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Notes -
I think French is basically right.
Andrews is making one of those famous totalizing theories of history, which invariably take a single phenomenon affecting a single place and time and attempt to make it into a completely general theory of cause and effect. A good analogy would be Marxism.
Totalizing theories fail because the actual material of history is far, far richer and denser than any monocausal theory can provide for (outside of extremely limited forms - think “crop failures drive starvation”). Right now, America specifically is under a great number of pressures, including: an aging population, immigration, the arrogance born of global superiority, gutted industries, old and new racial tensions, the rise of left and then right wokism, the intergenerational humiliations of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism, and yes, the monumental rise of women into the public sphere and corresponding retreat in men’s public influence. Each one of these is going to have its own effects and pressures, and to select one as the Cause of Causes is misguided or even benighted.
What I think Andrews is mostly describing is a sharpened tribalistic trend in the public sphere. Calls for ingroup violence are responded to more generously, as points of difference or even decorum are sufficient for a breach. At the same time, objective measures of advantage are taken less seriously, along with other dispassionate perspectives. Overt efforts towards creating entirely new value, or at least taking from the actual Other, are devalued compared to squabbling over internal resources.
But this happens over all places and times, and if I were to offer a theory, is probably more closely related to where people can expect the greatest return on investment for their efforts. While Rome had easy access to the Mediterranean and rich France, she expanded; when she reached the borders of the Sahara, the Atlantic, the Levant, and the Rhine, she turned inward and began warring over what she already had. This is not a complete analysis, but I think it’s a strong gearspring in this particular mechanism. In contrast, ONLY in the modern West have women penetrated the public sphere to such a degree. If there were consequences to this, we should expect to see unique ones, not regurgitations from every struggling power. And indeed, on the family and interpersonal level, we do see massive changes in gender relations. But interestingly, I don’t think those replicate directly to the civilizational level. The problems we are having were experienced by the men of yesteryear. Late Athens is, as always, an apt comparison.
I’m coming at this from a fairly sympathetic perspective. I think there are major problems with how America operates right now, I personally dislike how it feels to operate in a feminized institution, I think the legislative defenses of women have by and large exceeded their period of use now that women are paramount in many areas… and yet I find her overall piece to be lacking. It’s like she’s got cause and effect backwards.
Let me give an analogy. We all know that universities became dramatically more leftist over the past sixty or so years - I think that’s fairly established and supportable. But why? The simple reason is that more conservative individuals did not see the universities as worth fighting over. I know I didn’t. They don’t pay enough, you don’t get enough respect… so I went into industry, and I think that’s where most similar people went too. So the universities were ceded to people who wanted them for reasons nothing to do with wealth or status.
I think the women in industry question is similar. In the areas where women are most dominant, or increasingly dominant, one reason is that they want the job for reasons other than what men want, and are willing to effectively undercut men on that principle. As they do so, the costs for men to enter that industry go up and the rewards go down, so they hit a tipping point and become much more female. If a field were to become more profitable but also more demanding, we’d see a reverse effect where men flood in and squeeze the women - who frequently want more flexibility in their work and don’t like demanding and stressful positions - out. And I think this is happening to some degree in fields like nursing. It’s basically gender roles painted over industrial culture. So what does it mean that, say, being a judge or a lawyer or a Congressman is decreasingly attractive to men, such that they’d push through whatever feminine culture to be one anyway?
So, contra Andrews, my basic thesis is that the basic facts of gendering make some careers more suitable for men than women than vice versa, and that this tends to lead to dramatic differences in sex ratio and subculture, but that the larger cultural differences are separate from this phenomenon. Certainly there is some effect from civil rights legislation, but it’s not the whole story. If you took all the women out, I suspect the men that remain would act, by Andrews’ lights, like a bunch of girls.
Have you read what Andrews wrote ?
Do you truly think we are blank slates disconnected from our biology ? How then do you account for the extreme similarity of social institutions among primitive tribes ? There is no evidence of a matriarchal society - only ever matrilineal. Every known human society has marriage and jealousy. And so on.
Only if they were the kind of men who buy perfume and engage in what used to be called sodomy.
Yes, no, not necessarily, respectively.
No kidding, that's what you believe? That we're some sort of quasi-rational agents not biased by millions of years of mammalian psychology ?
What a strange thing to say. Didn’t I answer “no” there?
If you’re looking for an opportunity to be offended, then I can’t really help you.
Being too terse has its risks.
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