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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15365 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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On Social Norms

The English writer G.K. Chesterton talks about what one should do if you encounter a fence unattended in a field. Some people might have the impulse to just tear it down. After all, what is it doing there, standing alone in this field? But he actually suggests that one should investigate. The fence may not seem useful to you in this moment, but it was probably put there for a reason, and one should try and figure out what that reason was before discarding the fence entirely.

I think that notion can be applied to social norms too, even once it seems outdated.

So here's one example: Should men open doors for women? When you're trying to figure out whether a norm has any use still, it's helpful to look at what it was there for originally. Was it there to help someone, to protect, to orient society in a useful way? Is that use case still in some way valid now? If so, maybe that norm is still doing something good, even if it isn't evident immediately to you.

One thing I dislike about critics of social norms is how bad they tend to be at understanding why people had certain norms in the past. Many people believe that everything was simply oppressive and to shit on people, without critically thinking about anything in particular.

Feminist for example, love to dunk on slut shaming, without thinking about the alternative, which is basically people getting sick as shit from disease, and various illegitimate children with multiple mothers/fathers. Of course, as long as you get checked for STD's and use protection, you could avoid many of those problems, but the fact we see large amounts of STDs, abortions, and single motherhood among various racial groups withing society (blacks, Hispanics, & native americans) doesn't make that argument convincing at scale. I've known of men & women who deliberately for go condoms because it doesnt "feel good", and then get a pikachu face when they are given diseases or get pregnant.

Its become more and more apparent to me that there are many people in our society who simply dont or cant make good decisions, even if given an optimal environment. Perhaps there is a discussion to be had around norms about dating and sex, even if we conclude slut shaming isnt an ideal solution?

I think part of the problem is that when these norms were challenged, the people defending them didn't have anything legible to use. For example, homosexuality. They might say that it's a sin, and I don't think they're lying or coming up with an excuse, I think that's what they legitimately believed and they just didn't know the real reason was that gay promiscuity would lead to an extremely deadly STD being spread. In other words, they were right for the wrong reasons. So if you argued with them, it was very easy to win the argument and convince people there was no good reason for homosexuality to be taboo. But then you get the AIDS epidemic and millions of otherwise healthy young men dying in droves.

Yeah, this is a huge problem with most conservatives in general. Honestly, I think part of the reasons societies become more liberal overtime is at least, in part, because conservatism is defense (which is arguably harder) vs liberalism which offensive. And as you point out, often times, even the the people defending the status quo dont understand the status quo.

Social conservatives are Cassandra. But just like in Troy 1150 BC, nobody listens.

Seriously, go read bygone social conservatives. It’s hard to argue that thé women’s league against suffrage were wrong about their predictions.

Any specific links / names / titles? I keep hearing this and find it mildly fascinating, but I never bothered looking for actual materials on it.

Here's a decent article about it I read recently: https://kirkcenter.org/essays/a-cause-lost-and-forgotten/

"It is likely that you have come up with rebuttals to these anti-suffrage arguments as you have been reading along. That’s fine—I have a dozen myself. The important thing to know is that, whatever enlightened counterarguments you have in mind, they were almost certainly espoused by none of the suffragettes at the time. For women who were not terribly political themselves, that was the decisive argument against suffrage: half the women arguing in favor of it seemed to be utterly daft."

Thanks!

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