Well, read up on the evolution of moral systems and such. Those rules are not entirely arbitrary (even the ones coming from a religious origin, those are still manmade and follow certain rationales).
The problem is that such laws don't always make sense beyond their expiration date (when conditions changed etc), but can still be held in high esteem due to their existing stronghold.
I mean, as a thought experiment, do you really not internally know that bothering other people who are bot bothering you is wrong and ugly? Most people don't agree with that?
Edit: I am being downvoted, so this is apparently fairly controversial. That's unfortunate, in my mind. I personally believe that the democracy, liberty and prosperity that exists in the world today would not have been possible without America, its founders, and others who argued for this kind of liberty--most notably enlightenment figures. So I guess if you disagree with it, you're pretty lucky to happen to be here.
No, but it doesn't settle much.
For one, it's not always about how people are treated, but also about stopping things you think are bad from happening.
If you think e.g. that forests are good, you'd want to punish people who burn them, even if they did nothing wrong to you.
Similarly, if you are an ancient citizen and think people engaging in gay sex weakens your society (e.g. because these people don't have kids and your community will have less people to continue it, and fight and protect it) you'll try to stop people from doing that.
>I personally believe that the democracy, liberty and prosperity that exists in the world today would not have been possible without America, its founders, and others who argued for this kind of liberty
And I believe that its influence has been overplayed and is insignificant (if not negative). Starting from the genocide of the native Americans, to slavery of blacks, way after Europe had put an end to it, to treatment of chinese and other immigrants up to early 20th century, to inheriting old European colonialism after WWII and extending it with neo-colonialism, to promoting puritanism, neoliberal policies, the "war on drugs", global interventions and befriending and establishing dictatorships and banana republics, promoting crappy mass culture, unhealthy food culture, and total consumerism without regard for the environment, and so on.). Plus the unbearable exceptionalism and nationalism.
This always comes up and it's just like the Russian phrase "and you are lynching negroes."
This basically same argument from Russia to the US boils down to: it doesn't matter that you have improved upon the world, and looking to further improve on it, because you were far from perfect yourself and doing some very bad things.
Those bad things should be criticized, but I am certain had you the choice to be born in the pre-enlightenment world that you would not take it.
I find nothing wrong with that argument.
In fact, the actual disingenuous Cold War practice of whataboutism was rather the accusation of whataboutism itself.
It was meant as a thought stopper, to only allow one-sized criticism and to prevent putting things into perspective that doesn't flatter the first side.
Knowing that both side X and Y did bad things is totally compatible with trying to fix them (in fact it's a prerequirement).
It also stops you from painting Y as some uniquely evil, while letting X get away scot-free.
But only hearing side X attack Y on some bad shit, and not the other side (because that would be "whataboutism"), just serves to hide what X itself does, and to portray Y as some uniquely evil figure.
>Those bad things should be criticized, but I am certain had you the choice to be born in the pre-enlightenment world that you would not take it.
It's more of a wash. There are tons of places and social classes I'd like to belong to enlightenment, and tons of places and social classes I'd like to avoid being enlightenment.
Why do people reject that? It's literally what freedom and liberty is, and it is the exact opposite of authority and oppression.
Controlling access to sex was one of the ways societies found to achieve those goals.
For a simple example, communities with much laxer sex rules, found themselves frequently torn by relationship related feuds. Requiring (and punishing non-adherence) to sticking to some fixed husband/wife is what they found to prevent (not absolutely solve) such issues. They then invented religious and other justifications for the practice to normalize it further.
Certain kinds of marital arrangement also helped keep money in the same extended family, etc. Different such goals evolved different strategies to achieve them.
Plausibly, in the good old days before washing machines when keeping a home together was a gargantuan task, the economic equilibrium just happened to be 1:1 male/female pairings.
Examining the substance of marriage law in England, for example, suggests that most of meat of law and custom revolves around inheritance law. People get swallowed up in the pageantry, but the legal trouble starts when assets are involved.
For one, we now have more elaborate laws and enforcement of them, and people are much more docile and civilized.
We don't just go and beat each other up like in communities of yore. Try an extramarital affair in old rural community though (not even an ancient one), and watch what happens (e.g. the husband blowing your brain with a shotgun).
Second, depends on the definition of "torn apart". E.g.:
https://www.ijsr.net/archive/v3i9/U0VQMTQ0MA==.pdf https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=1673... https://digitalcommons.olivet.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175606161... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2593091/
And let's not even add "crimes of passion" (what those societies tried to avoid). E.g.:
In New York City, 1 in 4 homeless households became homeless because of domestic violence or crimes of passion.
Nearly 15% of women have been injured by an act that could be classified as a crime of passion.
https://brandongaille.com/27-intriguing-crimes-of-passion-st...
>and were probably quite prevalent through history.*
I you mean that some people always had all kinds of sex relations, yes (nobody said adherence and enforcement was or could be absolute or affect the powerful as much as the masses). If you mean that there were fringe societies (e.g. those studied by ethnology) that had lax sex rules, then also yes.
If you mean that big well known historical societies at large embraced and accepted lax sexual behaviors, that's wrong. E.g.:
https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-myth-of-the-anc...
And when the brain doesn't find good pattern matches, it alerts the person of something very strange and potentially dangerous going on.
Morality systems come on top of this fundamental fact, because morality systems are just the conscious justifications we give to our feelings.
I'd like to echo this. A while back, a coworker and friend of mine who is homosexual took me to a coffee shop that caters primarily to homosexual men. I had never been with him before in that social context, but his actions did fall within the stereotypes and I did feel myself uncomfortable with the situation. It wasn't that big of a deal, as I recognized my response.
What was more "eye-opening" was that later, he has the same reaction to those situations when he's with his heterosexual friends. He even went so far as to say he finds the concept of heterosexual sex as digusting.
But was that discomfort specifically related to homosexuality or just the general discomfort one feels when one finds oneself in an entirely alien social context? If you where to go with him to that coffee shop twice a week for a couple of month do you think you'd still find it uncomfortable?
This is a serious claim, one that moral philosophers (even those inclined towards moral fictionalism/nonrealism) have issues with. Just two of them:
* This account fails to distinguish between moral beliefs and cultural taboos. Individuals tend to think that they can justify both, but challenging taboos is more likely to result in confabulation -- individuals are willing to concede hypothetical concerns in their moral beliefs, but remain committed to their taboos even in the face of good evidence against them.
* Moral philosophy, as it exists today, doesn't seek to provide justification to homophobia, gender discrimination, &c. The dominant metaethical views don't give any consideration at all to these particulars, but rather accept as conclusions (via utilitarian calculus, via a supreme principle, &c) that homophobia and the rest are all morally unjustified. Where does this fit into the pattern matching to feelings to confabulated justifications pipeline?
https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/uterine+cal...
Just looking at same-sex marriage allows you to clearly see correlations in approval of same-sex marriage based on religious beliefs: http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/views-abou...
Beyond the differences between a number of the religions, You can look at the results for "Sources of guidance on right and wrong by views about same-sex marriage". The clear majority of those who oppose it do so based on religion.
I believe it's much deeper than that, it's evolutionary.
Some codified 'teachings' i.e. religious or otherwise may push our instincts in one way or another.
FYI there would have been ancient religions very much in favour of 'same sex' though probably not same sex marriage.
I suggest that a little more than 1/2 of men are repulsed by the notion of gay sex (totally different for women though) and that it's instinctive.
More complicated issues like 'hate' or systematic social shame etc. are obviously culture. But my bet for the impetus of it all is on evolution, not just some arbitrary moral systems.
Could you possibly refrain from speculating along these lines unless you have actual evidence that there is an evolutionary basis for laws that criminalize gay sex?
Because otherwise, even if this isn't your intention, you're giving people who favor this kind of legislation the support of sciency-sounding justifications which some people could easily mistake for actual science.
If a society has moved beyond the ‘natural’ impulse to shun members with some evolutionary disadvantages, it must consider that it cannot shun members with any of them.
Homosexuality is always a subconscious threat, because until recently if you were homosexual your bloodline died with you. If your child was homosexual that’s one possible family tree gone, and if it was an only child that’s your bloodline gone again. So if feels like there’s always going to be some opposition as long it’s still connected to reproduction.
It could be classified this way if there's scientific evidence to support that hypothesis. But throwing it out there as a speculation isn't helpful.
>like a lack of physical strength
Surely this shows how silly the argument is. Where are the cultures that criminalize having a lack of physical strength?
>Homosexuality is always a subconscious threat, because until recently if you were homosexual your bloodline died with you
No, because there's only a rough connection between sexuality and who you actually have sex with. Being gay doesn't stop you having sex with women, and you don't have to have sex many times in order to reproduce.
I'm not remotely justifying laws that criminalizing anything.
Moreover, evolution and social evolution are very grey subjects wherein we have a great deal of difficulty proving things one way or another.
I don't think it's offensive, or even 'a stretch' to suggest that attitudes towards some kinds of behaviour are evolutionarily derived, at least partly. It's just an opinion, and maybe it's not super perfect position ... but it's not unreasonable or objectively offensive either.
And for the record, I'm glad that they've changed this law.
Yes! Exactly. So it is pointless and unhelpful to speculate about whether or not people find gay sex inherently repulsive for evolutionary reasons.
I think maybe you're having difficulty seeing this because you're not (I'm guessing) a member of one of the affected groups. Imagine that I made comments offering an "evolutionary" explanation for why people find tech nerds inherently sexually repulsive -- without, of course, providing any actual science to back it up. Wouldn't that be pretty close to just trolling?
Whatever your intentions, these kinds of speculations only serve to normalize anti-gay prejudices by providing a "natural" or "scientific" explanation for them. Unless you really have done some kind of scientific investigation of anti-gay prejudice, it would be best not to introduce these kinds of speculations into the discussion.
So men evolve, but women don't, huh?
Just because your own personal experience propositioning men for gay sex instinctively repulses 50% of them doesn't mean your anecdotal suggestion means anything about the rest of humanity. Maybe you just need to take a shower.
This filter applies to trans people as well as people with full face tattoos or piercings. Great discussion, thanks.
e.g. If one culture hates dogs and kills them on sight, you might say that culture has a prejudice against dogs. If 95% of cultures hated dogs and killed them on sight, you should start to think there is a deeper reason for that (especially considering how useful dogs can be).
In the case of gay-shaming, the obvious common cause is evolutionary: It's people trying to have more grandkids.
If your kid is gay, and decides to go off and have gay sex for the rest of his/her life, he/she won't reproduce. Your gene line ends.
However, if you pressure/shame/tyrannize your gay kid into a reproductive relationship, your genes replicate into grandkids (who likely won't be gay themselves). Your gene line continues.
This also applies to brothers, sisters, and other kin. The reproductive benefit of pressuring a gay relative to act straight is comparable to saving them from death, since the outcome of 'acting gay' and 'dead' is evolutionarily similar. (Of course a living gay relative can help other relatives raise their kids, so it's not identical to being dead. Some have argued that the "helpful gay uncle" effect would counteract the evolutionary cost of homosexuality. But the math doesn't work; a childless relative isn't so much more helpful than a relative with kids that deliberately childless individuals replicate their genes better than ones who have their own kids.) This explains why the pressure to act straight is so strong and vicious - it comes from the same place as the pressure to not die.
So, given a population of people, some who have a gene that makes them pressure gay kids to act straight, and some who don't, over time the pressuring gene will spread through the population. And here we are.
And just to ward off the reflexive moralizing and personal attacks: There's no moral content to our evolutionary history, any more than there's moral content to a lion eating a baby gazelle alive. Please don't fall for the naturalistic fallacy and start attacking as though I'm saying natural equals good. Lots of things that are natural are not good. Understanding the world requires us to be able to separate rational understanding what is, from a moral judgment of what we should do. We should be adult enough here to make that distinction.
I have to disagree. I don't think people who opposr and hate gay people are doing it for evolutionary purposes. I haven't met anybody who thinks this guy is gay which meand he won't be making any kids, so let's hate him. Hate comes from much more fundamental place than that.
For majority of people it's not "normal" hence different. And for majority what's different is scary. The same reason why immigrants of different skin color than majority population are hated.
The same reason applies to extremely short, extremely tall, people with deformities, person with vitiligo in black/brown countries etc are treated differently, made fun of.
That's not how evolution works. Unexpected movement on the ground near your feet doesn't scare you because you have carefully thought about how it will affect your chances to reproduce, but because the siblings of your ancestors didn't pay attention, were bitten by snakes and didn't get to reproduce.
For majority of people it's not "normal" hence different. And for majority what's different is scary. The same reason why immigrants of different skin color than majority population are hated."
I don't agree at all, and I agree with the original post.
I think a slight majority of men have an 'instinct' against gay sex that is not learned or socialized. The 'hate' is another thing , as something maybe more developed. I think at least 50% of the population has an emotional revulsion to the notion of 'male same sex' (not female same sex) and but only a tiny portion for whom that turns into something more aggressive.
Also 'gay' is not just 'different'. It's not like someone wearing a different hat.
Reproduction is at the core of the survival of the species, much like oxygen, food and water are at the core of your individual survival. Those instances are extremely powerful, the most powerful social motivators of all. So I actually do buy that 'moral shame' towards those who are seemingly 'opting out' of reproduction is part of a kind of darwinian social evolution.
FYI - it's mostly the same reason that people who are 'obviously abnormal', ill or deformed. Women and Men want healthy children, that's a very deep instinct. Nobody (and probably not you) is actually attracted to deformed or obviously ill individuals. We may feel sympathetic to them, and want to help them - but we are definitely not attracted to them. 'Mocking them' - that's just people being crude.
So obviously it's all armchair whatbout thinking ... but I'm inclined to think that this issue is deeply rooted in evolution and cultural evolution.
But yes it's good news for gay Indians.
There's no gene like that, though. I'm skeptical of evolutionary explanations like this -- it's easy to come up with one for almost anything.
If this were the case, we'd have 'bred out' the gay, surely?
Acceptance of difference, including different sexual orientation, is higher in secular societies.
Religion seems to be a much more obvious, much more common, correlation to intolerance of homosexuality -- in no small part because the most popular written texts that form the basis of the bigger religions dictate an intolerance. The fact that reflects and feeds an innate distrust of different I think is important in the sense of maintenance of these beliefs, but can too easily conflate causality.
This assumes that there is a gene that determines whether someone is gay or not. I was under the impression that gay and trans are an epigenetic phenomenon that occurs during early development. In the womb, a male brain develops too much along the female trajectory or female too much along the male trajectory, either due to presence of hormones that should not be there or the lack of hormones that should be there.
This was evidently parent's assumption, per the claim that gay-shaming was evolutionary.
I've taken some liberty by inverting the former and conflating the latter (evolutionary / genetics) but my point is that there's no evidence for (and quite a bit against) the claim that any of this is 'evolutionary'.
We'd consider that repulsive by today's moral mores - so I'm not exactly sure that 'they once did it' makes it 'ok'.
They also had slaves and were cool with that.
But more broadly, the notion of sex, sexuality, social mores, relationships varies a lot and it's difficult to contextualize.
While the Romans had a lot of 'same sex' and generally mightn't have been ashamed of it, they didn't have same sex marriage and there's nothing to indicate that people thought it should be appropriate either. So we have to think a little bit about how a society with so much 'same sex' would have thought of 'same sex marriage' as utterly bizarre and possibly immoral.
Even in 2018 these things are still contextual from one place in the world to the next. That makes it hard.
First, because it sounds incredibly simplistic. Time after time new findings show that there's more to evolutionary processes than we thought, and there's more to the human brain than we thought, so imagine the sheer complexity of understanding both at the same time. It strikes me as suspcious, if not intellectually lazy, that an explanation for a phenomenon involving incredibly complex fields that have stumped generations of scientists can fit in a few sentences.
Second, because people using these kinds of arguments are not, in fact, biologists. As it happens, I know a fair few myself, and although it's not exactly the field of all of us, none are willing put this kind of argument forward. Not that it is necessarily wrong, but it speaks miles that people who would feel more qualified to give their opinion exercise much more caution than people who aren't.
Third, because many behaviors that don't make sense from an armchair evolutionary biologist's point of view are commonplace in nature. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_displaying_hom... There are many more such kinds of behaviors and we don't really understand where they come from or why they exist (if there's even a reason).
I don't want you to take it wrongly or read my post as dismissing what you said off-hand with arguments of authority etc. Nor should you take it personally, as there are many posts like yours and I simply chose to reply to the more detailed one. Again, it's not necessarily completely wrong, but probably simplistic to the point of being harmful. Just please be mindful of that the next time you're invoking the word 'evolutionary' in an argument to justify something.
Ancient Greece and Rome did not have significant stigmas against homosexuality, although it may not have been as common as some stories would suggest. Native Americans tended to respect homosexuals because they contributed to the tribe and helped care for the tribe's children - they put in more than they received.
Prejudices against homosexuality coincide with the development of monotheistic religions, first with the Jews when the old testament was written, and this continued with the development of Christianity and Islam as they also consider the old testament to be a holy text. Modern Asia (specifically regarding China and Japan, but others as well) still has some issues with homosexuality despite not having the same religious influence, but those cultures tend to strongly emphasize conformity and not standing out. These cultures also tend to still expect the elderly to be taken care of by their children, while the Western world has moved towards helping the elderly retain as much independence as possible rather than mixing multiple generations together.
(I mean to comment very narrowly about looking to other species for shaming behaviors, I'm not trying to argue the broader issue either way)