{"id":1980,"date":"2009-05-04T02:22:46","date_gmt":"2009-05-04T10:22:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=1980"},"modified":"2009-05-04T02:23:01","modified_gmt":"2009-05-04T10:23:01","slug":"change-does-not-have-directionalways","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/change-does-not-have-directionalways\/","title":{"rendered":"Change does not always march in one direction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past few days we have had some discussion on this weblog about the marriage of individuals of the same sex from different<\/a> vantage points<\/a>. As an empirical matter I think Andrew Stuttaford is correct to predict that this is one argument that the social conservatives are going to lose in our time. I also lean in Andrew’s direction when it comes to accepting this change. This is not to say that I think that homosexual marriage is wrong and I am accepting it as a point of pure pragmatism. In fact, there are all sorts of things which I find inevitable, from my own death proximately, to the futility of baryonic<\/a> based life ultimately<\/a>, that I am not positively inclined toward & wish to postpone as long as possible. This is why I understand why social conservatives may oppose this change, even if they also agree that it is an inevitable development, for they oppose it as a matter of principle and not pragmatic utility, and postponing what they consider to be wrong is naturally a\u00a0mitzvah in their eyes.<\/p>\n

But a dispositional conservatism serves more than a periodoc brake upon the inevitable march of history toward its final Utopian state. \u00a0In fact the empirical record shows some cyclical dynamics in human morals and values. After all, Western liberal democracy is a throwback<\/a> in many ways to the individualism of the hunter-gatherer phase of human history. I believe that the institutions and norms of communitarian “traditional” cultures were in fact ad <\/em>hoc<\/em> <\/em>kluges which attempted to reconcile our “caveman psychology” with post-Neolithic mass society. Conservative and liberal dispositions seem to be partly hardwired<\/a>; as humans we place ourselves along the spectrum. It is not simply a matter of conservatives always being a few generations behind liberals along the inevitable secular ascent up toward earthly paradise. Rather it seems possible these different political tribes are like two cylinders which serve as the motive force behind a winding and unpredictable journey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the past few days we have had some discussion on this weblog about the marriage of individuals of the same sex from different vantage points. As an empirical matter I think Andrew Stuttaford is correct to predict that this … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[243,1134],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1980"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1980"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1983,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1980\/revisions\/1983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}