Understanding Cultural Conservatives
Feb. 16th, 2005 11:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
forsythI've been thinking about things like the changing trends in society lately, and the possible causes.
Things like the decline of civil society, the divisions of America, and so on. Higher divorce rates, depression, loneliness, lack of civility, etc. And I think, thanks to some essays, blogs, just thinking, and life, I'm starting to get a handle on the edges of some of the things. For one, I think I'm starting to understand why so many cultural conservatives keep feeling like "the family is under attack" or "society is falling apart." I just think their diagnosis of why things are like this, and what to do about it are wrong, and won't make anything better.
For starters, there's not some huge "liberal conspiracy" out to "destroy the family" or anything like that. Conspiracies are attractive, they give you a definite enemy, they give you a nice line up of good versus bad (usually), and they give a framework to fit things into. They're also usually wrong. (Not always. Just ask Julius Caesar. Or King George III)
Society has changed a lot. And is changing a lot and more still, constantly. For most of the brief lifetime of humans on this planet, we lived in little hunter/gatherer bands, then small farming tribes. That's where and how our brains did most of their evolving. The first cities in Mesopotamia were only thousands of years ago. The first times people gathered in numbers enough to not know everybody they'd meet daily. I don't know how much role, or what, evolutionary biology has on any of this, but it seems reasonable to expect differences. But given how much I know about biology, and history (aka, reading popular science books by people who know a lot more than me, plus random bits via /. and metafilter) I'm not going to claim anything I say as right.
And then things sped up. More people, more cities, more exploration, more advances... Not cleanly, and backsliding and wars and all sorts of other mess, but. Even then, mostly, society had years between most major changes, time for traditions to be adapted, things to be integrated.
Then came the Industrial revolution. And transport and communication got quicker, and here we are now. Fifteen years ago, the Internet was used mostly by serious military scientists to share data. Ten years ago, cell phones were expensive and rare. A hundred and five years ago, airplanes didn't exist. People (at least in the "Developed World") can travel and communicate almost anywhere. Cheaply, and easily.
People move more. So the neighborhoods of old don't exist the way they used to. People live farther from their extended families, don't see them as often. Fathers (and more and more mothers) work outside the house, away from their kids. Kids get shuffled from planned activity to planned activity. Family life has CHANGED. Neighborhoods have CHANGED. Cities and houses and everything else has CHANGED.
Change can be scary. And with good reason, because not all change is good. And even if a change is good, not everything that comes from it is. But the traditions didn't have time to keep up and adapt. Neighborhoods and the structures and rituals of places have often faltered or failed, simply because people aren't around long enough to get involved, or they're busy with their own things, and just don't get involved. And without these social nets, without some of the coping mechanisms that used to be there, more of the stress falls on families. And when you place anything under stress, some that seemed fine just won't make it. (I could go off on a tangent here about how the emphasis of "family values" and placing huge importance on the family probably helps ADD to the stress on families, but I'll save that for later)
People used to be tribal. We still are. But it used to be clans of birth or tribes of place. But with mobility, both of those fade. Now it's tribes of interest. Tribes of "place" sometimes only apply on the level of compatible time zones (as in Cory Doctorow's book Eastern Standard Tribe). I don't really think this is a bad thing. But it does have one major failing. Tribes of interest are much more fragile, especially on the Internet. When you lose an interest in something, you stop doing it. And usually, you end up leaving the "tribe" (be it an IRC channel, a listserv, forum, or knitting circle) and then you just disappear. Along with all the social connections that had been there. Tribes of interest tend t be transient. Sometimes, a year is forever. (I know this from personal experience, there's at least two or three "tribes of interest" that I've fallen out of that were good places, with good people, but I just stopped going. I still miss a lot of those folks, and I regret the ease that people vanished, including me) With a tribe of place, the people are still there, you're still there, unless you move. It's harder to escape. And tribes of blood you can't, without extraordinary effort, even if your family's not that close. They're still your family.
The other problem with tribes of interest is that the people are more alike. At least on the level of sharing a certain interest, so you have something in common. There's narrower and more diverse tribes of interest, but they tend to be more homogeneous than society at large. Geeks, Conservative Religious Folks, Bowlers, Gamblers, Quilters, NRA, Fraternal Order of Police, what have you. This isn't to say that tribes of place are necessarily better, birds of a feather and all that. But, especially in cities, you don't choose your neighbors, they're just there. You don't pick the guy who works at the store, or the guy who lives across the street, or the rest of the people who walk into the bar. Families always have things in common, too.
It's not really bad on one level, friends tend to share interests and other things, at least enough to let them get along. It's a part of people to want to feel like you belong somewhere. But if it becomes too limiting, only encountering people like you, then you miss out. And your ideas never get challenged, you never have to think. And you end up in an echo chamber, where things only get reinforced, and reality never gets to check in.
At any rate, back on my point. These are two of many things, most of which I would say are overall good things, that have been putting stress on families and old social institutions. And some just don't make it. Things keep changing, faster than traditions can be updated or integrated. One reaction to change is to look for something stable to hold on to. And to some people, that comes as a set of rules, which usually comes with explanations, a framework to fit things into, and all that. Assurance that at least somebody knows what's going on.
Frameworks tie into observer bias (If you look hard enough, everything is related, one way or another to the Law of Fives), which is a subject for another post, this one's quite long enough.
The ultimate point is, though, there are lots of marriages that fail, lots of old social institutions that are having trouble standing. Things that can look like "families under attack" and "society falling apart". There is a core of actual problem that cultural conservatives keep decrying. But as I said, I think their diagnosis of causes and solutions is completely off. Janet Jackson's boob on TV isn't causing it. Gay people being married doesn't threaten anybody else's marriages. GTA doesn't make kids go shoot up schools. You can't legislate the country back into the imagined perfection of Leave It To Beaver. Baggy jeans aren't causing teen pregnancy, RPGs don't make kids murderers. And trying to legislate morality based on one group's interpretation of one religion, even if that religion is the most common one in the country, isn't going to solve the underlying problems.
No, I don't have any solutions, either. At least not simple ones. Not the kind people want, where you pop a pill, or post to the net, or make something illegal. The only ways I can think of are the hard ways. Starting with you, and it requires that you look at you, and see what needs changes and hard work. And then work on the world, too.
I don't know how you create a neighborhood, or a friendly bar where people can interact. You have to work with other people, help create the places people need. I'm not sure it's even something that can be done deliberately. Maybe it just comes from people living and working and doing other things, not trying to do it, just letting it happen. I dunno.
But when it comes down to it, what part of society is any more than people interacting?
(I SO feel like a fortune cookie.)
Tags: Politics, Mindscribbles
Things like the decline of civil society, the divisions of America, and so on. Higher divorce rates, depression, loneliness, lack of civility, etc. And I think, thanks to some essays, blogs, just thinking, and life, I'm starting to get a handle on the edges of some of the things. For one, I think I'm starting to understand why so many cultural conservatives keep feeling like "the family is under attack" or "society is falling apart." I just think their diagnosis of why things are like this, and what to do about it are wrong, and won't make anything better.
For starters, there's not some huge "liberal conspiracy" out to "destroy the family" or anything like that. Conspiracies are attractive, they give you a definite enemy, they give you a nice line up of good versus bad (usually), and they give a framework to fit things into. They're also usually wrong. (Not always. Just ask Julius Caesar. Or King George III)
Society has changed a lot. And is changing a lot and more still, constantly. For most of the brief lifetime of humans on this planet, we lived in little hunter/gatherer bands, then small farming tribes. That's where and how our brains did most of their evolving. The first cities in Mesopotamia were only thousands of years ago. The first times people gathered in numbers enough to not know everybody they'd meet daily. I don't know how much role, or what, evolutionary biology has on any of this, but it seems reasonable to expect differences. But given how much I know about biology, and history (aka, reading popular science books by people who know a lot more than me, plus random bits via /. and metafilter) I'm not going to claim anything I say as right.
And then things sped up. More people, more cities, more exploration, more advances... Not cleanly, and backsliding and wars and all sorts of other mess, but. Even then, mostly, society had years between most major changes, time for traditions to be adapted, things to be integrated.
Then came the Industrial revolution. And transport and communication got quicker, and here we are now. Fifteen years ago, the Internet was used mostly by serious military scientists to share data. Ten years ago, cell phones were expensive and rare. A hundred and five years ago, airplanes didn't exist. People (at least in the "Developed World") can travel and communicate almost anywhere. Cheaply, and easily.
People move more. So the neighborhoods of old don't exist the way they used to. People live farther from their extended families, don't see them as often. Fathers (and more and more mothers) work outside the house, away from their kids. Kids get shuffled from planned activity to planned activity. Family life has CHANGED. Neighborhoods have CHANGED. Cities and houses and everything else has CHANGED.
Change can be scary. And with good reason, because not all change is good. And even if a change is good, not everything that comes from it is. But the traditions didn't have time to keep up and adapt. Neighborhoods and the structures and rituals of places have often faltered or failed, simply because people aren't around long enough to get involved, or they're busy with their own things, and just don't get involved. And without these social nets, without some of the coping mechanisms that used to be there, more of the stress falls on families. And when you place anything under stress, some that seemed fine just won't make it. (I could go off on a tangent here about how the emphasis of "family values" and placing huge importance on the family probably helps ADD to the stress on families, but I'll save that for later)
People used to be tribal. We still are. But it used to be clans of birth or tribes of place. But with mobility, both of those fade. Now it's tribes of interest. Tribes of "place" sometimes only apply on the level of compatible time zones (as in Cory Doctorow's book Eastern Standard Tribe). I don't really think this is a bad thing. But it does have one major failing. Tribes of interest are much more fragile, especially on the Internet. When you lose an interest in something, you stop doing it. And usually, you end up leaving the "tribe" (be it an IRC channel, a listserv, forum, or knitting circle) and then you just disappear. Along with all the social connections that had been there. Tribes of interest tend t be transient. Sometimes, a year is forever. (I know this from personal experience, there's at least two or three "tribes of interest" that I've fallen out of that were good places, with good people, but I just stopped going. I still miss a lot of those folks, and I regret the ease that people vanished, including me) With a tribe of place, the people are still there, you're still there, unless you move. It's harder to escape. And tribes of blood you can't, without extraordinary effort, even if your family's not that close. They're still your family.
The other problem with tribes of interest is that the people are more alike. At least on the level of sharing a certain interest, so you have something in common. There's narrower and more diverse tribes of interest, but they tend to be more homogeneous than society at large. Geeks, Conservative Religious Folks, Bowlers, Gamblers, Quilters, NRA, Fraternal Order of Police, what have you. This isn't to say that tribes of place are necessarily better, birds of a feather and all that. But, especially in cities, you don't choose your neighbors, they're just there. You don't pick the guy who works at the store, or the guy who lives across the street, or the rest of the people who walk into the bar. Families always have things in common, too.
It's not really bad on one level, friends tend to share interests and other things, at least enough to let them get along. It's a part of people to want to feel like you belong somewhere. But if it becomes too limiting, only encountering people like you, then you miss out. And your ideas never get challenged, you never have to think. And you end up in an echo chamber, where things only get reinforced, and reality never gets to check in.
At any rate, back on my point. These are two of many things, most of which I would say are overall good things, that have been putting stress on families and old social institutions. And some just don't make it. Things keep changing, faster than traditions can be updated or integrated. One reaction to change is to look for something stable to hold on to. And to some people, that comes as a set of rules, which usually comes with explanations, a framework to fit things into, and all that. Assurance that at least somebody knows what's going on.
Frameworks tie into observer bias (If you look hard enough, everything is related, one way or another to the Law of Fives), which is a subject for another post, this one's quite long enough.
The ultimate point is, though, there are lots of marriages that fail, lots of old social institutions that are having trouble standing. Things that can look like "families under attack" and "society falling apart". There is a core of actual problem that cultural conservatives keep decrying. But as I said, I think their diagnosis of causes and solutions is completely off. Janet Jackson's boob on TV isn't causing it. Gay people being married doesn't threaten anybody else's marriages. GTA doesn't make kids go shoot up schools. You can't legislate the country back into the imagined perfection of Leave It To Beaver. Baggy jeans aren't causing teen pregnancy, RPGs don't make kids murderers. And trying to legislate morality based on one group's interpretation of one religion, even if that religion is the most common one in the country, isn't going to solve the underlying problems.
No, I don't have any solutions, either. At least not simple ones. Not the kind people want, where you pop a pill, or post to the net, or make something illegal. The only ways I can think of are the hard ways. Starting with you, and it requires that you look at you, and see what needs changes and hard work. And then work on the world, too.
I don't know how you create a neighborhood, or a friendly bar where people can interact. You have to work with other people, help create the places people need. I'm not sure it's even something that can be done deliberately. Maybe it just comes from people living and working and doing other things, not trying to do it, just letting it happen. I dunno.
But when it comes down to it, what part of society is any more than people interacting?
(I SO feel like a fortune cookie.)
Tags: Politics, Mindscribbles
