Making Nobody Happy

The narrative of (modern) colonialism radically overstates the benefits for the colonizers and radically underestimates the benefits for the colonized. Which is a reverse of the older narrative.

If you set aside feelings, which admittedly run extremely high on this subject for many reasons, a far more ambiguous picture emerges of the net cost and net benefits for everyone concerned.

There’s always plenty to be upset about in history. Even in European history, the Britons didn’t love the Romans or the Anglo-Saxons, and the Anglo-Saxons didn’t love the Normans, and the Scottish didn’t love the English, and the English didn’t love the Norsemen, and the Americans didn’t love the British, and none of them loved the Irish, and all of them found plenty of reasons to resent and fight one another over their respective incursions.

But judging the outcomes of history in a moral or adjudicatory sense, from the position of later time, is a bit more complex. Its also a lot harder to say what “would have been” if things had been different, when that simply isn’t what the historical process gave us. Choices may be moral or immoral, fair or unfair, wise or unwise. But history simply is. It’s more like biology; it’s a natural process of growth and failure and birth and death and challenge and adaptation. And although we can make specific choices, we cannot choose the past nor predict much about the future.

European colonies were as much a symptom of power and advancement as a cause of it. The countries in question didn’t know they would succeed, or that other nations and people wouldn’t. They were doing what everyone was doing and had been doing for all time. Sometimes that results in a major empire being established, and sometimes it doesn’t. And it wasn’t at all obvious that European nations were destined to achieve global dominance. That’s just how things turned out.

However much everyone at the time likely believed that they had a special destiny to succeed, which everyone involved did, and not just the various European powers, the future remained uncertain and still managed to surprise everyone. It’s only with the benefit of time that we can look back on what happened as a kind of necessary destiny.

Colonialism was often a particularly uncertain endeavor, and came with immense costs, as all empires eventually learn, from ancient times through to the present. The net financial benefit of European colonization was often so tenuous that it was hard to justify the cost of maintaining them to the home countries without the persuasive influence of special-interest groups, including groups whose interests had no obvious extractive benefit for the home country.

England fought to keep America, which was an unpopular decision even among many Britons, and the battle was more about the pride of the king and the symbolic significance of British unity than it was about maintaining the wealth of England through control over her colonies. Nor did the wealth of England cease to exist after the loss of its largest and most important colonies. And afterward England was willing to give up its other colonies with very little fuss, creating an easier pathway to independence, especially once it was clear that it wasn’t worth the cost materially of fighting to keep them, nor did losing them seriously affect broader English economic interests in the short or long run.

The other European powers ended up behaving similarly. Far from retaining their status as dominant powers, the most openly extractive European countries, such a Spain, enjoyed no lasting legacy of success, wealth, or innovation. For all that they took from the new world, they derived no long-lasting benefits, and Spain remains one of the least developed and most indebted of the major European nations. Meanwhile, those English colonies that avoided slavery the most and kept to themselves the most and most readily had more positive relations with the native peoples in North America, such as the Puritans and Quakers, were the most powerful and successful.

Abolitionist Britain, far from being impoverished by eliminating the slave trade in its provinces, had the wealth and resources and power to wage a worldwide economic and military campaign against the global slave trade. And the Puritan and Quaker north of the United States, far from being disadvantaged by rejecting slavery, had the power and money and influence to wage war against the slave-holding South. They even had excess resources available afterward in the absence of slavery to rebuild the South and make massive efforts toward educating and equipping the former slave population. None of that makes any sense whatsoever under the traditional colonialial arguments that are popular today that ascribe the success of European powers to extractive colonial practices and the success of America to slavery. The opposite is very nearly true. Those approaches were definitive of rhe least stable and effective approaches to long-term success.

These popular political arguments are similar to those that ascribe degeneration in the black family structure to the legacy of slavery, while being completely unable to explain the fact that the phenomenon actually decreases with proximity to slavery and increases with distance from it. That is like arguing that a causal relationship is stronger the less connected an effect is to the phenomenon that produced it. It sounds like a good story, the data just doesn’t back it up.

If brutality and slavery and plunder were such effective strategies for colonialism, then Spain should have been the most successful and should still be rich and powerful and culturally dominant today, and England should have been impoverished by abolition, the European powers should have fought to retain every colony, the Puritans and Quakers should have been economic failures, and the South should have won the Civil War.

None of this means that colonialism doesn’t and didn’t include all kinds of terrible things. But it changes how we should view the results. In the ecosystem of history, imperial expansion is a fact of the natural evolution of tribes and nations. Groups that can expand, do. Expansion is a symptom of capability, not a cause. And that’s as true for Europeans as it is for Native American tribes and nations, African nations, Asian powers, and everyone else.

The fact that Europe succeeded so exceptionally in that moment in time was never an obvious or predestined fact. Nor was Europe’s success built on colonization per se, colonization was a symptom of European capability. And that led to a positive feedback loop as European opportunity expanded in keeping with its reach.

The messiness and violence of conflict and imperialism makes many winners and losers and demands both capitulation and response. As often happens, conquered peoples gained access to information and technologies they lacked before, and many people benefited from the uniformity of legal structures. Middle men groups often follow empires around, because it’s far easier to operate a business under one set of rules than it is to operate across multiple jurisdictions. And that opens up new markets and new goods to a wider variety of people. And empires often overreach themselves, or accidentally create, through enabling access to new knowledge and technologies, the very enemies that will overthrow and supplant them.

History is complicated, and it happens to us all. We might criticize the Roman invasion of Briton as a decision, but without it and without further invasions of Anglo Saxon and Norman, there would be no England. Without England colonizing the new world there would be no America, without America defeating England there would be no America to save England during the world wars. And that is just the smallest of the many branches emanating from one country.

That doesn’t even begin to touch on England’s role in fighting the global slave trade, establishing colonies like Hong Kong, its role in the Napoleonic and world wars, its wars with Spain, and its role in the industrial revolution. They all happened, and the world is what it is because of them. And neither they nor their outcomes were known or planned in any sense that matches up with what we know today from our position in the future they created.

Colonialism isn’t a unique or particularly European phenomenon. It’s a part of history and the natural process of humanity. It’s there to be studied and understood, it’s decisions appreciated and criticized and learned from. But the conditions under which they occurred were far different from how they appear looking back at them from a comfortable distance. And in fact they were not so different from the sort of uncertainty and struggle and conviction and hazard we face today. For better or worse, we live in the world that history made. And we make the world that history will look back on, with the benefit of hindsight that we now lack. Will we be judged any less harshly for our ignorance and mistakes and good and bad intentions?

How to view history is a difficult question that people like Thomas Sowell and Niall Ferguson and David Hackett Fischer have addressed in far greater depth and with more wisdom than myself. I think the best way to view history is as if you were part of it. As if you could have been the one living in that time and place and making those same decisions and living those same lives.

Achieving that kind of transplantation is the challenge of the historical student, and it’s not an easy one. We view the past so differently from how we view the future and present, because it is known and fixed. When you can learn to see yourself in the people of another time, you can learn to see them in you. You begin to see how you are making the same choices and following the same ambitions, fears, struggles, and passions in your own moment in history. And maybe that grants you a tiny sliver of wisdom to see how to live more wisely in the present.

For all that we know of history now, we address it with such a detached and unsympathetic and temporally fixed and prejudiced eye, seperating ourselves so clearly from the past in our safety as moderns, as a different sort of people with an insight and wisdom they lack that is actually nothing more than the universal and eternal benefit of arriving after its all over, that we may actually be far less able to learn the lessons of history than people far less structurally advantaged than ourselves in past ages. They, at least, didn’t seperate themselves so and believed that they had a debt to and continuity with the past, that there was something shared with and something to learn from the example of the people of the past, not merely from post hoc criticism of them. We will all make our own successes and mistakes, and we will all one day be judged for them by later generations.

That is why it is so important to get our relationship to the past right. We cannot pass on our moment or our particular temporal perspective about the past or future. That is unique and particular to us and our moment in the time and life of humanity. We can only pass on our relationship to times ahead and times behind. That is the example we set that will last and be used on us when we pass out of our moment.

That relationship, at the moment, does not have the hallmarks or tenor of a good or balanced or complex one. We live in the eternal moment of our own strength and vision noon, secure in our place in the light and the work we can do and the plans we have laid, never realizing that our sun must one day also set and our night must settle upon us and our work be done. Our children may care for our plans and perspectives and intentions and efforts, and they may not. They may have their own and may despise and criticize and dispose of us just as we despised and criticized and disposed of our antecedents. That attitude, that relationship, will be the thing we have truly taught them and passed on.

That doesn’t mean that we view the past uncritically, only that we should view it as if it could have been us, and perhaps that will allow us to view ourselves more wisely and critically too.

The hardest thing to conceive about death is the fact that the world goes one afterward. Whether it’s your own death or the death of someone close, death is the end of your personal existential world, or at least a part of it. The sudden end of what it was, forever.

Because our world is our existential experience, it’s hard for us to understand how things can go on afterward. After us, after them, after all that we are or they were has ended and that story is finished. That’s a fact that’s almost impossible to countenance. And yet it happens all the time.

In fact it has to. That time, that place, that moment, that life, that world, must pass to make way for the future. For the new present. The new eternal moment. And only the raw, impossible fact of death makes that movement possible. What would we do if the personal worlds of the people of the past returned or simply stuck around, insisting themselves and their world in perpetuity on the present?

Is death a tragedy? It’s strange word to use. It is so much a part of the nature of the world. The price of every life is a proliferation of death. There is far more of it in the world than there is of life. Death is in many ways the natural default, and life is the rare and temporary abberation. And yet it still strikes us as unnatural, as terrible in even its smallest presence. We tolerate it only because we cannot avoid it forever.

For those who die, death is no great tragedy. Their personal world collapses. There is nowhere left for the tragedy to exist. That world is simply gone, leaving no remnant behind. The body maintains no portion of that existential world.

For those who are left behind, a part of their psychological world is taken. But the past cannot be stolen or lost, it is what is always has been and will be. And the future never existed, so it suffered no loss. When it cones, it is what turns out to have always been and becomes fixed forever as the past as it passes into it. So where then does the loss take place? Only in the present, I suppose, where all things that take place in the eternally dawning moment of our personal existence reside.

I’ve been learning about “neopronouns” and the “neodivergent” from the world’s greatest resource: TikTok. I’ve also read some guides from popular media websites about how to embrace this hot phenomenon. And here’s my reaction:

All of this is just people screaming “Indulge my fantasy!”

We all would prefer to live in a world of our own design, in an identity of our own design. We would all prefer to have that world and that identity not be limited by any outside structures and to be able to exercise our creativity without restraint. That’s partly why video games have so much appeal. As Douglas Adams said, most people find the universe very troubling and would prefer to move to somewhere smaller of their own design.

Many well-meaning people are eager to people do just this, willing to make them happy by indulging their fantasy play. It’s like indulging the game of a child. Except this child can bring the unhappiness of an adult to bear against you if you don’t. And that’s both tragic and hard to refuse.

So many people won’t refuse. The cost is too high, to themselves and to the person in question. The amount of conflict and unhappiness and sheer trouble it would entail is just too much to even consider. So the adults say that the game can go on forever, and you never need to grow up and leave the nursery. You never need to face cold and harsh realities that plague human existence and crush our creativity.

That’s not kindness. That’s cruelty and abdication of responsibility. Because the world is out there. And we don’t fully create ourselves. Life is a negotiation between a tiny us and a very big everything else. We can’t hold it hostage. We can’t avoid it without paying a price.

What I see on TikTok tells me that we’ve failed as parents and as members of a culture. We’re not willing to pay the price of standing up to our children. We’re not wise enough to do it in a way that shows that we’re doing it for their sake, to help them. Kids punish you for telling them what they don’t want to hear. They take revenge on you as the interlocutor of reality in their lives. And that’s a tough burden to bear. But we don’t save them or save ourselves by failing to pay that price. 

We are as chronocentric today as people were ethnocentric in the past. If the past was another culture, we would be considered the worst of bigots. Life, as Edmund Burke said, is a contract between the generations of the present, the generations past, and the unborn. And we’ve broken our contracts with both. 

https://youtu.be/-OQL1Jja3p4

Jump to 1:05:28

OK, this post requires some background. You have to watch at least part of the video, and I’m not going to explain it. There is something very important coming to light in this discussion. The bit about refusing development into some conception of maturity is a key point, and I want to discuss it.

There is a deep desire in us to refuse the demands of society and of the world and life itself, because development into a particular matured identity seems like a kind of violent imposition on us and on our creativity and freedom. And that complaint is not entirely untrue or unjustified.

You are tyrannized by the demands of world/nature and the demands of society, the demands of maturity and adulthood especially, to grow up, work, take on certain roles and obligations, produce the next generation, etc. They are an imposition. They are often distasteful to us, especially to the young.

J. M Barrie captured that feeling especially well in Peter Pan. Life is like a father shouting at us, a stuffy and pedantic figure seeking to trap us and abuse us into becoming a formulaic repetition of himself. He resents our youth and freedom. He wants to enslave us and send us to work in an office and saddle us with wives or husbands and steal away our individuality and magic and bravery and adventure. Most of us, quite naturally, feel repelled by that assault, and wish to escape to Neverland to escape our sentence. You won’t catch me and make me into a man.

That’s why Peter Pan is such an enduring story. It correctly captures the oppressive nature of the demands of nature and society.

So I grant that there is a kind of cruelty and violence to the demands of maturity and the confinement it forces on us, both socially and biologically. But it’s untrue that these demands are merely arbitrary, or that society does it only to be cruel or to somehow benefit some people and harm others.

In a purely constructivist world where all such advantages are arbitrary and possess no grounding in the nature of reality or in human nature, it’s not clear how such a trick would even be accomplished. How do you generate benefits from conformity to some arbitrary developmental path if there is no innate basis from which such benefits arise and nothing real to be conformed to by which to accrue them? Also, what idiot thinks there are no benefits or even necessary costs to development and maturity?

All species mature, and all pay the price of following their developmental pathway. And although nature is quite indifferent to their complaints, it wouldn’t drive every species that exists along and exact such costs if there was no benefit. It would have been selected out of existence long ago, instead of becoming the dominant pattern of all complex life. What idiot thinks that humans are the one species in the entire universe that can escape their fate, or that it has no value?

This is a Peter Pan attitude. And it helps us make sense of the lingering resentment and antagonism toward puberty we often see in trans activism, as a kind of imposed violence, as something we need to free children from so they can live free and creatively. Maturity itself is an enemy, under this kind of worldview. The desire of the lost boys is to stay in Neverland, where we can construct our own identities with no constraints and be whatever we wish to be (and change the game as we desire) forever.

That’s a wonderfully tempting idea.

Maturity is a tyranny many of us would happily wish to be free from. Neverland is a lovely place, next to the ugly, smoky, narrow-laned affair of the real world London. And it would seem like a kindness to grant it to people. Neverland is a kind of utopia of perpetual childishness and creative play. But what or who maintains Neverland and gives us the power to reach it or stay in it? Who are the keepers of the fairy dust? And to what degree do we become dependent on them to stay in Neverland?

Understanding Neverland as the flight from maturity into creative fantasy also explains why its residents must always be seeking to chase the adults out: the villains, the pillagers, the pirates. They’re resentful spoilsports, full of bitterness, trying to spoil the game. They’re a personification of resentful age and maturity gone pathological, trying to live in a world they don’t belong in and can’t return to, with nothing left but hate and vengeance for those who can. They’re an avatar of villainous reality, twirling a mustache like the character of that name from South Park. And it’s fun, when you’re young and free, to screw them over.

This close association between Neverland and the flight from maturity also explains why so much of the rhetoric around these issues of creative identity seem to treat the “victims” of identity violence as children. They are children, in a way, conceptual children, and the goal is to protect their play and their freedom from the codification of normative development. That means you can get people’s maternal instincts on board to defend them, if you play your cards right.

It also explains the patriarchal disagreeability of much of the opposition. There is something inherently challenging in the father figure. Fathers play a strong role in attachment seperation, in pushing children out of the role of the dependent, creative freedom of childhood. They’re the ones who tend to push you away from the breast and out of the nursery. That’s why the patriarchy is so powerfully symbolic as the enemy for this movement. The patriarchy is like the father in Peter Pan, the enemy that drives the children to seek safety in Neverland, and is often played in plays and movies by the same actor as Hook, the enemy within Neverland. Hook is the father as the children imagine him, driven entirely by resentment and tyranny, a despoiler of the treasures of childhood.

The goal of modern ideologies, the Lost Boy mentality is, ultimately, to make the real world stop being the dominant reality and to relocate reality to Neverland, where everyone will be happy all the time, because they can be whatever they want to be, whenever they want to be, however they want to be. And the first step to doing that is to assign, by whatever means necessary, equal, and in fact equivalent value to Neverland as the “real world”. The roles inhabited there, the games played, the lives lived, the identities assumed and cast off, must be ascribed equal value, equal status, equal validity, to those of the dreary and colorless “ordinary” world.

That’s the first step. But the ordinary world will always remain antagonistic to Neverland. So ultimately its agents must be ejected from Neverland, and the ordinary world must be forgotten, or abolished. In the end, by any and all means necessary. As long as it is there it stands in defiance of the creative world. So the first aim is for Neverland to stand beside the real world as a valid alternative. And the second stage is to stand above it, as a better, more free and creative and healthy reality. The final goal is to stand alone.

If the fixed world of the ordinary can be eliminated, then everyone can relocate to Neverland, and the creative world will be the only world. And that will be the best world, the perfect world. The world of our own design, created moment to moment for our own pleasure and according to our subjective needs and desires. That is the dream of queer theory, an identity without as essence. To be anything it wants, and not have to go to office and have a man made out of you. To not be bound by the enforced identity of the demands of the species. To reject the patriarchal tyranny of accepted developmental pathways.

But we must all worry as we set off into this paradise and lay our course in for the second star whether it’s true what JM Barrie said. What if it’s true that all children, except one, grow up?
The last chapter of Peter Pan is one of the most heartbreaking in all literature, for a parent. Captain Hook is dead and forgotten, Tinker Bell is dead and forgotten, Nana is dead and gone, even Mrs. Darling is dead and forgotten. Peter only tells stories about himself and forgets what passes in the real world. Wendy’s body grows large and guilty. Her hair turns white, and Peter hides from the light that would reveal her. Even Jane, Wendy’s daughter, fresh to her own adventure, is soon just another common grown-up, replaced in turn by Margaret. They all love Peter and what he represents, for he so needs a mother. But one by one they age and are forgotten, as all children grow up. And so it must be, as long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.

The hidden wisdom of Peter Pan isn’t to cling forever to Neverland, to Captain Hook or Tinker Bell or the Lost Boys. All pass, all the games end, to be replaced by new ones . The wisdom of Peter Pan is learn to treasure it for the brief and wonderful thing that childhood is, to honor it and to cherish it by taking our place in the succession that gives it as a new gift to each generation. And we in turn are reminded of our adventures and are able to glimpse Neverland again through the eyes of our children, and their children. The real lesson of Peter Pan isn’t childhishness, it’s maturity and parenthood.

The whole argument of queer theory basically boils down to, if we can eradicate the idea of the “good” or “healthy” or “normal” as a distinctive category, then none of us will have to suffer under the burden of being bad or unhealthy or abnormal. And that will free us from the psychological burden of that understanding, and that will make us good, healthy, and normal. Finit.

This burden, the burden of judgment, is a terrible burden our species carries. It is the burden of the concept of sin, of missing the mark, a burden that no other creature has to carry. They may have to live with the consequences of mistakes or disease or a lack of health and development, but they don’t have to know it or think about it. They don’t have to take any responsibility for it. If you know enough to be able to conceptualize the idea of health or normativity or hitting the intended mark, then you can conceptualize disease and abnormality and missing the marl. And because life is a mess, and so are we, you’re going to think about it a lot and suffer a lot. And sometimes you’re going to blame yourself, and sometimes rightly.

If you have any idea of righteousness, any standard or aspiration, you immediately set up a qualifying test for sin. So some things, and some people, inevitably move toward the center while others are forced to the fringe. And if the standard is high, then most people are struggling toward it, laboring under the burden and compulsion of either guilt (if they’re moving away) or aspiration (if they’re moving toward it). And religions help us codify and deal with this issue, the issue of what goodness, health, and righteousness are, and therefore what badness, disease, and sin are. They help us understand and manage the problem of sin and responsibility that consciousness and a sense of choice and purpose and value hierarchies generate.

Because we are aware, we can see different possible ways of being. Because we can act, we must choose a way of being. Because outcomes diverge, not all ways of being will seem equally worth pursuing. Because we diverge and because we can choose, not everyone and everything will attain that way of being. And if it is elevated, which it is likely to be, it will be hard for most of us to attain or maintain. And that is hard. If we have any ideal, then we risk failing to attain it. And our very nature as conscious agents seems to make choosing an ideal inescapable.

Queerness solves that problem by positing an identity without an essence. A universal righteousness with no innate nature. And so what once would have been considered deviance or corruption or the violation of innocence becomes a means to freedom, a blow against the tyranny of conscience, a deconstruction of any fixed normative identity. All conceptions, and I do mean all conceptions, of normativity and value hierarchy are a false consciousness, an arbitrary construct designed to imposes and sustain power structures. And that is why all must fall. That is why the only true solution, the only true freedom, is an identity without an essence. A universal goodness with no particularity, no direction, no sense of up nor down, top nor bottom, inside nor out, fringe nor middle, aligned not unaligned.

By abolishing righteousness as a standard you can no longer identify sin. If you cannot identify sin, then everyone is righteous. It’s a fairly contorted argument for solving a very simple (but very difficult) problem people have been dealing with through all of human history. In this sense, then, queerness is performing the function of a religious system or ritual. Its goal is a cleansing of the burden of human guilt and sense of sin, which is a universal problem. It washes the consciences clean, by effectively dismantling it.

The heaven it promises, where sin is gone from the world, still lies in an unreachable future state for the moment. For many reasons, it’s hard to abolish the value hierarchy altogether. But that’s ok. This theory also has a way of dealing with the burden of sin in the temporal moment, by reallocating it and transferring it to an acceptable receptacle in the present. It has its own guilt and sin offerings, as the Hebrews once called them, payments for trespasses both conscious and unconscious. A thing in which evil can be vested and which can be continually sacrificed as a method of cleansing oneself in the present fallen world from those accidental and occasionally deliberate missteps.

The religious comparison may sound strange, but these are longstanding and very effective psychological strategies. This is how we manage the burden of our sin in the present and move toward our idealized state, today just as much as back then. It is a symbolic affirmation and ritualistic embodiment of our participation in our value framework and willingness to “do the work”.

That sacrifice, under queer theory, is our cisnormativity, our toxic masculinity, our internalized misogyny, our homophobia, our transphobia, our white supremacy, etc. Wherever we find it. In ourselves, in others, in our culture and nation, in our art and stories, in our friends, and in our family. These precious, precious things, so dear to us. We search for the stain upon them and offer them up. We throw them upon the bonfire of public disapprobation and scourge them from history.

These can all be brought into the public square and sacrificed in the view of the people under the watchful eye of the priests of the society. Those who interpret and teach the law, who hand out judgments and penalties to violators and distribute honors and demonstrate the proper rituals for righteousness. We identify the unrighteous, the heretics, and the unsaved. Those who haven’t been reached yet and who live in ignorance of the evil they serve, and those who knowingly and willingly maintain it. Cleansing one brings you closer to heaven, and combating the other brings heaven closer to you.

A good religion needs to do all these things: posit an elevated heavenly state to aspire to, establish a sinful state to avoid (these two making value and action possible and coherent), provide a way to deal with and ritually confront and relieve the burden of sin in the present while moving toward the heavenly future, establish a basis for an authoritative and priestly class (those who help or inspire or provide judgment and criticism on the journey), and provide a way to identify who is part of the fold and who isn’t (who is helping move the world toward heaven, who is ignorant, and who is working to prevent heaven).

The need to deal with sin and guilt isn’t some invention of one particular religion. It is the burden of universal hunanity. It’s a necessary effect of our moral consciousness. All the most essential representational concepts in religion, as well as all the essential ritualistic behaviors of religion, are psychologically necessary. They’re emergent from human reality as it is. They are always present. The only question, as a postmodernist might say, is, how are you embodying them, how are you enacting them? This is what we do. This is what it means to be conscious, to be aware, to see good and evil.

And that makes queer theory much more comprehensible, once you can see what it really is and what it’s trying to do, beyond all the jingoistic theological obscurantism. It can be set alongside other similar objects to itself and compared as a theoretical structure. We can see what questions and issues it is actually addressing, what its aims are, what its core conceptions are, and evaluate it alongside its competitors.

It’s a stealth religion. A non-theistic religion, which isn’t anything new. Such religions almost always degenerate over time into a kind of neo-paganism, though, as the natural tendency to idolatrize and to fetishize certain aspects of the ideology and their avatars takes hold. That’s why we’ve got all these rituals and iconography in Buddhism centered around a divinization of Buddha that makes little sense in the context of the actual nontheistic teachings of Buddha. The tendency to ritualize and idolize is just too strong.

Whatever the basis for your religious philosophy is, the most natural course of all such psychological and social phenomena is toward the common features of the perennial philosophy, paganism, as Aldous Huxley called it. That why every culture everywhere ended up with something that we call or recognize as religion, because it takes certain familiar forms and uses certain familiar representational concepts, despite the enormous divergence in people, places, ideas, theories, context, language, technology, and custom. It’s all wildly different, and yet it is all so very much the same. And we are a silly people if we think that we are any different.

Queer theory is out to save your soul and redeem the world. It has a theory that once all hierarchies of value fall, all value will be equally good and the flowering of mankind will take place. Until then, we cleanse and we sacrifice, we tear down the false idols of the false value hierarchies. When all mountains are removed, all valleys will be filled. When all righteousness is proved false, sin itself will die, and only good will remain, forever, to the ends of the earth.

I never had much sympathy for the alarm-raisers of the 80s and 90s, who claimed that the advertised evolution in attitudes around sexual behaviors represented an attempt to deliberately educate children into sexual deviancy (as it was then construed), and that various efforts to normatize a wide variety of sexual behaviors would result in a movement toward the deliberate deconstruction of traditional family structures and sexual norms, perhaps even resulting in the deconstruction of the idea of gender identity in general, where what a man is and what a woman is will be fundamentally called into question.

That’s what was being said at the time, and the alarmists were roundly mocked and derided by all the smart, sophisticated people. It seemed like so much hyperbole and conspiratorial thinking. They were making a mountain out a molehill, predicting a ridiculous future of absurd changes, and trying to keep us all in the dark ages. But whatever your position is or was on those sorts of people and their opinions, they do seem to have possibly been actually, technically correct in a historical sense.

They were often accused of exaggeration and of proclaiming false “slippery slope” arguments. I think what we can learn from the social changes of the last 30 years is that, in general, although we may be wrong about a slope being slippery, we don’t really know for sure that it isn’t. We often assume we know where the level ground lies.

We assume that significant changes in social incentives won’t have long-term consequences, and that the way the world is is just some sort of default and nothing could ever actually change it. Or that anyone isn’t actively trying to change it, or that certain processes, once they start rolling, won’t continue to progress into fields of outcome far beyond our original purview.

It’s very easy to start things, and much harder to stop them once the machine has been built and set running. Government programs are like that. Once they’re in place, it’s extremely hard to stop doing them. They become part of the general conditions of the environment. And so they keep working and working and having their effect, while at the same time they’re becoming part of the environment and therefore the default conditions. Which probably means that soon, further interventions will needed to advance the initial interest. You need to do a bit more, go a bit further, to revivify the effect. And you’ve already got justified intervening before. So it’s a little easier to go a little further the next time.

Theres a pretty big divide between between what people say or think and what they actually do, and between what we initially intend and what eventually results. There are plenty of ideas we’ve introduced that sounded pretty good at the time, but what people actually did with them (dynamite, TV, the internet, social media, fast food) turned out to be pretty different from what we expected or advertised. The behavior of actual humans in response to new conditions, technologies, opportunities, and incentives is always much more surprising and unpredictable than the intentions of the people who create them.

People have often generated surprisingly positive characteristics and outcomes out of very bad conditions and actions, and people have generated surprisingly bad results out of well-intentioned actions and devices. The argument that a certain effort is well-intentioned, and therefore unquestionable and undeniable, is one of the most silly and shallow and unrealistic arguments a human could make, and yet it is a perennial favorite across the ages. It’s just as shallow as the argument that anything that is disagreeable and potentially harmful is bad.

Lots of disagreeable things are actually very useful and beneficial. When it comes to people and their actions, there isn’t any use in taking a shallow approach to complex issues. But we often do. “If it has good intentions, it’s good; if it causes harm, it’s bad” could be considered a popular truism. The only problem is that it’s not at all clear that it’s true.

Besides that, it is a universal human failing that we often talk out of both sides of our mouths, avoiding the internal conflict in that truism (that well-intentioned things often result in harm) by decrying any system that produces harms we dislike as unquestionably bad, while excusing all the negative consequences of our own devices as unquestionably good thanks to our good intentions.

So what do we make of the fact that the warnings of the prophets of doom, that people are coming for your kids, to seperate them from you and radicalize them and reeducate them and destabilize your family structure actually seem, on reflection to have not been entirely wrong? You can’t read an article like “Queer Futurity” and not admit that, at least in a technical sense, they weren’t just woofing. They were just wrong about it being a bad thing. The people coming for your kids are doing it to save them from you, and from your repressive cultural norms that are causing terrible harm. It’s a good thing, it’s education and the making of a better, kinder, more just and equal world.

I suppose the lesson to be learned from all this is, you actually can’t be sure that people aren’t after your kids. And you can’t be sure that they are. The culprits in question might not even be clear on that subject, or may not be aware of the underlying content or consequences of their own localized attitudes and intentions.

That’s life. That’s people. We can’t even trust our own arguments half the time. That’s why we need good dialogues. Because we may not even realize where we’re taking ourselves. I know that right now people are envisioning a future moral utopia. But the truth is that we don’t really know where all this is going or what it’s leading to. We don’t really know what our own deepest motivations really are, or what fruit they will bear. And we avoid scrutiny by pointing to our positive moral intentions, because who can argue with kindness and the dawning of a universal utopia?

What reasonable person is going to argue for causing harm and advocate against heaven on earth? Are you going to stand in its way? That would make you demonic. Something to be exorcize. Something to speak holy words of rebuke against.

We feel a wonderful feeling of confidence I ourselves and how good our intentions are and how their future results are guaranteed to be. Why have any doubts or caution? The fact that none of the things that alarmists warned about thirty years ago have actually happened makes us feel assured that we can keep heading along our path with confidence. In fact we should do more, go further, accelerate the process to reap even greater rewards. Kids are healthier, happier, more mature, more stable, and more productive than ever. We’re definitely on the right track and history is unfolding just as we expected.

What is the moral status of adaptive, evolved systems? It’s not easy to say. They’re emergent, unplanned. Morality is about choice, alternatives, consequences, and adherence to guiding principles. But evolved systems just are.

You can’t ask what the morality is of predation, of the fact that an enormous number of animals survive by devouring other animals, or the fact that many animals have developed means to avoid or resist or counteract those attampts at predation. You can ask what the morality is of bombardier beetles or skunks or parasitic wasps or intra-uterine cannibalism in sharks.

What is the morality of having males risk their lives in competition for mates, or in defense of the herd, or in maintaining physical features and displays that greatly increase their risk of death? What is the morality of having to gestate and feed a dependent organism with your own body in order to perpetuate your species, with all the costs and risks that entails?

There simply isn’t an answer to such questions. And morality, such as it is, may demand that we conform to and embrace many such evolved systems, from hunger to fear to sleep, despite the systemic and individual costs and dangers and problems. Or, at the least, life demands that we make our choices from within the constraints of such a framework.

Whatever it is that moral choice is about, it has to be about actual, tangible choices and alternatives. There’s no point in judging people for not taking alternatives that do not exist. Life is not lived in a vacuum of pure theory, although theoretical conceptualization may help us think through our options and their possible outcomes. 

    Morality, as with evolved systems, seems to be aimed toward positive outcomes, but moral principles and conclusions are not necessarily distillable from any given outcome. The term, “positive outcome”, after all, is up for debate, and is in many ways defined and constrained by the evolved systems themselves, established in some manner and time to which we do not have access. We didn’t get to vote on most of what makes up the business of the biological world, the mechanisms that regulate it, or the principles that guide it.

So how do the systems know what they are aiming at? That also is up for debate. Why does life seek certain outcomes, and what outcomes is it seeking? Insofar as life seeks the preservation of life, it has no trouble whatsoever accomplishing it by means of death, in fact by means of mostly death. Apparently the conditions of the universe are such that it is necessary and beneficial to do so. In order for the tiny fraction of life that exists today to exist, it required the deaths of a million times what it is.

  For a single, simple species to propagate and survive, the majority of all its young must die just to provide a few surviving adults, and those adults must be the descendents of all the previous generations who have died and been left behind, and all kinds of other forms of life must die to sustain it during its lifetime, and in its own body scores of cells must die every day to be replaced by those that replace them, and finally they too will die. Life is but the tip of an iceberg keeping itself above the waves moment to moment in the storm, supported beneath every moment by a vast, depthless mountain of death that descends to the deepest abyss. 

There is an infinite well of anger go be drawn from. There is so much to be angry about. Not just in one situation, but for everyone, about so many things. The whole world, other people, ourselves, history, chance, life.

Anger can be useful. And it can destroy us. We’re all always holding our anger at bay, about everything, and sometimes something opens a crack in the wall. Sometimes the whole edifice collapses and we can’t keep it in or control it any more.

If you open yourself up to connection with and identification with others, you open yourself up to anger and shame and disappointment just as much as you open yourself up to joy and pride and community.

Some popular categories like race maybe too broad and too vague and too undefined to serve as a nexus for the kind of connection and identification that we’ve loaded it with. Other kinds of categories, like the various miceo-sexualities, maybe be too narrow.

The lesson of history is that race, in broad, color-based terms, simply doesn’t contain enough content in itself to serve in the role we’ve assigned it. Especially in a country of 300 million and a world of 7 billion, it’s simply too large and abstract and contains too many elements over which we have little influence and with which we have little contact for it to stand in for the categories of community and identity that humans feel they need.

There’s power in that type of mass-aggregation, but it is the power of the faceless, impersonal juggernaut. In relation to you it’s millions of times bigger, and the amount that you can influence it or even understand it is limited simply by your own finitude. You’re far more connected to your own family. You have far more influence and agency. You likely understand your neighbors and coworkers and people in your church more than many people with whom you share only a racial connection.

And while the greatest of all similarities and differences exist at the individual level, mass agregation based on color is about as low resolution as you could go. That is the wisdom we gained in the past…and have already lost. If we stake our lives and identities and the lives and the identities of others on the matter of race, we are bound to be disappointed.
     Not that isn’t a dimension of life, even an important dimension of life. But as John McWhorter once observed when he was in Europe, he was far more of a curiosity for being an American than he was for being black. And many black Americans have struggled to find common ground with Africans, and even with recent African immigrants to America. The category of blackness fails to create much common ground outside America, and maybe less than is claimed inside it.

There is value in staking a claim to a racial identity. It gives you a stake and some power within a group. For better or worse, that’s something both Glen Lourey and John McWhorter have both done, in their own ways, despite their objections to a lot of the current ideas surrounding black identity. They’re trying to do good by means of this connection. But it can come back and bite you, too. That’s the price identification exacts.

That’s the price all connection and identification exacts. But race, especially today, is one of the most vague and pernicious identities. It can load you up with dubious connections, both positive and negative. Pride and shame that have little to do with you, or that you want little to do with. Needs you are not equipped to fill, limitations you shouldn’t accept, honors and burdens you don’t deserve to carry.

Our lives and communities are so complex these days. And we don’t make them clearer or stronger or more effective by forever aggregating them at the level of least connection and agency and specificity. We’ve lost our faith in the power of the individual, the close knit family, the proximate community, and believe only in the overwhelming power and significance of the teeming mass.

And that is a sad faith, that breeds frustration and a feeling of helplessness and insignificance. It breeds anger. Anger without a clear home, the most dangerous kind. And that’s something we should all fear. 

https://youtu.be/fFFSKedy9f4

Commentary

As much as Stephen advocates for empiricism, I think Jordan’s advantage in this discussion, despite appearances, is that he’s more grounded in ordinary empirical reality. As smart as he is, as successful as he is, Jordan hasn’t lived as one of the elite, the powerful, or the great of Canadian society. He grew up in a small town, more rural environment, ended up at a good university working a fairly normal job, and he didn’t just become a professor; he also maintained a practice.

    I think that’s the real key difference. Jordan didn’t just do research or spend his time writing books. He spent (or wasted, if you think his time could have been better spent) years wrestling with the worst, most intractable, complex  problems of a broad selection of people. And you shouldn’t underestimate how that shaped and affected his approach and perspective. And he had children and raised a family, the most basic and common of human endeavors and experiences, a battleground of practical training (far more than mere theory) in applied psychology, law, morality, education, and politics. And he seems to have done a good job at those things and maintained a healthy long-term relationship with his wife and his kids. That’s a longer and more complex endeavor than the PhD he earned. 
     Stephen has done all sorts of amazing things, he’s had his own kinds of experiences, but they generally skew toward the social, intellectual, cultural, and economic elite. And he’s not had to spend a lot of time on the ground confronting the sorts of problems that beset ordinary humans at their most basic levels. That skews your view of humanity and what its problems are; what’s possible, what’s dangerous, what’s helpful, and what’s viable. He’s wonderfully educated, and has done so, so much brilliant work, but he’s lived his life in the cozy parlor of the rationalists. Jordan has actually lived in the insane, chaotic empirical world that exists outside such elite spaces.
   I don’t want to level ad hominem arguments at anyone. I’m simply trying to explain why, in so many ways, Jordan actually seems more grounded and empirical to me than Stephen, why his ideas have more blood in them than Stephen’s, which sound very good and very brilliant but somehow seem less real in the light of the mundane realities of life. All this despite Stephen’s proclivity for empiricism.

    I think Jordan, for all his religious language, actually has a lot more dirt under his fingernails. And he’s embraced religion as a tool, because he’s been out in the field really working the ground, and found it very useful. He’s found that it actually speaks very closely to and captures the lived, empirical realities of human life. Religion is powerful because it has to be, because of what it communicates and what it wrestles with. Confronting serious evils develops serious goods. But serious goods are themselves very dangerous, both positively and negatively if they become corrupt. And that’s certainly true for religion. It represents the realities of humans and human life very well in that sense. 
   Stephen’s approach is a delight and very amusing and lovely. And maybe if we were all Stephen Fry it would be enough. But he’s almost too elevated, too brilliant, too witty, too eloquent, too able to take apart everything. He condescends to our level, but we cannot all rise to his. 
    In a better world there would be no problem having both of these men giving input. But so many people, including the humanistic atheists, seem to believe that it’s very important to stomp everyone else into the ground and sweep away their objectionable perspectives to make way for the necessary utopia. And they’re being outcompeted in this by belief systems with less rationality but with more blood in them, like the authoritarian left and right, the woke tyrants that Stephen bemoans.

   Dave Rubin is someone who probably held (at one point) a position more similar to Stephen’s, and he has embraced the right (maybe more than he should have) because he noticed that his own humanist liberalist worldview seemed to have an insufficient defense against the authoritarian left. That’s a vulnerability in atheistic liberalism. It doesn’t have much of a defense against religious liberalism. Religious traditionalism does, however. 

   Stephen is British, and so he’s a traditionalist (I think be his own admission), but he’s also an artist, so he’s fairly liberal. I think he is very much a needed voice and very helpful. But I also think he’s overly optimistic about the chances of his tradition’s outlook in the face of modern challenges, and insufficiently cognizant of his own role (or the role of his philosophy) in weakening and deconstructing the socio-cultural foundations of those traditions.

    To paraphrase Neitzshe, the rationalists killed god without being able to invent a sufficient substitute, and now they complain when new gods awaken to slake their thirst upon the worship of the people who have walked away from the anemic substitutes offered them. Postmodernism is the psychologically and philosophically necessary return of an updated form of paganism, my gods against yours, that the failure of modernism precipitated. And that’s an empirical and historical reality, as much as the rationalists might wish it otherwise and might wish humanity otherwise (more like Stephen and less like itself). Religious feeling didn’t go away, it simply took a new form.
   In fact, the people fighting for atheism are fighting a silly and irrelevant fight. They have completely misidentified the problematic element in humanity, and they have failed to recognize which features are essential to our identity as humans and which aren’t and what can and cannot be altered or replaced.

     Atheism could win completely against Christianity and Judaism and Islam, and you would still have all the same problems and struggles and conflicts. The rational humanists themselves are on the edge of being overwhelmed and forced to the fringes and pilloried by the woke leftists. All the things they have complained about are able to express and maintain themselves quite easily in an atheistic philosophical context like postmodernism. And it’s hard to really argue effectively why they shouldn’t, apart from the fact that you don’t like it. There isn’t a God to call in as backup for an objective moral or social order. There isn’t an authoritative answer to the most important “why” questions, or any definitive purpose or direction that must be followed. 
    At least within Christianity you could turn to various passages and the person of Christ and point out that the corruption and abuse of the church was in conflict with the fundamental tenets of its guiding text and leader. Religious authority can be abused, but it can also be used to refute and repudiate abuse. It’s a powerful tool, and a dangerous one. But people will still wield the power of authority, will vest it in themselves and their own little gods, whether churches stand or fall. The one advantage of the Christian God is that it is clearly foolishness to complain that he (or the truth) belongs to you, a mere human. It requires the whole church collectively in collaboration just to get the smallest handle on him and his truth. And that’s both unifying and democratic.

Perhaps one of my more unique qaulities is that I actually know what I’m capable of. And I mean that in the worst way. I don’t lie to myself. I don’t have pleasant illusions. Most people lie to themselves about themselves all the time. It makes it easier to lie to other people.

I believe that I could kill someone and live with it. I would love to be able to take what I want with impunity. I would love to take money, goods, position, and honor. I could easily ignore or not care about what happens to most other people. I would love to have sex with many women other than my wife. Lots of them. I would love it if I could impulsively have sex with whoever I wanted that I desired when I desired regardless of age, relationship status, or any other factor.

I would love to eat whatever I wanted, all the time. Every moment, of every day. Doritos and milkshakes. 24/7. I would love to be able to just destroy the people I see as problems and as threats to me and my interests. I would love to cripple, terrify, or kill them. Not only am I capable of theft, murder, rape, adultery, gluttony, deceit, and much much more, they’re positively attractive. They seem, in many ways, preferable, positively inviting. They seem easier, simpler. They seem like the most direct route to what I actually want, more than all the frittering about and worrying about what I should do and can get away with that I have to go through every day of my goddamned life.

I’m not a monster. I’m human. I’m average. I’m quite convinced of that. By psychology, by philosophy, by history. It’s not only me that wants these things, not only me that is capable. It’s humanity. I’m only unusual because I’m actually aware that I’m capable of all that. I’m in touch with that aspect of myself. It isn’t hidden from me. I can see it.

I’m always amused by people who put on a performance, acting as if they were disgusted by things they clearly desire. If people didn’t desire those things, if they weren’t inherently attractive, then we wouldn’t have forbiddings against them. You don’t need to bother forbidding things that people by nature don’t want. No one bothers making laws against eating pig droppings because there isn’t any general interest to merit a general effort against it. But theft, fraud, murder, rape, adultery? We actually want those.

And yes, there are plenty of things we wouldn’t want done to us, and so we reinforce the general social condemnation of things like theft and assault and infidelity. But we forbid them because we don’t want them to happen to us, not because we don’t want to do them. They happen to people because we do want to do them, and sometimes we can’t stop ourselves. We would love to be able to do them with impunity. We would just hate for anyone else to do them to us with impunity. We would love it if none of the rules applied to us, but we would hate it if the rules didn’t apply to other people.

Even people who seem harmless are terribly dangerous, deep down. They just need the right incentives. People who are deeply in thrall to social pressures can’t even admit that to themselves. They maintain the illusion of their own propriety so well they’ve fooled even themselves. But the capacity it there, deep down. That’s what it means to be human. We could. We may not. But we are capable. We have choice. And we may only await the opportunity, or the necessity.

   Why there are two sexes and why the two sexes seek partnership is intimately tied up with their innate differences. Those differences are the basis for the partnership. If they didn’t exist you wouldn’t need it. If men and women actually were the same we wouldn’t need each other, and we wouldn’t need to be men or women.

    It’s a popular theory, of course, that there aren’t any differences between the sexes. And as far as such things go there is more that unites us than what divides us. We share in the same species identity. We’re each individuals, but individuals cut from a common cloth. But a cloth with some very distinct patterns. 

  I understand the desire to eliminate any belief in differences between the sexes to help facilitate their partnership. But this approach actually undermines the basis for any partnership between them. What do you need it for, or why hold that pairing in any special esteem, if neither contributes anything structurally unique? What value is there in sex if the category contains no meaningful or unique content?

    By extension, then, if you believe there are no differences between the sexes, any emergent structural differences between the sexes must be pure distortions. How such differences were accomplished, if they are truly the same, is up for debate. How do two identical rubber ducks floating on the same stream end up in consistently radically different positions? 

    The theory may have pure ambitions, or it may not. But it lies to us in the service of its kind purposes, and it brings up some very difficult problems and questions that beg for explanation. That isn’t a kindness, and it isn’t productive or helpful. Accepting the reality of sex doesn’t mean accepting everything that has even been done as result of it, or in its name. If sex is real, and powerful, that means it’s subject to abuse and distortion. If the differences weren’t real, they couldn’t have had such terrible effects.

    Difference may be terrifying. But it’s also what makes union possible and desirable. We don’t need to seek what we already are, but we may desire something that shares a platform but runs a different program. That’s unity in diversity. That life. That’s what makes it possible. We won’t eliminate our need for one another by denying it exists, or denying that we are even the kind of thing that could need, or that anyone else is the kind of thing that need might be made for. We won’t save iursoevs with happy lies that hide the halves of humanity from us. Those patterns aren’t everything, but the cloth would be far less, maybe nothing, without them. 

   I feel like this is the definitive statement of Kendi’s philosophy. Childish, self-referential, simplistic, reductive, belligerent, prejudiced, akd contradictory. His thought is more of an attitude, than a thesis. And this explanation of it captures it perfectly.

    An intelligent person would realize, at this point, that they’re talking to a child, or much worse and more dangerous, a childishly reductive, simplistic, contradictory, prejudiced, belligerent, self-referential adult. An intelligence of adult magnitude, a will and influence of great magnitude, creative and determined, but magnifying the prejudices and follies of something none of us should aspire to be. It is a will to folly. A powerful one. But, as someone once said, the problem with trying to make yourself less clever than you are through self deception and confusion is that you’re quite likely to succeed.

    The obvious, correct answer almost any child would arrive at, hearing his response to the question is, “What? That didn’t answer my question. Maybe you aren’t as clever as you think and don’t really know what your talking about.” But adults, with their great need to find sense in nonsense, are able instead to convince themselves that nonsense is sense, and subordinate their thoughts to their expectations. Children are often very good at pointing out the blindingly obvious, which is the whole point of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.
   I once asked my daughter if boys and girls were different from each other. And she said, “Yes, obviously.” I said, “How do you know?” She said “Everyone can see that, all you have to do is be around them. They’re totally different.” I replied, “Some people think we just make them be different by forcing them to be different somehow, but they aren’t really any different.” She said, “That’s crazy. Adults try to make us act different all the time and it’s impossible.”

    And that was an argument I couldn’t respond to. The inability of parents to make children be and act they way they want them to is a well-known staple of human behavior. There’s an entire Platonic dialogue about it. And it’s certainly true in my own life. I actually have children, and it’s nearly impossible to directly influence anything about them. After ten years I still can’t get them to stop wiping snot on the walls or stop leaving the pantry door open. I can’t get my younger daughter to not cry so much. I can’t get my older daughter to talk more quietly. You work with your kids. You influence them, you provide some of the environment, but they teach you how you have to treat them just by being who they are. And us parents adapt to them.

    There is some reciprocity. They adapt to us too, reluctantly. But it takes an enormous amount of work and struggle that carries a huge psychic cost and cost of effort, even when you know exactly that you want and when it seems fairly simple. Parents actually adapt more easily and willingly than children, who are supremely self-centered when they’re young. Over time, we try to crack that brain open and make them aware of the existence, needs, demands, and expectations of the larger world around them. But it’s a trial. They fight you every step of the way.

    Even my very agreeable and sociable and communicative older daughter had no interest in pleasing us or being how we wanted her to be. Her will and self-regard at 2 was equal to my own and could sustain itself far longer. She had far more energy, no self-doubts, no restraint, no larger concerns. It was like fighting the ocean just to get her to stop doing small things and get her doing other small things that would help her exist around other people (like not hitting them or not screaming until she threw up). If adults could mold their children on the level that some people imagine, why on earth would so many parents and children be so unhappy with each other and disappointed in one another?
     This is all beside the point, I know. But it’s the sort of simple decption that adults can fool themselves into with massive effort, but that children can see through almost instantly. Any decently smart child would realize that Kendi hadn’t answered the question, that maybe he couldn’t answer it because he didn’t know what he was talking about and was talking nonsense. But it takes the special ignorance and foolishness of adults to believe that the question was answered. 

A lot of what men and women provide for each other is intangible. It might be a feeling, a general assessment of our psychological position in the universe. Provision and security, identity, and status are all a big part of this feeling. For men, sexual insecurity is a very big concern. In order to be able to turn down opportunities and invest in their current relationships, as well as to maintain stability and focus, men rely on the sense that their sexual situation is secure.

I’ve often had my wife ask me what I wanted for Christmas, birthdays, Father’s Day, etc. And I’ve often equivocated. I don’t need anything, I don’t want anything. I don’t require any special treatment or celebration. It’s OK, I don’t need it, I don’t need to be celebrated or honored or require any generosity. Unlike all humans ever, and like most dads always, I don’t really need anything.

What’s under that appearance that I’m covering up? What is it that I really do need? There’s really only one thing I want, and it’s not the sort of thing I’m able to bring up easily. My wife is a little prudish and has some psychological hangups about sex and about her own body, and she isn’t naturally very physically affectionate with anyone, which makes talking about the subject more difficult. And her own physical body in general isn’t one of her biggest interests (except maybe when it comes to exciting and exotic food. She’s very driven and very focused on the things she’s doing and working on or enjoying, and they tned to be very subject-focused or self-focused and are often very creative or abstract. They aren’t aimed at other people around her. She’s a creative intellectual. I’m not a job or a project, and I’m not a hobby or interest. So my body isn’t the object of greatest personal interest for her. And some of that is my own doing, I’m not exactly Mr Universe, but even I was it wouldn’t be that big a deal to her, or to many married middle aged women.

In the plethora of ways that our lives intersect, deliberate affection aimed toward or received from another person ranks lower than other concerns in her hierarchy of aims. It doesn’t rank as nothing, but it’s merely one priority among many others. It is far from monolithic. But as much as I appreciate my wife on many levels and share so much in common with her and chose her specifically based on and. For her intellect and creativity, for me this area looms toweringly large.

The greatest thing, the nearest and dearest desire of my heart that I’ve ever wished for as a special dispensation and gift from her, is sexual security. For me, that would mean knowing that I would get to have sex twice a week forever. For me, that would be the gold standard of security. I wouldn’t have to worry or obsess. I wouldn’t have to starve, wouldn’t have to feel that gnawing, burning need. Sure, I can imagine even more as a kind of pleasurable fantasy, but what I have in mind, what really sustains a man, is security. I don’t think women view sex through that lens. But then, a lot of women don’t experience sex similarly to men. Their pathways are different, even though they’re through the same territory.

Men and women both have orgasms, both have arousal, both have stimulation, both have post-coital phases. But they’re not quite the same and don’t work quite the same. On average, they’re massively different. The need for sex in men is like a literal hunger. In fact it’s more appropriate to compare it to holding your breath. I believe that’s a closer analogy.

Try this. Hold your breath and wait. The longer you wait, the more you feel that burning, that urgency. Try to go about your normal business while you’re doing it. Observe the effects on all your other habits and actions. They become a bit frantic or a bit aimless. Try to complete some of your ordinary daily tasks. It’s pretty hard, isn’t it? You either do them badly from distraction or wildly because of the burning within.

Now try holding your breath for painfully long periods of time on a regular basis during an entire day. So that feeling keeps coming back, so you’re only existing in rafts of peace between oceans of burning deprivation. Now try it for a week. How do you like that, as a general condition for living? That is exactly how it feels to be a man. That is what the sex drive feels like. It’s not wonder it makes us a little crazy, a little desperate. We’re drowning here. We feel like we’re going to die.

So you can see why the idea of sexual security has real power for men, why it fills a real need. That’s the sort of compelling, tangible good that men would be willing to give a lot up for and go a long way to secure. That’s valuable.

If you raise the difficult question, why would men be willing to get married, you can imagine all sorts of answers. Yes, two people working together are effective and complement one another in powerful ways. Yes, it makes sense for the distribution of labor in the face of overwhelming demands. Yes, it’s good for raising children. Yes, it gives you some social standing and means you’re more likely to have someone there in your old age.

But those are insufficient answers when it comes to motivating young adults, who tend to look at things in a more present, narrow, impulsive, and self-centered manner. In the old days you were dealing with teens to twenties, not a group well-known for their long-term, considered approach to life. Those sorts of benefits are something that you come to appreciate as you go through marriage, not what pulls you into it. Those are the nutritional benefits of the apple, not the shiny red skin that makes you reach for it.

What pulls you into marriage is sex. And now that sex no longer requires marriage, fewer and fewer young people are bothering with it. It makes a weak case for itself, especially among the young. And the question stands, (because I’m a man and that’s what I’m looking at) why should men in particular make the bargain that marriage demands? What do you get out of marriage as an arrangement that you don’t get out of other arrangements?

Marriage is a kind of bargain between men and women, a complex and long-term contract, an agreement, an alliance, a merger, an exchange, an economy. It’s fairly easy to see why women might desire it, especially in the days before effective birth control. Women are in greater need of securing protection and provision for their situation, if they’re going to be producing young, which in the old days you spent a lot of your adult life doing. And if you didn’t; no more humans, your culture and your legacy ceased to exist. So it was important work. But it required certain provisions.

You need someone to keep the threats away and bring back food when you can’t easily leave the nest. And men were particularly good at that sort of thing. So women desired a certain kind of sexual security. Security that allowed them to open up and flower.

Sex itself as a physical act, for women, has certain similar needs and parallels. It’s much harder for women to have good sex without an attached, invested, secure, understanding partner. Women’s ability to experience pleasure is much more dependent on removing obstacles, anxieties, and other psychological brakes than men’s is. It’s also more complex and decentralized and multi-dimensional. Even their physiology is.

Men’s ability to be aroused and experience pleasure is mostly dependent on accelerants. A pleasing visual display is the most powerful of these, but there are others. The visual sense is so incredibly sensitive that for some men, especially young and sexually deprived men, visual stimulation may be all that is necessary to carry them from arousal right through to orgasm. Even men who aren’t currently experiencing that kind of sensitivity can certainly understand it.

But you won’t easily find the same understanding among the female sex. Just try to imagine, as a woman, what it would be like to find the visual experience of the other sex that stimulating. Crazy, yes? Try placing that alongside the breath-holding experiment and you start to get a picture of some of the curiosities that make up being a man.

But to return to my question, if desire for sex is what drives men into marriage, if they’re seeking some kind of sexual security, which I believe they are, why consent to marriage to get it, or in what way does marriage uniquely provide it? After all, men don’t need those other types of security and familiarity to achieve pleasure that I mentioned. They’re notoriously easy to please, even for a stanger. Heck, even just a close approximation of a woman, like a picture or a doll or even certain inanimate objects will do in a pinch, with minimal effort. Sexual satisfaction, as a man, is easy to get. At least in terms of orgasms, and men’s sexual experience and physiological and neurological design is structured around them.

Does that mean that marriage is really just a woman’s game? A way to capture men in an exchange that, as long as they maintain their cartel on their sexual favors, will secure an equivalent exchange for them and get them the kind of sexual security and pleasure they want and need? And if the power of the cartel that demands men exchange one kind of sexual security for another is broken forever by declining (or non-existent) demands for marriage terms as a condition for sex on the part of women, plus the near-enough alternatives of porn and simulated sex existing as nearly-free alternatives, what hope does marriage have as an institution?

The most obvious answer is, very little. Without a monopoly on sex, women lose much of their bargaining power, and life reverts to a state more closely resembling polygynous cultures, where a few men will get all the sex but won’t have to commit to any single partner, and a whole lot more men won’t have sex with anyone (or only with cheaper substitutes), and women who do want sexual security on something approximating marital terms will have to deal with far more competition and compromises. Increased male violence also tends to be a side effect of polygyny, a consequence of mating insecurity.

Porn and artificial sex may help to blunt this effect. But men feel the pressure of biological selection knocking on their door, their own version of the ticking biological clock, except for them it isn’t a clock so much as a sorting machine. There’s a good chance, from an evolutionary standpoint a much greater chance than for women, that they will be selected out of the gene pool and be a zero. Their position is fundamentally insecure and competitive, and so they compete and they strive to secure their position. And if they feel pretty certain they’re going to lose under the current system, their instinct is to overthrow and upset and attack that system, and everyone in it. And that’s bad for social stability.

Both males and females are fighting to secure satisfactory mating opportunities. For women the limiting question is, how long do you have to make that selection, and so how choosy can you be? For men the limiting question is, what are your competitive possibilities? How able are you to you merit being selected, and who can you get to choose you? Both sexes want to maximize their answers to those questions. Women are in a race against narrowing options and a closing window of opportunity, and men are in a race for expanding options and increasing the window of opportunity. So they’re both fighting for the he same fight, but with reversed starting points and trajectories.

Marriage is more than just an individual contract, though, it’s a social contract. It’s a way of structuring relationships in a society. It’s not only intended to resolve individual desires, it’s intended to address systemic issues. It’s a game within a larger game. Polygynous societies are highly competitive, have rampant inequality, and are riddled with jealousy and violence. In fact young men react so instinctively to economic inequality, which for them translates into reduced or unequal mating opportunities, that it is a major predictive factor for violence.

I could go on for quite a while about the individual advantages of marriage over other options, but the truth is that all those options exist within the framework of a larger society and mating market. And there’s not much benefit to me in avoiding the limitations and copromises of marriage if the polygynous structure of the larger society means that my overall opportunities have collapsed. In a system where everyone else is following the rules, there’s an advantage to being the free rider who doesn’t. But in a system with no rules, there’s no advantage to be conferred.

And that’s one of the big advantages marriage offers over a deregulated, polygynous society. Each man has a greater overall chance of having a mate, because each man, no matter how high-status, can only easily monopolize a single mate. Of course some very high-status men and the women who desire them will find ways around this, but it won’t be nearly as easy, it will be contained. It will exist at the edges, not at the center, of the mating market. The majority of the market will deal with with the general demographic rule of one man per woman, and both men and women will make their respective peace with it. Women will have to accept the limitations to their selection, and men will have to accept the limitations to their opportunities. Both end up having to confine some of their fundamental sexual instincts, but in return most people end up getting most of what they want, and you avoid all the chaos and violence and mate instability and inequality of the unregulated market, where in fact the majority of men, far from getting everything, get nothing, and the majority of women, far from securing the best mates, find that those mates have no incentive to be tied down.

The great irony of the unregulated mating market is that it delivers exactly the opposite of thing it promises and that motivates it. Without marriage, most men get less real sex and most women get fewer real partners. We give up what we have as a stable, fairly equitable opportunity for most everyone in the hope that deregulation will let us be the one lucky winner in the chaos. Which is why marriage is a social, not merely an individual, concern. But this is certainly a benefit that would do real good for plenty of individuals. Do we really want to satisfy ourselves with peon and robots? Even if they make a pretty decent appearance of the real thing, and even if they’re dedicated to giving us what we want? Ia that really going to make of us and of our society what we want to be? Is that really the best use for the innate sexual incentive? To be merely pacified by technology?

Porn provides a facsimile or illusion of sexual security. A limited illusion. It avoids a lot of the complexities and difficulties, which seems nice. But it also degrades its verisimilitude. And you just can’t assume that the only benefit of mating, the only part of it that provides satisfaction, is the orgasm. Sex makes you feel complex things about yourself. And sex really is more than just penetration and orgasm. It’s nested in a much larger, connected experience. Can porn give you children? Can porn go with you to the beach and sit next to you and make you feel special because it’s clear that they’re there with you and for you and chose you, which says something about you? Can it make you feel like a king? Can porn look back on a lifetime of memories and accomplishments and struggles together? Can porn snuggle up close to you to keep warm at night? Can it surprise you? Can it be your friend? You traded all those things away for it, is porn really giving you the full spectrum of risk and reward that mating promises? Or is it just a cheap, easy, short-term fix to the need? A need whose fulfillment has become less and less likely the more that porn and sexual deregulation take hold.

Marriage isn’t a perfect solution to your individual problem of sexual insecurity. But it is the best systemic solution for male sexual insecurity. It might seem like complete license would be, but in practice it isn’t, because you get get outcompeted and outselected. For men and women, it breeds a host of losers and very few winners. It’s a conundrum. Discipline generates freedom, and limitation generates opportunity. A wife might not be a perfect solution to male sexual insecurity, it’s just the best solution. It’s also the most complete, durable, and multi-dimensional solution.

As a man, you need more than just an orgasm. You need a place in history, a connection to the future and the past, a role in society. You need so many more things than an orgasm can offer you. Even orgasms have a purpose. That’s when men get their primary dose of oxytocin. It’s when you get the rush of neurochemicals that are trying to bind you and connect you and invest you in someone. They’re trying to make you see this one person as more beautiful than they are, more beautiful than all others, to invest. You have these raging hormones and testosterone, and there’s meant to be someone there to respond to them and modulate them and regulate them into stability and productivity, and losing that someone causes them to surge again until they can find a new home. These are all effects we can see in scientific study.

It’s easy to romanticize a kind of hunter-gatherer mentality over an agricultural mentality. The excitement the chase papers over the fact of what an unstable and short and difficult life it is, spending all your time and effort in the pursuit and bringing down of the prey. It’s easy to fall for that stimulating image, and not see the cost and the way it traps you at a tribal level of endless struggle, never progressing, caught forever in the moment of the hunt, and the vast sea of failure that floats beneath all such efforts. Most hunts end in failure. Creating easier and easier prey with less and less nutritional value won’t make a greater hunter out of you.

The agricultural mentality lacks some of the drama of the hunter-gatherer story, but it also mitigates the problems of endemic failure, violence, inequality, and lack of progress. It makes a new kind of story possible, and far more and far longer and more complex stories. That’s why marriage is an emergent, evolved solution. And it’s why rejecting it is slowly pulling us backward into a more primitive and unstable and less civilized (not more) social state. Men are becoming more like animals and less and less useful engines or tools for civilization, and women are finding it harder to maintain the structure of civilization and order. And the whole system is becoming more dependent on stopgaps and technological band-aids and handouts and assistance and governmental interventions.

Marriage had this advantage, that it was a powerful social technology that was essentially available to everyone. It could be possessed and exploited and administered by individual couples. It didn’t depend nearly as much on other people and other things, on external social or material technologies. We possessed it innately. We could bring it with us into the wilderness and make a kingdom of it. It made kings and queens of us, sovereign miniature societies and economies, with all the functions of a state in miniature. We had an army, a social safety net, complimentary political and economic interests; we had a culture, a shared history, a joint future; we had investments and development projects.

Is there a sacrifice involved in settling down in one place, one territory, and taking a cultivation approach to our lives, instead of a wandering, hunting approach? Yes. Everything is a tradeoff. But look what it bought. The cultivation mindset, the acceptance of limits and discipline, makes everything we enjoy possible it generates civilization. Marriage is a foundational concept that helps make it possible. We haven’t outgrown the need for it, which seems to be the idea today. If we embrace the values of the hunter gatherers we will begin to live like hunter gatherers. It make take a while for the benefits of marriage and an agriculturalist society to run down, to be slowly eroded, and in fact the upper classes, despite their popular rhetoric are remarkably conservative in practice in this area.

For all that they romanticize the hunter-gatherer life, they know that their own security and success depends on living like agriculturalists and largely stick to it. But over time those benefits wear down and the instability grows, especially among the lower classes, who have fewer external social and technological protections to blunt the effects of losing their innate human technology of marriage. Their lives are already descending back into the world of the hunter-gatherer. Opportunistic, uncertain, unequal, hypercompetitive, violent, seeking short-term solutions to long-term insecurities.

In the end, machines produce that which they are designed to produce. The hunter-gatherer approach produces a certain kind of society. One that isn’t well-adapted to the populous, complex, interconnected, long-horizoned world we have built. Marriage is a kind of bargain, a devil’s bargain, maybe. One we make with and against ourselves and the other sex and society and the world itself. It’s not perfect because we aren’t perfect. And the goal of your desires isn’t necessarily to give you everything you want (most of your desires would ruin you if that were possible), but to drive you toward what you need. To compel you to make the most reasonable bargains for their fulfillment that you can.

Your need for sexual security, as dreadful as that need can be, doesn’t exist to punish you or to blindly fulfill you. It exists to give you an incentive, and yes, even to give the object of your desire an advantage over you, so they will have something to negotiate with. We weren’t designed as singular entities. We were designed for one another, to be embedded in one another, in the world of our many needs and capacities, our connections across and backward and forward through time. You don’t win that game by avoiding it or circumventing it or trying to trick yourself into thinking you’ve won. You have to play the game. For better or worse. Till death parts us.

Our problem today isn’t that we’ve liberated sex or that we hold it in so high a regard. It’s that we’ve trivialized it and trivialized our own needs. We’ve trivialized what sex does for us and for our whole civilization. It brings our seperated species back together. It lifts us out of our tribal struggles and makes kingdoms out of us. It reintegrates us, it empowers us, it civilizes us, it transforms us, it makes us useful. We haven’t freed it; we’ve lost it and let it disperse, holding on to only the smallest part of it, a reductionism of its meaning and power. We’ve lost the founding mythology of our civilization, the king and queen among the gods.

These may be small things, and maybe marriage and a cultivation mindset are too high a price to pay for sexual and civilizational security. Maybe people would rather take their chances in the open plain and the hunt. I’m not unaware of the costs of marriage. But I’m also not unaware of the benefits, nor of the actual costs of the hunt. And we each reap the costs and benefits of whatever bargain we make. That’s living.

I couldn’t catch the tails of all the love songs that drift through the summer air.

I couldn’t fit them in a jar or distill them and give them to you.

I couldn’t find that catch, that thrill, that slow throb, and make it real between you and me.

I couldn’t fit all those stories between my teeth, or carry the tune.

All those memories of moments I fell from love and walked out the door of my silence.

And every time I looked back, and that door was open again.

And love was a gift.

I can’t sing or write, can’t draw, can’t spell.

I can’t tell it like it should be.

So many moments of how I wished it was, caught in a tremor call, a note in the air.

I wanted to store them up, to add their names to a list of the elect.

That they could be a choir beside me, telling my story. Telling us.

Telling us, even when we’re gone, when the hall has filled with silence.

A quietness so small for something so great.

So many songs, so many bright days calling, drifting by in the open sun.

Never knowing how long the round would last.

Or where over the hill the ringing went on.

All I am left with is a wish for a song.

One that I knew, that was true. One you could sing with me.

And love me through as much as that song.

And love you in return, to be yours, always.

I wanted to give you music. But the music hides from me. And I can’t make it stay.

But love knows its secret song. It hides it in the dawn and the silences and the smoky air.

And you will not forget.

We are told that you can’t have a racially divergent outcome, because that doesn’t allow for human diversity. I say, you cannot have a racially loaded process, because that does not allow for human diversity. For it is the right of people, and in fact all races, to be different. To be what they are. Individual. To deny that, that is racism. The deliberate weighting of processes according to race, seeking uniform outcomes. Not only is it unjust and antihuman, it is impossible, a Herculean undertaking. Differential outcomes, not just good or bad but different, are exactly what we should expect and do see in a world that allows culture to exist. 

   The problem with this movie wasn’t that “people disliked it because the actors were women;” it was that people said that if you disliked it it was because they were women. And that created some fundamental tension. The actors chosen were marketed on the basis of being women. So when people weren’t impressed, that didn’t just reflect on the movie, it reflected on its identity as a movie with women.

    The studio was trying to blackmail fans morally into supporting the movie just because it had women in it, like this goofy commercialized comedy and shameless attempt at franchise development was some blow for feminism. So they marketed it as if it was a blow for feminism, and any criticism of it as an attack on feminism. It had a deliberately political identity, so responses to it could be interpreted politically as well. When people said the movie looked kinda dumb and bland and canned, they just weren’t criticizing a movie, they were criticizing a moral stance. And it wasn’t Sony they were hurting, it was women.

    To which I say, #@$% you, Sony. Stop trying to profit off moralism and division (which they deliberately stoked). If you make good movies people will see them on their own cinematic, not political, merits. Sell the product, not my moral obligations toward the product. And I would like to extend that comment to all the other companies trying to use moralism to sell me financial services and towels and soap and ou door gear and home goods. #$@% off.

    If you have a good product, I’m interested. But don’t try to sell me guilt or relief from guilt or moral or historical status. I’m so tired of commercials that are like, “Use our bank, you sexist pig, and maybe you’ll be less of a piece of $#!% and be pure and holy like us. Financial services with some blessings and indulgences on the side. Member FDIC.” Every time I see someone trying to sell me guilt or forgiveness and using that to try to push their product on me, I just instantly write them off. Somehow I don’t think that their heart is really in the right place.

    Nor do I think my soap or lotion company is really qualified to answer the deep existential questions about my value as a human and place in society. So please politely #@$% off, Dove, Sony, and all your cronies. No, I don’t want to fight the Nazis or the Reds with my damn soap. Just make a decent product, and if it’s good at what it’s supoosed to do, I’ll buy it. And I’ll keep my morals to myself and to more qualified institutions to deal with.

    I think I might be radically individualistic. I don’t care what other people think about me, I don’t have any interest in listening to anyone unless I’m convinced I should. I don’t really want to do anything for anyone else. Or maybe that’s just a part of me.

    In practice I’m a very caring and affectionate and agreeable person. I don’t like conflict, I hate making demands. I think I mostly like being left alone, and I want to leave other people alone. I don’t have any appreciation for group projects or group endeavors. I’m not a do gooder, I don’t want to do things to “make the world a better place” by some sort of collective action or personal participation. I only see myself and other individual people. I don’t have any collective interest in the good of anyone or anything.

   But I like individuals. I want to help them, or at least help them help themselves. I don’t want to take the place of them doing things for themselves. And I don’t really want anyone else to do things for me. I don’t welcome it. That’s almost perversely individualistic. I’m inherently suspicious of all group efforts. They seem dangerously abstract and dislocated from individual reality to me. 

   I’m not endorsing any of these instincts, just recognizing that they exist, that they are part of my psyche. Only a part, but a strong part. I know plenty of people who are different, even opposite. I know people who feel a great obligation to the collective good and group efforts, but don’t really like individual people very much, as strange as that sounds. People are complicated. 

There’s an enormous unaddressed hypocrisy in the attitudes of existing gays and liberal activists toward the trans movement. Everyone wants to say that the thing we knocked down and the thing we changed about the world, that was a good thing. But what you’re trying to do and what you’re trying to change is crazy, it’s not the same thing. It’s not a liberation or advancement, and it’s in conflict with existing established institutions and values and undermines existing, functional, dearly-won identities.

They’re not wrong about that last bit, they’re just not any different from the people who last made such claims. And the people coming after them, raising threats that arouse the current old-guard liberals, aren’t any different either.

It wasn’t that long ago that conservative and traditionalist figures were raising the exact same concerns that even many liberals complain about today. If you deconstruct the teleogy of sex to allow for the normativity of homosexuality, by transforming a behavior into an identity, what’s to prevent people from deciding they can identitize and normalize anything? What’s to prevent people from giving up on traditional marriage altogether, or embracing polyamory, or sadomasochism, or forming relationships with artificial partners, or even deciding that gender itself doesn’t mean anything fixed? What’s to prevent men from getting confused about what it means to be a man and women about what it means to be a woman, and for everyone to just decide that sex and gender and relationships are just whatever we want them to be an innate and unquestionable identities, resulting in psycho-sexual anarchy (in the technical sense) and the collapse of the family, the most basic social building block?

People said all these things at the time. And of course the liberals of the time pooh-poohed all of that. They said that was ridiculous and insane exaggeration and fear-mongering, and would never happen. They said there was no serious shift in our understanding of sex occurring, just a minor correction. All that talk was a bunch of crazy paranoia. And now here we are a couple decades on and gay activists are complaining that trans activists are attacking the very foundation for our understanding of our sexuality and identity with fantastic, deluded, self-indulgent, mental illness made into the vogue of health. They hurl literally the same objections that were once raised against (and dismissed) by them.

Once you remove the teloleology of sex, what does confine it? What prevents a continuous movement toward deregulation and deconstruction of any defined meaning or structure, apart from the assumptions and preferences of each succeeding generation, that move with each generation? If you remove the idea that sex has a specific purpose, and say that it’s just whatever you want it to be, then what, for example, actually prevents you from taking the same axe to the inhabited aspect of sex that you did to the performative aspect of sex? If there are no rules to what sex is supposed to be when you do it, nothing it is for or any structure that confines it and what it’s supposed to be and be for, then what is supposed to prevent you from assuming the same about what sex is when you are it?

Most young people draw a straight line in their minds from their stance on gay rights (the right to decide what performative sex is and what it means for you) to trans rights (the right to decide what inhabited sex is and what it means for you). And I don’t think they’re wrong to do so. And I don’t see that the complaints of gay people now are really any different that those that preceded them. Of course trans and gay rights are in conflict with one another and don’t fit together easily. But the thing they have in common that does unite them, even though in reality they’re in conflict over much of the same territory and have incompatible assumptions, is their practice and justification.

Sex, after all, isn’t just something you are, it is something you do. We use the same word for both, and with good reason; they’re deeply connected. The act of inhabiting a role and the status of inhabiting a role are deeply intertwined. And if you can knock one out, is it really such a different thing to knock out and deregulate the other? Isn’t it possibly the next logical extension of the concept? Love is love means sex is sex, which really means that sex is whatever I want it to be and to be for. I wasn’t made for it, to fit some predetermined structure, it was made for me, to be defined and enjoyed by me as I am inclined.

Sex under this ideological conception isn’t constrained by any innate structure, something that it is and is for, a teleology, a crystallized ideal to which some things conform and others don’t. Love is love. Did you really expect the world to hold still after that? That the big change you made to the world would be the last one? Your advance the final frontier? That you would be the last to have a right to see themselves as a liberator of humanity from some long-standing tyrannical structure? That no one else would ever be able to raise the kinds of challenges you did, or that you would never be subject to challenge yourself?

All gay people wanted was to be treated like what they were doing with sex wasn’t any different from anything else you could do. All trans people want is to be treated like what they are doing with sex isn’t any different from anything else you could do. And both require, as a prerequisite, the simple adjustment to the idea of sex (the act and relationship) as something without any confined teleology. That sex is sex, that it’s for us, for whatever we want it to be. It’s not one thing that all individuals participate in, it’s an individual thing no greater cis-ideology defines.

Sex isn’t for bringing men and women together, it’s not for creating children by sexual reproduction, it’s not for creating traditional generational families, it’s not for honoring God with our bodies or using them within our roles as members of specific sex with a specific duty of how to use that body and that gender in relationship with another. Your sexuality belongs to you. Not to someone else, not to the species, not to another gender, not to your potential children. It belongs to you, it’s yours to dispose of as you see fit.

So why should your gender, your behavioral expression of your sexuality in society, be any different? Why should your sex, the inhabited nature of your sexuality, be any different? If sex is fundamentally something to dispose of and define as you wish, not something to be confined by society, family, another sex, other people, social and familial and relationship roles, or biological obligation, why can’t I do just that?

Does having a penis obligate me to put it in a woman, fulfilling some duty to biological design? If not, if having a penis doesn’t obligate me to “act like a man” in some extended psycho-social-sexual sense, if I can refuse it and deconstruct it, sex as a performative teleological identity, why am I obligated to sex as a behavioral or inhabited identity? Why can’t I be free in that as well? And can you enforce it on me without in some sense endangering your performative freedom? Without wielding some club of external obligation and authority? How can you seperate the two safely? When both freedoms turn on the question of identity, teleology, and obligation?

As someone who watched the whole status of gay relationships play out in his lifetime, it’s hard not to see the irony and hypocrisy. I’m hearing literally the same arguments, the same complaints. I think some gay people are truly struggling to define what makes their situation different from that of trans people. And as long as they can’t do that, they won’t convince anyone. They’ll get branded as traitors and hypocrites and bigots. But something in them still revolts, if only because their own identities are threatened and they now find themselves as old and rigid relics ripe for deconstruction and criticism, where once they believed they were the freedom fighters living on the edge of creativity. And perhaps that is the great lesson of history. We all live to see ourselves become the past that must be left behind. And we wonder what it all meant, when the world is leaving us behind and forgetting all we fought for.

There are three men I’ve heard speak together a few times: Stephen Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, and Jordan Peterson. And they often strike me as iconic, representing different schools of thought approaching a similar subject.

Pinker always strikes me as a very brilliant but very limited person with a more abstracted and scholastic view of the world. Jonathan has a wider, more comprehensive and personal scope to his vision, taking in more of the blood and bones and humanity and heart. And Jordan is off the charts in the underworld and mysticism, into either insanity or genius. And all three are trying to understand this marvelous machine we call human civilization.

Pinker sees what the machine can do, but fails to comprehend how it is embedded in an entire ecosystem upon which it is dependent for its development, operation, and maintenance. He just sees the marvelous machine of civilization.

Jonathan sees the people and the community behind and around the machine. And he wants to understand and help them. And Jordan sees the whole sweep of culture and intertwining ideas and ideologies that run beneath the lives of those people. The unseen foundations on which all stand and operate.

Pinker believes that the machine could do its work better if we got rid of all that other stuff messing it up and running it off the tracks. He takes for granted that it would, because he doesn’t see the people or the tides of mythology as significant. They’re interference on or distractions from the one big, great, thing.

And so Pinker unwittingly contributes to orand praises the very process that is contributing to the inability of the machine to function, because the hidden figures upon whom it depends for development, operation, and maintenance are sickened and degraded, and the ennervating and guiding mythology forgotten.

We live in a world of mechanisms and technology and glorious things our civilization has built and consists in and relies on. And I don’t just mean phones. Government, law, social conventions, buildings, signs, 401Ks, even dogs, are all technology. The whole invisible world you live in and by which you live is made of technologies we developed, tested, selected, and codified into machines to help us live. We embedded them into our society, just as we codify and embed subroutines into our mind to help us live, so I don’t have to figure out driving or catching a ball or how to read facial expressions or every time I encounter them. We mechanize the process, we find ways to build these machines into ourselves and into our world, making the whole thing bigger and more complex and more capable.

These technologies, both innate and external, are functional things we’ve assembled to help us get about our business and amplify and broaden the scope of our essential actionable power. And they will keep spinning and keep having an effect for quite a while, maybe even forever. And we inherited a lot of them and have built on them. It’s easy to assume that they’re natural, or exist by default. And that they will run by default and be energized by default and be loved and embraced by default.

Pinker is so in love with civilization and reason, with the eye at the top of the pyramid, that he floats above it, forgetting the greater mass of the structure on which it stands and depends. The vast structure that grounds all human effort. Which is typical for an intellectual. Jonathan works in a field focused on the intersection between people and their beliefs, and so he has a greater awareness of the actual activity that upholds and devours civilization. And Jordan has dug down and excavated the foundations. I see one as pointing upward, like Plato, and another at the earth, like Aristotle.