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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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So I've been spending some time on the radfem pipeline. It's been my opinion for some time that radical feminists, like Marxists, are correct on their analysis of their subjects, with no regard to one might think about their solutions. Take the topic of promiscuity; a trait that was historically seen as far more taboo in women that it was in men. Double standards?

The argument is that the male desire seeks virgin wives and prostitutes. The whores will provide sexual release without reproduction and emotional investment to minimise the demand on men’s resources. On the other hand, virgin wives are meant to provide both sexual and reproductive services but exclusively to him so that his resources and labour are spent on his family and progeny alone. While relations with promiscuous women are intended to be secretive and secondary. Essentially, they play the role of sexual garbage collectors who clear the excesses when no one's watching. This is especially true for fighting men, who are separated from their families for extended periods in foreign places and under hard conditions. They miss female company, they seek comfort, relief from loneliness, sexual desire, and recreation. War-like conditions create a huge demand for such promiscuous women, who either seek financial reward in exchange, or security, or both. And so, when a woman has multiple partners, she is slotted into the whore sub-class automatically. This sub-class doesn't demand respect or commitment, they knows their place and that they're not likely to move up the ladder, and so they're viewed as the lowest value women. And in an age before industrialisation when paternity tests weren't even a twinkle in anyone's eyes, and of constant conflict and strife, such promiscuous women with kids especially would lose out of the support structure. Perhaps these standards did make sense in this period. But what role do such standards play now, in ultra societies like the West, with large populations, high levels of specialisation, divisions of labour, lasting peace and advances in medicine? The breakdown of families comes to mind, which is of course for a myriad reasons, to a point where families are becoming far too expensive to sustain. We still have sufficient demographics and functional infrastructure and institutions to keep civilisation alive, even if we reach SK levels of atomisation.

So here's where I'm less certain; will decadence necessarily mean decline? Or maybe we'll just draw out the inevitable and decline will come very slowly, say over a few centuries? Should we turn to traditional norms to reverse this trend? If so, how can traditional norms become tenable enough to be a potential solution?

to a point where families are becoming far too expensive to sustain.

Can you expand on why you think families are too expensive to maintain?

will decadence necessarily mean decline?

I believe so, and I think it might take a century or two. The future will belong to the people who "show up" genetically which means eventually the vast majority will have hardcore trad parents and or grandparents, hardcore in the sense that they resisted the current corrosive liberalism by virtue of their personality traits, cultural or religious tradition, or whatever. There was some triumphalism during the age of New Atheism about how fast many faiths were hemorrhaging members, but I think that those were the easy pickings and eventually a hard core will remain, and the numbers will stabilize and then reverse course. Of course, it's possible by then that the groups will be small enough that they can successfully be painted as "dangerous to democracy" by liberals and destroyed with punitive laws, taxation, lawfare, and targeted propaganda. Who knows.

how can traditional norms become tenable enough to be a potential solution?

I've come to believe that this is impossible, or at least unbelievably difficult. Liberalism, scientism, and humanism have thoroughly penetrated every level of education, entertainment, and "common sense" morality, to the point where it's the water in which every westerner has been swimming for at least several generations. This is a trumph for the secular humanist/liberal projects, but unfortunately it turns out that the axioms in which these projects rest lead to beliefs that are incompatible with societal flourishing (while being great for - a certain definition of - atomized individual flourishing). It's hard enough to remain Christian swimming in this water, nevermind trying to convert the fish who believe they are totally at home in it! It would be like parachuting into North Korea and trying to convince a random North Korean farmer --while you are both still in North Korea -- that the U.S. president is actually a good guy and Americans mean them no harm and that they should unilaterally disarm and then engage in trade with the archenemy. Even if the farmer wanted to, the years of slogans, of propaganda, of emotional speeches by the dear leader would make it extremely painful to change his mind, and even if he did, he would be under constant mental and emotional pressure to "deconvert." So it goes with traditional values today. Absent an authoritarian right wing theocratic coup, I think you're out of luck.

I believe so, and I think it might take a century or two. The future will belong to the people who "show up" genetically which means eventually the vast majority will have hardcore trad parents and or grandparents

What about once we get solid tech for 'test-tube babies' or otherwise take out the inconvenience and risk of pregnancy? I don't see this talked about often, but the time is coming. Much of the conceptual work has been done on artificial wombs, what's really holding us back is regulation. To point to your own username, don't you think that this type of advance will change the game when it comes to reproduction?

Why would it? Fear of pregnancy is not the main reason for childlessness. "Kids are unaffordable" may or may not be true, but it's not usually intended as a reference to the cost of childbirth.

Modern people who don't have kids don't have them because they don't want to raise them, not because they don't want to make them.