Links to Consider, 8/26

Lorenzo Warby on emasculated entertainment; Frank Furedi offers a perspective on a Drag Queen; Rob Henderson on Eric Hoffer; Wilcox and Wang on Marriage and Happiness

Lorenzo Warby writes,

The transformative politics of “future-as-secular-heaven, past-as-moral-hell, present-as-moral-hell-continued” poisons human achievement. We can’t admire the achievements and struggles of folk in the past—nor appreciate their flawed humanity—if the past is a litany of sin, of failure to instantiate a glorious future.

…Male stories—including the classic hero’s journey—are typically prestige stories about risk, effort, skill, discovery. Female stories, including the classic girl-gets-boy story, are typically propriety stories, about living up to (or not) proper standards. Clever female stories will also play with the problems of propriety: Jane Austen being the archetypal exemplar.

What we get with “wokification” is the suppression of prestige stories and male heroes in favour of by-the-numbers identity propriety.ht word—where male heroes are deconstructed (disparaged) into sad parodies.

There is much else worthy of excerpt.

Frank Furedi writes about a Drag Queen,

My immediate reaction is to pose the question ‘what is the difference between this spectacle and blacking-up?’.

It seems like a fair point. If we don’t like white people mocking black stereotypes by doing “blackface,” why do we like men mocking female stereotypes as Drag Queens.

Rob Henderson writes,

According to The True Believer, the shared factor among extreme mass movements is not ideology or practice but a shared hatred for the present and a yearning for a (subjectively defined) utopian future.

Lorenzo Warby makes a big deal about the appeal to the imagined future. The book Henderson refers to is a classic by Eric Hoffer.

Brad Wilcox and Wendy Wang write,

We also have new research, which finds that marriage is “the most important differentiator” of who is happy in America. Falling marriage rates, meanwhile, are a chief reason why happiness has declined nationally, according to this study. 

Concerning the substantive issue, I am in favor of getting married and having children. But appealing to “happiness research” on this issue does not change my beliefs one way or the other.

If you and I fill out a happiness survey, the scale has no meaning. How do I know that a 3 for me isn’t the same as a 7 for you? How do I know whether we are measuring my current feelings of pleasure or pain or long-term fulfillment? In the case of marriage and children, the biggest reward may come from becoming grandparent—how do you capture that in a happiness survey of thirty-somethings?

Suppose we ignore the fact that we do not know what the heck we are measuring, and we stipulate that there is some scientific validity to the average happiness scores of married women being higher than those of single women. (Incidentally, awhile back a feminist friend of mine claimed to have seen research showing the opposite.) What do we know about causality? Perhaps happier women are more likely to be married.

Finally, suppose we ignore the inability to show causality, and we stipulate that on average marriage causes women to be happier. What do statistical averages mean for you? Statistical averages show that many more men would rather sit home and watch football on TV than go dancing. But that’s not the choice that would make me happy.

Again, I’m all for marriage and children. But I’m all against happiness research. I refuse to cite happiness research, even when the researchers support my positions.

substacks referenced above:

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Without Belief in a God, But Never Without Belief in a Devil

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Why Is It OK To Black-Face Women

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Negating Achievement