I wouldn't call it "a lie that people agree to believe," I'd call it an ideal that people may or may not live up to. All cultures have ideals, and they have a strong impact on the direction of a society even if people don't live up to them 100%. It's not hard to see the positive impact of monogamistic ideals when it comes to things like family formation, which is one of the cornerstones of society as we know it.
Social norms aren't arbitrary, even if they aren't human universals -- you'll notice that matriarchal, low-paternal investment cultures never seem to get off the ground. All of the most successful cultures have broad similarities in regards to their attitudes towards sex, even if there are some differences. Such is the extent of the impact of sexual culture on the structure of the larger society.
In less affluent times, when people's lives depended on it, it was obvious that family formation was more important than recreational sex. Even today, with the importance of the family being somewhat masked by the expanded presence of larger-scale institutions like the state, it remains a crucial element of a truly healthy society.
Human beings are adaptable, and in modern times we can probably afford a more permissive sexual culture. Nevertheless, I think we'd be profoundly better off if people were more aware of the value of sexual restraint. Hedonism should not be our only guiding principle.
These social norms were formed when people didn't have the wealth or the technology for effective birth control. Once that happened, the sexual revolution happened. Cultures are self-modifying based upon changing conditions.
>Cultures are self-modifying based upon changing conditions.
Yes, and like biological evolution, cultural evolution has no foresight. Birth control may have facilitated these cultural changes by removing the most obvious downside to promiscuous sex, but this has next to nothing to do with my argument. The point is that such radical changes in a culture can have unforeseen consequences for our psychology and society.
I don't pretend to know what the "ideal" sexual culture for our time would be, but people should be more critical of the all-accepting, hyper-individualistic direction we seem to be going in.
> The point is that such radical changes in a culture can have unforeseen consequences for our psychology and society.
The old order had unseen consequences for our psychology and society too. The strong taboo against divorce enabled a lot of domestic violence and unhappy marriages, gays faced a lot of serious problems, and infidelity was rampant. Sexual repression itself has psychological consequences. We're still seeing the knock-on effects of this today.
You're making a cultural evolution argument as well, and my counterargument is that cultural evolution doesn't capture everything that we want to have in our society. Societies can function with the repression of women and minorities, with domestic violence, with marital infidelity. But all things considered, wouldn't we rather live in a society that functioned without those things, and with more satisfying sex to boot?
Furthermore, with the modern state of technology, the old order is probably unworkable anyway, even from the standpoint of cultural evolution. The old order was patriarchial and oppressive to women. It was always wrong, but in a time when women didn't work outside the home it was at least sustainable. In our modern economy that's no longer the case.
I don't deny that past eras took their hidden psychological tolls as well -- for example, "the problem that has no name" that Betty Friedan wrote about. However, the fact that women's self-reported happiness levels have declined considerably between then and now seems to indicate that our own time may be worse for them in the aggregate. I also question the assumption that all those extra marriages ensured by the non-acceptance of divorce were necessarily unhappy. I've never heard anything about domestic violence or infidelity being more common back then (unlike, say, prostitution, which has experienced a precipitous decline due to the easy availability of casual sex).
Whether or not the old order is unworkable today depends on what you mean by the old order. The culturally-enforced economic dependence of women on men probably would be unworkable, but that's not what I'm arguing for. I just think that people would be happier in a society more oriented towards family formation than our current one. We do have some control over things like this, and part of that control comes in the form of the values we choose to teach to our children -- which, as you may recall, is what this thread's original comment was about.
I'm not saying that the past was better than the present or that I'd like to return to it. I do think that we should stop seeing the past as irredeemably tainted by its oppression of women and minorities (or whatever) and assuming that it has nothing to teach us. All I'm doing is criticizing our present time and its prevailing values.
(This is getting rather long and tangential. Would you be interested in continuing it via email? My address is in my HN profile.)
> women's self-reported happiness levels
There's that word, "self-reported". There are a lot of pitfalls to self-reported data, and many of them apply here. Women used to be openly discouraged from displaying negative emotion because it would make them unattractive, or bad wives.
Arguing in the alternative, it's also inconsistent that you mention this point in the first place, because of your earlier criticisms of "hedonism". Career-focused today might be lead busier, more stressful lives compared to the lives of housewives, which is a loss for hedonism and perhaps a loss for "self-reported happiness", but doesn't it fulfill higher virtues?
> I also question the assumption that all those extra marriages ensured by the non-acceptance of divorce were necessarily unhappy.
I don't think they were necessarily unhappy either, but there was simply no good, acceptable outlet for the ones that were abusive or unhappy.
> The culturally-enforced economic dependence of women on men probably would be unworkable, but that's not what I'm arguing for.
One of the reasons women can have careers is because they can delay marriage, and one of the reasons women can delay marriage is because there are socially acceptable sexual outlets other than marriage.
> I just think that people would be happier in a society more oriented towards family formation than our current one.
Among people I've known, the ones who were having premarital sex between 16 and 25 still got married and had kids between 21 and 30. Having kids seems to be something people naturally want--you don't have to trick them into it by trying to withhold sex from them.
I guess you could add social pressure for people to have kids, so people who didn't actually want kids felt forced into having them anyway. But I've known people who were raised by parents who didn't actually want kids, and they seem more adamant than me that people shouldn't have kids unless they really want them. That's what it's really about--personal freedom.
> All I'm doing is criticizing our present time and its prevailing values.
No, see, you're criticizing it from the perspective of the past, and you are saying the past was better at least in some ways if not in others. I'm trying to show that the "bad" things about the past--the things we can agree were bad--are intricately linked with what you think are the "good" parts. And I'm criticizing our present time and its prevailing values too, but from the perspective of a possible future where everyone is perfectly okay with consenting adults safely doing whatever they want with each other.
Social norms aren't arbitrary, even if they aren't human universals -- you'll notice that matriarchal, low-paternal investment cultures never seem to get off the ground. All of the most successful cultures have broad similarities in regards to their attitudes towards sex, even if there are some differences. Such is the extent of the impact of sexual culture on the structure of the larger society.
In less affluent times, when people's lives depended on it, it was obvious that family formation was more important than recreational sex. Even today, with the importance of the family being somewhat masked by the expanded presence of larger-scale institutions like the state, it remains a crucial element of a truly healthy society.
Human beings are adaptable, and in modern times we can probably afford a more permissive sexual culture. Nevertheless, I think we'd be profoundly better off if people were more aware of the value of sexual restraint. Hedonism should not be our only guiding principle.