In a recent discussion over at Dalrock’s place, the issue of the relationship between the female-variant of the super-norm and the male variant came to the fore, and led to this comment by me:
I’ve said it here and elsewhere before, but I will say it again now because it is relevant: I think that Dalrock’s breakthrough proposition that serial monogamy is simply the female preferred form of promiscuity (i.e., for almost all women other than the most high sociosexuality, r-selecting/High-T women) is the most subversive thing he has ever written, and also profoundly true. It is also the gateway to understanding what we are trying to get at, identify and describe when we are discussing the female-variant of the super-norm (my own very much “work-in-progress” term for what we are discussing). This is because the widespread acceptance of the serial monogamy script as being “good” by pretty much everyone regardless of political, religious, and philosophical affiliation demands an explanation, and that explanation cannot be as facile as “it’s feminism”, precisely because feminism as a movement promoted no such script, and indeed was proposing relationship models that were much more radical than anything involving serial monogamous relationships with a series of men. It isn’t feminism. It’s something else. And that “something else” is what we are trying to identify, describe and understand in these discussions and posts.
In thinking about the relationship between feminism and the female-variant of the super-norm, I picture two rivers that flow into one, where immediately prior to the point at which they join there has been erected a big dam that spans both rivers and modulates their flow into the one, joined river. Each river represents a variant of the super-norm — the male and female variants, respectively. The dam in this picture is patriarchal hard monogamy, something which restricts both rivers and modulates them into a flow that is good for the joined river into which they both flow past the dam. One day a group of terrorists comes along and blows up the dam on the female river — the explosion also blows up some of the male river dam, but much less of it. These terrorists are, of course, the feminists. In the aftermath of the explosion, the female river is overflowing the dam, and has a hugely disproportionate flow into the joined river — this is our current cultural situation.
Now, someone living through this would clearly blame the feminist terrorists for blowing up the dam, because the explosion resulted in the overflowing of the female side of the river. However, the garbage that is flooding the observer’s street isn’t feminism, but the female river — too much of it, in an unmodulated way, such that it is overwhelming the male contribution to the river, which is still being (mostly) modulated by the dam. It’s that “flow” that we are discussing — not the feminist explosion that allowed it to flow, but the actual flow itself. This is something distinct from feminism, and claiming that it is simply feminism really looks like deliberate obfuscation once the concept is properly understood. (Emphasis added).
Helpfully, some other commenters have pointed out a few very helpful correctives for this rough analogy already, and I am sure (and I hope as well that) there will be more to come in the future.
The main one is the observation, correct in my view, that the “dam” in this picture is a biased one — that is, it is biased in favor of the female-variant “river”. This is undoubtedly true. From my perspective, this is explained primarily by the biological tilt in favor of women as the scarcer reproductive resource, and this has cascaded throughout history, such that the compromise that is the “dam” is a skewed one.
I do not think this is a problem, however. The male-variant, taken to its extreme, is *worse* than the female-variant taken to its extreme, although this is sort of like comparing the destructiveness of two different nuclear bomb variants — they are both destructive when taken to an unchecked extreme. The critical difference, however, between the two unchecked extremes is that the male variant, when unchecked, leads to incessant bloodshed due to endless sexual competition, hierarchy challenges and the like, because the fulfillment of the “male imperative” of polygyny necessarily leaves most men out in the cold — which leads to war among men, whereas the unchecked female-variant leads to the gradual decline of a society and its eventual, yet slow, ruin (as described in Glubb and Unwin). Both are terrible, but the latter is slightly less terrible because it defers the ultimate terrible, and deferral is almost always preferred over immediacy, when it comes to negatives.
In any case, Pittsburgh’s geographic and topographic situation provides almost the perfect image of what I have been trying to convey in some of the posts of this series, and which I will continue to explore in a few posts which still need to be finished.
As I describe above, the two rivers — the Monongahela and the Allegheny — are the male and female variants of the super-norm — that is, the two “ultimate” or “ideal” versions of how the society would be organized in terms of rules, norms, mores and so on, to further their respective reproductive and genetic replicative interests. The “dam” would be right over Point State Park there in the center of the image, and would modulate each river before permitting the flow of each into the merged, mighty Ohio river. This modulation favors the female river over the male one, for reasons of biology and culture, but it is still a very substantial restriction on the female river, and one which serves the interests of more males and females than an exaggerated flow from either the Monongahela or Allegheny rivers would.
Sometimes nature really does provide us with clues to help answer mental puzzles.
It is really hard for me to understand why the normal sexual strategy for a woman is serial monogamy. Not because I don’t realize that the evidence does indeed point to that, but because I have been so personally devastated by all of my previous break-ups and often prolonged bad relationships to avoid the devastation.
So while I do believe that the evidence doesn’t lie, its still mind-boggling to me.
But this is probably how the males feel who don’t have any sort of polygamous instinct and much prefer monogamy. They hear about men “spreading their seed” and think WHY? Who would want to do that?
Serial monogamy results in genetic diversity and thus maximizes the likelihood that at least one offspring of the woman will survive into adulthood. Of course, it’s not a conscious decision on her part.
Yes.
In the case of any individual, of course the perspective changes due to the influences of worldview/values and opportunity — one idea-based and one pragmatism-based (and they are often linked, to be honest).
It’s these “middlebrow” men and women alike around which the social system, mores, norms and the like should be organized — around the typical, the average, the norm. Not around the rock stars. We have an economic, political, social and sexual system that is de facto oriented around the rock stars in each of those areas, because we worship at the temple which tells us that “competitive systems are always good” and that “if you can’t compete, the problem is you, not the system” — when in reality we know that inherent inequalities relating to birth, inheritance, genetics, education, and so on mean that a full competitive situation will result in a dictatorship of the “gifted” in each area.
This sounds socialist, and I am not a socialist, because while socialists identify the problem properly, their solution socks donkey balls (and I have seen it first hand back in the 1980s in the Sov an its satellites). Socialism provides the wrong answer, but its diagnosis is not completely wrong.
“It’s these “middlebrow” men and women alike around which the social system, mores, norms and the like should be organized — around the typical, the average, the norm.”
I’m like a dog with a bone with this theme, but again: Modernity!
What you posted is a core idea of ancient politcal and social thought. The extremes don’t matter as much as the norm, and certainly one should not take ones bearings from the extremes or set policy based on the extremes but on the norm.
The early moderns say that the extremes “prove” that norms based on the average are false. A very quick and dirty way of putting this would be to say that if deed X, which is considered criminal in normal times is necessary in extreme times, then that “proves” that X is no more against nature than its opposite. The classics said, no, extreme situations do happen, which is why natural right and not natural law should be our guide in those circumstances, but that mere fact does not obviate the relevance of the normal case for guidance the rest of the time or for organizing the whole.
The early moderns say, BS, the fact of the extreme proves that the norm is just made up. Since the foundation of all justice is some form of injustice (conquest, harshness, etc.) injustice may be said to be prior in nature to, and hence more natural than, justice, which means justice is at best second order and at worst bunk. (Search through the early moderns and even the term does not come up very often).
Then there is the difference on the theme of “common good,” which is robust in ancient thought and slowly disappears from modern thought. Machiavelli talks about the common good a lot but if you really pay attention it becomes clear that he has replaced any classical notion of something higher with “collective selfishness.” By the time you get to Hobbes, the common good is simply fear-inspired peaceableness. Rousseau tries to revive the concept along ancient lines but … well, that is another post.
The point is, from whichever angle you look at our problems, it’s modernity lurking behind every door and under every rock.
I agree, but this needs a fuller philosophical treatment, Esc.
I invite you to write that and I will publish it here as a guest post, because it’s pretty bloody important.
OK, I will try. So lazy though!
There is much of interest in ancient texts about women, too. E.g., the notorious looseness/sluttiness of the Spartan women. The contrast between Pericles’ mistress Aspasia and Socrates’ wife Xanthippe in Plato and Xenophon.
But my all time favorite is the little interlude on Theodote the courtesan in Xenophon’s Memorabilia (III 11.1-18). It is Socrates practicing “game” avant la lettre. I swear it is ALL there.
I want to write that up some day.
Good.
Just do it.
I am also lazy, which is why I stopped blogging a couple of years ago. It’s fine, until something bloody important comes along which needs treatment, and then one thing leads to another.
We need your voice, Escoffier.
Write the post, I will publish (or you can publish yourself) — but write the post.
Mr Escoffer:
Please do.
I’d like to read that post too. I have a couple books on the heresy of Modernism (from the Catholic perspective) but haven’t read them yet. So little time.
Nova, you explained very well why I don’t like calling this feminism. Feminists wanted women to learn to do without men, not to always have one or more boyfriends and then be desperate for marriage at 35. A woman defined by her LTRs isn’t any better than a woman defined by her marriage, to a feminist. And you can’t say, “Well, feminists just wanted women to be able to do whatever they want, and here we are,” because when women wanted to stay home with the kids, they weren’t okay with that. They had a script, and serial monogamy doesn’t follow it that much better than traditional marriage did.
My only problem with the river analogy is that people might take it to mean that we’re just dealing with the same old imperative to protect the weaker sex and produce and protect offspring, only gone haywire. I think it’s more than that, because much of what’s being pushed now has nothing to do with protecting women and babies. Abortion, artificial birth control, women in combat, women in the college/workplace — these all work against the biological goal of protecting those eggs and raising them to be the next generation. Every society that adopts the super-norm, to use your term, ends up with a below-replacement fertility rate.
That’s why I say the super-norm is about deferring to women’s whims rather than biology, and I’m not sure these whims were all in the upstream river all along. Some may have been, like a woman’s biological urge to “trade up” to a more dominant man. But others, like the desire to go work in a cubicle all day, surely came from somewhere else. So maybe I’d amend the analogy a bit: when the dam overflowed, the female side flooded into a nearby landfill and got polluted with bad ideas, which then flowed back into the main stream.
OK, I am going to go fast here, make a lot of unsupported statements, and not try to “prove” any of it. Apart from the fact that what I am going to say can’t be proved anyway, the attempt to do so would be so slow and labored and make the post so long that hardly anyone would read it.
Also—like Machiavelli with the Discourses—I am writing this because I’ve been asked to not because I planned to. So if anyone thinks it sucks, too bad.
The enemy is not feminism or the Enlightenment or corrupted Christianity or any of the other things discussed here and elsewhere. Those are enemies, to be sure, but they are second order phenomena. The real enemy is Modernity, with a capital “M.” All the others flow from that, either by design from modernity’s central premise, or as inevitable unintended consequences, or concious choices made by later thinkers, or as not-inevitable (evitable?) matters of chance that went against us. But for the most part the intellectual history of the west for the past 500 years has been the ever-deepening, radicalizing, doubling-down, etc. on modernity’s central premises. There have also been attempts to rescue modernity from this or that contradiction or fatal flaw, all of which have only made modernity more radical.
Modernity was a conscious choice of a few men who thought it up and offered it to the world. We tend today to think of the history of mankind and civilization as one endless upward arc of progress, but this is not so. Indeed, the very idea of progress in this sense is a modern invention. The ancient philosophers believed that history was cyclical, that states and even civilizations were born, thrived and died for knowable reasons and that this happened over and over. (Along with natural cataclysms that wiped out the memory of the past.) This same idea is present in Chinese philosophy.
Beyond this, I might also add that the pre-philosophic prejudice in the west was that older is better. The ancestral is the source of guidance and strength. The classical philosophers replaced this with the idea of the “good” which transcends time and place. That of course never caught on as an organizing principle of society but it was still intellectually very influential. Modernity replaces that with “newer is better” and everyone believes that, both because they have been propagandized to believe it and because of modernity’s two most successful children, science and technology. But I am getting a little ahead of myself.
Modernity arose as an attack on religiosity in general and against Christianity in particular. The early modern philosophers believed that the middle ages had been a time of stagnation and concluded that Christianity was the cause, so the solution was to kill it. It’s worth noting in this context how “memes” can change radically and be taken for granted. For instance, throughout middle and late antiquity, Rome was considered the dazzling pinnacle of human achievement. In fact, more historians of Rome were Greek (a people whom Rome conquered) than Roman. Then Augustine came along with City of God and in one fell swoop smashed Rome’s reputation to bits for 1,200 years. Part of the forgotten purpose of Machiavelli’s Discourses was to revive Rome’s reputation. A similar thing happened with the Middle Ages. Some early moderns picked up a stray comment of Petrarch’s about “dark ages” (when he was really referring to one subset of Latin literature) and constructed a whole meme about how the Middle Ages were the Most Dismal Time EVAR!! And most people still believe it to this day.
Now, you would not have wanted to go to the dentist in 1250 AD. But there was a lot to like. However, that’s a digression.
The point is, the early moderns partially rewrote history to make the past seem worse than it was. Maybe they really believed it, maybe they exaggerated for effect. Probably a combination. But they definitely hated Christianity and religiosity so it made sense from a “strategic” perspective for them to attack the Christian Middle Ages with vigor.
Now, this comes through very slyly at first. Machiavelli, everyone knows, is the philosopher of scheming evil yet to this day there is a huge body of scholarship which holds that he was a believer. Hobbes devotes part IV of Leviathan to an apparent attempt to reconcile the rest of his teaching with the Bible (but is in fact a very funny–if you can tolerate the blasphemy–account of why the two are irreconcilable and the rest of his teaching is “correct”). Locke appears quite religious on the surface, etc. With Spinoza it starts to come out into the open, with Montesquieu more so. By the time you get to Gibbon, Voltaire, Diderot, Hume and the like, they are taking for granted that they have won the argument and making potshots more or less in the open.
Now, I don’t think I need to explain to this audience why a sustained attack on Christianity helped lead to the moral mess we have today.
The philosophy is a little more complicated. I touched on some of it earlier. There are a number of enormous differences between ancient philosophy and modern philosophy, and I need hardly add that ancient philosophy informs medieval philosophy so for our purposes there is no difference.
THE key unifying element to all modern philosophy is the attack on the transcendent. Above all that meant God. The moderns take for granted that God does not exist and that all religious tradition is made up to serve the interests of the prelates. The “Enlightenment” is above all the project to dispel the last vestiges of religious belief and put all life and society on a basis of pure reason. The classics argued that such was impossible, for many reasons.
But the transcendent also meant other things. This is a long and involved argument but the nutshell version is “philosophy as a way of life.” Above every earthly concern was the whole, the universe if you will, but not merely the physical universe, the noetic universe. Man is the one being with logos, he is the being capable of investigating the whole and at least potentially understanding it. This places him on a higher plane than the animals it gives him a high purpose. From this the ancient philosophers derive the concept of teleology and natural right, which are natural bases for morality (i.e., they oppose one the one hand the cynical teaching that all right or morality is conventional or man-made, and on the other hand the pagan religious teaching that right has no other basis but the pronouncements of the gods or poets writing about the gods). Then there is the whole issue of the “idea” or eidos of the “the good.” Basically ancient philosophy is totally normative in approach, it begins from the common understanding of things and then tries to ascend from that to the truth. So it accepts man’s distinction of things into noble and base, pleasing and foul, and above all good and bad. “The good” is the highest thing, and not relative or conventional or a matter of personal preference, it actually exists independent of human creation or will, and is ultimately separable from the things we describe as “good,” and until we understand what that thing-in-itself really is, we don’t have knowledge of the whole or wisdom and you might even say often lack sufficient basis for action, so the thinking through what is the good must go on, which is why philosophy is ultimately a way of life and not a subject matter or a destination.
Modernity also attacks these sources of the transcendent. It laughs teleology out of court. It takes philosophy and transforms it from end-in-itself, quest-for-wisdom and into mankind’s servant. Machiavelli wrote of the conquest of Fortuna or chance. Bacon expanded that to the “conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate.”
The purpose was genuinely to make life “better” for people materially (there’s more to it than that but that’s the important one for our purposes). Since the moderns are all atheists and most of them materialists of one sort or another, this is all that matters to them. There is nothing else. You have one life, may as well live it fat and happy and satisfied.
There is more to it than that—e.g., Machiavelli spends a lot of time on glory and on “love” (trust me on the latter, it’s in his plays and poetry)–and these at first glance seem “higher” than the rank materialism of later moderns but on closer examination it turns out that Machiavelli is just trying to satisfy wants, not appeal to the transcendent. Glory is a want of certain men, indeed a higher want than plenty and security, and desire for it can result in resplendent deeds that are a credit to mankind (as any reader of Plutarch can see). Yet it is still in the end just an appetite or passion to be sated. Ditto Machiavelli’s conception of love, which I venture to say is not far from Roissy’s. That is, higher than mere lust but ultimately not on the plane of Biblical love or Platonic “eros.”
Now, this does not answer the question of where “rights” come from, which is an important question because “rights” are the prerequisite for feminism (as is, it should be clear, is modernity’s premise that satisfying human wants is the whole purpose of life). Short answer: they come from Hobbes. There is no conception of the “rights of man” in the ancient or medieval world. Nor is there any in Machiavelli. Rights arise with Hobbes. He derives them from the natural impulse that each man has to defend his own life when threatened. Man cannot control this instinct, nor would it be just to expect him to surrender his life, hence he has the “right” to defend himself.
But the deeper reason for the conception of “rights” is that modernity believes that a whole new basis for political “right” (which is different than “rights”) must be found once Christianity and revelation are gone. It had to be grounded in nature and not made up. Hobbes thought, and said, that he had come up with the first truly, firmly scientific basis for political right ever. All prior thinkers were phonies.
The classics, according to Hobbes (he studied Aristotle with a care unimaginable today), merely THOUGHT they had rationally understood politics. But tellingly they didn’t try to implement any reform proposals. Plato’s Republic culminates in a “city in speech” that all the participants in the dialogue admit will never be put into practice. Then the sun comes up and they go home. Aristotle sketches what a best regime would look like but does not make any recommendations, much less a manifesto, for making it happen.
Hobbes comes along and not only says “Do this!” but also “This is the ONLY rational scientific reliable basis for politics, ever.”
Hobbes’ “solution” to the political problem is simplistic and reductive by design, because he wanted to rule out all nuance and any possible appeal to a higher principle that might grant one an exception from the civil law in this or that circumstance. Hence he completely dismisses even the theoretical concept of an “unjust law” as a contradiction in terms.
I could on but instead I will try to sum up. EVERYTHING that bothers us here flows from these (and other) modern premises. Now, one might try to find some of the problems within religion itself, or in the misinterpretation thereof. E.g., Christianity raises the status of women, hence eventually leads to feminism. Or (this is a common Enlightenment argument): Christianity’s emphasis on mercy and forgiveness leads to permissiveness and the breakdown of order. (Montesquieu says this about Rome after Constantine.)
However, the far more proximate cause of our ills is modernity. Modernity holds that nothing is transcendent. The world is materialist/atomistic; there is no soul in either the Biblical or the philosophical sense. There is no heaven or hell, nor is there any “right” that is not ultimately derived from utility. Man is the measure. To the extent that life has a purpose (and really it doesn’t) it is to satisfy his wants. The individual is the fundamental unit, society only exists to serve his wants.
All the great “isms” of the past few centuries–liberalism, historicism, positivism, subjectivism, relativism, socialism, Communism, hedonism, feminism, multiculturalism and nihilism—flow from this.