Traditional Morality as Future-Oriented Values

Low time preference favors social conservatism

The other day I wrote about the self-evident nature of certain life goals and how these things remain widely accepted as a desirable ideal even among most secular people:

In this post I will lay out the basic reasons why “trad” values, usually though not necessarily religious in nature, are the most effective strategy for achieving these goals and represent a superior lifestyle for anyone who values them (which is the vast majority of people). All of this might seem rather obvious, but remember that there are a ton of secular people out there even on the right, so for whatever reason, a lot of this stuff is still up for debate. That means it is worth talking about.

I’ll start by quoting the broad picture of “the tradlife” that I outlined in the previous piece, describing the most important areas where it diverges from secular sensibilities:

1.      The value of children, child-bearing, child-rearing, family. If I had to name a single fundamental issue that divides religious from secular, this would probably be it. Everything else that I am going to talk about can be related back to this one. Trads usually view children and family as ultimate life goals, while seculars are more likely to view them as optional, something that is to be taken or left based on personal whimsy.

2.      Sexual promiscuity. This one also outranks almost everything else, I think. This covers a wide range of behaviors—casual sex, pornography, views on “sex work,” etc. I will include in this category any alternative relationship arrangements to the traditional one-man one-woman marriage, such as polyamory, polygamy, “serial monogamy” with no marriage, whatever it might be. This also includes all forms of LGBT anything, which define themselves specifically by their fundamental incompatibility with traditional marriage.

3.      Drug use. This ranks below the first two as many deeply religious people remain quite open to some amount of drug use, in moderation, usually alcohol. However, the trad view will always be that such substances are a vice to be held in check. Seculars are more likely to accept chronic use as permissible and unproblematic. Likewise, trads will tend to oppose drug legalization, and seculars will tend to view it more favorably.

4.      The value of work and self-sufficiency. This one I rank lowest as the peculiarities of the modern economy make it a bit more of a complex topic, as I discussed in a previous post. It is also the topic on which trads and seculars are most likely to agree IME, as there are certainly many secular people who value work and self-sufficiency. However, among those who do feel that there is nothing wrong with, for instance, subsisting on welfare payments or the charity of one’s parents, I feel confident in saying that these people are almost always more likely to be secular, and that as someone’s worldview becomes more “trad,” the probability that they will view parasitic lifestyles as morally acceptable quickly declines down to zero.

Taking all of the above into account, we can get a pretty stereotypical image of where a tradperson wants to end up in life: In a stable marriage, with well-loved children, maintained by one’s own labor, relatively free of vices. The alternative view of where a secular person wants to end up is not clear at all. We can probably say that they don’t want to end up as the complete opposite of this, but the specifics of where they want to deviate vary widely from one atheist to the next. Secular worldviews are therefore defined not by their adherence to a different ideal altogether, rather they are defined by a willingness to modify some aspect or another of the traditional ideal.

With the above in mind, the conflict between traditional and secular is properly understood as a conflict between immediate gratification and delaying immediate pleasure for the sake of building long-term value. Once viewed through this lens, every single issue raised above sorts itself quite neatly.

The question of children remains the greatest example here, as having children is arguably the greatest sacrifice for the greatest reward, it may be the ultimate example of short-term pain for long-term gain. The difficulties of pregnancy and caring for small children surely do not bear repeating here. Likewise, even as children grow older and more self-sufficient, they can continue to place a great deal of strain on one’s life via persistent behavioral, mental or emotional issues. No one can pretend that the endeavor isn’t hard, that it doesn’t come with risks, or that at times it will be very unfun.

The payoff, however, is immeasurable and cannot be obtained via any other means. The couple who goes through the journey successfully has set themselves in a class apart from those who fail or who do not even try. All of the reasons not to have children are appeals to short-term comfort or anxieties born of safetyism. Yet the fact remains that to be a person worthy of respect, one must do something with one’s life, and to fill this need reproduction remains utterly without equal.

Points #2 and #3 are quite self-explanatory on the axis of immediate vs long-term gratification. Short term pleasure is the explicit payoff for sexual promiscuity and drug use. Point #4 is similar to point #1. Work sucks and life is almost invariably easier and more comfortable if you have some way to avoid it, for example, by living in mommy and daddy’s basement. Yet by refusing it, you are preventing your life from ever progressing forward out of childhood and adolescence. You will forever remain looked down upon by society as a person who came to nothing and rightfully so.

Proceeding from here, it is not hard to see that traditional values are better suited to achieving the long-term payoffs associated with each major lifestyle issue. The quintessential tradlife that I have outlined is a very fragile thing even in the best of times, and it is only more so today in a culture that has grown more hostile to it in many ways. Children, marriage, family—these things are not guaranteed in life! Many secular people seem to operate with the assumption that they can dawdle and fool around and whenever they are ready to “settle down,” they can just flip a magic switch and make that transition quickly and smoothly.

But this is not how life works, not at all. For starters, there is the very obvious issue that the possibility of children is literally on a biological timer, especially for women with many now needing to seek ART (Assisted Reproductive Technology) just to conceive in the first place. Even for men, sperm quality begins to decline around middle age, and once a man is over 40 he may need to seek a wife who is many years his junior in order to get the best odds of fathering healthy children. While this is not by any means impossible, it is also not an ideal situation for family formation.

Biological considerations aside, the greater obstacle to children in the modern age is simply the lifestyle sacrifices that are demanded, many of which people are loathe to endure in an age of convenience and abundance. The longer that one spends settling into a childless lifestyle, the more difficult those changes are likely to be, and the lower the odds that they will ever be attempted. People’s mindsets and lifestyles are at their most flexible during early adulthood; once past 30, people become much less amenable to large-scale overhauls of their life or big shifts in their worldview.

There is also the issue that before one can have children, one needs to find a partner, then needs to actually marry that partner, and ideally one will then actually stay with that partner. Every stage of this has obviously been made more difficult in Current Year, which only means that one is that much more likely to fail if they put it off for too long. The process of dating into marriage into family formation takes time, it takes years even on the absolute most expedited of timelines, and an expedited timeline is not at all guaranteed.

I will take a moment here to share a comment posted on my last article which perfectly encapsulates the idea that I wanted to convey in this one (shoutout to Saxifrage):

“I tend to think of following or not following moral strictures as loading the dice of life. You CAN break the rules and still do well; and you CAN follow the rules and still fail; but each choice loads the dice in one direction or the other.”

The longer that you put off pursuing marriage and family, the less time that you will have to “roll the dice” once you are ready to start. Again, each stage in the process is fraught with uncertainty, even if one is going into it well-prepared. You do not know how long it might take you to find a viable partner. You do not know how long it will take between finding that person and marrying them. You do not know how long it will take between getting married and getting pregnant. You do not know how many or what kinds of curveballs life might throw at you while all of this is going on.

Your odds are at their best by taking the issue seriously as soon as possible, thus maximizing your opportunities for success. Almost every risk that might get in the way of achieving the desired end goal—a stable family and household—becomes more severe the longer that one waits and has the best chances for mitigation the earlier that one starts.

You are far less likely to run into fertility problems in your 20s rather than your 30s. If it takes you years to find and marry a good partner, starting early will leave you with more years of youth left to conceive and raise your children, while starting late may leave you with none. If something goes awry in your relationship and it doesn’t work out, starting earlier likewise gives you that much more time to move on and find the next one before the clock is up.

The same goes for making the necessary mindset and lifestyle adjustments that necessarily accompany family formation. If you spend all of your 20s living selfishly, intentionally avoiding marriage and children, you are certain to find the notion harder to stomach now that you have sat for a whole decade living without it. It is common knowledge that habits are self-reinforcing; they are broken more easily the less ingrained in one’s life that they are, and vice versa. Whatever personal difficulties you might face in making the myriad habitual adjustments required of you in parenthood, undertaking them sooner rather than later gives you all the more room to do so with plenty of time left to spare.

Last but not least, it should go without saying that one is more likely to pursue children seriously and accept the trade-offs that they require if one simply views it as a necessary life goal to begin with, as opposed to the secular mindset that dying alone and childless is a perfectly viable option. As the norm of going to college shows, people are perfectly willing to make enormous sacrifices in pursuit of particular goals if they believe that it is something they must do in order to follow a successful life-script.

These same principles extend out to the other three major points in fairly obvious ways. The more time you waste engaging in any form of sexual activity other than marriage-seeking, the less time you will have when you are finally ready to do it, and the more difficult the transition will be. There seems to be an attitude among secular people, often unspoken but occasionally made explicit, that one can spend one’s youth “partying” i.e. engaging freely in promiscuity before then “settling down” sometime after 30.

While it is certainly true that one can do this and that some people manage to do it successfully, going back to the analogy of rolling the dice, you are clearly lowering your odds of eventually achieving a stable marriage by indulging in this mindset. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that if your “body count” is well into the double digits by the time you finally get married, infidelity will be much harder for you to resist! Furthermore, the proliferation of this attitude among the population means it will be that much harder for you to find a spouse who does not have this same issue. As always, behaviors like these are self-reinforcing.

Things get worse when we venture beyond “mere” casual sex and begin considering other common forms of sexual deviancy. Pornography bears mentioning here due to its extreme ubiquity in the modern environment. Whatever other arguments one might make about porn, two very simple facts make it problematic for family formation; one, your wife is almost guaranteed to have a problem with you watching it, and two, it is a serious addiction risk and a difficult temptation to resist given its high degree of both availability and concealability. Your marriage will almost certainly proceed on better terms if you are able to excise pornography from your life, yet secular people often remain rather unconcerned by this fact, with “trads” left as the only ones who take it seriously.

Likewise, engaging in “sex work” is not exactly good for a woman’s marriage prospects. Many men will balk at the idea of marrying a woman who has engaged in prostitution or filmed pornography videos in the past. In order to overcome this, she will likely need to fully repent from and condemn those previous lifestyle choices; in many cases that will not be enough and the man will simply decline to commit under any terms. A woman may pursue concealment of her past as a strategy here, but this runs a risk similar to the risk that pornography poses for men; lying to one’s spouse about something so important is planting a bomb in your marriage that might eventually go off.

Moving on to the issue of substance use, this is the most straightforward case of “rolling the dice.” Almost everyone who uses substances, unless they are already deep in the throes of addiction and held there by the threat of withdrawals, does so believing that their use of these substances is not dangerous or harmful. By definition, if someone did not trust themselves to use drugs and alcohol responsibly, they would abstain from them (or at least make a serious effort to).

Yet we can plainly see that people’s judgment on this issue is very often wrong. Yes, some people can indulge in some amount of substance use without any serious negative consequences, perhaps even most people. Obviously others cannot. You cannot predict ahead of time which one you are going to be. You might be able to make somewhat of an educated guess based on things like family history, but ultimately you still face an overwhelming degree of uncertainty on this issue. Thus, every time you continue to indulge, you are once again “rolling the dice”—upping the odds of a catastrophic outcome, whether it is something acute like a drunk driving accident or something more chronic such as a spiral into full-blown addiction.

I don’t think I really need to spell out how all of this applies to work/financial self-sufficiency at this point. As I mentioned in my previous article, there are plenty of good reasons to pursue financial self-sufficiency, but the main reason we are concerned with here is that it is almost certainly a pre-requisite for family and children. If you don’t make enough money to at least pull your weight in a two-income household, women simply aren’t going to give you the time of day.

Likewise, sorting out your vices with regards to sex and drugs are often pre-requisites for family formation. The odds that you will find a woman willing to marry you and bear your children while you are simultaneously seeing prostitutes or sleeping around with other women are close to nil. You might be able to get marriage and kids going while continuing to abuse substances, but even secular people will agree that this is a highly undesirable situation and that substance use should be strictly curtailed once children enter the picture.

The undeniable conclusion is that if we accept “the tradlife”—marriage, kids, stability—as life’s ideal set of outcomes, the “trad” way of doing things is far more likely to get us there. It is more likely to get us there at all, it is more likely to get us there sooner rather than later, and it is more likely to keep us there once we have arrived. These facts are widely accepted and borne out by data—the religious are both more likely to get married young and less likely to get divorced. Likewise, the religious have more children than the non-religious.

The first objection by some secular people will be to the ideal of a stable family to begin with. Why should anyone bother to even want kids or marriage? This was the subject of the post I wrote preceding this one, so my answer can mostly be found there. Again, this current post proceeds from the premise that these things are indeed highly desirable as ultimate life goals.

I will add one brief observation: With life expectancy now exceeding 80 in many developed nations, people will only spend a relatively small period of their lives in an age range that is suitable for “partying” and other alternative lifestyles favored by the secular. If your life is 80 years long, your 20s will only constitute 12.5% of it. You can probably continue fooling around well into your 30s if you want, but if you remain single and childless past 40, you are looking at an increasingly lonely existence as time goes on, especially for women whose fertility is nearly gone by now.

If you truly believe that you will be satisfied sitting alone in your goon cave playing video games (or doing whatever the female equivalent of that is for women) into and all the way through your decades of retirement, well, good luck to you I suppose. I feel confident that, again, even most secular people—if they are being honest—do not see this as the way that they would really like their lives to play out.

The next issue that one might raise with this argument for the tradlife is that “being trad” comes with big trade-offs for other things that are worthwhile to achieve or experience in life. Perhaps the tradcon is more likely to complete the main quest, but in order to do so he is skipping all of the side quests, one might say. In order to evaluate this premise we must ask ourselves what these “side quests” actually consist of—if they have rewards that are truly worth pursuing.

When we consider that within the context of the four major points discussed above, I think it becomes immediately apparent that none of these “side quests” are actually of much worth. Even if they are, it remains undeniable that they represent arrangements of short-term pleasure or convenience, thus returning to my premise of traditional values as essentially future-oriented. Are you likely to feel more satisfied on your deathbed knowing that you screwed dozens of women or consumed copious amounts of drugs in your younger years? I’ve been to a few funerals and, for some reason, those never seem to be the things that people focus on in their remembrance of the deceased.

If you do decide to pursue these “side quests,” I think it would be fair to say that you are proving yourself to be a low-quality person, or at least of lower quality than a version of yourself which does not waste energy on such frivolous things. Putting off serious long-term goals so that one can pursue immediate pleasure is a sign of impulsivity, lack of discipline, and high time preference. It is quite frankly an indication of low IQ, as it is well-established that higher IQ predictably corresponds to lower time preference.

Me living my life as a low time preference Chad, looking down upon the high time preference masses

To tradcons who have read this far, everything that I have said may seem rather redundant. My purpose is writing in this article is to address a certain type of secular person. One type of secular person is the true committed atheist—someone who has made up their mind that God Not Real and isn’t budging from that spot. This type of atheist is basically unsalvageable in my experience. I do plan to write about this person at some point, but not yet. We are getting there.

Another sort of secular person is someone who is irreligious because they think that religion is lame. They seem to believe that religious people somehow hate fun and want to suck all the joy out of life. This type of person often has one or more lifestyle hang-ups relating to the four major points I have outlined, and/or abortion, another topic that I have written a good deal about. Abortion could be filed under point #1 I suppose.

Whether their ignorance is willful or not, this sort of atheist (or “agnostic,” as the case may be) is under the impression that the devout live their lives in certain ways for no real reason, that their lifestyle choices are fundamentally irrational. This is the sort of person who thinks that the faithful only do things because “God Says So,” not because anything that God has said to do is actually a good idea.

I wanted to make it clear that the impression this person has is exactly the opposite of reality—that the traditional values held by the religious (and occasionally by exceptional secular people) are very rational, that they developed as they did for very good reasons, and that God likewise told us to hold them specifically because they are good for us and lead us to flourishing. I think this needs to be made clear as this type of secular person—the “party atheist” I will call them—often hides behind criticism of religion as a shield for their own poor judgment, in much the same way that anti-life people inevitably attempt to center discussions of abortion around religious doctrine (so that they can then avoid the issue entirely by saying “God not real”).

This understanding also means that the religious and secular should have much more in common than they might think. In terms of how we actually live our lives and make major decisions within them, the overlap between religious and secular should actually be very large, as most secular people ultimately want the same long-term life outcomes as the religious. This is important because it means that the religious and the secular can and should speak to each other on the same terms about nearly every facet of life with the possible exception of explicit theological matters such as the existence of God.

In my previous article, I pointed out examples of gay men who are basically pursuing a Tradlife™ aside from the fact that they are gay. Since then I came across an interview with TracingWoodgrains, another gay man who is doing the same thing. While I found much to critique in the interview, one thing that stood out to me was that TracingWoodgrains basically arrived at the same place as I have from the other side of the question. When he is asked what kind of values he wants to embody in place of religious ones, he essentially says that he values having children and creating a family exactly the same as I’ve argued for here, despite remaining utterly certain that God Not Real.

I think this matters because if agreement can be reached that even secular people should basically be living a religious lifestyle minus going to church, discourse will then be able to hone in much more closely on that single remaining question of going to church. Much discussion about religion is obfuscated by the tendency of “party atheists” to focus on specific lifestyle issues that they feel are unjustly maligned by the religious. If we can agree that a high IQ, low time preference secular viewpoint would actually malign those things as well, perhaps we can get past some of that and potentially force consideration of deeper issues relating to the nature of God and morality.