It’s tempting to point out a few heresies. My hunch is that you’d err on the side of feeling uncomfortable. “Ignorant” and “insensitive” are telltale signs of orthodoxy, the way that clouds are telltale signs of a thunderstorm.
I had a relationship with a much older woman when I was younger. It was long distance, and after a few years we met up for a wonderful trip down a river. It was one of the best memories of my life. Swimming with her, making a fire and cooking our own food, laughing the days away. When she had to leave, we sobbed our eyes out at the airport in front of everyone. I was 16.
This experience enriched my life. Ditto for the years leading up to it.
Today, the universal conclusion would be that I was groomed, taken advantage of, manipulated, and so on. In a word, she’d committed heresy.
I don’t think most people would want to have an open discussion on the merits of teenagers dating older women. The teen’s feelings don’t matter; whether the teen initiated it and pursued them doesn’t matter; the question of whether it’s a net benefit for their life certainly doesn’t matter. What matters is the power imbalance.
Do you see what happened? This is equivalent to saying that certain truths aren’t allowed to matter. The question of truth becomes irrelevant. You can’t have public conversations about it without summoning a thunderstorm.
Swap the genders in the above story, and it’d be a firestorm. Everyone would gleefully watch you burn.
The reason pg didn’t dare mention any specific heresies is because you can’t mention examples without immediately making the conversation about that, and not the bigger question of why so many opinions need to be so closely guarded now, when they didn’t need to be before.
I can think of at least five other heresies. But I wouldn’t dare point them out publicly.
It’s worth trying to force yourself to think of some. I say “force” because the ideas are uncomfortable by definition. And if the ideas you think of are also very popular, that should worry you — what are the odds that we happen to live in the precise decade when we got our morals exactly right? Or even a little bit right?
There’s a reason pg started with fire as a metaphor. We’re fortunate to live in a time where it’s merely a metaphor. And I think we should worry whether we’re burning people for the right reasons, the same way you’d worry if your neighbors set fire to a house while arguing that it’s okay —- the people inside really deserved it, right?
Sometimes they do. But if your moral compass just so happens to point in the same direction as all of your peers, it’s important to occasionally ask ourselves whether we might be mistaken.
Another fraught heresy, which I'm about to commit, is that men and women are intrinsically different (in aggregate, on average, blah blah blah) and thus if you swap the genders in your story, it is a genuinely different story. Granted, I can't say that I have positive regard for older women who sleep with teenagers, though I'm glad you didn't garner any trauma from it, but my personal experiences lead me to have a very negative opinion of older men who sleep with teenagers. Maybe it'd be different if that weren't a highly stigmatized thing to do, but currently the selection effects are such that 99% of them are scumbags. For the same reasons that counterculture groups have a higher-than-average incidence of rapists (anecdotally, I admit) — when you gather a bunch of people willing to transgress societal norms together, well, said transgression continues.
> The reason pg didn’t dare mention any specific heresies is because you can’t mention examples without immediately making the conversation about that, and not the bigger question of why so many opinions need to be so closely guarded now, when they didn’t need to be before.
> and not the bigger question of why so many opinions need to be so closely guarded now, when they didn’t need to be before.
But this begs the question, doesn't it? Like the real answer is that
1. Lots of opinions were guarded or hushed or held closely even 20 years ago even in much of the western world (being trans or gay, being particularly nonreligious, socialism/communism/any kind of viewpoint left of Obama, all kinds of things about dating and sex, and more)
2. People weren't generally having discussions, or figuring things out with tens of thousands of listeners. Saying really dumb things because you don't actually know what you're talking about because you're a nonexpert is common and has been common forever. But people didn't start doing this until social media.
3. Things that were previously handled by whisper networks ("This professor says all kinds of wild racist shit", absolutely something said in my undergrad, and "this prof gives better grades to women who wear short skirts in the front row", something that absolutely was said in my parents undergrad) are now handled more openly and explicitly. This is probably a globally more optimal result, in that fewer people have to deal with sexual or racial harassment. But it also means that misunderstandings can blow up.
> “Ignorant” and “insensitive” are telltale signs of orthodoxy
Some would call them telltale signs of knowledge, wisdom, and a moral framework that places great weight on respect for others, when used in a corrective context.
I'll put it this way: there are a lot of people, including many here, who are ignorant and insensitive; and in this very conversation, there are quite a few people who are unapologetically so. They don't even know how ignorant or insensitive they are being, because they seem surprised and/or defensive when it is pointed out to them.
And when confronted with this feedback, instead of responding with humility, open-mindedness, and intellectual curiosity, they seek shelter in groups or try to clumsily defend their ignorance through whataboutism, slippery-slope arguments, unrelated grievances, or other forms.
Alternatively, they question the entire premise of social norms or morality, such as what PG has done here. People like him are intelligent enough to know that they cannot attack the truth and defend a lack of respect head-on. Instead, they try to mount a flank attack by publishing pieces such as this that appeal to selfish audiences who care more about their individual freedom than our need to work together to build a better society. It's not super surprising that they do this; after all, controversy and endless argument makes them money.
> Alternatively, they question the entire premise of social norms or morality, such as what PG has done here.
This isn't a deflection, though, it's the core point. What PG (and the rest of us) are trying to communicate is precisely that we hold different concepts of social norms and morality which used to be common in our circles. Among my friends up until the late 2000s, "insensitivity" was a minor character flaw and "ignorance" was no flaw at all. I still remember how shocked I was the first time I heard the phrase "educate yourself", because the idea it expressed was completely foreign to me - the people I personally knew who were passionate about some idea or another were always happy and excited to talk about it with people who weren't familiar.
Thank goodness it's not like that anymore. I remember those days too. People thought we were insufferable jerks back then, too, but they weren't on the Internet to tell us so. They were telling us in real life, but many of us weren't receptive to it.
> I still remember how shocked I was the first time I heard the phrase "educate yourself", because the idea it expressed was completely foreign to me - the people I personally knew who were passionate about some idea or another were always happy and excited to talk about it with people who weren't familiar.
I think what happens is, after a while, smart people get tired of exerting the effort to provide basic information over and over again to people who could find it by way of a trivial Google search.
There are more- and less-effective ways to communicate. I agree that turning people off is a bad outcome. I don't necessarily recommend using those words head-on; rather, I try to summon facts, history, law, etc. in order to bring more knowledge to the table. Similarly, I try to help people see things from other people's perspectives, or try to help them complete their initial thoughts to their logical (and often absurd) conclusions so that they might see things differently.
Sometimes it works; but more often than not, it doesn't. People can be really freaking stubborn. They really don't like being proved wrong.
I had a relationship with a much older woman when I was younger. It was long distance, and after a few years we met up for a wonderful trip down a river. It was one of the best memories of my life. Swimming with her, making a fire and cooking our own food, laughing the days away. When she had to leave, we sobbed our eyes out at the airport in front of everyone. I was 16.
This experience enriched my life. Ditto for the years leading up to it.
Today, the universal conclusion would be that I was groomed, taken advantage of, manipulated, and so on. In a word, she’d committed heresy.
I don’t think most people would want to have an open discussion on the merits of teenagers dating older women. The teen’s feelings don’t matter; whether the teen initiated it and pursued them doesn’t matter; the question of whether it’s a net benefit for their life certainly doesn’t matter. What matters is the power imbalance.
Do you see what happened? This is equivalent to saying that certain truths aren’t allowed to matter. The question of truth becomes irrelevant. You can’t have public conversations about it without summoning a thunderstorm.
Swap the genders in the above story, and it’d be a firestorm. Everyone would gleefully watch you burn.
The reason pg didn’t dare mention any specific heresies is because you can’t mention examples without immediately making the conversation about that, and not the bigger question of why so many opinions need to be so closely guarded now, when they didn’t need to be before.
I can think of at least five other heresies. But I wouldn’t dare point them out publicly.
It’s worth trying to force yourself to think of some. I say “force” because the ideas are uncomfortable by definition. And if the ideas you think of are also very popular, that should worry you — what are the odds that we happen to live in the precise decade when we got our morals exactly right? Or even a little bit right?
There’s a reason pg started with fire as a metaphor. We’re fortunate to live in a time where it’s merely a metaphor. And I think we should worry whether we’re burning people for the right reasons, the same way you’d worry if your neighbors set fire to a house while arguing that it’s okay —- the people inside really deserved it, right?
Sometimes they do. But if your moral compass just so happens to point in the same direction as all of your peers, it’s important to occasionally ask ourselves whether we might be mistaken.