Infidelity, Part 3.

I'd though I'd list a few studies which, though flawed, still show a link between sexual partner count and infidelity.

Sexual Infidelity among Married and Cohabiting Americans. Author(s): Judith Treas and Deirdre Giesen, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Feb., 2000), pp. 48-60.

This was one of the first big studies looking into the the phenomena and controlled for an extensive list of variables including education, sexual values, sexual interest, religious values, marital duration and cohabitation. The study involved 2598 women between the ages of 18-59.

Some of the statistically significant positive predictors of infidelity were:

Characteristic(odds)

Sexual interest, defined as how often the subject thought about sex, (1.30).
Non permissiveness, defined as how negatively infidelity was viewed, (0.53).
Number of partners, (1.01). (N.B partners= partners after the age of 18 and before first marriage.)
Living in the central city, (1.47).
Male, (1.47).
Marital duration, (1.03).
Sharing a mate's social network, (0.74).

Each year of marriage increased the odds of infidelity by 3% whilst each additional sexual partner (after 18 years of age) increased the odds of infidelity by 1%.

This study also looked into attitudes and 99% of respondents expected sexual exclusivity. The polyamory crowd are freaks.

The study seems to be flawed in its methodology. The women were divided into two groups, those who were married once and those who were married more than once. The once married were allowed to answer sensitive questions anonymously whilst those who were married more than once were interviewed. Of those married more than once, the data excluded sexual relations that had happened after separation but before divorce and infidelity was only measured for the most current or recent marriage. In other words, if a woman had been unfaithful in her previous marriage it wasn't included. (I don't know who dreams up the methodologies of some of these studies, they almost seem to want to artificially lower the rates of infidelity)

Another study to look at infidelity, available online, is;

Cherkas et al. (2004). Genetic Influences on Female Infidelity and Number of Sexual Partners in Humans: A Linkage and Association Study on the Role of the Vasopressin Receptor Gene (AVPR1A). Twin Research, 7, 649–658.

This study was flawed in that it sent out a questionnaire to 3654 pairs of female twins aged between 19 and 83, of which only 46% bothered to complete and return it. Personally, I feel that this biases the study towards "conscientious" types, introducing another confounding variable into the analysis. However even with this bias toward the "goodie-goodies" a link between promiscuity and infidelity was statistically established. The mean number of lifetime partners was 4.67. The unfaithful had a mean of 7.73 whilst the faithful had a mean of 3.78. (p<0.001) all have their faults. But with regard to promiscuity, all studies show an increase in the risk of divorce and infidelity correlated with cumulative partner count. People may legitimately argue about the degree of the effect but no study shows a protective or indifferent effect.

A good review article, available on line, is;

Infidelity in Committed Relationships II: A Substantive Review. AJ Blow, K Hartnett, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy. April 2005, Vol. 31, No. 2, 217-233.

Perceptive readers will note that I have mentioned nearly all the major studies looking at promiscuity and infidelity. I have not been selective in the studies that I've presented. What's really interesting in how little research has actually been done on the matter despite such a strong correlation. Now, I'm fully aware that correlation is not causation, but the whole raison d'etre of statistics is to establish correlations which may be causally linked.

Infidelity, Part 2.

A far better study looking at the correlates of infidelity is,

Sexual infidelity in a national survey of American women: Differences in prevalence and correlates as a function of method of assessment. MA Whisman, DK Snyder, Journal of Family Psychology,Vol. 21, No. 2, 147–154.

This was an interesting study based on the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth and involved 4884 women.

It was a study with a twist.

The authors recognised, from previous research, that the response people give at an interview may be influenced by by the method of data acquisition. Namely, people are less likely to give accurate answers with regard to socially questionable activity in a face to face interview compared to an anonymous technique.

For "sensitive" data, the National Survey of Family Growth employs two techniques:
a) A traditional face to face interview.
b) A-CASI method, where the person listens to questions on headphones privately and enters the data into a computer, eliminating any "interviewer" effect.

What the authors did was compare data from the two responses and measured the difference.

Respondents were asked if they had a "secondary" sex partner over the previous 12 months. The study controlled for race, age, education, previous sexual abuse, religiosity, cohabitation and divorce.

Face to face interview revealed an incidence of infidelity of 1.08%
A-CASI interview yielded an incidence of 6.13%, nearly a six times greater increase in infidelity.

In fact, the authors found that when comparing the two techniques, significant differences in response were found with regard to:

1) Educational achievement.
2) Lifetime sexual partners.
3) Premarital cohabitation.
4) Ethnicity.

No differences were observed with regard to:

1) Religion.
2) Remarriage
3) Race.
4) Age
5) Childhood sexual abuse.

To quote the authors;

Thus, the fact that infidelity has been assessed using different methods across different studies may help to explain the inconsistent findings across existing studies. For example, if the current data obtained from the two modes of interview had been reported in two separate studies, three predictors would have been significant in one study but not the other, and the magnitude of the effects for four of the predictors would have been significantly different between the two studies. As such, the present findings regarding significant differences in the magnitude of the association between predictors and infidelity underscore the importance of consistent use of assessment methods across studies if a replicable set of predictors of infidelity is to be identified

And what were the correlates?
(Based on the A-CASI method of data acquisition, table has been modified and data omitted per copyright compliance, any breach is unintentional.)

Religion was scored on a 5 point scale, from never going to church to going to church more than once a week. Education was scored in years with the mean being 13.2 years.

Each additional sexual partner increased the odds of infidelity by 7% while increasing years of education seem to decrease the risk by 10%. Very roughly speaking each addition partner negates the benefit of a year of education with regard to infidelity risk. Yet another study demonstrating the effect of promiscuity on relationship exclusivity/stability.

Infidelity, Part 1.

Several studies have attempted to look at the causative factors of infidelity.

Sexual Exclusivity among Dating, Cohabiting, and Married Women, Renata Forste and Koray Tanfer, Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Feb., 1996), pp. 33-47 was a study of 1,235 women, aged between 20-37, drawn from the 1991 National Survey of Women.

The study aimed to look at infidelity patterns across married, cohabiting and dating groups, with controls for education, age, race, religious value in both the woman and her partner (race of the male was excluded) as well as relationship homogeneity and whether infidelity occurred before or after commencing marriage.

10% of the women of the sample group had a "secondary" concurrent sexual partner. The breakdown was as follows:

Married: 4% had a secondary sexual partner.
Cohabiting: 20% had a secondary sexual partner.
Dating: 18% had a secondary sexual partner.

When analysed across all three groups, the statistically significant--(p<.o5)--findings of this study were as follows: Mainline religion roughly halved the odds. Length of marriage increased the odds. Being married to a 3+ year older man increased the odds. Being in an educationally hypogamous relationship increased the odds. A woman with 1-3 partners was roughly four times(p<.o1), and a woman with 4 or more partners 8.5 times(p<.001), more likely to have a secondary sex partner than a woman with no other previous sexual partners.
From Forste and Tanfer;

Neither the respondents' nor the partners' education alone had an independent effect on sexual monogamy for married women. Statistical significance for respondents' and partners' education among married women was reached only when the educational homogamy measure was added tothe model. Educational heterogamy, however, had a very dramatic effect on sexual monogamy among married women. When married women were more educated than their husbands, they were significantly more likely to have secondary sex partners than women married to similarly educated men. However, if the husband had more education than the wife, the effect was reversed the woman was significantly less likely to have a secondary sex partner than if her education level was similar to her husband's.

After controlling for relationship type, race and ethnicity effects on commitment emerged. Minority race or ethnicity increased the likelihood of having secondary sex partners among dating women and particularly among married women, but race and ethnicity had no effect for cohabiting women. Having previous sex partners also increased the likelihood that dating and married women would have secondary sex partners. In particular, married women with 4 or more previous partners were 20 times more likely to have secondary sex partners than married women with no previous sex partners. The number of previous sex partners had no effect on sexual monogamy among cohabiting women.

Now, I have some reservations with regard to Forste and Tanfer's findings with regard to the marriage findings. There were 603 married women in the study and of those, approximately 4% reported a secondary sex partner. Therefore the conclusions are based on the characteristics of roughly 24 women, a sample size that's pretty small and makes me wonder how much real life significance can be attached to the statistics. The dating group had an 18% secondary sex partner rate in a sample size of 451, i.e approx 81 people, its findings are probably more applicable in the real world.

With that reservation, the table presented below presents a fascinating picture. ( This is an amended table from Forste and Tanfer. Click on image to enlarge)

(Negative odds mean less likely to have secondary partners)

1) The -483 Odds ratio seems difficult to comprehend when it was based on the findings of 24 women. It probably represents the fact that there were no college-degree educated women amongst the married with secondary sexual partners and statistical "magic" conjured the number.

2) The effect of education seems variable. On one hand, it increases the risk of infidelity in dating relationships and yet decreases it in marriage. Women in educationally hypogamous marriages seem to be more prone to infidelity, whilst those in hypergamous relationships seem less likely to seek other partners. It would appear that education is not per se intrinsically protective of infidelity, rather, its protective and corrosive effect seems contextual.

3) Once again, even when controlled for relationship type, increasing numbers of prior sexual partners increase the risk of infidelity.

Forste and Tanfer also looked at the factors which contributed to infidelity both before and after marriage. Once again, this is an amended extract of their report.


Consistently, increasing sexual partner count is associated with a statistically significant increase in odds of infidelity. Even if we exclude the marriage cohort, the promiscuity-infidelity correlation is highly significant.

The Virgin Bride.

Some of the best papers dealing with the subject of sexuality and divorce risk are unfortunately not online. I've purchased a few of these and unfortunately they come with pretty stringent copyright restrictions which means I cannot directly reproduce portions of the document. However I am allowed to comment on them.

One such study was done by Kahn and London. Joan R. Kahn, Kathryn A. London, 'Premarital Sex and the Risk of Divorce', Journal of Marriage and the Family 53 (1991): 845-855.

The data was extracted from the 1988 National Survey of Family group and involved over 2700 white women.

Virginity was defined as having sex within one month of date of marriage. (including before)

Some interesting findings.

At the end of the "Swinging Sixties" some 43% of white brides were virgins. I found this figure quite interesting since the impression that one gets from the media is that everyone was doing it, they weren't

By the early 80's only 14% of white brides were virgins.

In the first part of the paper they undertook a fairly conventional statistical analysis of virginity and its relation of divorce.

They did a probit analysis based on three models:

1) A simple virginity divorce correlation.
2) A virginity divorce correlation controlled for education, age of marriage , marital and per-marital birth.
3) A virginity divorce correlation controlling for all of the above and for intact/non-intact family background and religion.

The above analysis was calculated for 5 year and 10 year divorce risk respectively:

5 year divorce risk for virgins. -0.60. In other words, there was a 60% less risk of divorce.
10 year divorce risk for virgins. -0.402, less than 40% risk of divorce.

The other statistically significant findings were that:

1) Education and age of marriage is negatively correlated with divorce.
2) Education and age of marriage explained about 8-10% of the effect.
3) Coming from a broken home raised the risk of divorce but only for the first five years of marriage. Aat the 10 year mark, it, and age of marriage weren't significant.

The other really surprising finding was that there is no difference in the rate of divorce between Catholics, Protestants and non-religious when controlled for virginity.

The weakest part of the paper came next when they tried to explain the virginity effect by controlling for "unknown" factors using a bivariate probit analysis. Once controlling for these "known unknown" factors, no difference in divorce rates were observed between virgins and non-virgins. Kahn and London then go on to speculate as to what these known unknowns were. They freely admit that they're guessing. They suggested that it could reside in the attitudes and values of virgins compared to non-virgins. Though they admit it would require a study matching attitudes to divorce rates and virginity which they felt would be unfeasible. Essentially, their conclusion is that there is a qualitative difference between virgins and non-virgins which explains their lesser risk of divorce. They did not think that virginity per se was a protective mechanism with regard to divorce risk, rather that some unknown factors associated with virginity are responsible.


Some personal thoughts.

1) We are beginning to see some consistency. Teachman, on a different cohort, demonstrated a 35% reduction in the risk of divorce associated with virginity across cohorts. Kahn and London on a different group demonstrated a similar finding, a reduction between 40-60%.

2) Personally I find Kahn and London's explanation lacking. Their own research in a way repudiates their speculations. A persons religion or lack thereof is probably one of the biggest shapers of their life attitudes. Their own research showed the virginity effect persisted across all believing groups. Teachman was also able to show that cohabitors, who do have different attitudes to non-cohabitors, have no different rate of divorce when controlled for a single partner. Kahn and London showed that religion didn't matter if you were a virgin, whilst Teachman showed that "attitude effect" did not matter if you had premarital sex, only partner count. This explanation is overplayed.

3) Once again, that great shibboleth of the evo-bio crowd, education (which is a proxy for intelligence) had a mild effect on divorce rate, repudiating the haters of the critics of the Heritage Study.

Spend your fifteen bucks and buy a copy of the study.

2002 Male and Female Statistical Data.

I've managed to crunch the numbers from both Male and Female National Survey of Family Growth. As a treat for sdaedalus, I've included the male data.

Method.

First My approach to analysis was Catholic, in that you're only allowed to get married once. Remarriages count as a fail. However the data from NSFG 2002 included remarriages amongst the currently married.

Amongst males, 21% of the currently married were second or later marriages.
Amongst females, 23% of the currently married were second or later marriages.


What I basically attempted to do was calculate the following:

%Married=%married/(%married+%divorced+%remarried) for each sexual partner cohort.

1) The first thing to work out was how many remarriages there were.
2) Then I proportionately distributed the remarriages amongst the the greater-than-two-sexual-partner cohorts.
3) Then I subtracted the remarriages from the current marriages in these cohorts to give me a estimate of married once in each group.
4) Then I added the remarriages to the divorce group and performed the above calculation.

Result.

Note, this graph does not measure how long the the subjects had been married, simply their marriage status by partner count.

It's interesting to note that male promiscuity does not seem to affect marital stability as much as female.

Sexual Partner Divorce Risk

Cohabitation, that is "living together" before marriage has been shown to increase the risk of subsequent divorce of a couple. Many investigators have felt that the practice of cohabitation is selective for people who don't value marriage highly and hence are more likely to divorce when stress is put onto the marriage. In essence, it was thought that the cohabitors more "liberal values" placed them at higher risk of divorce.

Jay Teachman, an academic, investigated this matter further. The study, which is available online, makes for interesting reading. Teachman's genius was to look stratify the cohabitors risk of divorce by the by the number of sexual partners/cohabiting history.

The study was based on data from the National Survey of Family Growth 1995 cycle and involved over 6500 women.

It was controlled for a host of variables.

The study was in no way sponsored or funded by any conservative organisation.

Teachman's conclusion:

The results presented in this article replicate findings from previous research: Women who cohabit prior to marriage or who have premarital sex have an increased likelihood of marital disruption. Considering the joint effects of premarital cohabitation and premarital sex, as well as histories of premarital relationships, extends previous research. The most salient finding from this analysis is that women whose intimate premarital relationships are limited to their husbands—either premarital sex alone or premarital cohabitation—do not experience an increased risk of divorce. It is only women who have more than one intimate premarital relationship who have an elevated risk of marital disruption. This effect is strongest for women who have multiple premarital coresidental unions. These findings are consistent with the notion that premarital sex and cohabitation have become part of the normal courtship pattern in the United States. They do not indicate selectivity on characteristics linked to the risk of divorce and do not provide couples with experiences that lessen the stability of marriage.

Executive summary: It's not the liberal values, it's the number of partners that matter.

And,

This limitation notwithstanding, the results presented here should shift attention away from research that focuses on the selection of individuals into cohabitation and premarital sex to a focus on the selection of individuals who do not marry the individuals with whom they first cohabit or initiate first sex. It may well be the case that, irrespective of the legal status of the relationship, the relevant distinction to make is between people who form multiple relationships and people who form a single, longer lasting relationship.

(My highlighting)

The paper data and methods can be found here. Premarital Sex, Premarital Cohabitation, and the Risk of Subsequent. Marital Dissolution Among Women

Oh, in table 4 of the study, Teachman gives probabilities of divorce, which for fun, we will map onto the Heritage Foundation's study.

10 year divorce rate of the Teachman study group was 34%. (I didn't use the 5 year divorce risk in Teachman's paper since the Heritage study made its calculations on the people being married more than 5 years)

Teachman didn't plot the risk by the number of sexual partners, merely that more than one and in different relationship contexts, so I have simply marked the range of his findings. Note, the really disturbing one still holds. A soon as a woman has had more than one partner her long term marital stability risk drops to near 50%.

Note: Statements reproduced from the Teachman paper are not believed to violate copyright under the fair use clause. Any violation is unintentional and offending material shall be removed immediately if it violates any repespective laws.

Defining Slut: Erratum

I wish to thank commentator R. Stanton Scott for pointing out an error of fact which I had made in the post, Defining Slut.

In that post I stated:

Slut, of course, is the term applied to a promiscuous women and debates rage as to what number of partners earns the title. I think this is the wrong way of looking at the problem. The real danger of a promiscuous woman is that she will be unfaithful, so the definition should be really centered around that concept. i.e How many sexual partners does a woman need to have before she becomes high risk marriage material? The study quoted above asked the question.

The study, Harmful Effects of Early Sexual Activity and Multiple Sexual Partners Among Women, by the Heritage Foundation did nothing of the sort. The study did not look at how many partners a woman needed to have before she became unfaithful, rather the study looked at the number of partners a woman had and her risk of divorce, an important distinction.

The error of fact was unintentional and once again I thank Mr Scott for pointing it out.

Statistical adjustments to promiscuity data.

The Centers for Diseases Control published a document which contained divorce data from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth. Entitled, Cohabitation, marriage, divorce, and remarriage in the United States, it was able to provide data on divorce probabilities according to individual educational and economic characteristics.

Below are some pertinent extracts to our previous posts. (Click on image to enlarge)


Looking at the table we can see that the average divorce probability is 0.45 after 15 years. If we look at the family income breakdown, we see that the 15 year rate of divorce probability for people earning less than $25,000 is 0.65, an extra 44% risk of divorce above the national average.

Many of the detractors of the Heritage Foundation paper felt that its findings could be explained away by educational/socioeconomic factors. They are wrong.

What's interesting to note, is that ooking at the above table, the risk of divorce varies the most according to economic status. The difference in raw probability from the upper and lower third economic classes is 0.34, whilst the difference between the upper and lower educational categories is 0.23. In real life the two characteristics, income and education, are closely correlated and it would be quite reasonable to assume that the 0.23 subsists within the 0.34. However the Heritage study shows a 0.63 probability variance across cohorts, therefore socioeconomic factors cannot explain all the variation.

However, this 0.34 difference does not apply across the board, it only explains the added socioeconomic risk of divorce on the poor, relative to the rich. Relative to the average (0.43), the poor have an added 0.22 probability. What this means is that poverty increases the risk of divorce compared to the average whilst wealth decreases it compared to the average.

Now, this chart, gives us the socioeconomic and educational breakdown within each sexual-partner cohort.


In order to determine the confounding effect income has on the cohort divorce rate we must sum the weighted risks of each economic group from the cohort and see how it varies from the average.

Example:

If the entire greater-than-10 partner cohort were composed of poor people, we could look at the marital risk chart and see that they have 0.796 probability of divorce(%20.4 are married), we would then subtract 0.22 due to socioeconomic effect, since the the lowest income third have a divorce probability of 0.65, which is 0.22 above the national divorce rate. We know that this increased risk is due to the economic circumstances in which they are in so we subtract that from the 10+ cohort figure to arrive at a figure of 0.576. On the other hand, if the group were composed entirely of the rich, we know that wealth protects against divorce by a probability of 0.12, therefore the adjusted probability would be 0.916.

Using this method we can adjust for income effects in each cohort by determining the cohorts economic divorce risk and comparing how it varies from the average.

% poor x poor divorce probability+%middle x mid divorce probability+% rich x rich divorce probabilty-average divorce probability= adjustment.

The same adjustment can be made for educational status by such a method.
(Click on image for large view)


Explanatory notes:

9.3% of current marriages were remarriages. I distributed these remarriages evenly amongst the 2+ cohorts, any error arising from such is likely to be insignificant in real world terms. Also since I could not control for income and education at the same time, I've presented both corrections. In the real world, income and education are closely correlated so I would not expect to see much variance across the figures however in an effort to capture any socioeconomic/educational affect, the Maximum variant value represents the calculated value which gives the lowest divorce rate. (i.e maximising the impact of socioeconomic/educational factors on these calculations)

What's fascinating to observe, is that the CDC data on cohorts does not generally show a preponderance of one statistical group amongst the others across the partner cohorts. For instance, in the 10+ crowd, there is a slight preponderance of the educated and wealthy over the uneducated and poor, yet the cohort divorce rate for education and income were 0.44 and 0.45 respectively, indicating a variance of 0.01 and 0.02 from the national average. The largest variance was found in the 2 cohort group where 0.03 probability increase of divorce above the national average was predicted due to economic factors.

What this data shows is that sexual partner count is a very good--in fact uncannily good--predictor of the risks of divorce.

How good? One extra partner in a woman is equivalent to negating the protective benefit of greater-than-high school education in a woman, two partners equivalent to having a poverty affected marriage, ten or more partners negates any benefit of income or education with regard to marital risk.

From a statistical perspective, the marital dissolution risk of a woman receiving welfare and a wealthy promiscuous educated woman is about the same.

(This post was revised at 20:00 Australian Eastern Standard Time)

Defining Slut: More Data.

Several commentators have mentioned that socioeconomic/intelligence factors may explain the workings of this graph.

Whilst I did not think socioeconomic factors would alter things much, I could not prove it. Fortunately the source of this information has been found, (Thanks Leah!) and what's below is taken from it.


As you can see, socioeconomic factors don't play any major role in the number count. Furthermore, intelligence--measured imperfectly by its proxy education--seems to have a small effect. Highly educated and affluent white girls seem to be doing their fair share of the heavy lifting. Must be those Law/arts majors.

The paper from which this data is from can be found here. There is literally loads and loads of information in it.

The 2002 data is here and pretty much confirms the 1995 findings. Table 11, page 29 for those interested.

With regard to the 1995 data, there is a flaw in the Heritage Foundation's methodology. Apparently Married= Married+ remarried. Approximately 9.3% of the Married group were remarriages. I suppose that's why the Heritage Foundation labeled the graph, Stable Marriages instead of First Marriages. Anyway, what this does is artificially elevates that stable marriage rate of the 2 or more partner group, since about 15% of the marriages are remarriages.
It also dilutes the 1 partner group falsely by about 3% making the probability of stable marriage lower than what it is in reality.

I've got to admit that whilst I thought promiscuous women were less safe bets, I never imagined that the effect would kick in after so few partners.

It's actually spurred me to do a bit of a non systemic literature search and the data which I have found by other independent researchers seems to point in the same direction. I'll hopefully put up a post in the next few weeks when time avails.

This has all been rather profoundly depressing. Based upon the data, the current "hook up" culture is likely to produce a social disaster never before seen in the West. We are facing a social apocalypse. Society is going to implode.

The Foundations of Conservatism: The Mind's Understanding of Reality

Now for some conceptual art.

As mentioned before, Conservatives believe that reality is composed of two parts. That which is perceptible and that which is not. We can draw a diagram which illustrates the conservative conception of reality as follows:


The green area is perceptible reality--stuff that we detect through our senses--and the blue is non-perceptible reality. Stuff that's out there but we can't directly sense. The yellow area represents an ontological plane of non-reality; that is of things that don't exist(propositions which are false).

In the conservative scheme of things, the mind sits between the two planes and is able to know elements of both, even if the mind does not understand. That is, the mind has a capability to grasp both empirical and non-empirical reality, (I'm going to keep this simple for the moment and ignore the fact that the mind can also grasp falsehood. Imagine little yellow circles in the white one.)


Now, note the black line in the blue area that separates the white circle, that represents a "Sense barrier". By sense barrier, what I mean is that stuff on the other side of it--real stuff that exists--is not directly accessible by our senses. The important part about this is that the mind is capable of knowing whats on the "other side" but there is no way to physically perceive it and hence test it scientifically. ( I don't care if you don't believe it, just go with it.) We'll get to the importance of this later on. Ancient Roman, Greek, Hindu, Jewish, Chinese, Sumerian, Viking, i.e Traditional cultures, all had this view of reality. It's only in modern times that man has deviated from this vision.

Now the great revolution in human thought came about through the scientific method. Here theories were tested by sense observation and either validated or rejected. The "hard core" proponents of the scientific method insisted that the only valid knowledge was knowledge derived and verified by sense experience. Their ontological understanding of the hard core empiricists was as follows:

The strict empiricists basically said that since we can't test what's beyond the sense barrier, it either:a) Irrelevant.
b) Not worth knowing.
c) There is nothing beyond the sense barrier.

Now before we diss Empiricism we must recognise its strengths. By forcing men to seek an explanation of natural phenomena without an appeal to "higher powers" men were forced to look for answers amongst the perceptible world. Let's just say that the results produced by the scientific method were spectacular and the results justified the belief, and a corresponding contempt for knowledge that was not derived from it. Furthermore, as science progressed, physical phenomena were found to have to rational explanations which did not require the invocation of God. Theistic explanations gave way to scientific ones and this of course led to a certain optimism that everything could be explained by science.

Believers of empiricism can be thought of having a continuum of opinions of what lays beyond the sense barrier. The strict empiricists(Atheists) believe that nothing exists. The weak empiricists (Agnostics) believe that something may exist but as we cannot empirically verify it and therefore the knowledge is either irrelevant or the subject of personal opinion.

The strict empiricists basically declare that anything that was beyond the sense barrier was not valid knowledge, as it cannot be empirically verified. According to their view, any such "knowledge" was at best second rate and at worst blind superstition.

Now, the first thing to consider is by accepting the strict empirical view of reality a man separates himself for the bulk of traditional humanity by positing a conception of reality which is at odds with the rest of man. From an empirical epistemological point of view religion belongs either to the second rate knowledge or superstitious category. Therefore its thrown out of the window as a practical knowledge.

However then a real life practical problem arises. Humans are interpersonal beings that relate to each other through behaviour, and behaviour implies imperatives. i.e. How to behave? Empirical observation does not give us a guide on this matter. Since empirical observation can show us how best to achieve our goals but it cannot give us those goals in the first place.

The traditionalist view was that the knowledge of these goals came from the non-empirical realm something the empiricists rejected. They had to place the locus of these goals in the mind or self. Morality becomes self-generated or self-optimised. Here are the seeds of moral relativism.

Thirdly, the strict empiricist has to have a negative opinion of religion, because the type of knowledge the religion provides is the type of knowledge he does not want. More importantly he will be hostile towards religion.

Now it needs to be understood that Conservatism is not opposed to the empirical method, it's opposed to the empirical ontology, an ontology which is profoundly anti-conservative. On the other hand, many strict empiricists are hostile to Conservatism because conservative moral claims--derived from non-empirical reality--are usually hostile to some of their personal claims. As I've said before, strict atheism is intrinsically unconservative because atheists deny the realm of reality from which Conservatives derive valid knowledge. Saying that, however, many atheists can with sufficient intellectual honesty and intellectual strength and exertion arrive at a knowledge of "Natural Law" and therefore appear "conservative" without a belief in any non-empirical reality. (Something a complete idiot can efficiently arrive at simply by having faith) A case in point is Heather McDonald.

These type of Conservatives are very conservative, except that they're not.

The minimum ontological vision that a man can possess and still be considered conservative is agnosticism, though I equivocate on this issue and I'm capable of being convinced otherwise.

The Foundations of Conservatism: The Nature of Reality

The next great dividing line separating the Conservatives from the rest concerns an understanding of the nature of reality. Conservatives believe that while there is an objective reality which is extrinsic to their perception, not all of this reality is perceptible. In other words, there is a realm of existence which we cannot access directly with our senses. It is in this realm where stuff like universals, souls, gods and sky pixies of various types inhabit. With the exception of modern man, nearly all of the peoples that have ever lived believed that reality comprised an earthly component and a heavenly one. Be that Nirvana, Valhalla, Penglai Shan, Heaven, Aukumea, etc.

I suppose the minimum belief that a man can have and still be called a Conservative is agnosticism. Strict Empiricism, that is the denial of any plane of reality outside that which accessible by the senses separates a man from the conservative fold.

The importance of this "plane of non- perceptible reality" is that from it arise many of the transcendental imperatives by which a man must live his life. Ought can't be derived from is from the earthly plane but can be derived from from the transcedental one.

Lie Detectors.

Interesting article Here.

Must be the social processor at work.

The Foundations of Conservatism. Reality.

The Conservative Mind functions with several metaphysical assumptions.

These are:

1) There is such a thing as reality. Reality is that which exists.
2) Reality is extrinsic to our perception of it. In other words, just because we don't know about something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
3) Our minds are able to apprehend and misapprehend reality.
4) If our knowledge of reality is in conflict with some other aspect of our knowledge of it then we know that our understanding of reality is flawed.
5) Our happiness depends on a full understanding of reality.
6)Reality matters, since ignoring it leads to unhappiness.

Re-read The Metaphysics of Conservatism.

Holders of this view included the Titans of Classical thought, Plato, Socrates and Aristotle. The Roman Catholic Church and until recently, most of the mainline Christian Churches. Critical and Naive Realists.

Some people who oppose this view are Post-Modernists, Philosophical Relativists, Phenomenonists, holders of the Coherence Theory of Truth, and Existentialists.

( Intellectual pathology is the precursor of social pathology. A lot of the social pathology of the modern world has come about from the successful propagation of the ideas of this second group. Don't believe me? Homework task: Check out the adherents of this second group of ideas. The rot becomes apparent early on.)


That's all for today.

Defining Slut. 2

Several commentators have raised objections to the study mentioned in the previous post claiming that it was methodologically flawed due to the inability to control for confounding variables, bias and so on. I will admit that the study does have some flaws but basically the conclusions are valid.

Firstly, the study involved 10,000 women and the data was collected by the CDC, good sample size and a non-partisan credible collection agency. Tick.

Secondly, the study didn't control for socio-economic and demographic variables. This would be a legitimate criticism is a particular community chosen for study was non representative of the group. However the sample group was meant to be representative of the entire U.S. age cohort. Therefore, many of the biases, would in reality cancel each other out to produce a picture of the "average". Whilst this does not give us an absolute guide to a particular persons behaviour it give us practical rules of thumb by which we understand the real world and navigate society and base our expectations. The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the brave but its the way to bet. The "pure" risk of promiscuity is of academic interest only. We marry real people.

What we have here is statistical purists objecting to the application of the average to the particular. A complaint of limited relevance.

Thirdly, objections centered around the definition of stable marriage:
A stable marriage was defined as a woman over 30, who had been married for five or more years at the time of marriage. Basically who was excluded from the study was any woman less than 30 and any woman over 30 with less than 5 years of marriage. As their marriages were of indeterminate stability. Their data was excluded from the statistical analysis. This definition is reasonable as:

1) Most women want to be in a stable marriage by their 30's. The mean age of marriage in the U.S. when the study was done was 25, so this seems a reasonable end point.
2) A woman divorced before 30 was by this definition not in a stable marriage, I agree.
3) A 5 year definition of stability seems pretty lax, but I'd hate to see the figures if the standards were raised. Even with these lax standards the promiscuous can't make the grade.

However the study has a systemic bias. If a woman had multiple short flings in her youth but then entered a stable marriage she was included in the study. It's important to realise just how important this definition is. By keeping the age of stable marriage above thirty, the study gave the woman a chance to be wild whilst young and then monogamous. Example: A woman who had 12 partners prior to 24 and then found the "one" would still be considered as being in a stable relationship when she was thirty. It appears that there was systemic bias to minimise the effect of youth promiscuity in this study. The systemic bias of the study would have supported the common trope of the promiscuous college student settling down to be a good mother, yet even in a study that is designed in their favour they fail.

It appears that the Heritage Foundation wanted to give the promiscuous every chance to succeed in their relationships.

Also keep in mind that there are two aspects to being in a stable marriage, they are forming a stable marriage and then keeping a marriage. This is why the "sexually active but in not in a relationship" group were included. The presumption here being that women between 30-45 wants to enter a stable relationship. It appears a common sense assumption and it appears from the study that the promiscuous have problems with both. Whilst the relatively chaste seem to have better prospects.

Of course there are some women who don't want to get married and who are sexually active and these are likely to skew the stats. However, despite the "Girrrl Power" idolisation of Kim Catrall, nearly all women want a "Mr Big". The number wanting otherwise is likely to be small and insignificant. The methodology of the study is sound.

Finally, on speculative note, these two graphs raise important questions:

1) Whats going on in young girls between 12 and 18?


It appears that the turnover rate seems to stabilise 19-20 age group. Does pre-marital sex before 18 cause some problem with bonding? I'm not saying it does but it would be something worth further investigating. Does a permissive adolescence impair their ability to form long term mates? I'm not making a statement here, just wondering.

Defining Slut.

The other day I was perusing the internet and ran across a post at Hooking Up Smart called, The Essential Truth of Female Promiscuity. In the post Susan Walsh quotes a study linking promiscuity with marital instability. The article she links to is actually another article quoting the study in question. After a bit of hunting around I was able to locate the actual study. The study itself called, The Harmful Effects of Early Sexual Activity and Multiple Sexual Partners Among Women by R Rector et al, 2003, and it's a real eye opener. I'm surprised more mention of it has not been made amongst the right/conserve-o-sphere. The study is based on a survey of 10,000 women done in 1995 by the Center for Diseases Control.

Men have generally viewed female promiscuity in a negative light. Admittedly whilst some men don't care, the majority view a woman's promiscuity negatively in proportion to her partner count. It's fascinating if one "Googles" the subject, just how many men--both Conservative and Liberal--can't "get over " a woman's partner count. Liberal men indoctrinated in "Girrl power" seem to be perplexed as to why these negative emotions are aroused in them despite their own beliefs.

The Evo-bio crowd will probably argue that the aversion has been developed by evolution as a mechanism to avoid cuckoldry, unfaithfulness etc. I've always had the intuition that promiscuity seemed to injure "Love" in some way, furthermore the type of men a woman slept with revealed in many ways the type of woman she is. The woman who chose patently bad suitors was a woman lacking in good judgment and refinement; the essential qualities of femininity. Lacking femininity, a woman is a turn-off.

Slut, of course, is the term applied to a promiscuous women and debates rage as to what number of partners earns the title. I think this is the wrong way of looking at the problem. The real danger of a promiscuous woman is that she will be unfaithful, so the definition should be really centered around that concept. i.e How many sexual partners does a woman need to have before she becomes high risk marriage material? The study quoted above asked the question.























Now, Stable Marriage was defined as being currently married for greater than 5 years. It's a pretty non-demanding definition of stable. Now I thought that I was quite a cynical and judgmental bastard but I never expected these figures.

The virgin bride has an 80+ percent chance of having a stable marriage. Once a woman has had more than one non-marital sexual partner the probability of her having a stable marriage drops to 54%, that's almost a 50-50 chance of divorce. The statistical threshold is crossed--in other words, your betting on failure--once a woman has had two non-marital partners. Given that the aim of the game is to avoid divorce, from a marital stability point of view, a woman becomes a slut once she has had more than two non-marital partners. It's not my opinion, it's probability.

Any man, entering marriage, has a responsibility to his children to try to attempt to ensure the woman he marries is stable marriage material. The fact is that once a woman has had two or more extra-marital partners she become statistically a bad potential mother.

Given that the average female partner count has now crept up to four, we are facing a social apocalypse.

Organic Truth.

One of the ideas that Jim Kalb puts forward to justify the epistemological validity of tradition, is because traditions are the "organic" products of society, the ideas and habits being shaped over time and modified towards a certain veracity. Ideas, practices and relationships which have stood the test of time must have something going for them if human beings have adopted them for prolonged periods. There must be some truth to them which we shouldn't ignore because these traditions aren't just "ingrained habits" rather practices which are symbiotic with the human condition and therefore true.

I think Mr Kalb is onto something here but where I think he errs is taking the existence of tradition as proof of some kind of truth.

If we take three societies, Pre-Modern Christianity, Islam, and Judaism we find that whilst all three are traditional societies, all three have different ideas on Marriage. The Christian(Catholic) tradition permits marriage but bans divorce. The Judaic, permits marriage but permits divorce and the Islamic permits multiple wives and permits divorce All three traditions have stood the test of time so I suppose that all three conceptions of marriage must be right. Or not.

Tradition here gives us no guide at all as to how to view marriage since the traditional views are competing and mutually exclusive, their only commonality being that marriage is an relationship between husband and wife. And then this comes along.

It seems tradition can't even agree to that simple proposition. Tradition then, as a sort of knowledge which is organically intertwined with the human condition seems to give conflicting views on even some of the most basic human institutions. Tradition seems to provide for multiple "truths".

One thing I do agree with Mr Kalb is that many of the traditions that have developed across the world are indeed more "human" than the modernist ideologies that wish to replace them. The fact that Islam or Hinduism have produced stable cultures that have lasted over a thousand years means that there must be something in them that doesn't rub up against human nature in such a way to assure the self destruction of these societies.

Jim Kalb got unfairly argued with in this exchange over at What's Wrong With the World. I don't think that Mr Kalb was in any way trying to defend or excuse the evils of Islam what he was trying to say that human beings have had a successful and working relationship with Islam for over a 1000 years and therefore the tradition of Islam must, at least, not be against human nature completely. I agree with Mr Kalb.

The problem is though, from a Christian perspective though, is Islam has many faults which are incompatible with Christian truth. And these faults have--like the good traditions--persisted for thousands of years. The fact that limited polygamy has existed in Islam for over a thousand years mean that polygamy is right? Or Sati?

The sad fact is that human beings can at times be a barbarous lot, barbarous for a long period of time and bad customs can become ingrained into a society. The fact that a society is able to function and thrive for a long periods of time with bad traditions does not confer onto the traditions legitimacy rather the fact is that functional societies can operate quite successfully with a certain amount of "non self-destructive evil". The fact that an evil becomes custom or tradition does not make it right. Society's do not self purify over time ,rather what seems to happen is that tend to rot in their own corruption.

Rather, what the "organic truth" model of conservatism confers is not an objecetive knowledge of right or wrong but rather a sort of moral relativism, in which right or wrong is determined relative to the customs of society: It's self-referential.

Tradition, in the end, is not about what is right or wrong, it's about what people are happy to adopt and become accustomed to, so in a sense tradition is naturally co- dependent upon a human dimension, but that human dimension is flawed in its capacity for evil. The result being that the veneration of tradition leads to the same place as modernism-- the measure is man, not right or wrong.

Thoughts on the Conservatism of Jim Kalb.

I have great respect for commentator Thursday and he has recommended that I have read of Jim Kalb's works. I'm pressed for time and have other reading to catch up with, but I've had a browse of Mr Kalb's web presence and thought I would jot down a few of my thoughts.

If I had to distill Mr Kalb's thoughts into a phrase it would have to be the "authority of tradition". Whilst Mr Kalb does seem to acknowledge that reason and "truth" have some authority, tradition should be given the greatest weighting. The reason for this (as far as I can see) is that tradition contains the accumulated wisdom of a working society, and since societies are complex, veering far from the accumulated wisdom will cause societal dysfunction. This of course assumes that the society you already have is the society you want to keep.

The other factor present in Kalb's thought(similar to Oakeshott's)is that change should be incremental. Oakeshott justifies this on the basis of the Conservative temperament, Kalb on what essentially appears to be prudential criteria.

The other idea I sense in his thoughts is that individual insights into the nature of "truth" have less a claim that of a society's pre-existing opinions: The groupthink of tradition has a greater claim that the insight of one.

Finally, while Kalb acknowledges the existence of a truth, and recognises that its universal accessibility is difficult, its claims--as a practical measure--are subordinated to the authority of tradition. In the end, an unjust working society has greater claim to legitimacy and hence obedience than a potentially just one. (which is likely to end up dysfunctional) This appears to be a pragmatic measure.

It would appear that Kalb views society almost as an organism undergoing evolution. The organism itself an evolving product of its interaction with the environment and culture in which it finds itself. Societal stability is ensured by the insistence of gradual change, the assumption being that gradual change--as opposed to rapid--ensures the survival of the societal organism. Societies which are the result of such a process can be considered traditional. Islamic, Chinese and pre-Englightment Christian could certainly be considered as such.

Kalb's rationale for his support of traditional societies seems to be explained in the following reply to a commentator over at 2Blowhards(Reply to Mr. Kinahan) :

I suppose what I'm trying to work toward, to speak very grandly, is an inclusive understanding of human reason -- the constellation of things by which we understand the world and make sensible decisions -- that takes our limitations seriously and so recognizes that there are basic truths we need but can't fully grasp and must therefore be approached from the standpoint of tradition. So my argument is not with reason in all its aspects but with the modernist project of hyperrationality. Since I reject that project I view tradition as authoritative -- as something that knows more than I do, especially about things like the nature of the good life -- and not as an interesting array of possibilities that I can choose from as I please or experts advise. That makes me a conservative.

I don't deny that one aspect of tradition can come in conflict with others and force us to choose or that there are important aspects of human reason that have considerable autonomy with respect to tradition and can lead us to modify or break with some aspects of it. The ultimate concern after all is with the good, beautiful and true rather than tradition itself. There's no formula for recognizing and dealing with such cases though and they shouldn't be taken as the models on which we form our idea of how we normally should act.

(My bolding)

Executive summary:

The traditionalist man viewed the world differently than the modern man and was able to produce stable functioning societies. Stable societies are in themselves a good and complex things in themsevles reflecting a positive intermeshing between man and the environment. Because the principles that they are run on are proven to work, they have more authority than innovations.

Tradition "works" and therefore is good, innovation is liable to be bad. Tradition therefore takes precedence. Old is most probably right, new is most probably wrong. Conservatism is then in essence a pragmatic bias for the old, tried and tested.

OK, now an intellectual experiment. Suppose liberalism is able to produce a functional society. For example, there appears to be no let up of the North Korean regime and its quite possible that that with time, Communism could become the "traditional" culture of North Korea. Would Kalb's successors in the future be arguing that North Korean society should not be changed by virtue of the argument of tradition?

Indeed conflating the old with the good is profoundly anti-Christian. The Bible is full of stories of men who attempted to change society (prophets) even in the presence of long established custom. Jesus himself came to tear down the temple and rebuild it in three days: Hardly the attitude of a man who reverenced the old.

Indeed the Christian tradition has a quite simple method of societal change. When society is wrong, it is meant to change. That of course assumes a right and wrong and Christianity has handled that as well. It is true that the truth's of Christianity have sometimes been obscure, slavery for instance was seen as acceptable for quite a long time. But the emphasis on rationality bought on by the Enlightenment, the recognition of human rights, etc lead to a cultural re-examination of the question and the traditional understanding of society was found to be wrong. Slavery was banned.

Kalb's fundamental intellectual error is in conflating the old with the good. Just because the old was better does not mean that the old is good. It would appear that Kalb spends a lot of time explaining why the old is good. I will concede to Kalb however, that the older society seemed better at producing human happiness than the modern, still there were many people in traditional society that lived miserable and diseased lives simply by virtue of the way that the society was traditionally ordered.

Modernism, like Socialism, did not arise ex niliho, it was a faulty solution to the real problems of the times. Indeed, Tradition can be rightly considered the midwife of these intellectual beasts. The traditional fixation of pre-enlightenment society gave no means for the dissipation of rapidly building societal pressures. Indeed Kalb's "gradual change" became a like a sticky pressure cooker valve, unable to dissipate the forces building within it, the pressure building up faster than it could be relived until the structure was destroyed.

As any evolutionary biologist will tell you, a creature in order to survive needs to adapt to change, if that change is rapid, a creature has to change quickly to survive. Unable to do so, it is dead.

The printing press, Protestantism, increasing wealth, the beginnings of scientific knowledge and population expansion made a relatively rapid appearance(from a cultural perspective) and unleashed forces which required societal reorganization. The Traditionalist response: That's not the way we do things, we'll get back to you. Society moved on.

Kalb however is fundamentally right in that the difference between Moderns and Conservatives is in their epistemology. Kalb likes to call the moderns hyper-rational, where as I prefer to call them "empirically limited". The conservatives felt that valid knowledge could be garnered from faith and intuition;stuff that couldn't be empirically verified. The Moderns rejected this and thus the discontinuity with the old. The Moderns adopted a different epistemology and in many instances a different metaphysic.

In my opinion Kalb is not a Conservative he is a Traditionalist. Though I think he is a better man than his reasoning( a lot of his reasoning is good). The Conservative values the Good and True above all else, the Traditionalist the old. I've endeavored not to deliberately misstate his arguments. If I have I have my apologies and am quite willing to modify my views. Thursday is right, Kalb is the modern Burke, warts and all.

You Need to be Good Looking to Attract Hot Chicks.

Courtesy of the Daily Mail. Check out the Pictures.


BTW, when choosing a wife it's important to choose carefully.

What Conservatism Is.

From "What's Wrong With the World" by G.K. Chesterton:

Now the whole parable and purpose of these last pages, and indeed of all these pages, is this: to assert that we must instantly begin all over again, and begin at the other end. I begin with a little girl's hair. That I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the pride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is one of those adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every age and race. If other things are against it, other things must go down. If landlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and sciences must go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home: because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution. That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict's; no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred image; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.

G.K. Chesterton was the perhaps the greatest modern apologist for Christianity. The levity of his writing frequently disguised the profundity of his thought. Chesterton realised that at the 19th Century that there were many social ills. Society at that time had serious problems which needed to be solved and traditional solutions did not work. He recognised that the "progressives" were willing to change society, but in the wrong direction, whilst the traditionalists at the time did not want to change society at all.

Chesterton recognised that before any social change should take place an understanding of life and things in general needed to be made:

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good–” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.

Chesterton realised we needed to understand the "truth" of the matter before we proceeded with societal change. While Chesterton respected tradition (the democracy of the dead) he respected truth more. The aim of man and society was to live "rightly" and with that implied the concept of right and wrong.

Nothing more strangely indicates an enormous and silent evil of modern society than the extraordinary use which is made nowadays of the word "orthodox." In former days the heretic was proud of not being a heretic. It was the kingdoms of the world and the police and the judges who were heretics. He was orthodox. He had no pride in having rebelled against them; they had rebelled against him. The armies with their cruel security, the kings with their cold faces, the decorous processes of State, the reasonable processes of law--all these like sheep had gone astray. The man was proud of being orthodox, was proud of being right. If he stood alone in a howling wilderness he was more than a man; he was a church. He was the centre of the universe; it was round him that the stars swung. All the tortures torn out of forgotten hells could not make him admit that he was heretical. But a few modern phrases have made him boast of it. He says, with a conscious laugh, "I suppose I am very heretical," and looks round for applause. The word "heresy" not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word "orthodoxy" not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing, and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right. For obviously a man ought to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical. The Bohemian, with a red tie, ought to pique himself on his orthodoxy. The dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that, whatever else he is, at least he is orthodox.

Therefore Conservatism is therefore the desire to live rightly, from which politics proceeds.
As "ought" can't be derived from is ultimately questions of right or wrong are religious questions. Therefore the Conservative view is premised on three things.

1) The belief in religion
2) The belief in right and wrong.
3) The desire to live according to those beliefs.

Over at James Kalb's there is an interesting paper up for discussion, Traditionalism and the American Order, which asserts that the American Revolution was the first Liberal Revolution and from a traditionalist view point it is. The thing about traditionalism is, that a thing is liberal relative to the traditions you want to preserve. And if you're a European Monarchist, then the revolution was decidedly liberal, on the other hand if you're a traditionalist Marxist, it was a manifestation of bourgeoisie conservatism.

Chesterton would have had none of this rubbish. For Him, the founding fathers were convinced that they were doing God's work:

The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed. America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism. and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things.

It satisfies the test of Conservatism. It changed the world, but it changed it rightly.

What Conservatism Isn't.

2Blowhards is shutting up shop. Which is a shame since it was one of the best culture blogs out there. I must of been one of the last to know but Michael Blowhard's real name is Ray Sawhill. I think he has a great blog and recommend that you visit it. I don't agree with all of his views but his opinions are intelligent and informed unlike 99% of the blogosphere.

Whilst browsing his blog I stumbled upon a piece by Michael Oakeshott entitled, "On Being Conservative". I had briefly skimmed upon some of Oakeshott's writings in the past but they failed to capture my imagination, but I put in the effort on this piece and sadly, it was wanting.

Oakeshott's contention is that Conservatism is a disposition, a resistance to change. Valuing things for the way things are and and as such not wanting to meddle with them. Basically Oakeshott's reiterates the view of the Progressives, that conservatives are people who unthinkingly resist change by virtue of their temperament. They are the treacle in societies progress; the dead weight inhibiting change. Timidity and anxiety their virtues.

Bullshit.

And this is all the more depressing that this opinion comes from a man who was professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics. If conservatism is "Intellectually light" its because of rubbish such as this.

Oakeshott's conservatism is by nature "value light", in that man can have a conservative disposition in all sorts of social political circumstances and by his definition called a conservative. According to Oakeshott's view, an elderly British colonel tending his roses and Russian bureaucrat in the Brezhnev Soviet union (a time when the communists were loathe to change anything) could both be considered " Conservative". Nazi's who resisted policy changes by the party could also be considered " Conservative". What matters is not what you believe in, but on how prepared you are to change. Stupid people, who take a long while grasping new Ideas could then be considered de-facto conservatives.

Who's side is he on?

Firstly and foremostly, Conservatism is not a disposition: it is a weltanschauung, a world view, a metaphysical system. Conservatism is not a resistive disposition, rather it is a metaphysical system which believes that there is a reality, truth or good which man bases his life on. Be that Shiva, Jesus, Allah, Science etc.

Conservatives of all stripes have ideas on what constitutes the good. And in the words of an Australian commercial, "When your on a good thing, stick to it". We don't resist change for the sake of it, rather change is resisted when thing are changed for the worse. And frankly over the last 100 years or so a lot of the social changes have not been for the best.

Conservative are right to resist change when it is from good to bad, but they're moronic if they resist change which is an improvement on the bad, something people disposed to reject change are liable to do. In a sick or corrupt society, it's the Conservatives which are the radicals agitating for change, wanting to change the way things are to the way things should be.

Sometimes I really despair.