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gaudiorIn thinking about the same-sex marriage debate, I've been reviewing my thoughts over the past few years, sparked mostly by conversations with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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
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
