In romance languages there's a word "libertinaje", but the best translation I could find into english was debauchery which I agree has too many connotations of "partying." Wantonness perhaps?
Could you explain more?
From what I can tell, there is no inherent separation between freedom and debauchery aside from someone's judgement about whether particular choices where good for the person who made them.
I think I agree with this on a certain level, but also debauchery is fun and can be useful.
I don't see how it's at all convoluted. If anything, it's too reductive.
Taboos, traditions, etc., don't need to exist because of a reason that's explicit. Sometimes, they do, but that doesn't explain the taboos that don't make obvious sense. A taboo can be more or less a form of "cultural neuron" that doesn't have an explicit purpose but incidentally changes the balance of the system towards something that society at a given time may benefit from without even knowing it. A religion featuring more ornate hats than others may have more true believers, or perhaps the other way around for all we know. If that's at least plausible, if not true, that wouldn't necessarily mean a reverend at one point decided to declare a certain kind of hat wearing because of the "good of the church."
The inverse can also be true. Take for instance the taboo of sexism. Makes sense, right? Given modern western principles, why should culture allow for discrimination based on sex? On the other hand, there's evidence that many women, regardless of their political positions, actually appreciate men who are "benevolently sexist." It's a phenomenon compelling enough that even Psychology Today, a publication heavily biased against anything unflattering to women, has reported on it more than once. By making sexism a taboo, and far more taboo as of late, society has raised the bar for just how confident a man has to be to attract a woman. We really don't need a study to demonstrate that, on average, women are attracted to confidence. An effect of making sexism taboo is it changes the signal to noise ratio, allowing women to better identify which men they'll actually be attracted to. Maybe there were some people arguing against sexism with this in mind, but I imagine they are an extreme minority. Most anti-sexists probably weren't thinking along those lines.
At least that taboo makes some reasonable sense in isolation, and even the fashion of religious garb can be made sense of, but what about a taboo that makes no sense? What about merely making a mouth-noise that comes out sounding like "shit?"
It makes little explicit sense that saying the word "shit" be a faux pas. You can say poop, doodie, scat, dung, and even crap, but shit is considered a curse word. It's really pretty stupid.
Except I would argue that having any form of taboo can have a positive effect, even if it barely makes sense. By having cultural limits of any kind, it puts the society on the same page and creates a mindset where individuals try to at least maintain some level of basic class as a mindset. Personally, I like saying the word shit, but adding virtually any variable to a chaotic system can have effects that weren't explicitly predicted.
Why do men have nipples? Because there is no reason not to.
Evolution need not a reason, but unless things do have a purpose, all things have a cost, whether it is raw unnecessary complexity, inefficient energy expenditure, or a novel external selective pressure.
Taboos and traditions may not _seem_ to have purpose - but that ignorance is basically the inverse of our God of the (Knowledge) Gaps. Not being attracted to individuals you spent a large amount of time with - and shaming/shunning those who do - is a positive instinct that directly reduces the incidence of incest, which is an act that _literally_ degrades biodiversity.
Sexism and racism make sense too. Sexism gives an immediate rise to familial hierarchies, which have more benefit in a hunter-gatherer context. Racism/Xenophobia is a geat instinct when we were territorial primates - those with differing skin tones/significantly different facial structure were likely competitors for resources and carried diseases you wouldn't have defenses for.
Religions all stem from the upper castes of ALL developed civilizations. The priests/shamans/wizards/sorcerers/wise men were the ones with the celestial knowledge required to dictate when to plant crops.
We evolved from apes; taboos and traditions are just remnants of our collective unconscious, and are just unneeded artifacts we will grow out of as technology and modernity progress.
Many taboos and instincts have their roots in completely outdated utility - racism and sexism both used to serve evolutionary purposes, but stuck around LONG after they became useless.
Other taboos and traditions are still useful for society today, but are somewhat under attack - like the taboo on divorce/single parenthood. Studies show that children of divorced parents have much worse outcomes than children of parents who are still together, controlling for most variables.
I think there is a large chunk of society that is afraid we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so they think it's better to keep the bathwater...
I don't see how you control for the fact that couples who stay together are happier on average. That's why they're still together(at least some of the time), whereas divorcees are by definition not happy together.
To have a proper comparison you need to compare divorced parents to married, but miserable parents. Growing up with the latter can be just as miserable or possibly even more if it's an abusive marriage.
Here's a proposition: Learning to make compromises and achieve partnership with your partner and growing into it is the behavior most associated with happiness of couples. Having removed the obvious necessity of it, we've created a society with much more focus on individual wants and needs that gains less from cooperation, resulting in lower average outcomes.
Absolutely, the stigma on divorce was once too high, resulting in people staying in abusive relationships too long. But people still stay in abusive relationships. We can recognize that committed partnerships are healthy and encourage them without saying that any one individual is at fault if a relationship didn't work out.
Do we really need to encourage happy, healthy, and successful committed partnerships? Don't most people desire that for themselves? We should probably avoid outright discouraging them, but I suspect that most people are wanting a good, happy, loving, relationship and that if they divorce it's because they didn't have one.
I really don't think that it's simply a matter of most people seeing divorce as being so easy and consequence free that there's no value in putting in the effort to work things out with their spouses either. Especially not when children are involved.
And it's become impossible to call out bad advice in the current climate. You can call out good advice as much as you want, because it's common wisdom, but any criticism of things that have been historically looked down upon as terrible ideas because they are is "punching down".
Now, a vague reference to "studies" and a biased just-so story might convince you but I'm far from convinced by this.
Yes, and it's not a simple matter to estimate those costs, let alone any point where a cost reaches the threshold of evolutionary pressure. There are plenty of examples in nature of things that are inefficient and suboptimal but the pressure to remove them is lacking. Or, there is an unseen benefit to things that seem to be "bad" that 21st century humans haven't figured out yet.
In theory, everything has a cost, just as the First Law of thermodynamics suggests that energy is conserved, even though in the real world neither energy or mass are conserved, making it much more complicated if not impractical to make predictions from alone. On the flip side, all matter has the added factor (substituting cost) of gravitation, which one might assume to always matter to some degree, yet it's so inconsequential at the molecular level that it's basically not even factored into most chemistry. My point being that whether we are capable to actually determine whether anything is a meaningful cost on a system is dubious.
> Taboos and traditions may not _seem_ to have purpose
And that could be a result of them actually having no purpose, but consequently having an effect that manages to allow them to survive and propagate.
> We evolved from apes; taboos and traditions are just remnants of our collective unconscious, and are just unneeded artifacts we will grow out of as technology and modernity progress.
Be careful what you wish for.
Most every community have a tangle of a belief system outside of anything religious. Moving away from more obvious isms, I grew up surrounded by fierce ageism especially in regard to the dating set. As young adult I eventually realised it was another ism that was BS, but also realised its presence waxed and waned over a number of years - it's clearly a product of social interactions.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-...
And on the word shit, there is a long tradition in various world cultures of curse words being named on bodily functions. But you are missing the obvious in that "curse" words are such because they were originally thought to bring a curse on the speaker or recipients from whatever god-entity they believe in. I suspect this is a manifestation of (ancient?) society's methods of trying to control the fuck out of everyone and it is a meme burned in our consciousness quite deeply at this point. But all that makes the entire notion of curse-words invalid; if their meaning is that which we attribute to them then they are meaningless and therefore harmless. But with morality unable to escape the shadow of primitive, ignorant times, they continue to be "taboo"
I think the argument they're making is that in a sexist culture all men will present with more confidence due to the belief that women are lesser. So the average woman will find the average guy more attractive...
I can't say I'm convinced.
In a culture where sexism is more common, casual sexism will not stand out at all. The average guy will not appear more attractive. In a culture where sexism is largely frowned upon, being sexist but not too sexist is an act that stands out. A man who is either not sufficiently sexist or is silently sexist (for fear of repercussion) will appear average, because that category describes the average man. The man who is only slightly sexist and is just charming and good looking enough will win out because being sexist in front of a woman is the polar opposite of lacking confidence or placing the woman on a pedestal. They reside in a cozy region between the silent/supplicant majority of men and the ones who are either disgustingly sexist or are too physically unattractive to make up for saying something sexist.
No one's saying you or anyone have to like sexism. Being offensive in spite of blowback is a confidence move whether any individual finds it toxic or not.
There are models of behavior describing personality across cultures, like Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions, that speak more broadly on the way a group behaves as a whole. You might want to give them a read.
They claimed that "being sexist in front of a woman" and "lacking confidence" are polar opposites.
They also claimed that "being sexist in front of a woman" and "placing women on a pedestal" are polar opposites.
Do you disagree with their actual claims?
Apologies for possible pedantry. I think their actual claims are actually compatible with "confidence" and "pedestal-placing" being different dimensions.
I always thought it's just that there are things that you, personally, find weird and there are things you don't, and that it's heavily based on your upbringing, and because your neighbor will have a similar upbringing, both of you find the same things weird. When you hang with your neighbor, you will naturally shit on weird things, as we all like to do. A group of people automatically make up a society and so your society finds the exact same things weird and shits on the same things.
And at no point in the process did you have any individuality or real thought in the matter -- usually at least. Society created your identity and you simply promote it. Over time, opinions change because things happen to society collectively, but it's a slow process.
One good introduction is "The secret of our success" by Joseph Heinrich. There's a good review here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
I have developed a lot more respect for traditional cultures and religions as a result of adopting this perspective.