Dissecting Orson Scott Card, part 2

by Yonmei

This post was originally written for my livejournal, and posted there on 3rd March 2004. My livejournal has since been suspended, and the post is no longer available. This series will continue: there are three more parts.

Part 1 is here, and this is so long that frankly I’m just going to assume that you’ve already read Part 1 dissecting this lying piece of bigotry (yes, I’m trying for a googlebomb) without trying to summarise it here, but I am going to summarise part 2 here, and here’s why: In part 1, I was able to confront OSC’s lies with facts. In part 3, where OSC gets really ugly, I’ll be able to do that again. In part 2, I admit, I’m basically meeting his opinions about civilisation with my opinions about civilisation. Honestly, you could just as well read the lj-cut text [bolded in this version] to find out what his opinions are – his arguments in part 3 will depend on them.

OSC says: Pleasure is bad: sex outside of marriage is bad: either/both will destroy civilisation

So long before the Massachusetts Supreme Court decided to play Humpty Dumpty, the American people had plunged into a terrible experiment on ourselves, guided only by the slogan of immaturity and barbarism: “If it feels good, do it!”

What OSC is claiming as a slogan of immaturity and barbarism is in fact the sign of civilisation itself. Any civilisation which produces more than enough to survive on will have at least some proportion of the population (usually the richest and most powerful – those who exist at the centre of the civilisation) who get to live life by the rule: “If it feels good, do it!” And most civilisations will include at least some time in each year when all, not just the richest and most powerful, will get to experience a time of “If it feels good, do it!” Whether it’s the Yuletide festival or the harvest celebrations, there will always be some time in the cycle when people get to enjoy themselves. And this is because (though in Part 1 OSC was arguing against it) pleasure is intrinsically a good and natural thing. We are hardwired so that if we do something and get pleasure by it, we’ll want to repeat it. (If we do something and it hurts, we’ll want to avoid it: but this part of our wetware is far less strongly wired than the pleasure principle. We evolved to learn by pleasure more than by pain.) OSC is arguing in Part 1 that people ought to marry monogamously other people with whom they are bound to have unpleasant and unsatisfactory sex lives. This, to my mind, is demonstrably – unnatural. We are not wired up to experience sex as something painful and displeasurable. We’re made to learn sex by pleasure. “If it feels good, do it!” is how our species evolved, and civilisations are built in order to expand our pleasures. When OSC argues that this is a new and disastrous experiment for the US, what I think he means is that it’s very new that so many in any civilisation should have access to so many pleasures and so much freedom to choose between them. The US is a rich society: it’s 7% of the world’s population and uses 20% of the world’s resources. It’s nothing new that the rich should have access to more pleasures and more time and more freedom than the poor: but if you check out the Global Rich List you will find that the poorest people in the US (or the UK) are still in the top 15% richest people on Earth.

Civilization depends on people deliberately choosing not to do many things that feel good at the time, in order to accomplish more important, larger purposes. Having an affair; breaking up a marriage; oh, those can feel completely justified and the reasons very important at the time.

Complete garbage. OSC elides from one idea to the next. He could make a case for world civilisation being dependent on people resisting immediate pleasure for the sake of a long-term good – in fact, most civilisations are dependent on 99% of the population being compelled by poverty to do just that, while the top 1% take their pleasures as they please. You could argue that it would be only right to be more egalitarian: the population of the US ought to resist the immediate pleasure of cheap petrol, cheap imported food, all dependent on the peasants round the world barely scraping a living, in order to achieve the long term good of a fair share for all. But – and it’s a big, big but – this has nothing to do with people having affairs. For the most part (it depends how technological your sex life is) sexual pleasure is the most ecologically sound and unexploitative of pleasures. (You don’t even need another person to give yourself sexual pleasure…) Having an affair and breaking off a marriage may be reprehensible, but if so it’s so on a personal level, not on a level that will “damage civilisation”. Civilisation, indeed, could be said to be the level of social achievement at which breaking up a relationship is damaging only on a personal level. (If we consider a couple with two children living in the Arctic in midwinter, one hundred and fifty miles from the nearest town, and both are needed by both the children and by each other as much as the emperor penguin egg needs both its parents – then any breakup of the relationship cannot occur until the family moves to civilisation. Because two adults looking after two children do not, all by themselves, constitute civilisation.)

OSC says: children are important and the longest-surviving cultures depend on monogamy to ensure that everyone has children

But society has a vital stake in child-rearing; and children have a vital stake in society.

Exactly. Because “society” is the human basis of civilisation: society enables children to survive without their parents, and society is dependent on continuous generations of people growing up and working to maintain society.

Monogamous marriage is by far the most effective foundation for a civilization.

*snort* Apparently OSC has a degree in social anthropology from Notre Dame. You have to wonder at it, though, when he comes out with statements like this one. What did they teach him? Or did he just forget it all as soon as he left? This statement is utter nonsense.

It provides most males an opportunity to mate (polygamous systems always result in surplus males that have no reproductive stake in society); it provides most females an opportunity to have a mate who is exclusively devoted to her.

Actually, polygamous systems are mostly set up in recognition of the fact that there tend to be more adult females than males in human cultures, especially when war is common and with primitive medicine. A woman is more likely to survive childbirth than a man is to survive war. As OSC must know, Mohammad instituted polygamy in Islam as a means of providing for widows and orphans: hence the rule that a man could have up to four wives only if he could support them. In cultures where more men survive to adulthood than women, polyandry (shared husbands) is known to occur.

Those who are successful in mating are the ones who will have the strongest loyalty to the social order; so the system that provides reproductive success to the largest number is the system that will be most likely to keep a civilization alive.

*snort* Let’s just offer one example, shall we? The Australian Aborigines have what is literally the oldest continuous civilisation on earth: and yes, they practice polygamy. OSC probably thinks (if he thinks at all) that just because it’s worked for them for 1250 generations or so it’s no guarantee of long-term success. He would doubtless say the same for the ancient civilisations of Egypt and of China (a mere four thousand years or so of history, nothing on the Aboriginal scale, but still quite impressive when you compare it to the history of Western civilisation where monogamy has been practiced).

Monogamy depends on the vast majority of society both openly and privately obeying the rules.

Depends how OSC is defining monogamy. If he means the state in which no one has sex with anyone other than their married partner (and recall that in Part 1, OSC advocated that people who are attracted only to the same sex should marry people of the opposite sex) then his definition is tautologous: if people are having sex outwith their partnership, it’s not monogamy. But a far commoner setup, throughout most of Western civilisation, has been the public presumption of monogamy, but privately – “if it feels good, do it!”. While some people may have been monogamous, practically speaking, we know that many people might have been married but certainly weren’t faithful.

OSC says: men naturally want to have sex and women naturally don’t have any choice about it; only civilisation protects women from men’s natural wants

Since the natural reproductive strategy for males is to mate with every likely female at every opportunity, males who are not restrained by social pressure and expectations will soon devolve into a sort of Clintonesque chaos, where every man takes what he can get.

OSC makes the mistake of calling on “nature”, and implying that men (but, presumably, not women) are driven by their reproductive strategy. If we look at our nearest relatives in nature, bonobo chimpanzees, we find that the “natural” thing for both males and females is to have sex as often as possible, both heterosexually and homosexually, without regard for incest or age, as a form of social lubrication. (Pun intended.) OSC is arguing in the wrong direction. Remember what I said earlier? We’re wetwired to do things because we get pleasure out of them. We get pleasure out of having sex: this is evolution’s sneaky trick to get us to have sex to make babies, but it doesn’t mean that we’re driven by our “reproductive needs”: it’s a two-step process, not a one-step. Bonobos have sex not because they’re “driven” to do it by their “reproductive needs”, but because they’ve learned to live in social groups by giving each other pleasure. And that is the natural thing for us: to give each other pleasure. To engage pleasurably and sociably with each other. Personally, when I meet with my friends, I’d rather drink coffee/eat bagels than have a quick orgy, but that’s because we’ve developed all of these sophisticated methods of giving each other pleasure as social lubrication (bagels, coffee, cocktails, chocolate, watching Bridget Jones’ Diary). But the principle is the same. We’re bonobos: we’re not baboons. We get together with pleasure, not with pain. OSC is trying to claim that if there is no one strict set of rules restricting men each to one partner and one partner only, men will run riot in an orgy of rape and/or casual seduction. (I assume this is what the snide comment about “Clintonesque” is meant to imply.) He doesn’t seem to believe that women have any volition in selecting sexual partners at all: plainly, he’s never read Darwin. (Charles Darwin hypothesised, in 1871, that many instances of apparently-pointless sexual differentiation could be directly explained by females choosing the males they found sexually attractive. This hypothesis has been satisfactorily demonstrated in lab conditions.) So OSC’s assertion that only males have sexual volition is (possibly) true in his specific culture, that of American Mormons, but is neither true in nature (where the trend is generally that males compete, females choose), nor universally true in human cultures. OSC’s primary assertion that only “social pressure and expectation” keep males from behaving like male bonobos may actually be so: but what he’s missing is that “social pressure and expectations” come in many forms – indeed, I assume that he is being deliberately misleading, rather than just plain ignorant. If it needs to be spelt out: No, expectations of monogamous marriage (nor monogamous marriage itself) does not prevent seduction or rape. (To claim that it does seems vilely irresponsible to me, but maybe that’s just me.) Yes, social pressure (in many forms) can make seduction mutually agreeable rather than a form of sexual harassment. Rape is a matter of male ego, whether against other males or against females, not a matter of sexual need.

OSC says: Women can’t and shouldn’t trust men not to run riot unless men know they’ll be punished: civilisation is the only way to do this.

Civilization Is Rooted in Reproductive Security. There is a very complex balance in maintaining a monogamous society, with plenty of lapses and exceptions and mechanisms to cope with the natural barbaric impulses of the male mating drive. There is always room to tolerate a small and covert number of exceptions to the rule.

Again, OSC is trying to claim that only men have volition in sex: women apparently don’t have a “mating drive” and are not subject to “natural barbaric impulses”. (What this amounts to, however, is that more privileged people enjoy more of civilisation’s privileges: and men have traditionally been the privileged sex.) As I said earlier: OSC’s objection is that too many people in the US now have the status of being rich enough to practice “if it feels good, do it!” – an all-year-round privilege that only the very wealthiest get to enjoy.

But the rule must be largely observed, and must be seen to be observed even more than it actually is. If trust between the sexes breaks down, then males who are able will revert to the broadcast strategy of reproduction, while females will begin to compete for males who already have female mates. It is a reproductive free-for-all.

Here again OSC is confusing “trust between the sexes” with monogamy, declared or actual. A woman who is legally married to a man and to another woman may have the most complete trust and confidence in her husband and her co-wife. (Or not.) “Poly” is sometimes used to excuse all manner of unfaithfulness: but a woman with two husbands, legally married or not, may have as much trust and confidence in her husbands, and they with each other and their wife, as any monogamously-married couple. And speaking from my own experience, I have two (perhaps three) close male friends (and one more who is now dead) in whom I have complete trust and confidence. And absolutely no wish to have sex with any of them. Generally speaking, while some men (and some of them, yes, “monogamously” married) regard a lesbian as a sexual challenge, I know rather a lot of men in whom I am able to have trust and confidence that they won’t (ahem) “revert to the broadcast strategy of reproduction” either with me or with women generally. Conversely, I know straight women whom I don’t think trust any man as much as I can trust a couple of my oldest friends: not even, sometimes, their own partners. And it has nothing to do with whether their partners are sexually monogamous with them or not. Trust between the sexes is not a matter of sexual monogamy: it’s about freedom from fear. That women are taught to fear men is a function not of non-monogamy but of misogynistic violence.

OSC says: Civilisation is unnatural: we all have to live in a state of suppressed sexual desire

Civilization requires the suppression of natural impulses that would break down the social order. Civilization thrives only when most members can be persuaded to behave unnaturally, and when those who don’t follow the rules are censured in a meaningful way.

OSC is assuming that our natural impulses are bad, or at least working against the “social order”. This is not so. Our “natural impulses” are aimed towards getting pleasure and giving pleasure to others. Civilisation is a structure built up to enable us to satisfy our natural impulses: to create luxurious space in which we are not constantly struggling for survival. We have a natural impulse to breathe: if we lived in a giant globe of water in space where the only air available was bubbles that had to be trapped and caged around our faces, civilisation would consist of getting enough air together in order to be able to spend some time each day not struggling for each breath. As we live in a world where air is free, our next most imperative natural impulses – to satisfy our thirst and our hunger – are the ones that primarily control civilisation. OSC is overlooking this, because it’s a given for him: he lives in a culture (most of us do, in Northern Europe or North America) where having enough to drink each day to quench your thirst is a given. Most people in North America or in Northern Europe don’t spend a lot of time worrying that they’re going to starve to death. The civilisation that ensures most of us never have to worry about satisfying those natural impulses has been around for quite a while. Depending on the climate, there’s also a natural impulse to keep warm or to avoid getting overheated. In Saudi Arabia, the clerics claim that civilisation depends on women suppressing the natural impulse not to get overheated in a very hot climate. Those who do not conform to this suppression of their natural impulses are indeed “censured in a meaningful way”. How many people would care to claim that civilisation will fall in Saudi Arabia if women go out without their burqas? Or that the men who are forcing Iraqi women into burqas are acting to preserve civilisation in Iraq?

Just me, not OSC, speaking in defense of our natural instincts

OSC claims that US civilisation depends on men suppressing a natural impulse to be non-monogamous – or rather, given OSC’s earlier comments, to suppress “natural impulses” to forcibly seduce and rape any woman they can. No: what civilisation exists to protect, once the natural impulses to appease thirst and hunger have been satisfied, is freedom to experience natural pleasures. Sitting here, writing this, I am experiencing intense intellectual pleasure, with an enjoyable sloosh of vindictiveness, both deriving from the same source: I’m getting to take OSC’s ideas apart and show how silly they are. I would experience the same intellectual pleasure if I were taking someone’s good ideas apart: the additional enjoyment from vindictiveness comes from the facts that OSC’s ideas denigrate me and are extremely foolish and ill-informed. This is a natural pleasure: we are formed by evolution to be capable of intellectual thought, and we are formed by evolution to take pleasure in what we do. Thinking is natural for human beings. Enjoyment is natural for human beings. Vindictiveness is also natural for human beings: but while most species have very strong biological triggers to prevent excess of vindictiveness from causing intraspecies damage, our biological triggers are much, much weaker. What we have is civilisation. Human civilisation is our method of living together in groups: it is as natural to us as bonobo methods are to them. What civilisation depends on is not the suppression of natural instincts towards pleasure, but the suppression of much weaker natural instincts towards an agonic social structure. (Among primates, agonic social organisations depend on violence to rule by fear: hedonic social organisations are structured so that whoever is the best at showing off is the leader. Our closest relatives, chimps, are very definitely hedonic, and our natural instincts are, for the most part, very definitely hedonic.) OSC is claiming that US civilisation depends on the majority suppressing their hedonic instincts, if necessary by agonic means. The truth is just the reverse: human civilisation depends on the weaker impulse towards agonic rule being suppressed.

OSC says: Men only agree not to have sex with every one who attracts them, and women only agree not to have sex with the strongest man available, because they want their children to live to adulthood: civilisation is the means by which most children live to adulthood: the laws of marriage define a civilisation.

Why would men submit to rules that deprive them of the chance to satisfy their natural desire to mate with every attractive female? Why would women submit to rules that keep them from trying to mate with the strongest (richest, most physically imposing, etc.) male, just because he already has a wife?

Well, I hesitate to speak for men, not being one. But one reason why a man in a sexual relationship won’t have sex with everyone who attracts him is dead simple: if he does, it’s entirely possible that the person with whom he is in a sexual relationship won’t want to stay with him any more. People are more inclined to follow rules if it’s evident that the rules make life more agreeable. If I need to keep repeating this: this doesn’t necessarily mean monogamy. Nor does it necessarily mean conforming to a culture’s social expectations – not unless the social expectations are being enforced agonically on anyone who prefers not to conform. I hesitate to speak for all women, but I can certainly speak for myself. I have no natural impulse to wish to mate with “the strongest male”, however “strongest” is defined. Nor have I any such wish even if you switch over to “strongest female”. I have natural impulses about wishing to “mate” with women I’m attracted to. How I’m attracted to women, what attracts me about women, is my private affair: but I’m happy to say that I don’t conform either to OSC’s expectations about a woman’s “natural impulses” or (assuming he were going for the Havelock Ellis model of a lesbian) do I conform to his claims for male “natural impulses”. (Though since I’m happily childfree, OSC may feel that what I think is irrelevant.)

Because civilization provides the best odds for their children to live to adulthood.

Civilisation is not dependent on married people not having affairs. This cannot be said too often.

So even though civilized individuals can’t pursue the most obviously pleasurable and selfish (i.e., natural) strategies for reproduction, the fact is that they are far more likely to be successful at reproduction in a civilized society — whether they personally like the rules or not.

Civilisation is not dependent on married people not having affairs. This cannot… actually, I can’t believe how often I have to say this! Civilisation does create a useful structure for raising children safely to adulthood. Whether civilisation is a natural instinct for human beings, or simply the best method we have found for satisfying our natural impulses, the effect is still the same: civilisation works for us as a species because not only does it satisfy our natural impulses, the means it uses to do so (providing a surplus of food and water so that every waking minute isn’t spent struggling for survival but can be used for pleasure, too) mean that children born in civilisation are more likely to reach adulthood. So civilisation is evolutionarily advantageous for us as a species.

Civilizations that enforce rules of marriage that give most males and most females a chance to have children that live to reproduce in their turn are the civilizations that last the longest. It’s such an obvious principle that few civilizations have even attempted to flout it.

Except that the rules of marriage don’t inevitably control who gets to bear children by which father. This is such an obvious fact that I assume that OSC is hoping that the sheer obviousness of it will cause it to be overlooked. It’s only very recently that any man could be absolutely certain that he had in fact sired any child. Marriage rules in patriarchal societies were invariably focussed not on making sure that most men got to sire children and most women got to bear children, but on trying to enforce rules so that if a woman got pregnant the man who owned her (marriage rules in patriarchies tend to regard women as property) could be at least fairly certain that he was the father – or at the very least, have no public challenge from any other man.

Even if the political system changes, as long as the marriage rules remain intact, the civilization can go on.

Well, if OSC defines a civilisation by its rules about marriage, this is tautologously true, yes. But it would be absurd to do so: marriage rules change. In 1791, the rules of marriage in France were that it was for life unless a husband could prove his wife had committed adultery, in which case he could divorce her: and she could not divorce him. In 1793, this rules had changed: either partner could instigate divorce, and not only for adultery. Does this mean we should argue that one civilisation ended in 1792, and another began? How many civilisations have risen and fallen in the UK in the 20th century alone with every change in the marriage laws, if we measure civilisations by OSC’s standard? – it’s only a single civilisation if it maintains its rules on marriage unchanged. (Does this mean OSC believes there are two Mormon civilisations – one prescribing polygyny, one prescribing monogamy?)

OSC gets aspirational for everything except children’s rights

Balancing Family and Society There’s a lot of quid pro quo in civilization, though. Not all parents are good providers, for instance. So society, in one way or another, must provide for the children whose parents are either incapable or irresponsible.

This is a hopeful truth. The writings of many civilisations often include as an ideal the concept that children should not starve to death because their parents cannot provide for them: and as a civilisation becomes wealthier it also tends to be able to afford larger ideals.

Society must also step in to protect children from abusive adults; and the whole society must act in loco parentis, watching out for each other’s children, trusting that someone else is also watching out for their own.

Also a hopeful truth. There’s a natural instinct in us that leads us to protect children. But it can be suppressed. As OSC claims earlier, people can be made to believe that they must suppress their natural instincts or civilisation will fall. The history of child rearing is full of awful things that parents and those in loco parentis have done to children, both as a deliberate evil and as an intended good.

The degree of trust can be enormous. We send our children to school for an enormous portion of their childhood, trusting that the school will help civilize them while we parents devote more of our time to providing for them materially (or caring for younger children not yet in school).

This too is a hopeful ideal. This is neither the time nor the place to go into the history of education.

At the same time, parents recognize that non-parents are not as trustworthy caretakers.

Actually, and all too frequently, what the law permits is that parents look on their children as property – their property. I am not disagreeing with OSC’s aspiration that parents are ultimately responsible for their children’s well-being. But it is an aspiration, and not a given. Children aren’t property – to a certain extent they may be treated as if they were, both legally and actually, but children are independent human beings with their own minds and their own thoughts and their own self-will.

The school provides some aspects of civilization, but not others. Schools expect the parents to civilize their children in certain ways in order to take part safely with other children; parents expect to be left alone with some aspects of child-rearing, such as religion.

Hmmm… It’s getting late (I’m going to save this as a Private entry and do some reviewing tomorrow morning) or I’d have something to say about religion being an aspect of child-rearing, and religious indoctrination being something that parents expect to be left alone with. Though clearly OSC doesn’t want to look at that, children have minds of their own and a right to resist being indoctrinated: and a right to receive information that may help them resist. The US state that recently decreed that evolution can’t be taught in schools (Georgia, I think) was wrongly discriminating against freedom of religion for all children in Georgian schools, by compelling them to submit to an aspect of religious indoctrination.)

In other words, there are countless ways that parents and society at large are constantly negotiating to find the best balance between the parents’ natural desire to protect their children — their entrants in the reproductive lottery — and the civilization’s need to bring the greatest number of children, not just to adulthood, but to parenthood as committed members of the society who will teach their children to also be good citizens.

And, not at all incidentally, the ways in which society at large (which includes children) balances the right of children to be independent of their parents. Not very well, it often seems: but children have rights too. Children are not merely lottery tickets ensuring their parents’ genetic survival. If we were frogs, that’s all they would be, until they themselves became tadpoles (and how much volition does a tadpole have?).

I decided to stop here (it’s quarter to midnight) and catch some sleep. I’ll review this and post it as a public post in the morning. Part 3, which has in the original the exciting title of “America’s Anti-Family Experiment” will probably appear Thursday morning, assuming that any of you have stayed with me through this lengthy spiel.

To part 3.

- More blogging by Yonmei at http://yonmei.insanejournal.com

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