Degrading institutions, sneering at Somewheres, drowning in novelty

Women are not a finer form of Homo sapien. (V)

This is the fifth and final in a series of posts — first, second, third, fourth — on careerist feminism and what it has wrought. Between my day job getting much busier, a consultancy gig coming my way and other writing obligations, this post took longer to get up than I had hoped.

Evidence of an increase in the gap in political perceptions between men and women has led to a lot of concentration on the apparent shift to the “right” among men. It is a case of concentrating on men being presumptively bad and the Right being threatening: so doubleplusungood.

Shifting women

Much of the divergence has been from women, particularly young women, shifting sharply more progressive. But that is women, so presumptively good, and progressive, so doubleplusgood and, for many, not worthy of critical examination.

In its recent post on the matter, Persuasion has largely avoid the presumption of male blame. The post goes so far to, near the end, note:

Americans spent decades building a path for empowered women and girls, without any accompanying effort to craft a broader and more secure sense of masculinity for the men who needed to stand alongside them. Now we are reaping the backlash.

What is not mentioned is any negative elements in feminisation; the zero-sum narcissism within Feminism; that progressivism overwhelmingly dominates the cultural commanding heights; or the explicit attack on masculinity, including the writing down and out of iconic male characters, coming out of those cultural commanding heights. Alice Evans is wrong, a feminised public culture is an issue.

Under Critical Pedagogy — the pedagogy of the Dialectical Faith — the focus of education shifts from functional, task-oriented, reality-tested skills that potentially generate prestige to a morally grandiose, critical emotionality that pushes an aggressive and intolerant propriety based on an intersectional hierarchy that places women above men and is alienating male students. The point is to produce students who embrace an utterly irresponsible moral perfectionism, so they get to critique everything, take responsibility for nothing, where functional skills uphold an “oppressive” society. Such students are as about as much fun to teach, and useful to employ, as one would imagine.

Randy Laybourne on Unsplash.

The war against Maths and Science as “white, cis-heteronormative, patriarchal, colonialism” is also a war against the relative strength of boys in favour of the relative strength of girls, using an abusive and aggressive sense of propriety as a weapon.

It is the clever-stupid rationalising of in-group beliefs. As an academic friend puts it:

Rationalising ridiculous shit because you want to conform and you want to believe.

Gender-egalitarian societies offer improved outcomes for everyone based on greater utilisation of human talents while not diverting resources to hold folk down. This is not the game that the self-righteous narcissism of careerist feminism is playing. Standpoint epistemology — the elevation of lived experience and positionality, in part a derivative of the Hegelian master-slave/lord-bondsman dialectic — privileges female perspectives.

The irony here is that the Dialectical Faith elevates subjectivity so thoroughly that constraint becomes oppression. Any constraint gets in the way of the complete (indeed global) unity of Theory and practice. The realisation of a human subjectivity that is fully congruent with social constructed reality being the endpoint of the Dialectical Faith.

The biological reality of sex constrains, so it gets in the way of the unity of Theory and practice. Hence sex-based limits — such as “cis” female-only spaces and sports — have to go. Hence gender-critical feminists find themselves on the wrong side of the advance of the Dialectical Faith, as social constructed reality — including the secondary sexual chararacteristics of human biology — has to be aligned with the subjectivity of Transfolk.

Careerist feminism is about status and social leverage, so goes along with the imperial propriety status and social leverage games that the Dialectical Faith generates. Indeed, Affluent White Female Liberals (AWFLs) are some of its biggest enthusiasts. Hence, surgically mutilating and sterilising one’s child becomes a “social justice affirmation” status high.

Sneering at Somewheres

When did all adult men in the United Kingdom get the vote? In 1918 with the Representation of the People Act which also gave women 30 or over who owned property, or whose husband did, the right to vote. When did women first get the right to vote in the British Isles? Property-owning women got the right to vote in the Isle of Man in 1881. The achievement of full male suffrage and female suffrage either overlap, or one occurs within decades of the other, across the Anglosphere.

Outside the settler societies, unpropertied men got the vote as a trade-off for mass mobilisation for war — both in the battlefield and in factories. Men walked or charged en masse into machine gun fire and yet somehow Feminism tells us that they were privileged.

Women got the vote as an attractor in settler societies and because of their increased economic participation outside the household. The main argument against women’s suffrage in the Western States of the US was that they would vote for Prohibition. This turned out to be true. In our own time, as their institutional power grows, we again see (highly educated) women disproportionately supporting an aggressive, intolerant, anti-freedom propriety that is much broader in its targets than Prohibition, but hardly less destructive.

In much commentary, as exemplified by a recent Persuasion post, it is made very clear that citizenry can only be legitimately be represented by those acceptable to the highly credentialed Optimates.

The claim that Theory gives you insight denied others — and invalidates their choices — ramps up such pretensions. This union of Theory with an imperial propriety has become an ever-stronger, the more of a revolutionary and progressive disappointment the working class has become.

Invalidating working-class concerns, thought and speech has become a central project of Theory and of feminised, and feminist, progressive politics. It leads directly to the non-electoral politics of institutional capture precisely because the choices of those not steeped in correct Theory — and its spin-off status and social leverage strategies — are invalidated. Inconvenient truths can be dismissed — such as every single legal advance for women was voted for by men.

The analysis of economist Thomas Piketty and his colleagues that politics has become a struggle between university-educated possessors of human capital (the Brahmin Left) and the possessors of commercial capital (the Merchant Right) entails the squeezing out of working class concerns and participation in politics. Not least by conducting politics in language that does not resonate with the working class, nor connect to their concerns. There are few groups that careerist feminism more reliably despises than working-class men: part of the pattern of women tending to judge men more harshly for their relative status.

Such men tend to be particularly disadvantaged by current child support programs. If parents are forced to be together (“shotgun weddings”) that leads to increased violence (and death). The current systems of compulsory child support creates emasculated fiscal pseudo-fatherhood where men pay for children yet their payments, however onerous, give them no inherent authority over, or even access to, those children. Such programs have also revived debtor’s gaol, as men can be imprisoned if they fall in arrears — which then makes it likely that they will fall even further in arrears.

While DNA testing is increasingly used to check paternity, there can be significant injustice involved, even within the terms of such programs. The imposition of an absolute legal fiscal liability on biological fathers means that teenage boys who are too young to form a legally recognised intent to have sex can nevertheless have such financial obligations imposed on them.

Men subject to various levels of sexual assault, or outright deception, also have such financial obligations imposed on them, due to biological paternity imposing a strict legal liability.

Meanwhile a woman can get out of such obligations by putting the child up for adoption or if the child was conceived in circumstances that would not relieve men of their financial obligation. The dynamics of the disposability of males, and the asymmetry of vulnerability and risks in sex and pregnancy, seem to lie behind these inconsistencies in child support policies.

Konstantin Kisin, as usual, is very smart on such matters. As he says, victimhood is not a good look on men. Posing as victims doesn’t resonate for men because men are, for human societies, more disposable than women. Hence the aim should be for men to do better rather than wallow.

A more practical discussion of what is the appropriate child support policy regime is needed. One that sinks neither into competitive victimhood nor is coy about incentives and their consequences.

Degrading institutions

Any structure that does not select for good character will, over time, select for manipulative personalities, as they will be more able to “game” the system. This will especially true if the structure provides status and social leverage (i.e., resources) and even more true if it lacks reality-tests, as reality-tests test for functional competence. The more a structure selects for manipulative personalities, the more it will become degraded into a structure for gaming of resources and the more it will select for the sort of manipulative personalities that thrive in such an environment, in a downward spiral of dysfunction.

The notion that bureaucracies are social “machines” that continually operate as they are set up is nonsense. They are social institutions full of biological organisms aka people and so they (socially) evolve. Unfortunately, the inherent tendency of bureaucracy is to evolve in a pathological direction. That is, to hoard authority, de-legitimise or otherwise suppress alternative information sources, consume more and more resources, and to evade tests of competence. DEI (Diversity-Equity-Inclusion) is the evolution of an operating system perfectly targeted at bureaucratic pathologies, as it enables all the aforementioned to occur.

When the West adopted the Chinese idea of meritocratic bureaucracies selected by examination, how such bureaucracies evolve — as seen in the dynastic cycle in Chinese history — was not considered because bureaucracies were viewed as social machines that just continued to operate as they were set up.

At the beginning of a Chinese dynasty, one gets effective, meritocratic government. By the end, astonishingly pathological decision-making has taken hold as the selection for manipulative personalities increases, helping state capacity to spiral downwards into pervasive dysfunction. Ibn Khaldun’s model of rise and fall of asabiyya (group feeling) across dynasties (or regimes) picks up on this pattern of degraded capacity due to collapse of adherence to pro-social norms.¹

Feminisation tends to aggravate these patterns, as women tend to both select for emotional comfort — hence the shift to anathematising “offensive” speech, in line with women being more likely than men to see emotions as threats — and to disguise (above all to themselves) their aggression. Hence cancel culture mobbing is “just” moral or social concern, the standard way female-typical aggression is dissembled: including by the perpetrators to themselves. Propriety — status through norm conformity — is particularly easily gamed (indeed enforced) by such mechanisms.

Seeking emotional comfort leads, in feminised institutions and organisations, to conformity, micro-managing, and an unwillingness to focus on performance if it gets in the way of the dominant form of propriety, while shaming and shunning those who contravene such propriety. A process that is very easy to manipulate and is likely to be more intense in organisations and institutions that have eschewed male-typical techniques of building trust within teams in favour of more female-typical cliquey-emotionality.

Institutions evolve from the formalised teams they are supposed to be to an increasingly dysfunctional emotional cliquishness. This speeds up, and adds to, the pathological evolutionary tendencies bureaucracies are already prone to. The result is institutions that become less and less functional. An increasingly frustrated citizenry as they can see things work less well, and are less responsive, without it being clear how and why.

If female-typical aggression is less likely to be met by male-typical aggression — even of the civilised telling-you-off variety — there will be more of it. If it is excused or valorised, there will be more still. Which is precisely what feminism in particular, and progressivism in general, does.

Many of these patterns both drive, and are aggravated by, the ways social media is polarising. For it scales up and spreads female-typical aggression operating an imperial propriety.

It is a basic reality of social systems, that if you do not attempt to deal with the bad sides of human nature, you surrender to them. Tove K. expresses this point when she discusses feminism as an “ape alliance”. One that has narrowed down to highly educated career women. She notes that:

But nowhere females were responsible for setting the rules that repressed and enhanced their own nature, the way males were. …

The consequence is that :

A society burdened with typically female vices could get just as uncompetitive as a society burdened with male vices. This might be what we are seeing right now: For the first time in history, entire cultural spheres are losing pace because antisocial aspects of female nature as well as male nature are too freely expressed. Woke is the classical example of a heavily female-led toxic movement. But there are also less obvious expressions of toxic femininity, like a lack of excellence in female-heavy fields due to unwillingness to accept any competition between females.

When philosopher Kathleen Stock wistfully laments the shift from robust debate in academic seminars to a stultifying politeness, she — whether she realises it or not — is decrying the consequences of the feminisation of academe.

Psychologist Cory Clark has documented that women are much more likely to be against research deemed to be harmful and to be punitive about it — i.e., engage in shaming and shunning behaviour over such. While presented as women having higher moral sensitivity, it is mostly moralising emotional (dis)comfort. The effect of “MeToo” in discouraging male-female collaborations has disadvantaged young women, as they typically have narrower networks than young men, so where men just collaborate with other men instead, women are much less likely to find another women to collaborate with: another teams-versus-cliques difference.

Blocking discovery so as to protect the emotional comfort of the articulate and organised is no way to run a complex technological society.² The notion that you can work out the implications of discovery in advance is hubristic in the extreme. All the “that’s harmful research” based on how folk might, or even do, feel is arrogant nonsense. This is quite different from critiquing, say, gain-of-function research, which poses obvious dangers on a grand scale.

Women cannot well run institutions that deal with intellectual discovery unless they have the wisdom to confront downsides of typical female behaviour. The narcissism of careerist feminism blocks the achievement of such wisdom. It also feeds how contemporary progressives so often catastrophise disagreement from outside the progressive “we own morality” magic circle, hence their willingness to buy into closing down dissent.

Older generations of historians observed that feminisation had adverse consequences. Having come across such passages over the years, I thought it was expressing male chauvinism. The historians involved may well have been male chauvinists, but, observing the problems of feminisation of institutions and discourse in contemporary societies, I now realise they have a point.³

One sign of the fragility of institutions is they are no longer able to survive one bad leader. We are increasingly in that situation, creating the basis for an accelerating collapse of complex systems.

Drowning in novelty

We live in societies engaged in an enormous evolutionary novelty for Homo sapiens: societies without presumptive sex roles, societies abandoning the concept of gendering work.

A lot of men are angry because they believe — accurately — that they have been systematically lied to. They are not being delivered a gender egalitarian society of mutual benefit and accommodation, but one of female privileges — particularly for highly educated career woman. That the US has blatant diversity hire women in prominent public positions drives this home.

If anything goes wrong — including for men and boys — it is the fault of men and boys. Women,  as a finer form of Homo sapien, have moved into their utterly unprecedented level of social responsibility and authority with no problems or failures at all.

What irritates about Alice Evans’ consideration of gender polarisation amongst the young is that it is treated as if there are no downsides except to men, for which they are to blame, and no legitimate male concerns or complaints. In other words, she is reproducing the collective narcissism of careerist feminism and its zero-sum thinking.

It used to be the case that, during some blokes’ night out, someone would make a joking comment about “it was a mistake to give women the vote”. It would be a matter for a laugh, for letting off steam. Men complaining about women, as women complain about men.

In recent years, I have had more and more people, both men and women, quietly say to me “it was a mistake to give women the vote” and mean it. Nor, it turns out, am I the only one having this experience.

When people say that, they are not complaining about women’s success, increase in status, or equality. What is driving them is the attack on freedom of speech and thought, the replacement of meritocracy, the shift from teams to cliques, the loss of social solidarity, the trashing of heritage. The consequences of feminisation supercharged by careerist feminism doing so much to drive an imperial progressivist propriety that seeks to invade all spheres of life, from sport to comedy to entertainment, to all use of language to science, to ...

A lot of this comes from the female desire for emotional comfort — which a certain sort of male glomps onto — and self-deceptive aggression. It is no way to run an institution, a public space, science, technology or anything really, outside friendships and some aspects of parenting and family life.

It is not that women cannot be good at running institutions. But the self-righteous narcissism of feminism delegitimises even recognising the problems of feminisation, let alone intelligently discussing them.

That sexual selection means the sexes influence each other — and this is particularly so in a species with such highly cooperative reproductive strategies — passes blame-men feminist narcissism by. Psychologist and experienced clinician Jordan Peterson expresses this mutual influencing well:

…one of the things that differentiates men from women is that when men experience negative emotion they tend to focus on their comparative socioeconomic status, when women experience negative emotion they tend to they tend to focus on bodily image, and the reason for that likely is that men are evaluated by women more harshly for their relative status and women are evaluated more harshly by men for their physiological appearance, for their general appearance.

This difference is exactly what one would expect from the evolutionary structure of human reproduction, with males focusing on indications of fertility and females on capacity to fulfil the protector-provider role for her and her children.

The general historical pattern has been that men drive civilisation, women run society. A pattern the more gender-egalitarian Roman-to-Christian-to-Western civilisation managed better than the more patriarchal (and polygynous) Islamic, Brahmin, and Confucian civilisations.

The (mild) patriarchy of Western Christendom created Parliamentarianism, the Scientific Revolution, technological take-off, mass prosperity, democracy and female suffrage.

Now we have women attempting to drive civilisation while neglecting society. Both are decaying. The transmission of culture within families is being disrupted via fatherlessness and childlessness while the public manifestations of heritage are being de-legitimised. It does not help that childlessness increases the number of adults with no biological stake in the future.

Women are doing more and more of men used to do — and too often doing it poorly — while doing less and less of what women used to do.

The way the feminist narcissism of highly educated career women persistently denigrates the domestic and neighbourhood spheres of life — stay-at-home-motherhood is seen as a betrayal, for instance — is not helpful.

A deeply ironic consequence of careerist feminism is setting how much women replicate male career patterns as the criteria of judgement. The more career is elevated, and motherhood is relegated, the further from the quintessential female experience — bearing children — the “proper” identity of women becomes. So the more women become ersatz men.

It is an open question whether Western societies can survive as free, democratic, technological, open-scientific societies if the corrosive effects of feminisation supercharged by careerist feminism continue. Women are not a superior form of Homo sapien. Adding women does not always improve things.

Our societies will continue to degrade if we cannot have adult conversations about the upsides of men, and the downsides of women. Something that the pseudo-sophisticated narcissism of careerist feminism seeks to sabotage.

Many societies would be improved by more egalitarianism, including — even especially — gender egalitarianism. I wish Alice Evans would stop talking of the need for feminist consciousness. No one needs more, or indeed any, feminism. At least not of what the careerists and zealots have turned feminism into.

References

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1. Peter Turchin notes that elite over-production, leading to increased competition for available positions, also has a corrosive effect. This further reinforces the point that bureaucracy is subject to social evolutionary pressures.

2. Camille Paglia: “If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.”

3. In his essay on The Fate of Empires, Sir John Glubb observes that:

An increase in the influence of women in public life has often been associated with national decline. The later Romans complained that, although Rome ruled the world, women ruled Rome. In the tenth century, a similar tendency was observable in the Arab Empire, the women demanding admission to the professions hitherto monopolised by men. ‘What,’ wrote the contemporary historian, Ibn Bessam, ‘have the professions of clerk, tax-collector or preacher to do with women? These occupations have always been limited to men alone.’ Many women practised law, while others obtained posts as university professors. There was an agitation for the appointment of female judges, which, however, does not appear to have succeeded.

Soon after this period, government and public order collapsed, and foreign invaders overran the country. The resulting increase in confusion and violence made it unsafe for women to move unescorted in the streets, with the result that this feminist movement collapsed.

The disorders following the military takeover in 861, and the loss of the empire, had played havoc with the economy. At such a moment, it might have been expected that everyone would redouble their efforts to save the country from bankruptcy, but nothing of the kind occurred. Instead, at this moment of declining trade and financial stringency, the people of Baghdad introduced a five-day week.

When I first read these contemporary descriptions of tenth-century Baghdad, I could scarcely believe my eyes. I told myself that this must be a joke! The descriptions might have been taken out of The Times today. The resemblance of all the details was especially breathtaking—the break-up of the empire, the abandonment of sexual morality, the ‘pop’ singers with their guitars, the entry of women into the professions, the five-day week. I would not venture to attempt an explanation! There are so many mysteries about human life which are far beyond our comprehension.