So we’re promised freedom, and we end up with an almost Kafka-esque nightmare of never-ending series of rules that we can never be sure we truly following correctly since every situation is different. In contrast, the traditional model of infidelity has historically had one very simple rule: be discreet. Aside from that, anything goes, including sexual acts that have been considered illegal: interracial sex, prostitution, homosexuality, etc.. To be absolutely clear, I’m not at all advocating this, I’m simply pointing out that the claim that polyamory is about freedom while monogamy is about constraints falls apart immediately on serious inspection. If anything, the opposite is true.
I was initially going to respond “Constraints that you participated in the writing of and explicitly agreed to don’t go against the notion of freedom at all, certainly not compared to ones you have no say in and little choice to decline,” but it seems you’re coming at this from a rather different angle. You are considering the constraint of monogamy not as “be monogamous (details elsewhere)”, but rather as “be discreet about polygamy”. This has several problems, SFAICT.
We can apply this sort of level-jumping operation to any rule—“Do X” becomes “Be discreet about violations of X”—but these aren’t the same thing, and it is far from obvious that the latter is so. A real instance of the latter might be, for instance, how Spartan boys were taught to steal food—they were beaten if caught, because they were supposed to avoid getting caught. But, the general reaction to learning about violations of monogamy seems to generally be, “They did that?” rather than “They let themselves get caught?” or “They told people”, which suggests that most people have the simpler rule in mind. Or, even if they don’t, they certainly want to appear as if they did. Which either means they think most people have the simpler rule in mind, or the whole thing is one large mass hypocrisy in which everyone knows the actual rule is “be discreet”, but admitting this would be itself a violation of the rules. I suppose the latter isn’t too implausible, seeing that a number of things do seem to follow that pattern… but there will always be people, the “nerds” in Eliezer’s terminology, who actually believe what they’re told, and who won’t be in on it, and who actually will be using the basic rule. So even in the latter case I’m not sure you can claim that’s the actual rule. (In addition, in the latter case, the acknowledgement of the “be discreet” rule is unconscious, which doesn’t sound like what you’re describing above.) Though maybe I’ve missed a few cases?
OK. That’s problem number one. Problem number two is, once you’re acting within the bounds of “be discreet”… what are you actually going to do? You need more than one person for sex, and that (I should hope) means some sort of agreement about what’s actually going to go on. In short, we’re right back to square one—the freedom of “be discreet” is no different from the freedom of, well, open freedom, except that the former is hidden and the latter is not. Give people freedom to interact with each other, and they’ll want some sort of assurance of what other people will do, and will start making promises and contracts.
Problem number three is that it’s hard to see this as a solution when it’s fundamentally dishonest, but I guess that’s obvious.
Problem number four is that it’s arbitrary. You said the freedom is to “be discreet”. Be discreet about what? About violations of some rule. What rule? Does it matter? You’re talking about violations of monogamy, but your entire argument, if valid, would go through if that were replaced by polygny or any other rule. Your argument doesn’t support monogamy—it supports secrecy, and that’s all.
But, the general reaction to learning about violations of monogamy seems to generally be, “They did that?” rather than “They let themselves get caught?”
I think for many people, infidelity only can be said to have happened if someone was caught. This is the logic of “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” Another interesting aspect of outrage over rule-breaking is that it’s possible and even common to be openly outraged about a transgression that you don’t care about and even do yourself.
This is not really hypocrisy, it’s actually the way belief often works. An example of this is an Israeli politican who is an atheist. She was asked if there was any problem with her being an atheist, and she said “I don’t believe in God, but I believe in the Jewish people, and the Jewish people believe in God.” Or maybe that you don’t think there’s anything wrong with infidelity, but you are outraged that someone made it public because it will corrupt the morals of the youth or something. It’s even possible for no-one to literally believe that infidelity is wrong, and yet the belief still works because everyone assumes that someone else believes and wants to preserve their belief. This explains the phenomenon of a pastor of a church who is an atheist, but nonetheless every Sunday promises the congregation they will be together in the afterlife. In order for belief to be operative in a culture, it’s not necessary that people actually believe, only that they assume someone else does.
I’m not claiming that the actual rule is “Don’t get caught.” If that were the case, the authorities would simply say that. This kind of rule is like the rule against public nudity: you are allowed to be nude, just do it discreetly, in private. You are only prohibited from letting yourself be seen nude by others, from being caught. Or other examples, like urinating, defecating, etc. No-one thinks that people aren’t ever naked, or that they don’t defecate, we know it’s just done privately. People use euphemisms and say they are going to the “restroom” (to rest?), but we know what they are doing, they just don’t say it directly.
But this is not how the rule against infidelity works, which has to retain this dual character of official prohibition, supplemented by unofficial toleration. Another example might be the KKK—by day, good upstanding Christians, model citizens, etc., by night, raping, murdering thugs. Or military discipline which is supplemented by homo-erotic rituals, hazings, dirty jokes, and so on. Far from being a simple tribal bonding of no real consequences, military life could not exist without these hidden obscenities. If you remember the plot of A Few Good Men, when it revealed that a marine was murdered in the process of an extrajudicial punishment for breaking the unwritten rules. At the end, the Colonel on trial says “You can’t handle the truth!” The truth of those unwritten rules must be repressed. This is a case where those rules results in a much more serious punishment that simply violating the standard rules, in just the same way that you’d be shunned if you were revealed to be an atheist in a small provincial town in the South, but this would be nothing compared to what would happen to you if you crossed the KKK.
This is not really hypocrisy, it’s actually the way belief often works. An example of this is an Israeli politican who is an atheist. She was asked if there was any problem with her being an atheist, and she said “I don’t believe in God, but I believe in the Jewish people, and the Jewish people believe in God.” Or maybe that you don’t think there’s anything wrong with infidelity, but you are outraged that someone made it public because it will corrupt the morals of the youth or something. It’s even possible for no-one to literally believe that infidelity is wrong, and yet the belief still works because everyone assumes that someone else believes and wants to preserve their belief. This explains the phenomenon of a pastor of a church who is an atheist, but nonetheless every Sunday promises the congregation they will be together in the afterlife. In order for belief to be operative in a culture, it’s not necessary that people actually believe, only that they assume someone else does.
It is, as you say, the way belief often works; this doesn’t make it not hypocrisy, it just means humans are often hypocrites. (Though, I get the idea that the use of that term on LW and OB may differ a bit from the usual usage; here there does not seem to be any implication of conscious or deliberate hypocrisy. This may in fact just be a definitional dispute.)
I’m not claiming that the actual rule is “Don’t get caught.” If that were the case, the authorities would simply say that. This kind of rule is like the rule against public nudity: you are allowed to be nude, just do it discreetly, in private. You are only prohibited from letting yourself be seen nude by others, from being caught. Or other examples, like urinating, defecating, etc. No-one thinks that people aren’t ever naked, or that they don’t defecate, we know it’s just done privately. People use euphemisms and say they are going to the “restroom” (to rest?), but we know what they are doing, they just don’t say it directly.
This doesn’t seem to be analogous. People are explicit about the fact that the rules are “don’t go naked in public”, etc., and not “don’t go naked”. This is not the case with non-monogamy.
You claim that society prevents individuals from forming polyamorous relationships. My goal here was to show that tacit prohibitions and rights have strong efficacy and should be considered part of the social order. This supports the idea that the tacit toleration of infidelity is part of the social order, and given the very high rates of marital infidelity, it’s reasonable to say that polyamory, in a certain sense, is already a widely accepted practice. This is intended to clarify the specific claims that polyamorists are making as well as in what sense it can be said to be a nonconformist lifestyle. This also goes to the common claim by polyamorists that monogamy is unnatural & people are more naturally polyamorists.
Interesting that Sniffnoy observes that there will always be some people who take the rules too literally, the “nerds”, which is where we find the highest rates of polyamory (in the countercultural sense).
You continue to define polyamory in a way that is contrary to the established definition of the term.
You claim that society prevents individuals from forming polyamorous relationships.
I do not. I claim that society generally prevents individuals from realizing that alternatives to monogamy as a standard for good relationships exist. Society very obviously does not prevent people from forming polyamorous relationships; you can tell because polyamorous relationships exist.
This also goes to the common claim by polyamorists that monogamy is unnatural & people are more naturally polyamorists.
Again, I have not made this claim nor do I support it, not least because I am completely indifferent to questions of natural-ness.
A fruitful discussion on this topic is impossible if you continue to mischaracterize my position and refuse to even acknowledge that you are misusing words with clear definitions.
I continue to feel that the established definition is wrong, and I’ve made many points justifying that, none of which you’ve actually refuted. Instead, you simply insist that I restrict myself to your preferred definition. This is exactly my point—by defining the terms in advance and making them incontestable, you are trying to lead us to where you want us to go.
If you read carefully, you’ll see that I didn’t attribute the claim “monogamy is unnatural” to you. My point was to indicate the value of my observations about social norms and their relevance to general common claims about monogamy and polyamory.
Furthermore, you seem to be contradicting yourself. On one hand, you object to me deviating from the standard definition of polyamory, but also accuse me of mischaracterizing your viewpoints when I attempt to refute that definition. Do you or do you not subscribe to the standard definition of monogamy?
Definitions are neither correct or incorrect in and of themselves; they either reflect the way in which a word is used, or they do not.
I just asked google to define polyamory, and it gave me seven definitions, of which five are relevant; all but one heavily emphasize that polyamory requires knowledge and consent. If you can provide a link to any reputable source that defines polyamory in the way that you do, I’ll be happy to reopen this discussion.
I was initially going to respond “Constraints that you participated in the writing of and explicitly agreed to don’t go against the notion of freedom at all, certainly not compared to ones you have no say in and little choice to decline,” but it seems you’re coming at this from a rather different angle. You are considering the constraint of monogamy not as “be monogamous (details elsewhere)”, but rather as “be discreet about polygamy”. This has several problems, SFAICT.
We can apply this sort of level-jumping operation to any rule—“Do X” becomes “Be discreet about violations of X”—but these aren’t the same thing, and it is far from obvious that the latter is so. A real instance of the latter might be, for instance, how Spartan boys were taught to steal food—they were beaten if caught, because they were supposed to avoid getting caught. But, the general reaction to learning about violations of monogamy seems to generally be, “They did that?” rather than “They let themselves get caught?” or “They told people”, which suggests that most people have the simpler rule in mind. Or, even if they don’t, they certainly want to appear as if they did. Which either means they think most people have the simpler rule in mind, or the whole thing is one large mass hypocrisy in which everyone knows the actual rule is “be discreet”, but admitting this would be itself a violation of the rules. I suppose the latter isn’t too implausible, seeing that a number of things do seem to follow that pattern… but there will always be people, the “nerds” in Eliezer’s terminology, who actually believe what they’re told, and who won’t be in on it, and who actually will be using the basic rule. So even in the latter case I’m not sure you can claim that’s the actual rule. (In addition, in the latter case, the acknowledgement of the “be discreet” rule is unconscious, which doesn’t sound like what you’re describing above.) Though maybe I’ve missed a few cases?
OK. That’s problem number one. Problem number two is, once you’re acting within the bounds of “be discreet”… what are you actually going to do? You need more than one person for sex, and that (I should hope) means some sort of agreement about what’s actually going to go on. In short, we’re right back to square one—the freedom of “be discreet” is no different from the freedom of, well, open freedom, except that the former is hidden and the latter is not. Give people freedom to interact with each other, and they’ll want some sort of assurance of what other people will do, and will start making promises and contracts.
Problem number three is that it’s hard to see this as a solution when it’s fundamentally dishonest, but I guess that’s obvious.
Problem number four is that it’s arbitrary. You said the freedom is to “be discreet”. Be discreet about what? About violations of some rule. What rule? Does it matter? You’re talking about violations of monogamy, but your entire argument, if valid, would go through if that were replaced by polygny or any other rule. Your argument doesn’t support monogamy—it supports secrecy, and that’s all.
I think for many people, infidelity only can be said to have happened if someone was caught. This is the logic of “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” Another interesting aspect of outrage over rule-breaking is that it’s possible and even common to be openly outraged about a transgression that you don’t care about and even do yourself.
This is not really hypocrisy, it’s actually the way belief often works. An example of this is an Israeli politican who is an atheist. She was asked if there was any problem with her being an atheist, and she said “I don’t believe in God, but I believe in the Jewish people, and the Jewish people believe in God.” Or maybe that you don’t think there’s anything wrong with infidelity, but you are outraged that someone made it public because it will corrupt the morals of the youth or something. It’s even possible for no-one to literally believe that infidelity is wrong, and yet the belief still works because everyone assumes that someone else believes and wants to preserve their belief. This explains the phenomenon of a pastor of a church who is an atheist, but nonetheless every Sunday promises the congregation they will be together in the afterlife. In order for belief to be operative in a culture, it’s not necessary that people actually believe, only that they assume someone else does.
I’m not claiming that the actual rule is “Don’t get caught.” If that were the case, the authorities would simply say that. This kind of rule is like the rule against public nudity: you are allowed to be nude, just do it discreetly, in private. You are only prohibited from letting yourself be seen nude by others, from being caught. Or other examples, like urinating, defecating, etc. No-one thinks that people aren’t ever naked, or that they don’t defecate, we know it’s just done privately. People use euphemisms and say they are going to the “restroom” (to rest?), but we know what they are doing, they just don’t say it directly.
But this is not how the rule against infidelity works, which has to retain this dual character of official prohibition, supplemented by unofficial toleration. Another example might be the KKK—by day, good upstanding Christians, model citizens, etc., by night, raping, murdering thugs. Or military discipline which is supplemented by homo-erotic rituals, hazings, dirty jokes, and so on. Far from being a simple tribal bonding of no real consequences, military life could not exist without these hidden obscenities. If you remember the plot of A Few Good Men, when it revealed that a marine was murdered in the process of an extrajudicial punishment for breaking the unwritten rules. At the end, the Colonel on trial says “You can’t handle the truth!” The truth of those unwritten rules must be repressed. This is a case where those rules results in a much more serious punishment that simply violating the standard rules, in just the same way that you’d be shunned if you were revealed to be an atheist in a small provincial town in the South, but this would be nothing compared to what would happen to you if you crossed the KKK.
It is, as you say, the way belief often works; this doesn’t make it not hypocrisy, it just means humans are often hypocrites. (Though, I get the idea that the use of that term on LW and OB may differ a bit from the usual usage; here there does not seem to be any implication of conscious or deliberate hypocrisy. This may in fact just be a definitional dispute.)
This doesn’t seem to be analogous. People are explicit about the fact that the rules are “don’t go naked in public”, etc., and not “don’t go naked”. This is not the case with non-monogamy.
If I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying that monogamy is much like the KKK and also that monogamy is good.
Do you believe that knowing the truth is valuable?
You claim that society prevents individuals from forming polyamorous relationships. My goal here was to show that tacit prohibitions and rights have strong efficacy and should be considered part of the social order. This supports the idea that the tacit toleration of infidelity is part of the social order, and given the very high rates of marital infidelity, it’s reasonable to say that polyamory, in a certain sense, is already a widely accepted practice. This is intended to clarify the specific claims that polyamorists are making as well as in what sense it can be said to be a nonconformist lifestyle. This also goes to the common claim by polyamorists that monogamy is unnatural & people are more naturally polyamorists.
Interesting that Sniffnoy observes that there will always be some people who take the rules too literally, the “nerds”, which is where we find the highest rates of polyamory (in the countercultural sense).
You continue to define polyamory in a way that is contrary to the established definition of the term.
I do not. I claim that society generally prevents individuals from realizing that alternatives to monogamy as a standard for good relationships exist. Society very obviously does not prevent people from forming polyamorous relationships; you can tell because polyamorous relationships exist.
Again, I have not made this claim nor do I support it, not least because I am completely indifferent to questions of natural-ness.
A fruitful discussion on this topic is impossible if you continue to mischaracterize my position and refuse to even acknowledge that you are misusing words with clear definitions.
I continue to feel that the established definition is wrong, and I’ve made many points justifying that, none of which you’ve actually refuted. Instead, you simply insist that I restrict myself to your preferred definition. This is exactly my point—by defining the terms in advance and making them incontestable, you are trying to lead us to where you want us to go.
If you read carefully, you’ll see that I didn’t attribute the claim “monogamy is unnatural” to you. My point was to indicate the value of my observations about social norms and their relevance to general common claims about monogamy and polyamory.
Furthermore, you seem to be contradicting yourself. On one hand, you object to me deviating from the standard definition of polyamory, but also accuse me of mischaracterizing your viewpoints when I attempt to refute that definition. Do you or do you not subscribe to the standard definition of monogamy?
Definitions are neither correct or incorrect in and of themselves; they either reflect the way in which a word is used, or they do not.
I just asked google to define polyamory, and it gave me seven definitions, of which five are relevant; all but one heavily emphasize that polyamory requires knowledge and consent. If you can provide a link to any reputable source that defines polyamory in the way that you do, I’ll be happy to reopen this discussion.