants to move around, and the people who couldn't that you're thinking of, serfs, were specifically created as a class to prevent this problem for landowners or as part of specific cultural practices. Shopping around lords for a better deal is not at all unheard of.
It depends. Most did not outright but owned a perpetual lease. (much like people still do in the UK) Most of them owned their dwellings though (or at least their family did).
The history of the practice is actually pretty complex, with early middle ages armies being more like bands of peasants called directly by kings. And the extent to which they were replaced by professional knights and men at arms is debated.
Still, it's pretty consensual at this point that for most of the period armies were composed of professionals fighting limited battles. With peasant levies filling more of a militia role or last resort stopgap than that of a real fighting force. Which I must concede is actually similar to how a lot of Europe treats conscription these days. Perhaps less so as military threats start to loom.
In contrast the the total wars of the modern era that would mobilize huge amounts of men and empty whole countries to the degree that it require women take over industrial production, it's incomparable. That level of discipline was simply impossible with the logistics of the time, and you have to go back to the empires of antiquity to find practices that compare.
Here's a nice article on the topic.
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