That’s a matter of your perspective. You assume that the concepts are ontologically separate to begin with, and are then collapsed, simply because in this case they are made conceptually distinct by being named differently. I disagree, I say the conceptual distinction is artificial, used to avoid the full scope of the issue by ruling certain facts a priori irrelevant without having to consider them.
alsomike
Karma: −15
I’ll repeat something I alluded to before: a happily married woman who listens to her sister’s dramatic dating stories and feels relief that she no longer has to worry about all that. This is an example of how removing choice and flexibility can be the source of happiness. This requires us to see choice in negative terms, which is actually quite difficult to do, because the problems of a lack of choice have been dramatized in movies and novels so often that we have a strong emotional resonance with them—for example, the familiar narrative of the son who is forced into the family business by an overbearing father, deprived of his opportunity to explore and pursue his dreams. The plot of the movie Ratatouille is something like this. We know intellectually that problems of too much choice exist, of course, but strong cultural narratives have deformed our cognition such that they appear insignificant to us. Just noticing and critiquing these values when they appear is a very useful thing to do.
One good example of this is a recent book called Marry Him: The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough. The thesis is that women have extremely high expectations for potential husbands, to the point that they reject perfectly good men in the hopes that something better will come along. Eventually their options dwindle and they find themselves childless and unmarried in their 40s, which was the experience of the author. The problem here is buyer’s remorse. Given the wealth of options as well as the emphasis on getting the very best for yourself, this translates into a need for flexibility: form less secure, more temporary relationships until you find the one that gives you everything you want. I don’t really know what an improved decision-making process would be exactly, but the fact that our gut reaction to the title “Settle for Mr. Good Enough” is that this sounds patently absurd is a good gauge for our thinking. When this seems like wisdom rather than absurdity, we will know we have made progress. Having said that, I think the book is flawed because it doesn’t go far enough in it’s critique which forces the author to compromise the thesis.
Polyamory might posit itself as a solution to this problem of excess choice, diagnosing this situation as a problem of inflexibility within the social obligation to choose one person. If one person doesn’t have everything you need, you should find someone else who does, but why not have both of them? So polyamory addresses the problem of excess choice with still more flexiblity and choice, which in turn generates more crises which are then addressed by the proliferation of rules. To me, this points to the general unsustainability of flexibility as a single guiding norm, and also the undesirability of polyamory itself—in order to sustain this “freedom”, excessive regulation is required. This last point is of course a personal judgment; if others prefer heavily regulated sex lives, I have no reason to prevent them.
There’s a kind of knee-jerk analysis that happens: we see a difficult situation, and conclude that the ultimate problem is a lack of flexibility: things that are easy to change are always good, and things that are hard to change are always bad. Politically, this translate into support for right-wing economic policies, which are ideologically rendered as more flexible than the restrictive constraints of government action, and therefore preferable. And yes, I am aware that I am drawing another counterintuitive connection, between right-wing economic policies and left-wing sex politics, but I think there are unconscious shared assumptions underlying much countercultural politics that posits itself as radical, left-wing, etc.
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?
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).
Are you implying that the movement has changed its philosophical presuppositions? If so, please provide a citation to back this up.
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.
So are you saying that I’m wrong to assert that the polyamory subculture has deep philosophical roots in counterculture? Or that those roots influence the presuppositions of people who consciously identify themselves with it?
I should also point out that as the 4th top contributor in a fairly diverse intellectual community outside of the polyamory community, your personal values and opinions are a poor counterexample.
One difference that I have with this community is that I take seriously the influence of social context, the history of ideas and the discursive practices that help determine our horizon of meaning. To me, drawing attention to social context in which an idea acquires meaning is not conflating issues, that is the issue. Ignoring or downplaying it means we’re trying to ignore the background in which certain problems become salient, acquire meaning and new choices become a possibilities. That’s just not reality.
I’m not merely pointing to the political movement, but the entire culture of polyamory. What are it’s values, shared beliefs, assumptions, norms, categories and justifications, and how does it posit itself relative to mainstream culture? The fact that you identify yourself as polyromantic probably means you have largely adopted that worldview. And here’s another area where I differ from the individualist bent of this community—even if you personally do not suffer from the ill effects of a particular idea, I claim that you have an ethical duty to consider the effects of promoting an idea if the influence of it’s philosophical presuppositions has a negative impact on society.
I want to point out that, at least so far, you haven’t disputed my contention that the poly subculture holds flexibility as the pre-eminent value, only that you personally don’t.
(1) Yes, but also I claim that WrongBot’s claim of nonconformity is simply false. He’s just applying a very widely held value in a slightly novel way.
(2) I think monogamy can be justified rationally, but this involves reconstructing certain values that have been eclipsed by consumerist logic
(3) The demand to justify our sexual practices or risk being put into stigmatized position of conformist is unfair.
Some further points: the debate of polyamory vs. monogamy is not, strictly speaking, a debate about whether it’s best to have one partner or multiple partners. It is partly about whether society should stigmatize the open deviation from the norm, but that is not the thrust of the argument here. There’s a stronger claim lurking here, that many people consider maximum choice and flexibility the royal road to happiness and since polyamory more adequately embodies this ideal, it is superior to monogamy, at least for those people. Once people examine their beliefs in the cold light of reason, they will choose what works for them, etc.
I don’t see any reason why someone couldn’t consider multiple conflicting values and determine that polygamy was the best way to satisfy most of them.
In principle, this is true, but I take the polyamory movement as having been heavily influenced by the 60s counterculture movement and the sexual revolution, influenced philosophically by Romantic poets and Rousseau. One of the major countercultural critiques of mainstream society is hypocritical, inconsistent and contradictory values.
Empirically, this has been demonstrated by Jonathan Haidt. Maybe you are already familiar with his work. He proposes 5 moral foundations—Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Respect, Purity/Sacredness—these are different ways of approaching moral questions. He shows that self-described liberals tend to value the first 2 far more than the last 3, where conservatives value them more equally. It’s fairly easy to identify the countercultural critique of society through these categories, by observing that they largely reject notions like respect for authority, religious justifications rooted in purity & sacredness, and loyalty to nation & family, taking these values to be vices rather than virtues and seeing all the evil in the world as a result of them.
Aside from that, the institution of marriage and monogamy is governed by the norms of permanent commitment and connection, admittedly less so than in previous eras. It’s difficult to see how an activist who rejects the culture’s major symbols and practices embodying commitment could not be intending to reject it wholesale, especially when the alternate values of flexibility are emphasized so heavily instead.
Seems to imply that you engaged in something like bottom-line reasoning
Oh, I see. The complete statement is that the claim is that polyamory is good because it offers more choice and flexibility. My response is that far from an advantage, this seems like a good reason to reject polyamory insofar as it is justified in that way. I’m contesting the pre-eminence of the value of flexibility in every area of life because I think they discourage deeper, more costly forms of connection in intimate relationships. In this area, I think inflexibility & limitation are virtues. I even claim that limitation in general plays a prominent, positive role in sexual enjoyment, so the specific limitation of having only one partner doesn’t necessarily prevent or inhibit enjoyment. Although I will readily concede here that it might for some.
If it can be shown that the absolute valorization of flexibility doesn’t inhibit deep intimacy, that intimacy has no value and there are no costs to inhibiting it, or that polyamory doesn’t valorize flexibility and therefore doesn’t inhibit intimacy, then I have no objection to it. A more minor issue is whether polyamory falsely posits itself as a nonconformist lifestyle when it is simply novel. Here, I claim that false forms of nonconformity retard social progress by promoting misconceptions about the nature of society, but this objection is about polyamorist discursive practices, not the actual practice of polyamory.
Ah, yes I guess I’m sliding between multiple definitions of nonconformity. When I said that polyamory is consciously nonconformist, I mean that in the sense that they adopt a position that is understood that way by their peers, their parents, etc. Nonconformity here is adopting idiosyncratic practices that may be stigmatized, with the intention of opening up new possibilities for living one’s life. When I say the opposite, that polyamory is overly conformist, I mean to challenge that idea—what is usually understood as nonconformity arrives at it’s position not by challenging social norms, but by rejecting the inconsistency of social norms. Where the monogamist has multiple conflicting and overlapping values of commitment and choice and freedom, etc., the polygamist arrives at her position by valorizing a single, unambiguous value and rejecting anything that conflicts with it. The most precise term for this is not nonconformity, it’s fundamentalism.
It’s certainly possible that a given social problem is caused by an inadequate commitment to a single value, but I want to clarify that this is the claim being made, and that I don’t agree, in two ways. First, I contest the idea that having a single unambiguous value to govern human social life is achievable or even desirable, and second, that intimate relationships are improved by introducing more flexibility and choice. I think we are very sensitive to the problems that are created by a lack of choice in relationships, and remarkably blind to the problems that are caused by too much choice. The post attempts to exploit this blindness by asking us rationally justify monogamy, a task that can only be accomplished by appealing to a set of values that are waning. In my view, the fact that we can’t do this convincingly is an apt illustration of the malaise that afflicts society.
can you see why something like this… makes it sound like you’re engaging in cognition motivated by something other than finding the truth?
Not at all. Are you suggesting I’m attempting to conceal the truth? I don’t know how this could be misconstrued, it seems perfectly straight-forward to me. The author suggests that polyamory is a product of a thought process that challenges social norms. I take the opposite view, that rejecting polyamory on the grounds that it is overly conformist to social norms is a genuinely challenging and interesting thesis. I’m at a loss as to why this is considered out of bounds.
I agree that we all need what you claim LessWrong wants to be, but I don’t think I’m retreating in any way from having my assumptions scrutinized. If anything, the problem is the opposite one, most the replies haven’t identified the key points on which my argument turns or their weaknesses, instead they’ve largely seized on what I think are irrelevant or incidental points, basic misunderstandings or just jumping to odd conclusions. I don’t think my arguments are insincere attempts to see what I can make stick, I intend to defend them as best as I can & I can’t even find an example of something that might be interpreted like that. But I respect the desire to keep this community free of disruptive elements, and concede the right of the members of the community to determine what that is and if it includes verbosity and inadequate formatting.
My purpose is not to prove myself right, but to help drive the debate to a less obvious and boring conclusion by calling into questioning some of the assumptions and the frame in which the problem of polyamory is posed. I think the post implicitly frames the problem in such a way as to unfairly tilt the playing field against those who disagree. But many of my comments have been down-voted without explanation, and the ease with which you can register your disagreement without having to confront the substance of what you disagree with (or do not understand), IMO goes against what you claim to be the purpose of this community.
I appreciate the feedback. Once I respond to people’s objections, I’ll be on my way.
The issue I’m raising is that the logic of greater options and choices is the logic of consumerism. Renata Salecl has some interesting observations about this emphasis and how it generates anxieties and personal crises that directly challenge the ideological assumption that more choice can’t be bad. (See here: “Who Am I For Myself? Anxiety & the Tyranny of Choice: http://slought.org/content/11318/) As far as social critiques go, this is far more challenging to deal with than this post, which smugly & uncritically assumes that it stands outside of social norms. The truth is that society is not constituted by a single homogeneous set of norms which we can easily reject, but multiple conflicting and contradictory ones. Here, the norms of consumerism and choice come into conflict with the norms of marriage. Given what I’ve said about the tyranny of choice, the real challenge to our thinking would be to see this as an reason to reject polyamory. What if the main benefit of monogamy is that it provides relief from this tyranny? Sometimes you hear happily married people say that they are glad to not have to deal with the dating scene, which is a very interesting example of how the removal of choice is experienced as a benefit. A point I should make here is that the issue I have is definitely not with the practice of polyamory itself, but the stated rationale for it. It’s certainly possible to have non-consumerist justifications for polyamory—Mormon justifications, Muslim justifications, etc. The main problem I have is this uncritical assumption of the social norm that says more choice & fewer limitations is always better, particularly when it dresses itself up as nonconformity.
This ideal is particularly inappropriate applied to sexuality. The standard dictum that we can only truly enjoy ourselves once we get rid of all limitations should be reversed. Limitation is an inherent part of enjoyment, especially in the domain of sexuality. Why do we get erotic enjoyment from the sight of naked bodies but in tribal cultures where they walk around nude all day, they don’t? Nudity is only erotic if it is taboo and prohibited, which suggests that transgressing a prohibition is an essential part of sex. This explains the otherwise strange paradox of why mainstream society tacitly accepts infidelity so long as it’s discreet. Why not just make it official? The obvious conclusion: it would ruin all the fun. It’s well-known that the easiest way to make something attractive is to prohibit it which may explain why the rate of illegal drug use is higher in the US than in places with fewer prohibitions like the Netherlands. The mistake to avoid is thinking that the only purpose of the social regulation of sexual activity is to put a stop to enjoyment, and so it is therefore repressive. It is repressive, and that creates the moment of true erotic enjoyment, in the guilty or rebellious pleasure of having broken the rules. Thinking of society and social oppression as a consistent set of oppressive rules and regulations which we should try to reject misses the point. Ideology is at multiple levels, both in the rules and the ways in which we are solicited to break them, and the real social critique is not the cliche to always question the rules, question authority, etc. Rather, we should question the implicit rules of how we’re expected to break the rules.
So it’s very interesting how polyamory reverses the standard traditional relationship between law and transgression. The standard model is explicit official prohibition, but unofficial tacit acceptance of rule-breaking, which is then eroticized. Polyamory’s approach is officially about freedom—break free from the constraints of monogamy, etc—and unofficially filled with rules and prohibitions as I pointed out earlier, which we’re nonetheless assured aren’t really rules, only guidelines and suggestions, etc., which further attests to their secretive nature. Here we might find an example of how devotion to the law and the rules functions as a kind of obscene form of enjoyment in itself. In addition to the nonconformist polyamorist who gets an erotic thrill from freaking out the squares and is obsessed with what they think and how they are scandalized, there is also the conformist polyamorist who finds erotic enjoyment in the highly regulated and controlled lifestyle and in obedience to it’s secret rules and rituals. Maybe they unconsciously realize that standard monogamy model offers too many loopholes to violate the rules, they need them to be much stronger. We might also notice all the typical jokes about the wife as “a ball and chain”, keeping a man’s testicles in her purse, he’s whipped, etc., obvious references to BDSM practices. These jokes aren’t just incidental, they are part of the institution itself, even secretly integrated into its rituals, in the coded exchange of rings, an obvious symbolic representation of becoming a (sex) slave. The simplistic vision of standard marriage is that it’s very boring and vanilla, but what if it is a kind of kinky BDSM roleplaying?
The logic of consumerism is to weigh all your choices and find out what you really enjoy. Isn’t the dominant value of mainstream culture unlimited choice, maximum freedom and flexibility, so that you can better enjoy? You bring up the Veblen-esque conspicuous consumption account of consumerism, but that’s just dodging the issue, since that’s not how I’m characterizing it. This is not mere guilt by association—we could take any one of hundreds of TV commercials and re-edit them so they advocate polyamory in the exact same way as this post. The only change would be the name of the product. Could we do the same for a Mormon justification for polyamory? Not quite so easily.
When the author speaks about his personal benefits of polyamory: “I am happier, more fulfilled, and a better romantic partner when I am polyamorous” Doesn’t this immediately evoke the Radiohead parody of stereotypical mainstream conformist consumption: “Fitter, happier, more productive, comfortable, not drinking too much, regular exercise at the gym...”
I notice how your counterargument is inconsistent with itself in trying to cover all possible bases—on one hand, you say that this argument for polyamory bears no resemblence to consumerism at all (on your mischaracterization of consumerism). But at the same time, you also say the exact opposite, it does conform to the logic of consumerism, but that’s not a bad thing! Perhaps you might want to examine why your own argument contradicts itself.
But ignoring that, let’s take your second point—what’s the problem with this logic of consumerism? You’re entitled to defend it if you like. But once you concede that, you undermine the implicit appeal of polyamory, which is that it’s something daring and subversive and nonconformist, which sounds very exciting! But this is plausible only if your idea of “the mainstream” and “the system” comes from bohemian and beat poet writings from 60 years ago. It’s quite astonishing that people who think of themselves as deep thinkers would make this kind of error, since we can safely assume that they are confronted with empirical evidence that they don’t live in the 1950s on a daily basis. Such is the appeal of self-congratulatory pseudo-rebellion.
No wonder that polyamorists can’t simply adopt their chosen lifestyle, it’s necessary to evangelize about it too. What’s the difference between traditional marriage and polyamory? It can’t be that polyamorists are able to form romantic and sexual relationships with more than one person, since traditional marriage has always tacitly tolerated this. The main difference is that polyamorists want to do this in the open, rather than in secret, which is to say that the difference is primarily that polyamorists want to be nonconformists. Therefore it’s not a stretch to say that the primary appeal of polyamory is a kind of erotic role-playing of nonconformity itself.
One further interesting fact about polyamory that always interests me is how it bills itself as a form of freedom compared to the constraints of monogamy. Naively you’d expect that polyamory entails simply sleeping with and forming romantic attachments with other people, but this is not the case! A quick glance at polyamory books and websites reveals that’s overrun with various rules and prohibitions about the proper way to do polyamory, not the least of which is “There is no one-size-fits-all set of rules.” A minor industry is devoted to publishing on a whole range of topics: the proper way to communicate in a relationship, how to deal with jealousy issues, what if you have children, what about STDs, how should you approach potential new partners, etc. etc. 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.
Of course, the most appropriate Žižekian point about this post is that ultimate super ego injunction is “Enjoy!” In other words, one of the main forms of conformity today is exactly this pose of throwing off the demands of mainstream society demonstrated in this post. This ideal is the main message of consumerism in advertising—choose for yourself, unlock your deepest desires, express your true identity! If you really want to enjoy yourself fully, you can’t just settle for the boring default option—whether in toilet paper, jeans, music or relationship style. You are supposed to consider all your options and find out what generates maximum enjoyment.
This is the main form of authoritarianism today, and the correct response to the demand here that we justify our choice of monogamy is “It’s none of your business!”
I don’t consider them to be the same, I think individuals and culture mutually influence each other and interact in complex ways. There are facts that are relevant to the debate that are being disallowed based on a preference for reductionist approaches that I don’t share. This preference wants to consider an individual’s motivations independently of the culture in which he or she is embedded. It’s incorrect to say that I disallow facts that would allow them to be treated separately, I have no problem with that. For example, if it can be shown that the cultural issues have no bearing on the issue. Given that questions about mainstream vs. subculture and conformity vs. nonconformity are deeply connected to this issue, I’m skeptical that this can be done, but I certainly have no objection to you trying.
The specific facts that I think are relevant is the polyamory culture’s connection to counterculture. Ignoring this influence means we’re debating whether polyamory could be logically justified, which is an abstract intellectual exercise that has little relevance to the question of how polyamory is actually justified. I assume that the rationale for this is that if polyamory can be shown to be logically justifiable, it doesn’t matter too much if one gets there by a different route; that it doesn’t matter if you are right for the wrong reasons. I disagree with that, I think it does matter.