"We Should Applaud The End Of The Nuclear Family Says Top [British] Judge"
This is the kind of insanity that should make one sit down and reflect hard on...well, whatever the hell the general (social?) phenomenon in play here is.
Some quick and sketchy points: remember: I'm not a conservative. For most of my life I've been a cheerleader for social change and experimentation. I now think I was, actually, rather an idiot about it when I was younger. To cut to the chase, let me again quote my friend Dave from grad school (quoting someone else): a liberal is someone who thinks he's smarter than everyone else who's ever lived.
My father was/is a violent psycho. A lot of my time at home was spent fighting. I took a very dim view of the traditional family for the first part of my life, and decided early on not to have kids. For quite awhile, I was very anti-family.
And I do tend to agree that it's for the good that we're more accepting now of certain non-traditional familial arrangements. (Though actually it's a vexed question... Some argue that things were pretty catch-as-catch-can in the relevant respects in the past.)
What I disagree with is the view that all non-standard familial arrangements--including, e.g., polygamous parenting--are awesome. I doubt very much that all of the weird arrangements that people have thought up are just as good as more traditional nuclear-and-extended family arrangements. And I think that the left tends to be guided in such matters by its whimsical social preferences. Humans and families have evolved as part of the same system. It doesn't mean that the system is optimal--evolution doesn't optimize. But it means that traditional (or at least conservative) family arrangements are, on the whole, likely to be less disastrously messed up than a lot of the alternatives that humans pull out of their butts.
I'm all for cautious, controlled, risk-averse social experimentation. But I've come to view the kind of mindless, brainless, knee-jerk bullshit spouted by the judge in question as a kind of headlong rush into what is, for all we know, social catastrophe and chaos. Progressive preferences, no matter how whimsical, are assumed to be good--and will, undoubtedly, dutifully, eagerly, be given the imprimatur of social "science." And remember: we're not talking anymore about libertarian changes such as making room for same-sex relationships in private. We've moved far beyond that. We're now talking about totalitarian "interventions" like: taking children away from parents who refuse to accept superstitious, magical views of "gender."
I'm skeptical of extreme conservatives who reject all social liberalization. But I've also come to be skeptical of extreme leftists who seem to see social stability of any kind as the enemy. My intellectual pendulum is prone to some fairly extreme swings...but right now, and to me, the left seems like a bigger danger than the right. Conservatism is almost guaranteed to be sub-optimal--but, given that our social arrangements are largely the outputs of long experimentation (rather than the fevered imaginings of activists and humanists), conservatism is also less likely to lead us to social disaster.
Eh, my $0.02, FWIW, right now.
Some quick and sketchy points: remember: I'm not a conservative. For most of my life I've been a cheerleader for social change and experimentation. I now think I was, actually, rather an idiot about it when I was younger. To cut to the chase, let me again quote my friend Dave from grad school (quoting someone else): a liberal is someone who thinks he's smarter than everyone else who's ever lived.
My father was/is a violent psycho. A lot of my time at home was spent fighting. I took a very dim view of the traditional family for the first part of my life, and decided early on not to have kids. For quite awhile, I was very anti-family.
And I do tend to agree that it's for the good that we're more accepting now of certain non-traditional familial arrangements. (Though actually it's a vexed question... Some argue that things were pretty catch-as-catch-can in the relevant respects in the past.)
What I disagree with is the view that all non-standard familial arrangements--including, e.g., polygamous parenting--are awesome. I doubt very much that all of the weird arrangements that people have thought up are just as good as more traditional nuclear-and-extended family arrangements. And I think that the left tends to be guided in such matters by its whimsical social preferences. Humans and families have evolved as part of the same system. It doesn't mean that the system is optimal--evolution doesn't optimize. But it means that traditional (or at least conservative) family arrangements are, on the whole, likely to be less disastrously messed up than a lot of the alternatives that humans pull out of their butts.
I'm all for cautious, controlled, risk-averse social experimentation. But I've come to view the kind of mindless, brainless, knee-jerk bullshit spouted by the judge in question as a kind of headlong rush into what is, for all we know, social catastrophe and chaos. Progressive preferences, no matter how whimsical, are assumed to be good--and will, undoubtedly, dutifully, eagerly, be given the imprimatur of social "science." And remember: we're not talking anymore about libertarian changes such as making room for same-sex relationships in private. We've moved far beyond that. We're now talking about totalitarian "interventions" like: taking children away from parents who refuse to accept superstitious, magical views of "gender."
I'm skeptical of extreme conservatives who reject all social liberalization. But I've also come to be skeptical of extreme leftists who seem to see social stability of any kind as the enemy. My intellectual pendulum is prone to some fairly extreme swings...but right now, and to me, the left seems like a bigger danger than the right. Conservatism is almost guaranteed to be sub-optimal--but, given that our social arrangements are largely the outputs of long experimentation (rather than the fevered imaginings of activists and humanists), conservatism is also less likely to lead us to social disaster.
Eh, my $0.02, FWIW, right now.
posted by Winston Smith at
9:10 AM
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