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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:
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:
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?
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.
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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.
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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.
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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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