Shining_brow:

Nice post... too bad it doesn't hold much water :(

"

Patterns of occurrence worldwide

According to the Ethnographic Atlas Codebook, of 1,231 societies noted, 186 were monogamous. 453 had occasional polygyny, 588 had more frequent polygyny, and 4 had polyandry.^[3] At the same time, even within societies which allow polygyny, the actual practice of polygyny occurs relatively rarely. There are exceptions: in Senegal, for example, nearly 47 percent of marriages are multiple.^[7] Within polygynous societies, multiple wives often become a status symbol denoting wealth, power, and fame."

Please note - of 1231 societies, ONLY 186 are monogamous! (but I know a little of your beliefs from other posts, so I can see why you would see things this way)

Also, 'morals' and 'ethics' are 2 distinct entities... one is how a society perceives right and wrong, and the other is one's personal code of acceptability. Related, but still distinct.  You can be ethical and quite immoral (or amoral), or moral and very unethical...

Yes, there are common principles in the world's law books, but I would suggest that they are to help keep a society together and functioning - not as a consequence of a basic humanity,. Does one come from the other? Sure. But there are clearly aspects which are not moralistic in nature. And, of course there are laws that come directly from a supposed 'morality', which many would consider incredibly immoral - abortion, gay marriage, etc to name a couple.

Also, how do you explain various 'civilised' countries that still haven't written out of their laws (or into their laws) acts of discrimination. (I believe you're still living in one now...).

But, anyway, we've gone off topic.... Q: have you changed your views regarding such things in any noticeable way? for example, in your home country, would you stop and help someone who needed to push their car? Would you still do that here??

Traveler:

For anybody that has stumbled upon this, I would suggest you read some of Shining's previous posts before forming an opinion on the validity of his views. Particularly:

http://answers.echinacities.com/node/137481

xinyuren:

@shining  -  your reference material has validated my point.  Despite the opportunity for polygamy, few communities actually practice it.  Why is that?  A common sense of right and wrong.  That is the very definition of morality!!  Morality has to do with the principles distinguishing the differences between right and wrong.  In essence, all laws are a sort of moral code of conduct.
 In answer with the other things you wrote,  a nation's laws are usually at least a subset of what they feel is right and wrong.  They are an accurate gauge of a civilization's values.  Any omissions in those laws doesn't necessarily mean a different morality.  For example, most Chinese will agree that discrimination is a bad thing.   Of course, in practice, they may contradict this but contradictions exist in all aspects of people's lives.   You will notice that I never mentioned ethics.  Ethics is closely related to etiquette and you are correct that it is a guide as to what is acceptable in a social structure, not necessarily what they think is right.  There is nothing in your argument that challenges the basic facts that I originally posted.

Shining_brow:

Xin, I'm curious... how does it validate my point?? Out of 1231 societies, only 186 are monogamous...??? You are presuming that monogamy is morally 'right', while any other forms of sexual interaction are 'wrong'. You are also presuming that should an individual choose not to entwine themselves in such a relationship, it is because they consider it 'immoral', and not for any other (say 'pragmatic') reason. You also seem to think that if a society as a whole chooses not to continue to participate in this, then it again must be due to morality. Until you can come up with actual reasons for why these societal changes have occurred, I will disregard your reasoning... fair? (if not fair, why not?)

I do disagree with you that a nation's laws are a good indicator of what is morally right and wrong. China really is a good example of this... legally, there are many things that are not allowed, and yet they are often conducted/condoned. I would say, what a person actually does is a FAR BETTER gauge of what is acceptable and what is not!! Laws are like a good PR stunt - a way to save face... they can also be very very practical. Take the drug or prostitution issue (which we've discussed before). There are differing laws in different countries (and states within those countries) - do they really indicate a nation's attitudes towards them? Or, are they just enshrined in law because it makes more practical sense???

You mention 'contradictions' - I see those 'contradictions' as the actual moral level of a people :)

xinyuren:

The opposite of monogamy is polygamy, right?  Your report says that few societies actually practiced polygamy.  That's exactly what I noted, "Polygamy is only firmly established in a society where men hold ultimate power and women have no rights at all. "  This must only mean that most communities choose monogamy as the prevailing family unit makeup.  They have chosen this as their moral standard mainly because polygamy simply doesn't work very well for the woman. I'm sure its most every man's wet dream, but in fact does not promote a harmonious society.  Anyone who respects women can easily see this.  Monogamy is the most stable form of family arrangement.  Polygamy most often leads to (or a result of) a sort of emotional abuse of the spouse(s).  Don't tell me you haven't noticed the vast majority of polygamist relationships are one man/multiple women.  And please don't tell me you don't know why this is so.

National laws are absolutely a gauge of what a country believes is right or wrong!  The fact that that people's actions contradict what they truly believe is right, has nothing to do with it.  I believe smoking is wrong, without a doubt, but that doesn't prevent me from toking from time to time.  In every law, there is an underlying principle.  These principles (spirit of the law) are guided by our sense of morality.  This is clear to just about everyone I know except you.

Shining_brow:

You are ignoring polyandry (where the woman takes multiple husbands...). Common? No. Does it happen? Yes. Are the rights of the women being abused? Unlikely. Is it effective? Don't know!

Btw, please, from an argumentative point of view, it's really bad to use absolutes... such as 'all' and 'ultimate', and especially 'must'.

Sure, it seems that way (that the men get all the benefits). And yes, I do know why. It has to do with a couple of different things - including the 'need' to keep the population growing,and the biggest, strongest (richest?) male gets the women (as many as they want). Until we have societies where group marriages are accepted, and occur, we'll never know whether it is more harmonious or not! At the moment, what we could look at is the psychological make-up of the children who come from such families! Now, if you can find some data on that, I might be interested :)

As for laws... again, laws are what the country finds the most practical, given a whole range of limitations... not what the 'country' actually believes. After all, the 'country' can't actually believe anything - it's an artificial construct that people believe in. And, thus, 'country' doesn't equal 'people'... and it's people who have morals and ethics! Often, those which contradict the laws (as you said yourself!) In my home country, the White Australia policy prevailed for quite some time... does that mean that all Australians (white or otherwise) believed that it was 'right'? And, once that law changed, will you also assert that all those people in favour of if suddenly had a big change of heart???

xinyuren:

Polygamy will never (notice my absolute here) take root in any meaningful way in society because it absolutely doesn't work.  If it worked, it would be prevalent now.  But it doesn't, so it isn't.  Just about every form of government and society has been tried thus far.  The most successful ones are the most popular.  The awful ones, like polygamy, are discarded.  I do not need to argue this point.  History has already spoken.

And the most practical laws are the common thread in varying societies. Good moral values are practical.  Good moral values are stable.  And the majority of the people in most every society believes in good moral values (at least in principle).  When good moral values disappear, society starts to break down.  That's why laws are passed to reflect this belief.  A country's laws are based on it's people's or government's wishes.  Now it seems you can't make a good argument, so you argue over words instead of thoughts, so I'll leave you with your semantics.

mArtiAn:

  I don't know about polyandry, polygamy or origami, but from what I know of guys back home in England, plenty of them spend plenty enough time cheating that they might as well have two wives. I agree with xinyuren that there is a basic reality of moral truth that is universal though. Not sure my personal perspectives have changed, other than that I now look at the simple act of taking a trip to the toilet as something along the lines of an extreme sport. Only this morning I very 'very' nearly lost a race that would have left me in very 'very' deep................well........you know.

Shining_brow:

Where are you getting your definitions from? Especially with the 'threat of force or punishment' aspect?

I, for one, see no difference between 'indocritination' and 'socialisation' - they have about the same level of effect, although using the word 'indoctrination' can also be applied to instances that do not refer to 'socialisation'. Also, 'indoctination' isn't a perjorative, though many obviously think it is!

Now, addressing what you wrote specifically.... not obeying your parents can lead to ostracism, and potentially within a family, that can mean being cut off. It also has the threat of not being able to find a good partner, and the losing of connections (ie, bad guanxi). sure, not the same as going to prison or being executed, but still very important (and threatening, none-the-less!)

The important aspect of this (and of both words) is that one is not allowed to question what one has been taught. The very act of question would be seen as... shall we say, 'treasonous'? For that matter, the indoctrination/socialisation is so complete that one is almost always unable to even see a different way of being, let alone being able to question it... When it is questioned, any final answer must always be to side with the current views... otherwise, there will be elements of punishment (even if these are only odd looks, snide comments, or even fear and ostracism). "Why is it wrong to lie?" "Because it is". "Yes, but why?" Even should a person decide NOT to lie, the very idea that they may think lying is ok, or at the very least, not a bad thing, would lead to censure!

Traveler:

For anybody that has stumbled upon this, I would suggest you read some of Shining's previous posts before forming an opinion on the validity of his views. Particularly:

http://answers.echinacities.com/node/137481

t91camp:

Traveler, quit thrusting your e-peen into this, it's annoying. If people want to read Shining_brow's other posts, they will - and if they agree with him, then so be it. Attack the argument, not the person.

Before anyone accuses me of being an alternate account of Shining_brow, I agree with mattsm84 here.

mattsm84:

Okay, I see what the problem is. You (rather strangely in my opinion) don't read any sort of connotation into "indoctrination" or "socialization". To me, and I'd assert most English speaking people, both of these words come preloaded with a set of other ideas. "Socialization", as I or anyone with even a cursory understanding of developmental psychology would argue, is supposed to be clinical and devoid of positive and negative preconceptions. It's merely the process through which we are educated, for good or ill. Indoctrination is meant to imply that the views and opinions imparted are heterodox, which itself implies forced expulsion and punishment for deviation, and partisan. In saying somebody is indoctrinated, you're accusing him or her of being a zealot. That makes it a pejorative. Yet if we deprive both of those words of their intended shading then I guess they could be taken as being interchangeable. You seem willing to do that. I am not. That places us at an impasse.

Still though, I'd love to tell you why you should agree with me on purely linguistic grounds. I studied rhetoric in college and genuinely enjoy this type of conversation about language. Now, without wanting to argue aesthetics, good rhetoric--in the western sense--is the ability fully convey complex ideas as efficiently as possible. Remember the old adage that in writing less is more. For that to be possible,  certain words must be able to evoke specific emotional response that extends beyond their simple definitions. In allowing for that to exist, the words themselves take on deeper, more resonant meaning, the nuances of which can only truly be understood by fluent speakers of the language. However, if we rob the word of their ability to do that, which is what you're doing here by conflating these two terms, you risk being misunderstood as you leave it to the audience to interpret what you've said.  

xinyuren:

@mattsm84 - I'm really diggin' your explanation.  I have an affinity for geeks of all sorts. thumbs up from me.

Shining_brow:

Matts - VERY nice post :)

And, like Xin, I agree with what you have to say...

I didn't do 'rhetoric', but I double-majored in philosophy, and enjoy similar arguments (though, as you may have noticed from my posts, I tend not to go with the 'less is more' mentality :p I would also say, words have had their meaning changed so many times throughout history, that such is always going to happen! Expecting someone to agree with (or even know) a word that is used is, sometimes, fairly presumptuous. Also, I'd suggest that words are deliberately used in such a way at to make that play on emotions, and by pulling back and not associating those things, it drains it of some rather nasty emotional implications. In this context, you want 'indoctrination' to have a certain perjorative meaning, while 'socialisation' not have that meaning.. it feels so much better to say we've been 'socialised' into our beliefs, than to say it's a form of indoctrination - even though the end result is the same :)

As for the argument itself, I see that socialisation is a type of indoctrination. We do separate the two ideas, because, as you mention, socialisation is supposed to be devoid of negative connotations - ie, that it has negative affects. I assert, that regardless of whether one wants to believe there is positive along with the negative, it's still one form of the other - an explicit form (ie, Soc is a type of Ind).

Similarly, your comment that Ind "is meant to imply that the views and opinions imparted are heterodox, which itself implies forced expulsion and punishment for deviation, and partisan. In saying somebody is indoctrinated, you're accusing him or her of being a zealot."... yes, isn't that part of the definition of socialisation?? (not that we call ourselves 'zealots')

But, we do fiercely believe that OUR way of life is better than any other way of life. Look at what happens when people talk of hippies. those who have left our 'normal' society. They get derided in public and media (obviously, a lot less now, as we're supposed to be more 'tolerant'). Look at the hoo-haa when a Mosque is planned for a suburb that has been predominantly non-Muslim...

(ps - I love a good intellectual debate :D)

mattsm84:

But this isn't a matter of philosophy, or at least it isn't anymore. Science has dictated that this territory be given over to the behavioral psychologists. We know that choosing not to subject a child to any manner of socialization doesn't yield up some sort of ideal Rousseauian man. Rather, in a practical sense, it would mean locking an infant up in a Skinner box until they emerged a sociopath.  At the end of the day we are primates, and we can only exist within some social context.    

So no, most people, and I'm asserting that there is a public consensus on this, think of them as being two different things because they are two different thing, not because we are shielding ourselves from some horrible truth.  

Also, about the hippies, I think you should spend some time thinking about what exactly the hippies were. As Norman Mailer wrote in the White Negro 

"The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it. For if tens of millions were killed in concentration camps out of the inexorable agonies and contractions of super-states founded upon the always insoluble contradictions of injustice, one was then obliged also to see that no matter how crippled and perverted an image of man was the society he had created, it wits nonetheless his creation, his collective creation (at least his collective creation from the past) and if society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of questions about his own nature?

Worse. One could hardly maintain the courage to be individual, to speak with one’s own voice, for the years in which one could complacently accept oneself as part of an elite by being a radical were forever gone. A. man knew that when he dissented, he gave a note upon his life which could be called in any year of overt crisis. No wonder then that these have been the years of conformity and depression. A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve. The only courage, with rare exceptions, that we have been witness to, has been the isolated courage of isolated people.

It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American existentialist—the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled (at what damage to the mind and the heart and the liver and the nerves no research foundation for cancer will discover in a hurry) , if the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. In short, whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness, and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention, the life where a man must go until he is beat, where he must gamble with his energies through all those small or large crises of courage and unforeseen situations which beset his day, where he must be with it or doomed not to swing. The unstated essence of Hip, its psychopathic brilliance, quivers with the knowledge that new kinds of victories increase one’s power for new kinds of perception; and defeats, the wrong kind of defeats, attack the body and imprison one’s energy until one is jailed in the prison air of other people’s habits, other people’s defeats, boredom, quiet desperation, and muted icy self- destroying rage. One is Hip or one is Square (the alternative which each new generation coming into American life is beginning to feel) one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.

A totalitarian society makes enormous demands on the courage of men, and a partially totalitarian society makes even greater demands for the general anxiety is greater. Indeed if one is to be a man, almost any kind of unconventional action often takes disproportionate courage. So it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries. But the presence of Hip as a working philosophy in the sub-worlds of American life is probably due to jazz, and its knife-like entrance into culture, its subtle but so penetrating influence on an avant-garde generation—that post-war generation of adventurers who (some consciously, some by osmosis) had absorbed the lessons of disillusionment and disgust of the Twenties, the Depression, and the War. Sharing a collective disbelief in the words of men who had too much money and controlled too many things, they knew almost as powerful a disbelief in the socially monolithic ideas of the single mate, the solid family and the respectable love life. If the intellectual antecedents of this generation can be traced to such separate influences as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Wilhelm Reich, the viable philosophy of Hemingway fits most of their facts: in a bad world, as he was to say over and over again (while taking time out from his parvenu snobbery and dedicated gourmandise), in a bad world there is no love nor mercy nor charity nor justice unless a man can keep his courage, -and this indeed fitted some of the facts. What fitted the need of the adventurer even more precisely was Hemingway’s categorical imperative that what made him feel good became therefore The Good.

So no wonder that in certain cities of America, in New York of course, and New Orleans, in Chicago and San Francisco and Los Angeles, in such American cities as Paris and Mexico, D.F., this particular part of a generation was attracted to what the Negro had to offer. In such places as Greenwich Village. a menage-a-trois was completed—the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life. If marijuana was the wedding ring, the child was the language of Hip for its argot gave expression to abstract states of feeling which all could share, :at least all who were Hip. And in this wedding of the white and the black it was the Negro who brought the cultural dowry. Any Negro who wishes to live must live with danger from his first day, and no experience can ever be casual to him, no Negro can saunter down a street with any real certainty that violence will not visit him on his walk. The cameos of security for the average white: mother and the home, lob and the family, are not even a mockery to millions of Negroes; they are impossible. The Negro has the simplest of alternatives: live a life of constant humility or ever-threatening danger. In such a pass where paranoia is as vital to survival as blood, the Negro had stayed alive and begun to grow by following the need of his body where he could. Knowing in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothing but war, the Negro (all exceptions admitted) could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm. For jazz is orgasm, it is the music of orgasm, good orgasm and bad, and so it spoke across a nation, it had the communication of art even where it was watered, perverted, corrupted, and almost killed, it spoke in no matter what laundered popular way of instantaneous existential states to which some whites could respond, it was indeed a communication by art because it said, “I feel this, and now you do too.”

All the hippies were simply the agent of bringing ideas from the outskirts of western society into the mainstream. The same could be said of the "wiggers" or "chavs". Now these people are disliked not because of the ideas they represent or because they exist outside of the main, after all hip hop culture and recreational marijuana smoking both eventually entered the culture mainstream, but because they themselves are so incredibly obnoxious and clownish.