Although tyranny was often an outcome, as it is of any structured political or economic system, specialization into certain roles was also, in the main, a byproduct of local historical conditions and assumptions (both of which had a grounding in empirical personal and cultural experience, experimentation, consequences, and adaptation). Local systems didn’t just arise from nowhere; they built themselves up gradually through an experimental and historical process. And so one has to be careful with assumptions that people of the past were just specially idiotic and ignorant, or specially wicked, compared to us.
It is best to assume, from the outset, that they had some reason for doing things the way that they did, and also that there were some reasons why they ended up with the results that they did (good or bad), and that local conditions and local experience, solutions, and theories had something to do with both. In this way, you can engage in cultural and historical criticism without being “a critic.”
It’s very easy to assume that the people of another country and culture are a bunch of idiots, or are morally degenerate, because they do not do things the same way we do and do not have the same assumptions as we do. And people on the left tend to be more on guard against such judgements, while people on the right are more open to them. But it’s just as easy to make similar judgements about people of other times, who thought and acted quite different from us, and to condemn them for that. We cannot travel to the past to except by study, whereas other cultures are open to many of us now, but perspectives on both can be limited if we do not look very hard and try to immerse ourselves in the milieu. In this task, people from the right tend to be better at appreciating and valuing the cultures of the past, whereas those on the left prefer to be critical tourists, visiting only to come back and tell you terrible those places were because they did not share our enlightenment.
Conservatives are also more like to try to carry forward the treasures of their own cultural inheritance (which they seek to conserve), while liberals are more experimental and more interested in criticizing the inheritance of their own culture while bringing in new innovations from outside to invigorate it. In this way one side is more interested in preserving value, while the other is more concerned with adding to it. And both can clearly go too far in either their impenetrable rigidity or their porous platicity. One might not let enough in to sustain it, and the other might not keep enough in to sustain it.
But the thing I am concerned about at the moment is the tendency to judge all previous arrangements, such as those between the sexes, as inherently defined by unreasoned prejudice, false assumptions, exploitation, and moral corruption. Surely, as I said, there is some of that in every system under the sun. Our humanity imbues everything we build with the same proclivity for both good and evil that each of us individually possesses. But the condemnation of the system itself, as such, the idea that all division of labor was merely prejudice and had no origin in problems that humanity as whole was trying to solve, and had some success at and benefited from, is in my opinion misguided. They deserve to make their case for themselves and not be judged wholesale by outsiders who do not appreciate their position or their values and accomplishments. They had the unique conditions they were dealing with, their capabilities to meet those challenges, and their own best working strategies for dealing with those internal and external limitations and staying alive. Probably most of them would agree that it was pretty hard a lot of the time, but would also agree that it was worthwhile and bought them everything they had in the face of very difficult odds.
Regarding gender, for example. There was a correct assumption in the past that if women didn’t get on with women’s work, if that role were not protected (both by social conventions as well as legal protections and even, in the extreme, military protections) we would all be screwed and die. They weren’t wrong about that. And it required an immense amount of time and knowledge and specialization to do the tasks they shouldered, and everyone knew it. And they deserved great praise for it.
By the same token, it was assumed that if men didn’t get on with their work of hard labor in the fields or defending the borders or bringing down the buffalo, we would all be screwed. And people weren’t wrong about that either. The world presented many immense, time consuming, specialization and expertise requiring, and even life demanding challenges. Both producing and protecting the family had a good chance of costing your life. But people were aware of it and were willing to pay the price.
One other condition they had to deal with is that there wasn’t a lot of room for error or experimentation (unless and until greater security was achieved for some period of time). There wasn’t room in the system to carry sub-optimal versions of strategies just to satisfy some ideological prejudice. The consequences accumulated too quickly for that. So there was a very pragmatic, do or die, last one standing pressure on everyone. And since there wasn’t a huge amount of spare capacity to use to add to structural innovations beyond the obvious things that met basic needs like food and clothing, innovation was slower despite being more desperately motivated. These days we have lots of extra capacity, but less urgent motivation to use it productively. So we often spend our own excess energies on more frivolous and purely pleasurable endeavors. But we have so much excess that we still advance apace.
In a system like that of the harsh world of the past, obviously apparent differences, including between the sexes, were foundational to basic biological and social strategies. There wasn’t that much to be gained from proving a point by making an army out of women or a cadre of wet nurses out of men, when it was much easier and required less effort and investment to do the opposite. And also when doing so might put you at a disadvantage against others who took a more sensible route. That doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be done (well, maybe with the nurses it would be pretty tricky), but men and women filled many positions that were considered absolutely essential to the continuation, preservation, and quality of life, and that by and large some of them were much easier to get more men to do and some were much easier to get women to do.
At the level of an entire gender, small differences in personality and preferences add up to big cumulative differences in investment required to achieve similar outcomes. Men were already quite aggressive and built muscle easily. Women were already pro-social and conscientious. And both adapted their abilities and preferred modes of addressing the challenges of life in ways that met the challenges faced by their particular culture. And in this way risks were mitigated and challenges were overcome in the most efficient way those societies could conceive, and life went on and survived. And some did especially well and spread and multiplied and generated excess capacity that allowed them to better improve their local conditions and augment their personal capabilities. And others, perceiving (or occasionally suffering) the consequences of that accumulation of excess capacity sought to acquire it or imitate it or share in it.
Life today, of course, is a much changed landscape. We have greatly reduced the level of many challenges and the concurrent risks, as well as the need to specialize in many tasks that used to require much larger devotions of time and knowledge. And so the barriers to us participating in a wider variety of tasks and challenges have been greatly lowered. The selective pressure, as well as the formerly immense limitations of how far our own time and effort could take us, have been greatly reduced. We don’t have to spend ten hours a day in the fields every day just to produce enough calories in food to sustain us. We don’t have to spend hours fetching and heating water and making soap and mending and washing and drying our clothes. Anyone can solve those problems without much devotion of time or accumulated expertise.
What we might perceive as the mutual exploitation of societies was in fact a necessary response to the problematic fact that one person just couldn’t do it all. One person couldn’t handle it all. And with lives being shorter and less certain than they are now, individuals we both less capable of containing everything that society might require to function, they were also less stable and certain containers of whatever expectation you invested in them. We all needed each other much more then than we do now. And we had to find ways to negotiate that mutual need for one another for collective success.
So is history littered with tyranny, a lack of choice, limitations, and people paying terrible prices (even their lives) to keep it all going? For certain. So is all of nature. The world was, and still is, an uneven and challenging place that often exceeds our capacity to adequately confront it. That forces us to make hard choices and tradeoffs. It puts limits on us and on our choices. We try to make choices that will benefit us and benefit those we are collaborating with, and sometimes we succeed and sometimes we don’t. The key factor constraining everyone was the always known fact that the wolf was at the door. You never knew when the next plague or invasion of drought or devastating winter was coming. You never knew who would make it through and who wouldn’t. There were no guarantees. But you had to try to figure out a way to keep going and get through.
Our current society seems likely to be be prone to give uo and declare itself unable to go on if you kicked just a few minor provisional conveniences out from under it. We have the luxury of taking so much more for granted than any other group of people in history. Our many comforts and protections, gained through hundreds of years of labor and innovation and refinement and effort, cost us little today to secure and seem almost inevitable, as if they were simply a necessary feature of the universe. Do not all people have a right to dishwashers and college educations and the best medical care in history? This seemingly pleasant sentiment sounds noble, but ignores nature and the historical process. It has a good attitude but suffers from being, unfortunately, technically incorrect.
Not only are these not rights we can assume, they are not rights anyone has assumed ever, except us. A more correct way to formulate such a sentiment would be, wouldn’t it be nice if everyone could have these (contingent, and requiring effort and a process to secure) things? And assuming that the answer is “yes, it would be nice,” well then, what would it take (considering our understanding of the cost and process, not just taking the results for granted), what would it take to secure that outcome? This may seem like a small, technical difference. But the difference is far more than just a matter or a correct persoectival and historical understanding. If you misunderstand or remain ignorant of the processes by which goods are (and were) actually produced, you will misunderstand the process by which they can actually be secured.
If you believe that the problem is merely one of distribution, of the allocation of contingent objects you incorrectly assume to be necessary, rather than one of production, you will not actually succeed in razing the overall level of good outcomes, you will merely average them. And if your actions, by ignoring or misunderstanding it, actually depress or subvert the means of production (which is likely) in the process of reallocation, the net effect will actually be to reduce overall positive good, not increase them. If non-production rather than production is the default natural outcome, then the most likely result of averaging outcomes will be to more broadly distribute failure rather than success.
If the average outcome of a single human facing the world alone is, in fact, great struggle and insufficiency, and success is instead a contingent product of effort, exchange, risk, cooperation, construction, and development, then we’ve got a much bigger problem on our hands than we thought. If the average outcome of the most basic unit of civilization is negative, then any attempt to average that outcome across individuals will also be negative, by mathematical necessity. If positive outcomes become more possible on average by certain processes of combination, cooperation, effort, and exchange, then the surest manner of averaging those outcomes is to increase the average contribution to that process of effort, exchange, risk, cooperation, and development (which will then produce more of the desired outcomes). In other words, for the highest average quantity of goods across a society, we need the highest average quality of producers.
So our primary focus, not our only focus but our primary focus, should be on the development of those qualities which develop the highest capacities for production. That is where we should seek inequalities. Not of distribution but if production, and seek to remedy them. How we do that is not so clear. Partly that depends on figuring out what actually produces good outcomes and then finding ways to encourage and support those qualities and discourage and mitigate those qualities that reduce them. And that will take some soul searching. It likely also requires constant reevaluation based on changing circumstances.
What it primarily requires is a robust narrative about what sort of person is truly able to produce (not merely distribute) good in the world and what it takes to become that person. It requires heroes. It requires goals and values, so we have some measures available to us to judge our progress. It requires a steady focus on understanding the means of production and not solely on the distribution of outcomes (which may be affected by chance, may tend toward anecdotal accounts, and may be the result of a number of possible causal explanations). It requires courage and individual engagement and responsibility.
Because every person has a hand in the cumulative production of outcomes, because each person is the sleeves the fundamental unit and means of production and seat of ultimate responsibility. You cannot reasonably be held to account for all the possible bad outcomes in the world, because it was never a necessary expectation that there should be any good outcomes, all that is contingent on the effort of individuals working alone and especially together. But you can be reasonably held responsible for your own status as a producer, because, although it was not necessary that you be productive, it is within the scope of your contingent individual control.
Positive outcomes are, in the kind of contingent world we have, either contingent on the actions of actual particular humans who exist, and then aggregated to wider positive social outcones, or they’re completely senseless. If the basic value of an object in system is zero, then the sum total of all objects in that system is also zero. You can’t accumulate collective effects from an absence of individual causes. The collective economic value and goods for distribution of an apple farm wherein none of the trees produce apples is absolutely nothing. Economies of scale must scale up from some nonzero value.
It is, of course, a rather intimidating burden to realize that the good of the world does rest, in some sense, on your individual shoulders. The important things is to realize that it’s not the collective good that you bear, but primarily just your share of it. You’re not capable of possessing or distributing all the goods the world could need. But you are capable of developing yourself to maximize your own capability as an effective producer and making your individual contribution to the total net economy of goods that provides for everyone through its collection of specialized contributions. You don’t bear the burden for the whole outcomes of the distribution of labor, but you do bear it for your bit of that labor.
Often we misjudge both the present and the past because have not adequately answered the questions, what does my share of the world demand of me as a producer of value, or what did their share of the world demand from them as producers of value? And how well did they or do I carry the part of that burden I am able or gifted to bear? More often we judge purely by results, on the surface. We judge by quantity of output rather than quality of input.
Two things I wonder about. First, the imbalance between gender resentment. There is a great deal of desire among women to have access to men’s previous realms of work, as well as equal success at it. And some of this may be due to the way that post-industrial society deconstructed the more complex balance of tasks that men and women used to share and reconfigured life around narrow specializations and the pursuit of wealth. We have developed technologies that freed up women to use more of the capacities they share with men. Birth control and medical care have made so far, far less time (or none at all) needs to be devoted to the task of reproduction. We don’t have to have twelve babies just to ensure that there will be three children who survive to grow up to take over the farm when you suddenly go blind from an infection or die of smallpox.
We did develop other technologies that made men’s work far easier and more productive as well. Plows, tractors, mills, combines, rifles, city walls. All those innovations freed men’s capacities up, but only to do more of what they were already doing. We haven’t developed effective technologies to enable men to bear or nurse children. Those still belong to women as exclusive capabilities.
From all this I deduce that the number of things that are close to the actual core of either manhood or womanhood, that are the most exclusive, are fairly small. And we can each do each in our own particular way well, if not exactly the same way that a person of the opposite sex would do it. Both men and women can play basketball, and both men and women can play tennis, and both do it well. But they also approach the problems those games present differently, with different average strategies. As such, it is very worthwhile to see what each can contribute to the many fields in which their abilities overlap, not because they are the same, but because they are broadly different and bring unique perspectives and approaches to bear on problems. The diversity of having men and women present in an endeavor is not good because they are generic and interchangeable, but because it is diversity, because there is difference.
That doesn’t mean either, that some circumstances, some games, won’t exclusively favor one or the other, or attract one of the other based on preference. Men are unlikely to take of preschool education (or pregnancy) or nursing or social work any time soon. Probably the majority of family doctors and RNs will be women from now on. Women like working with other people. They’re good at it. They’re very competent and conscientious, they’re careful. They also like helping others, working at jobs that assist others like charity, social services and medicine. And that’s great! Those are desperate needs of society. Thank God for them. Value them. Don’t humiliate them or denigrate them or treat them as if they are worse worth less because of their choices or abilities.
Where would any of us be without our mothers? We owe them literally everything. Everything. Society doesn’t go on if they don’t do the job they’re doing. And it is a hard and challenging and sometimes thankless job the requires an immense amounts of skill and knowledge and character. We need to respect the value of their input and recognize the immense value of their output, which is all humanity itself. The honor and credit for the bearing of humanity belongs to women, and women alone. You can’t take that away from them. They can’t be replaced. And since they cannot be replaced they must be honored for the irreplaceable value they contribute.
Men have also done a lot that needed to be done to keep everyone alive. They worked slaved away to try to provide for their families. They regularly went out to risk their lives for them in all kinds of occupations. They also regularly spent their lives in an effort to protect their wives and children. It’s hard to deny the massive sacrifice that constitutes. They faced many dangers and endured many terrible conditions just for the chance of a better, more secure life for their family. Men have taken a lot of risks, many of which didn’t pay out, but some of which really did. When things got hard and the world started pushing on humanity, they pushed back. And it did get us somewhere.
Men embody risk more than stable value. You can see that in so many things about them. Even genetically, women always conserve genetic information, preserving the mitochondrial DNA line and even in their sex chromosomes always passing on a mix of both their X lines. But men only pass on either an X unchanged or a Y unchanged, and if they fail to pass on their Y gene it disappears from the genetic future of their descendants. Women conserve and collaborate, men select and compete, genetically.
And there is value to both. You actually need both. Stability and adaptation, care and aggression, preservation and risk. The world presents such a complex, shifting tapestry of challenges, and human society is so complex and full of potential, that you need counterbalancing forces and strategies to our use the common good. That’s why even within sexes it is so useful to have so much variety of personality. Overall there is an average character, a personality to each sex. But within each sex there is so much variation and so much overlap that those personalities can themselves be individually adapted to any given situation. It’s not only that men can help with this situation and women with that, but women and men themselves each have the capacity to adjust to the situation within their groups, while still remaining a meaningful category. Men find ways to be men and women find ways to be women, whatever the situation, and both find ways to be humans and keep our race going.
While the technology has reduced many of the barriers to women doing much of men’s work, it hasn’t removed all of their preferential choices and average personality traits. So even in modern situations that attempt to remove all barrier to choice, choice based on underlying qualities and preferences is what asserts itself the most, and men and women tend to drift strongly into gendered roles (as we see in the Jewish Kibbutz and Scandinavian countries).
One thing technology has not accomplished, though, is the desire among men to take over women’s distinctive areas. Partly, the problem is just that men can’t. Maybe there are some social ways in which men are envying and attempting to inhabit the roles of women. But it’s hard to do it successfully. Men just don’t have the capacity. We have no built-in store of eggs, no uterus. You can’t study enough or work out enough to fix that problem. Men seem to be less multi-faceted and flexible than women. Their design seems based more around going all in on certain capacities, whereas women are more pluripotent.
You can see this in genetics, and in all kinds of average outcomes (women are more consistent, men take up both the high and low ends of the distribution in all kinds of areas), in neurology (men have more grey matter, women have more total connectivity), in their approach to life (men will work more hours, women will balance more overall interests), etc etc. Their sexual behavior also reflects a similar approach. Women pursue a more complex and multi-faceted value system and set of goals in their mates. Men pursue a simpler set of values (and are actually much easier to please and are less likely to become displeased with their relationships, even if they are also less faithful).
In general, it’s much easier to get women to be come more like men than it is to get men to become more like women. This is a curious fact that no doubt has many explanations, one of which might be that it is easier to develop a simpler approach than it is to cultivate a more complex one. And, of course, it’s hard to undo the changes to the basic stable template of femininity that the Y gene creates across the human manifestation (brain, genes, bones, hormones, behavior, etc, it’s hard to un-ring that bell and extract all that systemic change).
Some things simply can’t be changed enough to make certain realities possible. So even though the contributions of women are of immense and essential value, men lack access to and have reduced interest in (and perhaps less overall average capability for) them. But women can do a lot of thing things men can do. Technology has reduced or removed many of the barriers they used to face and freed up their overall capacity so they need to specialize less in previous areas and can branch out and invest quite a lot into the same areas men used to specialize and compete in. Which means that men have new competition. Rather than finding new areas open to them, for many reasons, they just compete harder in their existing competencies. Or they give up and exit the competitive arena. Which is actually pretty hard on them. They don’t seem to do very well outside it. They turn in on themselves and become self focused, and a surprising number end up trapped playing video games, watching pornography, living at home, and doing drugs. Some, rather than just wasting away, turn to crime or descend into depression and may commit suicide, or may direct their aggression toward others.
Men fundamentally want to be men, and if they can’t figure out how to be men in a healthy rewarding acceptable way won’t become much of anything. They will remain adolescents or children, or simply because come very bad men. Women, in general, though, seem able to adapt and able to add new dimensions to an already more complex and multi-faceted life. Having space in the specific tasks of femininity freed up gives them excess capacity to devote elsewhere. Not that women don’t suffer challenges too. But their problem seems to be that it is actually harder to “have it all” and do it all than maybe they had been told (especially if men aren’t contributing to their lives any more), whereas more men are more having the problem of not trying to have anything.
Men haven’t really figured out a way to “have it all”. It’s not clear that they easily can. Their way of solving this problem, previously, was through negotiated stable relationships with women. That was how they unlocked the full panoply of avenues of fulfillment in life, and how they balanced and productively transformed the excesses of their own natures. But suddenly women are in the position of not needing them any more. Beyond the occasional sperm donation. They happily proclaim the end of men and their emancipation from the common project that used to unite these two halves of humanity. And men are not well positioned to thrive in that world.
Unfortunately, the likely fallout of their not thriving is likely to have consequences that go beyond their own lives. When faced with difficult, challenging circumstances, dangers, needs that cannot be met, men will take some crazy risks. They will fight wars, journey to other continents, plunder cities, and conduct wild experiments. Men don’t go down quietly. They are very very likely to fight, to try desperately to prevent their historical and genetic legacy from disappearing. That’s one of their strengths that has kept the human race going. But it can bite you pretty hard if they get cornered.
I think what both sexes need to remember is that the good of both is the good of all. We can’t afford to hate or say we don’t need half of humanity. We can’t afford to reject their nature or our history together or what we’ve accomolished. At the moment, we can’t live without one another. And we weren’t meant to. We were designed to be together. We aren’t like some types of reptile or invertebrates that live separate lives, meeting only in passing as one visits the egg clutches of the other to fertilize them and move on. We are a symbiotic species. We are infinitely intertwined.
We need our need for one another. We are made to reinforce and compliment and balance one another. We are there to protect each other from our faults and share our strengths. The romance of the human race, of the feminine of humanity and the masculine of humanity, the story of our long journey together through the ages, is the greatest romance in history. Our family is immense, it has filled the whole globe. We did that together. Men didn’t do it, women didn’t do it. We did it together. Together we created, together we tamed, together we adapted, together we nurtured, together we built, together we survived.
If either one of us has failed to give the other the proper credit for their roles, let it be given. We may have played differing parts, but every bit of it was only possible because we were together. Because of the marriage of humanity. If we want that story to continue, if we want that relationship to endure, we need to value one another. We need to value our relationship. A marriage can survive hostility, it can survive arguments, it can survive anger and regret. A marriage cannot survive indifference. And that is a place I worry is becoming more and more the destination of men and women today. We don’t see the other sex as even being worth the trouble. Not worth the risk or investment. When that happens, the whole shared project ends. We end up left only with ourselves. Creation ends. And when we end, silence falls.
The fundamental rule for surviving the future and navigating the relationship between the sexes is simple. Whatever happens, whatever must be done, whereever we go, however things change. We must love each other. I don’t mean individually, although that is a grest way to do it in your life, a great way to learn to do it for all Humanity. We must love one another as men and women. We must seek one another’s good, care for one another, value one another, see our contribution and identity as essential and important to the relationship that is humanity.
Men must love women. And women must love men. If we cannot learn to do that, if we cannot find that value, find something worth living and appreciating and desiring in one another beyond some generic notion of humanity that simply includes our own preferences and prejudices and personality, then we cannot learn to love humanity. We can only love half of it, the bit nearest to ourselves. And likely far less than that, once we have been willing to leave behind so much.
Loving the good part of men and women doesn’t mean simply ignoring or accepting the bad parts, the worst version of manhood or womanhood (and there are dangerous versions of both). It means investing in them, caring about them, helping them, being courageous enough to use who we are to help balance and redeem who they are, seeking rge best of them (not just the eradication of them, or the eradication of the bit of them that isn’t the same as us). It means appreciating them enough to know what the good and bad version of them are, beyond what merely pleases us or is how we prefer to be. It means valuing nurturing and aggression enough to know what the good and bad versions of each are, in ourselves and in others. It means accepting the gifts of the other as something we genuinely need to be the most complete version of ourselves and most complete version of humanity.
Making Nobody Happy 