Question
What moral traditions and values do we have in the U.S. that are unnecessary and outmoded?
Answer
I think this question is deeply misguided and a reflection of a very basic conceit on the part of progressives that there is an objective idea of modern/outdated that can be represented on an objective time-scale of past/present/future.
The Myth of "Progress"
Progressives not only believe that such distinctions exist objectively, but that they have some sort of privileged perspective on this "reality" and are nobly leading the charge to a better future. Everybody who disagrees with them is somewhere between 1 second to 1 millennium behind along some supposed grand march of progress.
This conceit is due to a blind-spot with respect to narrative. Traditions and values do not exist in a vacuum, each capable of being judged in isolation. They exist in relation to a narrative. They do not make sense in the abstract, but only with respect to a given narrative. Space and time are not absolute when you think in narrative terms. From the perspective of New York, Memphis, TN may be years to decades "behind" in "real" time. But Memphis, TN may simply be on a very different narrative time-line, with NYC being "behind" on the variables they consider important.
In other words, human evolution is a garden of forking paths carved out by the ever-forking paths of grand narratives rising, falling and spawning other grand narratives. Measuring "progress" on one branch with respect to another is as meaningless as the naive view of Darwinian evolution that shows a linear progression from amoeba through early hominids to modern humans. There is incredible anthropocentric conceit in this view. Sharks haven't evolved much in millenia. Does that put them "behind" us in evolutionary terms? Many bacteria and other species evolve far faster than we do; are we "behind" them? People who actually understand Darwin don't make this basic mistake, and realize that humans are just one evolving tip among many, adapted to their environment.
But when it comes to culture, progressives still believe in linear progression. It is a sort of Progressivo-centric bias. Or maybe it is just the same old anthropocentric bias, operating in the heads of people who believe they are more evolved "humans." In the beginning there was the amoeba. At the vanguard is the brave, Wall Street occupying Progressive. You could draw one of those little misguided evolution parade cartoons: after the ape-ancestor to homo sapiens part of the series, you'd put a series of cultural-evolutionary stages with the hippie-dressed progressive at the front of the parade.
This is deeply narrow-minded. Is there a better way of framing the question of evolution of traditions and values?
An Alternative: Folkways
A useful concept here is historian David Hackett Fischer's notion of "folkway" from his classic Albion's Seed.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/0...
The key here is that the elements of a folkway are not a random assortment of things. They fit together into an organic complex that evolves as a whole in response to its specific environment. It is a process best understood as autopoiesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aut...), the working out of an internal, evolutionary logic.
The grand narrative of a culture is the meaning read into this autopoietically evolving folkway and its material practices.
Fischer lists the following components of a folkway: speech ways, building ways,
family ways, gender ways, sex ways, child-rearing ways, naming ways, age
ways, death ways, religious ways, magic ways, learning ways, food ways,
dress ways, sport ways, work ways, time ways, wealth ways, rank ways,
social ways, order ways, power ways and freedom ways.
Using these, you can sort of fingerprint the DNA of any culture or subculture, make sense of its grand narrative, and to your question, get a sense of the narrative time line along which it is progressing, and measure its progress based on where it is headed, which may not be the same direction your home folkway is headed. This narrative time-line is not simply a delayed version of some other more "progressive" narrative, but a unique branch that's evolving on its own.
The Curiously Retrogressive "Progressive" Folkway
Where progressives go deeply wrong is in being blind to the fact that they are actually part of their own very characteristic grand narrative and folkway. Yet they insist on screaming that theirs is the only true direction human evolution, and everyone should get with their program. Alternative paths appear to progressives as "lost" wanderings.
Ironically, it is progressives who are retrogressive in this sense, since everybody else has moved on to a certain live-and-let-live relativism where they accept that there may be other paths. Beneath diversity-talk, there is a deep hypocrisy in progressive views about other viewpoints. Rednecks in a way accept Arab culture in far deeper ways than progressives do. When progressives embrace diversity, they typically do so in patronizing ways, by minimizing or trivializing differences, and proceeding on the basis of an unexamined assumed consensus around their own values which others find deeply infuriating. They are mostly unaware of this, so it is hard to get them to even see what they are doing. It's like talking to a child.
This presumption of cultural canonicity in engaging the future, more than anything else, is what riles conservatives and other political groups about "progressives." Talking to progressives, you get the sense that they think the rest of the world cannot handle January 1, 2012 until they've seen San Francisco handle it and provided some gracious hints and directions.
Equally annoying is the progressive presumption that they are more "scientific" than the other branches (classic progressives are among the least scientific people I've met, with a tendency to believe in all sorts of feel-good dreck, especially about their favorite unreconstructed concepts like "nature" and "empathy").
So what IS this branch that "progressives" are evolving on? Remember the famous insult leveled at Howard Dean a couple of elections ago?
Whether you like it or not, notice how coherent this picture is? Immediately evocative, right? Just like a Normal Rockwell painting is immediately evocative of a different folkway, or the motifs of a country music hit.
Another piece of irony: if you insist on comparisons and use evolutionary rate, progressives are more like sharks than bacteria: basic ideas don't seem to have changed for 140 years, despite the rise and fall of communism in the interim. Capitalism in the business conservative sense has evolved from its primitive Robber Baron mode to the modern financial system. Progressivism, which used to serve as a useful check and balance to the excesses of business conservatism, is now a joke.
Beyond Modern/Archaic Rhetoric
It is easy enough to pluck random cultural practices out of their cultural contexts and laugh at them as outmoded. You only realize that they are actually functional parts of the folkway if you try to mess with them in some misguided attempt at reform along "progressive and scientific" lines -- what is often called "authoritarian high modernism" (practiced as often by the left as by the right).
When you go global, the situation is even more drastic. Americans especially tend to identify progress with the evolution of some average, homogenized notion of "The American Way."
In terms of cultural exports, progressives dominate The American Way folkway (thanks in large part to Hollywood), even though domestically, the American Dream folkway is actually rather more conservative.
For as long as America (thanks to its youth, energy and circumstances) was the driver of world affairs, the rest of the world shut up and accepted this American export of its own hidebound "progressive" values and practices. Now, with "the rise of the rest" and America in deep existential trouble, other folkways are getting increasingly assertive about engaging the future in their own ways.
The Universals in the Human Condition
Now all that said, is there anything of a shared human grand narrative along which progress can truly be measured? One not presumptively squatted on by blinkered "progressives"?
Sure, but you have to choose candidates for this very, very carefully. The only thing I would unquestioningly put on there is a very basic set of human rights. These I hope will evolve to some basic animal rights that gradually eliminate the cruelties of factory farming. That's it. Everything else is negotiable, and potentially culturally contingent.
If there are regions where they don't want to trade cars on the Sabbath, or where they are uncomfortable with sex toys (examples in other answers), I'll accept that those choices might make sense within the folkways of those communities.
Among the basic human rights is the right to leave one folkway and join another, so those who have a problem with certain traditions/values can go join another folkway.
And of course, there is going to be an intense Darwinian competition amongst folkways, as there should be. Folkways can and should poach each others members, work to hasten the decline of folkways they see as unhealthy directions for human evolution, and protect their own direction.
But to assume that any one direction is the right one is a very sad kind of intellectual laziness and absolutism.
Personal Views
For the record, I am not progressive or conservative. I guess I am sort of on my own branch headed towards some sort of mental institution. If it seems like I've been particularly critical of progressives in this answer, it is because progressives are most likely to make this particular mistake of framing things in unproductive "modern vs. obsolete" ways.
I used to be a progressive for a while. Then I used to be a conservative for a while. Then I actually started thinking, and was fortunate enough to travel enough around the world, and within America, that these facile positions began to collapse for me.
More and more, I realized, you just have people everywhere struggling to make sense of the world around them, engaging it with whatever ideas and creativity they have at their disposal. I'll leave you with this quote from Thornton Wilder's Our Town, one of the most poignant reflections on the human condition; one that has often crossed my mind in strange places, observing the lives of people who are very different from me:
The Myth of "Progress"
Progressives not only believe that such distinctions exist objectively, but that they have some sort of privileged perspective on this "reality" and are nobly leading the charge to a better future. Everybody who disagrees with them is somewhere between 1 second to 1 millennium behind along some supposed grand march of progress.
This conceit is due to a blind-spot with respect to narrative. Traditions and values do not exist in a vacuum, each capable of being judged in isolation. They exist in relation to a narrative. They do not make sense in the abstract, but only with respect to a given narrative. Space and time are not absolute when you think in narrative terms. From the perspective of New York, Memphis, TN may be years to decades "behind" in "real" time. But Memphis, TN may simply be on a very different narrative time-line, with NYC being "behind" on the variables they consider important.
In other words, human evolution is a garden of forking paths carved out by the ever-forking paths of grand narratives rising, falling and spawning other grand narratives. Measuring "progress" on one branch with respect to another is as meaningless as the naive view of Darwinian evolution that shows a linear progression from amoeba through early hominids to modern humans. There is incredible anthropocentric conceit in this view. Sharks haven't evolved much in millenia. Does that put them "behind" us in evolutionary terms? Many bacteria and other species evolve far faster than we do; are we "behind" them? People who actually understand Darwin don't make this basic mistake, and realize that humans are just one evolving tip among many, adapted to their environment.
But when it comes to culture, progressives still believe in linear progression. It is a sort of Progressivo-centric bias. Or maybe it is just the same old anthropocentric bias, operating in the heads of people who believe they are more evolved "humans." In the beginning there was the amoeba. At the vanguard is the brave, Wall Street occupying Progressive. You could draw one of those little misguided evolution parade cartoons: after the ape-ancestor to homo sapiens part of the series, you'd put a series of cultural-evolutionary stages with the hippie-dressed progressive at the front of the parade.
This is deeply narrow-minded. Is there a better way of framing the question of evolution of traditions and values?
An Alternative: Folkways
A useful concept here is historian David Hackett Fischer's notion of "folkway" from his classic Albion's Seed.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/0...
…the normative structure of values, customs and meanings that exist in any culture. This complex is not many things but one thing, with many interlocking parts…Folkways do not rise from the unconscious in even a symbolic sense — though most people do many social things without reflecting very much about them. In the modern world a folkway is apt to be a cultural artifact — the conscious instrument of human will and purpose. Often (and increasingly today) it is also the deliberate contrivance of a cultural elite.
The key here is that the elements of a folkway are not a random assortment of things. They fit together into an organic complex that evolves as a whole in response to its specific environment. It is a process best understood as autopoiesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aut...), the working out of an internal, evolutionary logic.
The grand narrative of a culture is the meaning read into this autopoietically evolving folkway and its material practices.
Fischer lists the following components of a folkway: speech ways, building ways,
family ways, gender ways, sex ways, child-rearing ways, naming ways, age
ways, death ways, religious ways, magic ways, learning ways, food ways,
dress ways, sport ways, work ways, time ways, wealth ways, rank ways,
social ways, order ways, power ways and freedom ways.
Using these, you can sort of fingerprint the DNA of any culture or subculture, make sense of its grand narrative, and to your question, get a sense of the narrative time line along which it is progressing, and measure its progress based on where it is headed, which may not be the same direction your home folkway is headed. This narrative time-line is not simply a delayed version of some other more "progressive" narrative, but a unique branch that's evolving on its own.
The Curiously Retrogressive "Progressive" Folkway
Where progressives go deeply wrong is in being blind to the fact that they are actually part of their own very characteristic grand narrative and folkway. Yet they insist on screaming that theirs is the only true direction human evolution, and everyone should get with their program. Alternative paths appear to progressives as "lost" wanderings.
Ironically, it is progressives who are retrogressive in this sense, since everybody else has moved on to a certain live-and-let-live relativism where they accept that there may be other paths. Beneath diversity-talk, there is a deep hypocrisy in progressive views about other viewpoints. Rednecks in a way accept Arab culture in far deeper ways than progressives do. When progressives embrace diversity, they typically do so in patronizing ways, by minimizing or trivializing differences, and proceeding on the basis of an unexamined assumed consensus around their own values which others find deeply infuriating. They are mostly unaware of this, so it is hard to get them to even see what they are doing. It's like talking to a child.
This presumption of cultural canonicity in engaging the future, more than anything else, is what riles conservatives and other political groups about "progressives." Talking to progressives, you get the sense that they think the rest of the world cannot handle January 1, 2012 until they've seen San Francisco handle it and provided some gracious hints and directions.
Equally annoying is the progressive presumption that they are more "scientific" than the other branches (classic progressives are among the least scientific people I've met, with a tendency to believe in all sorts of feel-good dreck, especially about their favorite unreconstructed concepts like "nature" and "empathy").
So what IS this branch that "progressives" are evolving on? Remember the famous insult leveled at Howard Dean a couple of elections ago?
tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show” culture?
Whether you like it or not, notice how coherent this picture is? Immediately evocative, right? Just like a Normal Rockwell painting is immediately evocative of a different folkway, or the motifs of a country music hit.
Another piece of irony: if you insist on comparisons and use evolutionary rate, progressives are more like sharks than bacteria: basic ideas don't seem to have changed for 140 years, despite the rise and fall of communism in the interim. Capitalism in the business conservative sense has evolved from its primitive Robber Baron mode to the modern financial system. Progressivism, which used to serve as a useful check and balance to the excesses of business conservatism, is now a joke.
Beyond Modern/Archaic Rhetoric
It is easy enough to pluck random cultural practices out of their cultural contexts and laugh at them as outmoded. You only realize that they are actually functional parts of the folkway if you try to mess with them in some misguided attempt at reform along "progressive and scientific" lines -- what is often called "authoritarian high modernism" (practiced as often by the left as by the right).
When you go global, the situation is even more drastic. Americans especially tend to identify progress with the evolution of some average, homogenized notion of "The American Way."
In terms of cultural exports, progressives dominate The American Way folkway (thanks in large part to Hollywood), even though domestically, the American Dream folkway is actually rather more conservative.
For as long as America (thanks to its youth, energy and circumstances) was the driver of world affairs, the rest of the world shut up and accepted this American export of its own hidebound "progressive" values and practices. Now, with "the rise of the rest" and America in deep existential trouble, other folkways are getting increasingly assertive about engaging the future in their own ways.
The Universals in the Human Condition
Now all that said, is there anything of a shared human grand narrative along which progress can truly be measured? One not presumptively squatted on by blinkered "progressives"?
Sure, but you have to choose candidates for this very, very carefully. The only thing I would unquestioningly put on there is a very basic set of human rights. These I hope will evolve to some basic animal rights that gradually eliminate the cruelties of factory farming. That's it. Everything else is negotiable, and potentially culturally contingent.
If there are regions where they don't want to trade cars on the Sabbath, or where they are uncomfortable with sex toys (examples in other answers), I'll accept that those choices might make sense within the folkways of those communities.
Among the basic human rights is the right to leave one folkway and join another, so those who have a problem with certain traditions/values can go join another folkway.
And of course, there is going to be an intense Darwinian competition amongst folkways, as there should be. Folkways can and should poach each others members, work to hasten the decline of folkways they see as unhealthy directions for human evolution, and protect their own direction.
But to assume that any one direction is the right one is a very sad kind of intellectual laziness and absolutism.
Personal Views
For the record, I am not progressive or conservative. I guess I am sort of on my own branch headed towards some sort of mental institution. If it seems like I've been particularly critical of progressives in this answer, it is because progressives are most likely to make this particular mistake of framing things in unproductive "modern vs. obsolete" ways.
I used to be a progressive for a while. Then I used to be a conservative for a while. Then I actually started thinking, and was fortunate enough to travel enough around the world, and within America, that these facile positions began to collapse for me.
More and more, I realized, you just have people everywhere struggling to make sense of the world around them, engaging it with whatever ideas and creativity they have at their disposal. I'll leave you with this quote from Thornton Wilder's Our Town, one of the most poignant reflections on the human condition; one that has often crossed my mind in strange places, observing the lives of people who are very different from me:
"Most everybody's asleep in Grover's Corners. There are a few lights on. Shorty Hawkins down at the depot has just watched the Albany train go by. And at the livery stable, somebody's staying up late and talking. Yes, it's clearing up. There are the stars doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living things up there. Just chalk ... or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away to make something of itself. The strain is so bad that every sixteen hours everyone lies down and gets a rest.
"Eleven o'clock in Grover's Corners. You get a good rest, too." --Thornton Wilder, Our Town, 1938