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Sept. 25, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

36:29

2801 The Philosophy of Downton Abbey

A philosophical examination of the series Downton Abbey. What is the value of social ostracism? How did society deal with “fallen” women? How do you deal with charity? What about the balance of sex and marriage in society?

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	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux of Freedom in Radio.
	I hope you're doing magnificently.
	So, this is the philosophy of Downton Abbey.
	Where the men never blink and have surprisingly deep voices.
	And for all of the people embedded in the aristocracy, a man's waist expands with age.
	And only the free marketers remain trim.
	So, I hope you're doing well.
	I've been watching some of this...
	I resisted it for quite some time.
	I thought it would be sort of an upstairs-downstairs kind of thing.
	And I've been really, really enjoying it.
	You can find it on Netflix, Downton, not downtown, D-O-W-N-T-O-N, Downton Abbey.
	And it's really well done.
	It's got some great language.
	It has the lack of speechifying that has sort of been the norm ever since...
	The look back in anger.
	Guys went all naturalistic in the 50s.
	But some of the lines are just lovely.
	One of the women says about the war, it seems like all the men I ever danced with are dead.
	So the show starts in 1912 with the sinking of the Titanic.
	There'll be some spoilers in here, but not many.
	You can still enjoy it if you listen to this, and I hope you will check it out because it really is a fascinating view.
	Of what is literally a vanished age and a vanished ethos.
	Now, one of the things that I find most fascinating about Downton Abbey is the degree to which rules are enforced socially rather than legally.
	That is some fascinating, fascinating stuff.
	So one of the reasons that I talk about talking to people or even confronting people with moral issues and questions in your own life and becoming more comfortable with social ostracism for wrongdoers or evildoers or those who support evildoers.
	One of the reasons I talk about that is that's really the only choice we have.
	You have social rules enforced through ostracism or You have government rules imposed by force.
	Those are the only two choices for social organization.
	Force or ostracism.
	Now, ostracism, of course, is in no way, shape or form a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	But freedom of association, forced association is a violation of freedom of association.
	And if you choose not to see people...
	Whose moral sensibilities, let's say, as kindly as possible, are the opposite of yours.
	That is not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	Like, me not having sex with people who aren't my wife is not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	A woman who says, no, she doesn't want to go out with Quasimodo or the spiritual equivalent of Quasimodo, that is not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	And of course...
	We say no to just about everyone and everything in our life.
	When you go through the supermarket, you might buy 30 items, but there are thousands and thousands of items that you don't buy and thousands of items that you will never buy.
	There are billions of striving people in the world who all want to sell you something or get you to do something or have you join their course or date them or marry them or have sex with them or be their friend or give them money or lend them money or you name it.
	It's all over the place.
	Everyone has needs, and everyone's needs are limitless.
	And we say no to virtually all of them.
	I'm sure there's some guy setting up a tobacconist in Mumbai, which I will never, ever go to and never purchase anything from.
	And so, in a sense, ostracism or the non-participation with people and their preferences is very much the order of things, is very much...
	What life is.
	And once you understand that, then you sort of understand what I'm talking about, at least, when it comes to the potential to ostracize evildoers.
	Do you know how, I think it's Dawkins who has the argument against religion that says, well, there are 10,000 gods that you don't believe in and one god that you do.
	And atheists agree with you about the 10,000.
	They just go one further, right?
	Well, there's A near infinity of the human race that you do not engage with and interact with.
	But anyway, so social ostracism is how the rules are enforced.
	So a chambermaid who has an affair with a major and who then becomes pregnant through that major complains bitterly.
	That she is an outcast, that she's fired from her job, that she can't get benefits, and so on.
	And this is because the child is, of course, a bastard.
	A bastard is a child conceived and born outside of wedlock.
	And while there's some sympathy for the woman, and mostly that sympathy for the woman is the result of sympathy for the child, she cannot be received into decent society.
	People won't sit down and have tea with her.
	People won't invite her to their houses.
	And she's not a respectable woman.
	Now, there's another woman.
	Okay, so the first woman who has an affair with the major, the major is later killed in battle.
	Although they were never married.
	Now, another woman has a child and she was married and her husband was also killed in battle and she is perfectly respectable.
	She works at Downton Abbey in a great aristocratic house and nobody, you know, people say, yay, you know, sympathies, how can we help?
	And the woman basically complains, the first woman who had the affair with the major who had the child who wasn't married, complains bitterly that One woman has a child by a man who gets killed in the war and everyone is sympathetic.
	And she, who is not married, had a child by a man who got killed in the war and no one wants to have anything to do with her.
	Now, that is, I mean, sort of at one level, you can kind of understand it, like your frustration.
	But at the other level, it's like what the woman says.
	Another woman who she complains to says, well, the woman who was married and whose husband died in the war, well, she was a respectable married woman that someone chose to make his wife.
	And therefore, it's not the same situation.
	You just had an affair.
	The man didn't want to acknowledge paternity, let alone marry you.
	And there's a uniformity of tough opinion against people who make really bad decisions.
	And in the series, the women are explicitly the gatekeepers of sexual access.
	And one of the men says in discussing this, Mr.
	Carson says, when discussing this issue, he says, well, men will forever be men and it's the woman's job to say no.
	How difficult is it to say the simple word, no?
	And the channeling of the infinite energy of sexual desire, both male and female, into the stability of marriage was really one of the major goals and accomplishments of civilization.
	People want to have sex, but children do best in a marriage.
	And the fact that people were willing to condemn, I guess, what they would say, or not associate with what are called fallen women, women who'd had affairs and gotten pregnant and had the child, and the man was a scoundrel.
	The man was a...
	Didn't want to have anything to do with her.
	Well, there's a huge destabilizing effect in society.
	And in the past, people's Hostility and anxiety with regards to single motherhood was very important.
	It was a very important aspect of social cohesion and social stability.
	The willingness to ostracize is obviously tragic for the people who are ostracized.
	I have sympathy with that.
	I myself have been ostracized.
	I'm not saying it's a huge amount of fun, but But what are the alternatives?
	How do we control irresponsible and destructive behavior in society?
	Most charities would not let this woman starve, of course, and would not let the child starve.
	But people would not generally associate with this fallen woman.
	And the example of that woman, as the old demotivational poster has it, with a picture of a ship going down It could be the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
	And one thing that's happened over the past 40 or 50 years in the West is our willingness to let people's mistakes serve as a warning to others has vastly diminished.
	It has a lot to do with voting and all that.
	But our willingness to let people's mistakes serve as a warning to others...
	It's the complicated relationship that Western culture has with empathy.
	Because children started being raised better in the 18th and 19th centuries and because there was a growth in empathy and mirror neurons and so on, there was a lot of moral advancement from the 18th century period.
	Onwards in Western society, right?
	I mean, there was the extension of voting.
	There was more rights for women.
	There was the sense of the need to protect children.
	There was the stalwart campaign against slavery and so on, right?
	And so the growth of empathy has produced some real moral triumphs that have come out of the West.
	And of course, like all moral innovators, no good goes unpunished.
	Now, of course, Western Europe is considered to be the source of all ills in the world and blah, blah, blah.
	And this growth of empathy has been hugely beneficial but also hugely problematic because it has prevented or undermined our capacity to To let people suffer the consequences of terrible decisions as a warning to others.
	So, let's take the example of a man who smokes like a chimney and doesn't buy health insurance.
	And then when he's 50 or 60, he gets a lung cancer and he has no health insurance.
	Well, what do you do?
	It's tough.
	I think that empathy falls into the category of the Aristotelian mean.
	In other words, heartlessness is terrible.
	But over-sentimentality and rescuing everyone from the consequences of bad decisions creates a kind of soft tyranny which vastly expands the power of the state.
	So what do we do in a free society...
	We're the man who smokes like a chimney.
	Let's say he's got a reasonable income, he smokes like a chimney, and he decides not to buy health insurance.
	I think it's tough, right?
	Obviously, we don't want the guy to die in a ditch.
	I think that's brutal and cruel and painful and wrong.
	On the other hand, if we treat him as if he had bought health insurance and hadn't smoked, In other words, we try to get them the very best care possible and this and that and the other, then we do significant damage to the concept of insurance, right?
	Because if everyone knew that they were going to get the benefits of insurance without paying insurance, well, guess what?
	They would not pay for their insurance, right?
	It's like the...
	More modern mandates in the American healthcare system which says you cannot be denied for a pre-existing condition.
	So all that happens is people wait till they get sick and then they buy health insurance.
	What about somebody who is...
	who's eaten too much and never bothered exercising, is overweight and gets diabetes?
	Well, I don't think, I would not feel comfortable, I think it'd be wrong to let people, quote, die in the ditch, right?
	On the other hand, if we treat them as if they were trim people who had exercised and just unluckily gotten ill, we undermine the virtue of healthcare self-maintenance, right?
	So these are very challenging.
	And look, please understand, I don't have any clear or objective answers.
	The right place for charity in society is so complicated.
	And my own attempts at charity have been fairly disastrous as a whole.
	And so...
	Like somebody who's poor, does that poor person need education?
	Do they need money?
	Do they need a job?
	I mean, what do they need?
	It's very complicated, and this is why allowing the government to take care of charity is like putting the drunkard in charge of the wine cellar, right?
	The huge complications involved in helping people.
	Are people genuinely in need or are they pretending they're in need in order to take advantage?
	These are all big and messy and complicated and challenging questions, which only the free market and charities can continually come over and find the right answer.
	And the right answer will be a constantly shifting set of circumstances.
	What do you do with someone Who does not seem to have any objective medical issues but claims that they're disabled?
	I don't know.
	I mean, it's very complicated.
	You obviously don't want to hand out huge amounts of money to everyone who claims to be disabled, but at the same time, there are disabled standards or standards of disability that don't show up on a CAT scan or an MRI. So, it's complicated.
	It is complicated.
	It's a real challenge.
	To figure these things out.
	And if a woman decides to have an affair with a man, you know, in the sort of Downton Abbey world, like a hundred years ago, whatever, if a woman decides to have an affair with a man, Then if the man does not own paternity, of course, a hundred years ago, they were asking for proof, right?
	Does he have letters?
	Is there anything that he acknowledged anything?
	Because they didn't have DNA testing, of course.
	But if the woman gets pregnant through an affair, well, who is going to pay for the child?
	Well, obviously, the woman, in a sense, has a hostage, which is that she has a child, and it's, of course, not the child's fault that the child is in the world and needs food and resources and so on.
	So you have to give money to help out the child, and I certainly would be happy to do that, and I do that.
	But at the same time, if you give too much money, then women will view children as not consumers of resources, but the source of income.
	Which is not what you want, because then you're paying women to have children when they don't have a husband or other providers.
	So that's a big problem.
	Now, in Downton Abbey, the problem is solved through charity and ostracism.
	The charity to support the child, but the ostracism to make the mother's life difficult enough to serve as a warning to others.
	Her life is ruined in that she's not going to get married, and it's going to be very tough for her to have a job, and basically she would have faced real challenges if the charity had not been there.
	When you are breastfeeding and raising a baby, you really don't have time for much else and you can't really take the baby, unless you're some sort of field worker or you can't really take the baby with you, where you go.
	So what I find fascinating about Downton Abbey, and it's something I've studied quite a little bit, just as sort of a...
	Social theoretician, for want of a better phrase, is the degree to which the rules are enforced through ostracism, right?
	So when the daughter of an aristocrat wants to run away with the chauffeur, you know, I have no daughter, you know, this sort of heavy Russian stuff, the father threatens her with no money.
	And with social ostracism, you will never be received in London, you will never be able to socialize among the other aristocracy and so on.
	So they put out their ostracism, right?
	They would erect an ostracism circle around this young woman should she run off and get married to the chauffeur.
	And so to me, it's a fascinating study in the degree to which...
	Social rules are maintained through ostracism, through spontaneous social negative judgment.
	The state in Downton Abbey is society.
	It's the social rules.
	And it was very effective.
	I mean, the number of births out of wedlock were tiny in the past.
	And things like marriage are very complicated structures to maintain.
	I mean, in many ways.
	Of course, there was some romantic love, but sexual desire is at the root of most people's urge towards relationships.
	And by confining sexuality to the confines of marriage, well...
	You harnessed and civilized the sexual impulse to have it serve children, which is kind of what it's for, right?
	The whole reason we have the sexual impulse is not for our own gratification.
	Our own gratification is the means by which the security and safety of children is maintained, is achieved and maintained.
	Your penis is not for you.
	It's for making another penis.
	And this aspect of things is also, again, very important too.
	To understand.
	If women are giving sex outside of marriage, then the value of marriage diminishes considerably.
	Or, another way of putting it, is if women are giving sex outside of marriage, then women have to become more virtuous in order to, and men have to become more virtuous in order to Make marriage worthwhile for people.
	It's a lot easier to be sexy than to be good.
	It's a lot easier to say yes to sex than it is to pursue moral excellence.
	And in many ways, the less desirable a woman is, or a man is, the more they overtly put out a sexual display.
	So in Downton Abbey, in that world, and this is true among the rich and the poor, in that world, the rules are very powerfully enforced.
	And there's no government doing it.
	I mean, there was not much of a draft, and there was no draft for the first year or two of the First World War, but the way that some men were shamed into signing up was, as I'm sure you've heard, the White Feather campaign, where women would walk up and down the streets,
	and any young man not in uniform, they would give that man a white feather as a symbol of cowardice and It's one of the few recorded instances where an instrument of tickling is used as a murder weapon that it would shame these men into signing up for a war where they would be almost very likely to be maimed and killed, maimed and or killed.
	And that's an example of social rules being enforced, like the rule called go and walk into German shelling.
	Get atomized and turn into a red mist drifting over barbed wire.
	Feathers were the conscription.
	Feathers were the stain.
	Now with ostracism comes a preoccupation with honor.
	So without getting into the sort of complicated Love triangles and so on.
	One man is injured in the war, and his fiancee decides she's going to stay with him even though he can't walk or have children, and that he gets better, and another woman's interested in him, and he basically says, look, this woman decided to care for me when she had no hope of children or of a normal functioning married life.
	Does it really seem right to throw her over, to dump her, now that I can walk again?
	The other woman says, spoken like a man of honor.
	So the idea of honor and obligation is absolutely essential.
	When there's ostracism for immorality, the value of morality goes up enormously.
	And what do I, as a philosopher, want to do other than raise the value of virtue?
	This is not that complicated.
	People are confused by this.
	They just haven't been listening.
	As a philosopher, my goal is to raise the value of virtue.
	Because if people responded to innate values, I guess socialism or communism would have had more of a chance of working.
	But people respond to incentives.
	It's one of the basics of economics.
	People respond to incentives.
	And where there's no ostracism for immorality, there's precious little value in morality.
	In fact, morality becomes, or ethics become, not a plus, but a minus, right?
	In that, boy, if I had a dime for every time that I have been called narrow-minded, or priggish, or Victorian, or square, or whatever, among some of the nicer terms that I have seen firing over the irrational arc of the internet.
	But if there's no ostracism for immorality, there's precious little value in morality.
	In that, how many people work hard if they know they can't be fired?
	There'll be a few, of course.
	But the majority of people, when you say, well, you can't get fired now, they're like, whew, okay, good.
	Now I don't have to work that hard.
	When I was a business owner, running a pretty significant technical arm of a rapidly growing software company, I worked hard.
	One week I worked three days straight, no sleep.
	I worked very hard.
	And part of that, of course, was the commitment I had to employees and customers and so on.
	But part of it, of course, was that if I built the value of the software company, then go find a union worker who's worked three days straight with no immediate overtime.
	I won't do it.
	In the same way that I'm sure for women it's frustrating when women hand out sex like candy.
	So ostracism makes honor almost infinitely more valuable.
	It raises the value of virtue.
	Now, I understand that this is, you know, I wouldn't certainly agree with all the moral virtues and values that they had a hundred years ago.
	Far from it.
	But the form of the argument exists regardless of the content.
	If you are ostracized, I mean, we can put it as negatively as possible.
	If you are ostracized by everyone for disobeying social norms, then the value of obeying social norms goes up enormously.
	That's true whether or not those social norms are be a Nazi or be a good person, reject the aggression, reject aggression and all that.
	And this is why, of course, one of the many reasons why I focus considerably on the value of ostracism as a social mechanism, because we either have ostracism or we have a huge, all-consuming, self-destructive state, government.
	Those are our choices.
	There's an old saying which says, when you get rid of the big rules, you don't end up with no rules.
	You end up with thousands and thousands of tiny rules.
	Which is true.
	When you give up on ostracism as your methodology for enforcing social rules, then you end up with the welfare state, which is thousands and thousands and thousands of tiny rules.
	And then to fund the welfare state, you end up with the tax system, which is thousands and thousands and thousands of rules.
	And to me, it's fascinating that people in Downton Abbey When others do wrong, do not immediately say, we must go to the state.
	They say, nobody will have anything to do with you if you do this thing.
	It's also nice to see a gay guy who's mean.
	I mean, not out of any principle.
	It's just nice and refreshing to see the general spread of good and evil across traditional lines as far as that goes.
	But yeah, so I really wanted to recommend watching it.
	And I think what you want to watch it for is the degree to which strictness with regards to social ethics is the lubrication of the social machinery.
	Well, they're kept in line through disapproval and ostracism.
	Now, I mean, this all sounds like, oh wow, everyone becomes a tyrant, but the reality is, my friends, that this form of social ostracism is far more flexible and responsive to human desires than a government ever is.
	When the government is doing wrong, It's almost impossible to change.
	I mean, you go into public choice theory and the imbalance of incentives and so on.
	It's almost impossible to change a government that is doing wrong.
	You know, try and stop the welfare state, right?
	Or the military industrial complex, or national debts, or fiat currency, or central banking, or foreign policy.
	You can't do it, right?
	However, if people...
	Ostracize nonconformity to ideals.
	When you change those ideals, you change the ostracism.
	So, for instance, let's say that there was social ostracism for homosexuality.
	Now, the Victorian period was one in which, as Oscar Wilde said in his trial, homosexuality, you know, didn't used to be that big a deal, right?
	You got lots of ancient Greek philosophers.
	Who, as the Reverend Al Sharpton pointed out, were homos.
	You have lots of...
	I mean, the Olympics were naked, oiled men, right?
	Muscled, oiled men.
	But for a variety of reasons in the 19th century, it became a big problem.
	Punishable, right?
	Oscar Wilde, one of the wittiest and most delightful playwrights ever, was thrown in Reading Jail and had his health broken and died.
	Soon after.
	And there was ostracism for homosexuality.
	Now, if you wished to change people being ostracized for homosexuality, you'd pull the modern family slash will and grace approach, which is where you would write sympathetic and deep and complex and valuable and funny and engaging gay characters, and you would change people's prejudices against homosexuality Through art.
	You can't write a play that changes foreign policy, right?
	But you can.
	E.M. Forster wrote a novel with gay characters, although he suppressed it considerably in the gay stuff.
	It's all over my favorite movie, A Room of the View.
	But if you want to change people's ostracism based upon ideals, if you work to change those ideals...
	Then it's like spinning the wheel of a supertanker.
	It takes a while, but things change in turn.
	And so engaging the public in a moral debate has far greater value when society is managed through ostracism rather than statism, rather than through government laws and prisons and punishments and bribery and so on.
	And as a philosopher, shockingly, I am fascinated and driven to do more to engage people in moral debates.
	Now, when society is run by the state, the way that you change, the way that you believe you will change things, is through social activism designed to affect, or direct action designed to affect the political process.
	I want to make America a better place, or Canada or France, so I'm going to go into politics, right?
	I'm going to try and get the legislature to do what I want, and all this kind of stuff, right?
	And that's what's considered to the go-to position with regards to affecting social change in a state of society, right?
	You, by golly, you do that, right?
	So in a free society...
	When you change people's thinking, you change the enforcement of social rules.
	And so you can make the case with art, you can make the case with philosophy, with social engagement, with debates, all these kinds of things.
	And those debates were occurring.
	And so social ostracism, because it's based on philosophy, fundamentally on values, rather than on force and the centralized coercive mechanism of the state, Social ostracism is far more flexible and responsive.
	It is really the opposite of a tyranny.
	And social ostracism is subject to an efficiency principle that the state is not at all subject to.
	And that's another important thing to understand about social ostracism.
	If I ostracize everyone who doesn't have my accent, I'm going to end up pretty lonely, right?
	If I ostracize everyone who doesn't agree with everything I say, well, I actually have to ostracize myself, since my thinking has evolved in certain areas over time, as I would hope it to.
	But...
	If ostracism is over-applied, it becomes very inefficient, right?
	So if you have some racist who says, yeah, I'm not going to serve blacks, well, that's economically inefficient.
	It's going to be weeded out over time.
	And so ostracism is subject to an efficiency principle that government is not.
	In other words, you want to have the least amount of ostracism necessary to maintain social order.
	And by social order, I don't mean the aristocracy or anything, which was enforced through the state at the time and always.
	What I mean by social order is let's not have people doing ridiculously stupid stuff and screwing up society, right?
	So single parenthood is really bad for kids, but you don't want to ostracize everyone who's made any kind of mistake, right?
	So there's only the most...
	Egregious and social fabric-shredding behaviors will be ostracized, because ostracism takes energy, it requires a knowledge network, and you can make mistakes.
	Also, of course, social ostracism is wonderfully subject to reversal, right?
	So I thought it was a scandal.
	It turns out it wasn't.
	I was wrong.
	I accept you back with open arms, right?
	That's a little bit different from you've gone to jail for 10 years.
	For drug possession or whatever.
	Well, that's, you know, can't get that overturned, right?
	So people, they get bothered by social ostracism.
	And I think that's partly because it's not as open to manipulation as the political process.
	But it means when we have social ostracism as a mechanism, it means that people get fully engaged in attempting to shape the values of society.
	And I think that's a wonderful positive.
	I mean, how could that be bad to get more people, to have more people find more value in the engagement of social discourse on ethics?
	I think it's fantastic.
	So I would really recommend, I mean, there's lots of great stuff to watch with regards to Downton Abbey, but in particular, I think the one that generally would get overlooked for obvious reasons is the degree to which when you have people who are willing To make others suffer for immorality,
	well, lo and behold, you end up with far less immorality and far more social engagement and a far more nimble and responsive ethics system And, you know, with the plus of no, well, far less national debt.
	When government starts to enforce ethics, a tyranny arises that would be impossible to conceive of under mere ostracism.
	Thank you very much for listening, as always.
	I hope you'll check out the show again, Downton Abbey, on Netflix.
	And fdrurl.com slash donate if you would like to help out the show.
	Massively appreciate it.

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