Social Systems, Evolution, Change, and the Status Quo

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Another thing I learned from the Yale demographics course: marriage was exclusive to upper classes, and only became widespread in the 19th and 20th centuries, with the development of a middle class.
The decrease in marriage we're seeing these days is only relative.

But there are a few things that I attribute to Christianity: intrinsic value to human life and a shared basis of moral conduct.
Capitalism as the foundation doesn't see intrinsic value in human life or lay any foundation of how to behave (whether one sticks to it or not, at least there's a shared conception of what's 'right').
But on the latter: one could also argue that we're just transitioning from a disciplinary society to a society of control.
Instead of policing each other, our every move is recorded by google, facebook, amazon and twitter (and local intelligence agencies) and THEY are now deciding what's 'right', and what gets you ostracized from their infrastructure.

That's, again, an interesting aspect of China: rather than teaching people to respect their environment and police each other, you get surveillance and a reduction of social credit for, say, littering. Something in my youth the neighbours would have scolded me for.




Again.
It's only in recent decades that capitalism has come to actually resemble again the ridiculous caricature put forward by Marx and company.
There was a brief time, between 1945 and the late seventies, when wealth distribution was going the other way and did not totally suck to be born into the working and the middle class.
Admittedly, the situation was so bar for capital that it couldn't be sustained. Now we're running the extreme opposite regime, and rather than renegotiating with capital, we're somehow assuming the only possible outcome is civilizational collapse....

Well that's very interesting. I'm actually inclined to disbelieve it on first examination, particularly with the footnote that marriage decline today is only relative. That sounds like a left wing Yale professor misrepresenting data to try and "own a conservative" as they say. How did they measure this? The notion that marriage, a central tenet of Christian belief was largely ignored by the much-more-Christian lower classes is difficult to process. Were they looking at polygamous African tribes? Or perhaps only looking at officially, legally recorded marriage. I'd imagine so-called "common law" marriage is rather difficult to find data on.

There are many ethical systems which do not derive from Christianity. I do not want to needlessly downplay the role Christians have played and continue to play in improving the world, but I actually think liberalism places more intrinsic value on human life than Christianity.

It is liberalism that gives us human rights, particularly for groups that Christianity has historically persecuted.

Liberal societies are either opposed to the death penalty, or only support it for murder, whereas at surface level Christianity prescribes it for many sins. Regardless of whether you think it is right or wrong to break the Sabbath or disrespect your parents, we can surely agree that killing people for doing them shows a greater willingness to kill. I do acknowledge that Jesus was opposed to retributive justice and that nearly all Christians in the west outside of America would oppose capital punishment, nonetheless we see many instances throughout history of Christian societies killing people for being in the wrong sect or for witchcraft or homosexuality.

Liberalism is also capable of adapting to changing circumstances, self-reflection, and sensible consideration of novel issues. Christianity alone is not good at this. There are, of course, a great many Christians who incorporate liberalism into their worldview and have more robust ethical frameworks as a result.

Yes, well... The Liberal notion of value of the individual is an enlightenment/romantic one, which developed out of Christianity's notion of the soul.
You can trace the line from catholic souls to protestantism's individual relationship to god to enlightenment's individual rationality.
That's what I meant with, and in hindsight, it's obvious why I was misunderstood.
What I meant is: Christianity rather than, say, Hinduism, which explicitly places social irder higher than individual value.

But Capitalism as a basis introduces cost-benefit anslysis, instead of mirals and ethics.

Ever heard of the Ford Pinto? It would have cost 11$ for it to not explode in crashes, that lead to 200 dead a year and a similar number burned. But 11$ per car would have cost the company over a hundred million, so they didn't employ the changes to their design.

And so many things I own are produced in slavery-like conditions...but the companies selling phones, for example, either maximize profits or die, so they are forced to buy from the cheapest production company, etc. etc. - that's the dynamic we got to replace ethics.
Yay

Oh, yes, official marriage. The only one where inheritance is legally protected.
But then: official marriage is the thing in decline, no? I don't know statistics of common law marriage today

I'm pretty busy at the moment, so can't dive into the substance of the post which was pretty good.

I'm sure Walrus knows my username and just made a mistake or was on mobile and had his phone autocorrecting it. Just wanted to clarify my username is taken from this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antrax

It is not the metal band or bioweapon, which most people tend to assume. In hindsight a poor choice of username. That is all.

Social conservatives aren't concerned about the official part being in decline, nor particularly concerned about inheritance law. It's the other bit that concerns us. The promise to love, honour (and obey) til death do you part. I'm happy to be corrected but this still smells like a social liberal wanting to pretend that we wuz all adulterous degenerates only yesterday. Take that Republicans!



The meaning has changed. Until recently common law marriage was simply an unrecorded marriage - still valid in the eyes of the Church, God etc, believed by and represented by both parties to be a marriage, but unrecorded and this makes the Yale professor's argument a bit shaky. Nowadays it's extended its meaning beyond that, to any sort of vague cohabitation. I strongly disagree with this new meaning. While there is certainly a lot of shacking up going on, I don't believe there are many, if any, common law marriages in the old sense today, not that this helps Mr Yale.

Yeah.
I'm semi-dyslexic and have problems with long, technical posts.
It's exhausting.
Having said that, the conversation is now progressed to page 2. <shrug>



I always thought it was an odd choice, and yes, I always think of "Anthrax" when I see your name.

Here in Australia, "Defacto Relationships" have legal validity after 2 years.
I think the same applies to Canada.

@shlaifu still on the topic of civilisational patterns and cycles, you might find JD Unwin's infamous work interesting if you haven't come across it already:

https://frjohnpeck.com/why-sexual-moral ... r-thought/

The history of these societies consists of a series of monotonous repetitions; and it is difficult to decide which aspect of the story is the more significant: the lamentable lack of original thought which in each case the reformers displayed, or the amazing alacrity with which, after a period of intense compulsory continence (sexual restraint), the human organism seizes the earliest opportunity to satisfy its innate desires in a direct or perverted manner. Sometimes a man has been heard to declare that he wishes both to enjoy the advantages of high culture and to abolish compulsory continence. The inherent nature of the human organism, however, seems to be such that these desires are incompatible, even contradictory. The reformer may be likened to the foolish boy who desires both to keep his cake and to consume it. Any human society is free to choose either to display great energy or to enjoy sexual freedom; the evidence is that it cannot do both for more than one generation.

Unwin found that when strict prenuptial chastity was abandoned, absolute monogamy, deism, and rational thinking disappeared within three generations.

Here are a few of his most significant findings:

--Effect of sexual constraints: Increased sexual constraints, either pre or post-nuptial, always led to increased flourishing of a culture. Conversely, increased sexual freedom always led to the collapse of a culture three generations later.

--Single most influential factor: Surprisingly, the data revealed that the single most important correlation with the flourishing of a culture was whether pre-nuptial chastity was required or not. It had a very significant effect either way.

--Highest flourishing of culture: The most powerful combination was pre-nuptial chastity coupled with “absolute monogamy”. Rationalist cultures that retained this combination for at least three generations exceeded all other cultures in every area, including literature, art, science, furniture, architecture, engineering, and agriculture. Only three out of the eighty-six cultures studied ever attained this level.

--Effect of abandoning prenuptial chastity: When strict prenuptial chastity was no longer the norm, absolute monogamy, deism, and rational thinking also disappeared within three generations.

--Total sexual freedom: If total sexual freedom was embraced by a culture, that culture collapsed within three generations to the lowest state of flourishing — which Unwin describes as “inert” and at a “dead level of conception” and is characterized by people who have little interest in much else other than their own wants and needs. At this level, the culture is usually conquered or taken over by another culture with greater social energy.

--Time lag: If there is a change in sexual constraints, either increased or decreased restraints, the full effect of that change is not realized until the third generation.

Thanks - I dud come across Unwin before, niticed he had the same surname as a classmate of mine from highschool, and subsequently forgot about him.

I guess I'll have to read the actual book to see how much value there is. Pre ww2 ethno-history tends to be very armchair-y. I read Freud and Jung, for a research project, and found them to be somewhere between hilarious and untenable in the way they compound what they call 'primitive societies' into one 'primitive society', and create their theories from this virtual amalgamation of African, Australian and South American tribes.
Seriously, if you ever read Totem and Taboo and still think Freud was anything but making stuff up as he saw fit while sitting in a Viennese coffee house, I'd have to ask you to justify yourself.
Let alone Mr. Temporal-lobe-epilepsy-personality-disorder, C.G.Jung.

So... I'll look into Unwin, strongly expecting to find a multifactorial process that has non-monogamy as a correlate, and Victorian sexual morals as Unwin's frame through which he saw the world.
But maybe his research is worth something after all, I'll have a look.
Thanks again.

No problem. It is worth noting his biases, upbringing etc. and that this was written some time ago - but also - despite not seeing it first hand, his described patterns/"predictions" seem to be holding their own as regards Western civilisation, as analysed in the link.

I mean... My first question would be: do societies degenerate because of the breakdown of marriage, or is it that institutions just don't keep up with changing patterns of procreation?
I mean, currently, single mothers are the group most at danger of impoverishment.
Maybe we need to change our institutional support away from trying to promote the marriage-patterns of our grandparents and enact some realpolitik.

Interesting study.
Why "infamous"?

Who knows? Probably no one, these things occur on time frames that make it impossible to do anything but guess. I don't think Unwin offers much, just a few guesses of his own. Maybe it's causal, or maybe it's just comorbid alongside all of Glubb's observations, just what people do in a dying society. One of my favourite theories of civilisational collapse was this one (hey, you posted in it!), a pretty simple idea in which marriage decline is probably one among many linked factors that eventually stress the system beyond the point of no return.



It heavily implies that sexual freedom might cause or is at least linked with total cultural and social collapse. An idea that certainly isn't celebrated in the current liberal zeitgeist, at least not outside the bunkers and bolt holes that social conservatives live in.

I do have a serious question and a tongue in cheek but actually even more serious question.

The first one is: what about material conditions? What material conditions need to be met for women's lib to take place, and are these possibly the cause for the collapse?
I mean, here, women's lib and individualism came together with the highly competitive environment of late capitalism, which in its globalized neoliberal version created an inequality so jarring - it's not my access to females, or my frustration with limited access, that makes me reject society. It's that I have two degrees and can't affird a house and family, both things my father had at my age.
My perpetuated kidulthood is a result of economic circumstance, much more than one of "prenuptial freedom".

The second question:
Let's assume women's freedom allows procreation for the most alpha of the males, and the beta-cucks don't get to get their genome in. The second generation is all alpha kids then. Yeah, no wonder society collapses.
Everyone's an ultra-competitive a***hole trying to bang as many women as possible, and the third generation is alpha-squared, having gkne through two rounds of selection for alpha-ness. Everyone will be a frat-boy working in finance. Only immigrants will do the actual work and become doctors or other such high-effort jobs, while the domestic elite will be all busy trying to screw over as many people as necessary to get ahead.


There's an interesting talk by Robert Sapolsky, in which he explains how the group of baboons he was doing research on found a garbage dump full of tbc-ridden meat. The alpha males ate first, and died.
And then the whole baboon siciety changed into a peaceful, sexually liberated bunch of hippey monkeys, basically. Everyone was grooming everyone else.

I mean, let's be honest: western society was awful before science. And science is an aspie endeavour. Aspies aren't alphas.
Basically, a society in which alphas aren't able to attain power through alphaness might be the one with a chance to survive.