I was writing a while back about why Nietzsche is wrong about "the priests" teaching us to hate ourselves: beyond good and evil, and all that.
Because, I argued, people living in the city need to work with strangers and they need to get beyond a simple notion of my kin right, your kin wrong. And one of the ways to do this is to think to yourself: "Hmm, maybe I'm not right about everything. Maybe that weird-looking guy has a point.
AntiFa please note.
But then I thought a couple of days ago that maybe, ever since we stopped being hunter/gatherers, we have needed to gussy up cultural rules. Because we are no longer living according to our great-ape instincts. First we had to learn how to be farmers and subordinate serfs. Now we have to be good faithful cogs in the industrial machine.
So my line this week is that once humans got beyond being hunter-gatherers living in a band then we had to frame up new rules for living in groups, because the instinctual rules that our genes are programmed with probably won't all work in the new order. But, because we were able to reason, we could construct new rules without waiting for the genome to catch up.
So when you look at religion, all religion, from the earliest cultivators down through the Axial Age religions to the modern "woke" religions of the campus and the protest march, they are all artificial cultural structures that we humans have built to help us live in the new world we have built.
This comes into particular relief for me because I have been reading manosphere stuff recently, including The Rational Male by Rollo Tomassi, The Decline of Males by Lionel Tiger, and also Bronze Age Mindset by Bronze Age Pervert. All these guys are trying to make sense of the present highly feminized culture.
Tomassi is saying that, since women have become ruthless hypergamists since the Pill and the sexual revolution released their inner slut, then men should stop being white knights and act like rough tough hombres. Bronze Age Pervert -- with many a Nietzsche reference -- suggests that we should get back to being pirates.
And Tiger, who is an academician and has a job to protect, proposes that maybe the culture is right and we don't need men any more.
When I read stuff that is off the reservation my mind starts to jump the fences too.
Let us take the Tiger world, and think about what it means that, back in the agricultural age, there were very clear rules about marriage, in which it seemed that the patriarchs ruled, and there was a clear division of labor between men that did the muscular stuff outside and women did the affective stuff, from sewing to child-minding and family relationships, inside. Yes but what did it mean? Did it really mean that the men ruled? I wonder, because in Victorian novels it seems that it is always the women that are most invested in promoting the best marriages.
Then we have the early industrial world in which married men were exclusively involved in work for wages outside the home 40 hours and more a week, surrendering almost all their wages to the wife, and the woman worked in the home and raised the children and related to the neighbors. So was that a patriarchal world where the men ruled the roost?
Now we have women all getting educations and careers, with the assumption -- that Lionel Tiger seems to accept -- that this is a good liberatory thing. Is it? Is it good for women when men start easing back on work? When they divorce their husbands, according to Tomassi, in order to hypergame to a better provider? When women are expected to have sex on the third date? When college students all get blind drunk before going out for the evening? Suppose this Brave New World is all a stupid mistake?
And I believe that we humans progress by blundering from one mistake to the next.
Here's an interesting note from Lionel Tiger. He suggests that in India, the infanticide of girls is primarily among Brahmin families, and the infanticide of boys is primarily among low-caste families. Could this be hypergamy at work, where it is difficult for Brahmin girls to marry up, and impossible for low-caste men to find anyone willing to marry?
See, I believe, with many others, that really it is women that are important and men that are expendable. But, I suspect, it is important for men to feel they are important because otherwise they will just take off and drink and whore and leave the women to get on with being important. In other words, human society has to figure out a way to keep men in the system contributing to society and helping get kids on the ground and provisioning the mothers until the kids get off the nest.
So, Sherlock, how would you set all that up in the modern post-industrial age? Honestly, I don't know, but I suspect that in 50 years things will look a lot different from now. Because I suspect that by then society -- high-status women, don'tcha know -- will have figured out that the current dispensation is a foolish mistake and that we need to honor men more. Not because men are better but because we need to give them a reason to stay in the game.
And the way you do that is by adjusting religion and morality and good and evil and make people believe it.
Because, I argued, people living in the city need to work with strangers and they need to get beyond a simple notion of my kin right, your kin wrong. And one of the ways to do this is to think to yourself: "Hmm, maybe I'm not right about everything. Maybe that weird-looking guy has a point.
AntiFa please note.
But then I thought a couple of days ago that maybe, ever since we stopped being hunter/gatherers, we have needed to gussy up cultural rules. Because we are no longer living according to our great-ape instincts. First we had to learn how to be farmers and subordinate serfs. Now we have to be good faithful cogs in the industrial machine.
So my line this week is that once humans got beyond being hunter-gatherers living in a band then we had to frame up new rules for living in groups, because the instinctual rules that our genes are programmed with probably won't all work in the new order. But, because we were able to reason, we could construct new rules without waiting for the genome to catch up.
So when you look at religion, all religion, from the earliest cultivators down through the Axial Age religions to the modern "woke" religions of the campus and the protest march, they are all artificial cultural structures that we humans have built to help us live in the new world we have built.
This comes into particular relief for me because I have been reading manosphere stuff recently, including The Rational Male by Rollo Tomassi, The Decline of Males by Lionel Tiger, and also Bronze Age Mindset by Bronze Age Pervert. All these guys are trying to make sense of the present highly feminized culture.
Tomassi is saying that, since women have become ruthless hypergamists since the Pill and the sexual revolution released their inner slut, then men should stop being white knights and act like rough tough hombres. Bronze Age Pervert -- with many a Nietzsche reference -- suggests that we should get back to being pirates.
And Tiger, who is an academician and has a job to protect, proposes that maybe the culture is right and we don't need men any more.
When I read stuff that is off the reservation my mind starts to jump the fences too.
Let us take the Tiger world, and think about what it means that, back in the agricultural age, there were very clear rules about marriage, in which it seemed that the patriarchs ruled, and there was a clear division of labor between men that did the muscular stuff outside and women did the affective stuff, from sewing to child-minding and family relationships, inside. Yes but what did it mean? Did it really mean that the men ruled? I wonder, because in Victorian novels it seems that it is always the women that are most invested in promoting the best marriages.
Then we have the early industrial world in which married men were exclusively involved in work for wages outside the home 40 hours and more a week, surrendering almost all their wages to the wife, and the woman worked in the home and raised the children and related to the neighbors. So was that a patriarchal world where the men ruled the roost?
Now we have women all getting educations and careers, with the assumption -- that Lionel Tiger seems to accept -- that this is a good liberatory thing. Is it? Is it good for women when men start easing back on work? When they divorce their husbands, according to Tomassi, in order to hypergame to a better provider? When women are expected to have sex on the third date? When college students all get blind drunk before going out for the evening? Suppose this Brave New World is all a stupid mistake?
And I believe that we humans progress by blundering from one mistake to the next.
Here's an interesting note from Lionel Tiger. He suggests that in India, the infanticide of girls is primarily among Brahmin families, and the infanticide of boys is primarily among low-caste families. Could this be hypergamy at work, where it is difficult for Brahmin girls to marry up, and impossible for low-caste men to find anyone willing to marry?
See, I believe, with many others, that really it is women that are important and men that are expendable. But, I suspect, it is important for men to feel they are important because otherwise they will just take off and drink and whore and leave the women to get on with being important. In other words, human society has to figure out a way to keep men in the system contributing to society and helping get kids on the ground and provisioning the mothers until the kids get off the nest.
So, Sherlock, how would you set all that up in the modern post-industrial age? Honestly, I don't know, but I suspect that in 50 years things will look a lot different from now. Because I suspect that by then society -- high-status women, don'tcha know -- will have figured out that the current dispensation is a foolish mistake and that we need to honor men more. Not because men are better but because we need to give them a reason to stay in the game.
And the way you do that is by adjusting religion and morality and good and evil and make people believe it.
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