Therapism has caused a decline in the quality of our culture. People are now engaged in a kind of arms race, feeling obliged to express their emotions ever more extravagantly to prove to themselves and other just how much and how deeply they feel. This leads to the peculiar shrillness, shallowness, and lack of subtlety of so much of our culture.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Bad counsel”, The New Criterion, 2005-06-23.
November 18, 2022
QotD: Therapism
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November 13, 2022
Carrying on about the Carry On movies
In The Critic, Alexander Larman looks back at one of the longest-running film series beginning with 1958’s Carry On Sergeant (not to be confused with the earlier — and reputedly terrible — interwar Canadian film of the same name) and continuing with many more until the filmic disaster of Carry On Emmanuelle in 1978 (there was also a 1992 attempt to revive the franchise, which failed):
In Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, it is decreed by the contrarian history master, Irwin, that “if George Orwell had lived, nothing is more certain than that he would have written an essay on the Carry On films”.
We are invited to take Irwin’s instructions that the Carry On films represent a valuable insight into British social history with suitable detachment. (The precise, suitably pompous quote is that “while they have no intrinsic merit, they acquire some of the permanence of art simply by persisting, and acquire an incremental significance if only as social history”.)
Yet Irwin (or Bennett) was almost certainly right that, had Orwell survived into the Sixties and Seventies, he would have found the Carry On film series both repellent and fascinating. It is literature’s, and history’s, loss that we do not have an account of Orwell’s thoughts on the antics of Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Williams, Barbara Windsor et al.
In 1941, Orwell wrote of postcards by the cheerfully lowbrow artist Donald McGill that “your first impression is one of overpowering vulgarity” and that “what you are really looking at is something as traditional as Greek tragedy, a sort of sub-world of smacked bottoms and scrawny mothers-in-law which is a part of Western European consciousness”. He goes on to say that “jokes barely different from McGill’s could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare’s tragedies”.
[…]
The joy of watching the Carry On films, then, is twofold. On the one hand, the hackneyed stories, two-dimensional characterisation and laboured puns and innuendo can be enjoyable, on a purely basic level, but hardly threaten to aspire to the levels of great art.
Yet on the other, the cheerfully Rabelaisian sentiments of the pictures — in which all men and women are defined purely in sexual and scatological terms — exist on a level of reductio ad absurdum.
It is no coincidence that the best Carry On films contain a vein of social satire in their mocking of great British institutions, whether it be the NHS, MI5, the army or the Raj, and the final set piece of Carry On Up The Khyber — in which the stiff-upper-lip British occupiers ignore the Afghan invaders while taking formal dinner in black tie — rises to a level of surrealist genius that would have made Buñuel proud.
There is occasional talk of making another Carry On film, but with all the principal cast (save the ever-sprightly Dale) now dead and with the world a very different place, it is impossible to imagine that we will ever see, say, Carry On Tweeting or the like.
There is every possibility that a really top-notch cast could be assembled, if there was any serious intent behind it — I would love to see Andrew Scott, for instance, offer a more dynamic take on the kind of roles that Williams essayed, because he would do so brilliantly, and if the script could be written by the award-winning likes of Patrick Marber or Richard Bean, it could be a thing of innuendo-heavy beauty.
But then the Carry On series never was a thing of beauty. In its grim and hilarious way, it took every British national stereotype, pulled its trousers down, and gave it a hearty slap on its bare buttocks. Some might find this offensive; others might mourn its loss from public life.
In either case, we shall not look upon its like again. Dr Nookey, Francis Bigger, Professor Inigo Tinkle, Vic Flange: your services are no longer required. To which unkind cut we must solemnly say: “Ooh, matron.”
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October 24, 2022
The rise of “Queer Theory”
In City Journal, Christopher F. Rufo provides the background that has lead to the widespread phenomenon of “Drag Queen Story Hour”:
Start with queer theory, the academic discipline born in 1984 with the publication of Gayle S. Rubin’s essay “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality”. Beginning in the late 1970s, Rubin, a lesbian writer and activist, had immersed herself in the subcultures of leather, bondage, orgies, fisting, and sado-masochism in San Francisco, migrating through an ephemeral network of BDSM (bondage, domination, sadomasochism) clubs, literary societies, and New Age spiritualist gatherings. In “Thinking Sex”, Rubin sought to reconcile her experiences in the sexual underworld with the broader forces of American society. Following the work of the French theorist Michel Foucault, Rubin sought to expose the power dynamics that shaped and repressed human sexual experience.
“Modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual value,” Rubin wrote. “Marital, reproductive heterosexuals are alone at the top erotic pyramid. Clamouring below are unmarried monogamous heterosexuals in couples, followed by most other heterosexuals. … Stable, long-term lesbian and gay male couples are verging on respectability, but bar dykes and promiscuous gay men are hovering just above the groups at the very bottom of the pyramid. The most despised sexual castes currently include transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers such as prostitutes and porn models, and the lowliest of all, those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries.”
Rubin’s project — and, by extension, that of queer theory — was to interrogate, deconstruct, and subvert this sexual hierarchy and usher in a world beyond limits, much like the one she had experienced in San Francisco. The key mechanism for achieving this turn was the thesis of social construction. “The new scholarship on sexual behaviour has given sex a history and created a constructivist alternative to” the view that sex is a natural and pre-political phenomenon, Rubin wrote. “Underlying this body of work is an assumption that sexuality is constituted in society and history, not biologically ordained. This does not mean the biological capacities are not prerequisites for human sexuality. It does mean that human sexuality is not comprehensible in purely biological terms.” In other words, traditional conceptions of sex, regarding it as a natural behavior that reflects an unchanging order, are pure mythology, designed to rationalize and justify systems of oppression. For Rubin and later queer theorists, sex and gender were infinitely malleable. There was nothing permanent about human sexuality, which was, after all, “political”. Through a revolution of values, they believed, the sexual hierarchy could be torn down and rebuilt in their image.
There was some reason to believe that Rubin might be right. The sexual revolution had been conquering territory for two decades: the birth-control pill, the liberalization of laws surrounding marriage and abortion, the intellectual movements of feminism and sex liberation, the culture that had emerged around Playboy magazine. By 1984, as Rubin acknowledged, stable homosexual couples had achieved a certain amount of respectability in society. But Rubin, the queer theorists, and the fetishists of the BDSM subculture wanted more. They believed that they were on the cusp of fundamentally transforming sexual norms. “There [are] historical periods in which sexuality is more sharply contested and more overtly politicized,” Rubin wrote. “In such periods, the domain of erotic life is, in effect, renegotiated.” And, following the practice of any good negotiator, they laid out their theory of the case and their maximum demands. As Rubin explained: “A radical theory of sex must identify, describe, explain, and denounce erotic injustice and sexual oppression. Such a theory needs refined conceptual tools which can grasp the subject and hold it in view. It must build rich descriptions of sexuality as it exists in society and history. It requires a convincing critical language that can convey the barbarity of sexual persecution.” Once the ground is softened and the conventions are demystified, the sexual revolutionaries could do the work of rehabilitating the figures at the bottom of the hierarchy — “transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers”.
Where does this process end? At its logical conclusion: the abolition of restrictions on the behavior at the bottom end of the moral spectrum — pedophilia. Though she uses euphemisms such as “boylovers” and “men who love underaged youth”, Rubin makes her case clearly and emphatically. In long passages throughout “Thinking Sex”, Rubin denounces fears of child sex abuse as “erotic hysteria”, rails against anti–child pornography laws, and argues for legalizing and normalizing the behavior of “those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries”. These men are not deviants, but victims, in Rubin’s telling. “Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boylovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation,” she explains. “Consequently, the police have feasted on them. Local police, the FBI, and watchdog postal inspectors have joined to build a huge apparatus whose sole aim is to wipe out the community of men who love underaged youth. In twenty years or so, when some of the smoke has cleared, it will be much easier to show that these men have been the victims of a savage and undeserved witch hunt.” Rubin wrote fondly of those primitive hunter-gatherer tribes in New Guinea in which “boy-love” was practiced freely.
Such positions are hardly idiosyncratic within the discipline of queer theory. The father figure of the ideology, Foucault, whom Rubin relies upon for her philosophical grounding, was a notorious sadomasochist who once joined scores of other prominent intellectuals to sign a petition to legalize adult–child sexual relationships in France. Like Rubin, Foucault haunted the underground sex scene in the Western capitals and reveled in transgressive sexuality. “It could be that the child, with his own sexuality, may have desired that adult, he may even have consented, he may even have made the first moves,” Foucault once told an interviewer on the question of sex between adults and minors. “And to assume that a child is incapable of explaining what happened and was incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable.”
Rubin’s American compatriots made the same argument even more explicitly. Longtime Rubin collaborator Pat Califia, who would later become a transgender man, claimed that American society had turned pedophiles into “the new communists, the new niggers, the new witches”. For Califia, age-of-consent laws, religious sexual mores, and families who police the sexuality of their children represented a thousand-pound bulwark against sexual freedom. “You can’t liberate children and adolescents without disrupting the entire hierarchy of adult power and coercion and challenging the hegemony of antisex fundamentalist religious values,” she lamented. All of it — the family, the law, the religion, the culture — was a vector of oppression, and all of it had to go.
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October 18, 2022
“On average, a twenty-five year old man has the same level of impulse control as a 10 year old girl”
Rob Henderson considers how early humans managed to overcome violent tendencies as human communities got larger, and specifically considers the social role of young men, then and now:
One challenge to overcome involves the behavioral tendencies of young males.
[Oxford evolutionary psychologist Robin] Dunbar writes:
When males (and younger males, in particular) are deprived of social, economic, and mating opportunities, they are prone to behaving in ways that both stress other group members (especially reproductive females) and threaten the stability and cohesion of the group. This is as true of the more social primates as it is of humans, and is often associated with high mortality rates. Under these circumstances, males are also likely to indulge in raiding neighbouring groups, which can result in poor inter-community relations as well as retaliation. Managing male behaviour may, thus, be critical to maintaining an environment conducive to successful reproduction.
Young males are (unknowingly) experts at disrupting social cohesion. To be fair, they are also required to maintain and defend it. They’re a mixed bag.
Disputes that spill over into violence and homicide have been an ever-present risk in both contemporary and pre-modern small scale societies. Young men make up the overwhelming majority of such conflicts, both as perpetrators and as victims.
[…]
The vast majority of violence is carried out by young men.
Psychologically, a key reason for this is that women are more sensitive than men to penalties. Men are more inclined to take risks, oblivious to the punishments they may receive. Men also have lower levels of empathy and a higher tolerance for pain.
The psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has posited the hypothesis of the “extreme male brain”, suggesting that males are at higher risk for a clinical diagnosis of autism because of the constellation of traits men tend to score higher on (e.g., systematizing over empathizing, favoring things over people, etc). It also implies that most males may be a little bit autistic. Of course, some women score highly on these traits, and there are girls and women who are diagnosed with autism. Just at much lower rates than males.
I have wondered if, in addition to autism, the idea of the “extreme male brain”, could just as easily apply to psychopathy.
For both psychopathy and autism, the ratio of males to females is about three to 1.
Men (especially young men) are more pronounced than women on just about every trait that characterizes psychopathy.
Relatively low impulse control, low empathy, low fear, high sensation seeking, relatively shallow emotions, need for stimulation, proneness to boredom, violent fantasies, desire for revenge, and increased likelihood of criminality. Of course, some women score highly on these traits, and there are women who are psychopaths. But far fewer than males.
The psychologist John Barry has pointed out that when he was a student, he learned he couldn’t use standard adult psychopathy tests to administer to teenage boys. The reason? Because adult tests might give teen males a false positive.
Just as (relative to women) most men might be a little bit autistic, most (young) men might be a little bit psychopathic.
On average, a twenty-five year old man has the same level of impulse control as a 10 year old girl.
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October 16, 2022
The concept of “childhood” changes over time
Chris Bray on the steady changes in how adult societies have viewed their children from the “better whipped than damned” views of the Puritans to the “childhood is sexy” views of today’s avante-garde opinion pushers:
Childhood is mercury.
Puritans thought that children were born in a state of profound corruption, marked by Original Sin. Infants cry and toddlers mope and disobey because they’re fallen, and haven’t had the time and the training to grow into any higher character. The devil is in them, literally. And so the first task of the Puritan parent was “will-breaking”, the act of crushing the natural depravity of the selfish and amoral infant. A child was “better whipped than damned”, in need of the firm and steady repression of his natural depravity. Proper parenting was cold and distant; parents were to instruct.
By the back half of the 19th century, children were sweet creatures, born in a state of natural innocence, until the depravity of society destroyed their gentle character. (“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”) Meanwhile, the decline of family-centered industry changed the household. The historical father, present all day on the family farm and guiding his children with patriarchal modeling and moral instruction, left for work at the factory or the office, and mom occupied “the women’s sphere“, the nurturing home.
Depraved infants, stern and firm parents; innocent children, nurturing mothers. Those two conceptions of childhood and the family can be found less than a hundred years apart at their edges. There are some other pieces to layer into that story, and see also the last thing I wrote here about the history of childhood. But the briefest version of an explanation is that the changing idea of what it meant to be a child was a reflection of growing affluence and security: Calvinist religious dissenters living hard and unstable lives viewed childhood darkly, while the apotheosis of Romantic childhood appeared in the homes of the emerging Victorian management class.
So childhood is mercury: It moves and morphs with societal changes, becoming a different thing in different cultures and economies. It tells you what the temperature is.
In the febrile cultural implosion of 2022, childhood is sexy, and legislators work hard to make sure 12 year-olds can manage their STDs without the interference of their stupid clingy parents.
Or click on this link to see a fun story about a teacher in Alabama who has a sideline as a drag queen, reading a story to young children about a dog who digs up a bone and then cleverly telling the children, “Everybody loves a big bone.” Wink wink! I mean, really, what could be sexier or more fun than talking to very young children about thick adult erections, amirite?
Update: Corrected link.
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October 12, 2022
QotD: Luxury beliefs
An easy way to show that you’re not a member of the riff-raff, the masses, is to hold the opposite opinion, or a strange opinion that maybe doesn’t make sense, because it shows you’re not one of them. It’s not just the opinion itself, but the way that you express it. If you express it using vocabulary that no-one has ever heard of, for example … You often are not paying the price for your luxury beliefs, but even if you do, it’s still not nearly the same as the cost inflicted on the lower classes if they were to adopt those luxury beliefs too. […]
I talked to a friend of mine who was telling me, “When I set my Tinder radius to one mile, just around the university, and I see the bios of the women, a lot of their profiles say things like ‘poly’ or ‘keeping it casual’ – basically, they’re not interested in anything too serious.” He says something like half of them have something like that in their bio. And then he said, “But when I expand the radius on my Tinder to five miles, to include the rest of the city and the more run-down areas beyond the university bubble, half the women are single moms.” And basically, the luxury beliefs of the former group, the educated group, trickled down and ended up having this outsize effect on the people who are less fortunate, who don’t have the [social and] economic capital of the people who can afford that belief.
David Thompson, quoting from the transcript of a TRIGGERnometry interview with Rob Henderson, David Thompson, 2022-07-11.
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October 2, 2022
Robert Heinlein’s “Crazy Years” have nothing on real headlines in 2022
Ed West on what he calls the “triumph of the blank slate” in western culture:
As a depressive conservative who always sneered at the new atheist movement, I’ve enjoyed a certain, almost masochistic smugness about the way the sharp decline in American religious practice has led to a proliferation of wacky beliefs. I told you so, I laugh, as our boat heads for the rocks and certain doom for all of us. And every month I read something else in the media which makes me think, with the best will in the world and a sincere belief in improving our lot, that country’s ruling class is losing its grip on reality.
To take one recent example, an article in the Atlantic recently made the case that separating sport by sex doesn’t make sense, because it “reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting — a notion that’s been challenged by scientists for years”.
The author stated that “though sex differences in sports show advantages for men, researchers today still don’t know how much of this to attribute to biological difference versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential”.
Quoting an academic who claim “that sex differences aren’t really clear at all” the author reported of some studies showing that “the gap they did find between girls and boys was likely due to socialization, not biology”.
On a similar theme, a few weeks back the New York Times ran a piece arguing that “maternal instinct is a myth that men created”. In the essay, published in the world’s most influential newspaper, it was stated that “The notion that the selflessness and tenderness babies require is uniquely ingrained in the biology of women, ready to go at the flip of a switch, is a relatively modern — and pernicious — one. It was constructed over decades by men selling an image of what a mother should be, diverting our attention from what she actually is and calling it science.”
Even the most prestigious science magazines increasingly make claims about sex that a decade ago would have seemed wacky. Just recently, Scientific American stated that “Before the late 18th century, Western science recognized only one sex — the male — and considered the female body an inferior version of it. The shift historians call the ‘two-sex model’ served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body.”
If you find any of these beliefs strange, then you might need to “educate” yourself about “the science” because this is the direction of travel now. This kind of stuff is everywhere, growing in popularity in all areas, but all ultimately having the same common inheritance — the blank slate.
Yet what is strange is that such ideas are triumphant, even as the scientific evidence against them mounts up, with the expanding understanding of genetics and the role of inheritance. The tabula rasa should by all rights be dead, indeed it should have been killed twenty years ago with the publication of one of the most important books of the century so far, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate.
With its subtitle “the modern denial of human nature”, Pinker’s worked looked at the various ideas that had emerged out of academia and into wider society: that rape was not about sex, that hunter-gatherer societies were peaceful, that sex differences were learned, all of these beliefs having the common theme that humans are born with infinitely malleable minds and that that life outcomes are entirely shaped by society.
Pinker felt, quite reasonably, that many of these comforting beliefs were on the way out. Of the idea that differences in intelligence were entirely environmental, he wrote that “even in the 1970s the argument was tortuous, but by the 1980s it was desperate and today it is a historical curiosity”. And yet this historical curiosity continues to flourish, and 20 years after publication, the blank slate is stronger than ever. More so than in 2002, it’s taboo to discuss the genetic components of human intelligence or the biological factors involved in differing male and female behaviour. The ground has shifted – towards the blank slate.
Pinker is an optimistic Whiggish liberal who has since produced books looking at the decline of violence and making the case that things are getting better — that’s taken a wobble this decade, but I think he’ll be proven right, even if I think the new atheist-aligned cognitive psychologist has a slight blind spot about religion. In the Blank Slate he argued that worthy progressive goals should not rest on untrue scientific assumptions about human nature. When those ideas are proven false, the political argument will crumble too — and yet this hasn’t happened. Instead the taboos just grows stronger.
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September 28, 2022
QotD: Yearning for the “endless now”
By the (I think) 16th, and certainly by the 17th, centuries, you’ve got portraits of people as Classical throwbacks — contemporary figures tricked out in Roman togas and whatnot. This is the full acceptance of linear time — you can move a distinct individual both forward and back along not just the course of his life, but the course of linear history.
Contrast this to the Juggalos, whose first impulse in any situation is to take a selfie … but who never, ever look at those selfies. Basic College Girl “culture” is often described as narcissistic — lord knows I’ve done it enough myself — but the funny thing is, for as self-involved as they are, they have almost no pictures of themselves hanging around. They don’t decorate their office cubicles with pictures of their families. Nothing could be easier than “flipping” through a digital photo “book”, but they never do. They go to extraordinary lengths to arrange the perfect selfie … but then they could instantly delete it, for all the impact it has.
I think this is because they actively shun the idea of linear time. When I was a young man, every girl had a photo album in her dorm room, and part of the “getting to know you” process was flipping through it with her. Half the fun was seeing the brutal fashions of yesteryear; you both had a good laugh over it.
I think that would be actively painful for Juggalos, and not just because they can’t stand to have others see them as less than 100% perfect at all times. Rather, I think the problem is the fundamental one — they don’t want to be reminded that time passes.
They want the endless now. They want to be ghosts.
Severian, “The Ghosts (II)”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-18.
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September 24, 2022
The end of crisis culture – “[Y]ou can’t go on having a culture of crisis if people stop showing up for it”
Chris Bray on the inevitable endgame of “all crisis, all the time” culture:
The journalist John Tierney has described the Crisis Crisis, “the incessant state of alarm fomented by journalists and politicians”. What we’re experiencing now is the Crisis Crisis crisis, the emerging crisis caused by the Crisis Crisis. Over and over again, interventions in some invented or overhyped form of the crisis, undertaken in the hysterical spirit of the Crisis Crisis, cause a form of the Crisis Crisis crisis, which eventually results in a course correction that may or may not be fully apparent for a while. Skip right over the next paragraph if you don’t need to see examples again.
The Sri Lankan government intervenes in climate change by instantly ending the use of commercial fertilizers in agriculture, which causes a dangerous decline in the production of food. The German government intervenes in climate change by declaring a commitment to 100% clean energy, which causes dangerous instability in the availability of actual energy (“committing national suicide“), with some help from the Nord Stream shut-off valve, which nobody ever could have seen coming. The Dutch government intervenes in climate change by declaring an intention to limit agricultural production, which doesn’t cause anything yet, because Dutch farmers won’t stand for it, but final outcome TBD.
All over the world, things that work stop working because of excessive and unwarranted interventions led by people who cry crisis and throw sand in functioning gears. Dutch agriculture was just fine; then the government decided to help end the crisis. The interventions — the interveners, the people who get in the way — are harming us, when their harm could be prevented by literal nothing, by the simple choice to not perform the interventions. What we need is for the interveners to go play Risk in their basement or something, and forget their important duty to help.
The entertainment industry has had its own intervention, famously described on Substack, in woke-facing talent purges and narrative shifts and insulting “It’s Ghostbusters … but with WOMEN!” reboots. And now some hint about the endgame of the one big cycle of fraud comes from woke Hollywood — which has pounded audiences with The Message for years, resulting in a catastrophic loss of audience. The result is starting to look like this:
The social justice intervention in Hollywood storytelling is harming Hollywood; the intervention in that industry is causing the decline of the industry. At some point, people stop eating shit.
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September 21, 2022
QotD: Why postwar western economic and humanitarian “interventions” almost always failed
Prior to the Cold War, America’s interference in other countries’ internal affairs was practically nonexistent outside of the Caribbean where America’s preoccupation was with the stability in the region. What went on in Egypt, Thailand, Argentina, or Greece was none of our business, nor did we frankly care. However, having just survived the cataclysm of WWII, and the realization that Communism was a danger bent on world domination, and that each country that became Communist made that possibility much more likely changed that laissez faire attitude 180 degrees. Whereas NATO was formed for the purpose of deterring a military attack on Western Europe by the Soviet Union (the generals mentally fighting the last war as is always the case, not realizing that the war now was ideological and propagandistic rather than military), diplomats began to question how to best combat Communist insurgencies in the Third World. The arrived (wrong) conclusion was that the reason a country became Communist was because the dirt-poor people were so desperate that they became Marxists in order to improve their lives, so if the West helped poor countries economically Communists could not gain a foothold. As such, they ignored the fact that most Communist movements are organized and headed not by poor people, but by a cadre of power-hungry middle-class intellectuals.
As has been mentioned, the first approach was with foreign aid. The second was with military intervention, in Korea, Vietnam, Santo Domingo, Grenada, and Lebanon. Although such interventions were mostly successful, they carried a heavy price as American blood was spilled in foreign countries. America’s supposed allies hardly helped at all, including the citizens of the countries (Korea and Vietnam) that themselves were in danger of being conquered by Communist forces.
Armando Simón, “Schlimmbesserung“, New English Review, 2022-06-16.
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September 19, 2022
There’s a difference between “caring what kids think” and “pandering for kids’ attention and affection”
Rob Henderson wonders why so many adults these days are clearly desperate for the approval of young people:
During my recent re-watch of the entirety of Mad Men, which takes place in the 1960s, a recurring thought entered my mind: This was the last generation where young adults behaved like they were older than their real age. Don Draper is around thirty-five at the start of the series, and carries himself in a more adult manner than many 45 year olds today.
Recently, Abigail Shrier quoted a physician and psychologist who stated that “Fifty years ago, boys wanted to be men. But today, many American men want to be boys”.
Until the early 1960s, young people acted older than their actual age. Now, older adults pretend to be younger than their actual age.
Which is perhaps one reason why boomers are so easy to mock. They don’t act their age.
[…]
About two years later, I was at a breakfast gathering with some other students on campus. Our guest was a former governor and presidential candidate. He was gracious, and spent most of the time answering questions from students.
And in his answers, he continually returned to variations of the same response: “We screwed up, and it’s up to you guys to fix it. I’m so happy to see how bright you all are and how sharp your questions have been, because you will fix the mistakes my generation made.”
This mystified me. This guy was well into his sixties, with a lifetime of unique experiences in leadership roles, was telling a bunch of 20-year-olds (though I was a little older) that older adults are relying on them.
In the military, we thought of those senior to us as the leaders. It was okay to give feedback, of course. Commanding officers would regularly consult lower ranking and enlisted members to see what was working and what could be improved. But that happens only after getting through the filter of the initial training endeavors.
I remember in the first week of basic training, our instructor declared, “I don’t want any of you [expletive] thinking you are doing anyone a favor being here. I could get rid of all of you clowns and have your replacements here within the hour.” (This was 2007, well before the recruitment crisis).
My 17-year-old brain heard that thought, yeah, he’s probably right. I thought of the bus loads of other ungainly young guys I saw stepping off and being confronted with “Pick ’em up, and put ’em down” and other mind games from the instructors while waiting in the endless in-processing lines.
So then I got to college and learned that even though any seat, at least at selective schools, can be filled immediately with a bright applicant (top colleges reject thousands of them each year), students are never ejected for disrespecting professors or anyone else. In the military the first message was, you are a peon and less than nothing and we can easily have you replaced (this changes as you advance in rank, of course — at least to some degree). In college, the first message was, you are amazing and privileged and a future leader (and marginalized and erased) and you will never lose your position here among the future ruling class. That feeling of whiplash will forever linger in my mind.
[…]
Older adults crave validation from the youth, which is one reason they are mocked. Young people sense their desire to be seen as cool and deprive them of this by taunting them.
This desire for esteem may be why older adults won’t exert any authority in response to energetic young conflict entrepreneurs who yell at them or threaten them.
Older adults want to be on the side of youth. So desperate to pencil themselves out of the “old” category. Every parent wants to be the “cool parent”, every professor wants to be the “cool” professor. You can be cool and still be an authority figure. Maybe decades of imbibing the worst of U.S. pop culture made everyone forget this.
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September 13, 2022
Society would be happier if we all paid even less attention to “the tossers of Tinsel Town”
Ian O’Doherty on the malign influence pretty people who mouth other people’s words for the cameras still exude in our popular culture:
Tucker Carlson … the man from Jennifer Lawrence’s nightmares, apparently.
They never learn, do they? If the tumultuous events we have all watched with growing horror over the past few years taught us one thing, it is this – people don’t care what the pampered starlets of Hollywood have to say about politics. If we did, then Hillary Clinton would be comfortably enjoying her second term as the pantsuit POTUS, Jeremy Corbyn would be prime minister of the UK and we would all be driving electric cars.
But regular people are smarter than actors, which seems to drive the luvvies wild with fury. Rather than accepting that maybe, just maybe, there is another side to the argument, the tossers of Tinsel Town insist that anyone who doesn’t fully embrace the so-called progressive agenda is simply a monster.
We saw this recently when Jennifer Lawrence, who used to be quite refreshingly down to Earth, proudly admitted that she had to “work so hard … to forgive my dad and my family” for voting Republican. She also, quite wonderfully, spoke about having “recurring nightmares” about Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson.
In the course of her interview for the cover issue of Vogue magazine – that renowned bastion of proletarian agitation – the Hunger Games actress claimed that she was born a Kentucky Republican, was raised as a Kentucky Republican and had considered herself to be a Kentucky Republican, until she watched an episode of 30 Rock. And then her worldview completely changed.
Now most of us would agree that 30 Rock was a brilliant sitcom. After all, it was so ingenious in its construction that it even managed to make Alec Baldwin look likeable. But would anyone think that Liz Lemon’s line, “I’m not a crazy liberal – I just think people should drive hybrid cars”, would be enough to utterly transform someone’s political beliefs?
Apparently, this is what changed everything for Lawrence. She even seemed proud of the fact that a throwaway line in a sitcom triggered some sort of Damascene conversion to what is now so tediously known as “the right side of history”.
Predictably, following the Vogue interview, Lawrence was hailed as a modern-day Joan of Arc – for refusing to be “passive about politics”. But there is no real bravery involved in simply having the courage of other people’s convictions – she knows which way the political wind is blowing and is bending to it. That’s not all that brave, is it?
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September 5, 2022
We’ve somehow moved from “women who want to have it all” to “the servant problem” in less than a generation
In Ed West’s weekly round-up post, he links to this article by Helen Andrews about the cultural shift for women since the sexual revolution:
People are always more likely to believe a lie if it’s plausible. The lie that women can have it all has as many adherents today as it does because it’s not obvious why it should be a lie. Have a career and a family: why not? There are enough hours in the day. The challenge of refuting the lie that women can have it all — that is, that they can prioritize career and family equally — lies in the fact that the trade-offs that make it impossible are hidden, not obvious, because mathematically it’s not something that should be impossible.
If only employers would do more to accommodate working women, if alternatives could be found to fulfill duties at home that mothers used to do for themselves, like childcare and housework. But the more you start thinking about those accommodations and thinking not just about what it means for any one woman to have it all, but for society to be restructured around women having it all, the more impossible those trade-offs start to seem.
Obviously there are women today in America who are trying to have it all, and many appear to be doing so successfully, at least insofar as they have both demanding careers and children. But look more closely at those households, and almost invariably you’ll see that behind every woman who is balancing work and family, there is an army of low-paid labor, immigrant cleaning ladies, nannies who are paid cash under the table, Door Dash delivery men who deliver the meals that mom never had time to cook. It’s no coincidence that the vast increase in female workforce participation has coincided with the reappearance of something that the more egalitarian America of the early 20th century did not have, and that is a servant class.
America today is more prosperous than it was 70 years ago, and yet it is no longer possible for an ordinary worker to support a middle-class family on a single income. The story of how that happened is bound up into a lie that has become gospel today, which is the lie that women can have it all. Undergirding that lie is a further lie that the Republican Party can have it all. The GOP has very much hitched itself to the idea that it can be the party of stay-at-home moms and girl bosses equally. Again, superficially this seems like it ought to be possible. Live and let live, it’s a free country. But this bargain is unsustainable in practice. We only have to look at the last 30 years to understand why.
The official position of the Republican Party today is that the government’s job is to make it possible for everyone to make the right choice for their family. This rhetoric of maximizing choice requires politicians to talk as if some women will choose to be moms and some will choose to be girl bosses, and it’s really 50/50 which one you end up being. You know, both are equally valid. Who’s to say one is better? But that’s just false, and it’s false according to women’s own preferences. The number of women who say they do not want to have children is very low, in the single digits, around 5% — and that’s just the number who will tell surveys that they predict they won’t have kids when their childbearing years are over. The number of women who actually reach old age and feel satisfied with their life, being just a girl boss with no children to keep them company, is even lower.
Squaring away all this family happiness is and ought to be a higher priority than maximizing women’s career success. It is also a more urgent priority. A woman cannot simply wake up at age 35 and decide she wants to have a family. Everyone says that the sexual revolution was brought about by the advent of the contraceptive pill, which was supposedly ushered in at an amazing new age of a new human experience thanks to science. But it actually changed a lot less than we think. We’ve gotten quite good at not having children when we don’t want to have them, but the science that gave us the pill has not made us very much better at making children arrive when we do.
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“In this version of the story, the little boy points out that the naked emperor has no soul, and the people begin to notice”
Chris Bray uses the example of a new Disney show featuring the literal daughter of Satan — for the LULs — to illustrate just how unhinged our culture has become:
Give me a minute, and let me show you something without framing or a narrative. Then I’ll talk about it, but first just notice it. The company founded by Walt Disney has a new show about a middle school girl who has an awkward dilemma: She’s the Antichrist (as her mom reveals to her one day, after a weird day at school), and her Cool Dad is Satan, who has lots of funny lines about what a wild guy he is. Funny teen girl dilemmas follow, like this one time her parents show up to a party — which, like, super bummer and everything, but it’s even funnier when your dad is actually, literally Satan.
[…]
But no lines are being crossed, because there are no lines. Satan is a television character; immorality is impossible in a culture without morality, without a moral framework and moral anchors. Lacking principles, no one in power can violate any. They’re completely adrift, completely free, and completely ruined. They can go anywhere, and they often do. You can’t sin when nothing is a sin. Well, except for using the wrong pronouns, but more or less.
Now: There are people who are not adrift, who have moral reference points. I continue to believe they’re the majority, geographically prevalent and often thick on the ground, morally attuned as communities and families in a global and national milieu of amoral disconnectedness.
So we have people who see no lines, traveling freely across discarded boundaries, watched by people who are appalled by line-crossing that the line-crossers don’t perceive at all.
See also this essay from Dr. Robert Yoho, “Guess Who Passes the Psychopath Test?”
Psychopathic lying is successful because normal people do not believe that anyone lies as a routine. Debates with sociopaths are useless. No matter what we say, no matter how much evidence is given, it has no meaning for them. Their sole goal is to fool us into classifying them as normal so they can continue to deceive, control, and use us …
When major positions of power in business, government, industry, and society are filled by sociopaths, a downward spiral begins. The normal people eventually recognize what their leaders are and devise survival strategies.
We’re there, though it’s hard to place “there” on a map. We can see that a significant share of power and status — in politics, in economics, and in culture — belongs to people who have no perception of social rules or moral limits at all. And we see that some lines need to be reimposed, urgently and firmly.
After a few years of, “but these are the experts, right?” it feels like the beginning of the phase in which everybody finally knows the game and the stakes. In this version of the story, the little boy points out that the naked emperor has no soul, and the people begin to notice. And then?
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September 4, 2022
QotD: Sparta’s fatal problem – oliganthropia
This is is the problem of oliganthropia (“people-shortage” – literally “too-few-people-ness”) in Sparta: the decline of the spartiate population. This is a huge and contentious area of scholarship – no surprise, since it directly concerns the decline of one of the more powerful states in Classical Greece – with a fair bit of debate to it (there’s a decent rundown by Figueira of the demography behind it available online here). What I want to note here is that a phrase like “oliganthropia” makes it sound like there was an absolute decline in population, but the evidence argues against that. At two junctures in the third century, under Agis IV and then later Cleomenes III (so around 241 and 227) attempts were made to revive Sparta by pulling thousands of members of the underclass back up into the spartiates (the first effort fails and the second effort was around a century too late to matter). That, of course, means that there were thousands of individuals – presumably mostly hypomeiones, but perhaps some mothakes or perioikoi – around to be so considered.
Xenophon says as much with Cinadon’s observation about the market at Sparta. Now obviously, we can’t take that statement as a demographic survey, but as a general sense, 40 homoioi, plus a handful of higher figures, in a crowd of 4,000 speaks volumes about the growth of Sparta’s underclass. And that is in Laconia, the region of the Spartan state (in contrast to Messenia, the other half of Sparta’s territory), where the Spartans live and where the density of helots is lowest.
This isn’t a decline in the population of Sparta, merely a decline in the population of spartiates – the tiny, closed class of citizen-elites at the top.
So we come back to the standard assertion about Sparta: its system lasted a long time, maintaining very high cohesion – at least among the citizens class and its descendants. This is a terribly low bar – a society cohesive only among its tiny aristocracy. And yet, as low of a bar as this is, Sparta still manages to slink below it. Economic cohesion was a mirage created by the exclusion of any individual who fell below it. Sparta maintained the illusion of cohesion by systematically removing anyone who was not wealthy from the citizen body.
If we really want to gauge this society’s cohesion, we ought to track households, one generation after the next, regardless of changes in status. If we do that, what do we find? A society with an increasingly tiny elite – and a majority which, I will again quote Xenophon, “would eat them raw“. Hardly a model of social cohesion.
Moreover, this system wasn’t that stable. The core labor force – the enslaved helots – are brutally subjugated by Sparta no earlier than 680 (even this is overly generous – the consolidation process in Messenia seems to have continued into the 500s). The austerity which supposedly underlined cohesion among the spartiates by banishing overt displays of wealth is only visible archaeologically beginning in 550, which may mark the real beginning of the Spartan system as a complete unit with all of its parts functioning. And by 464 – scarcely a century later – terminal and irreversible decline had set in. Spartan power at last breaks permanently and irretrievably in 371 when Messenia is lost to them […]
This is a system that at the most generous possible reading, lasted three centuries. In practice, we are probably better in saying it lasts just 170 or so – from c. 550 (the completion of the consolidation of Messenia, and the beginning of both the Peloponnesian League and the famed Spartan austerity) to 371.
To modern ears, 170 years still sounds impressive. Compared to the remarkably unstable internal politics of Greek poleis, it probably seemed so. But we are not ancient Greeks – we have a wider frame of reference. The Roman Republic ticked on, making one compromise after another, for four centuries (509 to 133; Roman enthusiasts will note that I have cut that ending date quite early) before it even began its spiral into violence. Carthage’s republic was about as long lived as Rome. We might date constitutional monarchy in Britain as beginning in 1688 or perhaps 1721 – that system has managed around 300 years.
While we’re here – although it was interrupted briefly, the bracket dates for the notoriously unstable Athenian democracy, usually dated from the Cleisthenic reforms 508/7 to the suppresion of the fourth-century democracy in 322, are actually longer, 185 years, give or take, with just two major breaks, consisting of just four months and one year. Sparta had more years with major, active helot revolts controlling significant territory than Athens had oligarchic coups. And yet Athens – rightly, I’d argue – has a reputation for chronic instability, while Sparta has a reputation for placid regularity. Might I suggest that stable regimes do not suffer repeated, existential slave revolts?
In short, the Spartan social system ought not be described as cohesive, and while it was relatively stable by Greek standards (not a high bar!) it is hardly exceptionally stable and certainly not uniquely so. So much for cohesion and stability.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part IV: Spartan Wealth”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.
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