blatham wrote:
How is that different from a larger group, other than that it becomes more difficult, perhaps, to establish it so?
thomas wrote:
Quote:Because the larger your group gets, the greater the differences inside the group become, relative to the differences between the group and the rest of the world. For example, a few days back, I started making a list of conservative think tanks, sorted by the size of their budget, and probed their stand on gay marriage by searching their website for the term "gay marriage". I didn't finish the project because it ended up consuming more time than I was willing to put in. But what I did see was that conservative American think tanks publish opinions as diverse as America as a whole.
Official positions range from the Cato Institute's, which is rabidly pro-gay-marriage on freedom-of-contract grounds, to that of the Family Research Council, which literally stops just short of the claim that allowing gay marriage would risk bringing about The Flood again. In between, you have the American Enterprise Institute, which has no definite position; it thinks the states should just experiment in either direction and see what happens. Also in-between is the official position of the Heritage Foundation, which is definitely anti-gay-marriage but just as definitely not homophobic. I find it very hard to see anything in this spectrum that would be coherent enough to be called a 'movement', and a 'homophobic' one at that.
Sure, larger sample = more variance = more complexity. But that's not a particularly relevant corner of this argument anyway.
You've done a bit of survey of right-leaning think tanks. You claim their positions on gay marriage/homosexuality seem comparable to that of the general public. Possibly accurate. But why did you bother with that exercise? Those aren't the groups in question.
There's nothing I've seen in the neoconservative literature, for example, that concerns itself particularly with homosexuality other than some personal opinions (bill kristol apparently doesn't like sex of any sort very much), or as it might fall out from their rejection of all things 60s including sexual liberalism, or as it may be seen as an element of Straussian 'virtue', or even in the differences between a libertarian perspective and a neoconservative perspective - the latter not so bound to minimalist governance and rather more willing to legislate traditionalist moral norms for functional reasons (along with 'virtue').
But we aren't talking about the broad conservative movement here. We are talking about a portion of it, a portion which is identifiable and as I've quoted above, they themselves do the identifying...'this is us, this is what we think, this is what we've done'.
Quote:blatham wrote:
Bernard Lewis, for example, will suggest that the west will be prudent to do A but not B when engaged with the Muslim world, because of broad and general cultural propensities or commonalities. Is all such understanding valueless and are all such sentences meaningless?
thomas wrote: Almost meaningless, I'm afraid. In reality, what he calls "the" muslim world is even less coherent than American conservatives are on the topic of gay marriage. We have been brought up with history books where such generalizations sounded important and insightful -- but the more I grow up, the more I see this rhetoric for the pompous pretension that it is.
I sympathize with you here, thomas. One of my history profs spent a full lecture trying to dissuade his young students to recognize the fallacy in understanding periods and movements as is done in the Time/Life Books schema..."The Dark Age ended and the Rennaissance began on tuesday april 22, 1438 in Genoa".
But you said 'almost' in your sentence. So even you, a numbers guy with a distinct logical positivist coloration to questions of what we can know and what has meaning, allow some room for sensible statements to be made. Clearly, I allow much more...sociology and anthropology frequently must deal with a greater degree of fogginess, with acceptance of probability as the necessary language we must speak with. But of course, so do actuaries...'teens are more likely to be dangerous drivers'.
Quote:blatham wrote:
I truly don't mean to bring this up as a diversion or red herring. If the community discussion is influenced by a deep taboo or cultural value (and that is surely the case here) which is not available for reflection, how does one proceed with discussion.
thomas wrote: One doesn't. One occasionally points out discreetly, as ehBeth did earlier in this thread, that some countries have gay marriage yet the sky isn't falling there. One repeats such hints from time to time,then waits as the taboo slowly dissolves. This is how the English overcame the Victorian taboo against speaking about underpants, and this is how most anti-gay Americans will eventually overcome their taboos against homosexuality. But rushing into gay marriage won't do much good, any more than a legal prohibition against using the word 'unspeakables' would have done in Victorian England.
On this, we disagree, both as to how social change comes about and as to why we might want to find ways to accelerate social change. Much social change has come about or been accelerated through activism, loud and bold. Sufferage, civil rights in the south, workers' rights, etc.
