[extropy-chat] Famous author self destructs in public! Film at eleven.

[Charlie Stross]

[ oops. This is what comes of not checking the list every week ... ]

On 14 Sep 2005, at 18:34, John-C-Wright at sff.net wrote:
>
> I hope it would not be improper for me to wonder whether, until the  
> technology
> is available, I might suggest avoiding unwanted conception can be  
> addressed, at
> least in part, by normative and legal considerations.
>
> In so far as human behavior can be modified to make prudent  
> provision for the
> human sexual process, all human societies have adopted, with minor  
> variations,
> the same rule: no sex outside of marriage.

Rubbish.

Marriage is, for many societies, nothing to do with sex -- it's about  
defining inheritance of property. To pick one example at semi-random  
(I've been researching it for a book): the Victorian upper-classes  
all married, and once the crude business of breeding an heir was out  
of the way they bed-hopped in a manner that pretty much beggars the  
imagination. To the extent that they drew a polite veil over it in  
public, this was to keep the gutter press -- who were as scandal- 
obsessed then as they are today -- from using salacious gossip about  
their private lives as public entertainment. When divorce occurred  
(which required a fairly hairy court proceeding followed by a private  
act of parliament to approve), it was usually because the  
relationship had broken down at a business, not a sexual, level: the  
classic example was Lord XXXX, who divorced his 21 year old wife not  
because she'd been sleeping around (although she had been -- and so  
had he), or even because she'd born him another man's son (this was  
considered indiscreet and unfortunate, but not rare), but because  
she'd had the bad taste to acquire gonorrhea and the child was born  
blind (which made the whole business socially impossible to cover up).

Early agricultural settlement made knowing who had inherited title to  
the family farm a matter of vital importance -- literally one of life  
or death, because it determined whether you had sufficient land to  
supply you with food. The legal formulation of marriage made this  
easier to determine, and the development of agriculture coincided  
with the development of the first written (hence, fixed) legal  
codifications.

Other cultures have had -- and still have -- distinctly different  
marital traditions. Consider the Persian custom of Mut'a: a fixed- 
term marriage (where the term can be as low as one hour or as long as  
a decade). Contemporary neopagan handfastings follow the preset-term  
pattern as well. And then there are the polygamous variations, which  
tend to crop up in cultures which are patrilineal and run on a male  
firstborn inheritance pattern (males can't marry without the land to  
install their women on), or the tribal/dowry/cousin marriage systems  
common in the Middle East (where first cousins frequently marry,  
because the size of dowry that goes with a bride is so large that  
exogamy would threaten the clan with bankruptcy within a generation).

It's all about land and money. Sex is secondary, except in modern  
western civilization, where we've bought into the myth of personal  
happiness.

> In the heritage of the West, we have
> (until recently) enjoyed a strict version of this rule: no sexual  
> behavior that
> defies reproductive purposes. (The reasoning for this rule was to  
> habituate the
> society to check the sexual appetite, which, if led unchecked,  
> leads to tragedy.)

I blame Thomas Malthus. Who got it wrong, incidentally. And no, the  
sexual appetite does *not* intrinsically lead to tragedy; nor does  
"society" have a brain with which to formulate teleological objectives.

Nor was the west particularly good at preventing sexual behaviour  
outside of marriage; the sporadic attempts at enforcement just caused  
massive and widespread misery.

> While it may be possible, with contraceptives, to engage in the  
> reproductive act
> without purposing reproduction, it is not possible, when following  
> a rule of
> chastity, to bear a child without a socially-recognized father.  
> Even these days,
> in Anglo-American law it is still a recognized principle (albeit  
> under attack in
> some jurisdictions) that a husband cannot call into question the  
> paternity of
> his wife’s children. Chastity, hence, has the social effect of  
> protecting women,
> in so far as possible, from shouldering the cost and care of  
> childrearing alone.

This is so wrong-headed it's hard to know where to begin.

Hell, go read: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php? 
pid=S1415-47572000000400005&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en

(Yes, we have diagnostics that can tell us whether someone's related  
to someone else. This isn't the stone age any more! Ook!)

Secondly, you can avoid reproduction very easily by sticking to  
members of your own sex.

Thirdly, I'm sure the friendly lesbian couple (two kids) living just  
down the street from me would be charmed to know that without a man  
in the loop they have to remain chaste or raise their children alone.

Fourthly, we've got contraceptives that work properly. For political  
reasons and/or reasons of legal exposure to lawsuits by gold-diggers  
they may not all be available in the USA -- where contraceptive  
provision tends to lag a decade behind Europe for those reasons --  
but they exist.

Fifthly, you seem to be assuming that no man ever lived in a family  
relationship with a women and children where the children were not  
his genetic offspring. (This will come as news to a lot of adoptive  
parents, or remarried couples with children from earlier relationships.)

> Mr. Stross also comments: “It then becomes impossible to express an  
> opinion on
> the subject of abortion per se without a whole slew of additional  
> philosophical
> and social attitudes being attributed to one.”
>
> At the risk of sounding like a Christian, let me say: Amen, brother.

I should add at this point that I'm a strong atheist, of Jewish  
upbringing and origins. Also married, happily ... and completely  
opposed to the ethical stance you take on sex, marriage, and  
reproduction.

> prudential reasons, I realized what a foolish risk to a man’s  
> happiness is even
> the attempt at non-marital sex, and how demeaning to women: it  
> draws her most
> profound instincts out of alignment with her prudence, and urges  
> her to love a
> man who will not vow his love faithful. I cannot think of a greater  
> insult to
> the feminine spirit. The only other option is to coarsen and  
> eventually deaden
> that idea that ties love and sex together, the mystery called romance.

This is kind of touching, but it's weirdly non-traditional and a bit  
fetishistic, in my view.

Go and do some historical digging and you'll find that what would  
today be termed an 'open' marriage was, as often as not, the norm  
among the upper and lower classes; the only group who remotely  
behaved as you describe were the Victorian petit bourgeoisie, and  
*they* were aping a -- mistaken, because heavily filtered -- vision  
of how they *believed* their social betters behaved. And the social  
tension so-created found its outlet in staggering rates of  
prostitution (there were 120,000 prostitutes in London alone, in the  
1860s), and high rates of psychiatric problems among married middle- 
class women (it's no accident that Freud made his name in the 1880s  
and 1890s with such clients).

> I became an anti-abortion partisan when I became a father, and  
> these events
> happened years and decades before my conversion to Christianity.  
> The logic I
> used to support the decisions in both cases was entirely secular.

I am deeply troubled by anti-abortion arguments applied with the goal  
of inducing legislation to ban abortion, just as I'm troubled by the  
occurrence of unnecessary abortions.

Because the whole issue is a red herring.

If you could wave a magic wand and magically ban humans from  
performing abortion as a procedure, with 100% success, you would  
prevent less than 25% of abortions from taking place. Because the sad  
fact is, nature is profligate. If life begins at conception (a view I  
heartily despise) then for every baby that is born, a dozen or so  
fertilized blastocytes have been washed out in the menstrual flow,  
having failed to implant. Another few have implanted, but failed to  
thrive and spontaneously abort. Infanticide of surplus infants has  
been a long-standing tradition in many civilized countries, until  
relatively recently: call it "post-natal abortion" if you like.

Nor is it a matter of scriptual doctrine. Go back to rabbinical law  
and life begins when the first breath enters the lungs; go back to  
pre-1848 Catholic church doctrine and you'll find out that the soul  
doesn't arrive until the second trimester. This stuff has been  
stitched together from whole cloth, over the centuries, to suit the  
requirements of the patriarchate who wanted to use it as a tool for  
managing that most important of issues, inheritance law.

The romanticization of chastity, marriage, and so on, lends itself to  
fetishization. So does the hagiography of the almightly blastoma. If  
it makes your sex life work better, well, fine: good for you and your  
wife. But don't expect it to work for other people, and don't expect  
them to take the same axioms as read, because even the definition of  
what it is to be human is non-obvious. Most importantly, don't expect  
other people to sit still when you propose making your own practices  
-- which they see as fetishistic to the point of being one step  
removed from sado-masochism -- the law of the land.



-- Charlie