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I grew up in an actually socially conservative bubble, in the hardcore twenty percent or so of Americans(so this would be the hardcore 10-15 percent or so of working age native whites, even in the Bush era). Going to church every Sunday was the right thing to do; Mohammedans and atheists were inherently untrustworthy. The blacks are racist too, and responsible for the problems in their community(I was of course warned not to repeat this in public). Fornication is bad, actually, but it happens and needs to be dealt with- and if an eligible man was known to be sexually active with a woman he had to marry her, even if she wasn't his preference or he had other plans. Homosexuals are (mental and sexually transmitted)disease ridden perverts. Gender roles and real and not optional. Women shouldn't be in the military. Marijuana is an evil drug, much worse than alcohol. The 'liberal elite' pushes bad values on purpose; I remember much bellyaching about how they had recently succeeded in making bikinis the overwhelming default, and when I was a bit older about themes in Harry Potter and Twilight. Better be spanked as a child than hanged as an adult(and few, if any, of the people around me had sympathy for criminals). A woman's father had the right- and in many cases, the responsibility- to veto a marriage, and maybe even a dating relationship. Ideally the woman should stay home with her kids, unless she was a teacher, but in either case the man was responsible for the bills. Society was going to collapse because the government uses our tax dollars to push bad morals which make people unproductive; that's why people are dumber, less virtuous, and grow up slower than in the fifties. You can't get a divorce just for falling out of love- the man has to be violent or not holding down a job, or the woman has to be an awful mental case, or somebody has to be addicted to drugs, or something.
I don't say these things so the motte can litigate them. I say them to point to the sine qua non which made the worldview work- different people have different roles in society, mostly due to their membership in various classes(age, gender, social class, maybe sometimes race). As a male youth it was my duty to protect my sister if we went to a social event together, and it was more important that my schooling focus on getting me into a good job which would one day pay the bills for a family. My sister had more household chores(well, in the conventional sense- I had to mow the lawn etc but lots of people don't count yardwork as housework) because it was important that she learn how to do ironing and baking and stuff that I wouldn't need. I was told in no uncertain terms that if I got a girl pregnant or lived with her I would have to marry her, even if I was in love with someone else or had other plans(and my male cousins have pretty much all followed this rule when they took concubines)- although the ideal was obviously a white wedding. And of course being that we were basically middle class I would have to provide a basically middle class standard of living- homeownership and stable employment and going places in cars and the like. My parents threatened to kick me out when I expressed my desire not to go to university, and only relented when I found an HVAC apprenticeship- because it was my job as a middle-class man to have a career, not just a job. These are of course an illustration.
I don't see this mentality from, shall we say, 'converts' to social conservatism. I see a lot of bemoaning about how someone else used to do better from e-trads. And I think this is a lynchpin that's missing which makes a bunch of it 'larping' or 'cargoculting' or whatever; the motte likes to talk about it from time to time. But y'know, social conservatism works off of 'who you are makes x,y,z your job and not doing it even when you don't want to makes you a bad person'. Lots of people like to talk about this- positively or negatively- about women's domestic or familial expectations. I don't think focusing on 'a man's role' or whatever is the missing piece I think you just... can't talk about it without talking about it intersectionally. 'How does everyone fit into society' is a question that needs to be answered and if you've already decided personal characteristics are the way to go about it, well...
I feel like this discussion is the missing ingredient to lots of the topics du jour. Let's take the leftward drift of young women- well social conservatism today seems to have, uh, not discussed what other people owe to them, only what they owe to other people. Is it any wonder that the victimhood narrative from runaway woke is more appealing? Or the disagreements over immigration; we no longer have a class of people whose obligation is to do manual agricultural labor(and most of the historical people who did this did it as an obligation, not a job; serfdom and the corvee is the historical norm). The modern American right seems to simply lack the actual difference between itself and progressivism; it differs only in accidentals(I'm pretty open about voting republican because they protect my right to be socially conservative, and not because they'll push social conservatism). I don't think this mentality can come back from the government, but only from intermediating institutions that democrats would like to punish for doing their job and pushing this. But this is the key difference; most adults have probably worked it out for themselves but nobody ever says it out loud.
I had a vague post in mind that sort of overlapped with this one, which was just... The general lack of a sense of "duty". There's just a lot of talk about rights, or privileges, it feels like. Or of being taken advantage of (eg paying for children). Not "obviously if it's my child I have the responsibility to pay for them, what possible use for my money is more important than giving them as much support as I can".
I think the most basic component of a (successful) traditional marriage would be shared duty, both to the marriage itself, AND to something higher than the marriage itself. It's very different from marriage as a romantic fulfilment. Which you can still have, which is still even treated as something you can want, but when the marriage isn't romantically fulfilling but everyone is still doing their duties that's still considered a successful marriage, whereas in more modern culture I think it's considered a failure. (Fwiw I think the modern view has seeped into more traditional circles as well, but there's a clear generational shift I can see, because older couples are much more likely to think as I described)
I usually wonder about this kind of thing in a different sense, because men in spheres bemoaning lack of trad values often mention virginity but I'm never clear on if they're offering the same virginity themselves. And also if they're offering to respect their (prospective) girlfriend's desire for virginity until marriage and would indeed marry her without having sex.
You aren't clear because it is not relevant. Nobody cares if the groom is not a virgin, least of all the bride. Look up mate choice copying (or, as PUAs call it, pre-selection).
It's like worrying about how the groom will look in a dress.
The Catholic church cares and a bunch of traditional Christian churches and systems of morality care. A lot of Churches forbid masturbation and have shame circles where men confess to masturbating and try not to do it. I don't think the Catholics go that far but masturbation is still considered a sin.
Also while in traditional cultures the bride might not care if the groom is a virgin. She will care if he's a known womanizer because she wants him to be faithful to her after the wedding.
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But as @Clementine points out, in older systems the duty wasn't grounded in the preferences of the relationship partner. If you start with "your bodies doesn't belong to you as fun toys to fuck around with, and your lives doesn't belong to you as a fun game to score as much worldly status as you can; both of you are given this for a higher purpose," then you get rather easily to all the natural-law thinking about the high status of sexual continence and faithful marriage and self-sacrifice and family formation, for both men and women.
I don't think you can get there from quid-pro-quo negotiations between two rational actors with no common commitment to a higher moral purpose, because prisoner's-dilemma thinking kicks in immediately, as in fact you can see in responses below. Yeah, but what if s/he defects and I get exploited? Sure, I'll [maybe]cooperate eventually, but s/he needs to go first.
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Probably(even if rather unhappily so). But the crux of what makes white weddings work is ‘the man who makes it clear you aren’t a virgin has to marry you’, not ‘men dont get premarital sex’- even if the latter is still discouraged(rightly).
I did have a ‘duty’ frame in mind, but what I was really trying to get at in my post was- different people have different duties. Sometimes this looks unfair, but it’s because people are different.
Part of the problem is that underneath those surface differences, those varied daily duties were (and were explicitly claimed to be) the exact same set of primary duties: work as hard as you can, deny yourself, give up your life for those weaker than you, obey those set by God in authority over you. People forget that this cosmic hierarchy used to entail quite a lot of frictional social-class-based and age-based role rigidity, as well, so everybody had the daily experience of both authority and submission. In European trad systems, for example, the working man needs to obey both his lady and his lord and doff his cap to his betters of both sexes, everybody needs to obey the priest, who in turn needs to obey the bishop who needs to obey the Pope, etc. Sons and daughters need to obey both their mothers and their fathers, even as they reach uppity young adulthood. Of course, few humans are good at either authority or submission, so there are endless quarrels about boundaries for all this. But it's really clear how all of the role systems are upheld by the same explicitly analogical thinking and grounded in presumptions of not just difference but also similarity across stations.
The interesting corollary to this is that the dismantling of various family roles flows directly from the (economically-driven) political movement to dismantle class, legal and religious hierarchies, and is driven by exactly the same appeals to natural self-ownership, liberty of conscience and inborn equality before God. Although the US does pass through a couple of decades where class/political/religious hierarchy is gone but some limited gender hierarchy still holds, I don't think it's a stable equilibrium. For the middling sort, the system inevitably gets torn apart by the inherent contradictions in believing strongly in class mobility and spiritual self-determination but not in gender mobility or family self-determination.
Once you're committed to a class ethos of "you are not born to any fixed (economic) station, you can be anything you want to be! You should use your talents to try to rise in the world, in accord with your individual desires," then it's pretty hard to maintain the exact opposite line as regards genitalia. Even for yourself, I wonder if you'd get behind a system where a wife's natural duty to [whatever] implied that you also had a natural duty to obey your parents and go to college as they wished?
I did do as my parents wished- they agreed to HVAC. There were job plans they vetoed. I presented an alternative plan to their preference for me to go to college and they accepted it.
Fair, but that delicate interaction happened in a deeply individualistic society where you had the leverage of both parties knowing it was your right to choose. Tilt the conventional balance back toward hierarchy, connection, fixed roles and knowing your place, and now the peremptory or even tyrannical father comes back into the Overton window - the sort of father who is empowered to command rather than negotiate, who can refuse consent to a minor child's marriage or force an apprenticeship and back that up with physical discipline, and who has the right to make those decisions as he pleases without necessarily consulting his son.
Also back in the Overton window would be the full weight of social and political censure against rebellious subjects, disobedient sons, disorderly commoners, runaway 'prentices, religious heretics (I hope you're not Protestant?), innovators and entrepreneurs, misers and profiteers, and various other social groups who our present-day society lauds to the skies precisely for not accepting their customary role and place in the order of things.
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The thing is, you have to offer the rights/privileges if you’re going to ask for the duty. Duty without reciprocation is just exploitation.
What I’ve found is that due to inertia a lot of people expect traditional duties from men: chivalry, serving women first at meals, paying for and organising dates, being the breadwinner when necessary, child support, a certain level of strength and stoicism and respect.
But they aren’t willing to put up the traditional privileges: obedience and respect from the wife and the children.
For marriage, I don’t everyone understands and agrees on what they’re supposed to get out of it. People are constantly negotiating their wants and expectations and they don’t feel comfortable with the idea of just doing their duty because they aren’t sure what they’re going to get back from it all.
No, that's precisely the kind of rights-based mindset that I'm describing as not being duty-based.
Duty without reciprocation isn't exploitation, it's virtue. That's the entire point of duty-based thinking. That you might not get jack shit in return and you do it anyway, because it's your duty. The entire concept is of having things you do simply because you are supposed to, not for other incentives.
It is, admittedly, a very traditional mindset. But it's a fundamental lynchpin to how the whole thing holds together.
If he owes the duty to other people, his mindset isn't the only one--there's also the other people's mindset to consider. And they may think that they are owed, but that they don't owe. It's exploitation by them.
Which is the ultimate failure of communitarianism and social contract theory: this is inevitable, and there's never any opportunity for redress when (not if) this occurs.
Liberalism attempts/attempted to solve this by placing hard legal limits on what that community is and is not allowed to require- that is why 'Congress shall make no law', and it's why your neighbors aren't allowed to disarm you, and it's why the community can't quarter its army in your house, and it's why the courts must presume innocence and not hold you indefinitely, and it's why you get the benefit of the doubt in questions of search and seizure.
That is why places that are a lot more ossified and conservative- who prefer their communities to be more exploitative because they hate their neighbors' ability to do things that are new and scary (like European and other New World nations) until it's profitable [and now those communities want their cut for "providing the environment in which it can exist" or some nonsense like that]- have pretend constitutions that protect nothing.
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If you ignore a few millennia of cultural understanding of duty-as-virtue ethics, perhaps.
Duty-based ethics, aka deontological ethics, are highly reciprocal. This is especially true in the western tradition, due to the derivation of why there is a duty and to who. Namely- because God. Hence why deontological ethics and religious ethics are so intertwined across history, since the fundamental question of any duty-based ethical system leads to 'according to who?' whenever a secular authority demands dutiful obedience.
A god isn't required to be that 'who,' but it is the moral authority higher than any king to make those demands for obedience something more than arbitrary human with thugs and clubs. In turn, religious deontologies are incredibly reciprocal- you do your duty unto God, which can entail more worldly obediences as well, and you go to heaven. Defy your duties, and you are separated from God / go to Hell / bad karma happens. God's love may be unconditional, but the state of grace of being close to god is not. Your reciprocal gain for doing the right thing is that your soul will go the right place, no matter the worldly harm you may suffer. This isn't exactly unique to Christianity either, as a brief review of any karmic system metastructure can show.
But the element of God isn't required for reciprocity either. One of the most successful non-theistic deontological ethic systems about duty, Confucianism, is explicitly reciprocal. It appeals to a 'natural' relationship rather than a deific basis, namely the relationship of fathers to sons, but this duty system is obligations on both parties, the failure of which on either part can justify action by the other. A son who lacks filial piety may be disciplined. A king who lacks virtue loses the mandate of heaven and may be replaced.
The non-abrahamic reciprocal duty also goes back from east to west to the foundational civilizing force of western antiquity, Rome. In Rome, the patron-client relationship wasn't a brief transactional relationship of bribes or business, but a fundamental social institution. Patrons provided support and benefits to their clients, from nepotistic favors to representing them in court or assisting in arranging marriages, and in turn the clients owed loyalty, respect, and support... so long as the Patron provided. But if the Patron didn't, then another, more worthy, Patron could be shifted too. This was a bedrock arrangement of not only rome itself, but everywhere Rome dominated, as this was the relationship deliberately pursued between Rome and its clients/allies/conquests/etc. And it was part of a broader mindset that didn't limit this to the secular, but the religious practices as well, where Roman polytheism was part of a reciprocal 'if we don't show piety we will be punished' leading to 'show piety for divine favor' paradigm.
All of these duty traditions far, far, far predate any contemporary notion of 'rights-based mindset.' The Jews were in covenant long before millennia before any enlightenment philosophers were quibling over human rights. The enlightenment built from the corpse of the Roman reciprocity. The Confusicians and the Hindus and more didn't need their example to figure out their own thing.
Duty-based ethic systems are highly reciprocal.
I agree that often duty based ethics is framed in terms of mutual duty. But @Clementine is still correct with the assertion that duty without reciprocity is virtue, not exploitation. You may not be required to discharge your duty towards someone who doesn't discharge theirs to you, but it's still praiseworthy to do so. For example, Judaism and Christianity both depict how God continuously acts benevolent towards humanity despite them not deserving it. This isn't framed as "God is a sucker", but rather as God being the exemplar of virtue whom we should strive to imitate. Not all religions frame things that way, of course, but when you have some 3000 years of one religious tradition which does, it seems fair to call that just as established as the reciprocal duty that you outlined.
edit: forgot to mention that your explanation of Christianity is very much not how it works, and is in fact a heresy! Salvation is explicitly not something that God owes us because we upheld his law, but rather is a freely given gift. Thus our only choice is to say "yes, I accept" (out of which comes trying to uphold God's laws, again not out of obligation but out of love for him), or to reject his gift (because we would rather do our own thing). Salvation as a gift rather than earned by our conduct is a core tenet of Christianity.
This misses the argument previously made.
Religiously-derived deontological ethics aren't a duty towards the person you are doing the virtue towards, but the duty to the god who sets the paradigm of right and wrong action. Other people don't need to reciprocate your execution of virtue because the duty relationship isn't to them, but to god. The execution isn't praiseworthy because the recipients or human observers praise it, but because the worthiness is set by god regardless of the beneficiary.
In turn, the sucker being raised is the deontologist if god does not exist, not god if the deontologist fails. Being the root of deontological legitimacy challenges any premise of obligation to god by those without deontology-setting power, but people who do something on the grounds that derive from god are being suckers if that belief was always wrong, regardless of how socially commendable their niceness may be.
Reciprocal relationships are not the same as obligation relationships, much as they are not synonymous with transactional relationships. The duty (deontological obligations) to god for freely given grace is still a reciprocal relationship, even though it is not a transactional relationship nor does is obligate god in return.
It seems like a lot of your argument hinges on this distinction. Can you elaborate? Because I confess that I can't see the difference you're trying to point to.
This is fundamentally a categorization boundary difference. This is the sort of thing where we may simply have different categorization hierarchies/boundaries.
What you quoted is / was intended to be a reminder against the fallacy of composition without calling it such, since overtly calling on a fallacy can come off as an attack / belittlement. Which was not the intent, but lost some clarity, particularly on the categorization hierarchy.
The fallacy of composition is the error in which what true for a part of a whole is assumed to be true for the whole. It is a common categorization error when sub-sets are conflated with broader overarching categories. What is true for a subset (all dogs are mammals, A = B) does not necessarily apply to the over set (all mammals are not dogs, B =/= A). (Part of the error is that it's not actual the same category in both sets, as 'mammals' and 'all mammals' are not the exact same group- that is, they are not both 'B'.)
Reciprocal relationships are a category of relationships, distinct from other, non-reciprocal relationships. It itself is a subcategory of [relationships]. Reciprocal relationships as a (sub-)category can in turn be broken down into further sub-categories.
Obligation-based and transactional relationships are subcategories of reciprocal relationships. There are additional subcategories as well, types of reciprocity that are also not obligatory or transactional. Mutual love and mutual hatred are both reciprocated relationships that have no intrinsic obligatory or transactional element. More can be found.
The fallacy of composition limits the application of any of them to characterizing the others- what is true for a part (a specific subcategory) is not true for the whole (other subcategories / the broader category). What is true for one subcategory (god's relationship with man is not a specific type of reciprocal relationship, i.e. not a transactional relationship) does not disprove another subcategory, or the overarching category.
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"Reciprocation" doesn't mean you, personally, get something out of it, it means the person has duties of their own.
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No, I mean I used to have a duty-based mindset and I pulled myself partially out of it by noticing that people who are very interested in my duties towards them (personally or in a wider sphere) are often uninterested in any duties they might have to me, or regard their traditional duties as historical oppression now thankfully abandoned.
One must have both. Otherwise it’s just playing cooperate with defect-bot.
Don’t get me wrong, I know what you’re getting at. I’m just saying that, long-term, people have to feel that their duties broadly even out. It doesn’t have to be literal ‘I will give you X if you perform Y duty’ but ultimately you have to persuade people, generation by generation anew, that your conception of duty and virtue is a valid one they should follow.
I would say that a big part of the decline in duty you mention is both sexes observing, in different times and at different ways, that they seemed to be being taken advantage of. You can’t sustain such systems long term.
Lots of duty based systems eg confucianism lasted long term. I'm not sure how well adapted they are to modern day life, where a lot of the scaffolding¹ that helps maintain the systems is crumbling. But these systems usually specifically have moral parables about people behaving virtuously — dutifully — even when they're reciprocated not just with nothing but with active ingratitude and disrespect.
¹ things like belief in a god who will reward you for virtuous behavior if you're not rewarded by the beneficiary here, stronger community bonds, staying in the same place for decades or centuries so that having a good reputation meant more than it does today, etc.
Confucianism is an explicitly reciprocal duty-based system. It was often explicitly modeled both in terms of father-son relationships, where the son's obedience to the father is contingent on the father being a virtuous enough patriarch to be worth respecting, and between subject and sovereign, where a sovereign's failure to maintain virtue is the basis for losing the mandate of heaven and being replaced by someone else who will appriopriately fill the duties required.
Confucianism and deontological religions have a commonality in that the duty-based system is based on relationships that are reciprocal. Religious deontology works from the premise of virtue's relationship, and thus duty to, one's own god. Doing so brings you closer to your god / earns good karma / etc. from your metaphysical duty-obligator. More secular Confucianism works from the premise of the duty to natural relationship of [child] and [parent]. Doing so brings you more harmonious relationships with the other part of the relationships.
No major deontology system has ever worked from a premise of a duty towards an action outside of the context of the relationship. Even when the Christians preach charity to one's enemies, it is based from the premise of the relationship of the charitable practioner to their god. When the virtue-ethicists like Aristotle talk about balancing bravery between cowardliness and foolhardiness, it is in the context of its effects on, and the relationship of the practitioner to, others.
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I am reminded of a pastor who praised a groom during his wedding for bringing his bride to the altar a virgin. The pastor’s homily was kind of tacky, and his exegesis wasn’t great, but I think his heart was absolutely in the right place.
I mean that’s kind of weird?
Yes, of course; that's why I mentioned it. It's a funny story, and in some ways the pastor made nerdy, clumsy me feel like a paragon of social grace by comparison. It's not an example to imitate.
And yet... I don't know. The whole service was so incredibly earnest in a way most weddings, even Christian weddings, are not. It wasn't a show. It wasn't just a party. It wasn't a chance for the bride and groom to show off. Great is Thy Faithfulness may never have been sung more sincerely.
The liturgy would not have impressed Cranmer. The preaching would not have impressed Edwards or Baucham. But God was glorified anyway.
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...gotta say my reaction to that is a firm "ew". Delicacy, modesty, discretion, not saying everything out loud in public are all virtues.
I mean, I agree. It was weird. But looking back on it, it’s kind of adorable nonetheless.
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