Making Nobody Happy

   If you have children and observe the difference in their behavior between environments, you will notice radical differences between how they act around their family and in their own home and how they act in every other environment with everyone else. Their attitudes and behavior are not at all uniform and have a very strong contextual element. Your kids will do and say things to you and to their siblings that they would never attempt anywhere but in the security of their own home.

    We behave very differently toward a thing if we perceive it as something we can take for granted, if we assume it as part of the fundamental structure of being. Parents and siblings are archetypal, they are mythological figures, and in part because they are part of the structure of the world itself, to our minds. They make up a large part of what the world is and always has been and always will be.

    That’s why it’s such a big deal when a parent dies or leaves. You’re not just losing a contingent person who you happened to meet, you’re losing one of the major structuring elements of your existence. It’s like losing your sight or your hearing, or a leg. It’s like the sun stopped rising or the sky wasn’t there to greet you one morning. 
    So when it comes to how we behave about things, our implicit assumptions about them, and to what degree they are responsible for the very nature of our lives, are extremely important. To someone who has always lived within the shelter of a stable, productive relationship, or a caring community of faith, or a safe and welcoming neighborhood, it’s very easy to take everything they provide for granted. That familiarity to the point of unconsciousness (because they are actually a part of your unconscious mental landscape) also makes it very easy to isolate and attack the negative aspects, tradeoffs, and risks of that system.

   The positive aspects of the ststem are essentially invisible and implicit. You don’t really have the ability to imagine the world without them and their benefits, you just assume them as part of the nature of the world. You probably can’t even conceive of the world apart from your position as a beneficiary of those structures. But you probably can conceive of the ways in which you are limited and oppressed by them and what costs they continually extract from you. You don’t see what all that cost and limitation is for because you assume the resulting benefits as a given function of the nature of the world itself and what you can do in it.
    All this makes it very easy to criticize and rebel, much like healthy and secure children often do, just because they’re coming from a position of fundamental power and security. This, I think, explains the strange hypocrisy of the upper classes. It’s not anything unusual. It’s just what people are like and how they act under conditions when they are dealing with either people or structures that they perceive as being essential, assumed features of their psychological universe, to which they have an essential right as citizens of that universe. 
   The good news is that nothing helps you appreciate something like losing it. Once people have undermined those structures enough and lost enough of their benefits, they will rediscover their vulnerability and contingency and purpose and effectiveness. Once people have helped to throughly dismantle marriage, for an example as an abusive condition, they will rediscover why people developed it in the first place and what problems it was helping to manage.

Does the existence and pervasiveness of pornography essentially commit all women to the inescapable fact of virtual polygamy? Usage statistics are so enormous among men, and the social norms forbidding it are so absolutely in tatters, that it’s virtually an inescapable condition of sexual relationships from now on.

You’re not going to find anyone who isn’t in an existing relationship with pornography, and it’s not likely that they will give up that relationship, as it carries no widespread social cost and has no competitive alternative. So women are essentially committed to sharing their husband’s sexuality with their pornographic partners. (And, more and more, so are men, as porn use among women increases, but that’s a topic for another time.)

Perhaps to many people it doesn’t seem plausible that real flesh and blood women are actually in competition with pornography, or that pornography actually constitutes any form of real sexual relationship or dalliance. Maybe it even seems a bit silly to compare the effects of pornography on society to the effects of widespread polygamy, much less to imply that having your partner watch pornography is in any way similar to being in a polyamorous relationship.

If that’s what you think, then you don’t know what a marriage is, and you don’t know men or the power of the internet. It’s essential to the power of digital media that it is not only able to simulate lived human realities that trigger innate psychological and neurological responses, but that it be tailored in such a way as to be even more compelling than those realities. Compelling enough to compete for your time and investment.

Digital media deliberately takes advantage of psychological and neurological mechanisms to develop an intense connection to its users. Video games don’t just manipulate your neurological and neurochemical responses, they do so more easily and more directly as a result of deliberate design than real life does or can. Social media does the same. Websites and media platforms like YouTube are carefully tailored and gamed to elicit positive responses and reinforcement and promote engagement.

Moreover, they do so without restraint, as there isn’t a maximum amount of time on their platforms or a maximum limit to your engagement or devotion to them that they’re trying to achieve. In an ideal world, you would always be connected, always be engaged, always be getting reinforced, always be being tracked. Why? Because engagement=revenue.

So in a very simple way, their goal is simply to be as desireable and pleasing and useful as is humanly possible. And they’re all in competition with each other, as well as with the demands of real life. And real life often loses that contest. Young men work far less and play video games far more. Young girls get together far less and spend far more time on social media. Both sexes date and interact with the opposite sex far less, period.

If you wish to have more detail on the degree to which technology acts as a significant alternative and competitor to real life activities, including pornography, I recommend reading “iGen” or “Cheap Sex.” Both books contain an enormous amount of data, more than you probably want to know, about how much our real lives are being restructured by and even replaced by our digital lives.

Pornography is the ultimate form of cheap sex. But don’t mistake it, it is a kind of sex, by modern definitions. And it’s a real relationship alternative and avenue for sexual activity, of which there is a finite supply. Your husband has a finite amount of sexual attention, a finite number of orgasms he can have and hormonal and neurological responses he can develop and pursue, and you as his wife have to share that finite supply with a harem of digital women. And they’re far more competitive than you might expect. And there is an essentially infinite quantity of them, or at least exponentially more of them than there is of him to give.

Our digital lives are in direct competition with our embodied lives, as I earlier explained. The data shows that. Therefore our digital sexual partners are in direct competition with our actual partners. And the digital partners have a lot going for them. And I think we should explore what exactly that is. In many ways, digital sexual partners enjoy the same advantages as all digital alternatives. Convenience, accessibility, low cost, extensive reach, variety, targeting, commitment, simplicity, repeatability, and adaptability. And they wear those advantages on their sleeves.

I’m reminded of the story of how the “street of breasts” got its name in Venice. At the time, there was a proliferation of male prostitutes who were willing to provide their services to men at far cheaper rates than the fairly expensive female courtesans of Venice. The women viewed this as an unfair competitive practice undermining their industry and their livelihood, a breaking of the pact that governed their guild. So, like any trade union, they engaged in protectionist actions against the scabs who were stealing their work.

Unfortunately, the ladies of Venice weren’t able to get rid of the male prostitutes. So instead they found a way to raise their competitive status through a form of aggressive advertising that more easily displayed their competitive advantages. They got permission to advertise topless, clearly displaying and offering their wares in a more compelling and more competitive fashion. And so the “street of breasts” was born. Not because of demands by men, not because of competition between women, but because of competition between women and cheaper, easier alternatives. The women essentially had to either devalue what they were offering or start hawking it more aggressively under less favorable competitive conditions. In the end they had to do both.

You can see similar social phenomena occuring in countries where the viable population of male mates has been reduced for one reason or another, such as war or imprisonment. Feminine restraint can help maintain their value within the cartel, but it’s useless when there are aggressive competitors around or when there’s an oversupply of women and an undersupply of viable men. You end up just like the women of Venice. Devaluing what you have to offer, and marketing it more aggressively under less favorable conditions.

Now, unfortunately, this balance of supply and demand can be affected by more than just obvious tragedies like war or imprisonment or disease. Depression, suicide, addiction, and even failure to mature can greatly reduce the pool of available mates. And let’s not forget that women are most interested in picking from the top. They’re most interested in that top 5%. But men are very prepared to settle and be far less picky, and even to accept cheaper alternatives. Which is fine for them, in a way. But it’s not really clear that it’s always good for people to get what they want easily and cheaply, when the goods in question are rarified, deep, or demanding.

The cost of pornography, from a social and psychological standpoint, is virtually nothing. In fact the only real up-front cost to it is that you’re not investing what you put into it into any long-term relationship or even into a short-term relationship. You don’t have to invest anything but a few minutes and some fluids. And virtually all human relationships demand far, far more than that.

So what happens in this sort of situation, where men don’t invest or even engage, and women are by nature only interested in the top echelon of males? You break the market. The men at the top get everything, they have unlimited access to mates, because there aren’t nearly enough of them to go around, which means they don’t have to commit to any of them or invest seriously in any of them, because the demand for them is so high. Meanwhile, the vast swathe of men below them get virtually nothing and wander off to pursue easier-to-achieve alternatives: low-cost and low-commitment relationships. And for more and more men these days, that means porn.

Basically, none of the men really have a good reason to commit to or invest in difficult, costly mating endeavors. And women have to operate in a flooded market that devalues their worth and demands intense competition and advertising. That’s the world of polygamy and gender imbalance. A tiny number of winners, lots of losers.

But because the women outcompeting other women are digital women, porn actresses and Onlyfans girls, it’s an even worse situation than in the past. In the past, polygamy meant that most men lost, while a minority of men got everything, but most women could get still get mates, and high value (if shared) mates at that. But digital polygamy is a new frontier that differs from both traditional monogamy and traditional polygamy.

The new digital polygamy comes packaged with a digital gender imbalance, mimicking the conditions of there being far more available women than men (because digital women can spread themselves around and monopolize many male partners in a way that real women can’t). So now both most men and most women are getting outcompeted for mating opportunities. Now both sexes get the worst of both situations.

With the fading of monogamy, only a fraction of men will be able to find a mate. With the proliferation of an oversupply of competitive, lower-cost digital women, only a fraction of women will be able to get a mate. Welcome to the brave new world of modern dating.

An excerpt from an exchange I had with a European writer, who was very critical of American equalitarianism and was in favor of a return to a more (old school) European, hierarchical, class-based system of government. In his opinion the American experiment was corrupted from the beginning by an insistence on the equality of all men and a failure to recognize innate differences, that some are, by virtue of being smarter and better, etc, more fit to rule. Our disagreement eventually got fairly heated, in part because he was very contemptuous of American ideas. But I had a good time trying to help him understand us better. 

   Have you read De Toqueville? If you haven’t, you should. I actually do agree that there is a love of egalitarianism baked into the structure of the American constitution, by design. And there is a deep belief in all men being created equal, which isn’t an observation or a fact at all, it’s a foundational premise. But previously it was held in tension within a certain legal system and with other opposing but complimentary beliefs that allowed us to extract the good and the truth from that idea without it allowing to grow unchecked beyond the bounds of its own proper areas of influence.

    De Toqueville is very explicit that the love of equality is just as much a fundamental part of the character of Americans, especially in contrast to other peoples, as the love of freedom. Freedom necessarily breeds inequality. Because if everyone can freely in peace pursue the proper ends of their own unique capacities, the natural inequalities of both nature and circumstance will compound to produce differing outcomes.

   Strengths in a culture or a system are also vulnerabilities. If you have a large and powerful engine on one side of a plane, it will help you get where you’re going. As long as there is another engine to balance it on the other side. But the moment that other engine starts to fail, all that power, instead of directing you toward your course, begins to turn you powerfully and inexorably away. If the other engine fails altogether, then you may be turned round in circles until you run out of fuel and crash.

   In this way our greatest strengths are also the most dangerous features of our society. What made America work could also sink it. And De Toqueville spells out a number of different scenarios where he imagines this could happen, including some that are essentially exactly what actually is happening. And he was able to figure all that out just by looking at us a hundred and fifty years ago.

   I think one reason you might want to read him is because although he sees the danger of the love of equality, he also see what good work it is doing in the American context and how great it is. It’s easy to disparage an institution if you don’t understand its value and therefore seek to dispose of it because of the harm it is causing. But that’s a bit like turning off the engine that works. You do need to reduce power to balance the forces. Or you need to fix the broken engine to balance them. Not break things that are really very powerful.

    In a way you’re making the same sort of arguments about equality that the DEI crowd is making about liberty. That it was fundamentally corrupt and broken from the start, that the outcomes prove that, and therefore it should be disposed of in favor of the hegemony of equality. I don’t think either side is wrong in pointing out devastating dangers and problems, but I think it’s the wrong way to view what makes or has made American society work. It’s not a single theory or a single value, it’s a relationship. It’s checks and balances. It’s a system of interacting and counterbalancing values.

    That kind of dynamic system has absolutely enormous productive and adaptive power. But it also means that it’s more unstable and more dependent upon the various parts that work together to continue working together, or all that power will come unhinged and wreck havoc. America was and is a dangerous and radical wager, an experiment. It’s ambitious and unprecedented. And half the problem now is that people take it for granted and no longer value, understand, or respect the nature of that power and that danger and where it comes from. They take it for granted. And that means they will probably break it.
    You clearly have a concern about and fear of communism, very rightly so. That is a danger. But other people, including the founding fathers who were coming out of Europe, had a fear of elitism, and very rightly so. Both fears are justified. But the solution isn’t necessarily defeating one or the other. It’s teaching people how to love the counterbalances to both.

     Communism is a danger because people have lost the love of freedom, and that makes equality into a dangerous ideology (because ideology is always about reducing the world to a single overwhelming value matrix). A people who value only freedom need to learn to love equality, lest freedom itself become an abusive and unthinking mechanism, a monster.

     Communism didn’t fall just because people learned how scary and bad it was, they were motivated by the desire for something else, something worth pursuing and seeking and sacrificing for. People often stay in situations that are objectively terrible, simply because they’re even more afraid of what might lie beyond, that things could be even worse outside the system, and they’re entirely justified in thinking that. Even oppression, in its predictability, is generally favorable to chaos. But when you see that there is something good that you could love and move toward, you will take that risk and walk into the wilderness.

    People in America have not gone wrong in fearing freedom, or in loving equality, they’ve gone wrong in losing their love of freedom (and yes, in losing their fear of equality also, but fear alone can’t save them).

I think one of my greatest disagreements with Bret and Heather Weinstein is their idea of not being able to go back. I think it’s part of their own underlying evolutionary ideological vision. And in a sense, it’s right. You’re always going into the future. But going back, return, as a metaphorical moral and ideological journey, is a staple of mythology and evolved psychology the world over.

Jordan Peterson has articulated this idea of return as the descent into the underworld and resurrection of the spirit of the father. That that is how you rescue and revivify a dying culture, by resicovering and revitalizing in a new, living form what had become blind and dead over time, the enduring spirit and wisdom of the culture. But you don’t generally get to that stage of return until you’ve walked far enough down the road of ossification and decomposition that the primordial chaos is beginning to leak through and collapse the ancient walls upon which your prosperity depends.

I don’t think Bret and Heather are being entirely realistic about the chances of a catastrophic systemic collapse that our technological systems can no longer delay or prevent. After all, most of the cultural phenomena under dispute in our modern culture they say we can’t go back from are so absolutely, ridiculously novel, from an evolutionary standpoint, that it’s silly to say that we know they’re good, that we know they were the right way to go.

We don’t know that because there simply hasn’t been enough time, and we’re piling new changes on so quickly we can’t even tell how or how much our future conditions are being altered. Death and poverty are the ultimate evolutionary mechanisms that will render a judgment on the innovations we’ve developed in the last ten years. But it make take multiple generations for the seeds that were planted to develop and for the nature of their harvest to become clear. It’s hubris to assume that we already know with certainty the value, danger, or stability of our alterations to long-standing adaptive mechanisms. We don’t know what pathogens, biological or sociological, may be developing to take advantage of them.

A good reading of the Torah provides quite the view into the long-term social cycle of exodus and return. God’s people are constantly wandering off after new gods they’ve invented or encountered, or forgetting him and becoming decadent when things are going well. That repeatedly leads to God trying to call them back, and sometimes that happens and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes disaster is avoided, and sometimes the return only happens after years of exile and tragedy.

The old testament is an enormously useful record of one people’s relationship with the demands of being. And return is an essential part of the narrative. That’s one reason why I think it’s silly to dismiss return, as Brett and Heather do, on the grounds that it is somehow an unviable option. It’s perfectly viable if it can save your skin. And it’s perfectly desirable as an outcome and ambition and choice if you lose everything as a result of your wandering. That doesn’t mean you don’t still move forward in time.

It’s not the specifics of that moment in history that the people of God are being called back to, it’s their relationship to God, to the demands and structure of being, that they are called back to. That might mean giving up some things, even some valuable things, for the sake of something more precious. The security of Egypt often seemed more preferable than freedom to the Israelite when they were wandering in the wilderness. I think the idea that we might have to sacrifice something pleasing for the unknown benefits of a promised state of being is part of what makes morality such a hard sell. How do we know the Promised Land will be worth what it costs to leave Egypt?

My point is, the concept of return has a very legitimate place in our evolved conceptual narrative of where we personally and where we as a society can and should go. Much as Brett and Heather have said, you can’t simply dismiss such a longstanding and functional concept on little grounds. We just need a proper understanding of what return really is, what it means.

It’s not simply a turning back, it’s a turning toward. It’s not something that carries us back, it’s something that carries us forward. It’s not a return to a moment, it’s a return to a certain kind of relationship with truth and being and our own nature. People might mistake this state for its particular expression or symbols in a given time and place, but the reality is much deeper. It’s not an integer, it’s an equation.

I think a little more time spent studying the cultural inheritance of their own people could actually give Brett and Heather some deep insights into the nature of this negotiation with being and with ourselves that we find ourselves caught in. It’s hardly a new phenomenon, and no one has documented that negotiation like the Jews. That’s a gift, and it’s one we shouldn’t lightly ignore.

What no one is really willing to say, in part because there’s so much built up resentment and guilt that it makes the admission possible, is that women aren’t able to be happy without men and can’t survive without them. Before I get pilloried for saying that, let me observe that it’s equally true that men can’t be happy and can’t survive without women. And both sexes are kidding themselves and indulging in a delusion that the divorce and independence of the sexes is a viable option in order to avoid the painful realities of confronting the actual problem of admitting our dependence on the other sex and having to deal with it.

It’s easy to get confused. A woman can survive without a man. So can a man. But women can’t. There is no viable single sex version of the human species. We can survive and compensate for the loss of our partnership with the other sex in our individual lives, especially with the aid of modern technology that extends our individual capabilities and helps meet those needs that we cannot easily fill. But on a systemic level it’s completely unworkable.

The need to have an intimate social partnership between the sexes is one of the preconditions of human life and one of the first problems we had to solve. And marriage was the emergent solution proposed by and agreed to and sustained by both sexes. Did it carry costs? Of course, everything that actually does something will always carry costs. But those costs were less expensive to society and human survival and development than the inherent costs imposed by the absence of marriage.

I understand completely, it’s extremely hard to admit that we are dependent on anyone for our happiness or survival. But the systemic costs of sexual deregulation and sexual disassociation are only going to grow, and one of them is that a larger and larger portion of both men and women aren’t going to get what they want.

Women won’t get the stable relationships many of them desire, because men will be too busy chasing low-cost alternatives in an essentially polyamorous and impulsive, short-term sexual economy. And many men won’t get what they want because the reality of a short-term polyamorous relationship market, in concert with the radical inequality in selectivity between the sexes, means that a huge portion of men will fail out of the market, while a small number of extremely attractive men will take everything and have all the partners. That’s just what happens, there’s no way to avoid it happening, it’s simple economics.

Marriage is, in a way, a compromise between an entirely individualistic and competitive relationship market and a socialized and managed romantic economy. You have competition and sorting for both sexes, but so long as each has a reasonable acceptable limit of only one long-term partner, ultimately most people will end up with someone. So you get to have your cake and eat it too. You get selection and competition, but the limits on acceptable possession mean that in the end the majority of everyone gets each according to their ability and each according to their need. And this solves the systemic problem of needing to find a way to bring the sexes together into long term cooperation, which is a problem that must be solved one way or another.

One of the primary functions of marriage is to help us manage our own needs, which are a function of our inherent strengths and weaknesses. And weaknesses are largely a direct consequence of having strengths, as all specialization that results in any kind of specified competence begets tradeoffs. Men have to find a way to manage their aggression and make it useful. And women did that for them, largely through marriage. But now women aren’t doing that and you’ve got a lot of aggressive, useless, unhappy men.

Men, in turn, helped women manage their anxiety over their greater need for security, both economic and physical. But men aren’t doing that any more, and that’s produced a lot of anxiety and unhappiness among women. And this is just one example of the way the sexes benefit one another through specialization and cooperation. Both sexes have their alternatives to one another they can look to, but generally speaking no one has come up with a viable substitute for the innate need of half the human race for the other half.

It’s entirely understandable why the sexes want to go different directions and be independent. Who wouldn’t? There’s an enormous cost to needing or having to work with someone who is radically different than you and whose willingness and ability to give you what you need in exchange for your precious autonomy and abilities is dubious at best. Men are a huge disappointment. And as costly as it is to say it, so are women.

It’s costly because it’s generally easier to get men to admit that they need and want women, and women have much more freedom to reject you if you openly criticize them. Their natural predisposition to judge and reject men gives them a lot of bargaining power in their interactions with men, who are far less fastidious and far less competitively viable on average. Of course, men’s persistentlce and aggression and ability to ignore or resist the criticisms and concerns of others and willingness to cast down their competitors and risk being cast down themselves gives them their own advantages. But they need them because the judges they will face: one another, the selective pressures of the world, and the selective judgment of women, are incredibly harsh.

The vast differences in experimental results on mating selection between men and women show just how dire this divide is. Something like 60% of all women are deemed acceptable potential mates by men on platforms like Tinder. But only 4% of males are deemed acceptable by females. Tinder is a good place to look at these kinds of statistics because the nature of the platform helps eliminate confounding factors.

Everyone, men and women, are basically looking for the same thing on Tinder. And yet even among these similar people playing a similar game, the difference in how the sexes play it reveals a preference differential of 1500%. That’s not just a curiosity, that’s catastrophic for both sexes. And it’s easy for women to dismiss this fact on the grounds that men are stupid and have no discretion, so of course they like everyone, and that women are only so selective because men are so unattractive.

But these are huge, mololithic demographic facts that reveal stark difference in attitudes even when both sexes have agreed to the same terms. And it reveals the specific attitudes of both sexes as normally distributed, and therefore biologically and psychologically and evolutionarily innate and necessary. Quite likely because of the innate tension and complimentary asymmetry between the two, and the benefits of maintaining such dual strategies.

Studies into the benefits of sexual reproduction and sexual dimorphism have confirmed this, that one of the primary benefits of having two sexes in the first place is that, although it carries a very high cost compared to asexual reproduction and specification, it essentially lets a species have its cake and eat it too. The marriage, the unity and cooperation, of the two halves of a species, running two separate genomic lineages on one shared platform, allows them to simultaneously pursue and balance two different biological and reproductive strategies. It lets them be both risky and conservative, aggressive and cautious, consistent and variable, indiscriminate and selective.

But that also means that the fundamental character of sex, as a biological phenomenon, is tension in dependence. Or I suppose you could call it complimentation in efficacy. We’re very effective and adaptable. But we depend on our antagonistic opposite for the free exercise and maintenance and development and regulation of that efficacy. That’s not an easy pill to swallow. We all want to think that we’re great and perfect and right and complete. But the facts of biology simply fly in the face of this idea. It’s a completely specious premise.

We are great. We are specifically awesome. But only in the context of tension, opposition, complimentation, and cooperation with our counterparts. Our specific identity as a woman or man entails that by definition and necessity. To be man is to be incomplete and in need of woman. That’s what a species is. It’s a shared partnership for conquering the challenges of time and being. And while any single individual, man or woman, may be able to avoid or solve that systemic quandary, as a society and a species its simply not possible. And that’s something we will have to deal with, one way or another.

In response to an ecomonist saying that cultural questions aren’t relevant to economic policy.

I have to disagree that cultural and economic issues are seperable. Thomas Sowell is probably the best economist on that subject. Economics is a function of the social structure, because all productivity is a function of human production, which is dependent on and a product of actual individual humans. Cultural and social issues and values, positive and negative, are expressed in economics.

I always avoided economics as a field of study until I found Sowell, because I thought it was all about money and mechanics and ledgers. But he showed me that it’s actually all about people. All those abstractions cover up the fact that, at root, economics is about value, and that is a fundamentally human category. It is an expression of meaning, emerging out of human hopes, desires, needs, fears, strengths, weaknesses, and plans. Economics, in its deepest heart, isn’t about numbers, it’s about people.

If you have children and observe the difference in their behavior between environments, you will notice radical differences between how they act around their family in their home and how they act in every other environment. Attitudes and behavior are not at all uniform and have a very strong contextual element. Your kids will do and say things to you and to their siblings that they would never attempt anywhere but in the security of their own home.

We behave very differently toward a thing if we perceive as something we can take for granted, if we assume it as part of the fundamental structure of being. Parents and siblings are archetypal, they are mythological figures, and in part because they are part of the structure of the world itself, to our minds. They make up a large part of what the world is. That’s why it’s such a big deal when a parent dies or leaves. You’re not just losing a contingent person who you happened to meet, you’re losing one of the major structuring elements of your existence. It’s like losing your sight or your hearing, or a leg.

So when it comes to how we behave toward things, our implicit assumptions about them, as well as to what degree they are responsible for the very nature of our lives, are extremely important. To someone who has always lived within the shelter of a stable, productive relationship, or a caring community or a very active faith, it’s very easy to take everything they provide for granted. That also makes it very easy to isolate and attack the negative aspects, the tradeoffs and risks, of that system. Because the positive aspects are essentially invisible and implicit. You don’t really have the ability to imagine the world without them and their benefits, you just assume them as part of the nature of the world.

You probably can’t even conceive of the world apart from your position as a beneficiary of these structures. But you probably can conceive of the ways in which you are limited and oppressed by them and what costs they extract from you. You don’t see what they are for because you assume the resulting benefits as a given function of the nature of the world itself and what you can do in it.

All this makes it very easy to criticize and rebel, much like healthy and secure children often do, just because you’re coming from a position of fundamental power and security. This, I think, explains the strange hypocrisy of the upper classes. They constantly attack and criticize and undermine in public (and for the lower classes) the very things that grant them the security and power they enjoy. Marriage, education, stability, law-abiding, manners and etiquette, self-discipline. It’s not really anything unusual. It’s just what people are like and how they act differently under conditions when they are dealing with either people or structures that they perceive as being essential, assumed features of their psychological universe, to which they have an essential right as citizens of that universe, or with contingent, insecure elements. Like children who act one way at home and another in the world, they preach one message while assuming and benefiting from another.

The good news is that nothing helps you appreciate something like losing it. Once people have undermined these structures enough and have lost enough of their benefits, they will rediscover their contingency and effectiveness. Once people have helped to throughly dismantle marriage as an abusive condition, they will rediscover why people developed it in the first place and what problems it was helping to manage.

I would say that the people making these complaints are themselves the ones with a white savior complex, and they need to stop trying to be the voice from the outer world. They need to read Dune and learn about the dangers of such a complex. Dune could actually instruct them quite a bit on the dangers of such reductive moralistic ideologies.

But they probably won’t bother doing that. They don’t want to really understand and learn from the story because it might not fit into their neat little narratives that give them critical moral power over others.

The truth is, you just can’t pay attention to what people who get notoriety from complaining and judging things say. It just feeds their desire for attention and moral superiority.

I would use the term “anachronistic” to describe their perspective, but that doesn’t even go far enough. As if this petty way of viewing things in this moment (which is arguably a very limited and silly ideological lens even for viewing current and recent history) has any relevance in a world set 20,000 years beyond ours, in a time where such limited racial narratives have virtually no meaning. Dune presents a far, far bigger universe of identity and meaning and struggle.

If you can’t enter into and appreciate the ideas of a culture, including the culture of Dune, you need a lesson in tolerance. Dune isn’t about this silly white savior dichotomy, it doesn’t have the same reductive ideology as these critics, who want to reduce all our stories to these simple oppositions and make everything about white vs brown. It actually lives in a larger world of ideas. The inherent dangers of strength, whether it’s the illusion of security we gain from technology or the wild power that develops within us in response to insecurity and deprivation. The danger of saviors and resentment narratives (the Fremen kill billions, after all) that impose a liberation ideology on the world.

Paul may be the hero, or he may be the villain. It’s not entirely clear even to him. The book explores the dangers of what we become when we fight for our own freedom and for vengeance, even when we do it for seemingly righteous causes.
And the books clearly side with and favor the Fremen, not the Landsraad; it is clearly a tale of nativist vengeance and ascention. And Paul gets absorbed into the Fremen and their mission; he pledges himself to them. And he in return knows what that gains him. It’s a negotiation. And he regrets the way in which his own legend begins twisting his relationships with the other Fremen. It’s very nuanced.

Dune goes so far beyond mere ideological cliches. That’s why it’s is so great. It teaches us the danger of our own ideologies and reductive assumptions. It shows us how dangerous they can be and how even our love of justice and love for the underdog and love for righteousness can be perverted and run out of control and destroy us and become corrupt. And that’s a way better story than a tired retread of white savior myths. We can leave that to the critics, who seem to be living it themselves.

Hi Rob, I very much enjoyed hearing you talk to Jordan on his podcast. And I saw that you’re still crazy enough to openly display your contact info on your website, so I wanted to send you a short note.

    TV, like so many other things, is a tool. A powerful tool. And it’s only as good or as bad as the people who wield it and the purposes they apply to it.

    When we complain of the effects of a technology, we are really only complaining about people, about ourselves and others and what we have used it for. As with a child, if you’re given tools that outstrip your own ability to responsibly use them, they can be a great harm, and it might have been better if you had never had them.

    How do we weigh the cost of those who were harmed against those who benefited and the good things that were or could be done? Are there some powers that simply outstrip our ability to manage them in the long term? Are these some abilities that humans, as fragile and limited and self-centered as we are, simply weren’t meant to have? Powers so absolute that they cannot but cripple or corrupt us or make us dependent or decadent or abusive?

   It’s certainly possible. We might create things whose power and temptation we simply can’t manage and can only avoid. Things that take such powerful advantage of our instinctive selves that our conscious selves can’t manage them. Cocaine is an obvious example. But alcohol has been pretty hard to manage too. The extremes of wealth and fame, gambling, pornography, and a hundred other things consistently take hold of us in ways that go beyond our ability to consciously regulate them. 

    Automatic weapons and cars are more manageable, but still come with a lot of innate costs. Partly because of what they are, but mostly because of what we are + what we could do with something like that. We may manage them to some degree, but that kind of power will always test (and go beyond) the limits of what we can manage. 

    Social media is, perhaps, as example of a technology, much like nuclear weapons, that fundamentally outstrips our capabilities to properly use it. Maybe that’s a further extension of human reach than we are able to regulate. Creatures who arose in an environment of such limited capability and have the natures and passions of such a limited creature. Godlike power is naturally tempting to such a creature, but the possession of such a power is not something it is well-fitted to manage.

   So are TV and its modern media descendents good or bad? As a technology, as a tool whose measure is power and effectiveness and capability and refinement, it is astounding. But all such tools will only ever be used by creatures as good or bad as ourselves, and by their power only our own goodness and badness will be amplified. We don’t meet in them the greatness or corruption of anything but ourselves, grown large on our largesse. 

    I recently saw Showboat and Gone with the Wind, as well as most of Oklahoma, all movies I had missed up until now, but all were important parts of my wife’s childhood. Her family is very southern, and I had always avoided a lot of Americana, but most especially things to do with either the south or cowboys. I imagined myself more as a British citizen, culturally, and steeped myself in the traditions and literature of Albion.

    But, having caught up at last to some of that kitchy American junk from the despised south (I am as much a Yankee as my wife is a southerner), I found that it was actually rather wonderful. The stories were all very moving and very much deserve their reputation. And they helped me have a greater sympathy for and understanding of some corners of our culture I had previously ignored. They really are great stories and should be treasured.

   The characters are what really drive them. They’re the white hot fire in their bellies. If you want to talk about having character arcs, those are some great stories, Showboat and Gone with the Wind in particular. Oklahoma surprised me with how high-concept the darn thing was, for such a silly little story. It helped me see the great drama in the little things, in the simple lives of simple people. But the other two have some crazy character arcs and development. More in one film than many modern franchises get around to in ten films. The people are the drama and the action. 

   Melanie from Gone is probably one of the great “white knight” characters of all cinema. She’s idealistic, but not naive. She’s courageous, but not aggressive. She’s a real hero. She enters the dragon’s den on more than one occasion to save Scarlet’s life, and in her final attempt she actually dies. Scarlet herself is both the hero and the villain of the movie, and a lot of credit for her heroism goes to the one person who she resented most and understood least, Melanie. 

    There’s really not too much to say about these movies except that people should watch them. 

    Blaming Instagram for the terrible outcomes it has for teenage girls is a bit like suing a highway construction company for the way people drive on it. Instagram, after all, doesn’t create any of the content, it just created the platform. Yes, there’s a certain design at play in the forum, but the content is all user-generated. And they’re a business, so of course their goal was engagement and making a desirable product, which for them didn’t involve content, just infrastructure. They created an easy way to share pictures, a like and share button, and left the rest up to us. And the sad reality is what we’ve done with it and how it has exposed our own negative proclivities. As if the natural and expected outcomes of teenage girls socializing were all going to be good and somehow these wicked companies led them all astray.

    In part people are upset with Instagram because it had the gall to convey the reality of just how abusive and immature and shallow and emotionally fragile a large number of teenage girls are. Entirely unintentionally, of course. Teenage girls suffer because this is what happens when you give that amount of social and creative power to teenage girls. But we like to have our illusions, especially about how inherently good or how mature our children are, particularly because that reflects on us as parents, and so we go looking for someone to blame. In this case, the conveyance. The structure, not the actors. 

   There’s not really anything you can point to in Instagram itself that’s obviously malicious. However, it can have very malicious outcomes in the hands of certain kinds of people. Like I said, it’s more like a road than it is like anything on the road. It’s not the app design or the functionality or the way the like button works or how fast or slow the sharing is that’s making girls upset. In that sense it’s not Instagram that’s making them unhappy. Instagram is the conveyance, but it’s really other girls that are making girls unhappy. Instagram, like any good road, just makes it easier and faster and more efficient to get there. 

   The only really viable option for an actual solution would be to ban specific ages and/or genders from using the platform. No more adolescent scent or teenage girls on Instagram, or maybe just so young people in general. And while that might work to protect teen girls who get bullied, it would also be a very big restriction of freedom for all the people who don’t have the same problems. Or at least don’t have them to the same degree that they’re a serious issue.

  Should you punish everyone as a group by denying them freedoms simply because some of them aren’t able to handle it and have bad outcomes? That’s a pretty big move to make, from a governmental standpoint. Sure, it’s the sort of thing parents or kids could and probably should decide for themselves. Are you going to decide it for them? And how well is that likely to go? Can you really stop them? Will making it illegal and setting it behind an age barrier just encourage teenagers to try to access it even more, as a symbol of maturity and rebellion and risk taking, like they do with underage drinking?

   In my opinion social media is just as dangerous as alcohol, for many of the same reasons. It disinhibits, it encourages certain kinds of antisocial behavior. It’s not exactly the alcohol that’s bad, it’s who we become when we’re on it. Because it’s not all puppies and rainbows that we’re keeping inside ourselves. And a little inhibition, a little limitation, might be good for us. But outright bans don’t always go the way you would hope. Prohibition didn’t exactly go over well. Buy plenty of people have decided to voluntarily curtail or even avoid drinking altogether, purely as an individual reaponsibk choice. And people are starting to do that with social media too. But it’s not easy to say no to something that so many other people are using and enjoying. It’s not easy to deliberately leave yourself out. 

   Personally, I think as long as we have Twitter our society will be being pushed further and further toward the brink of disaster. But I also don’t think you can forcibly stop people from using it or deny them the ability to use it. Taking away a simple freedom like being able to say something fairly brief online and have other people see and share it, and maybe express their own opinion about it, would actually be a far greater imposition than something more complex and less common. You’re only exercising your most basic freedoms and abilities, so any forcible abridgement of their exercise cuts to your most basic and fundamental rights as a human being. Unfortunately, it’s also true that those most basic rights and abilities are also the most powerful and, in many ways, the most dangerous, if we don’t know how to regulate them.

   Words can set a city on fire. And for a people who have lost control of their tongues, giving them a platform that extends the power of their speech and social influence to an almost unimaginable degree is like giving a monster truck to a four year old. They’re going to crush everything in their path. 

The New Testament is only coherent in the context of the Old Testament. And I’m not saying that merely as a Biblical critic or a philosopher. It’s clearly built into the structure of the New Testament, and if you believe it, into history itself. There is a process unfolding, and you can’t ignore the foundation that the older scriptures provide. The Bible is a kind of meta-story, playing out across lived experience, national history, oral tradition, poetry, and philosophical speculation. For the Christian, it culminates with the gospel, reaching a kind of climax that the further books take their time exploring the ramifications of and carrying them forward into ethical practice and present history.

The gospel may be the climax of the story, but the gospel alone isn’t a complete story. You can’t even understand it properly, if all you do is skip to the climax. The good news is a revelation, but it is a revelation that comes as a surprise at the conclusion of a very well-developed historical narrative that lays the groundwork for the leap to transcendence. Taken in isolation, taken for granted as the limit and the default state of things, the good news loses its goodness, because we have no context of comparison against which to set it. God’s mercy only makes sense as a surprise set against a faithful description of the reality of our world, not as a default assumption.

Jonah is a kind of gospel story. What was the merciful message in Jonah? It was that God was going to destroy the city in forty days. How do you integrate that into a modern understanding of the gospel? And why wouldn’t Jonah want to carry that message? Apparently because he truly didn’t want to tell the Ninevites about it. Perhaps the reason he was so reluctant is because a warning about real danger is not, for all its disagreeability, an act of cruelty or merciless criticism, but was in fact a message directed at the wellbeing of the people. And Jonah, not truly wishing them to know that or to change, would rather see them suffer the outcomes of their sins than engage with them in preventing or avoiding them.

If you cannot push back on or challenge someone else on what they say, you cannot have a conversation or a relationship. You merely act on one another, or avoid one anothet, if you cannot genuinely reach one another. It is not merely a matter of applying force, of striking. It is a matter of grappling with one another. In such an embrace, you are both dangerous and in danger, inside their defenses and exposed in your own. The arms that reach around them and grasp them also carry the force of their grip back upon you. Relationships and real conversations aren’t a matter of firing broadsides at someone else from a position of security, they are a wrestling match where both draw close and engage in a way that precludes personal safety except through endurance, skill, and the fitness and goodwill of your opponent. It is what makes love and a careful balance of love and truth, grace and judgment, necessary.

We pervert mercy when we hand out forgiveness as if it is something we can grant. We pervert justice when we hand out judgment as if it is something we can grant. God is the source of both.

    Many people, women especially, see their work as consisting mostly in the fair distribution of goods, taking little thought for how things are produced, but rather assuming it. This isn’t a fault, it’s simply a tendency of how their thought leans, an approach, an area of special interest. But what lies outside that interest? We don’t know. We assume that our question is the primary, and perhaps only, one worth addressing. How are goods being distributed? 

   Production will take place because that’s what it does. It happens somewhere, we know not where. It’s just part of the nature of the world. And so we criticize what we have to work with and bemoan the negative factors we must deal with that mess up how the goods of society are distributed, including dangerous and predatory men.

   We take little responsibility for having produced these conditions, and believe that there is no special reason why they should have been produced, had all been administrated as we desired. A proper and equitable and caring hearth would suffice for all and provide all with equal and equally good and plentiful outcomes. Whatever it is that provides for the hearth is not only taken for granted, but assumed so deeply as the be believed not to exist. The variability and contingency of the world, and even of individual lives, is not only not understood, it is deemed to be an affront, an injustice, a barbarity. 

   Men, conversely, concern themselves primarily with production, to the exclusion of other concerns. What specific consequences it has, what costs it demands, how its results are apportioned, all of these are of little concern in the struggle to make the contingent become real. It will all sort itself out, somewhere, somehow. It will all happen as it should. It will take place somewhere, we know not where or how, nor do we care. That is not our business, and that is not where the real work of life takes place.

    It seems perfectly natural that some must suffer and the weak and inveterate must be left behind, pushed aside, or even destroyed, so that what can succeed may come into being. The future is bought with the blood and sweat of not only the men who must succeed to make the contingent future and the production necessary to reach it actual, but by those who must fail and be paid as a cost in reaching that future. It is the law of nature that few can reach the finish line, and even fewer reach it first and take the highest prizes, and only those will determine what is able to survive and succeed and carry the species into the future.

    Survival of the fittest can take whatever form it wishes, in whatever age, for it is a purely empirical proposition, and only the trial can prove its truth. To refuse the trial may preserve your life, but only at the cost of living, at the cost of avoiding the business of what it means to be alive, and to be a man especially. We fight for the production of what is and is not to be, and we purchase it within our own bodies, in our blood and sweat, and even in our deaths. Women also purchase the future, but by sustaining and nurturing and conserving it. They also secure it with their own bodies and hold it within them, in a cradle of life, instead of death. 

   So what is behind all these assumptions, these drives, these areas of concern, and this mutual blindness? This inability to even think about the other half of the business of living? The answer is, I believe, the division of labor between the sexes. And that extends even to the division of psychic burdens, what we think about and don’t think about. That’s something that’s built so deeply and unconsciously into us that we take it for granted as part of the very nature of the universe. Because it’s been there since long, long before we could ever articulate or analyze it. It needed to be able to function on an instinctive and implicit level, without even self-awareness as a crutch to rely on for its maintenance. 

   The division of labor is so deep of biological and psychological reality that it is built into who we are, into what we assume and what we ignore and take for granted. It is built into our own blind spots, assuming that even if we are ignorant that someone stands in that place. We are motivated each to our own seperate business because for so long we really had a seperate business and hardly saw or cared what the other did, though we relied upon it. Our natures assume that the other sex stands in our collective blind spots, so much that we take what is actually their great work and concern for granted as mere facts of the universe.

    The rule of biological instinct is that an organism does not need to know how or why a behavior works for it to function. That’s how instinct works. It is an implicit framework and effective mechanism that is inseparable from our natures and the way we see and interact with the world. In this way all animals get through the business of living as they have through all the long eons, ourselves included.

   Often, the hardest things for us to understand are those which we have always understood without thinking, or that which we never needed to understand. Such things took place and functioned without our needing to maintain or question them much. Their operation takes place before the level of conscious thought. Far from being noticed or articulated, they are assumed. They structure how we see the world as operating, how we define what it is, how we define progress, success, failure, and penury, and what we assume our tasks are within the world.

   In a way, they are articulated, but not as conclusions, as foundational premises. They are that from which people reason, not the articles they arrive at. And so they must be reasoned back to in order to discover them. From what underlying assumptions did you begin, so different from my own, as strange and inconceivable as that may seem, that you should arrive at such a different opinion on everything?

    And this, I think, is part of why the sexes struggle to understand one another. We seem almost sensible to one another. We share the same spaces far more than we ever used to. We meet not only for the purposes of conjugation, but in one another’s territory and work. And we have brought great alteration to the very nature of one another’s work and spaces. Men changed those of women largely through technology, women changed those of men largely through society, through themselves and the power of their own presence and social constructions.

   And that is pretty much exactly what you would expect from each sex, one being more interested in things and the other more interested in people and leveraging their power and experience with each to alter the world. Women work from within the social structure, and their discrimination and power decides what stays within and moves toward the center of care and attention and what is forced out to the fringes and forgotten.

   Modern people are, perhaps, more unidimensional and mysoginistic than previous generations, for their failure to understand or appreciate the nature of the feminine power structure. They seem to have bought their own propaganda that it doesn’t even exist or matter, and only masculine systems and concerns do. Men didn’t really care what women thought about or how they stood within their masculine system, and they couldn’t really understand or escape the feminine system. Each was something we just had to live with and live within, in large part unconscious of how or why it worked. Because we had our own concerns and systems to navigate. Our own business of production and selection, of distribution and cultivation. 

    Both systems are equally pervasive and inescapable, in truth, as both sexes are an inescapable aspects of the species. And both can be very intimidating and even dangerous. How status and position in the group are apportioned is an all-encompassing system of soft power. It is a powerful and benevolent, but often merciless and demanding hierarchy that demands you sacrifice yourself to the group to maintain your position within it. It seeks to bring all in and provide for all. But its demands are very high and both its anger and its perversion are poisonous. It won’t kill you outright, but will mark you and devour you from within, spreading a stain of infection for all to see, making you stink in the nostrils of all who perceive you. It is the kindest cut. You hardly need to be chased away. You will chase yourself away if you know what’s good for you. That is the mechanism of feminine social power. It’s different from the more individualistic, confrontational, competitive proving ground of masculine systems, but no less powerful, and no less pervasive. Masculine power is like a wave that smack you in the face and rolls on. Feminine power is like the tide pulling relentlessly at your feet. 

   The strangest fact is how much we either resent or ignore the power and value of the other. When we live in instinctive unconsciousness, we mostly ignore and assume the action of the other, while we busy ourselves with our concerns as if they were the limit of the whole world and how it works. Only when our lives are restricted, impacted, or impeded do we notice the action of the other, and resent it. When it is working we don’t see it at all, we just assume it and get on with our own business. When it imposes itself and becomes conscious, it is always a problem. But we cannot even address it then except through the skewed lens of our own instinctive prejudices. 

    That, I suppose, is the price we pay for being what we are and having what instincts we have. We are not, after all, some strange creature among all the hundreds of thousands of others with no instincts to speak of. No implicit assumptions. Nothing we specially see and attend to nor specially ignore yet depend on. We are different, unlimited, complete. 

   Leaning to make room for the work and interest and nature of the other sex is part of the business of being human. I won’t say understanding each other, because I’m not certain that understanding is one of the demands of nature. But relationship is. Whether we truly understand one another, or even ourselves, may not be necessary for our survival. But we are are necessary for one another’s survival. Our relationship with one another is necessary. 

I recently watched a series of interviews of people who lived through the sixties, done in the 90s, reflecting on who they were and what they believed and did, and how things actually turned out and how they had changed thirty years later. Suffice to say, things turned out very differently than they expected. They thought everything that they didn’t like was the fault of their parents’ generation, and they would do things radically better and differently and be radically better and differently because they had that secret knowledge and perspective and wisdom and creativity that no generation had ever had before. They were what the world had been waiting for, what it had all been leading up to.

I think the lesson you can take from such a look back is that everyone always thinks that they’re right, in every generation, by default. And every succeeding generation lives with the consequences of being handed the world that that generation created. And often it’s not at all clear what the consequences of their unique contributions and decisions will be, in large part because the people who are making the choices and changes are taking for granted so much about their world that was really contingent on the people who came before them.

They think they know what the world is, and they think they know what they want it to be. But it’s not clear that they understand either, because they don’t understand their parents or themselves enough to seperate the world from what was contingent and variable in the behavior of each generation.

It’s even harder to judge whether you’re making things better or worse, because how we judge those outcomes is so dependent on our particular aims and values, which aren’t stable but vary from generation to generation, and because it’s so dependent on how we see ourselves in relation to our parents and their generation. And vice versa.

I doubt many of these people could have foreseen where we would be today. And people today have even less idea where we will be tomorrow. We live inside tacit assumptions about the world we inherited and tacit assumptions about the world we think we will pass on. And we’re all a bit embarrassed adults by the things we said and did and thought when we were young.

Time puts us all in our places, eventually. And it’s only in our middle or old age that we finally start looking back and actually trying to understand the generations before us, so we can understand the world they gave us and how they gave it to us, and how we come to better understand ourselves and the role we are playing. As youth, we think we already know everything about those subjects, and are always willing to talk about them at length. But in our older years, with the benefit of perspective, we close our mouths and finally start listening and thinking.

  Fear and freedom are always in tension. It isn’t obvious that there is a fixed, correct amount of either. The two exist as opposing impulses. One can easily erode the other. As fear decreases freedom increases, the available options open up. But that only makes sense if those options are relatively equally safe and productive. There are things we need to be genuinely afraid of, bad outcomes. And outcomes vary in quality, and even when the majority of available possible outcomes don’t lead to disaster (which seems to be the naturalistic assumption today), many outcomes don’t lead anywhere especially great.

   Because the world is challenging, we need other people as well as ourselves for our wellbeing. And losing what other people could produce or become isn’t a completely trivial matter (setting aside what they could produce negatively). But as it is not in our power to command what they must or should do or produce, it’s not clear how much of a right we have to intervene in their lives to ensure the greater collective good. That’s the thorny issue. What kinds of limits on freedom are appropriate to wield as deliberate actions of power against others, as hard power? As opposed to soft power; social valuation, positive reward, social censure, etc. That’s something we’re all going to do all the time as an expression of our desires, fears, and values. But it’s a whole different matter to codify those values and aims into deliberate structures of law and limits on freedom. 

    You can have a culture that values certain things and disapproves of others but that contains few actually deliberately designed limits on freedom in its law. Choices will still have consequences, but they will be emergent and socially enforced rather than legally enforced. Either nature, society, or law will push back on the limits of freedom (sometimes all three), but which you choose to wield, and how and when, will make a very big difference in how your society operates.

    Nature is the action of reality (whatever that is) in direct response to our own actions, and is largely beyond our control. But because we can manipulate and blunt those effects with technology, we cannot be said to be living in lockstep within the bosom of nature, with God himself as our guide. Nature can be tricked, cheated, manipulated, avoided. But in the end, in the very long run, it comes home to roost. So in the long run the action of nature wins and is the most concrete check on our freedom. But it is also the most implicit and least articulated and least obviously structured.

   Law exists at the opposite end, and social regulation (soft power) exists somewhere in the middle. But don’t imagine that all other levels of response are merely arbitrary. The action of society is the action of human nature, while law is a purely human construction, a kind of machine we have created. Law is not emergent but must be deliberately created, taught, and enforced. All three structures are useful tools, and all three must be respected.

    The most difficult choice, when deciding how we will regulate the demands of fear and freedom, is what domains to render to what gods to rule them? When to use the law, what to leave to society, and what to leave to God? And how to structure and define each. 

   I don’t believe you can prove the woke ideology wrong in a way that will be truly convincing to its faithful adherents. It is only by its results that it will be truly known and judged, in the end. Jesus said people would know his followers by the love they had for one another. Which is to say, empirically. By the fruit you understand the tree. 

   The woke ideology is best viewed as a theoretical framework, a way of seeing the world and navigating it. The only way to judge it and show its value, in the end, will be through its results, to see where it arrives. Does it make society more or less just, does it bring people together or tear them apart, does it make life better or worse, does it make people better or worse, does it cultivate sanity or insanity, does it produce wealth or poverty, does it bring peace or does it bring conflict?

   People have a very basic suite of intuitions that come into play when all is said and done. They can tell, after the fact, if something was a disaster and is killing them and making them miserable. Eventually. But a person, and indeed a whole culture, may have to walk pretty far down the road of consequences before the screaming in their ears becomes sufficiently audible that they can realize where it’s coming from. 

    So I’m not entirely sure that this error is one that can be avoided or reasoned out of. It’s not a simple fact or even an argument within an existing theoretical structure. It’s an entirely alternative theoretical framework. It’s a different physics of humankind. And you can’t dispute the claims of one theoretical framework from within the nested structures of another. In the end, all you can do is let people use it as a lens and see where it gets them, whether they’re able to make any progress or get any of their anticipated results.

   People can fall deeply in love with their framework. What they wish it to be, what they hope it will do. The real question is, how many miseries will have to pile up before they realize the relationship is abusive and extractive and built on lies and half truths and false promises? And what skills do we have for carrying forward what did work and what was worthwhile out of the general wreck of human extremism and experimentation? 

    Freedom of speech and local governance are, perhaps, our only defense against the tyranny of centralization, which would gather all banners under a single hegemony and make all pay the price for testing the theories of a few. They confine the borders of the revolution, so they can be tested in some measure of isolation from the lives of others. If one ship goes down, there are others to salvage what is salvageable. If a fleet of ships gets lost, other survivors arrive at their intended destinations. If one venture fails to pay out, we still have others to keep us solvent. Experimentation is useful, but you have to confine the boundaries of the experiment or risk evolving yourself right out of your competencies. 

I think there’s a mistake being made in many corners of our culture. And it explains a lot. How conservatives failed to pass on their values, why the educational system is more essential to the character of a culture than its government, the decentralized and social nature of the current revolution in thought, all the things so many people are concerned about. And it is a failure to appreciate the nature or extent of the power of the left, or what might be more accurately conceived of as the feminine aspect of the social-political dyad of humanity.

It is the masculine, generally, that changes the course of a culture, because it itself is the least secure and most changeable. The masculine can be eliminated and selected in massively disproportionate numbers (and puts itself willingly in that position), causing great changes to the population. And it is more variable by nature. And it is more singular, disagreeable, extreme, risky, and individually unidimensional.

All this, together, makes it the most likely engine for advancement into new spaces as well as the frontier of adaptation. And it shoulders much of the cost of that adaptation, which is often very high as a proportion of that population. Adaptation is a positive process that achieves its results at the cost of a massive glut of death and failure. And people tend to notice those sorts of things, so the masculine gets a certain amount of attention, positive and negative. In part because the costs are so great, in part because it’s very important to acknowledge and take advantage of the benefits when something or someone does rise out of that maelstrom to succeed.

But. The feminine is the vessel of stability for the species, and of the civilization. It does the actual work of administrating and maintaining the culture through fundamental networks of connectivity, which includes evaluation of members and distribution of goods. It is the engine where much of the real daily work of running and maintaining the species and the society goes on. And it is extremely easy to underestimate just how powerful those forces are, without them needing to ever raise their heads above the crowd. They operate with the power of a tide from within the flow of the culture. And so they are less visible, less singular and easy to pin down or even understand how they operate. Because they are everywhere, they are the walls of the world around you, the hands that move all things. And if you don’t understand this or don’t believe it, then I think the problem is that you’ve misapprehended what much of the real business of life is and where it goes on.

Masculine efforts may open up new channels by their brute efforts, or create rocks and obstacles, even dams that obstruct or redirect possible pathways, but the power of the flow of history is in the feminine. Broadly speaking, this hashes out in the relationship between actual men and actual women, but it’s more archetypal than it is specifically sex-based.

Because the sexes are so closely tied to those super-personalities, though, changes in the relationship between the sexes on a broad scale can have systemic social and political effects. When they change positions, when they alter the ways in which they engage with one another, when there is a major shift in the balance of their respective powers or in the available arenas for those powers to be expressed, when they become come more or less connected or dependent on one another, all of these sorts of changes restructure society from the ground up. How could they not? This relationship is what the species is.

I think it is possible for both masculine and feminine to err by catastrophic failure and by catastrophic success. Disaster results from both because, for the species as a whole, it is the dialogue and the relationship between them that is the actual source of the strength and health of society, and this relationship is compromised by any action that disables it.

The form that this disaster may take can vary quite a bit depending on whether it is the masculine or feminine that rises or falls, or some combination of both. In fact it doesn’t really matter what trajectory either takes, or what positions, so long as the relationship is compromised. So long as the dialogue is broken. When that happens, society is headed for a disaster.

And I believe that, even apart from the sins and misunderstandings in the social and political arenas that have arisen to estrange masculine and feminine from one another, there is such a deep division emerging at a systemic level in our society in this most basic of all human relationships, the relation of the species to itself across its primary division, that disaster of some sort of almost unavoidable. We have such distrust, such dysfunction, such lack of community, such lack of understanding, such disappointment, such resentment, that it is becoming hard to justify the partnership at all, or even comprehend it or its value.

And that is a literal will to destruction for a society. That is a self-imposed death sentence. If that most basic knowledge has not been passed on, nothing can take its place or save us from the long-term consequences. That is a house divided.

And we do not have the slightest idea how to fix this divide. Or at least we don’t have many useful ideas that wouldn’t make the breakdown in dialogue worse. This dialogue is the lifeblood of a civilization. It begins at the level of individuals and scales up to the level of the social super-personalities, the archetypes, the Anima and Animus.

We’re all in the position today of watching a marriage fall apart, and it is the marriage that is our society. And we don’t have any clue how to fix it. Blame is insufficient, as there is plenty to go around. The causal chains could be chased back into antiquity, trying to figure out who should apologize first and for what misunderstanding or misstep or indignity or sacrifice.

For all that wise men can throw their stones into the tide, it won’t mean anything if women (or other representatives of the feminine) don’t take up their ideas and guide the flow of the current of life around them. Men, even smart men, simply don’t have the tools to accomplish that, and it is a power so diverse and distributed as be almost incomprehensible in its complexity and subtlety. It is a networked intercoherence of shared values, shared resources, shared concerns, shared stories, and more. It is both everywhere and nowhere. And the masculine is curiously maladapted to engage it on its own terms.

Being a rock thrower means you disrupt the flow, even when it’s for the purposes of good. You are an imposition, an offense, a destructive disturbance with collateral impact. But it’s still just one rock in the flowing tide. The feminine isn’t just strong, it is strong beyond belief, because it operates in the principle of a compound pulley. By this means a single hand can move a great ship, without any excessive display of strength or excess, because the whole load is pulled in a thousand parts from a thousand different joints. Everywhere the system hangs together and takes a turn, a loop of cord is run round, so one tiny tug is multiplied across a thousand tiny fulcrums and pulls the weight of the whole society along. That is feminine power.

Our new communication technology is the new cord of our society, one far longer and more extensive than any conceived before. Where in times past the extent of any system of such pulleys was limited by the local community and its means of connection and transmission, social media forms a silken cord that may be wrapped round the shoulders of every person in every corner of the nation, raising a web round every corner and every institution in the whole of the society. But it’s very hard to tell from where it is being pulled, and where it is being pulled to.

Archimedes claimed he could move the whole world if he only had a lever long enough, and he also knew that you could pull any weight with the smallest of motions if you only had a cord long enough and enough corners to wrap it round. Mechanical advantage and force multiplication are much less easy to understand and trace than mere strength of arms or display of force, but they are as real in the physics of social and psychological interaction as they are in the physical world, and you underestimate them at your peril. Not only do we lack the tools to resist such a tug, we can often scarecly even comprehend from whence it derives or toward what it truly aims.

I cannot fault either left or right in the current battle. Because I cannot see any possible solution that does not involve healing the rift between them, and declaring blame or victory for one side or the other has never been a good tactic for restoring conjugal bliss. Victory for either side is only another kind of condemnation to a further extreme and devolution. And who knows where that would end? The left might do everything to us. And the right might do nothing. And we err if we think either is sustainable for such a civilization. Either could destroy us, benevolent as both would imagine their unhindered action to be.

Having said that, the diagnosis is at least clearer than we think. We do understand this sickness. It’s well-known. What is it that is wrong, what is it that’s happening? It’s fundamentally a dying marriage. And we can approach it as such. It’s in really, really bad shape. It’s a career-breaker. But it’s intelligible, it’s not a new and incomprehensible kind of problem. It’s a bad relationship. And we can approach it through that lens. And perhaps begin to find the cures.

I don’t mind if you make a mess, as long as you clean it up. 

I don’t mind if you explore, as long as you can find your way back. 

I don’t mind if you experiment, as long as you deal with your failures. 

I don’t mind if you do something your way, as long as it meets the need. 

I don’t mind if you make mistakes, as long as you recognize them and learn from them. 

I don’t mind if you get angry, as long as you know how to control what you do with it. 

I don’t mind if you want to win, as long as you’re also willing to lose. 

I don’t mind if you play rough, so long as you play fair. 

I don’t mind if you cry, as long as you don’t walk away. 

I don’t mind if you walk away, as long as you can live with the cost. 

   I’ve had some time to think about your sermon, Smithy. I think it was bold of you to try to thread some tricky needles. It’s unfortunate you have to spend so much time on such issues, when the real point of the story has little to do with them. Real or poetic, the point is the same point. And it’s nothing to do with fish. So I applaud you for trying to deal with it. I know it can be very tiring dealing with these sorts of contentious issues, and I hope you will be able to maintain your energy and enthusiasm for the extra work that entails. So, be encouraged and soldier on! 

   I also agree that trying to own or privatize God is a big part of the problem people run into in religion. That’s what I like to think of as the relativizing of absolutism (and we also often run into its counterpart, the absolutizing of relativism). The particular slant you chose to address today probably reflects your own personal experience, or possibly your judgments about your audience and what their most likely tendency is (which mistakes they need to be warned against and what actions they most need to be encouraged). God isn’t the God of nationalism. But he’s also not the God of internationalism or anti-nationalism. And people have certainly tried to own those as ideologies and place God behind them, just as much as provincialism. It’s hard to know what side of the horse people are most likely to fall off of. And I know you had to make a guess.

    In their defense, some people today who praise nationalism and the provincialism of town and family do so only because they feel those things to be under threat and are defensively advancing them in the face of fear of extinction, when people are telling them that the love of your own country or even love of and preference for your own people and family are the root of evil. That God demands that they give their love, time, energy, maybe even lives instead to some distant good or people or cause or abstraction that erases the boundaries of or claims precedence over local love and fealty.

   But in the Bible, as much as the brotherhood of all believers is elevated, so is the independence of individual churches, and the direction to look first to and to love your own house and family. Grace and forgiveness are taught, but also sin and righteousness. Generosity and circumspection, bravery and caution, faith and works, forgiveness and justice. And I would argue that to teach either without the other is to court disaster. 

    The problem is that these things end up being set in opposition, instead of complimentation and interrelationship and mature development in the full flowering of the faith. People learn that God isn’t the God of this and conclude, thus, that he must then be the God of that. And in our efforts to push back on one we often accidentally set up the other as a new idol and forget what the value was behind the first.

    God is the God of nations. He is also the God of hearth and home, of fealty and filial affection and the need to look first to your own life and own home and set those in proper order. And if you don’t, then you won’t even really know what good it is that you have to give when you go out into the world to try to spread it (and I think Afghanistan might be an example of that, an attempt to right someone else’s house without a real understanding of either what was wrong with theirs or what was right with ours, and having an insufficient understanding of or development of the good within our own home to be able to give it to anyone else; hospitality begins with love of home before love of others, because you must first have something set in order that has been loved and cultivated to give to them to also love and cultivate, and that in particular is what we failed to do).   

    The mistake is in thinking that it stops there, that God is the God of nationalism. “Ism” meaning a reductive ideology, that our interests go no further and are for nothing further. That God gives us a home to love, and it is only for itself, that we develop and focus on it and love it first to do nothing but enjoy it second. And that, I think, is the mistake, and Jonah’s mistake. He was a faithful man who had his house in order, but who had no wish to share it or see it extended.    

    Jonah represents, perhaps, a kind of extreme. Someone who loves God and his faith, and who understandably resents those who are opposed to it. And he has that moment when he perceives, not that God could forgive his enemies (which he seems to have already been aware of) but that they might actually admit they were doing wrong and seek forgiveness if they were offered proper warning and the opportunity for it.

    I know that in my own life some of my greatest disappointments have been when I saw how people treated someone who had realized they were in the wrong and tried to repent. Instead of welcoming them and integrating them, they want to kick them, with the added strength of that person’s awakened conscience. Which shows that they don’t really care about the truth that much, or the person, because they would rather see the truth proved in punishment than in acceptance. They would rather see someone be crushed by the truth than see them bend to it.

    Jonah is a pious man who hates evil so much that he would rather see it be destroyed than redeemed, and for whom the outward vessels and icons of evil matter more than the eternal realities (which would be far more soundly defeated by being defeated within his enemies’ hearts than they would by being defeated as his enemies’ hearts). 

   So often the problem in life is that we want things simple. And we want God to be simple. Following God means caring about people in other countries and setting them in order. Following God means caring about your home and setting it in order. I think our mistake is that we think it’s either one or the other, or we get the appropriate order to tackle them in wrong. I think you preach from the assumption that people know that family and country are valuable and primary gifts and responsibilities, and you want to make sure that they don’t get stuck there. And that’s wonderful and very necessary. 

    But, as I said, I think some people take that tack because those assumptions are, in fact, crumbling around them and are under assault. They’re aren’t unassailable assumptions any more. They’re being told that it’s ungodly to have such concerns and loyalties. And I think more and more people these days take quite a reversed view of the world, of moral action being lodged in some wider abstract community, a faith that exists in pursuing causes at a distance from our own individual moral and family and community lives, that that’s what it means to follow God. And some people have seen the consequences of abandoning those more personal concerns, failing to “keep house”, and are sounding the alarm that the very strength and wealth we seek to give to others may be being squandered and lost at home and in misguided attempts at moral aggrandizement and intervention in the lives of others (which is often easier and showier than settling the problems in our own backyard).

    The issue, of course, isn’t that one is right and one is wrong. It’s that one is incomplete without the other, or one is baseless and weak without the other, and one can become extreme and misguided without the other. And I think the trend runs equally through both. Both are equally subject to perversion and subversion, because both are a kind of distortion of the heart of God.

   Is God the God of the world and all men, the God of the international, borderless brotherhood of humanity? Or is he the God of the individual, the family, the people, the nation, the independent church? And on what level does he prefer to greet us an deal with us? As abstractions, as collectives, as groups or societies, or as individual men and women and cities and families, people caught in a specific place and time? I think the answer must be, both. And if you argue either to the exclusion of (reduction to exclude) the other, you’re going to miss out. I also think if you try to subvert God’s order, the process of maturation, starting from the center as the basis (you, your life, your soul, your heart, your awareness, your relationship to God as an individual) and gradually working outward in circle after circle, each building on the strength of the one before it, you will also build an edifice that overreaches its own capabilities and forgoes its most essential responsibilities, that’s destined to fall and possibly bring you down with it.

   Afghanistan is perhaps another good example of this. America is left even weaker and more vulnerable, in many ways. The enemy we chased out is back, and more confident than ever in their victory, and armed with the strength and resources we left behind because we couldn’t sustain and protect them. I happen to have supported the war there myself. But I also believe we radically overestimated our ability to give or reproduce what we thought we had, or what it would take to truly make a change in such a place. We believed that we were on the side of the angels, and we thought that was enough. 

   Anyway, sorry for the long, wandering message. Brevity’s name is not mine, obviously. Thank you for tackling the minor prophets. I have always felt that much of the old testament misses the attention it deserves. Good luck with the rest of the series! And I hope that people will find it very helpful and instructive.

Children are the hand of the past reaching toward the future. 

   The strange thing about our children is that they’re clearly their own thing, their own life. But the more you think about it, the more your realize there is only one life, and all we do is hand it on, not create it. 

   A child is the creation of something new, a new form within the world, but the life that gave rise to it never stops existing. The cells that came from the mother and father are their own living cells, and they don’t stop living. The life that was in me, my cells, my essence, part of me, it stayed alive. It is still alive. Those cells of mine just kept dividing and grew into something new and (somewhat) autonomous. In a way that part of me is still in there. Somehow, by some insane miracle, it joined with those of another, and those stayed alive too.

   We literally are, in the most basic way, the living continuation and combination of our parents. The connection was never broken. My living cell, part of me, was alive when it merged with my wife’s. They both stayed alive. They sustained one another, they inhabited one another, they divided together, they grew. They continued. They still are alive. What is a child but part of yourself and part of your spouse that joins for survival and renewal and just keeps living and growing outside you?

    In this way we hand on the life that is in us. It exists, as a kind of miracle. We don’t create it from nothing. It doesn’t end with us. It doesn’t begin with us. We don’t come from nothing. We come from and literally are everything that came before us. The same life is in us, unbroken, that has been handed down for centuries, surviving all this time, slightly different in each generation. But there are no lives. There is no appearing and disappearing of lights. There is one flame. And we pass along our part of it. And it never stops being, as long as we survive. As long as we embrace the process that raises us up and let’s us hand it on. 

    The fire takes new forms, new vessels, but the flame never goes out. Death comes constantly to smother it. We spread the fire out so it cannot all be taken at once. We find the strongest and most beautiful vessels and reproduce them, to reproduce the best in the forms the fire can take. The shadow takes many unwillingly, some willingly, and some without knowing how they stood still and let it take them.

   The flame must always be in motion, it must always be being handed off. It cannot stop, cannot stay, cannot begin from nothing and nowhere, and must not end in one dwelling. It exists to be passed on and find new life in the giving. The same life, in a new time and place.

   I am alive in my children. Not metaphorically, literally. And my predecessors live in me. And they live also in my children. And I see those bits of them alive in my children, the past reaching forward. It is not merely a resemblance, as of something carved in imitation, those people of the past, the life and the meaning and structure that was theirs is still in existence. It was handed on. It stayed alive. It never died. It only changed vessels. It transformed across the handing. 

   We cannot make anything from nothing. Life and being are given to us, and we choose how to hand them on. It is a sacred trust. We carry the life of the species within us, the inheritance, the very lives, of all who struggled and came before, who fought to give us this gift, handing it down faithfully. It is strange how truly accurate to the last detail the metaphor of two becoming one in sex and marriage is. Children are the literal fruit of such a joining. They are nothing more nor less than the two becoming one, in continued existence. And on it goes, that existence, that life, that flame. A quixotic enigma in a sea of enveloping shadows that seek to swallow it; ever succeeding, but somehow ever falling short and finding it still afloat.