Tag: feminism

The Anguish of Young Men in a Broken Society

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized1 Comment

There are a great many young men who feel lost and hopeless in the modern world and many of them spend a lot of time on the internet complaining about it. This tends to rub older, moderately successful men wrong—very, very wrong. (Very roughly: men in their mid-thirties or older who have a wife and at least one child.) I’ve wondered about this for a while because I find this reaction in myself—I start out sympathetic but I verge on angry most times I try to interact with such men. I think I’ve finally figured it out: it has to do with the traditional role of adult men in raising other people’s young men into manhood.

Good parents love their children unconditionally and this is incredibly important to children and their healthy development. However, as children make their way to being adults, they are going to have to face other environments than the environment of home; they will have to face indifferent and even adverse environments. For most of human history (and much of the present, outside of some atypical but decreasingly atypical situations), this was especially true of boys. Somebody had to fight the wild animals who wanted to eat one’s children; somebody had to fight the other human beings who wanted to kill one and take one’s things. Defending against these and many other threats were usually best done in groups, often of people near in age, and that means working with people who were not one’s parents and who love one only conditionally. Preparing a boy for these environments is usually best done not by the boy’s father, but by friends of the boy’s father, or at least other adults males of good will. These are mentors.

Mentors do not love the boy unconditionally, as his father does (in the ideal, at least), but are willing to be more generous to the boy than the boy is yet capable of deserving. This mentorship forms a bridge for the boy to become a man. When a mentor demands more independence of the boy, this does not prevent the boy going to his father for unconditional love; by giving the role of being generously and patiently harsh to another man, the father can be a source of support for his son when that is too difficult, restoring the son’s strength, and enabling the son to go back to his difficult work of becoming a man.

This role of mentor is a bit tricky, since it does involve carefully gauging what the boy is currently capable of and only asking of him what he can do—as opposed to asking of the boy what would most benefit the mentor, as one does with, for example, a plumber1. But it does involve challenging the boy and pushing him to be able to deal with circumstances in which he has no support right now, to get him to use his “emotional muscles” to self-regulate and be able to deal with difficult circumstances, so that those “emotional muscles” grow. Because the time is coming when it will not matter how the now-boy feels, it only matters how he will fight in a battle and protect his fellow soldiers, or chase away the wolves, or do the unpleasant work before bad things happen because the work is not done.

Older men who are at least moderately successful (I mean in absolute terms, not as a euphemism for being rich) have the instinct that they should look for older boys and young men who need this kind of mentorship to transition into being fully independent men, and to provide this kind of supportive-challenging environment to help them to grow.

But the thing is, this relationship is very much a mutual one. The boy has to enter into it wanting to become a man. He has to want to be challenged. He has to want to rise to that challenge. All students must, in the end, learn for themselves; a teacher can only give the student what he needs in order to learn.

When you put all this together, I believe this explains why young men complaining about how unfair society is in its current configuration rubs us older men so wrong. This may all be true, but it’s not helpful in learning how to become a man. And a boy is better off becoming a man even in a bad society—there is no society where boys are better off staying permanently childish. Coming to us rubs us so wrong because we’re not the ones that young men should come to for this kind of sympathy. In fact, it would (often) be actively harmful to them to if we gave it to them, because it would discourage them from finishing growing up.

We all have our roles in society according to our station in life. For older men, our role is to act as mentors like this to young men. When young men come to us for sympathy, it feels a bit like coming to us for what they’re supposed to—mentorship—but then they reject attempts at mentorship, which confuses and frustrates us. Young men aren’t supposed to look to mentors for sympathy—they’re supposed to look elsewhere for that. It may be entirely legitimate that they are looking for sympathy everywhere because they can’t find it anywhere, but it’s a problem that this actively gets in the way of us fulfilling our proper role of mentor.

I don’t know what the solution to this is. I doubt it’s for us older men to just to give up on mentorship and become surrogate fathers to younger men, because that would still leave them stunted in their development and unable to fulfill their potential. God knows the answer; I don’t. At least, not yet. But identifying a problem is the first step towards solving it, and I think that this is, at least, a correct identification of the problem.

  1. This is perfectly fair with tradesmen because the tradesman is a full adult who trades what is best for the customer in exchange for money, which the tradesman needs more than whatever minor comfort he gives up in doing the work he is skilled at. ↩︎

Feminism is a Mostly Useless Word

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Rhetoric, Uncategorized1 Comment

Most words have multiple meanings, but there are problems when you can’t tell the meanings apart by context. The word “feminism” has exactly this problem because it has been used to refer to people doing superficially similar things in the same contexts which are actually quite different. There have been many feminisms, some of which have been absolutely terrible (especially Marxist feminism). A full taxonomy of them would take more than a little time and probably not actually be very interesting, but there are two types that I would like to distinguish in order to illustrate this point: the feminism of the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments (in 1848) and 2000s era internet feminism.

The 1848 version of feminism was about the context in which there existed places in America where women could not own property in their own name (the legal context of mid-nineteenth century America was far more heterogenous than modern America) and in some places could not be legally held accountable for their own crimes. In fact, one of the articles in the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments was that it was not just that, in some places, a father or husband would be held legally liable for a woman’s crimes and not she herself. That is, they asked for a reform to the laws that would involve holding women criminally liable for their own crimes. (Please note: I am not, thereby, saying that this was all that was in the declarations of sentiments or that it was a perfect or an unalloyed good; I’m not interested in discussing that one way or another. My only point is that one of its major concerns was both legal rights and responsibilities, many of which amounted to bringing American law in line with European and especially British legal traditions, rather than innovating.)

By contrast, 2000s era internet feminism was largely selfish people telling obvious lies to justify why they shouldn’t have to treat people decently or even take the trouble of developing basic social skills. You can see this today in the wretches who complain about “emotional labor” and when you look into what they mean, it turns out that they’re talking about the work of living in a society and having to treat other people better than as chattel slaves.

Of course, I’m not saying to never use the word “Feminism.” My point is, rather, that one should rarely, if ever, use it in an unqualified way. When talking about some feminism, it would be much better to say things like “equal property rights feminism,” “suffragette feminism,” “Marxist feminism,” “sexual liberation feminism,” “2000s era internet feminism,” etc. It is more cumbersome, of course, but it drastically improves the likelihood of actually being understood; all the more so as many people are only familiar with some of these and if they’re not familiar with the one you’re talking about they’re going to assume it’s one of the ones they do know about. By adding the qualifiers, this will be especially helpful in this case as their reaction will be “what are you talking about?” rather than “you idiot.” “What are you talking about?” can be an excellent starting point to mutual understanding. “You idiot,” pretty much never is.

Clearing Plates at Family Gatherings

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized2 Comments

In America, Thanksgiving and Christmas tend to be occasions for family gatherings with a large meal. People often talk while they eat, and when people are done eating and only talking, it is extremely common to see the women of the family get up and start clearing the plates away while the males continue to talk. Around this time, a few unpleasant women who don’t understand human beings very well will write articles complaining about this. So for the sake of young people who might be taken in by one of those articles, I will explain what’s going on.

Unless you’re really into cooking, making thanksgiving dinner isn’t actually a lot of work. It takes perhaps fifteen minutes to put the turkey on a tray, season the skin, and put it in the oven at 325F for 3-5 hours (depending on size). Mashed potatoes or if you have better taste mashed sweet potatoes are another fifteen minutes of work. Bread, you can easily just buy at the store. If you’re not making it from scratch, add another fifteen minutes for the stuffing. Putting that all together, it’s an hour of work for a single person. That’s not trivial, but it’s not that much work. I’ve done significantly more work than that for minor dinner parties, and it’s not more work than one might do barbecuing food at a cookout. Cleaning up a dozen plates from a table is, if you’re doing it yourself, perhaps five minutes. If you have a dishwasher (as everyone who writes articles complaining that men talk instead of helping does), add another five minutes for scraping food off of plates and loading them into the dishwasher. If this is a major amount of work for you which might break you unless you get help, as the kids would say, you’re NGMI (not gonna make it).

Of course, that’s not what’s going on. Except for the occasional host with significant health problems—and the family member with significant health problems almost never hosts family gatherings—the host of family gatherings is not overwhelmed by the work involved and doesn’t need help. The reason why all the women help is because this is an expression of female social bonding. Identifying ways to help each other and helping unasked is a way that women reinforce their social bonds. When there’s nothing to do, asking, “what can I do to help” is a next best thing, which is why you will see it asked even when there’s obviously nothing to do to help. The point isn’t the actual work, but the affirmation of the social bond in the offer. This is also why the typical response is, “there’s nothing right now,” followed by a list of what’s going on. The point of this is not the actual inventory, but the affirmation of the bond by sharing concerns and implicitly inviting the other woman to help monitor them. (There’s actually a bit of an art to this because a woman can give offense by usurping some decision-making in her effort to help; young women generally watch their elders navigate this and learn the art by the time they’re old enough to take part as adults.) This is why when one woman gets up and starts to collect plates, the rest of the women jump up and start collecting plates too—they are affirming their social bonds by all working together.

This type of social bonding is markedly different from male social bonding, which can be readily observed at a cookout, where it’s traditionally the males who do most of the work. Males can, without giving offense, make a perfunctory offer of assistance to the male host, but mostly they don’t because assuming that another man can handle everything is a sign of respect. Further letting the male host do whatever grilling and other work is involved in hosting without interference is also an implicit sign of respect. Males will, however, make a point of hanging out with and talking to the host, because conversation about interesting subjects is a primary way adult males affirm social bonds.

So at the big family meal, when the women clean the plates together and the males keep talking, both are engaging in their sex’s typical form of social bonding. The two groups bond with each other by the men showing appreciation for the (in truth, quite small) labor of the women, and the women bond with the males by enabling the conversation which is maintained. The males can be rude by taking the generosity of the women for granted, the women can be rude by interrupting the conversation with work that can easily be left for after people are done talking.

The unpleasant women who write articles complaining about this dynamic at social gatherings are people with poorly developed social skills that don’t know how male social dynamics work and who assume that female social dynamics are the only social dynamics and so regard males as dysfunctional women. So they’re trying to guilt them into being functional women. (They’re also trying to parasocially bond with other women with poor social skills who don’t understand the full range of social dynamics by communal complaining.)

Unsustainable Things Give the Biggest Short-Term Benefits

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Change in dynamic systems always brings with it opportunities, and, in particular, unsustainable opportunities. These opportunities come from the mismatch between the parts of the system adapted to the new system and the parts which have not yet adapted. And unsustainable things usually give the biggest short-term benefits, which creates an incentive for people to instigate change in order to take advantage of the huge short-term benefits available before the system has adapted.

A simple example can be seen in the inflation or deflation of a currency. Let’s take deflation since it’s less common and less likely to have negative associations. In deflation, money is removed from an economy. The same amount of economic activity can go on as long as the price of everything lowers, and indeed this is what will eventually happen as the people who still have money offer less of it to others for goods and services and out of desperation they take it. The money then flows from the people who have it to the people who don’t, prices tend to lower, and we’re eventually back to where we started but with different numbers. Instead of the average wage being one Florentine per hour, it’s now half a Florentine per hour, and instead of a loaf of bread costing one Florentine it now costs half a Florentine. (Florentine is, I hope, a made-up currency purely for the purpose of illustration. It can be paper or gold or platinum, it doesn’t matter.) So the same amount of labor buys the same amount of bread, but the numbers have changed. We’re back to a stable situation, because a human economy needs (roughly) a certain relationship between the price of labor and the price of bread in order to function. It will go back to that. But what happened along the way? A lot of things, including a lot of suffering, but the relevant part here is a lot of opportunity.

If a person foresees the coming deflation, he will do what he can to save money, knowing that it will go up in value. He will forgo luxury goods and save, while he works extra hours to amass even more money. Then when the deflation hits he finally pays himself back, with all the money he saved buying twice what it would have back when he earned it. His new riches will only last with his savings; eventually he will have to go back to work and there will be the same relationship between his labor and the things he can buy with it as before the inflation. But while it lasts, he’s living high. And people who realize this will have a motivation to try to influence government policy to create deflationary periods. If his country is on a gold standard, he will have a temptation to help revolutionaries who want to sink ships carrying other people’s gold.

(We don’t see deflation nearly as often because far more people appreciate the potential for personal short-term benefit in inflation, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

You see similar opportunities for short-term gain in social changes as you do in economic ones, though because society is more complex and also more subtle than economics, these are often better disguised. Let’s take a simple case, though. Suppose a man in the 1950s desires to insert his penis to the vaginas of many women who, unlike him, are not interested in being promiscuous. The number of promiscuous women is irrelevant to this man since promiscuous women are, by hypothesis, not the object of his desire. If you need a story to make this more plausible, suppose that he is attracted to the feeling of conquest in bedding a woman who is saving herself for marriage, or if that is too old fashioned for you, who only feels sexual attraction within the context of what she beliefs to be a long-term relationship. In stable times, this will not work. His dreams of many such penis-insertions will result in very few actual insertions, and most of those will end up being with women who deceived him while he was trying to deceive them. He may, however, have the opportunity to realize his dream during times of social change.

If the social norms protecting women who are only interested in coitus within the confines of marriage or at least a long-term relationship are shifting, some of these women will rely on the old social protections while they are no longer being afforded and will, because of that, be easily deceived. To give a concrete example, suppose that women no longer tend to stay near family members but instead are exposed to unrelated young men whose reputation they do not know. Let us suppose, for example, that public schooling as been instituted and that automotive transport has brought a large number of people together, and moreover it has become normal for teenagers to use cars to go to places where none of their family are. While people are still getting used to this new normal, some young women may rely on reputation and their family not allowing males of ill intent near them to filter out the males of ill intent, and so a pretty face coupled with charming words may well convince her that she is consummating a marriage with him that they effected (the sacrament of marriage is confected by the couple, not by any priest or officiant) while he has simply lied to her because he is a bad man.

This state of affairs will not last; young women will, fairly quickly, learn to rely on different things to vet males than applied in their old environment. But during this transition, they will have none of these things, and some will be easy prey.

It is interesting to note, though few will care because people are naturally less sympathetic to males and even less so to bad males, that the changing social norms will also result in young women who are eager to be promiscuous having a better shot at this hypothetical male who only desires to insert his genitalia into women who wouldn’t want him if they knew what he was doing. During these hypothetical changes in social norms, he will be far more easily misled into thinking that all women are shrinking violets who object to using sexual intercourse like heroin because that might as well have been the case under the previous social norm and the exceptions were easy to spot.

When everyone gets used to the new circumstances, things will return to their previous difficulty, albeit with small modifications for differences in exact circumstance. People will develop new ways of getting to know a person’s reputation, people will treat strangers as unfiltered by people they trust, etc. etc. etc. There will be no lasting benefit, but there can be huge short-term benefits.

(Bear in mind that this example was a change in social circumstances that didn’t alter people’s fundamental preferences. It’s not an example of temporary sterilization. That will still cause changes that can be taken advantage of, but it also alters people’s fundamental preferences and the changes that will be adapted to are in things affected by it but not its direct consequences.)

The example I gave above was of a social change induced by a shift in (transportation) technology, which our hypothetical cad had no real control over. Yet even there, you can imagine, if he was sufficiently far-sighted, how he could champion government funding for roads as well as mandatory public schooling.

In practice, of course, the sorts of advocacy that people can have on social changes tend to be far more limited in effect and tend to look far more like simple bad advice. Loosen up, don’t be such a prude, you only want to treat sex like it’s not a safer form of heroin because the mean Christians are trying to control you, etc. etc. etc. These people are not, in the main, Machiavellian masterminds who are trying to create chaos to take advantage of it before they settle down. Mostly they are fools who think that the good times will last forever. In ten or fifteen years they’ll probably be writing op-eds about how great jumping off the cliff was but you don’t want to take things to their logical conclusion, you just want to keep falling forever because it’s a lot more fun. What they’re trying to do is to get the advantages of the change.

A big part of why they don’t realize that this is what they’re doing is because a lot of people never consider that human beings have two phases: childhood and adulthood. Childhood is a time of change, when human beings are easily molded. People can still change in adulthood, but nowhere nearly as easily. Accordingly, if you institute a social change in all of society, it will take far more hold in the young than in older people. The young will take it to its logical conclusions because they’re not held back by being stuck on adaptations to a previous order.

To give an example (painted with an absurdly broad brush), social norms were changed in the 1970s to where family, friends, and aquaintances no longer protected young women from the sexual advances of bad men. So for a decade or so, bad men could sexually harass women to their heart’s content and it was a cad’s paradise. But then young women who were raised without the expectation of social connections helping them adapted to the circumstance and sought the protection of law, and we had the crime of sexual harassment, as well as all sorts of corporate policies against it. And things went back to more-or-less normal.

As a brief aside, it is amusing to see people who grew up at just the right time think that the 1970s were representative of how society worked throughout all of human history up until some people agitated for legal protections. These people have clearly never watched movies from before the 1970s! Back then, important customers could get thrown out of an office for making advances on a secretary in terms sufficiently veiled that they’d never get past the initial stages of filing a sexual harassment lawsuit. Heaven help an employee who was sexually aggressive with fellow employees! This weird historical myopia is a subject for another day, but it is funny how people have managed to continuously think of their grandparents as downtrodden slaves and themselves as the first generation to be free for several generations in a row.

Anyway, the amnesiac attitude towards the developmental stages of human beings is often behind quite a bit of agitation for social change; the people doing the agitating only ever think about what things will be like when people set in the old ways partially change over, and are always shocked at what people who grow up with the changes do in order to lead human lives within the new order.

Admittedly, part of that is that people rarely adapt to change well within a single generation. They go to excess on some things and utterly miss out on others. It takes time to refine complex systems. The people having to do the adapting often suffer for it, too. Adults have fewer needs because their lives are already largely set; children have a ton of work to do in setting up their lives and will often do less of it due to the uncertainty of tumultuous times. The adults who advocate for social change thus reap more of the rewards and pay fewer of the costs, then blame the new generation for not doing as well as them. It’s a bit cheeky to burn the furniture then complain that people don’t sit down, but then most people are not philosophers.

One final note I should add is that none of the above means that social change is always and everywhere bad. Much of it is inevitable with a changing environment (such as is caused by developments in technology). Some of it is needed merely in order to fix the mistakes of the past. Indeed, as the paradox of Chesterton’s post states, you need constant change merely to be conservative. As he so rightly said, if you leave a white post alone, it will, in short order, become a dirty grey post. Only by continually repainting it white will you and future generations have a white post.

Change there must be, but it’s often best to limit it to fixing mistakes. And have a thought for the people who have to grow up in the new system because they won’t have the advantages of having grown up in the old one. Only their descendants will have that advantage, and only if the people who have to grow up in the new system don’t change it again.