Weaponizing archetypes

From a letter.

I had a question. I dictated this in the car while driving, and I’m afraid it ran away with me. My real question is immediately below. All the background and why I’m wondering it follows.

I was wondering how plausible you thought it might be to hypothesize that the archetypes are themselves psychological representations of an innate biological instantiation or instinct.

My wife is currently reading a book about ending patriarchy. And I was trying to lay my finger on what exactly it was about the book that bothered me. And to some degree it seemed clear that what was troubling me was feeling of misidentification. I didn’t really have a problem with the actual facts or data the book presented. In fact I would agree wholeheartedly with their validity and reality. But I was troubled by a feeling that something about me or about men, separate from the facts, was being iconically misrepresented.

So I was thinking about the ways that you have pointed out that degenerative patriarchy is often represented, such as the blind king and the predatory brother, and I also think there is a third archetype of undeveloped immaturity or adolescence, a pre-pubescent masculinity that remains perpetually a benign child and never develops those masculine attributes into any real fulfillment.

And I was theorizing as to how much of what we do when we cogitate is just us making the case for identification of a particular set of facts or events or people with a particular degenerative archetype, so that we fundamentally know what we are dealing with and what to do about it. And perhaps we each have both a primary archetypal fear and a primary archetypal ideal. And maybe my problem with the book wasn’t the facts as such, but rather that they were being used to characterize patriarchy itself, the representation of the masculine in society, as being identical with the threat of archetypal predatory masculinity, and also that the ideal archetypal goal of transformation it presented was toward a non-threatening pre-pubescent masculinity.

Males as children are very different creatures representationally to women than mature, post-pubescent men. And it worried me that the idealized vision of the book seemed to be this more neutered and controllable and undeveloped less-specified vision of manhood.

As someone who grew up around confident and powerful women, it was also hard for me to swallow the picture of women as merely captive and victimized children, rather than active agents and contributors walking their own path . Not that women haven’t been in that position or haven’t been forced into that position by men throughout history. But rather, I feel that the narrative that that archetypal representation represents the totality of female experience and the totality of male instantiation, is wrong. And the transformational ideals I see being put forward as an alternative are not themselves the most mature and heroic conceptions of femininity or masculinity.

So I was wondering why it is so easy for women to slip into or want to slip into this kind of archetypal simplification and identification. Not that I am singling women out, it is obvious to me that all humans do this. I was just concerned with this one particular case, when it comes to identifying men and their appropriate or inappropriate archetypal forms.

There seems to be a pre-made slot in the mind that we are pre-prepared to structure other people into. And I wondered if they could be identified with or connected to the persistent experience of phenomena, including threats from other organisms that we co-evolved with. And perhaps these innate reactions became part of our necessary mental language for how we structure our understanding of the world. Man as beast, man as wolf, man as predator, man as ravening lion, man as werewolf. The hungry devourer to whom you are prey. Do we have an innate circuit connected to such fears?

Wolves are organized, social, and intelligent and live virtually everywhere. They are very similar to us, and they are apex predators with their own social structure that can be used to turn us into prey. So there you have near-universal potential for exposure among humans, as well as the presence of something similar to ourselves, something familiar in appearance, but in a predatory form. I also notice that the Egyptian god Set has a distinctly canine aspect.

Do we also not use other innate clues and traits to allow us to identify infants and children, and don’t those traits carry innate representational power for organizing our attitude and actions toward the objects of those representations? Is it possible that some of our more sophisticated representations of negative humanity are built upon combining the idea of a person with the idea of another organism, a threat or an asset (but particularly threats with whom we have co-evolved and value assets with whom we have evolved) much as the heads of animals are transposed onto the bodies of the Egyptian gods? The idea of the wolf integrated with the idea of a man, the idea a snake combined with the idea of a man (perhaps into something like a vampire, a more hidden and subtle type of dangerous predator who bites and infects you with poison).

Does the innate fear of the parasite have an archetypal human expression? And do we innately look for these things in humanity around us, for the connection to and identification with the innate fears that structured the world of threats around us in ages past? Is the idea of a disease-ridden and corrupted body, the predator that is age and pathological sickness or infirmity, transposed onto the head of man in the archetype of the blind king?

How much of the struggle of society and what goes on in communication and representation and identification really a matter of connecting the present circumstances to innate archetypal representations of threats? And to what degree is misidentifying the appropriate narrative, which god, which ideological representation, which positive or negative archetype we are dealing with, the heart of the struggle and the nexus of where things go either very well or go terribly wrong? And to what degree is our failure to articulate or preserve or value or even understand a mature ideal as our archetype toward which we aim our transformation another large part of our struggle, and where things can go so very right or wrong?

Am I being silly? Am I casting a simple factual or ideological debate too strongly in terms of a struggle between the navigation and recognition of archetypes and the force of those archetypes as expressions or transpositions of innate biological fears, desires, or prejudices? And is there a way that talking about these subjects and understanding them in this way that can actually be useful when it comes to working out real problems and real fears and real grievances and real hopes among actual people?

As you can see, it’s much harder to explain clearly what is wrong with an argument in these terms, especially when the facts themselves that are fitted to the narrative seem true enough. Arguing the obscure and ephemeral point that it’s the framing of the discussion that’s off instead of the specific points is pretty difficult.

There certainly isn’t any lack of evidence that the patriarchy is often embodied in the form of its predatory degeneracy. That’s true enough. For someone whose concern and locus of attitude and action and experience is an experience of or confrontation with the threat of predatory masculinity, it seems to be very hard to convince them to adjust or complexify that perspective. They’ve been hurt. They want to prevent others and their future sekevs from being hurt. That’s what matters to them. That’s their focus. Why should they let themselves be distracted?

When it comes to women in particular, especially when you take into account the kind of threat that mature males present to them, and their own positive prejudices, it is very easy to see why they would prefer male children. Especially if you’re predisposed to notice the positives of males as children, and disposed to particularly notice the negative of males as adults, why would you want them to be anything else? Especially to the degree that technology and social and economic advancement has provided alternative options for the distinctive goods that adult males once contributed, why would put up with them and their inherent risks and downsides when you can to get those same goods yourself from a career or from the law or from government? Why would you need men to fill those roles anymore? Or even allow it.

And that seems to be part of the argument, that because of their propensity to fall into or be identified or perhaps even be identical with these degenerative archetypes (like the predatory male), that men should not be allowed to fulfill these masculine and patriarchal roles and functions in society. And perhaps because women have been so solidly identified with their own positive archetypes of the good mother and the helpless child (which isn’t exactly good, but whose negative aspects are conceived as being the fault of the predator who preys on them; mothers don’t blame children for being vulnerable comma, they blame the threats that endanger them; they seem to have an innate prejudice toward that, whereas fathers often seem to be more willing to lay responsibility for their vulnerability on the child themselves), because of that overidentification with their positive archetypes, they lack a robust enough idea of the dangers posed by their own archetypal degeneracies. Which is a subject I have been working on elaborating by examining myth and fiction, what the degenerate female equivalents to the male degenerate archetypes are.

I think one key to actually changing people’s minds is presenting a positive vision, actually developing and articulating the value of a positive heroic ideal of masculinity, not just pointing out the downsides of the degenerative expressions. However, people might benefit from more understanding of the dangers posed by degenerative expressions that our society is less concerned about, such as the underdeveloped and pre-pubescent masculine.

The myth of the predatory male is so dominant right now, and perhaps that is in part a reaction to an insufficient histp iCal acknowledgment of the cost being born by women of the predatory male aspect. Or perhaps it’s because the relationship between men and women has broken down so much that women no longer feel (or believe in) the protection and provision of the positive male archetype and are instinctively looking for other solutions (seeking weapons or tools of their own, to hunt or neuter the dangerous animals).

If this is part of the problem, then the levers of government (and of the economy and technology and the social structure) are essentially being wielded as a substitute for the relationship between the sexes. If this is so, then it seems to me that the only solution is to get men and women to love and value and trust one another again. But how do you do that, when the wounds are so real and so deep, when there is such a legitimate reservoir of grievances against one another, such a well of unacknowledged need and betrayal?

There have been enough sins committed by men to spend all of the rest of human history working out what they were and what damage they did and how to address them. And I’m not certain that women on their own or even women with the help of demasculinized male allies could address them, or whether this process would not actually render them even more incapable of addressing them. The only previously-evolved solution we possessed for the problem of predatory men was heroic men. Law and technology have increased that power and in some ways taken the place of men in that role, but in divesting men of the heroic role we seem to be actually creating more examples of degenerative archetypes, more wolves and more infants. And that is and excessive and increasing burden that it is not clear women will be able to shoulder alone, or at least not without great personal cost to themselves.

The burden of single motherhood comes to mind as an example. It saves you from the dangers of predatory males and undeveloped males (because who wants a wolf or another child as a spouse), but it also deprives you of the benefits of a husband and leaves a remainder of a detached, lone, free-roaming predatory or undeveloped male wandering unintegrated about in society.

I do understand why some people misunderstand and are unhappy with what you are doing with men. It is because they have not understood the real range of possible masculine archetypes and their positive and negative potential. When they see you talk to men, they don’t understand what you are doing. To my mind you are trying to scoop up these free-roaming, undeveloped males (and even some predatory males) and redirect them into positive archetypal expressions of masculinity, the heroic archetype. But to the outside eye you are simply taking children, who are at least safe, and making them dangerous. And you are failing to avoid or confront predatory males in a way that doesn’t fix or neuter them by reducing them to demasculinized males. And that’s what they see.

So what we really face is the challenge of convincing women that children really aren’t that great or desirable and that big, powerful, scary men actually are or can be desirable. And instinctively I think that’s a tough sell. Especially when adult men are cognitively mapped onto wolves and idealized men are mapped onto children, and people’s reactions carry the force of these innate biological prejudices. And the prejudices of women would be particularly strong, in part due to their proclivity for higher levels of neuroticism in response to their greater physical vulnerability, and also their proclivity toward higher agreeableness as an adaptation for infant care. They fundamentally want to like men as children and dislike men as dangerous predators.

As much as I approach a subject like this through the lens of scholarship and understanding, it really is a very personal struggle and fear for me. I am a man and a father and a husband, and I want to be a good man and a good father and a good husband. And I want to be understood and appreciated, and I do want to fight against the negative representations of masculinity. I feel that there is an innate drive in me to confront them, actually, and to confront them for the sake of my wife and children. That seems to be instinctive in me.

And then along comes a book into my own home that says that there is no heroic version of masculinity, or at least no need for it, or that masculinity is only typified by its predatory elements, and that I am also wrong in seeking to confront childishness. That I and all my kind are nothing but predators and we do nothing but abuse children by trying to make them more dangerous. And that all our confrontation of other threats is merely a hypocritical facade in the pursuit of our own arbitrary and predatory power.

That story literally tears the heart out of some of the deepest and most meaningful aspects of my identity and my efforts in life. Is such a big wound that it’s very hard to even express it, especially to my wife, whose opinion of me, including me as a man, matters so much. And it’s hard to address the complaints of the book without seeming like I’m denying or defending predatory male behavior.

Maybe that’s a trust issue. But everyone everywhere, the best and smartest men and women, are telling women and children not to trust men, that they’re toxic and predatory and hypocrites and abusers and arbitrary power brokers. And the worst of it is that we are! And criticizing the women thinkers who our wives are reading and listening to risks running afoul of the instinct toward agreeability and solidarity among women. These are the women struggling to recover from abuse by men and trying to protect women and children from abuse by men, after all. Who am I if I’m attacking them or trying to get between them?

Is this why it’s so important to have the cache of some victim identity group in order to be able to speak, why only men who are black or gay, etc, seem to be able to express their aggression? Because they can disguise themselves as non-threatening children who are only defending themselves? But for me the application of strength and aggression can only be an expression of either sexism or white supremacy or bigotry or what have you? How am I supposed to build an acceptable positive expression of masculinity under those circumstances?

I have gone on far too long on too many subjects. I hope you will forgive me. Brevity has never been my forte.

Wishing you the very best,

Mr. N

Rights and the new religious right

At some point rights groups became the new version of the religious right. They’re kind of like the temperance movement now, or the instigators of the “Satanic Panic”. That’s a funny transition to have made, for groups that centered themselves around advocacy for the sociological fringe. I suppose there’s a point at which, if you win enough, you become the hegemony and you become the conservative position. And if you want to maintain your position as progressives and as someone on the edge, you have to constantly be seeking a new frontier and pushing farther and father into new territory. And that might even mean attacking the territory of your own past victories that have become gentrified and established.

In the area of sex and gender, women stand the farthest back and are the most gentrified, so they’re the lowest in the moral hierarchy, then gays, then trans. Is there a frontier beyond trans? I don’t see why there shouldn’t be. But we’ve been moving from large identity groups down the ladder to smaller and smaller identity groups, as well as crossing wider and wider ideological gulfs to being those groups into the mainstream of political and social centering. At some point that’s going to become a problem on a practical level.

It’s hard to run a perpetual revolution. You end up having to add more and more people to your list of enemies to be defeated while the available pool of righteous revolutionaries who can escape all those negative identifications gets smaller and smaller. First we deregulated gender roles in society. Then we deregulated gender roles in sex. Then we tried deregulating gender itself, and it’s still not quite clear how well that’s going.

For this last to happen, there’s a large pool of affected people that have to be OK with the dismantling of a fundamental aspect of the biological, psychological, and social structure of human life, for the benefit of a relatively small number of beneficiaries to whom those structures are a problem (presumably, the assumption is that if we accommodate them they will be happier and the negative effects on then will be removed, but that’s actually a theory, not a guarantee). That’s a much harder pitch to make than the earlier ones, but it’s being made with great strength. It basically came out of the gate, fully formed, out of nowhere, with Caitlyn Jenner only a handful of years ago, insisting that this was the new moral frontier, so get on board.

Some gays and some women seem to have realized that their own moral stock as the locus or frontier of moral significance has been slipping. They’re no longer atop the moral hierarchy. In fact their attempts to hang on to what they have and not surrender their status to the new moral stars is considered terribly bourgeois and backward. And if you’re not part of what’s ahead, then you’re part of what’s behind. To be progressive means to be far left, and that includes left of whatever was left ten years ago and is already explored territory.
So it’s hard to guess where things head from here. Does the revolution keep going? Is there anywhere viable to go? Or will things get stuck at this point for a long while? Or will this case prove to be a bridge too far and a bargain too few people are willing to make, something too big and important to surrender to reinvention, deregulation, and disruption, so that too many people resist it in the long run? I suppose we’re going to have to see what happens.

The problem is, conservatism and liberalism are based in personality, not facts or conditions. They’re a matter of trajectory, not position. So facts can change, territories can change, but the behaviors won’t. People can be conservative about feminism. They can even be conservative about gay rights. They will act just as conservatives a hundred years ago did, but over different things. And liberals are the same. The slopes are slippery because the direction of movement isn’t determined by the terrain, it’s determined by the fundamental attitudes of the people walking it. Some portion of people will always be pushing the boundaries and trying to break out of whatever the current consensus is to the next frontier of exploration, regardless of the cost to what came before. Regardless of whatever the current or most recent consensus was.

There isn’t a point at which people stop pulling back or stop pushing forward. They just drift over what specific things, what assumptions and theories about life, the universe, and everything, are worth pushing or pulling about. The question of what is actually right or reasonable or true or really good is actually an almost completely irrelevant matter. The struggle will take place, regardless, everywhere, everywhen, every culture, every age. It is a conflict of approaches, over assumptions.

The only thing that really confines such processes are the ways in which actual living conditions and the consequences of our movement and action in actual life push back on us. But the ease and safety and wealth and technological isolation of modern life, including buffering from short-term consequences, keeps these things at a much greater distance than in previous ages.

This process is so difficult in part because our world is so complex that it’s very hard to actually sort out such tangled messes of cause and effect among so many people at such great distances. So much so that ordinary people can hardly even hope to have a sense of what causes what and how. The mechanisms of production are so obscured from us that we have no idea where things really come from or what they produce or what their cost is or why. And the results take so long to arrive and are so altered and affected and obscured by so many powerful forces and artifices and mechanisms and institutions that they can hardly be recognized. We are, as Marx said, alienated from the work of our own hands.

So I think modern humanity can be forgiven for being a little confused and mercurial and at war with itself. Or maybe forgiven isn’t the right word. Pitied, maybe. Understood, at least. Having our hands laid on a million different threads of data spread across an entire world hasn’t exactly elevated us to the level of gods, as we imagined. It has merely spread our limited mortal understanding so thin as to be ephemeral and adrift upon the vast winds of influences we can barely perceive, much less resist.

In response to a critique of “On being seen” 

After writing this, I thought better of it and never published it, which is why it cuts off abruptly. The person was arguing that I wasn’t understanding Cornell West or his points and thus my criticism had no relevance. They also made some allusions to the Navi from Avatar and their ideas of collective social being, and compared West’s idea of being seen to that of the experience of Ewa.

I appreciate those thoughts. I don’t think I actually am making a point at cross purposes to Cornell West. My point is really that I think he misunderstands his own point, that he has insufficiently examined the degree to which our needs and struggles exist at a personal rather than at a political level.
Being seen is a very powerful and provacative conceot. If by it you are only mean something about political structure and the distribution of power, then it becomes fairly technical and loses much of the personal, almost existential, feeling that the phrase naturally arouses. But this clearly is clearly an issue that holds great existential and emotive power. And when the discussion is framed within this metaphor of a person being seen, being known, it takes on an almost religious connotation. To be seen and known and valued, as people used to say that God sees and knows and values each of us. That he knows and cares for each sparrow, and so we hold the existential terror of life and insignificance at bay.

West makes use of all these deep feelings and associations, the language of intimacy and family and meaning and faith. And when you hear people talk about this subject, including Cornell West, those personal existential needs and feelings are actually doing a lot of work. So I don’t think the issue at hand really is one of policy and politics, it’s about something deeply intrinsic to our most basic individual psychological needs.
Even the idea of the Navi’s Ewa is about taking your place and having significance within some larger universal structure. It’s a religious notion. And Cornell West’s God is the political state. And my contention would simply be that that’s an error. That’s a false God and a false home and false sense of being seen. It’s false power. The state can affect the distribution of power but fundamentally does not produce it. The deepest problem to be solved isn’t distribution of power or meaning, the deepest problem is production. And it is at the personal level that all really powerful things are actually produced.
At this point, African Americans are actually in danger of committing the worst sins they have (legitimately) complained about in the past, because they’ve actually bought into the whole idea of grasping for power and political force and a zero sum game of scrambling to be on top of others and judging and punishing some while rewarding others based purely on their racial heritage. They’re seeking false power as the solution to real problems.
The 1619 project is a good example, an attempt to rewrite all the history and meaning of America, the most complex heterogenous nation in history, as being defined by one specific story. The argument that the black story (specifically the slave story) is the American story, and invalidates all other narratives and meanings. #@$& the Italians and the Greeks and Lebanese and Jews and Irish and Polish and Croatians and Turks and Germans and the hundred other groups that made the journey to America to start a new life story there and what it meant to them. All of that is invalid, none of that matters, none of what those people went through or what America meant to them has any significance or is a valid part of the American story. The black story invalidates and overwrites all of those dozens of others.

The irony of it is that that sort of approach is the exact mistake that previous black leaders were legitimately complaining about. The truth about America is that it isn’t just the great stories, it’s also the difficult ones. And often both are quite mixed. America isn’t any one group’s story, no matter what happened to them, good or bad. It’s everyone’s. It doesn’t belong exclusively to any one single group. We all belong to it, and it belongs to all of us. The good and the bad, the difficult and the triumphant.

No one has the right to say that America is just this or just that. There is no “American race”; the American people simply are all these different peoples crashing into one another and sharing space in a way that had never occurred before in history. People who had been divided and fighting for their entire history, back to the dawn of time, suddenly living next door to each other and trying to figure out how to make that work. Some coming from slavery, some fleeing religious oppression, some fleeing from war or famine or devastating poverty, some coming from centuries of racial or political hatred.

From such a mix of down-and-outs, slaves, and exiles you wouldn’t expect much. But what do we actually see? Where do the wealthiest people of African descent in the world live? Where do the wealthiest and most successful people of Jewish descent live? Where are there five times more Irish then in the country from which they originated? For group after group, there is a place where you can find more of them here, and more successful and thriving, than in their own original homelands. Where can you find people mixed with and married to their historical and religious and racial enemies of untold generations? Only here.

We all get to be part of that great narrative and bring our own unique story to that meeting. America welcomes the black story. But being part of that story means you don’t get to take what it meant or means away from anyone else. And compared to most places, and for so many different people, America has been uniquely good. Not easy. Not simple. Not a utopia. Because there is no such place, that humans have built and occupied.

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On “being seen”

(From an online forum discussing Cornell West, who is especially fond of this phrase)

I don’t understand the obsession with “being seen”. Or how much or what kind of being seen it is that would make people happy, or whether that kind of feeling is something that someone else, even magical white people, can grant to African Americans.

I feel like I see black people all the time. They’re everywhere. They’re an extremely lively and dynamic and expressive people with an enormous cultural footprint. I grew up in a part of the country where there never was a slave population and that had very little post-slavery immigration of blacks. So we had only a few black people. But in our cultural minds, black people loomed largely. You learned about then, you listened to them on the radio, you watched them in movies and on TV, they were taken for granted as one of the major cultural components and influences of American life, despite the fact that there were virtually none of them where we lived.

Everyone in the world knows about African Americans. Everyone in the world knows their story and contributions. My people have a story too. He have our place, our journey, our struggles, our heroes. No one has any clue about us. Virtually no black people will ever see us or care about us, much less anyone else or people from other countries. That fact that we’re white doesn’t mean anyone knows about us or sees us, just because some white people somewhere are famous or successful. That’s not us, that’s not our place, our story, our success or failures. We could disappear and no one would know or care. I think that’s just a fact of life for most people, in fact. I think you feel it more in a big city.

And that’s the thing. You can’t legislate or demand that people see you and give you significance. Only you can create that, and only your family and friends and community can give you that kind of existential significance.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if someone on the other side of the world or the country or even the state knows my name or cares about me or thinks I’m important. That peace with your place in the universe starts within your own soul. It can’t be bought or voted into being or distributed by the government or the university or television. It comes from having people who know you and care about you. A life, however big or small, where you’re needed and valued. A home, however great or humble, where you’re important, where you have a family that loves you and resoects you and friends that like you and neighbors who appreciate you. It comes from taking responsibility for your life and how you live it, whatever the world throws at you.

This is how people have always gained these goods. It’s how people will always gain them. These are the things that lift you up. Your family, your faith, your friends, your children. These are the people you need to matter to. They’re the only people worth being seen by.

When I die, and we all will, the government isn’t going to stand by my coffin and weep, or remember all the great times we had and how much I had meant to it. The media isn’t going to be there and care. People from other towns and countries aren’t going to be there. Even when great and wealthy and famous people are dying or going through something really hard, if you don’t have the support of people who know and love you, your family, your children, people you have loved, if those people don’t see you and aren’t there for you, nothing else matters. You don’t have anything if you don’t have that. And if you have that, then you have everything. You have goods that cannot be lost or stolen. You have water that doesn’t run dry and treasure that doesn’t tarnish.

I won’t deny that people feel this burning need and painful lack in their lives. But I think they’re being sold a false story on where to look to get it fulfilled.

A critique of “The Thrill of it All”

I recently watched an old Doris Day movie about a doctor whose wife becomes a TV advertising star. And I couldn’t help feeling that the whole problem was that the characters never had an open discussion and never asked the right questions. And that’s fine, if people did that at the beginning of the story then it would end immediately. It takes a while for the characters themselves to figure out what the relevant questions and concerns and misunderstandings are that need to be addressed and get up the courage to address them. And that’s the moment you’re waiting for.

Think of Pride and Prejudice. The high points of that story are (are least to me), those moments when the characters actually manage to express themselves and confess their feelings honestly (which goes very badly the first time), and the second time when, after thinking through what the other person said they are able to communicate again and resolve their inherent conflicts. One meeting is a fight that leaves both angry and separated further apart than ever before, but having had their conflict and themselves properly revealed. The second meeting is a reconciliation, a love scene, an engagement, the birth of harmony and understanding. It’s beautiful.

Sadly, that never really happened in this movie. The characters were never able to fully articulate what was bothering them and causing the trouble on a deep and honest level, and so the conclusion and reconciliation rang false and hollow and far too easy. It was a collapse back into the status quo from the beginning, instead of an arc of progress and enlightenment and growth.

For the record, what the struggle was actually about was an undiscussed renegotiation of the terms of the distribution of labor and individual roles in the marriage. Married life with kids is pretty complex. There’s a lot to do, and a lot that can be done. And people negotiate and specialize. In this movie, being an older movie, the men make sacrifices in their careers and the women make sacrifices of their careers in the home, so both can maximize the value of the home and family through their vocations. Both enjoy the fruits of the other’s specialized labor, and both are reasonably happy with their work, although both types of work are inherently challenging and annoying impositions as well as rewarding. And both are equally important and would be felt as a dire impact on their shared happiness if one or the other were removed.

Doris Day kind of falls into the working world, being seduced by the promises of providing for the family (although her husband is a doctor), without being quite aware of how much it will actually demand of her. It ends up disrupting their lives quite a bit, makes finding mutual time for the family much more difficult, and upends a lot of the dynamics they had established. That much is simply natural, it would be a challenge for anyone. The structure of their lives has been radically upended, without either of them really knowing what they were getting into or having thought and talked through how to manage it.

If the movie had properly addressed just the achievement of a victory over that structural difficulty, it would still be a triumph of practical marital adaptation, people learning to adapt as a couple to shifting conditions. But that never really happened. Or at least to the degree that it did, in the middle of the movie, it happened offscreen. But the characters never seemed to really turn their attention to it and become active, conscious agents of their shared life. Seeing people do that together in large and complex endeavor like a family would be interesting. The foibles, the mishaps, the false starts, the maladaptations, the tricky situations, and then finally getting on top of it and seeing peace return. That could have been fun to watch. And the elements were there, it just never came together as a coherent narrative arc.

There were instead some larger, more complex and psychological issues that were there, and those were the primary focus. The real issue, the real question, was what the change in gender roles and the distribution of labor (altered suddenly and without much understanding of what that meant or would entail) meant for the characters. The question of gender roles per se and the distribution of labor in the home, and how each spouse felt about it, what having the wife enter the working meant for for and what it meant for her husband.

The real mistake that the movie made is that it never really articulated those questions properly or answered them meaningfully. We knew the husband was upset. And the wife was upset in return. There was a real conflict under there. But they never expressed or resolved it. The wife just sort of realized that working as a TV star was kind of demanding and annoying and disruptive in way that negated its monetary and status value, and she realized that she was happy getting those things from him and didn’t need more (which, frankly, is putting it with much more thought than the movie ever did). But because the conflict was never properly articulated, the solution felt cheap and hollow. The conflict was removed rather than solved. Things just went back to how they were at the beginning, all in a moment. It was a shallow solution. Remove the problem. The conflict shouldn’t exist. And now it doesn’t.

A modern movie, maybe, would make a similar but inverse error. I expect a modern movie would just assume that there never was a problem with the wife taking on a career, that the conflict shouldn’t exist. And then it wouldn’t. The husband would just be fine with it. There would be no costs, no tradeoffs.

Neither kind of dissolution of the conflict would do the characters justice, in my opinion. One simply assumes that the woman is wrong for reacting how she does, and the other (theoretically) assumes that the man was wrong for feeling how he does. Each would pick different sides. But in my opinion merely picking a side that’s right and ending the conflict with victory is shallow, dishonest, and doesn’t really teach anyone anything.

This movie took for granted that the husband had good reasons to be upset. A modern movie would take for granted that the wife had good reasons to be upset. I take for granted that both do. That life is complicated and marriage and sex are solving complicated problems. But since we are moderns and are more likely the take the wife’s position for granted, and since it’s the husband’s concerns that were focused on (but poorly explored), I think it’s worth talking about what a better version of this story could have looked like.

The fundamental question of the movie was stated, but shallowly. So I’ll ask the underlying questions better. Why was the husband upset by his wife becoming a TV star (outside the usual disruptions such a change causes)? Why was it hard for him as a husband and father? What did it mean to him, why did it threaten him? And why was pretending to be having an affair his idea of a solution? Had it been a real affair, the movie would probably have ended in their separation. But since this was a comedy it ended in reconciliation.

For the sake of argument, like a therapist, I’m going to assume that there was some sense to the husband’s feelings. And the problem wasn’t the sort that could be solved simply by dismissing his feelings as invalid.

The clues to the meaning of what was happening were hidden in the movie. At the end, the wife said “I need you, do you need me?” And that is the closest the movie came to explaining what was at the heart of the conflict. Marriage is a tricky business.

You give up a lot and risk a lot of live in a partnership. This being a traditional partnership, that meant that the husband was making his contribution to value in the family by working outside the home. And the wife making hers by working inside it. And together they were covering the bases of how to deal with the world, which includes attention and effort that needs to be applied both close in and at a distance, narrow and wide focuses. When the wife took the soap job, it did two big things. First, it destabilized the ability of the wife to contribute in the way she had been contributing. And here’s the kicker, those contributions of hers had real value and meaning for the family. They were important, especially to her husband. And they were a large part of what made it possible for him to accept and accomplish his own contribution to the family through his work. Her work made his work possible. And the wife had underestimated, because of inexperience and undue optimism, just how much such a position as a TV and advertising star can demand of a person. She thought it wouldn’t impact her existing contributions to the collective good and her husband’s good, but they did. That’s fair enough, that falls under what I would call the problem of structural difficulties. How to handle a disruption of circumstances and arrangements in a way that preserves the function of the family.

But the second big thing that happened from the wife taking the soap job is that it threatened the husband’s actual sense of self, his value as a husband. And, to be honest, that’s a very reasonable concern. Because to a very large degree, when women choose a mate, they marry the career and the status. Women practice hypergamy. They like to marry up (or across) in economics and social class, in education, even in height. That’s what they look for, that’s how they choose mates, and that’s how they reject potential and even existing mates. Men establish rank through achieving status and wealth, and women assess that as a sign of mate quality. A woman will rarely choose or be happy with a man who is shorter, less educated, of lower social standing, poorer, or earns less. It’s what women want, and it’s what men have to offer. Yes, there are all kinds of individual preferences and tastes, but these prejudices are nearly universal.

But there is no correlation between those same factors and mate choice for men. Whereas they tend to be absolute deal breakers for women, men don’t use them as a matrix for mate selection. Men don’t care if you’re poorer or earn less, shorter, or of lower socioeconomic standing. They’re just interested in you. If you’re beautiful, charming, kind, caring, neat you seem very attractive. And men are particularly visual and sensitive to physical traits like symmetry and body proportions, which have been shown to be accurate measures of health and reproductive fitness. But the truth is that men aren’t really that picky. They’re ambitious, they hope that high value women will consider them to be high value and deem them worth their attentions. But even when it comes to physical attractiveness men are much less judgemental about women than women are about themselves and each other. They aren’t exceptionally picky about mates (and can’t afford to be, because women are).

If you’re looking for an amusing example of this asymmetry, consider some statistics compiled about tinder. Researchers found that “The bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.” So there’s a huge imbalance in terms of attraction and attractiveness, interest and selectivity. A woman of average attractiveness tends to be “liked” by the majority of all men. Whereas a man of average attractiveness “will only be liked by approximately 0.87% (1 in 115) of women on Tinder.” If Tinder was an economy, it would be among the 5% worst in the world for inequality. Women are simply much more picky matters than men, so what they prefer really matters for men.

Of course both men and women can have shallow and short-sighted and uncomplex version of their respective prejudices, and both can have more complex and developed and far-sighted versions of these prejudices. It depends on the person and their maturity and also their available options. But these values are pretty much always down there as part of the basic structure of sexual selection. On the most absolutely basic level, it’s what men and women are looking for and what each will contribute as value to meet the value of the other.

The husband in this particular movie is a pretty lucky guy. He’s married to Doris Day. Smart, frugal, confident, capable, skilled, beautiful. She’s got it all. And he’s a pretty good catch too. He’s a doctor, a good one, even one that’s skilled with women and children, and he’s pretty good looking on top of it. So they’re well-matched.

So what happens if suddenly his wife has all that she already has innately, and also has what he was bringing to the table, and maybe now has even more than him? More status, more income. Suddenly, there’s an imbalance. She’s outclassed him. She doesn’t need him any more. She could either get by without him and not bother making the compromise of martial cooperation, or she could upgrade to someone more at her current assesed level, at the level of a wealthy and famous TV star. And her husband instinctively sense that. He’s worried that his wife doesn’t need him any more. That he has nothing to offer, that he’s useless and valueless. That his contributions are no longer needed and have, with little effort, been radically outclassed. He’s become a kind of vestigial organ in his own family body.

By the same token, he’s not only seen the collapse in value of what he had based his identity and role and work and sacrifices on, he’s also seen a significant erosion in the value that his wife was contributing to the relationship that was sustaining him and contributing to the shared quality of life. Money and status might be useful, and might be useful to men as ways to attract women (since they care about them), but he doesn’t want more money or status from his wife, he wants her. Her care, love, affection, attention, support, and admiration.

If you’re wondering why men feel the need to be admired, I’m afraid you’ve got sexual selection to thank for that. Because women have been consciously choosing to mate specifically in a hypergamous manner for quite a while, with extreme prejudice, so that you have only half the number of male ancestors as female, the simple fact is that men who weren’t willing to care about pursuing status and achieving the admiration of women, are all dead. Lost from the gene pool. Women won’t choose them. That’s a deal breaker. Men are under a greater selective pressure to prove their value as mates. So much that the command “prove your status to women” has become baked into their genome. You either do it or you vanish. Women worry about making the best choice, while men worry about success.

The husband won’t be worried or threatened, his wellbeing won’t be endangered, and his personal value won’t be compromised, if his wife loses her well-paying and high status job. He’s happy to give her his money and status. Frankly, that’s what he got it for. But, had the movie begun with him losing his job, the wife would have been worried, her wellbeing would have been healiy compromised, and the loss of his income and status would have mattered to her. Maybe not too much in the sort term, but possibly more and more in the long term. Women don’t like being with low status and low income men. It’s hard for them not to have it nag at them. It’s hard for them to not wish for better alternatives. And if their own star begins rising, maybe they will. If you don’t need the man any more, and he isn’t producing the thing that gives him value in a relationship, you won’t keep him around as an ornament. A man who isn’t useful isn’t husband material. Failure to succeed as a man matters a whole lot more for a man than it does for a woman.

Women are, I think, on the whole very loyal and patient. But they also feel the threat and anxiety that such a loss presents very strongly. They demand more of their environment, a consequence that possibly emerges as a consequence of higher negative emotion (neuroticism), which is likely a kind of nesting adaptation. Women are, statistically in their expressions on the Big 5 personality scale, more orderly, while men are more industrious, which simply means that in the same domain (conscientiousness), women tend to focus more on having things just right while men focus on visible achievement. Again, selectivity vs success.

So, next, why did he focus on an affair (or pretending to have one), as the best way to proceed? Because, from his perspective, it raised the same concerns for his wife that he was having about his own value. He was feeling not needed, replaced, surpassed. Like his value had been deflated, bypassed, and his wife was getting what he had to offer from another source. So he raised the same specter for his wife. What if she were being bypassed, replaced? What if he didn’t need her and could get what she had to offer somewhere else?

In a relationship of mutual dependence in which the way each spouse meets the needs of the other is deeply essential to their happiness and stability, what happens if you shift the balance by introducing a direct alternative to your partner’s basis for their contribution? The husband was feeling jealous and threatened, so he made his wife feel jealous and threatened. If both partners don’t actually have any mutual need for one another, what is the basis of the partnership? It’s like imagining a restaurant that doesn’t need business catering to customers who don’t need food. There’s no economy there. You’ve already got so much you don’t really require a partner, so why seek it out; why introduce a partner you don’t need? Why carry around the costly demands of another person if they’re merely as a redundancy that could be eliminated? In fact, a large part of the terror and the glory of forming a partnership is the idea that you could be something more together than you are alone. That your union isn’t merely additive, that it is exponential, that you plus me equals more than just us.

If your partner didn’t provide something you genuinely needed then you wouldn’t put up with them, because all partnerships come at a cost. I know that I am often a burden and an annoyance to my wife and make all kinds of demands of her she would often prefer not to have to bother with or think about. But we are partners because I am not merely a burden. I also contribute something valuable. And in return I derive something valuable from her.

This doesn’t mean that relationships are merely transactional or merely mutually exploitative. It just means that there is something real going on. A real, living, dynamic exchange; a chemical reaction, an active economy, a living respiration, a functional metabolism. Something is actually happening. It’s not just the case of two perfect crystals sitting inert next to one another in the same case. There is a living dynamism and mutualism Independence and integration taking place. The heart and liver aren’t fully independent entities with a thin sack of skin stretched over them it makes them look like they’re part of the same thing. They’re actual functioning and essential parts of a greater, complex organism.

None of this means that the actual solutions the movie reached for the characters’ problems were the right ones. Or even the wrong ones. Because the real problems were never properly understood or talked about, they were never really addressed. Part of the freedom of being in an individual marriage partnership is that you have the ability to figure out between the two of you how to negotiate your problems, once you’ve understood them. But I’m not convinced that either the husband or the wife got a fair shake in this story. And they didn’t just need that for themselves, they needed it for one another, for the two of them together. The wife deserved to be understood and she deserved to understand her husband. And he deserved to be understood and to understand his wife. And I don’t think either of them got that.

Even from the perspective of the husband, who essentially got his way in the end, it was a completely unsatisfactory outcome, a pyrrhic victory. It perpetuated the status quo without understanding why. The one good thing I could say about it was that it did ask the essential question that really was what the whole thing was all about. I need you. Do you need me? If the answer is no, then there isn’t any relationship, there isn’t any need for a partnership. There isn’t any romantic economy. The couple at least realized that. They needed each other. They just could have spent more time exploring how and arriving at that conclusion and how best to maintain it.

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Knowing when to stop

Open people, creative people, will always want to be on the edge of explored territory. And this can be a problem, if the territory is already quite expansive. They will always keep pushing the boundaries, by nature. There won’t be any logical stopping point. Once whatever used to be fresh and exciting has been fully gentrified, they’ll move on to the next new territory. They always want to be in the new place, bringing what is hidden into the light and bringing what has been sidelined to the forefront. They want new possibilities, new places to go, new experiences to chase.

But there isn’t any logical stopping point. If they want to remain current and creatively vital, they must always remain in motion. Even as individual artists age and settle down and become gentrified themselves, the next generation that already takes for granted what the last generation did wants to surpass it and is waiting in the wings.

As Camille Paglia once said, once wonders if this will drive some artists back to traditionalism. They’ve spent so long deconstructing things that it stopped being innovative forty years ago. Now one wonders if any of them know how to put anything together. I think that’s her current rebellion. Rebellion against a passe rebellion. And maybe is something it would be refreshing to see.

Why fear differences?

People today, for all their talk of equity, inclusion, and diversity seem to be doing so because they’re actually terrified that there might be real, substantive differences between people. Much as the European reaction to nationalistic fears in the postwar period led to a drive toward the dissolution of borders and differences of nationality in the European Union, the current drive toward the equalizing of all differences among people of different races, sexes, religion, creed, class, and country seems to be born of a similar unspoken fear.

And among the differences that are the most under threat of criticism today are the differences between the sexes. We are told, in no uncertain terms, on daily basis that there are no real differences between them, that they are of equal value, possess the same innate characteristics, and that any differences between them are illusory. Any differences in outcomes between them are unjust and artificifial. We receive major doses of counter-programming designed to invert and subvert our assumptions about the sexes, to help correct these dangerous prejudices. And where disparate impacts and diverging outcomes remain, they must be denied, condemned, or corrected.

And the question we must ask is, what’s so scary about differences between the sexes? We’ve lived through the entirety of history (and prehistory) with that being one of the most basic assumptions of every human. And far from it being a cause for terror and distress, it was so casually assumed as to be almost inconsequential, like the difference between night and day, or the need for food and water. So why, at this late date, are we suddenly so scared of it? Why be afraid of our differences?

There are, of course, many historical and social and psychological reasons for both sexes to fear one another. And everyone has their own reasons for why they feel the way they do. In practice we might have good reason to fear anyone. But to fear difference itself, on principle, is another matter. Why is the mere principle that there might be real differences between the sexes so dangerous and frightening?

The answer is, for the same reason that differences between cultures and countries are frightening. Because if there are real differences between the sexes, then there there might be a value hierarchy. If there is a value hierarchy, then men might be better.

Or at least, if you admit that real differences are possible then someone might draw that conclusion and act on it, regardless of whether it was true or not. Disarming the conviction of their own distinctness and value and need to compete and prove and assert it seems like the only way to render men less dangerous. Like dangerous nation states, if they have no concept of the borders between themselves and other adjoining peoples, they cannot develop the need to fight or dominate them.

If differences are real, then hierarchies might also be real, and men might take them over. Women think this, even if they won’t say it, and it scares them. And some men might think it and fear it in themselves or in other men. It’s not like the only losers in a competitive hierarchy are going to be women. In fact the sorest losers have always been other men, who have often been imprisoned, killed, or otherwise completely defeated and reduced, while the winners seek the favor of women with gifts of the rewards of their victory.

Women, however, seem to be more biologically and psychologically predisposed to worry about this potential imbalance between the sexes. Partly because they’re physically weaker and easier to damage, partly because they are higher in neuroticism and more sensitive to emotional and social distress, and partly because they’re more agreeable (pro-social) and so in a way more vulnerable to domination and exploitation in general. And that plays out in their higher levels of anxiety and depression, which are the innate dangers of these psychological features.

And these features aren’t bad, they’re just particular. But it means that women have a lot of (reasonable) anxiety about men. In the past, these anxieties may have been mostly confined to certain specific men. Bad men, strangers, the men of other rival tribes and nations, socially unacceptable or dangerous men, criminal men who sought success outside the bounds of moral and social codes, the lower end of the male hierarchy and the top of other competing tribes’ hierarchies. The ones, to summarize, that their own men were set in opposition to and competed with and protected them from.

But for women in a society with few good men, or where relations between the sexes have degenerated such that one can no longer rely on the good men to be present to balance out and hold back the bad, all men, with their adaptations for competition and violence and aggression and strength and ambition and dominance, become a kind of threat. So they become a universal concern and source of perpetual anxiety, and a factor in society that must be addressed and suppressed as a whole. Differences must be abolished, lest someone sieze advantage.

Men, on the other hand, take the same experiential data and run a different way with it. They also notice that there appear to be real differences. And if there are real differences, then there might be a hierarchy. And so they want to compete in it. They want to win. They want to test and be tested, to battle and show their mettle. To die, even, to win status and approval, if necessary, and to protect their people. And to kill, if need be, to preserve their place and to purge what is dangerous and undesirable from the world.

And if you abolish differences, if you abolish their hierarchy, they become listless and selfish and unmotivated. They collapse in on themselves and turn to drink and distraction and meaningless diversions, to suicide and crime and addiction and petty indulgences and childish dependency. Men, like males of many species, are strange creatures. Compelled to fight and compete, to pursue and to dominate, to test and be tested, to kill and to die. Because if you can’t get to the top of some hierarchy, if you can’t engage in that process of struggle and selection and proving yourself, then you aren’t worth anything, and life is a pointless farce.

The answer of the Christian faith isn’t to endorse either of these approaches, and it also isn’t to disagree with them. According the Christianity, there are real differences between the sexes. But there isn’t a value hierarchy between them. Both ways of being, different as they are, are good and useful and exist for our benefit. We can’t afford to lose or ignore or undervalue either of them. But there is an internal value hierarchy to each of them. There are ways each can go wrong or go right and become better or worse versions of themselves. And because the two are meant to be complementary, making up together one whole species, each can seriously affect the other.

In fact, the same features that empower female anxiety pathologies are also the core of feminine strength and competence, just as male aggression is the source of their endemic pathologies and accomplishments. You don’t get a specialized strength without it creating commensurate vulnerabilities.

If you’re going to be particularly good at any kind of thing, that particularity will also disadvantage you in other ways. Humans are very flexible and adaptable, moreso than any other creature, but we still have particular nature’s, and we still have and make use of sexual dimorphism specifically. Our natures are more complex than those of other animals, but we still have the same sexual differentiation, and it’s one of the more obvious and useful things about us.

By dividing half the species into one specialization and half into the other, you can cover a lot of bases that a single spec couldn’t, so long as the two halves remain fundamentally united to take advantage of one another’s strengths and protect one another’s vulnerabilities. And within those specializations there is still an enormous amount of variability and overlap, so how that collaboration comes together and what it looks like can have an enormous amount of individual variety, and there is a pool of flexibility to cover contingencies that might come up.

When we need to survive, when the world is demanding a lot of us and its hard to figure out how to handle it, we’ve got a built-in role specialization to fall back on that grants us enormous power and capability. And fortunately you don’t have to spend your short and dangerous and difficult lifetime figuring this divided strategy out for yourself as a novel invention; it’s so useful that it’s been pre-baked into the general structure of the species.

We are, to some degree, pre-prepared biologically to fall into and figure out our own specific version of those roles. Society and tradition don’t define or produce that capacity, but they do help develop and interpret it for the specific conditions that our society faces, the sorts of adaptations it has had to apply those basic capacities to to survive in the time and place it exists, to best exploit the available resources and manage the dominant threats. It’s a mix of nature and nurture, as with all human development.

Now, there is a confining and restrictive element to these biological and social specializations. But there is also a powerful and beautiful aspect to them. Specific features in any animal, not least of all humans, are best thought of as tools. They’re adapted to give specific advantages. But they always come with a specific cost. The more like a hammer a tool gets, the less good it is at being a saw. The more like a saw a tool gets, the less good it is at being a hammer. And the cost to make a tool be everything at once, apart from the extreme difficulty of trying to make such a thing, is that it’s quite likely to not be that great at any of its specific uses, and will likely combine the disadvantages of all of them. And the more complex and difficult the task is, the more you need tools that are well suited to the specific tasks, if you want to get it done in any reasonable amount of time.

I once watched two lines for breakfast at two different restaurants in an airport. The lines were of similar size, but I very quickly perceived that one was moving at about triple the rate of the other. In the one moving slowly, employees were wandering back and forth, taking orders, getting drinks, getting items from the kitchen, assembling orders, calling out names, each person wandering from task to task, moving from front to back and from side to side, shuffling around one another. At the other restaurant, they had the whole process specialized and coordinated. One person took orders, one got drinks, one put the orders together, one called out names and delivered the orders. It was a clockwork of specialization, each person doing their task as fast and continuously as possible. That is the power of complex, interdependent societies. The second restaurant didn’t seem to have more workers or a less complex menu, but they could fill orders at a far greater rate.

How reasonable this kind of role specialization seems largely depends on how complex the task you’re managing is. In a small company that isn’t handling a ton of work, everyone has to be more of a generalist. Even in very small companies there is some specialization and distinct roles based on competencies, but there isn’t a highly developed of defined separation between employees. In a large, complex company doing millions of dollars in business and managing a large body of complex work, you see all kinds of specialization. Each role is so demanding that just to do one of them well strains the capacity of an individual human.

I think the thing to realize about gender roles is that they’re a kind of negotiation with the challenges of life, not just some arbitrary invention created in a vacuum of endless ease and opportunity. By simply existing, they create an opportunity, a means, a mechanism. They provide a basic pattern and structure that has a pretty good chance to do a lot of good and accomplish a lot for most people. It also means that if you take them away or weaken them significantly, that you’ll lose a lot of those benefits. You’ll lose a strategy that could have done a lot for a lot of people.

We have innate and biological as well as articulated and cultural incentives to move into these sexual roles. If we don’t inhabit them to at least the very smallest minimum, the species (or at least that branch of it) ends with the current generation. And yes, the demands of the roles are pretty specific. Even if we’re only talking about married, heterosexual sex, if you don’t do it the right way, with the woman exposing and penetrated and the male exposed and penetrating, giving and receiving (usually on a repeated basis across time, since humans have concealed ovulation) it won’t work and won’t create new life, a family, and the continuance of the species.

A woman can strap on and penetrate her presenting husband all she likes, but it won’t further the species. Masturbation and oral sex and other iterations on the principal sexual experience may help maintain a bond between partners. They have some supplemental value. But if people don’t do sex this one specific way that results in a man penetrating and orgasming inside the woman, their situation will remain static and their love will not bear fruit and multiply. Unity will not be achieved and the most basic function of sexual specialization will not come to fruition.

Even in the most basic of sexual roles, there’s a lot of room for freedom and exploration and individual expression. Every couple develops a unique sexual relationship, given time, that integrates and caters to and reflects their unique capacities. But there is still the confinement of the role too. Unless you play out the roles in this one specific way, you’ll never fully consummate your sexual identity to its fullest potential (and primary intention).

There is a 100% failure of pregnancy for every type of sexual encounter other than standard penetrative sex. The tally of worldwide humans produced by it and by its alternatives is (an estimated) 107 billion to 0. It doesn’t share the field with any competitors. It’s the only game in town that actually brings sexual dimorphism to its ultimate conclusion of reuniting the gametes of the divided species into a complete whole. So that’s a pretty restrictive and specific gender role that nature and conception demands of you (or else face extinction). Just that one thing, that one posture, that one same performance. Or nonexistence.

Having said that, the union of the sexes is astoundingly powerful and wonderful. It’s the engine that drives and maintains our whole species. It literally creates new life and new combinations of beings. It’s a truly creative act. It breaks the rules of conventional experience. In the sexual union, one plus one doesn’t equal two, it equals three. Or maybe four or five, or ten, if you have time! And as it trickles down generations, maybe dozens or even hundreds. That’s insane.

For all that our differences cost us, we also owe them everything. Before we consign them to the past, it’s worth recognizing what power they have, and what we might lose by surrendering them. I certainly won’t deny that men and women have suffered a great deal as sexes. But when the alternative is oblivion and the deconstruction of our most basic innate capacities and identity, perhaps it’s worth trying to understand them better.

Any power can be abused. But that doesn’t mean that our choice is between the evil of power or the good of its abolition. Perhaps the real choice is, and always has been, a choice within, a hierarchy internal to our roles and differences, not between them. Whether to wield the power we possess well, for the good of ourselves, the other sex, our children, and the whole of humanity, or not. Whether we live as good men, as good women, or as bad.

Surviving the past and present through sex

One not well-understood way that men and women differ from one another is in their strategies for filling and defining roles. It is often noted that women occupy the great stable middle of social and personal distributions, while men occupy a larger portion of the extremes, both at the top and at the bottom. So you will find more exceptional male geniuses, but you will also find an equal excess of idiots and criminals. Success and failure are more exaggerated and less well-distributed among men than they are among women across a host of domains.

Both sexes seem to be adapted for these differences. Neurologically, their brains are wired this way. Women’s brains are more diversified, and female behavior is often typified by complexity, especially when it comes to value decisions. Men have a greater tendency to go all in on things and to pile everything into a single dimension or strategy or value, and their brains feature less connectivity across regions. Proportions of white and grey matter differ between them, and they react differently to the same neurotransmitters. As a result, it’s easier for women to adapt into a variety of neurological patterns, but male patterns vary more and are more radically developed into those patterns (but are more committed to them). And that translates into behavioral outcomes.

One of the ways that the human race has survived the ages is that it contains these dual strategies of female conservation and male selection. Male inequalitarianism, and female equalitarianism. Males go all in on strategies and test ideas, and a large chunk of them pay the price of error and wash out while others reap the benefits of success. Women meanwhile have performed the dual roles of maintaining a more stable and flexible and distributed position, and then they have also performed the extremely important role of selecting men and identifying the winners and losers in the race.

As I once heard Camille Paglia put it, men test ideas and women test men. Or to put it another way, men struggle and die for the competition of ideas, while women live and cultivate for the integration and cooperation of ideas. I say ideas, because ideas have and currently do serve as the principles behind and proxy for differing human ways of being. But both in the past and in the present and future it is the life of individuals, societies, and the species itself that is at stake and where that testing is realized.

Taking biological and sociological risk management as a kind of economic game, men are like venture capital and women are like mutual funds. One pays out steady and reliable returns. The other results in more showy and notable displays of success, but also a whole lot of catastrophes. And it’s not easy to have your cake and eat it to, to enjoy the advantages of one strategy without its accompanying disadvantages. If you take a complex and nuanced approach to life and are careful to hedge your bets, you lose the benefits of extremism and risky bets. You also avoid their unpleasant outcomes.

Both strategies exact a price that is essential to your ability to enjoy its benefits. And as much as we would like to imagine that there’s an easy way around that (and technology has been hard at work doing just that for men and women, finding ways to insulate us from the costs and disadvantages of what we are and what we do), nature itself has provided only one reliable solution to the problem that individual humans are just too limited to easily contain and maintain the necessary tension between approaches that keeps the human race going. And that solution is the relationship between the sexes (and their respective personality trait distribution curves).

The marriage that is humanity is the primary innate technology that we possess for navigating the many complex and conflicting and ever-changing problems life constantly throws at us. Depending on your religious perspective, it’s either a designed or an evolved solution to an intractable problem, that the best appoach to life can’t be boiled down to a single, static, complete unit, but can be maintained only through unity and relationship.

And this phenomenon is hardly exclusive to humans, who are among the most variable and adaptable organisms on the planet. It is a strategy shared by most sexually dimorphic species and by mammals as a whole in particular. The average lifespan of any male mammal is roughly 20% shorter than females of the same species for exactly these strategic reasons, which are built at multiple levels through the whole nature of the sexes and not merely expressed in their mating habits.

The lesson to take from this, I suppose, is that different strategies come with specific costs and benefits and are assisted by specific adaptations of mind and body. That doesn’t entail sexual determinism. As I said, humans are remarkably adaptable and variable. But it doesn’t mean that they have no general nature and that understanding that nature isn’t useful.

It also means that the historical outcomes we see, including differences between the sexes, are not merely the result of manipulation and social construction, the result of arbitrary power games. At least to some degree, they are also likely to be the result of humans following their own innate adaptations and strategies in the ways that are most useful for confronting the immense challenges that life presents. And before we dispense with the bargains we have made with our own natures and with one another, it’s at least worth understanding what we are giving up and what we are purchasing in a renegotiation.

To a very large degree, people have done what came naturally to them and what they had to do to get by, to survive and to provide a stable present and better future for their children. We relied more on our roles because we lacked the excess capacity and technologies to survive or succeed effectively outside them.

Now that we have more capacity and more technologies, we are less reliant on our innate species technologies, our evolved or designed differences of adaptation and role. Does that mean we can discard them? That isn’t so clear. The challenges that species face are stable enough and essential enough to the nature of life and reality that certain strategies for dealing with them are baked right into our biology and psychology. And let’s be clear, on the scale of biological life, the social and technological conditions of the world since, say, 1960 in a few corners of the globe like America are the merest blip and amusing diversion in the scale of history.

It’s very unlikely that this brief moment represents a large enough stable change in the fabric of life that we are going to redefine what it means to be human in such a short time. And who knows what the future may hold? God or evolution has decided that there are certain unique adaptations we are likely to need again and again across our history. And it’s not entirely clear what or who we would be without them, they are so deeply intrinsic to what we are.

If provenance is any measure of how deep any given feature of our being is to who we are, it’s very hard to find anything deeper than the biological adaptation of the dimorphic sexes. And those adaptations have been expressed behaviorally and structured our social interactions more than almost any other factor, right back to the furthest depths of primordial time.

While personality variation and roles are virtually impossible to specify on a neurological or genetic basis and race is equally as vague and hard to clearly identify, differences in sexual adaptations and complimentary strategies are clearly obvious from just a cursory glance. Long before the major differences and functions of the rest of human genome were seen or understood, the difference between the male and female chromosomes was blatantly obvious.

The point is simply that it’s worth understanding and appreciating these differences before writing them off as a merely relics of times past. Especially when the current situation represents such an infinitesimally small percentage of the total life of the species. If these adaptive differences were important enough to code into our very being over the course of roughly two billion years, it’s very likely they will still prove relevant in another fifty. If we want to learn to live well and love one another well, we need to understand and appreciate one another, including our long history and unique contributions and interdependence.

Doing something

One thing that often gets forgetten in the rush to take action and the moral pressure to “do something” is the historical reality of how much of what we think of as the terrible crimes of the past were committed out of a similar desire to take action and do the right thing. It’s very seldom that people have done things on a large scale out of mere brutality or conniving evil. Especially for actions that required a decent amount of planning and effort and social and institutional coordination, the real explanation is often closer to “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

As much as liberals, who are generally a bit higher in compassion, as well as more psychologically sensitive and open to experimentation, complain about the terrible things done by society in the past, upon looking back at the actual arguments used to advance those actions, it was often those exact same people (by type) who originally generated those practices. This isn’t always true, of course, but it’s been true quite a lot. Being sensitive creates emotional motivation, being compassionate (or at least socially oriented) provides moral motivation, and being open to experimentation provides practical motivation. Add in a dash of competence, get some conscientious people who will make it happen on an administrative level, and you’ve got broad social action and experimentation in action. And sometimes that goes well. Sometimes it doesn’t.

And that’s why, curiously enough, the people who are most likely to complain about the sins of society are also those, in many ways, who were most likely in times past to have produced those sins as innovations. The conservatives are loath to change anything once it’s in place and functioning. They’re more averse to change or to experimentation and have a weaker tendency toward the kind of utopian social experimentation that liberals like to engage in. Once something is set up and working and becomes a sort of default, they’re the ones who will maintain it. But they don’t like making bets that aren’t fairly sure, and they like to be able to clearly see and measure and control and react to the results of anything they do.

To pick one tiny, random example, liberals are the ones most likely to complain about the sort of schools for native American children that were used as an attempt to Americanize or Anglicize native cultures, by separating them from their cultural and familial influences so they could be directly remediated and improved by the state. That’s the sort of thing that is regularly decried by liberals and held up as an example of the sort of sins they are trying to point out and act to correct. And that’s why you need to listen to them and vote for them, so they can take action and prevent these conservative sins from recurring. But, in looking at the actual ideas that gave rise to these sorts of practices in the past, as well as their contemporary equivalents, it becomes clear that, both then and now, that approach is a fundamentally liberal, not conservative. It’s not so much the pot calling the kettle black as it is the pot calling tea soup.

Before we go to far into this, I think it’s important to note that I’m not arguing that liberals are “worse” or “too blame”. I’m just trying to parse how the actual genesis of ideas and practices happens in a society. It’s a dance, in which both halves of society take part. And there isn’t an inherent moral advantage to either, in that both can go equally and catastrophically wrong, and both can be right. They simply employ different strategies. One betting on the tried and true and standing on principle, and the other betting on adaptation and experimentation and challenge.

Because our society tends to assign so much glamour to innovation and rebellion and challenge and disruption, it’s necessary to speak back to that particular cultural bias and remind ourselves of a more balanced and nuanced view that takes into account the value of stability, tested and functioning institutions, and takes into account the real dangers presented both in the past and in the present by attempts to intervene and reinvent and destabilize social constructs.

To put it more bluntly, we need to recognize the value of what conservatives are conserving and recognize the danger that the compassionate intervention and utopian experimentation of the left has and may currently be causing. The call to take action and do something may sound heroic, and no doubt it did to generations past. But for so much of what we look back on with regret, that was the “doing something” of the time, and only further time and consequences have provided the clarity of hindsight that allow us today to so easily identify them.

Good intentions and positive expectations have never been in short supply. It’s just much less easy to get good result than you would think. And if your assumption is just that people of the past were wither so much worse or more stupid than yourself, and that’s why it will be different for you, then you’re simply ignorant of just how much you have in common with the dreamers of the past.

The market for art

I know from experience I would get accused of being a philistine, but I think it’s at least worth considering that there’s a kind of intelligence to the enduring popularity of certain art in the world market. Some works of art, like the great cathedrals of Europe, will live forever. You don’t have to convince anyone that they’re astounding and beautiful or teach them how to appreciate them. They demand such appreciation, irresistibly. They are embodied statements of aesthetic and philosophical value.

A whole lot of contemporary art simply is philosophically and aesthetically bankrupt. It is small and shallow and mastubatory and simple. Popular art doesn’t have to work very hard to outcompete it on the most basic metrics of value, lazy and uncreative as it often is. And neither can compare much to the products of the past that still captivate and inspire both the general public and aesthetic specialists.

Picasso mattered to artists, as an important contributor to the internal social and political and ideological dialogue that goes on within the field of human creative production. He mattered and still does matter far less to the general public, who largely relegate his works to the realm of curiosities and baroque amusements. I don’t think you can blame them, nor correct them, for that. Picasso’s interest is largely of internal value to the discipline, not objective value to the human aesthetic experience. Because my kid could, and does, do that.

Contemporary art is largely self-referential. It’s more about the discipline of being an artist and your relation to it than the artistic content itself, or the world it addresses, or anything accessible to the passerby. It does not draw you into its truths and down into its depths through the irresistible current of universal human experience and aesthetic representation. It’s very elitist and impenetrable, often indistinguishable as art to the common man.

What inheritance of art will our culture leave behind? Half of our contemporary art is in danger of being cleaned up by janitors for being indistinguishable from uncreated, unintentional, meaningless objects and clutter. Future societies likely couldn’t even recognize half of what we we call art as a human creative product from the general wreckage of whatever is left behind. And so much of our artistic content is so deeply embedded in the contemporary relationships and content of art criticism that, without being able to access them, finding the objects only as themselves, they would be largely vacant of meaning or value and be unintelligible.

That’s a real flaw of modern art. We haven’t really created. We haven’t made something with its own life that can live and speak after us. We’ve made automatons to reflect and point to and serve us. We have just made little signposts pointing back to ourselves. And that is a weak and uncreative godhood.

Caused or conveyed?

Conveyance is one of the most concepts in human life and psychology. The phrase “don’t shoot the messenger” is a trope simply because of the universal human tendency to do exactly that, to attach causal responsibility to the mechanism that conveys an effect. People also make this mistake positively, chasing the phenomenon that conveys an effect without realizing that it’s only the most proximate cause, the manner of conveyance, and have no idea what actually produced the effect.

Human minds are designed to make these kinds of associations and assumptions, largely because we’re very practical and concerned with action and effect. We don’t like to waste time and energy looking deeper than we need to, and we care about effects, tangible results, so we have a natural prejudice of attention toward whatever seems most directly associated with them or conveys them. Ever since philosophy dilineated the four causes, however, we’ve had a very clear reminder that such an approach can be shallow and inadequate. Especially if you’re really trying to think about things and be deliberate and careful.

The problem is, we often don’t have time for that. The average person doesn’t have the time in their lives, nor the speed of reasoning, nor the availability of information, to do a deep dive on everything they see that they would like to avoid or pursue. So we keep making judgments at the level of conveyance. Which was fine when the world was smaller and less complex, and the limits of causal chains, especially when it came to human behavior and production, were more clearly laid before our eyes. Most people had plenty of chances to see exactly where the meat and bread on their table came from, how children were raised, how clothes were made, how the home was built and protected, how music and art were produced, and so on. You couldn’t get away from the realities of these things even if you wanted.

But life today is so complex, built of layer upon layer of things we have constructed, edifices of enormous complexity. Social complexity, legal complexity, mechanical complexity, economic complexity, logistic complexity, that it’s impossible to see or grasp exactly where things come from or how they really work, even for those with great intelligence and plenty of time. You could spend days chasing down the true origins and nature of a single element of your life.

As someone once said, the difference between barbarism and civilization isn’t what it’s individual citizens know, it’s how much more the civilized don’t need to know. There is so much more information and structure and craft implicit in the system; unseen machines that carry the burdens so you don’t have to, so you can operate on top of it all. In a frontier situation you can’t take anything for granted and must be aware and active in all areas, because there is nothing but you to produce and maintain them.

In the modern world, there are so many layers you’re standing on top of that it becomes hard to even perceive or distinguish them from the nature of the world itself, and it becomes extremely hard for our psychological systems, which aren’t really designed for such elaboration and obfuscation and distance, to easily draw accurate conclusions about cause and effect.

Sports and competition

Competition is fundamental to sports. Even at less conventional displays of athleticism such as the X Games there is still a competitive hierarchy. You just didn’t see the actual competition that eliminated everyone except those four people performing. So it’s more like an exhibition of winners than a competition for winning. People like me who are relatively mediocre at those sorts of things (and even plenty who are fairly good) were already eliminated and effectively lost according to well-understood metrics.

Sports competitions differ mostly in their simplicity. In order to make the process of competition clearer and more understandable for outsiders and amateurs and non-participants, a very simple metric for competition and victory has been established as a proxy for the much larger and more complex dimensions of competition that got people to that place and actually are in competition during the game. We pick “points” as the thing to look at, but the points are largely symbolic of a much larger struggle. Some of which takes place during the game and some of which took place in the entire process leading up to the game cross years and whole athletic careers. So you can’t reduce any major sports competition to just the particular game or exhibition you see. That game is a net result, the conclusion of a process, not an isolated incident among equals.

Diversity and estrangement

Diversity is real because differences between people are real. We aren’t all just some generic, interchangeable things. We have actual differences. And those differences are consequential.

This is such an obvious fact that virtually everyone will defend it in their private lives, yet people often act publicly as if they can treat other humans as mere interchangeable cogs to be acted upon who have no personal nature or agency. As if all that really exists and differs between us are the machines we’re slotted into, and it’s the institutions that define and produce individuality, rather than individuals that define and produce institutions.

How much of our modern pathology is the result of our estrangement from the realities of cause and effect? We see effects, and we don’t see how they were produced, and so we assume that they were produced by the nearest associated thing. And therefore if we can just stand on top of that thing we will have gained the effect. It’s a very childish way of looking at the world. Children think credit cards are what let you buy things, because they don’t see or recognize the entire chain of causes that makes the effect of the credit card work. They have causality backward, but can’t see it, because we have hidden it away, and because we think in very simple terms.

Progress and moral relativism

The idea of progress is indefinable and incoherent if there is no fixed value (even in a merely numerical sense) toward which you are progressing. A series of random numbers does not progress toward anything. It merely changes. And there is no essential difference in position between any particular number in the series and any other. They don’t bear any relation to some final pattern or value toward which each is developing.

So by denying any fixed value as an aim, you lose claim to any such word as progress, or any grounds to prefer or denigrate any value from any point in the chain above any other (except irrational personal prejudice, that it happens to be your number). And since it’s a theoretically infinite chain, with nothing to confine it, no limits of ontological necessity to direct it, then it’s not really even something you can address coherently, except to point to where you stand and observe that this is your number, a mere assertion of identity.

On the other hand, a random series of numbers could be said to be progressive if you allowed that they were all different guesses at the value toward which the series was aiming. And there could be wide variety, but some could be judged as coming closer or less close to the value being aimed at, from multiple directions. And if you allowed that there were some fundamental constraints on what sorts of values you could effectively generate, limits that caused some kind of feedback that allowed worse guesses to be eliminated and better guesses to be favored, while not actually confining what values could be hazarded, you could have an emergent system that would allow you to evaluate those numbers and group them according to empirical performance, as well as develop rational models for comparison according to theoretical models (which would be less costly than making a wholly novel and unlucky guess and maybe falling foul of one of the feedback mechanisms).

To make the metaphor explicit, because humans do have a particular nature and because the world has a particular nature and because life itself has a particular nature, because they have specificity, a set of certain confined, non-infinite, non-random integers and values, it does in fact seem to be the case that morality is more like the second model than it is like the first. And that’s why we feel the pull, even counter to our own theoretical stances, to think in terms of and use words like “progress” and “better”. We know, on a deep level, that the world is much less random and less individual to our own perspective and preferences than we would like. We can easily get flattened by the world and by life, regardless of our beliefs about how it should work. The world, and the nature of biology itself, isn’t especially concerned about pleasing us or conforming to our expectations and preferences. It won’t let us just be happy, all to ourselves. It keeps putting us in our place. It keeps ramming our finitude home.

Morality without religion?

One statement I often hear from humanistic atheists like Stephen Fry that I think is obviously false is the claim that you can have morality without religion. I think that claim is not only untrue, but definitively untrue. And recent events should prove that.

Sam Harris and Stephen Fry themselves would have to admit that the biggest practical result of the general success of atheism (or at least non-theism) against traditional religion in the modern world isn’t the dawning of some utopian rationalist paradise, it’s that they now have to spend a surprising amount of time fighting the rising tide of a postmodern atheistic religion.

Religion is the architecture of value. All humans have an architecture of value, therefore all humans have religion. You can have a morality without a formalized, developed, or coherent religion. But you will still have a religion.

Or a parody or perversion of one. A Frankenstein monster of bits cobbled together and animated by human need and passion and ingenuity. Possibly some monstrosity of pagan design. All head and no hands, or all hands but no heart. Fractured elements of a greater design swollen to godlike proportions. A cult instead of a pantheon. An idol instead of a God. An ideological cutting from the tree of religion.

Religion is simply what we call a well-developed architecture of value at the scale of human complexity and enterprise. What I mean is that it has extended itself into the many various areas of human value and action, as well as the various domains of human creative expression, and developed algorithms or rituals related to daily human life and the life of the society.

So if you’re human, you’re going to have a religion. It’s just a question of how formalized, how developed, how extended, what algorithms, what values, what actions, how much has it been tested rationally and empirically across time, etc etc. Religion, but to what degree of development and integration and extension? And how aware of it and in what way do you follow it and how engaged with that whole process are you?

Humans don’t impose religion on some preexisting underlying moral structure, that it takes over and sits on top of and could be removed from, like scraping butter off of bread. The religion is the moral structure. The degree to which we recognize a system of value as a religion is much the same way we recognize all products of human development. There is in a single cell the nature and structure, the guiding code, of the whole developed organism, a human being. But it is only as that single cell is extended and develops and produces all the mechanisms, both physically and intellectually, that allow it to engage with the world in the many ways that we can, that we start to recognize it for what it is.

When we see the limbs and the face particularly, we can say, aha, it’s a person. Or that it’s a child on the way to becoming the fully-developed fulfillment of that promise. And it takes a long time for that cell to become a fully capable adult human, able to do and think and be all the things we can be, able to reproduce itself. And we do that reproduction, again, with a single cell containing one unique genetic code.

The nature is constant, the nature is implicit; but it is not complete, it is not embodied, it is not what it is in its nature to be, unless it is also explicit. You couldn’t take the body and mind away from the DNA and expect it to somehow survive or be a functioning human on its own. The human body isn’t a mere epiphenomenon of human DNA. And that code, that nature, that DNA, is implicit and unremovable from the cells of the body. It contains them. But the body is more than the mere vessel that carries the DNA. It is the embodiment of it. And that is also why a living and active morality and a living and active religion are fundamentally inextricable.

Morality and value are the DNA that the body of religion expresses.

Ideological pressures in institutions

From a letter to a pastor

I’ve written several letters this year to my state reps, to the local paper, to a local TV station, to our school superintendent, and others. They all featured fairly similar content. Concerns about the politicization of the news and schools. Concerns about partisanship and antagonism and ideological pharisaism. Mostly in the context of political correctness or wokeness or whatever you wish to call it. It’s been interesting reading the responses.

The responses mostly fell into three categories. People who agreed and shared my concerns, people who were sympathetic but reluctant to take any kind of action out of fear, and apathetic responses that said they just didn’t have the time or energy to do anything but follow prevailing trends.

Generally speaking, the news was apathetic. All they wanted was to sell their product and survive; they didn’t really care about the issues that much. I think most businesses fall into this same category. The schools were sympathetic but scared, because they have so much exposure to public criticism and are generally well-meaning. And my representatives (maybe because of where I live) openly shared my concerns. Churches are most likely to be similar to the middle group. They are open and public, and generally well-meaning.

It seems to me that its relationship to the people it’s trying to reach and help, and the open and republican (not in the political sense) nature of the church makes it more vulnerable to ideologocal capture. It’s not an autocracy (or shouldn’t be), and it’s not focused purely on some limited and narrowly defined internal goal, like profit. It wants to listen, wants to help, and is made up of many mixed members. And you can’t just shoot off negative responses casually or simply opt out of these issues and the concerns people have abiut them. You’re obligated to listen to the cares and concerns of the people.

Disagreeability is one defense against ideological pressure, but it’s one that the church is disincentivized to take because of the nature of its mission and its guiding values of compassion and service. You’re called to be thoughtful and gentle and wise and kind, because you’re trying to represent Christ. And that’s a lot of work and takes a lot of time. I don’t envy pastors, having to navigate it.

I personally think the way to maintain advantage in the cultural discussion is to always try, whenever possible, to turn the narrative toward what you do believe in and what you do offer as better solutions to those same problems, a powerful positive vision, rather than trading exclusively in negatives and criticism. It’s so easy to get bogged down in criticism. So tell your own stories of “lived experience” instead.

If you are a pastor, because of the open and moral nature of your organization, you have to recognize that at some point there will be an assault on the freedoms of your organization, very likely. An attempt to capture and align your ideology and mission with that of the larger cultural movement.

It’s funny, the way it’s usually done isn’t what you would expect. It’s not a top down or bottom up operation. It’s from the solid middle. It’s from the capture of mid-level administration in schools and companies, the bureaucratic middle of government and law, the regulatory and statutory levels of administration. It’s not quite revolution or tyranny. It’s the meeting of both through the practical, unobtrusive, conscientious middle.

I also think that’s why women, especially middle class women, have played such a large role in it. It’s symptomatic of the psychological tendency of women to divide the world into infants in need of protection and assistance or predatory aggressors in need of repudiation, regulation, or excommunication. The helpless and hurting oppressed and the thoughtless and selfish oppressors. Being very capable and conscientious, and being eager to control a protected space whose limits have been altered by the dissolution of the family (removing the typical mechanisms and outlets for protective instincts) and expanded in scope through modern media (especially social), they assert the kind of soft power women have always wielded.

Women have always been quick to exchange concerns with one another and identify social threats. Men, who have higher thresholds for their alarm system but higher aggression in their threat response systems, will respond to the concerns of women to make spaces safe and acceptable for them and their infants (or proxy infants). And I think that’s what Wokeism is. With religion as a solution gone, with family as a forum gone, and with the way that technology has altered how social information is gathered and exchanged, combined with the effect of reduced male parental involvement (which increases anxiety and creates a greater feeling of need for some substitute protector and provider structure), you’ve got all the conditions you need for something like Wokeism to arise and step into that void. Women used to play this same role in the context of church and family. Now they play it in the church and family of Wokeism.

Those same women are still around, as well as the men who want to confront the world for them, and also many “children” eager to be mothered and to exploit the indulgence and attention of a kind and well-meaning mother. And of course there’s a lot of overlap between the sexes, and the division between woke and anti-woke is more representationally feminine and masculine than it is male or female, but a lot of actual males and females (especially at the extremes of representation) fall into the typical feminine and masculine categories.

So how have men dealt with this sociological and technological shift, if they haven’t thrown themselves into the new forum of woke activism? A lot of men have just gone off on their own, taking no responsibility, living insularly and exploitatively for themselves. People haven’t changed, but the institutions through which they managed and expressed themselves have changed fundamentally. The wokesters of today are the gossiping church ladies and their eager husbands of yesterday. They just found a new church. And plenty more men are just staying at home.

I don’t think you can address this problem until you 1. Offer young men a positive vision for male responsibility where they feel they can meaningfully contribute, and 2. Manage to assure young women that their concerns are being genuinely heard and addressed by Christianity (and by the church and society at large, whatever society is most meaningful to them). Unless you can do that, people will always be looking for someone who will promise to fulfill those needs.

Some pastors are taking direct steps to address this invasion of religious spaces by politically-defined quasi-religious worldviews. We need people to innoculate the young. And they’re going to face plenty of prosthelyzation, no question. I really do think, psychologically, the appeal of social justice for young men and women is that men want something to be demanded of them, and women want to feel that their concerns and demands are being heard. And Christianity can fulfill those same needs, you just have to make the case, and make the case convincingly that it will do it better. I think those are the underlying motivational states that drive people toward social justice or divine justice.

The only thing that will give young people the strength to stand against social pressure when the system demands that they participate is the deep conviction that the solutions being offered won’t solve those problems, and that they have something else that will. If their underlying motivation has a higher call on it than what comes knocking. If they have deeper sense that the pain and need of humanity is being understood and heard, and a deeper sense of a heroic call to take action and responsibility in the world.

This is a personal theory, but I think government and social media are the new ways to express the male-female romantic partnership. That relationship has degraded so much that people don’t feel they can ask of one another what they used to. Women want to feel protected and provided for and listened to, so they can focus on managing their affairs within a protected space. But they don’t feel that they can ask that of men any more, partly out of pride and independence, partly out of past disappointment and disillusionment. So they ask the government to do it. Provide for me, protect me, hear me.

And men want a mission, they want to be asked to do something, to make something of themselves and of the world, to subdue it and provide. But they can’t directly offer those services to women any more without hurting their pride or seeming patronizing. So they do it through the government. They can have a mission there. Listen, provide, and protect; create that protected, civilized space. Subdue the wild beasts, secure the resources, make the space acceptable for the moral authorities. Being able to do these things through the government gives us the distance we need to seek what we need without lowering ourselves before any particular person.

Government is big and impersonal and low-resolution, though. It wields a heavy hammer with a wide strike. It is not very tailored or individualized. It can’t really see you the way another person can, the way your family can. It’s can’t really love you or care about you as an individual. It’s useful, but it’s uses are more limited than we might wish. It’s an open question whether it really has the kind of power we asbribe to it. And the family might have more power than we currently ascribe to it. It’s at least a question worth asking, how effective the family has been at producing wealth and meaning and stability across time, and how effective government has been at the actual production of those goods. We might be expecting too little of one and too much of the other.

Camille Paglia’s advice to Christians

There is quite a growing list of “friendly” atheists that Christians have been finding common ground with in the fight against postmodernism. James Lindsay, Jonathan Haidt, John McWhorter. I think you could also add Bret Weinstein and Heather Haying to that list. And maybe Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Summers (if you want a feminist angle). And maybe Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s brother), although he’s more agnostic with a pro-religion bent. Even Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are against postmodernism, because they’re modernists. So they’ve had to shift their aim, at least, from the pre-modern theists to the postmodernists.

I find Camille fascinating to listen to, and she’s an atheist, transgender, lesbian, feminist, pro-pornography radical. She’s brilliant, she’s witty, she’s subversive, she’s unique, and she’s a dyed in the wool iconoclast. She also absolutely despises CRT and postmodernism, thinks feminism has been ruined by animosity toward men and a failure to appreciate innate sex differences, and thinks teaching people about classical art, literature, and especially religion should be the core of American education. She’s a bag of contradictions and surprises.

People like her are invaluable because they’re able to criticize these movements and institutions from the inside and give insight into them, positively and negatively. She’s completely willing to challenge the prevailing fashions, whether it’s 1950s conventionalism or 2020s political correctness. And because she’s always been on the radical left, she has a unique ability to criticize the errors and hypocrisy of her own political movement. And in my opinion, the best critics and criticisms of any ideology always come from within.

Camille has said, publicly, that the current transgender craze is part of the assault on masculinity, that it’s a sign of a larger cultural collapse, and that anyone who collaborates in assisting a child in gender reassignment or puberty interference is guilty of a crime against humanity. That’s a pretty subversive thing for a liberal public intellectual to say in this day and age. Maybe you could have said that twenty years ago and remained a liberal, but now it’s likely to get you excommunicated and branded as alt-right, if not ejected from polite society altogether. It goes radically against the grain of the prevailing attitudes among the left’s thought leaders. But she’s quite unapologetic about it.

She’s a feminist, but according to her book on art history, the movement toward androgeny is a consistent historical sign of late-stage cultural development, when a civilization is starting to unravel. Its citizens perceive themselves as very sophisticated, but have lost belief in the ideals that established the culture, and are soon consumed by fringe barbarian cultures that still preserve the ideal of heroic masculinity (often in very savage but powerful forms). That doesn’t sound like the argument of a left wing radical. But if you listen to her, you can see how it flows from the same fountain of radicalism that drove her way back in the 60s.

There’s a secondary risk she mentions, that a culture can get retaken by overly heroic and orderly elements within its own society and become tyrannical. The weakness of the Weimar Republic in Germany was overtaken and cured by the rise of Hitler. That sort of revolution cures one problem, but creates new ones. So you need to be cautious about who you ally with or use as tools to fight your present battles. You have to be very careful about their character, not just their useful positions. In the long run those people can do more to hurt the cause than help it, by enacting the worst version of it and alienating the people.

One last bit of advice Camille gives that I think is worth heeding for Christians is that it’s very easy to criticize, but if you don’t also take the time to properly articulate what you have to offer, what there is to love about your position, you’ll lose. That’s why she says fine art died forty years ago. All it can do now is criticize and tear down and defy conventions. It doesn’t create. And that makes it uninspiring and unlovable and degrading.

You win culture wars by articulating, through any and all means possible (art, music, architecture, speech, story, books) the great beauty of your position and what there is in it to love, not just what there is wrong with the other folks. Both tactics are useful, but one (criticism, which arouses fear) is stronger in the short term, and is more temporary and connected to the enemy of the moment. The other (creativity), arouses love, and it can last and keep making its case eternally (as the cathedrals of Europe still declare the glory of God and his creation and draw people long after the builders are dead).

Decriminalizing incest

https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2021/04/17/consensual-incest-should-be-decriminalized-advocates-say/amp/

If you don’t read the article, the headline contains the essential argument. Consensual incest should be decriminalized.

The one thing I can say in favor of this is that is that, yes, they are correct; based on the currently accepted arguments, there isn’t any particularly good reason why consentual incest shouldn’t be legal. Or polyamorous marriages. There’s no real basis left for objecting to either. Both of these holdovers are really just down to them not being a commonplace enough situation for enough people to demand the extension of rights to cover them.

Child-adult relationships might be one case where things won’t change so easily. There’s still a large prejudice against that, and a coherent internal argument still exists against it (based around consent, which is about the only condition for sexual regulation we have left). And there is a pretty big difference between laws forbidding racial mixing, which really have nothing to do with sex or marriage at all but are a case bad values in one area of life being transferred to a connected domain, and laws forbidding incest.

I believe I wrote some while back wondering what the next frontier to break through would be, since all the ideological arguments that confine any kind of regulation of sexuality have lost their underpinnings. Considering that consent is essentially the only measure left around which to organize sexual taboos, there isn’t any reason to place special protections around anything or any special penalties around anything except what conforms to or violates that condition. Consent, good; no consent, bad. End of story. Love is love.

The main problem is that you need a good example, a good case, to shift opinion around, and you need enough people who care to want things changed. Transgenderism is a pretty limited demographic, but media attention and one good story were all it really took to extend the ideological boundaries that had already been established for homosexuality. The idea that sex as an act is in any way limited or defined by biological function had already fallen (and in fact had fallen quite a while before the shift in opinion on homosexuality). These were just the next logical steps as the barriers gradually come down.

Progression moves outward in ripples from the center, once the point of gravity ceases to exist. Divorce was first, then premarital sex, then single parenthood, then cohabitation, then homosexuality in general, then gay marriage specifically, then transgenderism. And there is actually a very coherent underlying logic to that entire progression. You might even say that it was necessary, or necessary by definition. I don’t have time to explore it now, but far from being random, it’s an extremely logical progression, possibly even an inevitable one. It’s not a slippery slope so much as it is a gradual gravitational realignment around a major shift in the underlying mass of value theory, driven by drastic changes in either ideology or practical conditions among the populace.

By this point in time we’re already out at the further statistical boundaries of deviance from the former center, with the ripples reaching categories that are quite small. With the disintegration of the gravitic structure, the orbits start to blend together, the amount of matter at the center shrinks and erode and disperse into the outer territories, because there’s nothing really keeping them in any more, and the centrifugal force of culture and human desire and exploration will drive more and more people away from the former center.

Further and further out and less and less dense orbits are coming loose now, gaining momentum. In many ways transgenderism is the last really serious horizon to be crossed and dissolved. There just aren’t any really serious arguments to confine much of anything once that area has been unleashed.

That’s why it’s so hard to predict what might be next. Each step in the preceding progression was in some ways a logically necessary extension of the conclusions of the previous step to the next most comparable situation. It’s a long and drawn out series of “if this, then why not this?” As much as some people said it was silly to call it a slippery slope (which happened at every stage and was denied at every stage), the results bear out those perfectly reasonable conjectures. The failure to recognize how obviously most slopes are slippery is simply a failure to appreciate how people actually think. Assumptions drive belief, belief conditions action. If you fundamentally alter people’s underlying assumptions, their beliefs and actions will change of their own accord. Nothing in particular is stopping them except time.

But it’s hard to perceive a logic beyond this last threshold. It’s more a matter of opportunity, which is closer to chance. I think non-binarism in general, as well as bisexuality, will continue to gain cultural currency. Not merely being one or the other sex, by identity or behavior, but both or neither. A general dissolution of all borders except consent.

Quantity, age, and genetic proximity are a few obvious sexual barriers that might dissolve next (multiple partner relationships, adult/youth relationships, and incestuous relationships). I think the first and last are much easier to sell to the culture. It’s easier to picture. And it’s much harder to imagine a sympathetic case for undoing age prejudices. Some people (gay men particularly) have tested the waters on age differentials and haven’t had great success with those barriers and taboos in the wider culture. It’s also easier to make an argument about a with regard to consent, which means this barrier is unlikely to fall quickly, if at all.

But you never know. People may demand their freedoms. The idea of letting younger people making voting decisions or key decisions in other important areas in life for themselves, reducing parental control, is gaining traction. If a child can determine that they should change sexes and undergo serious medical treatment without parental approval, then other serious choices about sex and consent aren’t so far off.

I don’t think multiple partnerships will have the same ethical clout as other types of non-traditional sexual relationships. In some ways they already contain elements that are non-controversial (hetero and homosexual partnerships); the main issue is quantity. We already made our peace with serial monogamy, with promiscuity, with divorce, and all of these included a change in the accepted quantity of partners. Why not more than one at once, then? Possibly the main barrier is just that these relationships are still so rare and so complicated and, in some ways, also so conventional that you just can’t make a big deal or a big splash with them. There’s not a compelling story there. It’s a minor adjustment, not a major one.

Incestuous relationships also shouldn’t be hard to get approved ideologically. The idea of biological function and procreation have already fallen out as defining values for sexual regulation, and those are really the only really good arguments against incest. And incest hasn’t really been that uncommon in the past, even when sex was about having children and forming families. “Love is love” and “consent is all” clearly include no reasonable forbidding on incest.

Maybe you could try to make a case out of consent and taking advantage of a position of proximity, but there are ways around that objection. And it’s hard to pull that argument off with consenting, legal adults in particular. Who are you to deny them and the reality of their feelings?

I think the main barriers to approving incest are first, apathy, and second, hedging. It’s such a fringe case. It’s not an exciting story or barrier to cross, more of a box to be checked. And it’s tempting to keep those barriers up just as a hedge against potentially questionable and problematic cases. Because we aren’t entirely sure how being related affects consent, we may be tempted to just put off making any serious change to the status quo. The weak potential benefit hangs in a balance with a weak but possible risk.

If we want any insider information, some intelligence, on what sorts of things people are interested in as sexual frontiers, that is easy to get. All you have to do is look at pornography. I don’t mean that literally as a suggestion, I mean that you just need information on what people are interested in with regard to porn and you’ll know what desires haunt the human id.

As Camille Paglia once pointed out, pornograohy is an unregulated free market expression of what people want, or could want, an expression of the underlying forces of human desire, unrestrained by the realities of actual life, society, sex, people, or even basic biology. It’s a window into the wild and wooly paths that the sexual impulse can walk when not confined by any serious gravitic realities to channel, direct, guide, or restrain it.

So if you want an actual picture of where people would fundamentally like to go, if you want a window into the spectrum of what deregulation of sex would mean in an ideal world, where people could just get what they desire and didn’t have to be ashamed or restrained or censured or discriminated against, then just check out porn.

Porn is an imaginative world, a world of our own creative invention. Sex in a world of our own design. What we would do if we only could. It’s wish fulfillment. And a lot of it has crossed over into the mainstream. Porn itself helps power that process. If you spent a few years really enjoying and exploring the porn that’s out there, and technology and social mores were amenable, it’s not hard at all to see why you would be perfectly fine with age, quantity, and genetic proximity being eliminated as regulatory categories. If porn is anything to go by, it’s exactly what people want, in fact. Incest, age, and quantity-transgressive sexual relationships are some of the most common and popular genres you can find.

And the crossing of those barriers is hardly the limit of what people desire. Sex with simulated beings, such as robots or virtual reality partners (human or otherwise) is also an emerging field. People are working on that. Why? Because there is or would be a huge demand. And if you’re wondering where, exactly the limit is that will satisfy people, it’s not at all clear that there is one. There are always going to be some people who want to explore the fringes of acceptable and possible behaviors. That attitude doesn’t change because the frontier gets pushed back, you just seek out new frontiers. So the fact that incest is so popular as a category of pornography may have more to do with the fact that’s its one of our few remaining taboos than any actual general interest in committing incest.

Hentai is a field of sexuality that’s radically divorced from the social and biological realities of our world. Gender, quantity, age, and even species are barriers and lines that are blurred and crossed with ease. And that’s a genre that is right at the top of popularity. A realm where the rules and realities of sex in the human world as it has generally been understood hold no sway. You can have and be and do whatever you want. Be a half-wolf hermaphrodite in a physically impossible three-way with a prolapsed anthropomorphic deer and a tentacle monster.

As one writer researching sex once explained it in a magazine article I read, a large percentage of young people are engaging regularly with a kind of sexual ideal that isn’t even in theory physically possible. Not yet.

No doubt people of the past could have hardly imagined what we can do now with technology. That you could manage to raise a family alone successfully, that you could have sex safely with so many people, that you could have sex so much and not have it result in pregnancy, that you could have risky or unconventional sex so much and not become sick or injured, that you could find partners for all kinds of sexual antics so easily, that you could transform a person of one gender surgically and hormonally to resemble another, that you could see so many naked people and so many varied sex acts without ever needing to even meet or see those people physically, that you could be pleasured electronically by machines controlled by yourself or by others remotely.

All of these could hardly have been imagined by the people of the past. They’re all radical restructurings of the basic limitations and realities of human sexuality. They’re radical changes to the rules, to what can be reasonably expected. The average middle school boy has seen more naked women and more diverse sexual behavior by the age of 14 than the most indulgent lotharios in history ever did in their entire lives. Technology has drastically lowered the cost of all kinds of goods, and sexual goods (being in great demand) are among those most affected. Sexual behavior of all kinds is radically cheaper, in terms of cost, and getting cheaper all the time.

With possibly one exception. Traditional long-term heterosexual unions are actually getting more costly. For many reasons. Not least because they’re being so heavily outcompeted by every other possible form of sex. Pornography alone is a major competitor to marriage. And that doesn’t make marriage cheaper. It makes it harder to produce and maintain.

Marriage used to offer a great return. It was a bargain people were willing to make. But as the costs of other sexual options decreased it became less competitive. Promiscuity, non-marital relationships, and single parenting became more compelling and viable options for men and women, and less costly.

So in order to stay competitive marriage got deregulated, which allowed it to be depreciated. You could get it easier, exchange it easier, dispose of it easier. You didn’t need to commit so many resources to secure it. You could spread yourself around in other areas of sexual investment and still afford it. But as time went on, the question became, why bother? If it’s mostly symbolic at this point and confers no special advantages but still carries some serious costs and complications, and these other new options are so much more convenient and low-cost, why bother? And so the age of marriage has been skyrocketing. It’s more of a feather to put in your cap when you’ve already got everything you want than a means of getting what you want. You don’t need to invest in it to get what you want.

It’s hard to say what the future of sexual values will be in the US. A lot depends on the random chances of history’s unfolding. A single person here or there, a single story, could cause radical shifts in any direction. The development of drug-resistant diseases becoming widespread could also cause a major cultural shift, as our attitudes have become so dependent on our technology to support them.

Anything could happen. In the short run it seems likely that more and more of the remaining sexual taboos will continue to erode, but with a more shrill and less convincing battle cry. Marriage will likely continue to decline as a cultural force and major player in the organization of social and sexual relationships. And it’s always possible that there will be a blowback. People may find that sexual deregulation and a lack of investment in stable monogamous relationships isn’t all its cracked up to be, in the long run. Who knows, it could happen.

On culture warriors

There are some pundits who are pushing back that are a little too aggressive for my taste. It’s not that they’re wrong, they’re often right as far as they go. But their reactions are strong enough that they become prey to being pushed too far into their own position, and into being too critical (and cynical) of the opposing position and not critical enough or cynical enough about their own side.

I think Dave Rubín has started struggling with that a little, in fact I wrote to him about it. Ben Shapiro has always been that way. And Tucker Carlson. Obviously those people are needed, and they’re doing good work. I like to balance them out with a dose of the most reasonable leftists, like Jonathan Haidt, Bret Weinstein, Camille Paglia, and John McWhorter.

You need those culture warriors. Very much. To stand up to what’s clearly wrong and dangerous. But it can’t always be war; that’s not the end state goal, and there’s always a risk that in militarizing you lose perspective and create new problems covered and justified by the threat. And you can’t bet the future state on victory and elimination of the other side, because it’s clearly meant to exist. People vote their personalities, mostly. Ideology can either refine or distort those personalities. But they’re given by God, meant to be. So you can’t literally defeat or eliminate the other side without going against God’s design.
I’m not a warrior, but I do have an eye to the end game. Which is something more like balance or dynamic equilibrium or redemption. We need to lift up and encourage and become friends with the good people on the other side of the spectrum and watch out for when we go too far or become too comfortable in our own.

Or, more secularly, we need a more balanced equilibrium where the best elements of both sides are challenging and productively antagonizing and balancing one another so the worst tendencies of both sides are repressed and the most thoroughly tested and universally beneficial ideas that both sides can roughly agree on are what get through.

Whenever you have a functioning system, you want to only make the minimal amount of adjustments to it, that are the most carefully tested, or the most likely outcome is that you’ll break it. And then you will probably need to intervene and rejigger it even more to keep it going.

This is why I’m skeptical about either side actually getting what they want. I don’t think either side should. I believe in the struggle, the dialogue. Both as the state of nature that God designed, and in our political system as the best alignment of politics to that fundamental design ever devised. Politics should be a marriage, basically. It’s just a very bad, unhealthy one right now.

P.S. The recent shenanigans with unemployment payments come to mind as just one minor example of the kind of overbalancing Ive been taking about, the way that getting just what you want to solve a problem often just creates new problems that then themselves have to also be corrected.

The pandemic seemed to justify acting quickly, without much oversight, to help with unemployment. So at great cost, they quickly rolled out a program whose goal was just to get as much money as possible into as many hands as possible as easily and quickly as possible. And now, just in Colorado, they’re dealing with two huge problems that created. First, a gigantic amount of fraud that they don’t have the time or personnel or procedures to investigate and deal with. And second, they incentivized being out of work so much that now people don’t want to go back to work when they could. They would actually lose money by doing so. And that’s not entirely to their discredit, there’s a perverse incentive.

So now the government has to add even more costs and measures to their program. Partly to deal with all the fraud they created. And partly to deal with the owverse incentives they created. Now they’re offering large bonus payments to people if they’ll just go back to work and stop collecting the extra benefits. So they made a mistake paying people too much not to work, and the only solution they could come up with was to add even more payments and incentives to try to buy out those previous incentives.

And on and on it goes. Once you enact a program and it’s become institutionalized, it ossifies; it’s very hard to roll it back or adjust it in the face of feedback or outcomes. Often all you can do is just add a new system on top to try and correct for it. And so your attempts to fix the problem run into a continuous escalation of costs, trying to fix things you weren’t careful enough in designing in the first place.

Religious musings

These are not only things that are, they are things that must be.

1. People crave moral legitimacy and moral justification.

2. Sacrifice is continual.

3. You can’t get rid of the need for sacrifice, it just goes somewhere else.

We are piñoned between past and future, caught at their intersection. We must be released by aligning them, placing one behind us in the direction necessitated, placing the other before us in the direction desired, so that we can move along them. We do this by defining our relation to them through enacted rituals, embodied actions. We speak the right words. We make a display, to ourselves, to others, to God and the universe itself (however we conceive the moral order). We stand with our backs facing one way and our faces another.

Rituals express the ideal and vision and morality that drives the nation. The ideal is what makes action possible, because it’s what’s creates the incentive to drive action in a motivated state toward the reward. No ideal, no motivated state, no action. No understanding of movement out of the last. No conception of movmenet toward the future.

We need a justification for action, to make sense of it in the present, future, and past.

We carry the burden of knowdge of the past and responsibility for the future. And it’s enormous. So we have to have mechanisms to help us manage it. Religion is the architecture of the mind and of society. You can’t remove it because it’s what makes action possible and understanding of ourselves across time coherent. It is bearing the weight of the most immense psychic burden you could conceive of, unprecedented in known existence.

Religion isn’t only something that covers up or makes palatable or bearable the weight of consciousness and existence within time; it’s not merely a sedative. It’s the actual superstructure that makes bearing it and acting within it possible. It’s the bones, not the skin. It doesn’t obscure the mechanisms of consciousness, it is the expression and iteration of those mechanisms that make thought and action possible at the scale of human understanding and capability. This is what those mechanisms of the mind (motivated states, etc) look like at the level of developed human complexity, where knowledge of the past, conception of the future, understanding of finitude and temporality, comprehension of cause and effect and responsibility, and potential efficacy at navigating these currents of space, time, and thought all come together.

Religion is a realm of thought, of spirit, that gains power over the world, over nature, and over ourselves and others, by grasping these abstracted realities. By comprehending and invoking the power of a word, a concept (even a number, as a number is both), we can lift stones over our head and make them stay, make food come forth from the earth as we desire, even lift ourselves up into the heavenly realms, to the very surface of the heavenly bodies themselves. All because we grasp the true names of things. The words, the concepts that give you power over them.

It’s a long standing belief, that if you can gain or discover the true name of a thing (which is merely an embodiment of a concept of its nature), that you can control it. Because that has been our experience. And we still do that. Professionals are always looking to put a name to a thing. It gives it definition, separates it conceptually from the vast, undifferentiated miasma of phenomena, and gives us something we can understand and manipulate. It makes it something we can grasp. And if we can grasp it, we can treat it as a tool, or use tools on it. It becomes possible to act with and on and against it.

When are the gods satisfied? Never. They are appeased. And they must be continually appeased. Because time and action are never done. History is never dealt with. You conquer one issue, in one moment, and then it’s on to the next. And you have a whole new fight and a whole new problem. Life never lets us rest on “happily ever after.” So the rituals are continual. The sacrifices must be repeated.

The Aztecs would say that sacrifice was what literally kept the world itself turning. And that repetitive nature, that need to return continually to the altar, that is common across all cultures. With maybe one partial exception. Christianity, by positing Christ as the ultimate and complete sacrifice, names his specifically as a sacrifice that was “once, for all”. It is a complete work. Peace has been made, a bridge has been forged, a safe space carved out, permanently between man and God (God as representative of the particular nature of the universe we inhabit, with all its laws of cause and effect, time, individual consciousness, etc).

But there is still a need, even in Christianity, to be continually reminded to turn toward that sacrifice and invoke it. The demands of life and time continue to be perpetual. You just have access to a perpetually adequate sacrificial response. It’s also unusual in that it attaches particularly to the individual. It’s personal and private, not societal or social. The forces of time and guilt and authority and alignment and motivation aren’t dealt with at a collective level, a societal level, they’re internal and personal. And that is considered to be adequate. Everything, presumably, scales up from there by nature, rather than needing to be fixed deliberately at any higher point.

Our society tells us, and we tell ourselves, continually, what our ideal is. And we continually make sacrifices to it and enact rituals to reaffirm it and our relationship to it. This aligns us within it, aligns us to the past and future, defines our motivated states, releases us from our piñon, and makes action possible. Our sacrifices either eliminate what is pernicious or give up what is precious. Those seem by their nature to be what is required. Any other kind of sacrifice is fundamentally unacceptable and inadequate to place us into proper relation to the past and future.

All cultures seem to know this. They all have some code of what is or is not an acceptable or adequate sacrifice, some hierarchy. And people are always looking to make a display of what a great evil they have captured and sacrificed, or what a great good they have contributed, for the sake of their ideal. They’re proving their efficacy, their justification. Their ability to align themselves, their past and future, along the trajectory of the ideal. That makes them able to act, worthy of acting. Worthy of following, maybe.

All this exists in all societies, it merely takes different forms. It’s especially obvious in our own society. But it’s such a deeply ingrained thing, and we take so much for granted, that we can’t really see it objectively for what it is. Why do all our modern books and media articles focus on identitarian grievances (race, gender, etc) as the locus of moral attention? Because that’s our religion. It is the greatest (and perhaps only that we allow ourselves) moral axis upon which we judge and criticize ourselves. It is how we conceptualize evil and sin (and personify it, which is a very key act) and how we conceptualize the ideal and personify and represent it.

We feel that we must continually bring up the sins of the past and sacrifice them in the present, to align ourselves properly to the past. We must reaffirm and reiterate our commitment to an envisioned future. And that lets us take action and have justification in the present. It frees us to act, to engage in motivated states.

It also lets us separate the sheep from the goats (another very fundamental instinct), those who are in the proper alignment and who have made the proper sacrifices and rituals, and those who haven’t and who will damn us. Those who resist and imperil our actions and motivated states, because they won’t accept our vision of either the past or the envisioned future. And they must be cast out, purged, lest they drag us with them into hell.