So much to think about in one post. My first take is I agree 95%, but will read again.
I am also a fan of Konstantin Kisin.
We are seeing "right-wing" movements in most Western nations, often described as "far right" or worse, and there is always some truth in these disparaging stereotypes.
I think there is tie-in (in the US) to exploding housing costs and decades of sluggish wages. The macroeconomists keep saying real wages are up, but anyone who lived in L.A. 50 years ago knows single-earner households used to buy houses. 40-hour workweek.
Many white collar workers now talk about 50-60 hour weeks. We have better color TVs than we used to. Much smaller and less stylish cars.
Social tensions of all sorts get magnified when the pie is shrinking for the bottom 75%.
Women, being the smaller weaker sex who are often engaged in protecting and nurturing babies and small children, are thus more conciliatory and agreeable, more attuned to any forms of aggression (even verbal) and pretty much think along the lines of SAFETY FIRST!
All the modern hyperventilating about the "Patriarchy", especially among young, secular, bourgeois Western women who actually have almost unlimited sexual (and other) freedom and live in maybe the least patriarchal societies in recorded history, has a very "doth protest too much" quality to it.
In their endless hysterical denunciations of things that don't exist (like witches in Salem), the young women of the West show that the thing called the Patriarchy came into existence to benefit them as much as any man, and how without male protection and the male penchant for Apollonian ordering, they feel very lost, confused and (as they say) "unsafe".
The modern West's ethos of maximum personality autonomy is nerve-wracking for just about all of us—how do we cobble together an "Authentic Self"? how do we choose "values" etc when they become just another market-based style that gets swapped out like last year's wardrobe?—but for young women it seems especially dangerous and crazy-making, their psyches are the mental equivalent of someone with no immune system who is vulnerable to any and every social pathogen.
If the West does ever return to a more patriarchal social structure, it will be because (just as with sex) women need it as much as men do, they just have a harder time admitting it.
So much to unpack here. Thank you for crafting this essay. And I say that as perhaps one of those CFs years ago. Having had a family later in life, I gave up needing to 'prove' myself. And also having a family will remain the most important thing I will have ever accomplished. The challenge is how do we benefit from the work outside of the home that women do without destroying the work men do. Why do we need to destroy one to elevate another?
🙂 Hopefully I'll get a chance to read the rest of your post, but thanks for the Glubb link -- definitely worth a read, just on the basis of a quick skim. Reminds me of a cartoon, first published, I think, in the New Yorker:
"Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who DO study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it."
As an armchair philosopher it has always seemed to me that the question of steering a fair course through the choppy waters of discourses about relations between men and women is the trickiest of all.....and better understood as resulting from a kind of Faustian tango between the sexes than as a simple case of one sex always doing wrong by the other. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/shall-we-dance
And this quote from a piece by (still 'feminist') Kathleen Stock shows how things might move in a more positive direction: "it would also be good if we could talk more about what is wonderful about masculinity, and toxic about femininity, without caveats or excuses.!"
"choppy waters" and "Faustian tango", indeed. Though it reminds me of the quip that the battle between the sexes won't ever be resolved because there's too much "fraternization" between the combatants ... 🙂 Maybe the nature of complementary.
But took a quick skim through your "dance" post -- several links there to Stock's oeuvre that will be worth pursuing. Not sure if you mentioned it or not but, ICYMI, see her "trenchant" criticisms of feminism in general and radfems ("barking mad") in particular on her own Substack:
"Effectively, the stupid story [transgenderism?] functions, for mainstream feminism, as a reductio ad absurdum: it reduces most of contemporary feminism to risible absurdity, necessitating urgent reflection on the tenability of prior commitments to explain how the absurdity ever got such a firm grip."
Moot exactly where feminism has gone off the rails, though some have, quite reasonably, argued that it more or less started where feminism "trans-mogrified" itself -- so to speak -- from a philosophy into a political project. Dogma -- AKA untenable and politically motivated premises -- often conflicts with, as Amia Srinivasan once put it, an "unfettered inquiry that is conducive to the acquisition of truth and knowledge":
Not to say that there isn't some merit in that project.
But speaking a bit more directly to your "Masculinity and Femininity are complementary polarities", you might have some interest in my recent post taking a shot at an article in Cell magazine that asked "Is ‘sex’ a useful category?”:
A rather "bizarre" position, at best, to take for a journal more or less dedicated to delving into the intricacies of biology. It is maybe somewhat moot what are the "essences" of the sexes -- maybe more so of "yin" and "yang" which may subsume or undergird that pair. But I had argued, from something of a "mechanist philosophy" point of view, that those "essences" boil down into two quite distinct processes: producing large gametes and producing small ones. Hard to imagine a more fundamental and "essential" "natural kind", at least within the "empire" of biology.
A lot to chew on here...but now we've cross-subscribed we can probably pursue this conversation over time. (I'll be looking at your 'useful category' post in the coming days.)
The two most sexual-relations-pertinent essays on mine are:
In terms of barking mad feminism, I made this comment recently on another 'stack:
"DEI has a long pre-history in our corrupted monasteries of groupthink. To take just one example....how did someone as emotionally and intellectually screwed up as Judith Butler ever get to be deemed a 'high-powered academic'; a 'scholar'; a 'philosopher' for Christ's sake? Had she presented herself at any academic institution worthy of the name all those years ago she would have been told politely that the academic life was not for her - and then suggesting a good psychotherapist where she might get some help with her personal hang ups.. "
But "barking mad feminism" indeed. Nice to see more feminists, more women recognizing that. Quite liked your "that celebrated grand American dame of militant androgyny Judith Butler".
You no doubt know of this:
"The Professor of Parody: The hip defeatism of Judith Butler"
Something of a favourite "conceit" or "fancy" of mine:
"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of [gender identity]. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of [Judith Butler].”
Partly why I've been trying to put "gender" on something of a more scientific footing. As it is now it's not much better than phrenology and astrology. Than Chinese fortune cookies as someone said about the similar Myers-Briggs Type System.
But also like your "corrupted monasteries of groupthink", not least because it reminds me rather starkly of Russian political commissars. If you get a chance to look at the Cell article itself you might note this similarity:
Cell: "Collaboration between life scientists and STS [science and technology studies] scholars can be incredibly fruitful and take many forms. One approach involves embedding an STS scholar in a lab setting."
But I'll definitely look forward to a bit of potential collaboration as I think that the philosophy of "biology as mechanisms" may help to shed some light on a rather murky, fractious, and enervating "debate". Apropos of which, you might also have some interest in a post by philosopher of biology Paul Griffiths on "What are biological sexes?"; of particular note therefrom:
Griffiths: "Moreover, as I have briefly sketched above, the operational definitions of sexes used in biomedical fields all rely on the more fundamental definition that comes from evolutionary biology. .... However, attending to these concerns does not undermine the common biological definition of the sexes, and if anything seem to reinforce it. As we will see in Sections 5-7, that definition makes clear how and why the biological understanding of sex is unsuited to defining the social and legal status of human beings. .... Nevertheless, [evolutionary biologist and transwoman Joan Roughgarden] sees the conventional definition of the sexes as undermining rather than reinforcing the projection of cultural norms of gender onto biology. Like Roughgarden, I think the biological definition of sex is part of the solution, not part of the problem."
One might reasonably argue that that whole Cell article is pretty much an egregious effort to impose “cultural norms of gender onto biology”. Outright Lysenkoism.
I've come to be bothered that in today's society, to be a successful woman, you must be indistinguishable from a successful man. Like this essays says though, the women are abdicating society while struggling to do the job men did and ripping those structures apart.
It's an abdication of the healthy feminine and an attack on the healthy masculine. What it is unleashing is the worst proclivities of both and id daresay that's a great recipe for shredding a civilization.
"Inconvenient truths can be dismissed — such as every single legal advance for women was voted for by men."
We also need to keep in mind that none of us, man or woman, was not born of a woman. :-) [At least yet!!]
I gather it is not yet fully settled whether the ancient emphasis on fabricating Venus figurines reflected worship of fertility or something else. Given the current trends in world wide demography, perhaps a time will come in the not too distant future when a woman able and willing to have 4 or more children will become a highly prized bride indeed.
Fascinating, ta. I had come to the conclusion that the collapse in birth rates were a mixture of urbanisation (particularly apartment living) and what you might call the Mulan effect — careers as a focus replacing children.
"Any structure that does not select for good character".
You have made this point a number of times so I am curious as to how set up a bureaucracy that selects for 'good character'. Apologies if you have already addressed this.
P.S The paragraph starting with "The biological reality of sex constrains" is repeated again immediately following.
Trial by combat has always been the court of last resort. When you remove it as a practical option, something very fundamental in the human social imaginary gets broken. Something doesn't have to be 'good' or comfortable in order to be, nonetheless, necessary.
I don't see how they're any different. They both use violence to decide which side has 'the mandate of heaven'. The stakes may be different (personal versus political) but the method of decision is the same.
'Legal' is, itself, a technicality. A matter of a few squiggles on the right piece of paper. The issue for Dirt People like myself is whether trial by combat suits community standards or not. Whether the community sees value in being able to 'put the question' to anyone who strays to far from 'our ways'.
This is the most forensic and insightful takedown of feminism – as practiced by professional-managerial women in the Anglosphere, at least – I've encountered since I went through a Camille Paglia phase many years ago.
I agree that feminisation will be a major reason for the fall of Western Civilisation, but not the only reason.
The big questions are: when and at what cost?
My guess is that China will be subtle enough to let the West slide towards them and then behead it, taking over the top of governance. See https://therenwhere.substack.com/p/the-new-national-socialism-a-golden for how the slip sliding towards National Socialism is progressing. The West will fall between 2030 and 2050. It will probably slowly drown in its own moralising naivety rather than needing a shooting war to be defeated.
There is no turning back.The way forward will be different. Artificial wombs and robotic companions . That is if humans will still be relevant in the future .
Of course it does. Invoking 'reality' as if it cares or has a goal is all very progressive, but 'reality' is - at the very least - what you make it if you're willing to make it.
The painful reality is that most people do not want to admit what they want, they do not want to admit what it is that would actually make them happy.
Desire denied is desire seeking unexpected outlet.
Going all out post modernist here? There is no point in desiring what is not going to happen (in this context return to more tradional arrangements).
Artificial wombs btw is not desire for extinction. Its actually opposite. It is a way have ensure human race continues to exist regardles of gender relations. It is also a way to improve it with genetic engineering.
And robotic companions? It might just happen that most humans will be happier with loyal, empathic and aesthetically perfect robots. Today most humans are not happy in relationships area . It is a huge void left unfilled right now.
I think post-modernism is just fine when properly applied. But, I consider myself a Pre-Socratic at least as much as a post-modernist.
The idea that there's not point in desiring something that is not going to happen is exactly why the Right has continually lost to the Left for 300 years: The Vision Thing.
Yielding to 'reality' is just another form of masochism.
Marx was right to say that point of thought is not to understand reality but to change it (paraphrase).
Assuming that 'reality' bends some particular way or another *and then stopping trying to assure that it bends that way* is a sure-fire way to make achieve nothing.
Which is, really, what the Right has done for three centuries.
I think it's a mistake to just assume that things fall apart on their own and that machines that emulate pleasurable experiences are the same as the true sources of those experiences themselves.
In my experience, every 'technological fix' for a social problem just ends up creating a more intractable problem.
Test-tube testicles and sex-selected semen producing an all-female population are technically easier than artificial wombs.
One thing is for sure: from an evolutionary perspective, third-wave feminism and its context (literacy, urbanisation, secularisation, mechanisation) are extraordinarily heavy selection pressures. Just look at Allen Downey's post "Millennials Are Not Getting Married" on his blog "Probably Overthinking It". (Downey is a well known professor of statistics; that essay of his was originally an in-passing observation, that he has revisited).
In eight generations or fewer, humans will be quite different, genetically and phenotypically.
Id wager sooner than 8th generation. In The next 50 years there will be a massive change in composition of sentient species on the planet. It is even questionable whether at the end of the process the majority of will still be human or even humanlike.
I'm mindful of Hofstadter's Law: everything takes longer than you think, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
I had in mind that, as an undergrad, my mother created a new species of Drosophila (fruit fly) in ten generations by applying heavy selection for eye colour. Eight generations was already exaggeration.
But yes, this is the century of Consequences, with a capital C.
"Such men tend to be particularly disadvantaged by current child support programs."
--- Men need to take full reproductive responsibility for their lives and wear condoms, get vasectomies, or be celibate.
"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."
--- There is nothing stopping fathers from having full custody or at least 50/50 custody of their children. Those dads who want that, get it, by fighting for it in court. The fact is that most dads don't want even 50/50 custody. They like to be the "fun weekend parent" who gets the kids every 2nd weekend and 1 night per week for dinner (out of course).
So much to think about in one post. My first take is I agree 95%, but will read again.
I am also a fan of Konstantin Kisin.
We are seeing "right-wing" movements in most Western nations, often described as "far right" or worse, and there is always some truth in these disparaging stereotypes.
I think there is tie-in (in the US) to exploding housing costs and decades of sluggish wages. The macroeconomists keep saying real wages are up, but anyone who lived in L.A. 50 years ago knows single-earner households used to buy houses. 40-hour workweek.
Many white collar workers now talk about 50-60 hour weeks. We have better color TVs than we used to. Much smaller and less stylish cars.
Social tensions of all sorts get magnified when the pie is shrinking for the bottom 75%.
Women, being the smaller weaker sex who are often engaged in protecting and nurturing babies and small children, are thus more conciliatory and agreeable, more attuned to any forms of aggression (even verbal) and pretty much think along the lines of SAFETY FIRST!
All the modern hyperventilating about the "Patriarchy", especially among young, secular, bourgeois Western women who actually have almost unlimited sexual (and other) freedom and live in maybe the least patriarchal societies in recorded history, has a very "doth protest too much" quality to it.
In their endless hysterical denunciations of things that don't exist (like witches in Salem), the young women of the West show that the thing called the Patriarchy came into existence to benefit them as much as any man, and how without male protection and the male penchant for Apollonian ordering, they feel very lost, confused and (as they say) "unsafe".
The modern West's ethos of maximum personality autonomy is nerve-wracking for just about all of us—how do we cobble together an "Authentic Self"? how do we choose "values" etc when they become just another market-based style that gets swapped out like last year's wardrobe?—but for young women it seems especially dangerous and crazy-making, their psyches are the mental equivalent of someone with no immune system who is vulnerable to any and every social pathogen.
If the West does ever return to a more patriarchal social structure, it will be because (just as with sex) women need it as much as men do, they just have a harder time admitting it.
So much to unpack here. Thank you for crafting this essay. And I say that as perhaps one of those CFs years ago. Having had a family later in life, I gave up needing to 'prove' myself. And also having a family will remain the most important thing I will have ever accomplished. The challenge is how do we benefit from the work outside of the home that women do without destroying the work men do. Why do we need to destroy one to elevate another?
Haven't read all of your post yet, and you're probably aware of this quote, one I ran across the other day in an old tweet by Claire Lehmann:
https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/967286107007197184
"If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts."
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/camille_paglia_159814
Though we might have been further ahead -- maybe we shouldn't have come down out of the trees or even out of the ocean as Douglas Adams once quipped.
Not to say that women haven't held up half the sky -- as Mao once put it if I'm not mistaken. But half isn't all of it.
Footnote 2. Clearly, great minds think alike.
🙂 Hopefully I'll get a chance to read the rest of your post, but thanks for the Glubb link -- definitely worth a read, just on the basis of a quick skim. Reminds me of a cartoon, first published, I think, in the New Yorker:
"Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who DO study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it."
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lordedwinhitti_those-who-dont-study-history-are-doomed-activity-6983816073129123841-gEWk
As an armchair philosopher it has always seemed to me that the question of steering a fair course through the choppy waters of discourses about relations between men and women is the trickiest of all.....and better understood as resulting from a kind of Faustian tango between the sexes than as a simple case of one sex always doing wrong by the other. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/shall-we-dance
And this quote from a piece by (still 'feminist') Kathleen Stock shows how things might move in a more positive direction: "it would also be good if we could talk more about what is wonderful about masculinity, and toxic about femininity, without caveats or excuses.!"
"choppy waters" and "Faustian tango", indeed. Though it reminds me of the quip that the battle between the sexes won't ever be resolved because there's too much "fraternization" between the combatants ... 🙂 Maybe the nature of complementary.
But took a quick skim through your "dance" post -- several links there to Stock's oeuvre that will be worth pursuing. Not sure if you mentioned it or not but, ICYMI, see her "trenchant" criticisms of feminism in general and radfems ("barking mad") in particular on her own Substack:
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/feminist-reboot-camp
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/lets-abolish-the-dream-of-gender
Of particular note from the first:
"Effectively, the stupid story [transgenderism?] functions, for mainstream feminism, as a reductio ad absurdum: it reduces most of contemporary feminism to risible absurdity, necessitating urgent reflection on the tenability of prior commitments to explain how the absurdity ever got such a firm grip."
Moot exactly where feminism has gone off the rails, though some have, quite reasonably, argued that it more or less started where feminism "trans-mogrified" itself -- so to speak -- from a philosophy into a political project. Dogma -- AKA untenable and politically motivated premises -- often conflicts with, as Amia Srinivasan once put it, an "unfettered inquiry that is conducive to the acquisition of truth and knowledge":
https://users.ox.ac.uk/~corp1468/Research_files/Does%20Feminist%20Philosophy_KCL%20talk.pdf
Not to say that there isn't some merit in that project.
But speaking a bit more directly to your "Masculinity and Femininity are complementary polarities", you might have some interest in my recent post taking a shot at an article in Cell magazine that asked "Is ‘sex’ a useful category?”:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/is-sex-a-useful-category
A rather "bizarre" position, at best, to take for a journal more or less dedicated to delving into the intricacies of biology. It is maybe somewhat moot what are the "essences" of the sexes -- maybe more so of "yin" and "yang" which may subsume or undergird that pair. But I had argued, from something of a "mechanist philosophy" point of view, that those "essences" boil down into two quite distinct processes: producing large gametes and producing small ones. Hard to imagine a more fundamental and "essential" "natural kind", at least within the "empire" of biology.
And thanks for the subscription. 🙂
A lot to chew on here...but now we've cross-subscribed we can probably pursue this conversation over time. (I'll be looking at your 'useful category' post in the coming days.)
The two most sexual-relations-pertinent essays on mine are:
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired (one of my favorites) and
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/life-in-the-shadows-of-metoo
In terms of barking mad feminism, I made this comment recently on another 'stack:
"DEI has a long pre-history in our corrupted monasteries of groupthink. To take just one example....how did someone as emotionally and intellectually screwed up as Judith Butler ever get to be deemed a 'high-powered academic'; a 'scholar'; a 'philosopher' for Christ's sake? Had she presented herself at any academic institution worthy of the name all those years ago she would have been told politely that the academic life was not for her - and then suggesting a good psychotherapist where she might get some help with her personal hang ups.. "
Good to connect with you.
Thanks. 👍🙂
But "barking mad feminism" indeed. Nice to see more feminists, more women recognizing that. Quite liked your "that celebrated grand American dame of militant androgyny Judith Butler".
You no doubt know of this:
"The Professor of Parody: The hip defeatism of Judith Butler"
https://newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody
Something of a favourite "conceit" or "fancy" of mine:
"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of [gender identity]. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of [Judith Butler].”
Apologies to Thomas Jefferson ... 😉🙂
https://quotefancy.com/quote/918147/Thomas-Jefferson-Ridicule-is-the-only-weapon-which-can-be-used-against-unintelligible
Partly why I've been trying to put "gender" on something of a more scientific footing. As it is now it's not much better than phrenology and astrology. Than Chinese fortune cookies as someone said about the similar Myers-Briggs Type System.
But also like your "corrupted monasteries of groupthink", not least because it reminds me rather starkly of Russian political commissars. If you get a chance to look at the Cell article itself you might note this similarity:
Cell: "Collaboration between life scientists and STS [science and technology studies] scholars can be incredibly fruitful and take many forms. One approach involves embedding an STS scholar in a lab setting."
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00122-3#%20
😲 "gobsmacking" doesn't begin to cover that.
But I'll definitely look forward to a bit of potential collaboration as I think that the philosophy of "biology as mechanisms" may help to shed some light on a rather murky, fractious, and enervating "debate". Apropos of which, you might also have some interest in a post by philosopher of biology Paul Griffiths on "What are biological sexes?"; of particular note therefrom:
Griffiths: "Moreover, as I have briefly sketched above, the operational definitions of sexes used in biomedical fields all rely on the more fundamental definition that comes from evolutionary biology. .... However, attending to these concerns does not undermine the common biological definition of the sexes, and if anything seem to reinforce it. As we will see in Sections 5-7, that definition makes clear how and why the biological understanding of sex is unsuited to defining the social and legal status of human beings. .... Nevertheless, [evolutionary biologist and transwoman Joan Roughgarden] sees the conventional definition of the sexes as undermining rather than reinforcing the projection of cultural norms of gender onto biology. Like Roughgarden, I think the biological definition of sex is part of the solution, not part of the problem."
https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2
One might reasonably argue that that whole Cell article is pretty much an egregious effort to impose “cultural norms of gender onto biology”. Outright Lysenkoism.
I've come to be bothered that in today's society, to be a successful woman, you must be indistinguishable from a successful man. Like this essays says though, the women are abdicating society while struggling to do the job men did and ripping those structures apart.
And we are losing the healthy feminine.
https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/rediscovering-the-goddess
That is an irony of the attack on masculinity, it is undermining femininity at the same time.
It's an abdication of the healthy feminine and an attack on the healthy masculine. What it is unleashing is the worst proclivities of both and id daresay that's a great recipe for shredding a civilization.
FYI: Tove (Wood fron Eden) is a woman.
Oops. How very now to be fixing pronouns …
Ah, but she would be amused. That's the difference. :)
A quibble, technically "Wood from Eden is a husband and wife team": 🙂
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/about
Not always easy to see who's "talking" in any given post; maybe they need to include their pronouns ... 😉🙂
It's at the top of every post. Anders does not write often now. Tove writes transcendently clearly.
Late to the party -- but thanks ... 😉🙂
That's my byline! How did you know?
🙂 But if not a jest, all you have to do to see anyone's byline, or "where they're coming from", is to move your mouse cursor over their user name.
I like to see where my "Likes" are coming from, often worth a follow or checking-out. 🙂
This is really a powerful and well-written piece. It brings a number of important threads together.
"Inconvenient truths can be dismissed — such as every single legal advance for women was voted for by men."
We also need to keep in mind that none of us, man or woman, was not born of a woman. :-) [At least yet!!]
I gather it is not yet fully settled whether the ancient emphasis on fabricating Venus figurines reflected worship of fertility or something else. Given the current trends in world wide demography, perhaps a time will come in the not too distant future when a woman able and willing to have 4 or more children will become a highly prized bride indeed.
Today [4/2/24] I came across this item discussing large families and the women who desire them: https://lawliberty.org/book-review/breeding-immortal-beings/
BOOK REVIEW MARCH 27, 2024
Breeding Immortal Beings by Rachel Lu
What motivates an educated woman to have seven children?
REVIEWED: Hannah's Children by Catherine Ruth Pakaluk
https://www.amazon.com/Hannahs-Children-Quietly-Defying-Dearth/dp/1684514576/
Fascinating, ta. I had come to the conclusion that the collapse in birth rates were a mixture of urbanisation (particularly apartment living) and what you might call the Mulan effect — careers as a focus replacing children.
https://youtube.com/shorts/rf9q6OKgSxs?si=TdrGtKn9GWHzNm69
"Any structure that does not select for good character".
You have made this point a number of times so I am curious as to how set up a bureaucracy that selects for 'good character'. Apologies if you have already addressed this.
P.S The paragraph starting with "The biological reality of sex constrains" is repeated again immediately following.
Fixed the repetition. I am hoping that if I mention the character problem often enough folk might come up with some possible solutions.
Oops. Ta. No, I don’t have a solution on the character issue. Bringing back duelling does not seem practical.
Trial by combat has always been the court of last resort. When you remove it as a practical option, something very fundamental in the human social imaginary gets broken. Something doesn't have to be 'good' or comfortable in order to be, nonetheless, necessary.
The duel of honour is not the same as trial by combat, but I take your point.
I don't see how they're any different. They both use violence to decide which side has 'the mandate of heaven'. The stakes may be different (personal versus political) but the method of decision is the same.
One’s a legal procedure and the other is not, and was often technically illegal.
'Legal' is, itself, a technicality. A matter of a few squiggles on the right piece of paper. The issue for Dirt People like myself is whether trial by combat suits community standards or not. Whether the community sees value in being able to 'put the question' to anyone who strays to far from 'our ways'.
This is the most forensic and insightful takedown of feminism – as practiced by professional-managerial women in the Anglosphere, at least – I've encountered since I went through a Camille Paglia phase many years ago.
High praise! Thank you. (I have long been a Camille Paglia fan.)
Yep, me too! I quote the "grass huts" line frequently.
I agree that feminisation will be a major reason for the fall of Western Civilisation, but not the only reason.
The big questions are: when and at what cost?
My guess is that China will be subtle enough to let the West slide towards them and then behead it, taking over the top of governance. See https://therenwhere.substack.com/p/the-new-national-socialism-a-golden for how the slip sliding towards National Socialism is progressing. The West will fall between 2030 and 2050. It will probably slowly drown in its own moralising naivety rather than needing a shooting war to be defeated.
Brilliant but also effing sad
There is no turning back.The way forward will be different. Artificial wombs and robotic companions . That is if humans will still be relevant in the future .
Nothing says 'Don't listen to my opinions' quite so well as expressing one's desire for extinction.
Desire has nothing to do with it. It is just the future reality. Whether ones like it or not its already coming
Of course it does. Invoking 'reality' as if it cares or has a goal is all very progressive, but 'reality' is - at the very least - what you make it if you're willing to make it.
The painful reality is that most people do not want to admit what they want, they do not want to admit what it is that would actually make them happy.
Desire denied is desire seeking unexpected outlet.
The desire to deny desire is itself desire.
Going all out post modernist here? There is no point in desiring what is not going to happen (in this context return to more tradional arrangements).
Artificial wombs btw is not desire for extinction. Its actually opposite. It is a way have ensure human race continues to exist regardles of gender relations. It is also a way to improve it with genetic engineering.
And robotic companions? It might just happen that most humans will be happier with loyal, empathic and aesthetically perfect robots. Today most humans are not happy in relationships area . It is a huge void left unfilled right now.
I think post-modernism is just fine when properly applied. But, I consider myself a Pre-Socratic at least as much as a post-modernist.
The idea that there's not point in desiring something that is not going to happen is exactly why the Right has continually lost to the Left for 300 years: The Vision Thing.
Yielding to 'reality' is just another form of masochism.
Marx was right to say that point of thought is not to understand reality but to change it (paraphrase).
Assuming that 'reality' bends some particular way or another *and then stopping trying to assure that it bends that way* is a sure-fire way to make achieve nothing.
Which is, really, what the Right has done for three centuries.
I think it's a mistake to just assume that things fall apart on their own and that machines that emulate pleasurable experiences are the same as the true sources of those experiences themselves.
In my experience, every 'technological fix' for a social problem just ends up creating a more intractable problem.
Test-tube testicles and sex-selected semen producing an all-female population are technically easier than artificial wombs.
One thing is for sure: from an evolutionary perspective, third-wave feminism and its context (literacy, urbanisation, secularisation, mechanisation) are extraordinarily heavy selection pressures. Just look at Allen Downey's post "Millennials Are Not Getting Married" on his blog "Probably Overthinking It". (Downey is a well known professor of statistics; that essay of his was originally an in-passing observation, that he has revisited).
In eight generations or fewer, humans will be quite different, genetically and phenotypically.
Id wager sooner than 8th generation. In The next 50 years there will be a massive change in composition of sentient species on the planet. It is even questionable whether at the end of the process the majority of will still be human or even humanlike.
I'm mindful of Hofstadter's Law: everything takes longer than you think, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
I had in mind that, as an undergrad, my mother created a new species of Drosophila (fruit fly) in ten generations by applying heavy selection for eye colour. Eight generations was already exaggeration.
But yes, this is the century of Consequences, with a capital C.
Grrrl power bought down the Soviet Onion
https://youtube.com/shorts/-xIufcncQRo?si=7oBM1is7zgkHOD45
Thank you for sharing. Outstanding work!
"Such men tend to be particularly disadvantaged by current child support programs."
--- Men need to take full reproductive responsibility for their lives and wear condoms, get vasectomies, or be celibate.
"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."
--- There is nothing stopping fathers from having full custody or at least 50/50 custody of their children. Those dads who want that, get it, by fighting for it in court. The fact is that most dads don't want even 50/50 custody. They like to be the "fun weekend parent" who gets the kids every 2nd weekend and 1 night per week for dinner (out of course).