Do you have a specific proposal for bringing back the communal protection in this case?
As I see it, there are three levels in how this works:
what are the local norms of behavior (sex before marriage: ok / not ok)
who enforces the norms and what are their incentives (lynching / police)
how anonymous is the environment (depends on size of the town)
(By the way, the situation 100 years ago would depend a lot on your and the girl’s status. High status men were not punished for things they did with low status girls. A denial, not necessarily plausible, would probably suffice. So let’s assume that both are approximately average.)
First, there is a change of sexual norms. Sleeping with someone and then abandoning them is… basically, the freedom our hippie ancestors have fought for. From this perspective, nothing bad happened. The girl may feel sad, but that’s partially a result of her own choices, and partially just a force of nature that cannot be avoided.
(Note that 100 years ago, the girl would also be blamed, because she also broke the rules.)
Second, the behavior is now enforced by police (and Twitter mobs). The police will, ideally, follow the written laws. If there is no law, there is nothing for the police to do; actually, police might interfere with the attempts to drive a guy out of town.
Third, what you described would work only in a small town anyway. In a sufficiently big town, there are always new girls to woo, and whatever happens, 99.99% people will be like “I don’t know anything about it, and I don’t care”.
I was thinking of the situation more so with young people. Where the guy doesn’t have high status and the girl is under the full care of her family. Certainly you’re right that it was hard to punish high status people for stealing a girl’s heart and running away with it. But I think that’s just because it was hard to punish high status people for most improprieties back then. A high status person could not pay the shoe shiner, renege on oral agreements, and do all manner of improper behavior as long as mainly harmed low status people and didn’t ever have to defend against a campaign launched against him.
But this gets away from my main thinking which is that there was SOME level at which parents had security over their daughter. They knew that if the [equivalent of the local weed dealing loser back in 1900] swooned over their daughter and broke her heart and the rest of the town found out then he would be ostracized from polite society. I think of this as community policing/shaming.
what are the local norms of behavior (sex before marriage: ok / not ok)
I don’t think this is really that important honestly. The shaming and being driven out went away long before norms sufficiently changed that being a deadbeat was considered ok. I grew up in a city where the majority of the population would want to shun a deadbeat like that.
who enforces the norms and what are their incentives (lynching / police)
When I say driven out by the town I don’t mean lynching or anything necessarily illegal. I mean not being served at restaurants, being kicked out of his lodging, being harassed by sympathetic local cops, etc. Cancelling but less astroturfed.
For me this is the big reason communal policing and shaming went away. Businesses lost the legal ability to exclude people. If a business chooses to exclude someone they can now be fined by nonsensical/corrupt judges who believe that the same cake can both celebrate gender transitioning and not make any expressive statement. The risk to a business by excluding someone is just too high to justify any benefit they receive by policing the community.
how anonymous is the environment (depends on size of the town)
I think the general idea is that communal policing/shaming in small towns forces deadbeats to only prey upon people in those sorts of anonymized medium to large cities. There’s a surprising amount of solidarity between businesses in small towns. Business owners go to meetings together at the chamber of commerce or one of a million other similar organizations. Employees at small businesses are treated like family in many cases. I’m certain many business owners would want to strike back at a deadbeat who wronged his employee’s family.
The only thing that’s really needed to bring back communal policing/shaming is to give business owners back the right to exclude who they choose.
Which like already happens. Somehow major tech companies have more leeway in banning people from their businesses than local bakeries
edit: and also those two don’t really need to go together? They definitely don’t go together now. Physical stores are forced to entertain basically everybody while tech companies ban people with impunity. I don’t see why the laws can’t reverse. Let physical store owners ban who they wish and make it illegal for online forums to ban people for anything other than spam, illegal behavior, and whatever other clearly bad thing I’m missing here.
Mainly reading and watching period fiction, court opinions from around 1900 and earlier, and hearing about what life was like from my grandfather (who wasn’t alive prior to 1920 but told me stories from his youth and from his dad). I definitely could be totally wrong and it was rare for a community to punish a deadbeat for leading a girl on and abandoning her or that the typical punishment is very different from my understanding.
Data of course shows that pre-marital sex was both much less common and reported much less prior to 1920.[1] This however doesn’t necessarily mean there was community policing/shaming of the sort that I describe. Only that there were some prevention/punishment mechanisms in place that have eroded.
Do you have a specific proposal for bringing back the communal protection in this case?
As I see it, there are three levels in how this works:
what are the local norms of behavior (sex before marriage: ok / not ok)
who enforces the norms and what are their incentives (lynching / police)
how anonymous is the environment (depends on size of the town)
(By the way, the situation 100 years ago would depend a lot on your and the girl’s status. High status men were not punished for things they did with low status girls. A denial, not necessarily plausible, would probably suffice. So let’s assume that both are approximately average.)
First, there is a change of sexual norms. Sleeping with someone and then abandoning them is… basically, the freedom our hippie ancestors have fought for. From this perspective, nothing bad happened. The girl may feel sad, but that’s partially a result of her own choices, and partially just a force of nature that cannot be avoided.
(Note that 100 years ago, the girl would also be blamed, because she also broke the rules.)
Second, the behavior is now enforced by police (and Twitter mobs). The police will, ideally, follow the written laws. If there is no law, there is nothing for the police to do; actually, police might interfere with the attempts to drive a guy out of town.
Third, what you described would work only in a small town anyway. In a sufficiently big town, there are always new girls to woo, and whatever happens, 99.99% people will be like “I don’t know anything about it, and I don’t care”.
As to the status:
I was thinking of the situation more so with young people. Where the guy doesn’t have high status and the girl is under the full care of her family. Certainly you’re right that it was hard to punish high status people for stealing a girl’s heart and running away with it. But I think that’s just because it was hard to punish high status people for most improprieties back then. A high status person could not pay the shoe shiner, renege on oral agreements, and do all manner of improper behavior as long as mainly harmed low status people and didn’t ever have to defend against a campaign launched against him.
But this gets away from my main thinking which is that there was SOME level at which parents had security over their daughter. They knew that if the [equivalent of the local weed dealing loser back in 1900] swooned over their daughter and broke her heart and the rest of the town found out then he would be ostracized from polite society. I think of this as community policing/shaming.
I don’t think this is really that important honestly. The shaming and being driven out went away long before norms sufficiently changed that being a deadbeat was considered ok. I grew up in a city where the majority of the population would want to shun a deadbeat like that.
When I say driven out by the town I don’t mean lynching or anything necessarily illegal. I mean not being served at restaurants, being kicked out of his lodging, being harassed by sympathetic local cops, etc. Cancelling but less astroturfed.
For me this is the big reason communal policing and shaming went away. Businesses lost the legal ability to exclude people. If a business chooses to exclude someone they can now be fined by nonsensical/corrupt judges who believe that the same cake can both celebrate gender transitioning and not make any expressive statement. The risk to a business by excluding someone is just too high to justify any benefit they receive by policing the community.
I think the general idea is that communal policing/shaming in small towns forces deadbeats to only prey upon people in those sorts of anonymized medium to large cities. There’s a surprising amount of solidarity between businesses in small towns. Business owners go to meetings together at the chamber of commerce or one of a million other similar organizations. Employees at small businesses are treated like family in many cases. I’m certain many business owners would want to strike back at a deadbeat who wronged his employee’s family.
The only thing that’s really needed to bring back communal policing/shaming is to give business owners back the right to exclude who they choose.
That would also allow the owners of Google, Facebook, and Twitter to choose the groups of people they want to remove from their parts of internet.
Which like already happens. Somehow major tech companies have more leeway in banning people from their businesses than local bakeries
edit: and also those two don’t really need to go together? They definitely don’t go together now. Physical stores are forced to entertain basically everybody while tech companies ban people with impunity. I don’t see why the laws can’t reverse. Let physical store owners ban who they wish and make it illegal for online forums to ban people for anything other than spam, illegal behavior, and whatever other clearly bad thing I’m missing here.
What kind of sources do you have for the norms that existed 100 years ago that drive your predictions of how people were driven out of town back then?
Mainly reading and watching period fiction, court opinions from around 1900 and earlier, and hearing about what life was like from my grandfather (who wasn’t alive prior to 1920 but told me stories from his youth and from his dad). I definitely could be totally wrong and it was rare for a community to punish a deadbeat for leading a girl on and abandoning her or that the typical punishment is very different from my understanding.
Data of course shows that pre-marital sex was both much less common and reported much less prior to 1920.[1] This however doesn’t necessarily mean there was community policing/shaming of the sort that I describe. Only that there were some prevention/punishment mechanisms in place that have eroded.
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/fgg.pdf