The joy and freedom of harmlessly upsetting social norms
sive.rs
sive.rs
Social norms enforce behaviors that are necessary and desirable, but which would be unnecessarily punitive. For example, many societies have social norms that make getting married and having children social obligation. In many cultures, such as in Northern Europe, people are discovering that they are "not actually bound to social norms." Those cultures are universally in decline, and find themselves having to import workers and taxpayers from cultures that believe deeply in social norms (in Europe, Muslims).
In societies that don't have modern technology and a surplus of wealth, upsetting social norms is anything but "harmless." The U.S. is currently in the midst of a huge STD epidemic: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/p0412-STD-Increase.h.... And that's with modern technology and medicines. Imagine what things like during most of human history, when social norms against promiscuous sexual activity developed. Norms and taboos are a way to make people do good things and make them avoid bad behaviors.
The factors behind population decline are multifaceted, complex and vary from country to country.
Both Russia and China are also in decline, and cannot be accused of being bastions of promiscuous, individualistic Western liberalism.
COVID is another example. The breakdown of norm-oriented behavior has been especially acute where the counter-culture of the 1970s collided with deindustrialization. The fallout was mitigated in certain blue areas by high levels of education. But I’m much of the country it ended up destroying the framework of norms that helped mediocre and not especially educated people make good decisions.
Does that mean witch-burning was a good decision because it carried the weight of social consensus?
Burning witches doesn't seem to give any society a competitive benefit – certainly not in contemporary circumstances – so it is unsurprising it has mostly died out. While many ancient, mediaeval and early modern empires built their wealth on the backs of slaves, in late modernity slavery appears to be more of an economic detriment than economic benefit – a free workforce has greater flexibility to respond to changing market demand for skills than an enslaved one does – so it is unsurprising it has greatly declined–although, contrary to what many think, it still exists, and still even has its defenders.
In terms of what is "good"–if you believe that there is some deep metaphysical connection between the True and the Good, such that even though they are non-identical in the past and the present, in the long-run they must converge–the sort of view presupposed by that Martin Luther King Jr quote which Obama liked so much, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice"–then if a social norm helps a society/culture outcompete in the long long-run, it must be good.
Whereas, if your metaphysics has no room for any such connection, then what social norms turn out to be most beneficial in the long long-run, and what social norms are actually good, may be fundamentally unrelated, even in complete contradiction to each other. Maybe witch-burning and slavery are simultaneously great evils, but also will inevitably conquer the earth because of their great advantage to any society that adopts them? I hope not. A worldview which would permit such a conclusion is rather dismal.
A person doesn't have to be a theist to accept King's principle. A naturalist/materialist/physicalist metaphysics doesn't have room for such a principle. But theism and naturalism/materialism/physicalism do not exhaust the space of metaphysical options.
A person might believe in the Scholastic doctrine of the convertibility of the transcendentals – that, at an ultimate level, Goodness, Beauty and Truth are identical to each other, even though at the non-ultimate level they are distinct. It is easy to see how a person who accepts such a doctrine might be attracted to King's principle as an expression of it. While the Scholastics themselves accepted that doctrine in a theistic context, and even saw theism as a necessary consequence of it (ultimately, Goodness and Beauty and Truth are identical to each other, because they are all identical to God), a person might accept that metaphysical doctrine yet find some rational reason to refuse its theistic implications.
Also, I can't speak for King personally, but the idea that morality is "imposed" by God – in the sense that morality is something God freely chose to create, and could have chosen to create differently, as opposed to something inherent in God's inalterable necessary nature – is one many in the Christian tradition reject. Certainly it is traditionally rejected by Catholics and Orthodox, although Protestants are more mixed in their views. Among Muslims, that idea is accepted by the Asharite theological school, arguably the most influential in Sunnism, but rejected by the other major orthodox Sunni schools (Maturidi and Athari) and also by most Shi'a theologians.
> If you purport to not believe in some sort of religion (loosely defined), how can your metaphysics allow for social norms to be judged by anything other than some sort of empirical fitness function?
How loosely do we define "religion"? I think a person could accept King's doctrine without accepting King's theism, but maybe any such position is in some sense a form of "non-theistic religion"? It isn't clear how to answer that question.
A person (even a non-theist) can believe in the metaphysical existence of objective ethics, yet reject any attempt to reduce ethics to "some sort of empirical fitness function"
It also seems like your hypothesis is "more lax social norms lead to lower birth rate" but this clearly isn't the case because east Asia has much lower birth rates than the US despite much stricter social norms.
I think the hypothesis "industrialization, urbanization, and density lead to lower birth rates" describes the world better and makes more sense.
I think that’s the same reason birth rates have dropped so sharply in east Asia. Their religious tradition doesn’t place the same value on having children as a moral imperative. In fact the opposite is true: an entire generation of Asians was socialized by the west into a mindset that population reduction is the way to prosperity. (My dad is an expert in this field that did that work.)
Industrialization explains it in part—you don’t need as many kids when less of the population is engaged in farming. But many western countries had a TFR over 3 in the mid 20th century, a time when we had supersonic airplanes already. The US had a replacement TFR as recently as 2008, prior to a sharp drop in religiosity over the last decade. The point is that norms can, among their many other powers, can maintain sustainable population replacement even within an industrialized society.
The STD link you posted is a statement from the US CDC that reduction in healthcare availability because of COVID-19 caused STIs to go untreated and spread more. How does that relate to marriage norms at all?
Source: https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/03/17/fertility-in-europe...
For example, when it was socially normal to own slaves, would you consider this necessary and desirable? What about say, 30 years ago, when it was the social norm to deride and abuse gay people?