I think you're simply refusing to accept that people have sold themselves into slavery in history
I think that problem is that you're not differentiating between sales and rentals, that is, between property and bonded labor, and I am. That's not to say that no one has ever sold himself, only that it's such an unlikely choice that it probably didn't happen much if at all. I don't see how it could ever be advantageous for the would-be slave and you have not offered any plausible scenario so I'm stuck at why anyone would have done it. The only reason I can imagine to do it, as I said up-thread, would be to save a loved one.
Why bother with the clean sheet approach? Is this a matter of Randian idealism?
It's not ideology driven. It's a basic analysis technique--looking at a question stripped down to its essence, then adding back in the surrounding factors, the clutter, so see which are relevant and which aren't. It clarifies thinking.
You might try Sowell's A Conflict of Visions.
I will check that out.
I have long been very concerned about polarization and incivility. That has been an issue for me for as long as I've been here on SI. When people take an approach that I don't understand, I used to ask them to explain. I almost never got an explanation. Either they got mad because they felt challenged or they couldn't or wouldn't come up with an explanation. Mostly I got my education from Neocon, who was willing and able to explain everything. Without him, I'm relegated to sources like "Moral Politics." In its first chapter it makes the point that most people don't have a clue why they have the worldviews that they have. That is certainly consistent with my experience.
but I see he's a Berkeley professor
He's a lefty but you couldn't tell it from the early chapters. He makes the point that the Strict Father worldview is more coherent than that of the left. That's certainly the case as he presents the two. (Personally, I found that each of them gave me the creeps. The Strict Father is too regimented and binary for my taste and the Nurturant Parent seems airheaded and is cloyingly touchy feely.)
And asking it to enforce the proposition that marriages shouldn't include father-daughter unions isn't very extreme.
I agree. I'm sure that a referendum would support your position.
Its part of the situation being discussed.
I did not think so. I haven't been discussing it. I have been discussing the abstraction of an adult incestuous couple. The couple in the story that introduced the discussion is not an exemplar because of the likelihood that the incest began before the daughter was an adult so it's merely a segue or point of reference.
If you pictured, instead, a couple, say half brother and sister, who had been separated in childhood as a result of a divorce and who met again in their thirties, hit it off, and wanted to marry, would your reaction be different? With the father and daughter in the story, there's something sick about that. That girl must be very damaged to want to be with her father. The example I offered from the detective story, the twins, now that's weird, but maybe not so sick. And I don't see a victim.
And the nurturant family doesn't want their children to be morally upright as they see things? And self sufficient?
Morally upright as they see things, yes, but they see things so very differently that you wouldn't recognize it as morally upright. Morally upright is defined as nurturant. They want to produce kids who are nurturant. And happy and fulfilled but mostly nurturant. Happy and fulfilled because happy and fulfilled people have greater capacity for nurturance. That's entirely different from the Strict Father's sense of morally upright. There's no mention whatsoever of character in the Nurturant Parent.
The self sufficiency thing, that's what I found most fascinating. It was barely mentioned. I'm not sure to what extent that is because it's a low priority and to what extent it's because self sufficiency is expected to result from developing empathy and other nurturing skills. I cannot easily connect the dots between this approach and self sufficiency. Morality is framed as nurturing others and as developing oneself to increase one's capacity for broad nurturance. One's capacity for nurturance, then, is the expression of self-sufficiency, the "manifestation," if I dare use that word. The contrast is stark between that approach and the Strict Father's emphasis on drilling self-sufficiency into kids.
I don't think you should assume people necessarily fit Lakoff's model.
I don't. I thought I specified that it was the standard model, to which there are variations, to which there are individual expressions. The author, himself, makes the point that this doesn't apply universally. It just captures the essence. It isn't intended to stereotype anyone, just a tool to try to get at the essence. It's like the clean sheet of paper--an analytic tool. |
