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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.
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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