Nineteenth-century socialists, going back at least to Charles Fourier, sometimes had the notion that the human race, the whole of it, was full of enormous untapped potential...and that all it needed was the right arrangements (as envisioned by the socialists themselves) to unlock it, 'til they turned the seas to lemonade and freed the poles of ice (which in Fourier's mind was a good idea). The Leninist idea of the "New Communist Man" is the same idea...we could unlock this amazing, untapped potential, if only these wicked social arrangements (or the incomplete progress of the Revolution) weren't holding it back.[1] I think, if I believed that, I would have to be outraged at the abundance we were missing for no reason.
(I'm identifying the idea with blank-slatism, and it is tied to it, but Fourier wasn't a full-fledged blank-slater since he did believe in different human temperaments, and I remember one modest Marxist suggesting that the "New Men" after the Revolution wouldn't all have the same brilliance...just that the average would be "a Goethe, a Freud, or a Marx" while the geniuses would be beyond description. But the central conceit of huge potential, being held back by evil forces, was there.)
Reality is different. The human race has evolved rapidly in recent times, and the things we can do now are awe-inspiring...but intellectual ability is largely inherited, and not every person or every group of persons inherits the same amount. My own experience teaching doesn't suggest that each student's mind is just waiting to be molded to genius level. The idea of enormous untapped genius just waiting to be awakened all over the place doesn't make evolutionary sense, either. In denouncing wild claims about talking apes, Noam Chomsky managed to say something wise:
It's about as likely that an ape will prove to have a language ability as that there is an island somewhere with a species of flightless birds waiting for human beings to teach them to fly.Give a prize to that villain. The human brain as it is costs a lot of energy to maintain; humans, like other creatures, evolved in a world where getting enough to eat was a real challenge; maintaining a massive store of brainpower they weren't even using would be an evolutionary absurdity, even without the idea that Man was waiting for a bunch of socialists to teach them to use it.
Limited brain power, with some men's far more limited than others', is not an arbitrary imposition of a wicked society, but an inescapable reality...it might someday be changed if we can re-engineer the human race, but that will take hard work, and the day is not today.
So much for socialists and intellectual power; now on to modern feminism and pleasure. In 1928, Margaret Mead informed the world that it simply wasn't so, that she'd found a world in Samoa where girls could and did sleep around as much as possible...with no bad effects at all; in fact the society came off as peaceful and happy as a dream of Fourier. Her account wasn't quite that one-sided and her debunkers are said to have exaggerated too much as well...but the idea entered Western consciousness. And from that, I think, proceeds the feminist rage at "slut-shaming" or the stigmatizing of "sex work." If girls can really have it all, the desires of the moment and the deeper desires of their biology, why should anyone be telling them "no"? All we need is just a little conditioning, shouting down those dupes of the Patriarchy, and then we can live the life of this calypso song. Who wouldn't be outraged at all we'd been missing?
Reality is different. Her most trenchant critics may have exaggerated, but Mead was wrong (or "Not Even Wrong") about Samoa. From the dawn of history through the 1920's, I think almost all the human race understood there was something wrong with heavy promiscuity, especially for women.[2] These fine folks at the University of Virginia found that as the number of the wife's previous sexual entanglements goes up, the quality of the marriage goes down. (The correlation is much weaker for men; the marriage is less likely to be top-quality if he has a child by someone else, but the researchers didn't find a significant relation to his number of prior sex partners.) My own observation, and the customs of every people I've read about, suggest that a woman with a "past" becomes a less attractive as a potential wife...so that families worldwide would fight, kill, or even sue over a daughter's seduction. It's so widespread as to make me think it's hardwired into human nature. The Christians wouldn't be surprised that following the Commandments made the husband and wife happier, and even an observant secular (unseduced by Mead) might get the idea by reading about foreign cultures or watching the lives around him.[3]
The agonies of frustrated youth are not the arbitrary imposition of a wicked society, but an inescapable reality...it might someday be changed if we can re-engineer the human race. But that will take hard work, if it's worth doing at all, and the day is not today.
Looking at religion from the outside...there's not a one of them that'll convince you it's true by simple argument and evidence (I greatly disappointed one of my pals when the "miracle of Fatima" did not turn me to Catholicism). Religion gets hold of people at another level entirely. Read scriptures by "plain meaning" and you'll find the central parts vacuous or outright barbaric. (As Christians and Muslims sometimes do about each other's.) Joshua's conquest of Canaan at God's command -- complete with commands to slaughter and subjugate -- looks as false an excuse as the Hamas Charter's claim that Palestine is fiqh and meant for Muslims alone. Now the believers have provided millennia of commentary, and even the scriptures have passages that are far more beautiful and subtle, but if you don't believe them they look like layers of pearl on top of a very nasty core of grit--not the work of a divine being. If you think a religion is just a set of factual propositions that people are convinced of, then religion in general, or at least the one you like least, looks like a simple con-job if not a demon's creed. How amazing that so many millions could fall for this...and how superior you must be to have seen through it. How tempting to end up like John Derbyshire's atheist father...watching the crowds at St. Peter's on television, and yelling at the screen, "You bloody fools!"
Reality is different. You no more comprehend a religion from reading its scriptures and apologetics than you comprehend marriage by reading your state's case law on the subject. Chances are, if you're an unbeliever, you're just missing an instinct your fellowman has...and as I commented here, that gives you little reason to be smug. I only tried the Book of Mormon once--I was really stunned that an intelligent person could think it was for real--but I have known too many intelligent Mormons (and liked every single one I've met, plus the one who writes my favorite webcomic, not to mention that extremely decent fellow I voted for the year before last) to dream I'm so far their superior.
The absurdities of religion (or, if you're religious, the absurdities of the other fellow's religion) are not the arbitrary imposition of a wicked society. It's not arbitrary even if it's obviously wrong, because it's feeding a real human need. The content can change, and maybe in a way that's better for the human race, but that takes time and agony. (some people can scratch their religious itch without believing the contents of any faith, but it's uncommon, and most quite understandably feel no need to leave the faith they've already got). The churches and mosques of the world are not crammed with "bloody fools" just waiting for, or else unable to understand, the five-minute explanation that'll turn them away once and for all.
Blank-slate ideas about plastic human nature lead to fantasies of abundant untapped potential. They lead also to the idea that our greatest frustrations can be talked or trained away, and from both places they lead to pointless rage.
[1] This is doubtless why the so-called "definitive answer" to The Book of Soul Destroying Blasphemy, by Abdul al-Hazred and the Foul Fiend Flibbertigibbet, is by an red-diaper Marxist (with, apparently, no more than Marx's level of commitment to accuracy when reporting the writings of others).
[2] Common sense suggests that men who get around too much are lacking something...like self-control and judgment...that makes for a good husband (there's also a remark here that compulsive womanizers, like drunks and heavy gamblers, proved likelier to break in the stress of battle). I do not think anyone should be brought up to sleep around freely, but I am talking about instinctive, emotional consequences here...and as far as I can tell these are not made equal between the two sexes, but fall harder on women.
[3] A few oddball thinkers (Fourier among them) had the idea that sexual frustration was unnecessary, and the right social arrangements could eliminate it. (I wonder if the Utilitarian Utopia of Brave New World -- where "everyone belongs to everyone else" -- was inspired by him.) But as far as I can tell they really were odd, and seen as such.
53 comments:
the central conceit of huge potential, being held back by evil forces, was there
Where have we heard that before?
Oh, yah! Genesis!! Munching the apple would make man like God, right?
I hadn't thought of that. I'm not used to being on the opposite side from Satan. Thanks, Dad29.
At the end of the Republic, Plato presents an extended myth that he thinks is rationally designed to convince people to behave better if they can be convinced to believe it. This is the "Myth of Er," where Er is a warrior who dies in battle but does not decay. Indeed, he revives after several days, with a story of the world to come.
In the story, Er is taken to see that a judgment is being passed on those who lived and died with him. Those who lived well are permitted to pass into a heaven of great pleasure and delight. Those who lived viciously are sent under the earth, into a terrible hell. This lasts for a thousand years.
At the end of that time, their souls return to be reborn (as either Plato or Socrates seems to have believed in reincarnation -- we've talked about the Meno several times). The possible array of lives are spread before them, and they choose in a kind of random order, but are stuck with their choice once it is made. There are enough good lives for everyone, and plenty of very bad and horrible lives too.
Most of the ones who choose badly, and wail when they realize what they will have to suffer, are among those who went to heaven before. For many, Socrates says in the dialogue, were good only by habit and not because they had taken the time and trouble to understand what was good and why it was good. (They were not, in other words, philosophers.) So, they benefited from the accident of living in a place with good laws, but they would suffer in the life to come.
It's an interesting example of a rationally-designed myth, because it's intended to get people both to live virtuously, to avoid an evil judgment, but also to explore the nature of virtue and goodness in order to ensure a good choice of next life. After all, if you live well in this life, you're only entitled to a thousand years of pleasure, and if you make a bad choice of the next life it's likely you'll end up vicious and having to go to hell next time around.
The only way to be sure that you continue to live well and enjoy the best of good cycles is to live virtuously while thinking carefully about what virtue is. And this myth, Socrates says, "will save us if we believe it."
There's an interesting aspect, by the way, in that one of the souls who comes forward to choose a new life is Odysseus. He elects a very plain life without much adventure at all.
I wonder if that's one of those rational aspects of the myth -- to help people living such plain lives feel content without the adventure. It doesn't seem likely to be the life that produces the most certainty of virtue, since virtue is a kind of excellence rather than easiness.
Only about 3% of the human species is a blank slate with high level abilities. Many of them end up dead or persecuted by society for being different, the nail that stands out. Most of humanity is average, in the 68% statistic. Or also known as upright citizens or normal common sense.
Molding society itself is not different. Humans desire a hierarchy for the most part, so all you have to do is to take Authority and hold it. Then everyone obeys and will automatically slam down anyone disobedient or strange.
Molding the 3% requires special talents and luck to such an extent that the 3% oftentimes can only mold and configure themselves or those like them. The rest of the 97% of humanity is unfortunately incapable of understanding, let alone helping.
Such is the case of autistics, when most people thought it was a bunch of retards having lived beyond their expected expiration date. In reality, autistics are merely examples of min maxing human attributes based upon a non foundation. They can use their strengths to lift up their weakness and compensate, but not in a way the normal 68% of humanity did it. Savant level abilities can only be understood and taught by savant level geniuses that are functional in communication.
Some autistics are better at reading body language, once taught, than the most experienced interrogators. Other autistics have high motor control finesse, even though their math and language are close to IQ of 60.
Without training in their highest strengths because society is too dumb to notice it, autistic individuals decay rapidly, like a person that is stopped from using their muscles and kept in a sensory deprivation tank for decades. They won't be useful for much after you pop them out, drugs or no drugs.
The philosophy that the Enlightenment produced, one of a kind, was that humans could change themselves. Some portions of that philosophical search thought that they were at the top of humanity, thus could direct and guide humanity's change.
But it turned out that only 3% of humanity is qualified and they weren't it. That conceit and deceit alone disqualified them, and the only way for them to make up for it is to use force and Change the World. Changing the World, however, has consequences.
Plato was deeply hurt by the manner in which his sensei or mentor died or chose death over life.
I would judge by his profile that a lesser or more violent person would have set out on a blood vengeance, like people did in the American Indian wars. Having received the Will of Socrates, however, he chose to caution people to avoid excesses. That would be both the excess of Socrates in choosing death and virtue, as well as people who choose adventure and war to any great excess.
So if people's souls are merely bopping around between 2 extremes each life, then a better life by the conscious soul would be to choose to integrate the two opposites into one fundamental life.
Socrates' proclamation, before his death, that at the end of his life he sees into the future, might have consoled Plato had he known that we would still know of the villainy of the Athenian Democracy even now. But like the Japanese, people of that cultural mix tend to take seriously their debt to their life mentors and will often desire bloody revenge if their masters are killed.
The Greek philosophers of that era were substantially superior to the so called academics of today's America. They were not only thinkers, but also doers, teachers that didn't complain about wages or student quality, warriors, soldiers, and citizens.
Most of the ones who choose badly, and wail when they realize what they will have to suffer, are among those who went to heaven before. For many, Socrates says in the dialogue, were good only by habit and not because they had taken the time and trouble to understand what was good and why it was good.
Many Americans are like this. If the Law says pedophilia is bad, then it is bad for them. If they lived in Rotter, and the local Authorities said Obey Pedophiles, they would Obey and think it Good.
Just as the Americans refused to do anything about Hasan at Ft. Hood. They refused to report him or do anything about it, because they Obeyed their Authorities when their Authorities said "shut up about Islamos or we'll do something about you". Diversity was their God and Dogma. Hussein their Messiah.
If the Authorities say evil is good. Then damn, Americans will believe evil is good and good evil. Whatever they say is so.
I can't speak to the statistics generally, but I can say that, if you're a woman with an extensive sexual history, it's very important to choose a husband who doesn't apply a different standard to your history than he would to his own. That will automatically clear up a lot of other problems you might have had with him, too, in time.
The more I converse with other people on the Net, the more I appreciate my husband of 30+ years. He breaks nearly every rule I ever read about, and values me for exactly what I am. He makes my life and my home.
Agreed. Feminists would argue that the "problems" with a woman having "an extensive sexual history" are not so much with the woman and her history as they are with the men who object. My own personal opinion is that the importance of sexual history (for both men and women) is not so much about extent as it is about self-respect. If a woman (or a man) has numerous sexual partners because she wants to and enjoys it and behaves well in those relationships, that's one thing. If she has numerous sexual partners because she thinks she should or she gets drunk often, or she hates it but does it anyhow or she behaves badly in those relationships (or allows herself to be treated badly), that's another thing.
The more I converse with other people on the Net, the more I appreciate my husband of 30+ years. He breaks nearly every rule I ever read about, and values me for exactly what I am. He makes my life and my home.
Yup, me, too.
For myself, all I ever asked from a potential wife was loyalty. I would have accepted a wife (and considered a few possible ones) who had a far more extensive sexual history than my own, as long as I could see in her heart that she would be loyal to me once we were married.
Clearly, in your case, you had the important quality. It was also, of course, your fortune to be born at a time when such things were common enough. I am a bit younger, and came of age when AIDS was rampant, and not only uncurable but untreatable. Sex education was manadatory, and focused on that peril above all others. We didn't have the same sense of what sex was, or what it meant, as a consequence.
Yes, post-Pill, pre-AIDS; it was an unusual time. But there were men then, as there are now, who see a sexually active woman one way and a sexually active man another. The trick was to recognize them early, which luckily was pretty easy--it would affect nearly everything they said and did--and then have nothing whatever to do with them.
Feminists would argue that the "problems" with a woman having "an extensive sexual history" are not so much with the woman and her history as they are with the men who object.
This argument doesn't ring true, if only because it is very often the women who object. As I understand the next part of the Feminist reading, we begin with Marxist import of false-consciousness, which leads us through the way in which the Patriarchy is making the women object in order to protect their half-privileged position as wives of the Patriarchal Elite instead of embracing the sisterhood which would liberate them from the whole superstructure of male privilege (and perhaps even finally eliminate the oppressive institution of marriage itself)...
But I like marriage. I like being married to my wife. In fact, all of us like our marriages, even in spite of the fact that they involve some occasional difficulty. They make our world, as you say.
"it is very often the women who object"--You're familiar with relationships in which the trouble is that the woman is bothered by her sexual past though her husband is totally OK with it?
If we take relationships to include the relationships involved in a town or a society, such that there are many men and many women involved. It is often the (many) women who object to the (some) women who are sexually promiscuous, and indeed try to drive them out of society as far as possible.
I'm also familiar with Alexandre Dumas' writings -- my favorite book at 16, when I was a novice in matters of love, was The Three Musketeers. The guidance he gave me, as generations before me, was that D'Artagnan regarded (and we might as well) a woman of experience, who was not insensitive to masculine attention, as nearly irresistably charming.
And so I thought, whatever she may have thought of herself.
I can't speak to the statistics generally, but I can say that, if you're a woman with an extensive sexual history, it's very important to choose a husband who doesn't apply a different standard to your history than he would to his own.
Or, in the alternative, one with the good grace not to inquire closely into such matters...on the theory that knowing them won't do a damn bit of good to anyone. (Instincts don't point the same way as intellect...but if you don't trigger the instincts, they don't get in the way.) Othello brings it up in his crash and burn:
I had been happy if the general camp,
Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body,
So I had nothing known...
...granted he was on the rack, but he had an insight there.
You can beat the whole population over the head (as our modern feminists have done) about how male and female desire ought to work the same, and how it is absolutely unfair that "women who sleep around are sluts, and men who sleep around are studs." But that inborn human nature says it won't work the same, and what makes the one less desirable has no bad effect on the other.
You can non-judge a woman for having been promiscuous, non-judge a man for being shy and effeminate,...but the bulk of humanity won't desire either one (at least not for the long run, not without some offsetting qualities). Not even those rare creatures who'd make it through Plato's myth unscathed.
I read a very insightful person who said that feminism was designed to "change the memetic structure of society"...but what blank-slaters don't get is that some of our mores are a lot more than just memes, and the underlying instincts can't be indoctrinated away.
I'm also familiar with Alexandre Dumas' writings -- my favorite book at 16, when I was a novice in matters of love, was The Three Musketeers. The guidance he gave me, as generations before me, was that D'Artagnan regarded (and we might as well) a woman of experience, who was not insensitive to masculine attention, as nearly irresistably charming.
I should think nearly any 16-year-old novice would think that same way....I'm sure I did with no help from Dumas...but when you have large masses of adults needing to hold together good marriages and raise children well...you ignore the deep truths of human nature at your peril, and the peril of your civilization.
I'm going to have that myth of Er in my head all afternoon...I want to talk about it later.
You missed a good bet if you didn't read The Three Musketeers at 16. It's the perfect age for it.
Oh, I see what you mean--you're talking about the other women in her society ostracizing her for her promiscuity. I was thinking in terms of the problem strictly between the man and the woman.
I think I might be able to learn to deal with the disapproving women in my village, but having to take the guff from the man in my life would be a non-starter.
I'm trying to think if I've ever taken any flack from female society. I don't think so. Obviously there are female societies I don't fit into, but we seem to reach an immediate accommodation once they realize I'm not in competition with them. That is, we may not be very close, but no one's trying to tar and feather me, either. Perhaps it helps that I'm solitary by nature, and a little oblivious, but in general woman have proved very flexible about tolerating the ways in which I contradict whatever their expectations may have been. They don't need me to be any particular way in order for their worldview to be sustained.
Joseph: You may be right that most men can't desire a woman with a history, and would be happier if they could avoid thinking about it. Luckily the problem isn't universal, and even luckier (for me), a man with that problem can't hold my romantic attention. That would be awful, to wish I could have him, knowing that he would always think of me as sullied! But the fact is, as soon as I knew he thought that way, I couldn't want him any more. It would be like finding out he couldn't handle higher math: we could never be more than casual friends.
I, likewise, have never had any difficulty with society -- female or otherwise. I don't have the faintest idea what they say behind my back, of course, but I also don't care. That helps a great deal. Also, the fact that I am somewhat intimidating in person (so I am told).
My sister and my mother were very supportive of a young woman, I remember, who was being drummed out of some female honor society -- I forget the details, but it was some sort of society for young women -- over having become pregnant. Their support was, I'm sure, welcome to the girl; but drummed out she was, all the same. That's the sort of thing I was thinking about.
The pregnancy, nor the child, nor the refusal of the good-for-nothing rascal to marry her, did nothing to chase off other young men from the girl. I don't know what happened to her finally, but I would guess that she eventually married her pick of the many young men who admired her. That's another aspect of the case that is currently in my mind.
In any case, I never found a young lady's experience to be less than an advantage in considering her fine qualities. As I've grown older, and can see the misery of some (now substantially younger) women who have been promiscuous but not successful at finding a marriage or true love... well, I think the contemporary model for relationships is flawed. But not because I think the women are contemptible; because I wish they weren't hurt.
Hmm. Well, I can't say I was ever hurt by sexual experience. I'm much happier being monogamous, though. I never played the field because I believed that was the best way to be, only because I hadn't succeeded in settling down yet.
Well, that's why I mentioned the era. I think -- Joseph's point about how common these structures are to one side -- there was something about that moment (as you said, post-Pill but pre-AIDS) that made it different. It may be that an era like that is possible again, in some future where we have resolved the disease issue.
If that's right, then there is some kind of subconscious reasoning going on in these structures -- they arise when useful (to the species? To the gene?) and depart when not. It's still 'human nature,' but as nature does, it expresses itself differently in different environments with different triggers.
In any case, if I were raising a daughter, I would try to suggest that she refrain from being too quick to give herself freely. I would caution her against anyone who expected her to yield to them before they made a commitment toward marriage, if not marriage itself. I would tell her that the Christian message of marriage and unity of souls is the best and surest way to a lifelong happiness, as well as to a kind of physical security (Cass often talks about the inverse relationship between poverty and marriage).
I think that's good advice, for where we are now in our society, though in another time or place who knows? I might tell her that, too -- I could tell her your story, to let her know that my reasons weren't about trying to shame her, but to help her see the way, from my perspective being older and caring about her, to the best life.
Wait, you think it was easier for men and women to apply the same standards to each others' sexual histories before we were confronted with a new widespread and deadly venereal disease? My impression is that women are more likely today to look askance at a hotdogging man, in view of the increased likelihood that he's a viral timebomb. In the past, women may have been less inclined to investigate a guy's past proclivities.
If I were unattached today, I know I'd be a lot jumpier about taking up with a new guy of whose virginity I couldn't be absolutely certain.
This argument doesn't ring true, if only because it is very often the women who object. As I understand the next part of the Feminist reading, we begin with Marxist import of false-consciousness, which leads us through the way in which the Patriarchy is making the women object in order to protect their half-privileged position as wives of the Patriarchal Elite instead of embracing the sisterhood which would liberate them from the whole superstructure of male privilege (and perhaps even finally eliminate the oppressive institution of marriage itself)...
I seem to have missed the whole "Marxist" bit in Feminism. To me, women's objections to female promiscuity (sorry, no better word comes to mind) seem quite rational so long as women are dependent on men for material survival. It's the same objection a grocery store would have to a charity handing out free food on their doorstep. Once women are no longer dependent on men for material survival, there is no rational reason for them to object to other women providing free samples.
Now, I understand that there are problems with my understanding, such as the reported feeling among young women that they must be promiscuous themselves to compete in the romance sweepstakes. However, that seems to contradict the original thesis, that men prefer women who have not so competed.
Somewhat as a side issue and for what it's worth, my understanding is that Camille Paglia supports the idea that promiscuity is normal for men but aberrant for women. She supposedly makes this claim somewhere in "Sexual Personae" - I'm looking forward to reading what she has to say about this.
...for men and women to apply the same standards to each other...
No, what did I say that sounded like that?
What I thought I said was that, during the time period before AIDS but after the pill, men were more likely to assume Dumas' opinion (which even Joseph admits must be nearly universal among men, at least at 16) that a woman experienced at love was exciting and desirable (and not sullied or unworthy).
I assume that after AIDS, everyone became more cautious. My understanding of the statistics is that teenage promiscuity is actually down even since I was a teenager.
I think there's a lot to be said for the idea that the promiscuity double standard, which cannot conceivably be defended ethically, makes tremendous sense as a matter of brutal power politics in a world where women expect to be financially supported by men.
...seem quite rational so long as women are dependent on men for material survival.
That's part of the Marxist bit, actually: it's a materialist analysis of social and moral structures in terms of classes and oppression. Here the classes are "men" and "women" rather than "capital" and "labor," but it's a Marxist analysis of the relationship.
Contrast it with a Christian analysis of the relationship between men and women, for example, in which the social structure and moral rules come -- not from the means of production or material survival -- but from love. You end up with a very different picture by moving onto the materialist ground, and applying a Marxist analysis.
...cannot conceivably be defended ethically...
I can conceive of a defense, at least. It would be this:
1) The goal of ethics is happiness.
2) Different things make men and women happy.
3) Therefore, they should do different things.
That defense may not be right, but it's not inconceivable. :)
I suppose if you posit a world in which women are happy being subjected to the double standard, your ethical analysis would work. I've never actually met any women like that, but I can't prove that none exist anywhere. I've known women who thought there was no percentage in fighting it, but none who were happy about it.
It's true that more men than women appear to be made unhappy by restrictions of any kind on their sexuality, but that's not the same as both sexes being content with being subjected to a double standard if and when they do rebel--particularly the sex who comes out way behind in that bargain.
The Christian analysis is one that I (obviously) favor, but it leaves no room for a double standard on this issue.
Well, all the argument does is let the standards come apart. It could be any two standards, as long as they made people happy.
Take a theoretical case of a copule in which the woman had a high sex drive combined with high jealousy, and the man had a very low sex drive and no particular jealousy. She took occasional trips to Thailand or India for sexual tourism; he stayed home and pursued his interest in golf.
They could be happy living with this arrangement, even though the standards are not exactly the same. The fact that the standards come apart isn't evidence of injustice in the relationship, assuming premise 1 ("The goal of ethics is happiness").
That premise seems uncontroversial in modern society, although some conflate happiness with pleasure. So the argument is actually probably made all the time, if you look for it -- by women as well as by men.
The Christian principle differs on the goal of ethics, of course. That's where you get the problem.
I agree: in an imaginary world in which women were totally content to be judged harshly for the same behavior that men expected to be given a pass for, both sexes could be deliriously happy applying this double standard, and there would not necessarily be any ethical problem.
Well, outside of the area of sexual ethics, we see that all the time. Take an office environment with lots of women in it, and a few men. Now one of the women is pregnant. The women will be judged (by each other, mostly) harshly if they do not go to the baby shower. Very often, men do not expect even to be asked to the baby shower, let alone to feel that their attendance is mandatory. They probably won't come, especially if it's on their day off, and nobody will think them especially rude for it.
Who's maintaining that harsh double standard? It's not the men, who won't even know if you didn't come to the baby shower (because they didn't come either). But the standard seems to exist quite widely in our society.
I borrow the example from a highly feminist friend of mine, who is also very introverted and finds baby showers intolerable. She is quite jealous of the male exception here; but she is also very clearly an exception to an ethical standard that all the other women in her life feel quite good about.
There's an inverse, of course: there are plenty of standards where men will judge other men harshly for failure to adhere, but give women a pass. Some men really wish (like my friend) that they could have access to the exception, but most men are content with the standard.
Yes, I can imagine a lot of double standards that suit people just fine, where the two groups actually differ in what they want (on average, with obvious exceptions). It's just that the promiscuity double standard isn't one of those situations.
But as I say, if we imagine a world in which women are quite happy to be judged harshly for an infraction that a man expects to be given a pass for, I would expect this particular double standard to make everyone happy and therefore not pose an ethical problem. I would be the last to claim that workable ethical standards require us to pretend that everyone is alike.
I think there's a lot to be said for the idea that the promiscuity double standard, which cannot conceivably be defended ethically, makes tremendous sense as a matter of brutal power politics in a world where women expect to be financially supported by men.
But there is also a lot to be said for the promiscuity double standard to be baked into us by evolution...and the reason is not hard to see. Our genes wire us to pass them along, whether or not that means being fair. So regardless of whether the man thinks this way...his genes "want" him to know that the children are his own. If the woman's exclusively his, and has been since virginity, he "knows" the children are his, and that lights him up for a long-time commitment. If she's shown herself ready to change with the days...he doesn't know it so well. Loyalty is the sine qua non.
The woman, by contrast, knows the child is hers regardless of what the father did with anyone else before; and her instincts accordingly place little value on virginity. (Her problem is different...selecting someone with qualities that'll make the child a survivor...which, from watching too damn many military marriages break up, doesn't always mean staying loyal.)
If that's so, and happiness in marriage is driven by these genetic drives, then the promiscuity double standard is every bit as justifiable -- and, more importantly, every bit as inevitable -- as the shyness-and-femininity double standard.
(And I notice that all these things act more strongly on the young than on the old; which makes perfect sense if they're driven by reproduction. Now that I think of it - one of my chums from age 16 was a not-so-novice of the same age; as best I remember he always had at least three girls pursuing him at once; and he always found the most experienced to be the least interesting. Ended up happily married to someone else entirely.)
(I missed about four comments while typing that one and can't read them 'til later...pardon!)
I almost mentioned earlier that, while I can follow the ethical arguments and the brutal material ones well enough, the bio-evolutionary arguments have always left me unconvinced. They seem like little more than special pleading with a pre-determined outcome. The only way I can make sense of a female's supposed indifference to her man's going around fathering a bunch of other children is if I assume he's not going to support them (at the expense of his children with her). But how is it an advantage to DNA to induce a man to leave his children to starve and die? Is the idea that, on average, someone else will always come along and tend to his offspring in his absence, so that his DNA is propagated? Or maybe that he can father 10 or so, and if 1 or 2 survive, he's ahead?
I think a more convincing argument is that, in the past, it was less likely that responsibility for a pregnancy could be pinned on a man, whereas it's sort of inescapable for a woman. That has an unavoidable impact on the ability or willingness of most people to think the ethical ramifications through.
...bio-evolutionary arguments have always left me unconvinced...
I'm curious about whether you find bio-evolutionary arguments more convincing when they are applied to other species. Do you think the problem with deploying them, in other words, is that human beings aren't dispassionate enough to approach this subset of questions in a scientific way? Or is it a general problem that bio-evolutionary arguments tend to be 'just so stories'?
I tend to find the latter problem, myself: I may have mentioned Aristotle's analysis in his biology of why camels have hard mouths instead of horns. It's a great story, but of course it's not really right. We do a pretty good job as scientists of understanding what we are looking at, but we are on more suspicious ground when we start talking about why things got that way.
I think we're probably less likely to put our fingers on the scales when we're describing other species, certainly. But even with other species, there are many of us who are considerably given to crafting "just so" stories: it's a strong human instinct, apparently. It's often quite difficult to sort out how any evolutionary advantage works, even if we're lucky enough to be dealing with a concrete and easily measured heritable trait, a large statistical sample, and an opportunity for control groups. It's particularly difficult when we're imagining social, emotional, physical, and sexual impulses among our distant ancestors.
In any case, it's a long way from a brutally effective evolutionary strategy to propagate ones genes, on the one hand, to an ethical standard that will hold water, on the other. The evolutionary history is probably better understood as something that affects how strongly tempted we are to breach an ethical duty, not to what the duty should be. In other words, while it's understandably easier to let our baby starve if we're not likely to be right there watching, that doesn't tell us much about whether it's less a crime for a father to do so than for a mother to do so--which I suspect to be the difference that accounts for a great deal of the discrepancy in attitudes about responsibility for an actual or risked pregnancy between men and women.
Our genes wire us to pass them along, whether or not that means being fair. So regardless of whether the man thinks this way...his genes "want" him to know that the children are his own. If the woman's exclusively his, and has been since virginity, he "knows" the children are his, and that lights him up for a long-time commitment. If she's shown herself ready to change with the days...he doesn't know it so well.
I have a lot of trouble with this argument. I don't think my genes want anything.
I find it far more likely that some group of humans somewhere stumbled upon a system which bound a man and woman to each other with sexual exclusivity; found that such a system resulted in a thriving society (for reasons I'm happy to speculate on); and spread it by virtue of being more successful than surrounding groups.
That's part of the Marxist bit, actually: it's a materialist analysis of social and moral structures in terms of classes and oppression.
Sure. But it's no more "materialistic" than the idea that we are somehow hard-coded to abhor promiscuity in women. So I wasn't contrasting it to the Christian ideal but to another deterministic explanation.
As far as the Christian ideal goes, I like your proposed advice to a daughter because it includes this:
I would tell her that the Christian message of marriage and unity of souls is the best and surest way to a lifelong happiness ...
That provides a non-material incentive for chastity or at least relative chastity. By the time I went off to college (many years ago), the instruction to young women not to have sex outside of marriage (or at least not much of it) was justified by: you might get pregnant; guys won't want to marry you; society will shun you. But birth control took care of the first; guys proved surprisingly willing to marry women who had slept with someone else; and at least sub-groups of society were fine with women having sex outside of marriage.
In other words, if all the arguments in favor of chastity are based on external consequences then once those consequence disappear the arguments in favor of chastity do also. A positive argument in favor of chastity, focused on a woman's soul and couched in terms of God's plan for our lives is not so easily undermined. Unless, of course, religion itself is undermined.
As a very broad rule, I've found that men who are deeply concerned about chastity mostly think of it in terms of anxiety over whether their women will be faithful (i.e., not burden them with the upkeep of a child not their own), while women tend to think of it in terms of the importance of emotional depth in all aspects of our lives, particularly those involving physical intimacy or vulnerability. Maybe that explains, in part, why so many men balk at applying the strictures of chastity equally to themselves, while it comes naturally to women to assume that chastity applies equally to both sexes.
It has been argued that the correlation of the N of a woman's sexual partners with the higher odds of marriage breakup has a direct, biochemical cause, having to do with oxytocin surges during sexual experience.
On the other hand, perhaps it is due to the psychological damage and emotional hardening of being repeatedly "ditched" (in which case it ought to be possible to differentiate between future marital stability for ditch-ees versus ditch-ers)...or maybe there is just a common factor such as strong desire for novelty, which drives both the multiple sexual partners when younger and the desire to change husbands when older. (Though why wouldn't this effect also apply to men as well?)
Or maybe a mix of all these things.
The emergence of blank-slate theory is odd, if you think about it...there are no animals or other things in nature that show blank-slate characteristics, nor--prior to the emergence of general-purpose computers in the late 1940s--were there any blank-slate human-created machines
Well there was, of course: the tabula rasa itself. The theory is an Enlightenment one, and follows from a belief in reason as the only legitimate source of human morals. Now reasons are given in language, and language can be written in words.
So that is why it seemed plausible to them to think about words as having been written, on a person who was like a blank slate. What you wrote there was what they had to use.
Of course (as Aristotle might have told them), even a wax tablet is a substrate, and the nature of that substrate limits the kinds of things that can be written. Even in the case of that very bad analogy for human nature, which leads to so many bad conclusions, it should be clear that there isn't perfect freedom uninhibited by nature.
"the tabula rasa itself"....true dat...but words written on a tablet don't actually DO anything; they just sit their until interpreted by a human (or mechanical) agent.
(Which thought actually gets scarily close to some of the things the postmodernists say)
Re the energy cost of the brain...is there evidence that lower-IQ people have lower brain energy consumption than higher-IQ people?
Or are there multiple variants in brain structure, which use the same general quantity of neurons and the same energy consumption in different ways, ie, optimized for different purposes?
(Which thought actually gets scarily close to some of the things the postmodernists say)
My point, sir.
...is there evidence that lower-IQ people have lower brain energy consumption than higher-IQ people?
About this topic, I confess complete ignorance. I'm not sure if it has been studied, or how it would be studied.
Well, you definitely can study glucose metabolism using PET scans. In fact I attended a lecture on this very thing a day or two ago. It showed (I believe) PET scans of cocaine users' brains...showing how much less glucose their brains were metabolizing.
(But the lecturer, for all the interesting things he showed us, on brain injuries and the effects of drug abuse in murder defendants...he couldn't tell me why cokeheads and meth-heads are such selfish liars...whether they're my clients or the accusers of my clients.)
The Wiki on "Neuroscience and Intelligence" suggests that more intelligent brains metabolize less glucose, possibly because they are more efficient.
So if more intelligent brains are more energy-efficient, why would not this create a very strong evolutionary incentive to raise ALL brains to this level...even in cases where the smarts aren't really needed...just in order to reduce the person's calorie demands?
just in order to reduce the person's calorie demands?
Probably because to build and sustain the brain, proteins are needed. Protein which isn't going to the muscles or ligaments.
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