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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   32275 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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How can modern 'gender roles' possibly be sustainable? Fertility rates below 2.1 mean that civilization itself is unsustainable in the medium-term (let alone the long-term where more fecund civilizations will overcome less fecund peers, ceteris paribus). Either it dwindles to nothing in a kind of evaporative cooling where the few remaining young people leave their many senescent dependants for greener fields. Or you get mass immigration, the importing of other societies. Either the immigrants assimilate and age into oblivion, perpetuating the problem, or the natives assimilate and their civilization is gone.

The universe does have rules - reproducing is rewarded. It's not like worrying about masculinity is a new thing (see all the concerns about the degeneracy of the youth as the article points out). But in this case, we know masculinity and femininity are broken because they're not working at sustaining the population! Anti-social is not a bad thing if society is broken (not in a small way but in a terminal way).

All through this article there's an awkwardness as the author tries to describe a problem without admitting any kind of serious change is needed.

I’m convinced that men are in a crisis. And I strongly suspect that ending it will require a positive vision of what masculinity entails that is particular — that is, neither neutral nor interchangeable with femininity. Still, I find myself reluctant to fully articulate one. There’s a reason a lot of the writing on the crisis in masculinity ends at the diagnosis stage.

Then we get some banal, inoffensive, ineffective ideas of what masculinity should be:

We can find ways to work with the distinctive traits and powerful stories that already exist — risk-taking, strength, self-mastery, protecting, providing, procreating. We can recognize how real and important they are. And we can attempt to make them pro-social — to help not just men but also women, and to support the common good.

Like people say in the comments, this is just recycling 1950s Boy Scouts rhetoric, the sort of stuff you'd see in a Tom Swift novel. Did it work then? Maybe. Did it keep working? Obviously not. And it's a really facile thing to propose 'finding ways to work with powerful stories like self-mastery'. What does that mean in concrete terms? Nothing at all. WTF is self-mastery? Is the author proposing media manipulation, putting more strong father figures in film? Who knows, maybe we're expected to be mind-readers.

There's a model of how industrial states were run with medium-high fertility - women were not in the workforce at anything near the male participation rate. One option is taking women out of the workforce and higher education (a universally proven sterilizing agent), which entails political difficulties and practical problems. Another option is mass-scale human cloning, which also entails political difficulties and practical problems. Another option is rushing for life-extension or AI to bypass the problem entirely, which has problems of its own. Or we could try to found powerful religions like LDS or Islam or Orthodox Judaism. Or we can just wither away talking about pro-social stories of self-mastery and be written about in the history books of others.

But these aren't really 'options', they're destinies. There's no declining one of these paths.

But these aren't really 'options', they're destinies. There's no declining one of these paths.

I mean, I strongly disagree. I think the most likely path is that the current elite (or the elite of the next generation) will create life extension technology and effectively rule forever, at least under your worldivew.

I'd like to see a humanity that moves forward and values things more than just base reproduction. I'd like to see us value knowledge, and understanding, and frankly love. Even if it contradicts some of the transhumanist futures some other users believe in.

Demographics are not destiny, and never have been. Memes are destiny, and you'd better start acting like that's the case, or you'll be outcompeted.

This is a techno-optimist take. But I don't know that the techno-optimist take is well supported by evidence. The current elites will stay in power until they die in office- living much past 100 is just not attainable even for the elites.

Well yeah current older folks are dead. With the advance of the pace of science I see coming with AI and other advances though, I'm optimistic that anyone younger than say, 45 or 50 today, may be able to live a lot longer than people can right now.

Remember that it used to be almost impossible to survive things that are routine to cure nowadays. Medicine inexorably advances, and if we techno-optimists are right about the potential of AI that advance will be swift indeed.

Remember that maximum human lifespan hasn't really changed in centuries.

Remember that humans couldn't fly for millenia. Remember that space was a celestial sphere thought unbreachable. Remember that sickness was seen as the devil's work.

The march of technology renders these claims pointless. We will solve aging if given enough time, and if we keep on the right track.

Remember that humans couldn't fly for millenia.

Still can't. Humans can only build machines that fly.

Remember that sickness was seen as the devil's work.

Based on pandemic propaganda, it still is, except the Devil is now personified as a Republican instead of a humanoid with horns and tail, or a man of wealth and taste.

We will solve aging if given enough time, and if we keep on the right track.

This claim is vacuous, though.

Humans can only build machines that fly.

There are human-constructed flying objects in all four quadrants of the machine/not-machine//self-powered/human-powered schema.

(Normal aeroplane/helicopter/etc.; pedal-powered aircraft; helium balloon; hang-glider.)

All of those are machines.

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