The Intersection of Politics and Religion

I wanted to start this piece with a reference to an article I read a day or two ago about the intersection of politics and religion, and how problematic that is. But I can't find it.

Obviously politics and religion are inevitably intertwined. And that is as clear to me as ever since I read Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political where he defines the political as friend vs. enemy and the moral as good vs. evil.

Let us define an enemy as someone who is a physical threat, who might visit violence upon us.

Let us define an evil person as someone who is something less than a physical threat to us: someone who is a moral threat to the community.

The point is that an evil person is not necessarily an enemy, although an enemy is probably evil.

The problem is that the more anyone mixes up politics and religion the more likely they are to consider an evil person to be an enemy.

And the point about an enemy, as Carl Schmitt makes clear, is that "conflict," ultimately leading to killing, is inherent in the notion of "enemy."

We humans can argue all day about whether the chap down the street is evil or not. And that is pretty harmless, until we bring politics and government into the equation. Because government is force, and politics is Us vs. Them, Friend vs. Enemy, and ultimately the only safe thing to do with an enemy is to kill him. 

And that's the problem with our progressive friends. Once you have decided that the job of government has to do with justice, righting wrongs, then pretty soon you are labeling the unjust as people that need to have their heads chopped off. Hello Stalin, Hitler, and Mao.

Obviously, there is no complete separation of the political and the moral, or church from state. But I'd say that the whole point of the moral is to influence humans into doing pro-social acts short of actually threatening them physically to get their act together.

Put it another way. The reason he humans experience a thing called "guilt" is probably God's way of helping us avoid a lot of violent conflict. When we feel guilty we probably decide not to do something evil, or regret actually doing something that we come to understand as evil.

Inevitably the two -- the political and the moral -- will intermix, and there will always be a tendency for humans to regard someone they experience as evil as nothing less than an enemy.

And let us connect this with my notion of male honor and female honor that I got years ago from James Bowman's Honor: A History. Honor in men is courage, standing in line with the brothers against the enemy. Honor in women is chastity, or being a good little girl, as I like to sneer. "Don't be evil," as Google says. But you can see that honor in women also means holding together with the other women in the community and "not talking to" someone who is acting against the mores of the community.

So the question always comes down to this: is the obnoxious guy down the street causing enough of a problem to classify him as an enemy, and invoke the power of the state to compel him to observe social norms?

Does he have a couple of wrecked cars and a bunch of trash on his property? Is he building a mega-mansion that is three times the size of every other house on the block? Does he have loud parties that go on into the middle of the night? Does he steal the odd dahlia in high summer?

Then obviously there are things that have to be agreed if things are to work: driving on the right. Then there are nice-to-haves: keeping businesses out of a residential district. Then there smelly factories on the downwind end of town. Then there is the issue of pollution, factories that are not just smelly but emit substances that actually harm other living things. In other words what the economists call "externalities," activities that harm other people. And if you want to carry it to the limit, then there is the question of climate change, where fossil fuels are going to cause irreversible changes to the climate.

Hey! It's complicated!

But I would say that the "tell" is when the normal argument about good and evil escalates into the designation of the evil person as an "enemy."

And I would say that our liberal friends are a little too quick to designate political opponents as enemies. 

But I understand why. When you have merged politics and religion, as many of our modern belief systems do, then the difference between and evil person and an enemy becomes at best confused and at worse erased. The evil one is an enemy and the enemy is evil.

And what can you do with an evil enemy, except destroy him? Or her.

Nancy Pelosi's Darkest Hour

I've been wondering about our Democratic friends for a while, really going back to the 2000 election when Al Gore didn't concede a normal change election. By that I mean that it's normal for the voters to think it is Time for a Change after one party has had two consecutive terms of the presidency.

The exceptions merely prove the rule, where Michael Dukakis, he of the tank photo, lost to George Bush I.

My point is: what is their problem? Of course the other guys are going to win elections, the bums, especially after we've been in office for a couple of terms. But wait until next time. We'll show 'em, the bums.

Obviously, in 2000, and again in 2016, our Democratic friends didn't approach losing a normal change election in this quintessential male way.

My feeling is that this is explained by a deep and existential understanding in our Democratic friends that something has gone wrong in the political universe. The stars are no longer moving in their accustomed courses.

I think they are getting more and more desperate to hang onto power. Because they feel it slipping away. They don't know why. They just know that Republicans and white oppressors are evil and that Gaia wants them dead.

So now we come to Our Nance: Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Speaker of the House of Representatives.

What's it all about Alfie Nancee? 

What's the deal with endless committee investigations of Donald Trump and two abortive impeachment efforts? What in the world do you think you are doing with these nukings of the political system, Madam Speaker?

Well, I have a few ideas, based partly on my eevil sexism, and my understanding of the difference between honor in men and women, after Honor: a History by James Bowman.

According to Bowman, honor among men is the reputation for courage, and I think it issues from the necessity for men to stick together in battle and not run for the exits.

But honor among women is the reputation for chastity, he says. You can see why. There are enormous advantages for a woman in not spreading her favors around, for any number of reasons. But I think this culture of chastity in women goes way beyond sex, and especially applies to the reluctance of women to admit when they are wrong.

Yeah, I know. Men hate to admit when they are wrong. But women are worse, in my opinion.

When women lose an argument, or are exposed as less than pure in heart, they tend to lie about it, and they tend to be vindictive towards their opponents.

Oh, sure, men do that too, but with men vindictiveness is considered "bad sportsmanship."

I have extended this into a whole philosophy, that women do not like, do not relate, and cannot thrive in the "public square." Because women do not communicate in a kind of public "open outcry" of a public meeting. They communicate one-on-one over coffee, and judge the world through "I can't believe she said/did that" of "Much as I hate to say it..."

Also, I think that women are very bad at revising their world view when it starts collapsing about them. This is because I believe that very few women have "strategic minds." They are good at the tactics of manipulating the family and the community of women in the neighborhood on a day-to-day basis. But, with some remarkable exceptions, women just don't get strategy.

So, to me, all this explains Our Nance to a tee. Nancy grew up in a Democratic world, scion of an Italian political family in Baltimore, Maryland. It just does not compute that America is now 50-50 and Democrats can't just take the white working class for granted like in the Good Old Days.

It explains all her shenanigans, especially now in the Trump era, when the white middle class (and increasingly the East Asian middle class) is rebelling against half a century of vindictive ruling-class anti-white racism. At a strategic level, I just don't think Nancy understands what to do. So she does what comes naturally to a woman, which is to say nasty things about the other women in the neighborhood and "stop talking" to the women that offend her.

Miranda Devine has some nice takes in the NYPost on this.

If anyone is to blame for the hyper-partisanship in Washington these days, it’s the spiteful House speaker.

Everyone in Congress — and, by extension, the nation — has been sullied by the spite and vitriol she has injected into the political sphere. There is no grace or Christian charity, just the barren wasteland of the zero-sum game, power for power’s sake. 

Of course, the January 6 committee is at the center of this, and the unassailable fact is that Nancy Pelosi is the boss of Congress, and she "commands" the Capitol Hill police. So, if there weren't enough police on hand to defend the Capitol, Nancy is to blame. Period, end of story, no need for a commission.

Guess what: the one person that should not be running the January 6 investigation is Nancy Pelosi!

Now, the point is that the most difficult thing for a politician to do is to admit blame and, I would say, particularly so for a woman politician for the reasons articulated above in respect of honor in women.

There is a strategic reason why it is a good thing to admit when you are wrong. It clears the decks. It lets you get on with life. It lets you say: wow, we screwed that up, so let's make sure we don't do it again.

But if you don't admit when you are wrong you are trapped using all your energy to twist the facts around to absolve yourself of guilt and blame other people when you should be figuring out how to avoid the same mistake in the future.

So really, for me as a racist-sexist-homophobe, it is a Good Thing that Nancy Pelosi is tying herself in knots with her spitefulness and vindictiveness. It means that she will lead the Democrats into the wilderness, and let the rest of us figure out how to avoid the stupid Nancy Pelosi mistakes in the future.

One thing I, as a profound racist, wonder about is what happens when the current White-as-Snow Democratic leaders retire and are replaced by the quota People of Color and Gender. Just between you and me, I don't think the next generation of Democrats are up to snuff. Can you spell K-A-M-A-L-A?

Taleb on the Sacrificial Hero. But Whatabout Women?

I just finished up Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. Actually, it's a bit of a hot mess. The key concept, he says, is "ergodicity." What does that mean when it's at home?

Ergodicity: In our context here, ergodicity holds when a collection of players have the same statistical properties (especially expectation) as a single player over time... Absence of ergodicity makes the risk properties not directly transferable from observed probability to the payoff of a strategy subject to ruin...

But he does say something very significant that complements my Good Life philosophy, in which the highest, best person is the Sacrificial Hero, who dies that others may live. He writes that 

Courage is when you sacrifice your own well-being for the sake of the survival of a layer higher than yours.

He has a six-layer hierarchy as follows:

Ecosystem
Humanity
Self-defined extended tribe
Tribe
Family, friends, and pets
You

Now that fits right into my notion of courage being honor among men. The courage to fight a duel, I would say, is not a sacrifice for the survival of the group. Or, as I say, the Ego Heroism of Nietzsche's Übermensch is not the highest form of courage.

But, I thought, all this is guy stuff. Whatabout women, you sexist? As we know from James Bowman's Honor: A History, honor among women is the reputation for chastity: broadly, the reputation for being a good little girl. So how would women fit into Taleb's notion of courage as sacrifice for the bigger community?

I was pondering this in the middle of last night, as I am wont to do. And the answer from my unconscious came pretty quickly. The answer is: Forgiveness. 

If women don't forgive, then the community of women is all bollixed up with destructive Mean Girl competition and the seminal "I can't believe she said that." Because women play-acting at chastity are the first to name, shame, and shun other women as whores. And as we know, women can hold a grudge for a lifetime.

Indeed, I remember distinctly a acquaintance reciting how, whenever he did something wrong, his wife would rehearse The Catalog of all the things he had done wrong since he and his wife first met 40 years ago -- for which she had still, it appears, not forgiven him.

This notion came upon me pretty strongly while watching the Polish movie version of Quo Vadis: a Narrative of the Time of Nero. In the DVD version it is a six-part series. 

Quo Vadis is all about Nero sending the Christians to the lions after Rome burned. The book was originally written by a Pole, Henryk Sienkiewicz, so you can see why the post-communist Poles would be eager to do a movie version.

But the big scenes occur when someone does something really bad and St. Peter forgives them in the name of God. This concept of forgiveness absolutely knocks everyone for a loop in good old pagan Rome. They never heard anything like it in their lives.

But that's the highest thing for you, ladies. Forgiveness. But whatabout a recipe for living?

Taleb has a three-point program for a guy to live as if he had Skin in the Game:

1. Never engage in virtue-signaling
2. Never engage in rent-seeking
3. You must start a business

Obviously, this is a guy thing. But whatabout for women? As a starter, I would say

1. Never engage in virtue-signaling
2. Never say "I can't even!"
3. You must learn to forgive

Whaddya think of that, sports fans?

Hamnet and "A More Feminine Sensibility"

As I keep writing, I read, years ago, the German sociologist Georg Simmel who wrote that while the public square -- Öffentlichkeit in German -- was invented by men for men, the emergence of women into the public square starting in the 19th century meant that women would start to change the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

I pondered that for a few years but have since come to believe that women don't relate to the public square, not at all. The public square is a relic of the duel, the fight between two men for dominance, only conducted today with words rather than fists. That is not how women live, or interact. As I say, women communicate one-on-one over coffee and in that conversation they do not disagree with each other, not at all. They talk about other women, as in "I can't believe she said/did that." The public square is not just a thing invented by men for men. It is inaccessible to women because they are women and their brains are wired differently.

So whenever I read a woman author I am thinking about her world-building: how does she present her women characters? Are they presented as just like men only better, like Mulan or a thousand martial-arts female heroes in the movies of the last two decades? Or are they handmaid victims in The Handmaid's Tale? Or what?

Recently a friend gave me a copy of Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague by Maggie O'Farrell, an Irish-born writer that seems to have worked her way up in the Brit world as a journalist. The book is about the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet, as experienced by Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway, of the well-known cottage.

Hathaway -- called Agnes in the book -- is not your regular feminist kick-ass heroine. Instead the whole book is about her feelings and emotions: what it was like when she first had sex with our Will, what it was like to be left behind in Stratford with the in-laws when Will went to London. And above all what it was like when her beloved son Hamnet dies of the plague and our Will heads back to London after a couple of days: things to do, people to see. And what it was like when Will wrote and produced a play called Hamlet.

Considering that Maggie O'Farrell lives and works in the liberal and woke environment of Brit journalism -- being at one point "deputy literary editor of the Independent on Sunday" -- it is remarkable that she writes a book so free of feminist cant and orthodoxy. And it makes me feel that the worm is turning, and that high-status educated women are starting to get beyond the fantasy of competing mano-a-mano as "independent women" with men in the public square. Instead these high-status women are realizing that the life of a woman just isn't anything to do with strutting your macho stuff on the public stage. It is about who you love, who you hate, who you look after, who you mourn, and what you feel about the day-to-day events of life -- oh, and, of course, the kind of people you invite to dinner.

Now, of course we know, with Curtis Yarvin, that for people in the educated Gentry life is all about "ambition, honor, and vanity." So well-born women are still going to be all about that, only of course, in the feminine sense of ambition, honor, and vanity. And don't forget from Honor: a History by James Bowman that honor among men is the reputation for courage, and honor among women is the reputation for chastity -- or as they say over at Washington Examiner, "Am I a good person?"

Nobody should doubt the emotional wear and tear that come from living a life in a male skin suit, doing that male swagger and male hierarchy thing while still being a woman inside that instinctively is programmed to life a completely different life.

I've been appreciating this more and more from reading Jung and his notion of the battle between the unconscious mind and the conscious mind. When you remember that almost the whole animal world lives only by the instinct and stimulus and image-making from the unconscious mind -- or whatever it is that prompts ants to ant and swallows to swallow -- it helps you appreciate that we humans, that have distinguished ourselves from all other animals by our conscious mind, are still complete beginners in the consciousness game. And, to use Jung's emphasis on the importance of dream analysis in understanding the operation of the unconscious, every time we fall asleep the unconscious mind rears its head and rushes forth from the shadows on to center stage and performs a little playlet, starring the archetypes.

So, I would say that the worm is starting to turn on the women-in-the-public-square front. But don't get your hopes up. Not yet. Not for a while. But it is a start.

What is the Good Life Better than the Left -- for Women?

I've established to my own satisfaction that the meaning of "life, the universe and everything" for educated male Gentry or People of the Creative Self is symbolized by the notion of the Sacrificial Hero that comes through the Nietzschean/Jungian tradition, and through adepts like Joseph Campbell and Jordan B. Peterson.

But whatabout women?

Truth is, women are not into heroes. You can see that in the whole "safety culture" that powers the "cancel culture." If you make me feel unsafe, well, your words are hurtful and you should be canceled. We have seen this in the resignation of Bari Weiss at The New York Times.

This safety thing, to me, is a girl thing. Being safe, intellectually and emotionally, is not something that occurs to a guy. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." That's the guy approach to wordplay.

And this takes us back to Georg Simmel's prediction a century ago, that with women coming into the public square, they would transform it to suit "a more feminine sensibility." I have been thinking about this for a few years and have come to the conclusion that women don't relate to the public square; they aren't comfortable at all with a frank and fair exchange of views; they don't believe in "debates." That's because women that have a disagreement don't have it out woman to woman. They complain to their friends about the woman they have a problem with, and the whole thing gets massaged by the neighborhood community of women and spat out, eventually in some collective decision of naming and shaming and shunning.

The proof of this is the "safety culture" that is emerging in universities and in the prestige media as women take over. Most of your university students these days are women; most of your university administrators these days are women. And it certainly seems that most of your young journalists are women. That is why you see the rise of the "safety culture." Women expect to be "safe;" they insist on being safe. Being a hero doesn't make sense. Not to a woman.

(Yes I know. There are exceptions. I know a few of them, personally).

So what is "best in life" for a woman?

The answer, I believe, issues out of the basic concept of honor among women. As James Bowman writes in Honor: A History, 

[In] spite of the discrediting that honor has undergone, the basic honor of the savage -- bravery for men, chastity for women -- is still recognizable beneath the surfaces of popular culture what has done so much to efface it. If you doubt it, try calling a man a wimp or a woman a slut. (p.5)

I think the woman's notion of honor comes out in the #WeBelieve yard-sign which usually closes with "Kindness is Everything."

Then, of course, we turn to My Girl George Eliot, Mary-Ann Evans that was. In Adam Bede, the heroine Dinah Morris is the kindest and most thoughtful person in the world. She is always thinking about other people and how she can help them. Her antagonist, Hetty Sorrel, is the most selfish person in the world who thinks of nothing but her beauty, her self-adornment and herself. You can see the question of chastity in women blazing across the sky: goodness, thoughtfulness, kindness.

In Middlemarch we have a rainbow of young women exemplars, from Dorothea Brooke, who really wants to do good in the world, to Rosamond Vincy, who is completely selfish and cannot see out of her needs and her truth of her eternal innocence, to Mary Garth, the Mary-Ann Evans name-alike, who is not to be dislodged from her determination that Fred Vincy has to deserve her before she will accept him as her affianced husband. Dorothea is the kindest, noblest, most thoughtful young woman in the world, and yet, as her uncle Mr. Brooke might say, she has a tendency to "go too far." Rosamond is a peerless beauty, yet frozen in place, determined never to do anything wrong, yet unable to see the wrongness of her mindless selfishness and sense of entitlement. Mary Garth is the balance between the two: kind but firm; thoughtful but not yielding; good, but no pushover.

So, after the alpha and omega of womanhood in Adam Bede George Eliot in Middlemarch gives us a spectrum of women and the opportunity to reflect on the question of woman's honor in more depth and breadth.

Now let us think about how this works out in the context of the modern educated woman in the educated Gentry or the People of the Creative Self.

Clearly, for such women, the need is for something original, something that steps out of the Commoner context of being good and kind and thoughtful by following the rules, going to work, obeying the law. We are trying here to think outside the box of goodness, thoughtfulness, and kindness, all the while avoiding falling into the trap of becoming a Lady Bountiful.

So, obviously, our Dorothea/Dinah/Mary would not be doing conventional things such as nice liberal women do, just aping the current liberal line and doing good, being kind and thoughtful and Lady Bountiful around the usual liberal victims.

In other words, the role of the creative good/kind/thoughtful woman is hard, as the role of the male Sacrificial Hero is hard.

OK. We have solved the whole problem and the future of womankind is set for the next millennium.

But what shall we call this paragon of femininity, the name, the feminine ideal corresponding to the male Sacrificial Hero.

Frankly, I don't have a clue. So I will just lay the question aside and leave it to my Jungian unconscious to rummage around in its archetypes to come up with the right answer.

Honor -- Table of Contents

Honor in Men and Women

1. Hypocrisy Week
   
   
2. The Three Principles of Government
   
   
3. The Real Meaning of Honor
   
   
4. The Age of Anti-Heroes and Anti-Modesty
   
   
5. Back to Basics
   
   
6. What About That Mean?
   
   
7. Bergdahl: Obamis Just Don't Understand Honor
   
   
8. Then and Now: "And Mary Pondered These Things in her Heart"
   
   
9. Chelsea Clinton Proves My Two Cultures Theory
   
   
10. Are Women The Big Problem?
    
    
11. The Wages of Women in Leadership
    
    
12. The Pure Theory of Tribalism
    
    
13. A Public Square with a "More Feminine Sensibility"
    
    
14. Melinda Gates Validates My Theory of the Sexes
    
    
15. Which Is Worse: Trump's Insults or The Racist Canard?
    
    
16. Looking at the Good Side of My Culture-of-Insult/Culture-of-Complaint Notion
    
    
17. What is the Good Life Better than the Left -- for Women?
    
    
18. Hamnet and "A More Feminine Sensibility"
    
    
19. Taleb on the Sacrificial Hero. But Whatabout Women?
    
    
20. Nancy Pelosi's Darkest Hour
    
    
21. The Intersection of Politics and Religion
    

Looking at the Good Side of My Culture-of-Insult/Culture-of-Complaint Notion

Here was I, cruising along unconcernedly as a seagull with my notion of the male Culture of Insult and the female Culture of Complaint when suddenly I realized I had got it all wrong. Or at least only half right.

Because the male Culture of Insult and the female Culture of Complaint are only half of the story.

And I shoulda known it. What a fool! Fortunately my unconscious mind got me sorted -- as the Brits say -- about 4:00 am a couple days ago. Really, what would we do without our unconscious minds pointing out the "glitch" in the Matix?

What I realized was that, with the notion that honor in men is courage, according to James Bowman in Honor: A History, that there are two sides to the coin. Let's reproduce the key quote again.

[I]n spite of the discrediting that honor has undergone, the basic honor of the savage -- courage for men, chastity for women -- is still recognizable beneath the surface of popular culture that has done so much to efface it.(p.5)

(But as late as the movie On the Beach in 1959, with Gregory Peck as the captain of a nuclear submarine in the aftermath of nuclear Armageddon, the male characters are all constructed around the courage archetype and the female characters around the chastity archetype.)

Obviously, I now realize that male honor -- courage and the reputation for courage -- comes in two cultures. There is the positive side and the negative side. There is the Culture of Courage in the Hero and there is the Culture of Insult in the Adversary. I get that from Jordan B. Peterson in his Maps of Meaning.

So, when men are hurling insults at each other, they are not as good as they could be. Because the Man of Courage, the Hero, is above all that.

Hmm. And here I have been encouraging men to throw the insult of racism right back in the face of the pathetic liberal pejorator (perjorator is one who hurls pejoratives: I just coined it). Obviously, in the Culture of Courage, our Hero would not throw the insult right back. On the other hand he would not cringe either, and whine that he was not a racist, no, because some of his best friends are black. Still, to throw an insult at a vile liberal pejorator requires a significant degree of courage, particularly if the liberal pejorator gets in touch with HR and gets you fired.

But what would the pure Hero, sans peure et sans reproche, do? I'll have to think about that.

Now let's get to the female side of the equation, where honor is chastity and the reputation for chastity. Here, obviously, we have a Culture of ChastityPraise and a.Culture of Complaint. But whatabout the archetypes? I don't know where this will end up, but I think we have to start with Good Girl and Mean Girl. The practitioner of the Culture of Praise is the Good Girl, the Virgin, that is pure and innocent and sees nothing but good around her. The practitioner of the Culture of Complaint is the Mean Girl, of high school memory, who is always poking holes in the chaste pretentions of the other women in her community of women. That, after all, is what the iconic "I can't believe she..." remark is all about. Don't imagine that the the girl next door is a sweet innocent, 'cos I got the goods on her.

The point about the Hero and the Culture of Courage is, to return with Bowman to the savage, the defense of the border which can be psychologized into the border between Order and Chaos. The point about the Good Girl and the Culture of Praise, with Bowman, is the management of the hearth and home. If we go back to our chimpanzee friends, the males are defending the band's territory so that the females can bear and feed and rear the baby chimps. That's according to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn. The Good Girl is doing all the things that need to be done about the hearth -- Latin: vesta, as in Vestal Virgins -- or, as we say, keep the home fires burning.

The point is that in the Culture of Praise the Good Girl is getting on with the things that need to be done with good cheer, while in the Culture of Complaint the Mean Girl is busy critiquing all the other women because they aren't doing the things that need to be done, according to the judgement of the Mean Girl. The Mean Girl is perfect, of course.

So, in this analysis, the Culture of Insult and the Culture of Complaint are both perversions. The Insulter is faking the courage of the Hero, and the Complainer is faking the innocence of the Good Girl.

Notice that Insults and Complaints are easy peasy; anyone can do them. But what does the courageous Hero do? What does the chaste Good Girl do? Good question.

See, living the life of Courage or of Praise is hard. That's why the Hero has to go on a Hero's Journey to find out what it really means to be a hero. And the chaste Good Girl? Despite the pretensions of the Heroine's Journey and all those unbelievable superheroines around these days, the life of a woman is lived moment to moment; she doesn't get to go off into the underworld for a spell. That is why women are eternally agonizing about the right thing to do. There's a word women use for this, but I have forgotten it.

Well, obviously this is just the start. Who knows where it will lead?

Which Is Worse: Trump's Insults or The Racist Canard?

We all know that all educated suburban women are disgusted with -- cannot believe! -- the crudities of President Trump, the Twitter Insult Dog.

But I have a question for you educated suburban women. What do you think about the lefties in our land that think nothing of calling anyone with an opinion they don't like of being a "racist?"

Which is worse? A presidential insult? Or the admission that when you are a billionaire, women will let you pet them in the crotch?

Or being accused of being a "racist" the Summum Bonum of the Pejorative Culture?

Now, I would think that there is no contest. A few insults on Twitter, about Slow Joe Biden or Pencil Head Schiff, are just joshing among the guys, the kind of thing that is normal and natural on, say, the locker room and the golf course.

But I realize that among women such insults are experienced in a conversation at the coffee shops as "I can't believe he said that." An abomination!

Whatabout the accusation of "racism?" Isn't that much, much worse? Particularly if it means that your husband loses his tech industry job because some woke HR woman had it in for him?

OK, ladies, I'm waiting for your answer.

I was thinking about this, as one does when you have had an idea for a blog and haven't yet written it.

And then I thought, OMG. Yes, even I say OMG from time to time.

Because I realized that the question of honor among men, and honor among women, as developed by James Bowman in Honor: A History applies here. And how!

Bowman's simple dictum is that honor among men is the reputation for courage; among women honor is the reputation for chastity. Or, to quote Bowman directly:

[T]he basic honor of the savage -- bravery for men, chastity for women -- is still recognizable beneath the surfaces of the popular culture that has done so much to efface it. If you doubt it, try calling a man a wimp or a woman a slut.

Now, Bowman develops the idea that the institutionalization of society leads to a situation where the honor culture of bravery among men gets diluted by the presence of women and the substituting of police and courts for the revenge culture of the tribesman or the gang member.

In fact, following Nietzsche, we could say that Christianity and "the priests" have switched entirely the bravery culture among men for the good vs. evil culture among women. And what, says Nietzsche, would happen if good finally triumphed over evil, so there was no evil in the world, but only good? What then?

So here is what I think. I think that, indeed, it has been necessary and appropriate to diminish the honor-as-bravery culture among men and dilute it with the chastity culture among women, so that men become good little boys in the peaceful market economy.

But whatabout women? And here I return to the prophecy of Georg Simmel from a century ago, who understood that things were going to change, what with women emerging out of the home.

Obviously, Simmel wrote, the public sphere, the world outside the home, in the short term would still be defined by men for men, but in the long term women would transform the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility." 

But do you know, I am coming to think that the opposite is true, and that women in the public aquare will have to adapt to a more masculine sensibility. In other words, following Nietzsche, they will have to acquire something of the culture of the Übermensch, the "free spirit:"

Who will prove to be the strongest in the course of this? The most moderate; those who do not require any extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede, but love a fair amount of accidents and nonsense… human beings who are sure of their power and represent the attained strength of humanity with conscious pride. 

I don't think you can thrive in the public square unless you are a person "sure of their power" and someone that can not just endure but "love a fair degree of accidents and nonsense."

Now, it seems to me that the women's culture of chastity demands absolute purity. You are not allowed to make mistakes; you are not allowed to push against the community of women that define what "good" is in your community. In this sort of culture it makes perfect sense to name, shame, and shun people who are not perfectly chaste in all their actions. That's all very well in the private women-only culture of the tribe, where men live in a different world of war and hunting.

But the modern public square cannot be a perfect moment of chastity maintained to eternity. It is a roiling mess of accidents and nonsense, and that's just on a normal day. Why is this? Because the public square is the old world of tribal warfare and defending the border that has been civilized into the market economy and democratic politics.

So I say to educated suburban women: if you don't like the male honor culture of Trump, and insist of enforcing the name and shame and shun culture of "she's a racist-sexist-homophobe" then you had better retreat from the public square and live in a male-provided safe space.

And one thing is for sure. You are not a liberated woman.

Melinda Gates Validates My Theory of the Sexes

Over the course of a rather sheltered life, I have come to believe two things about men and women. Men have a Culture of Insult; women have a Culture of Complaint. That is to say: men and women are not equal; they are different.

The men's Culture of Insult is obviously related to the question of Honor. As related by James Bowman, in Honor: a History, honor among men is the reputation for courage, the courage to stand in line with his brothers in battle. To publicly doubt a man's courage is an insult that must be defended. Thus the Culture of Insult, in which men cunningly doubt each other's courage, but below a threshold that must be defended by force of arms.

Women, as I said, are not equal; they are different. Honor among women is the reputation for chastity, and I mean this not just in the sexual sense, but in the larger sense of being a good little girl that never does anything wrong. Thus the women's Culture of Complaint, in which one woman complains to a second woman about a third woman's behavior.

Don't doubt me on this. Just go abroad with an open mind, and see how often I am right.

Enter good little girl Melinda Gates, wife of the billionaire. She's a feminist, dontcha know. (But not so much of a feminist that she has forsworn hypergamy). Oh no. Not that!

According to Nicholas Kristof (H/T Steve Sailer) Melinda found the office culture at Microsoft toxically masculine.

One of Melinda’s first challenges came in the harsh, male-dominated techie culture at Microsoft. “It was just so brash, so argumentative and competitive, with people fighting to the end on every point,” she writes.

See what I mean? Culture of Insult, going full throttle, pedal to the metal. And Melinda as a woman didn't like it.

So what did she do? She complained to another woman.

Then she found a woman colleague, Charlotte Guyman, who felt the same. “It’s not O.K. for women to cry at work, but it’s O.K. for men to yell at work?” Guyman once asked.

Or, as I like to put it, Charlotte complained to Melinda, "I can't believe the way that the men yell in meetings."

Believe me, I am not making this up.

Which brings me to my Georg Simmel gambit, that women coming into the public square would adapt it to suit "a more feminine sensibility." That is exactly what Charlotte and Melinda proceeded to do at Microsoft.

With other women employees, they began to create oases in Microsoft where courtesy was not seen as a sign of weakness. A critical mass of women employees helped civilize the company.

Am I right or am I right?

Now my second-hand take on Bill Gates -- what I have heard -- is that he was a holy terror in meetings. If you brought some idea or project to him that wasn't up to snuff he would say that it was the most stupid thing he had ever heard. I dare say he is still like that, unless the fair Melinda is in the room.

But here is the question. Was it a good idea for Charlotte and Melinda to "civilize" Microsoft? I'd say: it depends.

The point about Bill Gates and also Steve Jobs is that they were both impossible people heading up tech startups that changed the world.

Bill Gates' effort with MS-DOS enabled IBM to put its PC into every office. I was there; it was transformative. And then Gates did it again with Windows. What about Microsoft in recent years? Well I'd have to say that it is steady as she goes. In the 15 years from 2000 to 2015 the stock went sideways. Now it is going exponential again, under South Asian management.

What about Apple? Under the turbulent leadership of Steve Jobs, it produced amazing products, and magnificent failures, but ended up with the earth-shattering technology in the iPod and the iPhone. All the evidence is that Jobs was impossible to work with: not "civilized" at all. And since Jobs' death? Well, right now it is doing fine under the civilized leadership of Tim Cook.

What does it all mean? I think it means this. If you are talking about business startups, you are talking about men. If you are talking about steady as she goes, you are talking about introducing a more feminine sensibility into corporate culture.

Then there is this. Joseph P. Schumpeter described capitalism as a process of "creative destruction." In other words each technological revolution that transforms our lives is built on the wreckage of the old technology and the old ways.

If women had been in charge we would not have experienced the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years.

In my view men are adapted to the creative destruction aspect of things, and women are more adapted to the preservation of things. This is unremarkable, since the job of men is to defend the border, even unto death, and the job of women is to bear children, to stay alive and keep the home fires burning until the children leave the nest.

“Bill and I are equal partners,” Melinda Gates said. “Men and women should be equal at work.”

That is not what Charles Dickens thought. His Mathew Bagnet, former soldier, basically deferred to his wife -- "the old girl" -- in all things. But never admitted it: "discipline must be maintained" he told his army pal Sgt. George in Bleak House.

And frankly I think that Chuck knew a lot more about the world than Good Little Girl Melinda Gates whose main claim to fame will always be that she married the richest man in the world. The old-fashioned way.

A Public Square with a "More Feminine Sensibility"

Some years ago I read the prediction of German sociologist Georg Simmel about women in the public square:

Obviously, Simmel wrote, the public sphere, the world outside the home, in the short term would still be defined by men for men, but in the long term women would transform the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

Of course, I said to myself, that makes complete sense. But what exactly would a public square with "a more feminine sensibility" look like? Ever since I have tuned my cultural antennae to be looking for signs and portents.

I last took a look at this in December 2017.

Let us examine the question again, and let us start with the question of honor, from Honor: a History by James Bowman.

According to Bowman, honor is very different for men and for women.  Honor for men is a reputation for courage, in particular the reputation for standing in line with your brothers-in-arms and not breaking line and heading for safety. Honor in women is a reputation for chastity, and I do not mean just sexual chastity, but the broader question of never doing anything wrong, never having made a mistake.

In my view, the notion of chastity in the public square is a problem, because the only way to avoid making a mistake is never to do anything.

And there is another thing. Men bring their masculine sensibility to the public square, both the good and bad. For instance, men have an insult culture, by which they playfully insult each other. This can be good, if insults are truly playful, or bad, if the insult hits a bit too close to home and leads to fisticuffs or the blood feud of the Hatfields and the McCoys.

It stands to reason, therefore, that women bring their feminine sensibility to the public square, both for good and for ill. For instance, women have a complaint culture by which two women chatting together will impugn a third woman: "I can't believe she said/did that." This can be good if the complaint is true, or bad, if the complaint escalates into a mean-girl ganging up on some individual woman in the kind of operation that has come to be called a witch hunt.

It seems to me that these two cultures, the insult culture and the complaint culture, represent two very different ways of dealing with social conflict.

I would say that the political system, with its eternal exchange of insults, is almost irredeemably male. How do you modify it to suit "a more feminine sensibility?" and the underground system of complaints about third parties?  The legal system, with its process of prosecution and defense, is as male as can be.

You can see "a more feminine sensibility" in the politically correct culture of today's university campus, where the students -- and I suspect  the administrators -- are now majority female. It is clear to me that the notions of "microaggression" and "safe spaces" represent "a more feminine sensibility" on campus. Women on campus are saying that it is unacceptable for a woman ever to be offended or challenged by another person. But notice that the effect of the microaggression/safe space" culture is to eliminate any discourse that might be construed by sensitive souls to "give offence."  How, for instance, does a group of people on  today's campus represent their experience of injustice if the feminine powers-that-be determine that their "peaceful protest" "gives offence?"

It seems to me that the male insult culture accepts that there will be disagreements between men that need to be publicly acknowledged and worked out. But if you ask me the women's complaint culture will tend to marginalize disagreements, and has no way of resolving disagreement. The mean girls rule, because they monopolize the air waves, and too bad for the rest of us.

For instance, all the women Democratic representatives dressed up in white at the recent State of the Union speech by President Trump. So how does that make the Republican women feel? Isn't this kind of behavior a microaggression that would make non-lefty women in Congress feel unsafe? Doesn't it send a message to all and sundry that you are either with us or against us?

And if we are talking about white uniforms, what about the KKK? Are we to understand these Women in White as the new street-thug department of the Democratic Party, just like the KKK was in the Jim Crow South?

I think the whole question of women in the public square is a huge issue, and we have just begun to scratch the surface.

The Pure Theory of Tribalism

I was writing a piece about patriotism vs. nationalism, and experiencing them as "fake tribalism" over the weekend, and in the middle of it got started into Amy Chua's World on Fire and her "market-dominant minority" meme. Her notion is that economically successful minorities like the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia tend to find themselves cast as the enemy of the impoverished ethnic majority. Well, not exactly. It is more that democratic leaders "opportunistically whip up hatred against the resented minority" and propose to loot them and return the country's wealth to the "true owners of the nation."

Why not just say that all political leaders need to establish themselves as the protectors of "us," our tribe, and thus almost inevitably need to advertise a threat from "them," real or imagined, for which the leaders propose to mobilize us in order to prevent our annihilation by the threatening foe. If you are a nationalist leader of a nation not actually threatened by the Huns or the Mongols or the Commies then you have to invent a threat, otherwise what's the point?

So let us begin.

Humans are tribal. We are tribal because hunter-gatherers needed to protect their "patch of land" (as they put it in the Creation story in Fabian Essays in Socialism) from the neighboring tribe. The way this works is that the tribal leader is the first in a band of brothers that unite to fight to protect the patch of land from the enemy. They must fight to the death because if they lose they will be slaughtered by the enemy tribe next door, and their women and children taken over by the neighboring tribe.

Actually, it turns out from War Before Civilization by Lawrence H. Keeley that hunter-gatherer tribes did not have pitched battles, because they could not afford the casualties as we can. Instead they had dawn raids and massacres, both driven, I imagine, by the advantage of surprise. Given that hunter-gatherer tribes had an annual violent death rate of 500 per 100,000, two orders of magnitude greater than our violent death rate here in the good old US and A, you can see that they were right not to go in for pitched battles.

So all the young men in hunter-gatherer tribes were the border police. Their job was to protect the border and stop any dawn raids and massacres. Naturally they developed a warrior culture, and the acme of warrior culture is the concept of Honor, described in Honor, a History by James Bowman as the reputation among men for standing shoulder to shoulder with the tribal brothers to defend their patch of land and not breaking ranks and running away. You can see that this is no accident. Any armed group must be a band of brothers that will always stand together and never flinch when the going gets tough.

Also, each tribe had its shaman, a man that connected the tribe with the meaning of life, the universe and everything through what Jungians would call his connection with the unconscious. So each tribe really had its own religion, as explicated by its tribal initiations, its tribal animal mascot, and the peculiar talents of the local shaman.

The important thing to remember about the tribe is that it was a group of people related by blood. They were all brothers and sisters and cousins and uncles and aunts. We all know how, the closer that people are related, the more likely they are to help one another when in difficulty. That would be real helpful in the blood-related hunter-gatherer tribe.

The important thing to realize is that all humans have lived this way from the Dawn of Man down to the Neolithic Revolution, the dawn of agriculture about 12,000 years ago. Studies of chimpanzees described by Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn indicate that they have a similar culture, occupying food-growing land and defending the border by means of young males attacking any border violator in a three-against-one massacre.

So the notion of the tribe united against threats and dangers from without is programmed deep into our DNA. It must be so, because without a defended food-growing territory it is, as Bugs Bunny said, "curtains."

However, in the last 12,000 years, with agriculture, and more recently industry, humans have created a society where the men are not all enrolled into the border protection force. Most men in the agricultural age became farmers, converting their strength and aggression from defense into plowing and reaping. Most men in the industrial age have "jobs" and work in the exchange economy for wages. This is a far cry from the hunting and border defense of the old days, and humans have had to learn to adapt and live in new ways.

But under it all we are still tribesmen; we men still respect men of courage. And we are still ready to rally to our brothers if called by our tribal leaders to face the foe.

It stands to reason, therefore, that as mankind moved into the agricultural era and now the industrial era, we would need to adapt our tribal ways to the new realities.

And the most important thing we did was to adapt our tribes and tribalism to the new order. We invented new ways of belonging, not just to the old tribe of the kindred, but to new "fake" tribes, where people not related by blood came to experience each other as the moral equivalent of blood brothers.

We shall see next how this worked in the agricultural age.

The Wages of Women in Leadership

I am coming to the conclusion that there is a certain kind of human that does not belong in a hierarchical administrative system, and certainly not at the top.

I am talking about woman.

Yes, yes, women can do everything that men can do. Not. But this last weekend there has been a cascade of news about women in hierarchies that don't have a clue.

Yes. I know that men are mostly clueless, but the difference is that nobody is making excuses for them, not at least if they are white males. So we are supposed to believe that dear little Hillary didn't understand the mansplaining meaning of a (C) in a government document. But Trump is supposed to know exactly what all his minions are doing, otherwise it's Russian collusion all the way down.

So here are a few examples of female cluelessness. From Powerline, a hospital director at Harvard Medical School is worried about stuff that "might upset women and minorities who are training to become doctors." So,

Dr. Nabel has removed 31 portraits of former department chairmen from the hospital’s Bornstein amphitheater because they are all men and all but one of them are white.

Ya know, I would say that in a major teaching hospital there are 20,000 problems in need of executive action before the vital and important job of moving the pictures around. So this is what female leadership reduces to? Redecorating? Indeed, the dissent of an Iran-born doctor suggests that Dr. Nabel and her "posse" seem suspiciously like your average Mean Girls clique in high school.

Then there is the woman President Deborah MacLatchy of Canada's Wilfred Laurier University. Her faculty sanctioned Lindsay Shepherd, a graduate student and teaching assistant, who showed a video of Jordan Peterson in debate with a liberal about gender pronouns. Not for expressing a heretical opinion: just for showing the video. In her suit against the university Shepherd cites chapter and verse of how the faculty harassing her for the thought crime of actually showing a video were violating all the university's bureaucratic rules against harassment, but nothing was done. Does this woman president -- that was finally shamed into disapproving of the harassing actions of her underlings but has since done nothing to fix the problem -- not understand that one of the jobs of any executive leader is to lay down the law to her subordinates pour encourager les autres?

But here's the loveliest one of all. Remember that collision between a US Navy destroyer and a container ship in June 2017? Guess what: the "officer of the deck" (OOD) and the "Tactical Action Officer" in charge of "monitoring the combat radar" were both women.

The OOD was named Sarah, and the Tactical Action Officer was named Natalie, and they weren’t speaking to each other!!!

OMG! Like, I Can't Believe They Would Do That!

And they didn't communicate at all on the watch leading up to the collision with the Philippine container ship.

Of course this all precipitates out of the basic difference between men and women. Men are organized to fight for the survival of the tribe on the border. Women are designed to fight for the survival of their children until puberty.

That means that the male strategic mind is thinking about what vital fact about the war plans of the neighboring tribe am I not paying attention to? And the female strategic mind is thinking about what food or dangerous shrub might be threatening the life of my child.

That is why when you walk around Green Lake in North Seattle you hear the men talking about tactical issues at work and the women talking about the health care issues of their friends.

Men naturally self-organize into quasi-military hierarchies, because that is the way not to get killed in the next dawn raid. Women naturally organize into gossip networks because village harmony depends on a consensus of who said/did what to whom and who is to blame.

Again, from James Bowman's Honor: A History, there is a fundamental difference between male honor and female honor: two separate cultures. Male honor is about guarding the reputation for courage; female honor is about guarding the reputation for chastity. Notice the profound difference. For men, it does not matter whether you are right or wrong, but whether you stood in line with your brother soldiers. For women it does not matter whether you stand together, but that you were "right" or "innocent." Thus the universal female complaint: "I can't believe she said/did that."

Now, in my view, taken from Rodney Stark, the original human "informal social control" is epitomized by the female village gossip network. But that didn't work when humans moved from villages to cities and the first stirrings  of the market economy where anonymity started to rear its ugly head. So "formal social control" is all about hierarchical armies and state bureaucracies based in cities. And trials with formal rules about evidence/gossip. Oh and church bureaucracies.--

I wonder if women are really cut out for formal social control. Unless you are Margaret Thatcher with the will to completely reinvent yourself as an Iron Lady.

By the way, the whole culture of microaggessions and safe spaces is a girl thing. The whole point of being a man is to be impervious to minor insults, and not to need a place to hide. Because male honor and the reputation for courage among your male warrior pals. I mean: what kind of a man can't take a insult without collapsing into tears? And what kind of a man needs to hide away from his enemies unless on a modern lethal battlefield?

But I am optimistic. My whole existential worry about the world is that it is impossible to reform any government program, so nothing changes until the whole thing collapses from failing to adapt to changing circumstances.

But with women getting to be top managers of big bureaucratic organizations from schools to hospitals to universities we can expect an increased failure to adapt, because of an inborn inability in women to succeed in a "formal social control" environment. This means that our current bureaucratic monstrosities in health care and education are heading for the cliff earlier than we would expect if ordinary dull men were in charge.

Put it this way. Charles Dickens represents your average male bureaucrat as a "Barnacle" or a "Stiltstocking." Clearly such names just do not connect with women. But what names would be appropriate?

That is the question for today. And I have to admit that I don't have a clue.

Are Women The Big Problem?

Dear old Ben Stein is upset that a long-time liberal friend, Mrs. B., has cut off their friendship after the 2016 election. Apparently her "daughter had apparently undergone an incident in Carmel in which she felt threatened by a Trump supporter because she was wearing a Hillary T-shirt."

As for why Ben should choose the initial "B" for his onetime friend, I couldn't possibly comment.

Then there is the CBS lawyer, Hayley Geftman-Gold, who on Facebook inadvertently advertised after the Las Vegas shooting her contempt for country-music fans. Frankly, I don't think she should have been fired. All she was doing was expressing the conventional wisdom that all Good Little Girls share in the liberal bubble. Like Mrs. "B."

It's interesting that one concert goer said she likes country music concerts because everyone there acts like family.

Is this the new woman, roughed up by the sexual revolution and radicalized by the feminist movement?

Not at all. I'm happily re-reading Anthony Trollope's Dr. Thorne right now (available on DVD, etc.) and the two notable adult woman are both "Bs." There's Lady de Courcy of Courcy Castle. What a piece of work she is. And then there is Lady Arabella Gresham of Greshambury. So I suppose we should talk  about "Lady Bs." The big thing about these two women is the rules about the young marriageable women they allow in their august houses. The rich Miss Dunstable, heir to the Oil of Lebanon cosmetic fortune, is invited to Courcy Castle, because son-of-the-house Frank Gresham must marry money. But the sweet innocent Mary Thorne, our beloved heroine, the girl next door that Frank really loves, must be banished from Lady Arabella's house, because she has no money and, worse, she is a bastard with no breeding, no bloodlines, darling, for all that she is Dr. Thorne's niece.

Yep. Women may not commit horrendous mass shootings, but they sure know how to stick in the knife, and they always have.

Now, if you ask me, this is a Big Problem in our global society going forward. The whole point of the Great Enrichment is that people consort with all kinds, anyone that can be trusted. Playing high school or aristocratic Mean Girls is not what it's all about. Any more than lifetime employment. Any more than affirmative action and quotas and diversity and inclusion and all the other reactionary government policies that liberal force on us.

You can see the problem in the basic difference between male honor and women's honor, as explicated by James Bowman in Honor: a History. Honor among men is the reputation for physical courage, standing in line with his brothers and not acting like a coward and breaking and running. But honor among women is different. Honor among women is the reputation for chastity, and I mean that in the broadest sense of being pure and undefiled. Two cultures, and ne'er the twain shall meet.

The thing is that our modern societies need the kind of person willing to do stuff and make mistakes, and then get up, sadder and wiser, and do it all over again. It does not really want the reckless courage of the soldier; neither does it want the person that will not act because she does not want to make a mistake.

Sociologist Georg Simmel wrote over a century ago that the entrance of women into the public square would transform it to "suit a more feminine sensibility."

Obviously, there are advantages and disadvantages to that. My view is that some things are better left to men, such as software startups, which require a certain recklessness and standing with the brothers in the chaos of startup battle. But other things are better left to women. Caring for grandma, for instance. Men do a pretty sketchy job of that, if they can be persuaded to do anything at all.

I suspect that men and women have starkly different ideas about mass shootings. Men are perhaps too cavalier about the inevitability of mass carnage, as in battle. Women are perhaps naive in imagining that presidents can "make us safe."

Meanwhile I must get back to Dr. Thorne. We are approaching the denouement, when...

Well, I can't possible give the ending away. Let us say, following Trollope, who is always breaking the fourth wall, that Mary Thorne will either die of a broken heart or life happily ever after.

Chelsea Clinton Proves My Two Cultures Theory

I am a theory guy, and I am always trying to think up cute theories to explain the human condition. Like my Three Peoples theory.

But I also have a theory about the basic culture of men and women. Men have a Culture of Insult and women have a Culture of Complaint.

What I mean is that men relate to each other by insults, from the harmless barroom banter up to the fighting words that can only be decided by pistols at dawn across the Hudson at Weehawken, New Jersey. But women are the eternal complainers, which I characterize in the eternal whine: "I can't believe she said that."

That is all very well, you may say, but what about a real world illustration of this wild-eyed theory?

Thank you Senator. I am glad you asked that.

To illustrate my theory I offer the tweets of Chelsea Clinton, Princess of the Blood. They were made in response to a comment by the handsome and talented Steve Bannon about White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

Asked why Sean Spicer wasn't appearing on camera, Bannon said "Sean got fatter." Then Chelsea Clinton chimed in.

The White House using fat shaming to justify increased opacity. 2017.

See what I mean? The Steve Bannon comment was classic guy talk: in other words a joshing insult. If these chaps were Irish from Worcester, Mass., the insult would have concluded with a friendly "yer bastard."

But Chelsea Clinton is a woman, for all that she is the daughter of her mother and a princess of the blood. One might say precisely because she is the daughter of her mother. So she utters the classic female "I can't believe he said that" complaint.

Now it is my belief that the reason for the Two Cultures is the profoundly different roles that evolution has carved out for men and women. The essence of being a man is male honor, which James Bowman defines in Honor: A History as the reputation among men for courage, for standing in line of battle with his brother soldiers. Thus the worst insult a man can suffer is an attack on his courage. But honor among women is the reputation for chastity. I do not mean just sexual chastity, but purity in all its possibilities. The accusation: "I can't believe she said that" is an attack on another woman's chastity, her reputation of being a good woman. It is one step away from saying that the other woman is a bitch. But typically a woman will never say that to another woman's face. Instead she will "share" with her friend that "she can't believe that this other woman said that," implying that the other woman is a bitch. And the friend will smile and agree with the complainer. Then she will go off and "share" with her friends what her friend just said and say "I can't believe she said that."

Obviously the whole campus froufra about "microaggressions" and "safe spaces" and
"mansplaining" and so on are pure examples of the woman's Culture of Complaint.

But it is my instinct that you cannot conduct matters in the public square according to the woman's Culture of Complaint. Also I suspect that institutions conducted according to the woman's Culture of Complaint will come to a bad end. That's because I think that a basic frankness and honesty is required to conduct public business, and that an absence of this frankness and its substitution by whispering behind other peoples' backs will harm and ultimately destroy the institution.

But let us do the Eisenhower thing, knowing that if we have a problem we cannot solve, the answer is to make it bigger.

In my view the whole intersectionality movement is a flailing admission that the sexual revolution was a disaster for women. Women are not sexual adventurers and never will be. Women are not the equal of men in the simulated warfare of the political or corporate battlefield, and never will be. Men are fighters and designed to be warriors in the eternal border wars of the tribe. But now that border wars don't matter any more we humans have found other things for men to do that use the talents and instincts of the border warrior. Women are lovers and carers, designed to keep the kids alive until it is time for them to leave the nest, and they always will be. But now that a woman's life is not wholly consumed with childcare we have come up with other caring things for women to do, from nursing to HR to charitable work. But I am sorry: most women are not cut out for battling for corporate market-share. Many women can do it at a pinch, but it makes them look ridiculous.

Here is a real world example of what I mean.

As Steve Sailer has written, women started disappearing from tech about the time, in the early 1980s, that computing stopped being a career and became an adventure. You don't see women in tech start-ups because tech start-ups are reckless expeditions across uncharted oceans, and there is no room for a Culture of Complaint when you have one day's food left and you are a month away from port.

Then and Now: "And Mary Pondered These Things in her Heart"

The wonders of the rape culture are something to behold. First there was "Jackie," freshman at the University of Virginia, who conceived a story about rape on shards of glass in a fraternity house. Then there's the Columbia mattress story, where we have now heard the side of the German student accused of rape (for which the police declined to prosecute).

I've said it before in 2008, so I'll say it again. This is all about sociologist Georg Simmel's century-old prediction that eventually women would transform the public square to "suit a more feminine sensibility." And it's about the clash between women's "liberation" and the basic instinct that every woman needs to be right with the other women in her community.

In Honor: A History, James Bowman says that honor for a woman is her chastity. But we should understand chastity in a wider sense than not having sex before marriage and not having sex with other men. It is about not being wrong, ever. A woman cannot say: Gee, I screwed up; but let's forget it and start over. Starting over is for men, not for women. A woman must reinterpret events that might throw a bad light on her to show that she was innocent all along. I am not saying this in a pejorative sense. I suspect that this attitude is deep in the Darwin, a necessary part of the female role of bearing and raising children. After all, one mistake and your kid is eaten by a wolf, or nowadays, darts into the street and is run over by a car.

There's another thing too, something I learned from James A. Ault's Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church. It's the story of a liberal's sojourn in a fundamentalist church community. You know, patriarchy and barefoot and pregnant and all that. Only it wasn't.

It is true that women did not hold any offices in the fundamentalist church of his study. But Ault found that it was misleading to assume that they had no power. On the contrary, they controlled the church. And they controlled it through their gossip network. The women’s gossip network got to define reality, who had said what to whom, and who had done what to whom. This made the women of the church enormously powerful. But their power often was used destructively, and the church would split every year or two.

We are now reaching the point where the majority of university students are women. And a larger and larger number of university teachers and administrators are women. This means that a moral equivalent of the "women's gossip network" is getting to define reality in the university.

How do you explain "Jackie's" transition from disappointment at failing to win the love of "Randall" by rousting him out in the middle of the night with a story about being forced to perform oral sex at a fraternity to the magnificent story of the Night of the Shattered Glass? (Notice how careful "Randall" was to get a couple other friends to accompany him to rendezvous with "Jackie"?) "Jackie" started talking about it with the campus counselors.

And what about the Mattress Girl at Columbia? Six months after a night of rough sex, after which she and her lover started to drift apart, she accused him of rape. Through the Office of Gender-based Misconduct.

How do you explain this? Mattress Girl got angry. She started talking about it with friends and then with the campus counselors, and one thing led to another.

I will tell you what I think. I think that free sex just doesn't work for most women -- particularly well-born women. When a woman has sex she opens her heart as well as her legs, and she can't shut it off like a man, and go on to other sexual partners. So in the turmoil of the campus sex culture she gets to feel angry, abandoned, and ashamed. You can see the searing ambiguity in the relationship between Mattress Girl and her German lover. They were supposed to be friends, but a couple of times they ended up sleeping over and one thing led to another. I tell you: girls don't like that sort of thing.

There's a double standard here, of course, but it is not the one you think. Let's rewind to the most popular opera of all time, La Boheme. It involves two middle-class artists living in a garret doing the bohemian thing and getting it on with little Mimi, a seamstress, and Musetta, a girl with a sugar daddy. All great fun and all that. But don't start trying this bohemian stuff with Daddy's girl, or helicopter Mommy's girl. Oh no.

You see, in the lower orders, a girl accepts what the world hands out to her; she has to. And hey, suppose she managed to snag a college boy? But in the professional middle class things are different. Middle-class girls get protection, and the middle class doesn't take kindly to adventurers mucking around with their little darlings. If you want confirmation, just read Trollope's The Prime Minister, where a rich county girl, Emily Wharton, gets swept off her feet by an adventurer, Ferdinand Lopez, about whom nobody knows anything. Well, it all ends well because Lopez eventually gets run over by a train, and Emily marries the man she was always supposed to marry. But she takes a year getting to Yes because she is so ashamed of herself for getting into a mess with Lopez, the man from nowhere.

Ever since the Virgin Mary in Luke 2:19, and doubtless long before, women have been pondering things in their hearts. Mary had a lot to think over, what with her cousin Elisabeth getting pregnant and all and Mary wanting her baby to be special rather than a follow-on after Elisabeth's baby. I'm not saying that Mary got envious when Elisabeth suddenly got pregnant after years of trying and concocted the whole story about the angel to cover the fact that she ran out and got pregnant before she actually married her espoused Joseph. Oh no. After all this time, who can tell?

But as a conservative I have to believe that people don't change, least of all women.

I believe that we are seeing women today revolting against the sexual revolution, and they are revolting against it using the woman's cultural technique of the women's gossip network all gussied up into glorified bureaucratic categories.

The problem is that I wonder if the informal women's gossip network doesn't make a complete mess of the public square and the fact that the public square can't operate on feelings but must be based on facts, facts that can be adjudicated in court.

The lesson for men is simple. Get away. Don't go to college, don't work for big anything, because the women's gossip network is taking over, and you are in the target hairs.

The whole point of being a man is to make life into an adventure. That's what rape and pillage were all about; that's what ISIS is all about. For us civilized chaps rape and pillage are out, but there is still the start-up. Read Peter Thiel's Zero to One: Notes on Startups and How to Build the Future to get with the program.

Bergdahl: Obamis Just Don't Understand Honor

Many conservatives are puzzling over why, just why, the Obama administration would get itself into such a mess over the Bergdahl prisoner exchange.  How could anyone treat Bergdahl's likely desertion as just a matter of missing a class on Monday?

The answer is simple.  It is honor.  Lefties don't understand honor, male or female.  And especially they don't understand military honor. The whole point of the left has been to expunge honor from the culture, except for the honor-among-thieves culture among lefties and community organizers.  Yeah.  It's one thing for Obama's Organizing for America buddies to "have his back."  But not for the rest of us.

If you want to understand the whole question of honor, a good place to start is James Bowman's Honor, A History. It comes down to this, writes Bowman:

 [T]he basic honor of the savage -- bravery for men, chastity for women -- is still recognizable beneath the surfaces of the popular culture that has done so much to efface it.

But it is not just the act of bravery that is important; it is the reputation for bravery.  And by bravery we mean the reputation for standing in line with your fellow kinsmen or fellow soldiers and not running away in the heat of battle.  In the Greek hoplite honor and bravery meant literally standing in the shield line and not breaking away, for victory in hoplite battle usually went to the side whose shield wall collapsed last.

That is where the duel comes in.  The aristocratic duel is a corruption of the code of honor.  It goes beyond the idea that my deeds of courage speak for themselves; it says if that you attack my reputation for bravery I will kill you.

In the development of the modern nation state the idea of honor developed from bravery among kinsmen to bravery among hoplite soldiers to bravery in the army of the nation state.  That is why the bravery of Sergeant York in World War I is such a big deal and why the cowardice of Private Eddie Slovik in World War II was such a big deal.

And that's why the apparent desertion of Sgt. Bergdahl is such a big deal to the men and women in the armed forces.  It's about their loyalty to to their buddies, then their unit, and finally the United States.  That is the code of honor in the US armed forces.

Obama & Co. don't understand that because they have a different code of honor.  It is not to family, not to nation.  It is to the movement, the progressive movement, or whatever the current left-wing thing is at the time.

Obama & Co., with Hollywood, celebrate the anti-hero who makes a point of declaring that he does not owe loyalty to family or to his city or his nation.  So to them Sgt. Bergdahl's hesitance about doing the army thing is only natural.  That's how Obama & Co. feel too.  Enough of this nationalist nonsense!  Peace and Justice!  And that's how the mainstream media seem to owe loyalty to Obama and his agenda rather than to the United States and the rule of law.  In their code, the United States and the military are rather shabby things.  And the constitution was drawn up by slave-owners.  What matters is to fight racism, sexism, and inequality.

Of course all along the Obamis have known that they need to bow to the national gods.  They must say that there is no blue America or red America, but just one exceptional America, and when their minds are focused by the need to win the election they can stay on message.

But they don't really believe a word of all that exceptionalism crap.  They just say it because they must.  Just as they know they must wear those stupid American flag pins.  Their loyalty and honor code is, we might suggest, the the honor code of the community organizer.  The loyalty and the celebrated acts of bravery are the acts to advance the banner of progressivism.  Like the UAW and the Battle of the Overpass.  Or the Movement against the Vietnam War.  Or the Battle for Women's Rights, or the Battle for Marriage Equality.

I would argue that the entire left-wing movement is really a crazed millennial cult.  That everything it does leads to a dead end, whether the economic dead end of communism, the free-stuff dead end of the welfare state, the reproductive dead end of feminism and homosexualism, the population dead end of environmentalism.

Actually, we've seen this before.  Rodney Stark has a name for our modernacademic-artistic-and-punditry industrial complex.  He calls it upper-class asceticism.  It starts with Buddhism, and the young prince Gautama Siddhartha giving up his princedom, his wife and children, for a higher life.

Ring a bell does it?

According to liberal philosopher Charles Taylor the trick is to combine a commitment to human flourishing with a commitment to something higher.  So you can't reduce life just to human flourishing.  Nor can you reduce it to upper-class asceticism unless you are a liberal trustafarian.

But back on Earth our liberal masters are screwing up royally, because they have selected themselves into an upper-class ascetic cult and are trying to force-feed the rest of us on their divine manna from heaven.  So they wrong-foot themselves again and again, and sooner or later the American people are going to take notice.

The folks that really need to take notice are the millennials, because they are the folks getting most royally screwed by the Obama doctrine.  But first they have to unlearn everything they learned from their liberal unionized teachers from K through grad school.

And the folks that will struggle hardest with that will be millennial women.  Nothing personal, but my life experience is that women actually believe what they have been taught, whereas men tend to think that the whole school thing is a joke.

What About That Mean?

Every virtue, says Aristotle, brings things into good condition.  Therefore virtue is also "the state of character which makes a man good and which makes him do his own work well."

Does that mean that the harder you work at virtue, the better?  Not exactly, for virtue is not found in extremes, writes Aristotle, but at the mean between two extremes.  It is "an intermediate between excess and defect."   Thus the great Aristotelian notion of the mean.

But the mean is not a rigid thing, half way between the extremes of excess and defect.  If "ten pounds is too much for a particular person to eat and two too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order six pounds."  The mean is an individual thing for each person.

Thus, the mean for Milo the excellent wrestler in the eating department would not the the same as for "the beginner in athletic exercises".  Obviously, Milo would need to eat a lot more than you or me. He's a wrestler in training. Therefore the appropriate mean for him is a lot more than for the beginner.  Today, we would say that it is one thing for a Tour de France competitor to consume 5,000 calories per day, but quite another thing for a couch potato.

The point is that "the master of any art avoids excess and defect, but seeks the intermediate," the mean between the extremes. But the mean for each virtue is not the same for everyone; the mean is the intermediate that leads to virtue in each of us.  It is a "mean relative to us" according to a rational principle as a "man of practical wisdom" would determine.

Vice, of course, is different. There is no mean there for Aristotle. It is just bad. There is no such thing as "adultery with the right woman, at the right time, and in the right way". Of course that says nothing about adultery with a slave.

With the virtue of honor, according to Aristotle, the mean is "proper pride"; the excess being "empty vanity" and the defect "undue humility."  Aristotle understands honor here as aristocratic pride.  But in Honor: A History, the modern James Bowman defines honor rather differently.  It is the reputation that a hoplite infantryman would have for staying in line, or a GI for supporting the buddies in his unit.  It has nothing to do with aristocratic pride, but is rather the reputation for courage under fire.

Indeed aristocratic pride, so ubiquitous in The Iliad, is a corruption of honor.  It is the insistence that an aristocrat be treated as though he were courageous and unflinching in combat, whether or not he is.

You could call aristocratic honor a vice.

Back to Basics

OK. We’ve congratulated President-elect Barack Obama on his victory. Now it’s time to get back to basics.

It’s the old question after a defeat in battle. What are we here for?

For the conservative movement the answer is the same as it was always been since Edmund Burke invented conservatism in 1790 with his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Conservatives stand for a balanced understanding of human life and human meaning. We assert a fundamental ignorance about our human destiny. That is why we stood against the French Revolution, as Burke did. We also stand against communism, fascism, socialism, and all the secular religions of the modern world, including the progressive religion of our liberal friends, the educated elite.

In putting flesh on the bones of this bare understanding of the human condition I turn to the ideas of Michael Novak in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.

In Spirit Novak develops the idea I call the Greater Separation of Powers. There are three differentiated sectors in modern society: the political, the economic, and the moral/cultural. They are and ought to be separate and individual centers of power, and need to be separate and independent of each other. Each has its power, and each is checked and balanced by the jealous critique of the other sectors. But no one sector should ever obtain dominance over the others, and no two sectors should be allowed to gang up on the third sector.

Viewing our society through the lens of the Greater Separation of Powers we can see that our society suffers from three major diseases.

The first I call The Rape of Honor. It is a disease of the moral/cultural sector. In his book Honor: A History, James Bowman begins by defining honor. He says that, in men, it is bravery, the courage to stand in line with your brethren and not run away in the face of danger. In women, it is chastity, the reputation for right action, that is, the good opinion of other women. In our society we have allowed a sustained attack on these two anchors of right living, and the more that people allow their lives to deviate from the practice of honor the more their lives wither and decay.

The second disease I call The Weight of Government. It is a disease of the political sector. Our governments in the world today are too big, too powerful, too ineffective, and too bossy. “It’s the spending, stupid,” you might say. And if you don’t believe me, go to usgovernmentspending.com. Big government infantilizes us, and subsidizes the Rape of Honor, because people without honor are people who cannot live outside the sheltered liberal plantation of big government.

The third disease I call The Sweating of Business. It is a pollution of the economic sector by the political and moral/cultural sectors. Back in the 19th century, everyone knows, the world was full of sweatshops that worked people long hours for low pay and no benefits. Well, today, businessmen and women are like the sweatshop workers of old. The political sector uses business like a piggy bank, and the moral/cultural sector uses business like a punching bag. The other two sectors have ganged up on business to humiliate it and to reduce its reputation and its power.

Our conservative destiny to to cure these three diseases of the body politics, and right three great wrongs. We must rise up to end the degradation and the violence of the Rape of Honor, to reform and remove the great Weight of Government, and to liberate our Sweating Businesses.

It’s not that complicated, now, is it?

The Age of Anti-Heroes and Anti-Modesty

At the beginning of his remarkable book Honor: A History James Bowman defines honor.

Honor in men is bravery, the courage to stand in the line with your brothers even unto death. Honor in women is chastity. And if you think all that is old-fashioned then try calling a man a wimp or a woman a whore and see where it gets you.

So why is it that our liberal friends and their willing accomplices in the media and the popular culture make such a big deal about the anti-hero, the man who defines himself by standing against his brothers in the line? And why does it celebrate a “sexual life” for women that celebrates the idea of women acting much like men when it comes to sex?

Media critic L. Brent Bozell III notes the current glut of TV shows glamorizing prostitutes as smart, contemporary women. Writes Showtime of their hooker heroine:

She is smart, strong and confident and, like many modern women, she is struggling to balance her personal and professional life.

My guess that this is all going to collapse into a Return to Modesty. (Wow, that’s the title of a book by Wendy Shalit.)

But for some time I have been wondering what it is that women are advertising with their honor concept of chastity. I’m a man; I understand the honor as courage bit. But chastity?

A couple of nights ago I finally put it together. If you want to understand women then you must understand love. Chastity is the measure of a woman’s love and devotion.

We start with Lord Byron:

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
’Tis woman’s whole existence.

But sleeping around doesn’t do anything for a woman, not least because of the “loss” factor. Women mourn and grieve all lost loves, and the pain they cause pretty soon teaches them to love where they are, not where they might hope to be.

That is why Jane Austen in Persuasion makes Anne Elliot’s speech about womanly constancy the climax of the novel.

All the privilege I claim for my own sex... is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.

The minx says this, of course, in the hearing of the worthy Captain Wentworth into whose arms she will fall within the hour.

Honor for a woman is to faithfully and generously love. All they want is for their love to be appreciated.

And that, boys and girls, is why Christianity goes down big time with women, especially right now in the Global South and in China where two-thirds of Christian adherents are said to be women. You love God and God loves you back. What’s not to like?

And that is also why the present age of anti-heroic men and anti-chaste women is going to go the way of the Dodo. Men love to be heroes, and women love to be chaste. They won’t be denied for long.