Ways in which American social conservativism makes sense to me

[gaudior]

In thinking about the same-sex marriage debate, I've been reviewing my thoughts over the past few years, sparked mostly by conversations with lignota and B, about social liberalism and social conservativism as they're thought of in America these days. I was raised very, very liberal, and my views remain liberal (though more nuanced than what I got growing up). But there are things about this conservative view which make sense to me.

The social conservative view as I see it goes: in society, there are set roles, either assigned at birth (woman, daughter, citizen, etc) or accepted/chosen later in life (mother, wife, doctor, elected official, etc), all of which include certain rights, duties, and responsibilities. These roles intersect with and complement other roles (e.g., "mother" and "father,") and the whole makes up a network which works together for the good of everyone. It is crucial for everyone to fulfill their duties and take care of their responsibilities, and it's right and useful for people to be punished for stepping outside of their roles.

This makes sense to me when I think about it as coming from times and places when life is/was a lot harder than it was for me growing up upper-middle-class in America in the late twentieth century. I've just been reading two of Lois McMaster Bujold's Sharing Knife books, and while there are any number of criticisms one can make of that series, they do a splendid job of showing just how hard people worked in colonial America. Fawn, one of the two protagonists, was raised as a farming woman, and when she isn't actively engaged in an adventure, she is doing chores all the time. Because if she doesn't spend hours and hours every day cooking, cleaning, mending, knitting, sewing, preserving food, fetching water, making fires, attending to children, etc, etc, et-live-long-day-c, they won't eat. Or won't have somewhere warm to sleep. It doesn't matter whether she wants to do these things or not. They need to get done.

That's the strength of it, in my opinion: the understanding that life is hard, and sometimes, you have to do things you don't want to do. As a psychotherapist, I'm a big believer in deeply understanding your feelings. But there are times when as much as you understand your feelings, you need to not act on them.

I think that a lot of the rigidity of the roles in the conservative stance comes from this, though. If you're living on a farm, most of the ways in which you deeply want to step outside your role are ones which would damage you and the people around you. I suspect that if you're a coal-miner with same-sex desires, while you might like to have sex with your friend, what you really want, more than anything else in the world, is to lie down in a warm, comfy bed above-ground and not have to go do grueling physical work in the suffocating dangerous dark all day. Your feelings, deep down in your soul, are: I'm hungry and tired and cold and have painful intestinal parasites and fuck providing for my family, I want to rest. Your deepest id says: I have already nursed three children through scarlet fever and had them die and I am exhausted and grieving and ill and to hell with getting up and taking care of that crying baby. Your heart says: my spouse is old and sick and angry at all the harshness of life and irritating to deal with and no longer attractive and I'm sick of this marriage and I want to go off with someone else and leave this house to rot and I don't care if they starve in their sick-bed.

So if everyone listens to their feelings, everyone dies. Society is maintained, in the sense of there being food on the table and people not dying on the streets, through people sticking with their roles and so doing very hard work and taking care of each other, even when they'd rather not. People don't just make their own choices based on what they believe would be most fulfilling for them-- they are held by their sense of duty to their role and their family, and by the threat of social condemnation if they don't.

There are, however, problems. One is that in the moment, it's hard to distinguish between which parts of the role are and aren't needed for survival. It's hard to distinguish between "I don't want to get married" and "I don't want to get up at 4:30am to feed the animals"-- both are strong desires to do something for your own happiness, disregarding what others say. So there may be just as much social condemnation for a man wearing a dress as for his not plowing his fields in a timely way, and people may see that condemnation being just as necessary for society to survive.

Another is that the conservative view relies on all of society agreeing with it. People like to say about gay marriage, "It's not harming you-- why do you care? If you don't believe in same-sex marriage, just don't marry someone of the same sex!" What this ignores is the importance of duties being universally understood and agreed-upon-- that if someone gets drunk and beats their spouse, it's not just a matter between them and their conscience-- they suffer the social consequence of people snubbing them, cutting them, criticizing and shaming until they do the right thing. Why should A stay with his wife who's dying of cancer when B got a divorce and C just never married? If the only reason to do the difficult thing is because of your own beliefs, not because of any social consequence... well, some strong people will do the difficult thing, but a whole lot won't. And society will suffer.

You could see it as two different approaches to life being hard. Liberalism says: you must look deeply at yourself and find your own strong, durable, flexible set of values which cause you to choose to do the hard but necessary thing (and you must set up a system of social structures to catch people when others make other choices). Conservativism says: everyone must agree together on a set of values which cause people to do the hard but necessary thing. It's simpler, and probably more effective when there are fewer resources available. I suspect liberalism leads to greater highs of fulfillment and enlightenment, but also deeper lows of angst and uncertainty-- and possibly more disaster when things are really hard.

As a relatively wealthy and well-educated person-- as well as a person whose desires and sexual hard-wiring mesh badly with the conservative view available to me-- I much prefer liberalism. And barring disaster, as technology gets better and cheaper and more widespread, I believe that more and more people will be liberal. But I can also see that liberal is not the only way people can reasonably be.

--R

Reading: The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Antonio Damasio. Dress Your Family in Courderoy and Denim, David Sedaris. The Sharing Knife: Horizon, Lois McMaster Bujold

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

ooh, chewy*.

My immediate reaction is to be perhaps unreasonably amused that this particular definition of "conservative" works perfectly well for the values which one proposes everyone must hold for things to work out happening to be, say, those espoused by a dedicated follower of Trotsky.

*This comment is in reference to the post and not to be construed as an assessment of the author.

[matt-rah.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. It works for any sort of rigid ideology, especially in a communal setting—I've been around some left-ish commune types recently, and their stuff working totally depends on everyone holding certain values in common.

Thing is, people who want to live on hippie communes don't need our entire nation of 300+ million to live with them. Our society has grown too large and complex for social values dependent on us all living and working together in a small area to make sense. We're too interconnected on a nation-wide and global level. For example, a social welfare safety net is the equivalent of helping your neighbor raise a barn, it's just that because the person benefiting from welfare isn't in your monkeysphere (http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html), it's easier to dismiss them as lazy shirkers.

Furthermore, one thing I think both liberals and conservatives would agree on, in principle, is that people should live up to responsibilities that they themselves voluntarily entered into. Like marriage—liberals may be more likely than conservatives to be okay with polyamory, for example, but we still condemn someone who cheats without their spouse's consent and knowledge.

But, in fact, the major problems we face are in fact brought about primarily by people failing to live up to their job responsibilities—CEOs, the Mineral Management Agency, Congress. And yet there's no political will to materially punish those who do ill to society as a whole, probably also for monkeysphere reasons. Attempts to do so are derided as "class warfare" by the conservative entertainment industry (http://www.frumforum.com/waterloo).

So, while I agree with you that social conservatism makes sense emotionally, and it may be practical in terms of facing up to life's daily difficulties, it makes no logical or practical sense in a broader political context.

Matt

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Our society has grown too large and complex for social values dependent on us all living and working together in a small area to make sense.

I agree. And one thing which I think makes liberalism a good strategy for us as a culture right now is its flexibility and ability to deal with many different systems arising in different places.

Furthermore, one thing I think both liberals and conservatives would agree on, in principle, is that people should live up to responsibilities that they themselves voluntarily entered into.

More or less? I think that liberals hold the value of living up to responsibilities, but also hold the value of doing what suits you best for your own happiness and fulfillment. And when those conflict, we choose one or the other.

And yet there's no political will to materially punish those who do ill to society as a whole, probably also for monkeysphere reasons.

I think we feel like that's the job of our elected officials? But then we don't always elect officials who are strongly motivated to do it.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

*This comment is in reference to the post and not to be construed as an assessment of the author.

Grin!

Also, deeply amused by this: this particular definition of "conservative" works perfectly well for the values which one proposes everyone must hold for things to work out happening to be, say, those espoused by a dedicated follower of Trotsky.

I'm not sure whether this is because I have an insufficiently complex view of conservativism or what...

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Yes--the part of conservatism that makes sense to me is, "You have to keep your oaths and obligations, even when it's difficult, to make sure that everyone is taken care of." And I would be more impressed by real conservatives if they were more interested in making sure everyone is taken care of, and less in making it difficult for me to fulfill my oaths and obligations.

A conservative who really believed in doing hard things to hold society together would be willing to pay taxes into a social safety net, would support the education that makes people better able to care for their families, would treat his ex-wife honorably even if he didn't get along with her any more. But in practice, most seem more interested in making other people do hard, useless things--and in making the important, useful things more difficult.

The older I get, the more my reaction to social conservatives becomes a very conservative one: "You are attacking my family. Stop it now."

[matt-rah.livejournal.com]

Absolutely—and, as I said in my longer comment above, I think it all has to do with the monkeysphere.

Helping your neighbor who's in a bind? Great.

Giving to the collection plate at your church? Pretty good.

Volunteering at a local shelter? Okaaaay...

Paying taxes so that someone you'll never meet won't starve? Theft!

(Oh, also—conservatives believe that simply by being born a person has certain oaths and obligations—like if you're born female you have an obligation to be attracted to men and vice versa—which liberals are less likely to believe.)

Matt

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

conservatives believe that simply by being born a person has certain oaths and obligations—like if you're born female you have an obligation to be attracted to men and vice versa—which liberals are less likely to believe.

Yeah.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

There is, I think something deep going on with the difference between "inherited obligation" and "negotiated commitment" models of human interaction and which one uses where, though whether it makes a meaningful conservative/liberal divide in US terms I am far from sure; in that a large number of people I know from the US who identify as liberal seem to think in terms of inherited obligation to, frex, allow freedom of expression.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

I would be more impressed by real conservatives if they were more interested in making sure everyone is taken care of, and less in making it difficult for me to fulfill my oaths and obligations.

One thing which I think makes things thorny for many social conservatives is that their lives aren't as difficult as their ancestors. Newt Gingrich doesn't have to get up at 4:30am to feed his farm animals, so his social conservativism mostly takes the form of condemning others... and he doesn't end up staying with his spouse. They're running out of what they were using it for.

[khava.livejournal.com]

It sounds, from this post, like you're unfamiliar with the social (and economic) conservative ideas of slow cultural evolution. That is a key part of the picture. I don't have time to type out a whole explanation in this comment thread, but if you are interested, we can discuss it later by e-mail or (gasp!) phone.

In fact, on Thursday I'm leaving for a two-day conference in Denver to discuss exactly these conservative cultural evolution issues.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

I'm totally not familiar with them at all, and would like to be. For other people who might be, do you have any good links to articles or websites?

And good luck at your conference!

[khava.livejournal.com]

I just read this and am going out right now to a club meeting. If I forget to reply to this tomorrow, could you send me an e-mail to remind me? hanahm at g mail

[khava.livejournal.com]

I wrote up a long thing for you, which will probably take several comment units to post. Here goes:

What you wrote about social conservatism does describe many people's actual view of the world. But there's a much more sophisticated view related to what you said that is widely held among more intellectual conservatives and libertarians. It's an evolutionary perspective on social and economic institutions, often described using the phrase "spontaneous order."

Here's the basic idea: The institutions we see in society today are prevalent precisely because they work well. For whatever reason, some people/groups began to behave in a certain way, and that behavior made them more successful than groups that did not adopt the behavior, so either the groups with the new behavior outcompeted the others or else the others eventually adopted that behavior too. These evolved institutions encompass nearly everything in society you can think of--property rights, monogamous heterosexual marriage, educational programs, what we eat, what we wear, where we live.

Note that there is no claim that the institutions we have today are the absolute best ones that could exist. Nor is there any claim that the institutions that have worked in the past will always work in the future. They continue to evolve. Circumstances change, technologies change, or new ways of behaving are discovered that were simply never thought of before. People adopt new behaviors, those are successful or unsuccessful, and they are copied if they are successful. Institutions change and adapt constantly.

Here's a terrific example of how a simple institution can evolve and then decay. Have you ever heard the nursery rhyme about what work is done on days of the week? "Monday is washing day, Tuesday is ironing day, Wednesday is sewing day, Thursday is market day, Friday is cleaning day, Saturday is baking day, Sunday is the Lord's day." It sounds ancient now. Nobody structures their life this way any more. But for at least 100 years, this is the way basically every woman kept house. These were all huge tasks that could easily take up the majority of a day, and there was a good reason for doing them in that particular order. (See http://www.thenewhomemaker.com/choredays) The order of tasks was so universal that at least two nursery rhymes discussed it (the other one is "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush"). But over the past 50 or so years, every one of these tasks has became massively easier to do, such that they don't take an entire day and can be done mostly in one's spare time on whatever day one wants. Washing machines, cars, grocery stores, and two-income families have made the entire process obsolete. From a universal way of life, this has become a nearly forgotten antiquity. People now structure their housekeeping around entirely different things (e.g. clean leftovers out of the fridge on Wednesday night because the garbage truck comes on Thursday morning).

Much of our lives, of course, is built on much more complex institutions. These institutions may (in fact, they probably do) serve purposes that we do not mentally connect with the behaviors. We perform an activity just because it is what has always been done, and it has beneficial effects on our lives (or on the broader society) that we never anticipated or intended. When those institutions begin to break down, there will be side effects that nobody thought of. For example, the easing of divorce laws in the United States has led, among other things, to higher rates of children living in poverty. Good trade-off? Probably. The point is that nobody expected it when the divorce laws were initially changed.

[khava.livejournal.com]

Conservatives holding this philosophy are reluctant to approve of societal changes because they understand that they cannot foresee the effects those changes will have. In particular, these conservatives hate massive, quick, top-down-imposed changes in the name of intentional improvement, because they believe that such changes will be incredibly disruptive to the institutions that create all the good things in society. In a nutshell, they will create many more problems than they solve. By contrast, these conservatives favor gradual, organic, evolutionary change in social institutions that come about by individuals choosing different behaviors for themselves.

There have been some really interesting articles written by conservatives arguing that gay marriage is precisely one of these gradual, organic changes to a societal structure, and I agree with this 100%. It used to be that marriage was about procreation and the combination of a breadwinner and a homemaker (gendered, of course) into a household unit. Those justifications for marriage have faded away, but the institution survived as a bond between two loving individuals, a stable way to raise children, and a more personalized division of labor within the household. With those justifications, there is now no reason to exclude gay couples from the institution. Gay marriage should thus be seen not as a radical up-ending of what marriage is about, but instead as a natural evolution of an institution that serves many different purposes.

If you believe that this view of social institutions is correct (which I do), the trick becomes to figure out which institutions are still important and which have become obsolete or at least diminished in importance enough to change for the better. To the extent that the institutions are not reinforced by law (e.g. nobody will arrest you if you do the laundry on Tuesday), individuals can alter them for themselves at will, and the institution will grow or fade on its own. To the extent that they are embedded in the law, such as marriage and property rights, they become more ossified and require an organized societal effort to change. For those latter types, the public policy discussion should weigh the anticipated benefits of the change against the anticipated AND UNKNOWN, UNANTICIPATED effects of the change. Because the premise is that there WILL be unanticipated effects. This leads to a certain amount of caution (i.e. conservatism) depending on how risk-averse the people making the decision are.

The major thinkers in the spontaneous order tradition are Edmund Burke (late 1700s), Michael Oakeshott (writing between the 1930s and the 1980s), and most importantly Friedrich Hayek (contemporaneous with Oakeshott). This essay seems like a thorough description of the subject on a basic level, though I didn't read the whole thing: http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=169&Itemid=259

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Hm! khava, this is indeed a more complex and thoughtful view of things, and it makes a lot of sense. Because yeah, I've seen what can happen when someone tries to massively overhaul a huge, complex, organically-evolved system for overly-simple ideological reasons, and there tend to be so many things that haven't been thought of. (The author who comes to mind who writes about this best, funnily enough, is Terry Pratchett.)

At the same time, though, I do have a disagreement. Namely: I don't think that systems come into existence because they work well for everyone, or even for the majority of people-- I think systems come to be the way they are because they generally work well for the people with the majority of the power. In a mythical system in which each individual had exactly the same amount of power, this would mean that the existing institutions would be the ones that work more or less well for the majority of the population. In the real world, though, an institution which works incredibly badly for some individuals or populations can last a good long time if it works well enough for the people who control the money or the military or other important aspects of the existing power structure. And members of that population are likely to feel strongly that potential unforeseen consequences are highly unlikely to be as bad as the abuse they're getting under the current system (even if those unforeseen consequences-- or even the foreseen ones-- are highly likely to worsen the lots of the people currently in power).

Another difficulty with the idea of institutions as evolving is that the word "evolve" gives me the image of a natural process happening bit by bit, rather than being deliberately changed by people's actions. Take same-sex marriage. In some ways, the increasing popular support for same-sex marriage is caused by changes in technology (birth control, better machines) changing the status of women and so breaking down strict gender roles and so making same-sex relationships more acceptable. But in another way, that support is a direct result of the work of gay rights activists, from the Mattachine Society to the Stonewall Riots to the 1980s AIDS activists to Ellen Degeneres possibly nuking her career by coming out on TV to everything the HRCF does every day. Does the evolution model include that kind of direct work towards changing the system?

Edited to fix html.

[khava.livejournal.com]

I think these are both valid points. I would amend your first one slightly, though. It's not that the system necessarily works well for everyone (which I may have implied in my post), but it's not really that it works best for the people in power, either. It works for the people who get to make the choices. Which is an argument for giving everyone the greatest freedom of choice possible.

Take gay marriage and gay relationships as an example, again. Over the past 40-odd years, we have seen a massive shift from individuals choosing to be in heterosexual relationships to individuals choosing to be in homosexual relationships. A gay person 50 years ago would probably have ended up either single or in a heterosexual relationship as a cover. A bi person 50 years ago would almost certainly have ended up in a heterosexual relationship for a variety of reasons. But those choices were always completely in the control of each individual. At first, there was extreme social pressure to choose a heterosexual relationship (just because there are social consequences from making a choice doesn't mean there's not a choice). Only the people who felt most strongly about being in a homosexual relationship would want to deal with that. As gay relationships became more and more accepted in society, more and more individuals opted to make that choice. And today, gay relationships are open and common. Entirely within individual choice.

Government-recognized gay marriage, on the other hand, is not within the choice of ordinary individuals. The people in power--politicians, churches, organized interest groups--have disproportionate say over whether gay marriages will be recognized. One could imagine a different structure, in which the government did not license marriages at all, and each individual couple could decide, themselves or through their church, whether to announce themselves as married. Under that structure, there would be more individual freedom and the power of choice would be held by ordinary people. The politicians wouldn't have any say in it, regardless of their inherent powerfulness. Do you see the distinction?

WRT the terminology of evolution, I agree that it's a bit confusing. It's trying to describe the fact that the overall structure of rules in society is not imposed in a top-down, planned fashion. Of course, human beings are rational animals, and when each individual makes a choice, he or she does so for reasons, not just based on instinct or physics. Human reason is thus an ingredient in social evolution, much like DNA is an ingredient in biological evolution.

[ifnotnow.livejournal.com]

This is interesting. Remembering that our actions have unintended consequences seems like a very good thing. More difficult is how to figure out how much we should weigh those unintended consequences (after all, we don't know what they are!) against the known and anticipated consequences of those same actions.

But I am curious about your example at the end, where you mention that the easing of divorce laws has led to higher rates of child poverty. Do you happen to have a source for this? It seems a little bit surprising to me - Are child poverty rates really higher than they were in the 19th century? If so, is this really explainable by changes in divorce laws? Certainly, divorce sometimes leaves children poorer than they were when their parents were married, but I wonder how much of the effect can be explained this way. So, I certainly don't mean to doubt the honesty of your statement, but if you have a chance at some point I'd be interested in seeing a source, if you have one.

(Sorry, gaudior, for once again getting into conversations on your live journal. It's just that you keep posting about interesting topics!)

[khava.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, I don't have a source to cite for you. I know I've heard other people using that example, but I can't remember who. The broader point is that any policy change will have unintended, unanticipated consequences. Fill in whatever example you're most familiar with, I'm sure you can think of one.

I completely agree that it's difficult to decide how much the unforeseen consequences should be weighted, since they are by definition unknown. It often comes out as a kind of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude--if this thing is working well enough, we shouldn't try to make it even better. If the thing is clearly flawed, it may be worth making changes despite the potential unforeseen problems.

[pastwatcher]

Wait, now I have a question about gaudior's LJ preferences: do you mind if other people discuss with each other on your entries?

Anyway, I am intrigued by this post and khava's explanation.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Wait, now I have a question about gaudior's LJ preferences: do you mind if other people discuss with each other on your entries?

No, not at all! I love people getting into discussions on my lj, especially when they're people who wouldn't meet otherwise. Please continue!

[navrins]

This seems very consistent with my impression that a lot of what I think of as conservatism may have been really good ideas in a low-tech, rural, agrarian society with effectively infinite resources, but is much less valid in a high-tech, urban, industrial, society that only supports the number of people it does because of advanced technology.

When "if you don't like our rules, go away and start a farm of your own" isn't realistically possible, for example, the rules need to flex to include people for whom the usual rules don't work, because you *cannot* exclude them. And when your neighbor's home is practically within arms-reach of your home, he has a legitimate reason to want to set some limits on what you can do in your home.

* Which is far more influenced by Robert Heinlein than Rush Limbaugh.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

When "if you don't like our rules, go away and start a farm of your own" isn't realistically possible, for example, the rules need to flex to include people for whom the usual rules don't work, because you *cannot* exclude them. And when your neighbor's home is practically within arms-reach of your home, he has a legitimate reason to want to set some limits on what you can do in your home.

This makes sense to me. And there's also the question of whether or not everyone has the right to rules that make sense to them... or whether some people should just shut up and deal with what the majority or the people in power prefer.

[sovay]

What this ignores is the importance of duties being universally understood and agreed-upon-- that if someone gets drunk and beats their spouse, it's not just a matter between them and their conscience-- they suffer the social consequence of people snubbing them, cutting them, criticizing and shaming until they do the right thing.

Is this true, though? Or do people just say, "Eh, all right, he's a drunk and a wife-beater, but he gets his harvest in on time" and look past the failure of more personal duties so long as the wider social obligations are fulfilled? The former seems far more historically common to me.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Hm! Yeah, I don't think there's a consistent set of behaviors everywhere. I don't have enough history, though, to know what the pattern is-- when people value what more, and when people are more likely to use social condemnation for what.

[pastwatcher]

Funny, I just read the first Sharing Knife book and had a few similar thoughts. But I disagree entirely with the implication, if I understand it correctly, that conservative ideals get the credit for cooperative solutions. I am not sure, but I think you've framed both viewpoints with the underlying assumption that government and law are outside influences on society. I would call your description of liberal attitudes toward life choices a "social liberal", perhaps, but actually more libertarian. The liberal viewpoint, to me, is that everyone deserves protection from fear (of people, starvation, and so on), everyone is affected by others but only in some spheres, and thus the entire country must settle on the best practical methods to protect everyone in spheres where it is necessary. That's all based on the value of human life and happiness, and so is the conservative ideology you describe, but I think the danger of that viewpoint is that in adding a somewhat arbitrary set of mandates it can cause people to lose sight of this fundamental principle.

[pastwatcher]

I meant also to draw something like the "monkeysphere" contrast: that is, liberals should assume that government is part of our society and thus our responsibility at least to question if not to support, whereas conservatives see government as theft.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think it's an important distinction between "social liberal/conservative"-- "this is a set of philosophies to live by,"-- and "political liberal/conservative"-- "this is how the government should run." I'm not sure exactly how the two are connected, or whether views on the correct form for that connection are some of the major differences between the two philosophies.

I don't think that only conservative views lead to cooperative solutions-- there are many other ways to come to them. But I do think that this vision of American social conservativism is one way for a lot of people to survive a difficult situation together.