The joy and freedom of harmlessly upsetting social norms

https://sive.rs/nor

by saeedesmaili • 3 years ago

20 23 3 years ago

sive.rs

jdmtheNth2• 3 years ago

What would Kant say about this?

coldtea2• 3 years ago

Kant's ethics are useless abstractions.

uvnq• 3 years ago

Just my guess but he probably would not have said that

jdmtheNth2• 3 years ago

Spoken like a person incapable of self-regulation that needs external rules to function.

rayiner6• 3 years ago

We’re not actually bound to social norms. We don’t need permission. We don’t need to please everyone.

Social norms enforce behaviors that are necessary and desirable, but which would be unnecessarily punitive. For example, many societies have social norms that make getting married and having children social obligation. In many cultures, such as in Northern Europe, people are discovering that they are "not actually bound to social norms." Those cultures are universally in decline, and find themselves having to import workers and taxpayers from cultures that believe deeply in social norms (in Europe, Muslims).

In societies that don't have modern technology and a surplus of wealth, upsetting social norms is anything but "harmless." The U.S. is currently in the midst of a huge STD epidemic: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/p0412-STD-Increase.h.... And that's with modern technology and medicines. Imagine what things like during most of human history, when social norms against promiscuous sexual activity developed. Norms and taboos are a way to make people do good things and make them avoid bad behaviors.

yvan-eht-nioj3• 3 years ago

If being bound by tight social norms is the key to bringing birth rates above replacement level, then Japan’s population should be skyrocketing.

The factors behind population decline are multifaceted, complex and vary from country to country.

Both Russia and China are also in decline, and cannot be accused of being bastions of promiscuous, individualistic Western liberalism.

rayiner6• 3 years ago

Cultures of course vary in the particular norms they enforce. Many East Asian countries don’t have strong social norms in favor of procreation despite otherwise being strongly norm oriented. But of course a society that isn’t strongly norm oriented loses the ability to enforce that norm as well as other socially desirable behaviors.

COVID is another example. The breakdown of norm-oriented behavior has been especially acute where the counter-culture of the 1970s collided with deindustrialization. The fallout was mitigated in certain blue areas by high levels of education. But I’m much of the country it ended up destroying the framework of norms that helped mediocre and not especially educated people make good decisions.

subjectsigma• 3 years ago

Even outside of this, it always makes me pause when someone’s reaction to their causing grief, anger, awkwardness and worry is to laugh or goad them. Seems kind of perverse.

JamesBarney• 3 years ago

Besides reduced birth rate what else does cultural decline mean?

It also seems like your hypothesis is "more lax social norms lead to lower birth rate" but this clearly isn't the case because east Asia has much lower birth rates than the US despite much stricter social norms.

I think the hypothesis "industrialization, urbanization, and density lead to lower birth rates" describes the world better and makes more sense.

rayiner6• 3 years ago

To be clear, Scandinavia doesn’t have “more relaxed social norms.” It’s actually an extremely norm-driven society. It’s just that this one particular norm common to abrahamic religions has declined sharply.

I think that’s the same reason birth rates have dropped so sharply in east Asia. Their religious tradition doesn’t place the same value on having children as a moral imperative. In fact the opposite is true: an entire generation of Asians was socialized by the west into a mindset that population reduction is the way to prosperity. (My dad is an expert in this field that did that work.)

Industrialization explains it in part—you don’t need as many kids when less of the population is engaged in farming. But many western countries had a TFR over 3 in the mid 20th century, a time when we had supersonic airplanes already. The US had a replacement TFR as recently as 2008, prior to a sharp drop in religiosity over the last decade. The point is that norms can, among their many other powers, can maintain sustainable population replacement even within an industrialized society.

xnyan• 3 years ago

Immagration is a factor of relative wealth and physical access. People who immigrate to Europe do so because 1) Europe offers a significantly better quality of life than their home country and 2) they can physically get there. Birthrate is also a wealth thing, maybe you can argue that the changes in wealth changed social norms, but that's indirect.

The STD link you posted is a statement from the US CDC that reduction in healthcare availability because of COVID-19 caused STIs to go untreated and spread more. How does that relate to marriage norms at all?

patapong• 3 years ago

The claim regarding Northern Europe do not seem to match the data... Compared to the EU average TFR of 1.53, both Sweden (1.67) and Denmark (1.72) are higher. Not at replacement levels, but higher than many other places in Europe.

Source: https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/03/17/fertility-in-europe...

elliotto• 3 years ago

Would you say that there are social norms that either currently exist, or existed in the past, that are undesirable?

For example, when it was socially normal to own slaves, would you consider this necessary and desirable? What about say, 30 years ago, when it was the social norm to deride and abuse gay people?

tptacek• 3 years ago

We are in nothing even resembling a huge STD epidemic. The rates of the diseases your just cited weren't just higher, but were vastly higher, in the era of tighter norms against promiscuity. You've made a self-refuting argument: just follow the link you provided.

The joy and freedom of harmlessly upsetting social norms

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