Robert Kurzban on the theory of morality; Samuel Hammond on language and civilization; The Financial Times on the Gen Z gender divide on politics; Tove K's theory of society
I want you to imagine trying to raise a child during COVID with a shitlib wife.
I know because one of my best friends has lived through this. In fact is still living through this, the wife still makes the kid mask in public.
I've met her before. She wasn't ragingly insane all the time. But this one thing got in her and bam, life basically ruined.
I actually think people underestimate how important political divisions can be in a marriage. At least well adjusted conservative men probably think they don't really mean it, but one day they might.
I think wokeness has made marriage and family much more emotionally demanding. Women have been indoctrinated that men should care about their every concern and they have been supplied an ever increasing supply of concerns to have. Men probably need more empathy. But women need to better discipline what concerns influence them. A huge issue I see today with young moms is following the crowd on child rearing. And with social media the crowd has opinions on everything! All my parents had was a Dr. Spock book and their own experience that kids should be free range and everything will work out.
I am going to combine two analogies. The first is based on those lists of US counties that are richest or most educated and lately something like half of the top 20 are in the DC region. This probably seems duplicative, but they are distinct enough to be counted separately. The second is the way the Fed talks about the multiple "channels" by which macroeconomic tools and policies operate to pump liquidity into various areas. So, likewise, If you made a list of top 20 most toxic influences that are corrosive to and undermining of healthy, stable, and affectionate relationships, then a number of genuinely distinct channels through which women are influenced by social media would also make up half the list.
In general it is important to help people find ways to be satisfied and content in their lives. But because it is really easy to both disturb harmony and agitate people into discontent and to profit from that psychological manipulation, we have built the internet into a giant and unavoidable machine for discontent and acrimony.
In the short run the future belongs to those who master this tech. In the long run the future belongs to those who shun it.
It is a good thing for women to be liberated to be financially independent and to choose whether to have children. It is a huge problem, however, if too many women choose not to have children. There is not just the economic issue of sustaining the population and providing young workers to replace and pay social welfare for retiring workers. Marriage and children give men and women a common interest. The less marriage and children you have the more the sexes and society are divided. Cultures that lack common interests are not durable.
It is simply not in the benefit of middle class men to make a marriage commitment if they do not trust the wife will want them to be around long term - the emotional and financial costs of a failed marriage for this class are huge. And for many men, there is no lasting enthusiasm for a marriage commitment if there are not children involved. In defense of women, they are not enthusiastic about being around a man who is lazy or undisciplined and does not give them confidence of a better future.
So men need women to show enthusiasm for marriage and family and women are not confident, for valid reasons, they want to make that commitment. There is an impasse and it is not readily solved.
Old cultures bridged this trust gap by promoting the institution and duty of marriage. Men were expected to marry and women were expected to have children. Modern culture can scoff at the "coercion" of this social expectation but it fails to recognize that for almost all people marriage and children are better in the long run than the alternative of being old and single.
And notice that government encouraging women to bear children only addresses the economic issue of population growth. It utterly fails to correct the collapse of shared cultural values.
Women are diagnosed with mental illness more. Does that really mean less men are mentally ill? Who is more likely to be on the streets? What does it mean that more women attempt suicide and more men are "successful"? Be careful interpreting your data.
Here’s my hypothesis to explain the greater prevalence of mental illness among girls and young women. Men sense an enemy approaching (see my other comments) and are thus enlivened to prepare for “battle.” Warfare, and its precursors--whether signs of an approaching hostile political enemy, or greater concentration of power within government, or growing restrictions on their rights—cause men to engage in various warfare activities, including—and especially important—learning about the enemy. Men are focused on knowing and understanding their enemies. Men are increasingly conservative because they are more actively reading and searching for truth and morals that ensure that their genes are passed along. Men are actively engaging in a new modern warfare that increasingly is a war of ideas.
Women the other hand are more likely to take a neutral stance and not engage in fighting. Their survival instincts cause them to seek protection, to take care of their bodies so they can stay alive to care for children. Women are not seeking truth to the extent that men are. They are not studying and confronting their enemies like men are. Thus, they are increasingly confused by the polarization and battle of ideas. They see great power on the left, thus they are increasingly seeking protection from that power. Their mental health problems are caused by growing uncertainty and confusion caused by this war, about where and who to seek protection from.
Men are rising to confront that power. They are willing to risk their lives to defeat the rising progressive authoritarian enemies. Men are enlivened by the leftist enemy whereas women are seeking to protection from the stronger force, which is currently the political left.
Benenson writes
“I suggest that women's genes have programmed them to keep themselves, their children, and their closest relatives alive and healthy. Men love risks. Women avoid them whenever possible. The reason is simple.
“An individual woman's survival and general good health are much more important than a man's. A man's basic contribution to procreation requires a few minutes of activity. Further, if he is not available, another man can easily substitute. Not so for a woman. A woman's body is responsible for successfully carrying the fetus to term, ensuring that it stays healthy. She then has to successfully give birth to her child, which is quite risky in humans.
After birth, she has to feed her baby, which in most periods of history has meant producing enough milk to keep the baby alive and well nourished for a couple of years. After that, women also are primarily responsible for maintaining the health and security of their children for many more years, before their children are old enough to survive on their own. Even after their children give birth themselves, they often help out with their grandchildren.
Staying alive and healthy therefore is absolutely critical. Women must keep this problem, and its solutions, in their sights at all times throughout their lives, until they become very old. One mistake, and their health, and the health of all of their living and future children, is compromised. It's an enormous burden.
“Boys and men needn't worry on a second-by-second basis. If a man manages to impregnate one or more women who will carefully take care of the resulting children, his genes will survive—even if he doesn't. He's free to fight, to go exploring, or take whatever risks might lead to finding more women to have sex with.”
It is unfortunate that so few people writing on morality read Adam Smith. It would have saved Robert Kurzban a lot of work flailing around if he could have read Theory of Moral Sentiments and been done. Notably that moral judgements include both consequentialist aspects, social cohesion aspects, judgements of whether something is good, bad or indifferent, all those things.
I just posted an essay that summarized that (quickly in only like 10 pages) but Smith lays it out in much more detail, and frankly he finishes the question. Almost no one since has had anything to add to "how do humans decide what is good and bad?" People have argued whether or not something should be considered good and bad, but explaining how we make those considerations is pretty much done and dusted.
Incidentally, Haidt's theory is upstream a bit of Smith's, describing the categories of things we might consider good and bad that we use in our judgements of whether a particular action is good or bad.
Smith never married nor had kids. Neither did Hume. Neither did Newton. John Stuart Mill had no kids, he pined after the married Harriet Taylor for decades, her husband died, then he married her when they were in their 40s. I could go on. Anglospheric atomism has been shredding once-incredible reserves of elite human capital for a long time.
I don't know that the atomism aspect applies so well here. Smith and Hume had particularly dense social networks, writing extensively on the importance of such. (I don't know about Newton and Mill.) Likewise, socialistic contemporaries like Rousseau, and later Marx, had lots of kids they never took care of. Many other greats also never had kids, like Robert E. Howard. I am not sure where he would fall on the "Anglospheric atomism" spectrum, but like Smith he was very devoted to his mother. (Unlike Smith, he apparently wasn't very ugly... even Smith's admirers thought he was exceptionally bad looking, with one young women with an almost high school girl's crush on him writing in a letter that his lips were thick and rubbery like those of a demon.)
The trend also goes back before the Anglosphere as well. Aristotle didn't have kids, nor Plato (so far as I recall) or Cicero, or Aquinas... Shakespeare... I don't know about Grotius or de Tocqueville. Looking at the names on my books shelves, however, only a very small percentage had children, and of those that did only a very small percentage had children who carried on their legacy or achieved similar notoriety. In fact, the only name that jumps out as fulfilling that is Freidman.
So yea, I don't think the atomism argument holds up well, as opposed to an argument that brilliant people are often obsessed with their field and otherwise weird in a way that makes marriage difficult or unappealing. Of course it isn't clear whether one becomes great largely because one eschews family life to focus on one's work, or if the ingredients to be great make it comparatively harder to have a good family life as compared to work.
A good song is called "Finishing the hat" from the play "Sunday in the Park with George" about, inspired, by Georges Seurat 's painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
Great painters, brilliant people, are usually obsessed with whatever it is that makes them great. Not enough time/ attention/ care to others to have good marriage relations.
Warren Buffet took over a dozen company annual reports on his honeymoon to study for choosing investment targets. ("Snowball")
"Feminism is organic: women - no longer valued commodities, unneeded as producers of children - are just now coming up from primitivism and developing civilization" [so naturally it's a little crude!] as if re-inventing the wheel is a novel take, but I think it way underestimates people's tendency to believe/do what they are told to believe/do.
I see it this way: a number of high-IQ, high-strung, "neurotic" women were dissatisfied with family life and influenced by Marxist ideas about power. They were narcissistic enough that they couldn't imagine/accept that they might not bear much relation to the mass of women over the world. They insisted that all women must share their dissatisfaction - their difference. To a great extent in the Western world, they were wildly successful in spreading this news and re-orienting society accordingly.
I think a small percentage of women are really happy and thriving in this new order.
And now all the ordinary, non-high-IQ women are high-strung and vaguely dissatisfied.
Roe v. Wade was a pure expression of this phase. Its going has been traumatic for many American women. I am a hermit and nor do I use social media, so I wouldn't know this necessarily except that my husband who interacts with far more women than I do, said that his women colleagues were truly upset about the decision. And that this bore no relation to their age or status as potential mothers or babykillers.
What was interesting was that they were upset with the loss of a tool to prevent procreation that they scarcely needed anymore.
They practice birth control. Or they are generally sexually continent. Or they aren't in a relationship at all. Or they are smart enough to know about the morning-after pill. Or they are married and actually trying to produce that one kid. Or they are married with that one kid and if they found themselves pregnant again, it would be a surprising blessing in the end. Or they are old and wishing for nothing more than a grandchild to spend money and time on. If they "used" Roe - they generally used it once. Full disclosure: no, no full disclosure, but the question is not academic for me.
Overwhelmingly the only people who will have children now, are the ones who fail on all these metrics, especially on the "self-control" or self-abnegation that Tove seems to most associate with social organization, albeit only for men.* Arguably the ones you'd least want to procreate. And now, more than ever - with the loss of Roe. So much for the proto-civilization of the Bonobo Women.
*The other thing that can actually be *overestimated*, a lot of the time, is the difference between the sexes.
"There is a long-standing argument about whether men are inherently different from women. I wonder if these young men and women are on opposite sides of that argument. Think about that for a moment."
I am not as kind to your first author because his statement reads as performance art: he is staking a moral position to increase his own status relative to conventional moralists, declaring that by consequentialist, utilitarian, or 'effective altruist' measures, they are immoral and outside the tribe. That's his claim. There is no need to cede any ground to it.
"While the compromise of exchange is driven by self interest, the compromise of norms is driven by imposition on others. … Norms are driven by homogeneity. No one ever negotiates for a norm used to restrict themselves; they could simply self-impose it instead.“
This quote from two days ago and today's first author seem to me to be saying much the same. And yes they both exaggerate a bit but I don't think they are far off. And I don't agree with your negative comments on the one's words.
I wasn't commenting per se on the first author but technically on the "view" he describes; which was also what Arnold is commenting on. Arnold says it is too extreme. I view it as self-referential - as well as harmful.
While I agree the quote sounds extreme, I don't see self-referential. I suppose that's because I don't see how he is "staking a moral position." I don't see harm in what he says either. I don't know how you reached those opinions.
With good graphs, including showing the women changing far more than men on identifying as liberal (from 28% up to 44-42%; men still around 25% "liberal", no graph of "Conservative").
Key graph: "A survey we conducted last year found that young women expressed statistically significant greater concern for 11 out of 15 different issues, including drug addiction, crime, climate change, and gun violence. There was not a single issue that young men cared about significantly more than young women. " As Hanania noted, liberals CARE more than conservatives.
Bus. Insider had to denigrate Trump as "stoking grievances and directing young men's frustration toward liberals and feminists." Steve Sailer notices the 4x higher suicide rate and other increasing fails of men failing HS, failing college, and much less often entering college.
For a happy relationship, both men and especially women should read the fine book: "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus". D-Different.
The article concludes there is "a growing eagerness among both young men and women to blame their problems on each other. "
This seems to confirm the Confas argument that the basic problem is "equality" - the belief that men and women are equal, thus any difference in results is because of systemic ... reasons/ discrimination/ toxicity.
It's related to abdication of individual responsibility and agency--what you get is less good than you deserve, but it's Not Your Fault. And there is an aspect of truth that most of what happens in the world really is not you fault, yet each person's decisions hugely affect what actually happens to them.
We need to get back to individual choices and individual agency, including responsibility, more than anybody else tho not 100%, for the results. Group blame is to enable bad choices.
Regarding the gender divide, it would seem to me that boys and men sense an approaching enemy and are “preparing” for war. See Joyce Benenson’s book Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes. Girls and women do not sense this enemy or react to it differently. She writes
“What do boys fear? Based upon my years of study of children and, more recently, adults, I believe that boys' and men's specialty is worrying about enemies. The enemy is their problem, and it is their responsibility to defeat it. Because the enemy is not always present, boys and men don't worry all the time. Nonetheless, I believe that confronting the problem of the enemy has allowed human males to evolve a whole suite of instinctive reactions that still exist today.
“The intuitive preoccupation with enemies is so strong that when modern men fight other forms of danger, they end up recasting these as the enemy. For example, men fight wars on drugs; they battle cancer; they attack illiteracy; they combat infection; they defeat bad attitudes; they assail political beliefs; they assault stereotypes, and so forth. Girls and women use these terms much less spontaneously. It is the enemy who has got hold of boys' and men's attention and resources.
And a few pages later, she writes
“Likewise, Hollywood specializes in war movies, Westerns, horror films, crime stories, courtroom dramas, action and adventure themes, doomsday scenarios, spy movies, and prison stories, filled to the brink with men fighting enemies….When such an enemy does not exist, girls and women don't think about it. But boys and men will create one. They make and watch the movies. Fighting provides pleasure, but not enough to sustain a whole movie. It is the enemy that captures the interest of male moviegoers. The ability to watch others killing enemies generates billions and billions of dollars. Since filmmaking began more than a hundred years ago, violence always has had its appeal. Films by the Japanese director Kurosawa, Mexican revolutionary movies, Chinese leftist films, Indian Don films, and Soviet propaganda movies show that disparate cultures share the American penchant for watching violence unfold.”
I think this passage from Joyce Benenson’s book illustrates that the gender divide has a great deal to do with boys’ and mens’ innate interest in war and enemies. Boys’ interest in learning is inspired by war. Males are sensing an approaching enemy and are preparing differently than girls and women. Males are increasingly reading and learning different things in order to prepare for this enemy.
“one explanation for why fluid intelligence is greatest when men are simultaneously physically strongest and fastest is because it increases victory in warfare. Abstract conceptualization of the enemy's battle formations, strategic planning of future moves, rapid execution of complicated tactics, alongside maximal physical prowess and speed, seems like a good recipe for winning a war. Men with these heightened physical and cognitive skills may have defeated more enemies, and passed the genes for these traits to their sons. After their physical skills waned, fluid intelligence and speed became less critical to survival, so they diminished too.
“Regardless of the truth of this proposition, these days a major problem preoccupying educators is the difficulty that many boys have in acquiring academic skills. The idea that fighting wars requires a fairly high level of thinking could be valuable. Educators could use males' innate attraction to fighting enemies as a tool. Skills could be learned in the context of defeating the enemy. Calculating points won and lost would make mathematics more real. Geographical knowledge would be essential to establishing territorial boundaries. History would provide real-life examples of warfare, politics, and changing national boundaries. Morality could be broached through the generation of competitive rules. Clothing considerations could include evolution and camouflage of animals in differing environments. Physical education on the playground could take its playbook from military exercises. The importance of naps and eating right to basic training could be stressed. As the boys grow, the incredible scientific advances that the military has produced in technology, medicine, and engineering could be introduced. Fluid intelligence could be co-opted as a means to win battles, even if it didn't originally evolve for this purpose. As strange as this may sound, I have met many nonviolent boys whose interest in learning was inspired by war.”
The whole men need to capitulate for women fails to mention that women not having children also means girls aren't being born either. It isn't really much of a surprise that giving women the option to sacrifice many prime developing years right after adolescence or have the responsibility of family and children, the path of least responsibility or burden however one wants to see it will be predominantly selected. But many women cannot be criticized out of social consequence therefore nobody has the courage to bring up the notion that biological reality has a hard stop on child bearing specifically for women. Making this an ideological division may be salient given that cultural animosity is the fashion of the day but in the end, women are the ones who aren't having children (not people) and they aren't going to select for children especially given their nature to find higher mates and the optionality or the illusion of optionality in a deregulated, decentralized, global mating marketplace. But selection pressures will run their course over a long enough time horizon and the most religious who happen to have children happen to win out if one wants to extend the logic to its conclusion. Now, the development of the artificial womb could effectively make this moot whereas women's eggs will theoretically be another commodified product that women will auction off if this technology would develop. Gene editing is already coming online so this is the inevitable logical step.
An artificial womb is likely a technology that is at least 100 years into the future- figuring out all the needed inputs into bringing a fertilized egg to the state of a multicellular baby is a herculean endeavor. All the other evolutionary and cultural pressures will act to correct the problem on a shorter time scale.
It's not fears about the risks and burdens of pregnancy that's holding women back, that's just a socially acceptable excuse. So there is really no demand for artificial wombs, the emergence of which wouldn't change or solve anything.
But taking the technical question seriously, 100 years is far too long. Now, it depends what you mean by artificial. For fully artificial - at 15 weeks gestation, lamb fetuses were transferred to biobags and continued to develop normally for 4 weeks (with some implications for how premature human births could be treated in the future) and by all indications could have gone longer and perhaps even to full term but to now IRB animal testing protocols have required all such experiments to stop at 28 days. Because ... um ... uh ... reasons! Human embryos can be grown normally in Petri dish conditions for at least two weeks and probably a bit longer, but, again, protocols forbid it. Still, spreading the gap of the period between 20 and 100 days will non-biological systems is indeed at least a few decades off.
But for less than fully artificial, I suspect the technology is already there if anything short of normal human pregnancy qualifies. If one allows for a more abstract form of 'surrogacy' there are all kinds of (admittedly very creepy) things one could do to leverage biologically-assembled parts (i.e., organs) or whole gestational systems in sufficiently compatible or engineered animals.
For example you could initiate and sustain womb-like conditions in some braindead or induced-comatose animal, and grow a human fetus in a bio bag with an 'umbilical' cord connected to that womb on the next lab table or whatever. It's not clear whether the hormonal and immune system issues would be major impediments or not, though I suspect not.
I want you to imagine trying to raise a child during COVID with a shitlib wife.
I know because one of my best friends has lived through this. In fact is still living through this, the wife still makes the kid mask in public.
I've met her before. She wasn't ragingly insane all the time. But this one thing got in her and bam, life basically ruined.
I actually think people underestimate how important political divisions can be in a marriage. At least well adjusted conservative men probably think they don't really mean it, but one day they might.
I think wokeness has made marriage and family much more emotionally demanding. Women have been indoctrinated that men should care about their every concern and they have been supplied an ever increasing supply of concerns to have. Men probably need more empathy. But women need to better discipline what concerns influence them. A huge issue I see today with young moms is following the crowd on child rearing. And with social media the crowd has opinions on everything! All my parents had was a Dr. Spock book and their own experience that kids should be free range and everything will work out.
I am going to combine two analogies. The first is based on those lists of US counties that are richest or most educated and lately something like half of the top 20 are in the DC region. This probably seems duplicative, but they are distinct enough to be counted separately. The second is the way the Fed talks about the multiple "channels" by which macroeconomic tools and policies operate to pump liquidity into various areas. So, likewise, If you made a list of top 20 most toxic influences that are corrosive to and undermining of healthy, stable, and affectionate relationships, then a number of genuinely distinct channels through which women are influenced by social media would also make up half the list.
In general it is important to help people find ways to be satisfied and content in their lives. But because it is really easy to both disturb harmony and agitate people into discontent and to profit from that psychological manipulation, we have built the internet into a giant and unavoidable machine for discontent and acrimony.
In the short run the future belongs to those who master this tech. In the long run the future belongs to those who shun it.
It is a good thing for women to be liberated to be financially independent and to choose whether to have children. It is a huge problem, however, if too many women choose not to have children. There is not just the economic issue of sustaining the population and providing young workers to replace and pay social welfare for retiring workers. Marriage and children give men and women a common interest. The less marriage and children you have the more the sexes and society are divided. Cultures that lack common interests are not durable.
It is simply not in the benefit of middle class men to make a marriage commitment if they do not trust the wife will want them to be around long term - the emotional and financial costs of a failed marriage for this class are huge. And for many men, there is no lasting enthusiasm for a marriage commitment if there are not children involved. In defense of women, they are not enthusiastic about being around a man who is lazy or undisciplined and does not give them confidence of a better future.
So men need women to show enthusiasm for marriage and family and women are not confident, for valid reasons, they want to make that commitment. There is an impasse and it is not readily solved.
Old cultures bridged this trust gap by promoting the institution and duty of marriage. Men were expected to marry and women were expected to have children. Modern culture can scoff at the "coercion" of this social expectation but it fails to recognize that for almost all people marriage and children are better in the long run than the alternative of being old and single.
And notice that government encouraging women to bear children only addresses the economic issue of population growth. It utterly fails to correct the collapse of shared cultural values.
Great comment, Invisible Sun.
Re the gender political divide, note also that there is much more mental illness among females, and evidently, it is worse the more liberal they are.
Women are diagnosed with mental illness more. Does that really mean less men are mentally ill? Who is more likely to be on the streets? What does it mean that more women attempt suicide and more men are "successful"? Be careful interpreting your data.
Here’s my hypothesis to explain the greater prevalence of mental illness among girls and young women. Men sense an enemy approaching (see my other comments) and are thus enlivened to prepare for “battle.” Warfare, and its precursors--whether signs of an approaching hostile political enemy, or greater concentration of power within government, or growing restrictions on their rights—cause men to engage in various warfare activities, including—and especially important—learning about the enemy. Men are focused on knowing and understanding their enemies. Men are increasingly conservative because they are more actively reading and searching for truth and morals that ensure that their genes are passed along. Men are actively engaging in a new modern warfare that increasingly is a war of ideas.
Women the other hand are more likely to take a neutral stance and not engage in fighting. Their survival instincts cause them to seek protection, to take care of their bodies so they can stay alive to care for children. Women are not seeking truth to the extent that men are. They are not studying and confronting their enemies like men are. Thus, they are increasingly confused by the polarization and battle of ideas. They see great power on the left, thus they are increasingly seeking protection from that power. Their mental health problems are caused by growing uncertainty and confusion caused by this war, about where and who to seek protection from.
Men are rising to confront that power. They are willing to risk their lives to defeat the rising progressive authoritarian enemies. Men are enlivened by the leftist enemy whereas women are seeking to protection from the stronger force, which is currently the political left.
Benenson writes
“I suggest that women's genes have programmed them to keep themselves, their children, and their closest relatives alive and healthy. Men love risks. Women avoid them whenever possible. The reason is simple.
“An individual woman's survival and general good health are much more important than a man's. A man's basic contribution to procreation requires a few minutes of activity. Further, if he is not available, another man can easily substitute. Not so for a woman. A woman's body is responsible for successfully carrying the fetus to term, ensuring that it stays healthy. She then has to successfully give birth to her child, which is quite risky in humans.
After birth, she has to feed her baby, which in most periods of history has meant producing enough milk to keep the baby alive and well nourished for a couple of years. After that, women also are primarily responsible for maintaining the health and security of their children for many more years, before their children are old enough to survive on their own. Even after their children give birth themselves, they often help out with their grandchildren.
Staying alive and healthy therefore is absolutely critical. Women must keep this problem, and its solutions, in their sights at all times throughout their lives, until they become very old. One mistake, and their health, and the health of all of their living and future children, is compromised. It's an enormous burden.
“Boys and men needn't worry on a second-by-second basis. If a man manages to impregnate one or more women who will carefully take care of the resulting children, his genes will survive—even if he doesn't. He's free to fight, to go exploring, or take whatever risks might lead to finding more women to have sex with.”
It is unfortunate that so few people writing on morality read Adam Smith. It would have saved Robert Kurzban a lot of work flailing around if he could have read Theory of Moral Sentiments and been done. Notably that moral judgements include both consequentialist aspects, social cohesion aspects, judgements of whether something is good, bad or indifferent, all those things.
I just posted an essay that summarized that (quickly in only like 10 pages) but Smith lays it out in much more detail, and frankly he finishes the question. Almost no one since has had anything to add to "how do humans decide what is good and bad?" People have argued whether or not something should be considered good and bad, but explaining how we make those considerations is pretty much done and dusted.
Incidentally, Haidt's theory is upstream a bit of Smith's, describing the categories of things we might consider good and bad that we use in our judgements of whether a particular action is good or bad.
Smith never married nor had kids. Neither did Hume. Neither did Newton. John Stuart Mill had no kids, he pined after the married Harriet Taylor for decades, her husband died, then he married her when they were in their 40s. I could go on. Anglospheric atomism has been shredding once-incredible reserves of elite human capital for a long time.
I don't know that the atomism aspect applies so well here. Smith and Hume had particularly dense social networks, writing extensively on the importance of such. (I don't know about Newton and Mill.) Likewise, socialistic contemporaries like Rousseau, and later Marx, had lots of kids they never took care of. Many other greats also never had kids, like Robert E. Howard. I am not sure where he would fall on the "Anglospheric atomism" spectrum, but like Smith he was very devoted to his mother. (Unlike Smith, he apparently wasn't very ugly... even Smith's admirers thought he was exceptionally bad looking, with one young women with an almost high school girl's crush on him writing in a letter that his lips were thick and rubbery like those of a demon.)
The trend also goes back before the Anglosphere as well. Aristotle didn't have kids, nor Plato (so far as I recall) or Cicero, or Aquinas... Shakespeare... I don't know about Grotius or de Tocqueville. Looking at the names on my books shelves, however, only a very small percentage had children, and of those that did only a very small percentage had children who carried on their legacy or achieved similar notoriety. In fact, the only name that jumps out as fulfilling that is Freidman.
So yea, I don't think the atomism argument holds up well, as opposed to an argument that brilliant people are often obsessed with their field and otherwise weird in a way that makes marriage difficult or unappealing. Of course it isn't clear whether one becomes great largely because one eschews family life to focus on one's work, or if the ingredients to be great make it comparatively harder to have a good family life as compared to work.
A good song is called "Finishing the hat" from the play "Sunday in the Park with George" about, inspired, by Georges Seurat 's painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
Great painters, brilliant people, are usually obsessed with whatever it is that makes them great. Not enough time/ attention/ care to others to have good marriage relations.
Warren Buffet took over a dozen company annual reports on his honeymoon to study for choosing investment targets. ("Snowball")
"Feminism is organic: women - no longer valued commodities, unneeded as producers of children - are just now coming up from primitivism and developing civilization" [so naturally it's a little crude!] as if re-inventing the wheel is a novel take, but I think it way underestimates people's tendency to believe/do what they are told to believe/do.
I see it this way: a number of high-IQ, high-strung, "neurotic" women were dissatisfied with family life and influenced by Marxist ideas about power. They were narcissistic enough that they couldn't imagine/accept that they might not bear much relation to the mass of women over the world. They insisted that all women must share their dissatisfaction - their difference. To a great extent in the Western world, they were wildly successful in spreading this news and re-orienting society accordingly.
I think a small percentage of women are really happy and thriving in this new order.
And now all the ordinary, non-high-IQ women are high-strung and vaguely dissatisfied.
Roe v. Wade was a pure expression of this phase. Its going has been traumatic for many American women. I am a hermit and nor do I use social media, so I wouldn't know this necessarily except that my husband who interacts with far more women than I do, said that his women colleagues were truly upset about the decision. And that this bore no relation to their age or status as potential mothers or babykillers.
What was interesting was that they were upset with the loss of a tool to prevent procreation that they scarcely needed anymore.
They practice birth control. Or they are generally sexually continent. Or they aren't in a relationship at all. Or they are smart enough to know about the morning-after pill. Or they are married and actually trying to produce that one kid. Or they are married with that one kid and if they found themselves pregnant again, it would be a surprising blessing in the end. Or they are old and wishing for nothing more than a grandchild to spend money and time on. If they "used" Roe - they generally used it once. Full disclosure: no, no full disclosure, but the question is not academic for me.
Overwhelmingly the only people who will have children now, are the ones who fail on all these metrics, especially on the "self-control" or self-abnegation that Tove seems to most associate with social organization, albeit only for men.* Arguably the ones you'd least want to procreate. And now, more than ever - with the loss of Roe. So much for the proto-civilization of the Bonobo Women.
*The other thing that can actually be *overestimated*, a lot of the time, is the difference between the sexes.
"There is a long-standing argument about whether men are inherently different from women. I wonder if these young men and women are on opposite sides of that argument. Think about that for a moment."
Thanks for the chuckle I got out of that.
I am not as kind to your first author because his statement reads as performance art: he is staking a moral position to increase his own status relative to conventional moralists, declaring that by consequentialist, utilitarian, or 'effective altruist' measures, they are immoral and outside the tribe. That's his claim. There is no need to cede any ground to it.
"While the compromise of exchange is driven by self interest, the compromise of norms is driven by imposition on others. … Norms are driven by homogeneity. No one ever negotiates for a norm used to restrict themselves; they could simply self-impose it instead.“
This quote from two days ago and today's first author seem to me to be saying much the same. And yes they both exaggerate a bit but I don't think they are far off. And I don't agree with your negative comments on the one's words.
I wasn't commenting per se on the first author but technically on the "view" he describes; which was also what Arnold is commenting on. Arnold says it is too extreme. I view it as self-referential - as well as harmful.
While I agree the quote sounds extreme, I don't see self-referential. I suppose that's because I don't see how he is "staking a moral position." I don't see harm in what he says either. I don't know how you reached those opinions.
Again many good links, often with further links. The Gen-Z divergence was in Bus. Insider 23 Jan
https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-gender-gap-young-men-women-dont-agree-politics-2024-1
With good graphs, including showing the women changing far more than men on identifying as liberal (from 28% up to 44-42%; men still around 25% "liberal", no graph of "Conservative").
Key graph: "A survey we conducted last year found that young women expressed statistically significant greater concern for 11 out of 15 different issues, including drug addiction, crime, climate change, and gun violence. There was not a single issue that young men cared about significantly more than young women. " As Hanania noted, liberals CARE more than conservatives.
Bus. Insider had to denigrate Trump as "stoking grievances and directing young men's frustration toward liberals and feminists." Steve Sailer notices the 4x higher suicide rate and other increasing fails of men failing HS, failing college, and much less often entering college.
For a happy relationship, both men and especially women should read the fine book: "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus". D-Different.
The article concludes there is "a growing eagerness among both young men and women to blame their problems on each other. "
This seems to confirm the Confas argument that the basic problem is "equality" - the belief that men and women are equal, thus any difference in results is because of systemic ... reasons/ discrimination/ toxicity.
It's related to abdication of individual responsibility and agency--what you get is less good than you deserve, but it's Not Your Fault. And there is an aspect of truth that most of what happens in the world really is not you fault, yet each person's decisions hugely affect what actually happens to them.
We need to get back to individual choices and individual agency, including responsibility, more than anybody else tho not 100%, for the results. Group blame is to enable bad choices.
Regarding the gender divide, it would seem to me that boys and men sense an approaching enemy and are “preparing” for war. See Joyce Benenson’s book Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes. Girls and women do not sense this enemy or react to it differently. She writes
“What do boys fear? Based upon my years of study of children and, more recently, adults, I believe that boys' and men's specialty is worrying about enemies. The enemy is their problem, and it is their responsibility to defeat it. Because the enemy is not always present, boys and men don't worry all the time. Nonetheless, I believe that confronting the problem of the enemy has allowed human males to evolve a whole suite of instinctive reactions that still exist today.
“The intuitive preoccupation with enemies is so strong that when modern men fight other forms of danger, they end up recasting these as the enemy. For example, men fight wars on drugs; they battle cancer; they attack illiteracy; they combat infection; they defeat bad attitudes; they assail political beliefs; they assault stereotypes, and so forth. Girls and women use these terms much less spontaneously. It is the enemy who has got hold of boys' and men's attention and resources.
And a few pages later, she writes
“Likewise, Hollywood specializes in war movies, Westerns, horror films, crime stories, courtroom dramas, action and adventure themes, doomsday scenarios, spy movies, and prison stories, filled to the brink with men fighting enemies….When such an enemy does not exist, girls and women don't think about it. But boys and men will create one. They make and watch the movies. Fighting provides pleasure, but not enough to sustain a whole movie. It is the enemy that captures the interest of male moviegoers. The ability to watch others killing enemies generates billions and billions of dollars. Since filmmaking began more than a hundred years ago, violence always has had its appeal. Films by the Japanese director Kurosawa, Mexican revolutionary movies, Chinese leftist films, Indian Don films, and Soviet propaganda movies show that disparate cultures share the American penchant for watching violence unfold.”
I think this passage from Joyce Benenson’s book illustrates that the gender divide has a great deal to do with boys’ and mens’ innate interest in war and enemies. Boys’ interest in learning is inspired by war. Males are sensing an approaching enemy and are preparing differently than girls and women. Males are increasingly reading and learning different things in order to prepare for this enemy.
“one explanation for why fluid intelligence is greatest when men are simultaneously physically strongest and fastest is because it increases victory in warfare. Abstract conceptualization of the enemy's battle formations, strategic planning of future moves, rapid execution of complicated tactics, alongside maximal physical prowess and speed, seems like a good recipe for winning a war. Men with these heightened physical and cognitive skills may have defeated more enemies, and passed the genes for these traits to their sons. After their physical skills waned, fluid intelligence and speed became less critical to survival, so they diminished too.
“Regardless of the truth of this proposition, these days a major problem preoccupying educators is the difficulty that many boys have in acquiring academic skills. The idea that fighting wars requires a fairly high level of thinking could be valuable. Educators could use males' innate attraction to fighting enemies as a tool. Skills could be learned in the context of defeating the enemy. Calculating points won and lost would make mathematics more real. Geographical knowledge would be essential to establishing territorial boundaries. History would provide real-life examples of warfare, politics, and changing national boundaries. Morality could be broached through the generation of competitive rules. Clothing considerations could include evolution and camouflage of animals in differing environments. Physical education on the playground could take its playbook from military exercises. The importance of naps and eating right to basic training could be stressed. As the boys grow, the incredible scientific advances that the military has produced in technology, medicine, and engineering could be introduced. Fluid intelligence could be co-opted as a means to win battles, even if it didn't originally evolve for this purpose. As strange as this may sound, I have met many nonviolent boys whose interest in learning was inspired by war.”
The whole men need to capitulate for women fails to mention that women not having children also means girls aren't being born either. It isn't really much of a surprise that giving women the option to sacrifice many prime developing years right after adolescence or have the responsibility of family and children, the path of least responsibility or burden however one wants to see it will be predominantly selected. But many women cannot be criticized out of social consequence therefore nobody has the courage to bring up the notion that biological reality has a hard stop on child bearing specifically for women. Making this an ideological division may be salient given that cultural animosity is the fashion of the day but in the end, women are the ones who aren't having children (not people) and they aren't going to select for children especially given their nature to find higher mates and the optionality or the illusion of optionality in a deregulated, decentralized, global mating marketplace. But selection pressures will run their course over a long enough time horizon and the most religious who happen to have children happen to win out if one wants to extend the logic to its conclusion. Now, the development of the artificial womb could effectively make this moot whereas women's eggs will theoretically be another commodified product that women will auction off if this technology would develop. Gene editing is already coming online so this is the inevitable logical step.
An artificial womb is likely a technology that is at least 100 years into the future- figuring out all the needed inputs into bringing a fertilized egg to the state of a multicellular baby is a herculean endeavor. All the other evolutionary and cultural pressures will act to correct the problem on a shorter time scale.
It's not fears about the risks and burdens of pregnancy that's holding women back, that's just a socially acceptable excuse. So there is really no demand for artificial wombs, the emergence of which wouldn't change or solve anything.
But taking the technical question seriously, 100 years is far too long. Now, it depends what you mean by artificial. For fully artificial - at 15 weeks gestation, lamb fetuses were transferred to biobags and continued to develop normally for 4 weeks (with some implications for how premature human births could be treated in the future) and by all indications could have gone longer and perhaps even to full term but to now IRB animal testing protocols have required all such experiments to stop at 28 days. Because ... um ... uh ... reasons! Human embryos can be grown normally in Petri dish conditions for at least two weeks and probably a bit longer, but, again, protocols forbid it. Still, spreading the gap of the period between 20 and 100 days will non-biological systems is indeed at least a few decades off.
But for less than fully artificial, I suspect the technology is already there if anything short of normal human pregnancy qualifies. If one allows for a more abstract form of 'surrogacy' there are all kinds of (admittedly very creepy) things one could do to leverage biologically-assembled parts (i.e., organs) or whole gestational systems in sufficiently compatible or engineered animals.
For example you could initiate and sustain womb-like conditions in some braindead or induced-comatose animal, and grow a human fetus in a bio bag with an 'umbilical' cord connected to that womb on the next lab table or whatever. It's not clear whether the hormonal and immune system issues would be major impediments or not, though I suspect not.