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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15298 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I think that notion can be applied to social norms too, even once it seems outdated.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.

I think part of the problem is that when these norms were challenged, the people defending them didn't have anything legible to use.

Their arguments were legible and worked for thousands of years. They don't work within the particular frame of secular liberal individualism, which refuses to accept certain arguments.

I'm not sure we've established that secular liberal individualism is so right that failing to meet its standards means you don't have an actual point. There are places where it seems obviously wrong, imo.

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.

A more charitable view is that they don't like homosexuality because it's seen as degenerate and one of the reasons they think it's degenerate is STD spread. God enjoins the good and forbids the wrong, after all.

It's just not the ultimate reason. The problem you face without that normative anchor of "God said so" is that moderns rightly believe the world is more malleable to our powers. For a vast number of people now any problems with the gay lifestyle are technical ones: either we need better medical technology to render the downsides irrelevant, or we need more social engineering to solve the attendant psychological problems that come with that lifestyle.

Without some sacral peg, even clear downsides do not necessarily justify banning the behavior.

Their arguments were legible and worked for thousands of years. (…) I'm not sure we've established that secular liberal individualism is so right that failing to meet its standards means you don't have an actual point.

I mean, we can get into the whole "God does not, as a matter of fact, exist" argument, but I don't know that this is a good use of anybody's time. Inevitably an argument that relies on the existence of the Christian God is going to be null and void when levied against people who are pretty sure that there's no such varmint, never mind the circularity of "X is wrong because God says so".

There are arguments that don't require god that nonetheless get rejected or closed down because they violate the prevailing ideology of the day. For thousands of years people have argued for human sex differences and thus gender roles in a variety of ways. We tend to be much less sympathetic to this to the point of not just rejecting the normative conclusion but denial of the empirical claim itself because it sits uncomfortably with this ideology.

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