Not a rules, but a moral-caste-based order

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

This is the fourth in a series of posts — first, second, third — on careerist feminism and what it has wrought.

That the American Republic is not currently travelling well is a common observation. One dysfunction is the yawning division between the highly credentialed Optimates — products of the elite universities, increasingly contemptuous of the ordinary citizenry¹ — and trouble-making Populares. That — just as in the lead up to the US Civil War — there have been massive surges in migration that are polarising the Republic geographically is not exactly an encouraging sign.

The decision of the Colorado Supreme Court to block Trump from being on the ballot for something he has neither been charged with nor convicted of, where the four Justices educated at Ivy League law schools voted to block Trump, and the three Justices educated at the Denver Law School voted not to, expressed the elite divide starkly.

In November 2023, the US Vice President, the President of Harvard and the most recently appointed US Supreme Court Justice were all diversity hires. None of them came from anything even remotely resembling a deprived background. They all hit various (utterly spurious) intersectional “oppression points”.

“Oppression bingo” has been taken up so enthusiastically as elite folk can play it — either themselves, or with folk like them: including an actual Princess. There is no need to associate with folk from the lower orders while playing the game.

The false, yet pervasive, characterisation of American society — and other developed democracies — as riddled with structures of oppression devalues what democracy has wrought. For, clearly, election after election has failed to eliminate “oppression”.

Hence the electoral (and commercial) choices of the citizens cannot be trusted. Only those who have mastered Theory can be trusted. Thus we get the non-electoral politics of institutional capture. A politics that careerist feminism has enthusiastically embraced.

Such superior understanding includes that merit and procedural equality has perpetuated oppression. Indeed, are clearly mechanisms of structural oppression.² Hence the need to “move beyond” merit. Hence shifting to diversity hiring.

The US has been playing the diversity hire game for many decades. There is a lot of ruin in a nation, but decay in US state capacity has become clear, and the diversity hire game is part of the problem. It also has a polarising effect, as it angers those who see the system stacked against them.

This is particularly so when the lack of capacity of those who benefit from it becomes particularly stark.

The University Presidents

Which brings us to the now infamous testimony of the three University Presidents (Harvard, MIT, and Penn) to the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce. A (female) lawyer friend who watched it described their performance as “toe curlingly embarrassing”. Two of the Presidents have since resigned.

What folk were presented with was three female University Presidents, who clearly got their jobs because they were female, and who were not up to the demands of the job. Of the three, only one — the President of MIT — was a serious scholar. Not coincidentally, she was the only one to keep her position.

The President of Penn resigned almost immediately. The President of Harvard held on until it became clear she had other issues: including, not merely a remarkably thin scholarly publication record, but a somewhat plagiarism-troubled one.

This was the diversity hire issue being made very public, at the top of key institutions. Indeed, at the top of institutions charged with credentialing merit, of generating signals of competence.

Playing intersectional bingo via diversity hiring does not generate respect, it poisons it. The notion that respect can be centrally handed out is a classic case of the progressivist delusion that social goods can be allocated in such a fashion.³ It is also a classic manifestation of progressivism seriously underestimating the problems of just making things work. It is much easier to make a complex system less functional than to make it more so.

I have discussed before how we are becoming a civilisation of broken feedbacks. This includes deliberate blocking or breaking of feedbacks: including, in many ways especially, accountability feedbacks. Degrading the signals of competence via diversity hiring, and other forms of affirmative action, is very much part of this.

The Dialectical Faith

Behind the Theory that has become a compulsory subject in so many university degrees is a Dialectical Faith that does not take the problems of order, of making things work, seriously.⁴ What has become known as “wokery” is the popularisation of Critical Theory and Critical Theory. It is the updating of the Marxian Dialectical Faith without Marx’s economism (aka “vulgar Marxism”) but with increased Hegelianism.

This Faith, due to social alchemy theory, claims that if one corrodes existing “oppressive” society the transformational future will emerge, like gold out of base metal. It deliberately seeks increased social entropy⁵ A Faith that spreads because of a lack of reality-tests within a civilisation of broken feedbacks while itself actively suppressing reality-tests: through diversity hiring, affirmative action, institutional politics by-passing electoral politics, morally “required” yet false or misleading media narratives, and attacks on freedom of speech and thought.

Because social corrosion (“accelerating the contradictions”) is the point, one ends with an anti-heritage, anti-natalist, anti-science, anti-truth Faith operating as something of a doom spiral. (For a horrifying, or perhaps terrifying, take on this, see here.)

Thus, the heritage of Western societies is illegitimate, because it is full of white male faces. As this has become increasingly the clear view of presumptively feminist — and increasingly feminised, elites — young white males are increasingly declining to serve in militaries in both the US and in the UK. Why should they defend a heritage that they are told is awful because it has too many people who look like them in it? Mathematician Eric Weinstein watching his son’s school systematically alienate his son because he was male is part of a much wider pattern.

Meanwhile, more and more women are finding that careers do not substitute for children while men are increasingly uncertain about their proper role, as the undermining of the protector/provider undermines masculinity. We are in utter evolutionary novelty here.

Women are engaged in running formal institutions and organisations at levels without parallel in human history:

As of 2022, women held 52 percent of professional-managerial roles in the U.S. Women earn more than 57 percent of bachelor degrees, 61 percent of master’s degrees, and 54 percent of doctoral degrees. And because they are overrepresented in professions, such as human resource management (73 percent) and compliance officers (57 percent), that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally.

What makes us think women in general will be inherently good at things they have never done at such a scale in all of human history? Particularly in a situation where zero-sum feminism takes any notion of male wisdom in running things to be laughable; thanks to me-too plus believe all women, makes experienced men more reluctant to mentor women; while talking about problems within female patterns of behaviour becomes misogyny.

There is plenty of evangelising of the Dialectical Faith at the base of progressivism, for it is structured to evangelise. The proper end of history is global unity of Theory and practice. So to spread adherence to Theory is to advance the transformational future. The purpose of Theory becomes to spread Theory — aka critical consciousness.

But we also see emergent patterns of coordination. What we might call emergent non-conspiracies. Feminisation increasing the salience of emotional conformity mobilised by an imperial propriety very much suits this pattern.

Moreover, there is a longer term cultural shift underway of a decrease in use of rationality terms and an increase in intuitive terms. A shift that started well before the advent of Fox News (1996), mass internet or social media. It coincides with post-Pill-and-legal-abortion surge in female higher education participation and the beginning of cable news (CNN 1980).

DEI corrosion

The diversity hiring of Diversity-Equity-Inclusion tends to select for narcissistic bullies. As a (female) academic friend has observed, watching the corrosive effects on her own institution:

DEI attracts narcissists because even if they're diversity hires they don't care about the head-patting and humouring, because it's ATTENTION.

DEI is organisational entrenchment of mechanisms of narcissistic aggression via catastrophising emotionality through anathematisation of speech and thought on the grounds of being offensive — in a word, being bad feels. It valorises demanding accommodation to the politics and viewpoint of the practitioners of such politics, via a heckler’s veto over the words and actions of others.

Mathematician’s Eric Weinstein’s comments about “inclusion” are very much on point:

The reason that inclusion has become terrible is that we are trying to create low trust environments in all previously high trust environments and that thing means we can’t have any serious discussions.

Without using the phrase, he is describing a civilisation of broken feedbacks. The generation of a DEI moral caste system (female over male, person of colour over not, gay over straight, trans over cis …) creates a fraught modern workplace. As a friend commented recently:

I remember being told by one boss "stop tiptoeing around things and say things directly" and me saying "but I can't because I am a man and a complaint can be made against me at any time for any thing" ...

As our institutions and organisations have become increasingly feminised, we have moved from too few boundaries in male-dominated institutions and organisations with a minority of women to increasingly feminised institutions and organisations with continually inflating boundaries operating a moral caste system with unequal presumptions of guilt and innocence. This cliquey emotionality is incompatible with robust levels of trust.

Wandering Indian on Unsplash.

Institutions with such emasculated culture are also increasingly dysfunctional. Ones where Theory both shifts their operations further towards feminisation, plays off those dynamics and intensifies the negative effects thereof.

Instead of centrally-imposed inquisitors and commissars, we get networked ones, arising from a self-righteous — and self-serving — puritanical propriety, where error has no rights and those who have mastered Theory can determine error. The revealed logic is “the current situation is oppressive; social action is required to exit that oppression; dissent inhibits such action; hence dissent harms the oppressed group” thereby de-legitimating all such dissent. It is untruth piled on reality-avoidance to wield a totalitarian — no area of life is left untouched — propriety.

While making a very practical critique of DEI, Ryan Ruffaner, an industrial-organizational psychologist, describes DEI as a grievance industrial complex generating a sense of being saviours without generating practical benefits. He also notes the rhetorical pattern of citing history, moving to emotional experience, then to supporting anecdote and, if challenged, back to cited history to repeat the pattern. If you remain calm in front of what is likely to be an increasingly emotional performance, it can seem like bullying against their emotionality.

This gels with what Richard Hanania discusses as the “women’s tears” issue. As he notes:

While most women don’t go around cancelling people, it’s clear that many do value protecting feelings over free speech. Given these realities, I think we have a few options for how we treat public discourse. The first two are

1. Expect everyone who participates in the marketplace of ideas to abide by male standards, meaning you accept some level of abrasiveness and hurt feelings as the price of entry.

2. Expect everyone to abide by female standards, meaning we care less about truth and prioritize the emotional and mental well-being of participants in debates.

Instead of either of these options, I think we’ve stumbled upon a hybrid system, where

1. We accept gender double standards, and tolerate more aggression towards men than we do towards women. We also tolerate more hyper-emotionalism from women than men.

Option (2) is what I think most people mean by the feminization of intellectual life, but Option (3) is actually worse, because it also introduces double standards we see everywhere in our culture.

Hanania himself takes what might reasonably be described as a very Roman view of all this:

Given that (3) is so horrible and basically gives a veto to hysterical women over all public policy, we have to choose (1) or (2). I have no doubt that public discourse as a male space works better. That doesn’t mean women are barred from voting or discussing politics. They can participate in the public arena but as soon as they start crying over a Halloween costume or talking about “online abuse,” most people should roll their eyes and understand that someone without the emotional stability to even participate in the marketplace of ideas isn’t going to have the traits necessary to contribute much to it. I think we were closer to this ideal 20 or 30 years ago, but we’ve moved away from it under the pressure of civil rights law and women becoming more prominent at higher levels of important institutions. This is basically the way we treat men already; a male journalist crying over mean words instantly loses credibility, and rightfully so. The public space should be regularly purging people, and we can’t care if the purges have a disparate impact.

Just as a civilised society requires men to sit on various negative traits, if women are going to participate in public discourse and institutions to the level they apparently wish to, then they are going to have to sit on various negative traits as well. But the pseudo-sophisticated, self-righteous narcissism of zero-sum careerist feminism — and the devoted actor zealot activists of Theory, of the Dialectical Faith — systematically sabotage even identifying, let alone discussing, such issues.

References

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1. Arnold Kling points out that those identified in the Rasmussen survey as elite are more accurately identified as the ultra-citified. They operate as a strikingly coherent group within elite circles even if they are only part of the US elite.

2. What James Lindsay nicely characterises as magic spirits sociology.

3. In the case of the African-American middle class, affirmative action has done much to gut the — previously vibrant — African-American commercial middle class, as educated African-Americans shifted to federal, state and local government employment.

4. Marx held that the division of labour is the basis of alienation and exploitation. Once you accept that, there are no problems of order, there is just power, domination and exploitation. It is how Marx got his immiseration prediction so wrong. If capital is bourgeois domination, more capital means more domination, hence more immiseration. If capital is the produced means of production, more capital means labour is more productive and has more relatively scarcity, so is more valuable, so wages rise. The latter is a how you make things work matter. The former is what you get when a pre-Darwinian metaphysician pretends to be a social scientist.

5. In the words of Herbert Marcuse explaining why there is no positive vision, just critique of what exists:

What kind of life? We are still confronted with the demand to state the “concrete alternative.” The demand is meaningless if it asks for a blueprint of the specific institutions and relationships which would be those of the new society: they cannot be determined a priori; they will develop, in trial and error, as the new society develops. If we could form a concrete concept of the alternative today, it would not be that of an alternative; the possibilities of the new society are sufficiently “abstract,” i.e., removed from and incongruous with the established universe to defy any attempt to identify them in terms of this universe.

Max Horkheimer says essentially the same thing:

The Critical Theory which I conceived later is based on the idea that one cannot determine, what is good, what a good, a free society would look like from within the society which we live in. We lack the means. But in our work we can bring up the negative aspects of this society, which we want to change.