In this post, I will broadly address why I feel many of them are missing the point, and detail my “floor/ceiling” model a bit more, so you should read that first.

To start, I will reiterate what we have to face: The exact opposite of what some predicted has happened. There is an illogical and unscientific ideology rippling through our public institutions, and atheists and agnostics are more likely to believe in it than the religious. Worse, they don’t just accept it without question, they are highly intolerant of dissent.

This isn’t just true of “movement” atheism, this is true of atheists more broadly:

There are many reasons offered for why this particular irrationality has gone far with atheists (atheists are confusing gender with LGBT rights, atheists are reflexively opposing the religions, etc), but all have troubling implications of their own: Are atheists only rational when the religious are irrational? Can atheists be more vulnerable to social pressure than the religious? Are atheists more likely to blindly support new and untested theories than the religious?

Meanwhile, they do not explain why a commitment to “reason” and a (supposedly) greater understanding of biological science seemed to have no impact at all in preventing the madness in this population.

The great Richard Dawkins recently wrote a piece in the Spectator which, although not addressed to me and focused on a related but different theory, unfortunately also highlights the refusal to face the problem:

“An irritating strain of the Great Christian Revival is the myth of the God-shaped hole. “When men choose not to believe in God, they then believe in anything.” …..How patronising, how insulting to imply that, if deprived of a religion, humanity must ignominiously turn to something equally irrational.”

…Except in this case, that may be exactly what has happened! We are encountering evidence that the thing that is too insulting to presume might be true for anyone appears to be happening, and to exactly the people one might suspect would be most vulnerable.

In other words, reality is giving us feedback.

When I was knee-deep in ex-Muslim activism I would frequently encounter Muslims who denied the violence inherent in Islam by asserting something like “Islam means peace”, as if that was the end of it, as if somehow our repeated exposure to Islamic terror was invalid because some Quranic verse gave occasional lip service to the virtues of coexistence.

But we instinctively know to mistrust such claims. We know that nothing is more real than, well, reality, and the phenomenon of Islamic terror demanded an explanation, not a rebuttal. Similarly, the submission of the anti-dogma/pro-reason tribe to clear absurdities must be directly addressed, not dismissed with a scoff or an appeal to the possibility of a brighter secular future.

To be clear, like Dawkins, I have no “God-shaped hole”. I have missed very few aspects of faith and for the most part, enjoy my life and mind much more without it. I have fought for a world where more people can be free to be like me. I also dismiss gender ideology precisely due to its irrational claims and denial of science.

So it should be clear that I’m not asking anyone to join a church, or give up on science or reason as a key tool in your analytical toolbelt. I am asking you to imagine that what is true for us may not be true of others. I am asking you to allow the feedback given by this situation to enter your mind, and to seriously grapple with it.

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Religion as ceiling and as floor

Having said all that, I am not actually proposing the existence of a “God-shaped hole” as many of my critics presumed. (I am not commenting on the merits of that conception, I am saying that I am pointing to something different–an indirect benefit of faith that benefits reason).

From my last piece:

In the past, I had mostly thought about the “ceiling” that faith created–the ways in which religion hindered progress, scientific achievement and understanding. But now I think much more about the “floor” it creates, too. Perhaps without certain myths granting the power of the sacred to some fundamental truths (like the fact that there are two sexes), we would drift away from reality altogether.

This view does not contend that, on the whole, religion is a “better way of knowing the world” than reason or science–the floor exists, but so does the ceiling. Instead, it recognizes the vulnerabilities of reason to other pressures, and proposes a value in safeguarding certain precepts with extra-rational support.

Let’s start with the assumption that religions are interested in propagation and longstanding faiths tend to be good at propagation-via-procreation in particular. This is a process that requires behavior to pass a minimal standard of reality-acceptance, as reality-denial without any brakes can easily result in harm, if not death, to yourself and any progeny.

As religious convictions shape decision-making, we might assume that if a faith has coexisted with society for a length of time, it is unlikely to include or otherwise require its adherents to commit to ideas that lead them to catastrophically destructive consequences in the near-term.

And as these religions are competing with other ideological systems, we might also expect them to include some degree of the inverse: ideas that act as a prophylactic against the most self-destructive bad ideas that humanity has shown itself to be vulnerable to.

This is what I propose constitutes the “floor”.

Of course this doesn’t apply to any or all faiths; newer cults would not have had time to develop this floor, and are therefore disqualified. And as time goes on and we encounter new threats, we would expect an update-resistant floor to be less useful.

Further, the set of ideas that constitute the floor can themselves be untrue, or even irrational. Inherent truth value is not a good standard for a floor. The purpose of the floor is to thwart more dangerous irrationalities, however it can.

The cost of the floor, as I presume my readers are well aware, is the existence of the ceiling.

Happy weekend!

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I also went on Ethan Strauss’ podcast to discuss a few similar themes (here).


Happy Friday,
Sarah

The main difference I make between the two is the degree of dependance on public perception.

“Reasonable” is a social descriptor–a person appears reasonable to others. To be reasonable, therefore, is to be legible–you must be able to make yourself understood. But legibility requires a whole host of other things too, for example: shared knowledge, assumptions, and even values. A person who grows up in an isolated religious context and does not know basic science might not find a reference to the theory of evolution all that reasonable, and they are not wrong to feel that way. If a society is made up of such people, then Darwin is, by definition, unreasonable. 

Rationality, however, has no such requirements. Rationality is independent of human perception–Galileo was not “reasonable” in his time, but he was rational in all times. (However, it is important to understand that while rationality may have a greater claim to approaching truth, a rational argument can be wrong if the presumptions are wrong—some scientists who initially opposed Galileo can also claim to be rational. We needed a new physics, after all.)

The point I want to make with this distinction is that what is rational quite often sounds unreasonable.

A rational argument can easily look crazy if “fashion” pulls powerfully against it (the lab leak hypothesis is my favorite example of this), or if it runs against a valued social norm. A rational person can also look crazy to all the reasonable folk, if the degree of separation between the spheres of knowledge is far enough. This is one reason I recently argued that being a heavy reader is probably bad for one’s chances at running for political office–ideally, one should be just slightly better read than their audience or must compensate for their damning level of knowledge by also possessing extraordinary communication skills. (Obama is an example of the latter, both well read and excellent at making himself understood, while JD Vance might be a heavy reader who fails the communication test.)

But it isn’t just politicians walking the tight rope—the pressures to place the reasonable above the rational affect us all, including (and perhaps especially) “public intellectuals”.

While politicians can garner support through other means, reasonableness is the main capital of the public intellectual. They must always have large stores—stores that they accumulate by being only as rational as the demands of reasonableness will allow. However, when the two are in tension, it is career suicide for the public intellectual to choose the unreasonable-but-rational position. In such cases, it is often better to remain silent, or speak out only if one has amassed a great deal of social capital as a “reasonable voice”. Then, people are more likely to question their own assumptions, but it is still a risky act and must be rarely done.

This is one reason I argue intellectuals might be more likely than the public to defer acknowledging important but controversial truths—the cost to reasonableness may be too high.

I remember the taxonomy of the political coalitions back in my college classes, which were overlaid with the assumption that while we may see drifts here and there, the basic structure would remain. In a report, the Manhattan Institute cites one political science textbook from 1998 which details what were formerly considered the party distinctions: “lower-status people, those with less education, those with low incomes, recently immigration ethnic groups, racial minorities, and Catholics are more likely to vote Democratic. Higher status people, the college-educated, those with high incomes, whites of northern European stock, and Protestants are more likely to vote Republican.” 1

Which of those is still true? 

Working class districts are more likely to be represented by Republicans, as is less educated America in general. Meanwhile, the Democrats have captured the managerial class. The religious front is a tad more complicated, but there are still interesting deviations from the old pattern. Catholics can be said to be “divided” (depending on where the Latinos go), while mainline WASPs first left Christianity, and then shifted over to Blue.

Racial minorities remain broadly on the Left, but they appear to be headed over to the Reds too–remarkable given the extreme racial hostility that is alleged to be waiting for them there.

I’m not a pollster nor particularly interested in horse-race politics, but this issue in particular has fascinated me for years, as I began to feel this change on the ground. I started my “culture war” participation in an arena where the ideals of the Left theoretically clashed with its desire to be supportive of a maligned minority group. In reality, there was not much of a debate at all, and the hijab became a symbol of progressivism. Politically, this would make more sense if the minority group was powerful, or a even a long-standing of the coalition. But American Muslims were quite favorable towards the Republicans before 9/11, and outside of Michigan they wield limited power. At the very least, it was hypocritical for social progressives to treat Islam favorably while castigating conservative Christians for far lesser crimes. But over time, I began to realize that the stance towards Islam wasn’t pandering towards Muslims as a voting bloc–the reality of Islam did not matter, nor did the livelihoods of Muslims. 

The sensibilities being catered to instead belonged to educated white liberals who defined themselves by their tolerance towards groups disfavored by the majority. It was here where I first began to notice the incredible power of this bloc–although I continued to remain in denial for quite some time. (When I pictured “political dogmatism”, the picture in my mind was a purple-faced, sweaty man yelling from the pulpit of some mega-church, not the soft-spoken, kindly NPR listener. Eventually, I accepted that even the sandal-wearing can be politically powerful, oppressive even.)

I’m getting off track here, so I’ll jump to the short of it: I believe what we are seeing now is the extended fallout of the political “white flight”. When the educated whites began to shift from Red to Blue, their strengths in coordination, resources, and institution dominance forced everyone else to reconfigure. I suspect their abandonment of the Right was a necessary condition for the ascendency of Trump–their absence tacitly weakened the GOP establishment until it collapsed under the weight of the Trumpian challenge. 

I have some predictions as to how this might play out in the coming years, if indeed it is true that we are in the middle of a re-alignment. 

• Educated whites might make for nice neighbors, but they make for tyrannical political allies. The ideological exclusion will continue to foster an increasingly inhospitable climate for minorities and new immigrants, who are more religious and socially conservative. Meanwhile, the population decline of whites overall will make the threat of white bigotry less frightening, and so minorities (particularly the “underrepresented” sort) will continue to shift over to the Reds. 

• As a byproduct of the multi-polar nature of their new coalition, the GOP will become the party of ideological “innovation”. By this, I don’t mean to say it will necessarily innovate in a progressive direction–but simply that it will accept non-conformists and demand less ideological consistency than it had in the past because it must, which will make it attractive to society's “deviants”.  

• Meanwhile the Left, which has understood itself as the champions of the “marginalized”, will increasingly resort to relying on chosen identities as its legitimizing force, with transgenderism leading the way.

• God will be everywhere and nowhere. The atheists who hate Christianity will go to the Left, the atheists on the Right will go to church. 

It is interesting to think about what the reversal will do to the underlying ideologies that the parties hold–how will “conservatism” and “progressivism” transform? Where will the old-school liberals go? 

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This time the realization was prompted by my assumption that if/when the Blue team saw the cognitive degeneration of the President in a way that was undeniable, the bubble would pop. No one could deny the nakedness of the emperor, and this new shared consciousness would allow for something new to occur.

The savvy Blues would realize that the reality of his mental state had been deliberately kept from them by his handlers (whose identities can only be guessed), and that the legacy media institutions (which pride themselves on being the “check” against the government) covered for him. 

They would wonder how it could have happened—how the media and much of the Blue political class could have gaslit themselves and others on this existentially vital issue. If the President has one job, they would think, it is to be ready and willing to act in a crisis. Regardless of the correctness of his politics, this man clearly cannot do that, and this fact was kept from us for months, likely years. 

If the US was a company, there would be fury from shareholders and employees alike if it was revealed that the CEO was rapidly losing his cognitive abilities and the c-suite covered for him and lied about it for ages. But the US is not a corporation, and this is orders of magnitudes worse than a business scandal. It is a heinous and self-serving dereliction of duty—nearly treasonous.  

But as the title of this post suggests, the bubble has not popped. 

Yes, there are now calls from many for Biden to step down, but little introspection among anyone about how we could have gotten here to begin with. This means they are not to be trusted—they will not learn.

Those who have been keeping up with me know what I have to say about how this happened: The American left is deeply, dangerously isolated both ideologically and increasingly, socially. Despite the claims of right-wing culture warriors, modern cancellations have largely been a phenomenon of the left towards others dissenting liberals or leftists, and we are finally witnessing the consequences of this approach on the tribe as a whole: they have mutilated themselves. Having purged anyone capable of disagreement from their ranks, they are blind and helpless and likely to remain that way. 

You can also catch me making the same argument on the most recent episode of my podcast with Meghan Daum. Meghan thinks that “only women can stop this” (this meaning the various manifestations of wokeism—cancel culture, DEI complex, etc)—and I mostly agree, except that I think they almost certainly won’t. We have to reckon with the fact that this is a politics that suits (or at least exploits) female psychological disposition very well, and this means that we can expect to see a bias towards it everywhere women are in power. It is possible, but I think highly naive to imagine that the same group that is contributing to the growth of something will somehow turn it all around and lead the charge for its destruction.

As it is in our interest to keep women engaged and involved in society—we must get creative in terms of solutions. I think the first step is acknowledging that men and women are not the same, and that our institutions were created to suit the psychologies of men and not women, so it is likely that when women are introduced into the picture in large numbers, some of these institutions can begin to function abnormally—especially those whose “missions” involve practices that are uncomfortable for women. 

For example, a vast majority of the polling of student opinions of free speech that I am familiar with finds that female students are reliably more censorious than males, and have a stronger preference for “diversity and inclusion”. This matters, because women now make up a majority of students and and even bigger majority of graduates—which means that our future elite is going to become more and more female. 

If wokeism is simply a feminization of liberalism, then we cannot approach the problem as simply one of “bad ideas” that have to be “challenged”. Persuasion for the liberal side is going to get harder, not easier, as time goes on.

Bizarrely enough (for me, anyways!) I do see the faint glimmer of hope. In the past, I did not have a working theory as to why institution after institution “fell” to insipid woke-logic, I could not understand how so many seemed to have “found the light” of the new religion simultaneously. Now I think I am closer to a working model, with this being one of the more important legs, so that is some kind of progress. It is possible, in my mind, to create institutions with incentives that counteract natural tendencies of the people in them, or to work with those tendencies in a positive way—much like how capitalism can turn human selfishness into societal progress, if instituted correctly. 

So while “changing minds” sounds very nice to liberal sensibilities, the solution is probably going to involve changing systems.

A Special Place In Hell

Subway Masturbators and Radicalized Singles

Listen now (77 min) | This week: Why New York (continues) to suck, why we still don’t trust the news, and what might be turning our young singles into raving SJWs / far-right nationalists. Plus, Sarah’s theory blaming (who else?) #AllWomen for the corrosion of our institutions, at which point Meghan breaks character and defend female honor. Will women put a stop to this madn…

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3 years ago · 10 likes · Meghan Daum & Sarah Haider

Lastly, on a totally unrelated note, I’ve been looking into reading more social science published *prior to the 60s*, because it is my understanding that that is when it all went to hell. I would love recommendations, particularly esoteric ones!

That’s all for now. Happy Monday.

https://twitter.com/FordFischer/status/1666193308912164864?s=20

Similar scuffles are taking place in Canada, and around the world conservative Christians are locking arms with Muslims in their opposition to the inclusion of gender and orientation in classroom materials. Some are applauding this new brotherhood of Abraham, and hoping that this heralds a change in the winds.

https://twitter.com/TheRealKeean/status/1667192126235639808

I’ve been receiving some questions from followers and friends about all this, such as:

• Is this new coalition a “turning point” in the culture/gender war? 

• Will the parental outcry help progressives recognize that they might be pushing things too far?

• Will progressives instead recognize the socially conservative tendencies of Islam and correct their stance on the faith?
  

The short answer: No, no, and no. Sorry. The longer answer is more interesting, so I’ll get to it.

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“True Islam” is Intersectional Islam

It is true that Muslims have “energy” in a way Christians do not and progressives will have a tougher time opposing a “marginalized” group. Nevertheless, if a Muslim-Christian coalition emerges, it will make things broadly worse for most parties. 

It is worth remembering that in America, Muslims have no direct political power. Unlike European Muslims, ours are fewer in number and are more dispersed—nor do they have the finances to make up for it. American Muslims are also some of the most socially progressive in the world—which means that the Muslim parents will face opposition from within as well, most effectively from an archetype I have come to know well: the MINOs (Muslims in Name Only).

While it is commonplace to see nominal Christians disregard the majority of biblical teachings, this is a much more rare occurrence in the Muslim community and the stigma against it remains powerful. Therefore, these types are few in number—far fewer even than the population of ex-Muslims. 

But their numbers are irrelevant—the few MINOs that do exist are larger than life, as they are the literal poster kids for what I like to call “Intersectional Islam”. This Islam is a product of the West, more specifically, of the desires of elite white liberals.

In that sense, the Islam of the MINOs might be better understood as an “identity” rather than a religion—a kind of personal vibe, a stylistic choice. It leans strongly on visible markers of “otherness”—colorful ethnic clothing, the casual peppering of foreign words in everyday conversation (alongside exaggerated “correct” pronunciations), and instagram pictures of gorgeously prepared traditional food. Intersectional Islam provides the kind of diversity that educated liberals are comfortable with—all the “enriching” accouterments of cultural difference without any of the underlying ideas. MINOs don’t eat pork, but they do support #TransRights.

*Lest any of you get mad at me for using a real person as an illustration, I’d like to point out that the woman pictured above is a Rachel Dolezol-level faker. As a “progressive Muslim”, she swam in circles adjacent to mine, and from what I recall she seemed nice but personified multiple stupefying contradictions intersectionalities. (Yes, she’s a hijabi—by choice! And yes, she is also a proud gay woman—what of it, bigot?)… Meanwhile her multi-ethnic status (Latinx/Arab/South Asian) meant that she didn’t shy away from race either—even landing a senior position as a diversity officer at a major progressive nonprofit in large part due to her “lived experiences”. Unfortunately, her mom decided to rain on the rainbow parade by telling the truth: her daughter is a race-hoaxer (“white as the driven snow”), the revelations throwing all the other identities into doubt. 

If Muslims decide to be more vocal about their opposition to leftist social agenda, they will find that MINOs will be invited to speak over them, and will succeed in drowning them out. We will be treated to a barrage of ludicrous op-eds that posit Islam as a LGBT friendly religion (“How Muhammad Was The First Queer Activist”, etc) as well as profiles of camera-friendly gay Muslims who claim to find no contradictions between “their Islam” and homosexuality. The more intelligent among the MINOs might attempt to put a more theological spin on it with a few cherry-picked quotes from hadith or the Quran, or perhaps bring in some historical flavor by blaming colonizers for anti-gay legislation in the Middle East. “True Islam”, it will be revealed, is a religion of Peace and #Pride.

Muslims Get the Apostate Treatment

Muslims might be tempted to correct the record, to debunk MINO claims using evidence, legal histories, and scholarship, but they will find (as ex-Muslims know) that no one cares about the truth. When Reza Aslan claimed that “the first thing Muhammad did was outlaw slavery”, the blatant and easily disproved falsehood was uncritically accepted. This was in the time of ISIS and Aslan had said what everyone (including, mainstream Muslims) wanted to hear. When ex-Muslims attempted to expose the lie—to point out that all evidence incontrovertibly points to the fact that Muhammad was a slave owner himself—it was we who were kicked out of polite society. 

This is the future that lies ahead of Muslims who do not prescribe to the Islam the New York Times anoints. Their skin color might prevent them from facing the most direct fire, but they will find themselves instead made invisible: Regardless of how much they protest, they will not be heard outside of conservative circles. The media apparatus that couldn’t wait to hear from them when they might have served as sympathetic victims of random-attacks-of-MAGA will look straight through them. It is bad optics for white people to confront brown people, so they simply won’t acknowledge Muslims at all—focusing all their energies on the more palatable villains in their story: the white Christians. 

Meanwhile, the MINOs will be deployed to do the work that the whites cannot, and will begin to label those who object to progressive social values as “extremists”. It won’t matter if these “extremist” views are, in fact, widely held in the Muslim community (and thus not actually “extreme”—just deeply conservative relative to American norms). It has never mattered what Muslims actually believe—Islam has always served as a proxy for domestic squabbles. Muslims were too happy to overlook this when they were being valorized by the Left as noble savages, but now the bill is due. The cost of being idealized is that along with the imperfections, your humanity is stripped away too.

Muslims were never truly part of the Leftist fold. The inclusion was only of their idealized representation, a creation that both parties maintained through a mix of falsehoods and self-deception. It was a marriage of convenience, and like all such marriages, bound to turn sour eventually.

On a related note, a public statement signed by many Muslim scholars was released last month, the purpose of which seems to be to corral Muslims into a clear, unified position around LGBT issues and to serve as a point of reference for non-Muslims.

The statement makes clear that sexual relations within the same sex is an explicit sin in Islam, as is “imitating the appearance of the opposite gender”. In addition, Muslims may not “take pride in identifying with labels that categorize them by their sins”—#Pride is haram.

The statement also makes clear that there can be no “progress” on this issue as “...particular principles that are explicitly stated in revelation, known to be necessary elements of Islam, and unanimously agreed upon by qualified scholars are deemed immutable and not open to revision by any person or entity, including the highest religious authorities”. Attempts to reinterpret doctrine to be inclusive of LGBTQ affirmation are, therefore, “theologically indefensible”.

So far, no surprises for those familiar with doctrine.

Next comes the more interesting part, a plea to MINOs and other liberal Muslims who might be tempted in fashioning a more #Pride-inclusive Islam:

We urge Muslim public figures to uphold the sanctity of our faith and refrain from making erroneous pronouncements on behalf of Islam. We reject any attempt to attribute positions to Islam concerning sexual and gender ethics that contravene well-established Islamic teachings. To be clear, we cannot overstate the detrimental spiritual consequences for those who intentionally reject, advocate the rejection of, or misrepresent the will of God, as in doing so they endanger their status as believers (Quran, al-An‘ām: 21).

Sounds a little desperate to my ears—one imagines that if they really did have the authority they claimed, this would not need to be said. Other parts of the document addressed lawmakers and activists, referencing constitutionally-protected right of Muslims to practice their faith. In a profound reversal of the mode of operation for the last few decades, the scholars felt it important to remind the public that disagreement does not equal hate:

“As a religious minority that frequently experiences bigotry and exclusion, we reject the notion that moral disagreement amounts to intolerance or incitement of violence.”

I had figured that at some point Muslims would come around to this. The romance with the Left was bound to fizzle out, and the ideological gulf between the two would become apparent, and then they would need to fend off the charges of bigotry. Still, it is probably too much to hope that this new “ideas are not people” principle will be applied to the critiques of Islam, too. It is certainly not going to become popular in the parts of the world in which Muslims remain in charge—nor do I expect the American Muslim community to care.

I find that it is easiest to adopt high-minded civil libertarianism when one is in a position of weakness, so (reasoning backwards) we can surmise that if a group is newly adopting such principles, they are newly finding themselves in a vulnerable position. Boring old gays did not have as much moral authority as Muslims in the intersectional victimhood matrix, but the modern LGBTQ+ apparatus is a different beast altogether. If Muslims challenge it, they may lose. Another way of gauging power here is to notice which of the opposing groups can most easily weaponize the word “bigot”. Tellingly, the word “islamophobia” did not occur once in the above statement.

Another good quote before we wrap up: 

“Peaceful coexistence does not necessitate agreement, acceptance, affirmation, promotion, or celebration. We refuse the false choice between succumbing to social pressures to adopt views contrary to our beliefs or facing unfounded charges of bigotry. Such coercive ultimatums undermine prospects for harmonious coexistence.”

Well said, and on the face of it this feels like a mature take on ideological differences. Sadly, it isn’t really true.

Some amount of ideological agreement is required for coexistence—or at least, a coexistence worth having. The ultimate function of the culture war is to establish that shared ground—which is yet another reason why those who think culture war issues are meaningless couldn’t be more wrong.

If I had to guess of where this will go, say, three years from now, I would say that it is likely that Muslims will broadly re-join the conservative fold. The Left will abandon Muslims, who are no longer cooperating nor all that useful for signaling tolerance. Conservatives might begin loosening up their xenophobia, and provided terror attacks remain rare, they are unlikely to pick it up with the same intensity as before (against Muslims, at least).

Meanwhile, the religious alliance taking charge of the conversation will discourage secular critics of woke extremism from speaking out—polarizing the debate further. As several writers and commentators have pointed out, the lack of a British religious Right has made it easier for feminists in the UK to speak out against gender ideology. If the religious come storming in citing holy books instead of presenting arguments that can move anyone, the debate will be billed as one about belief vs. “science”—and this is bad news for secular critics of gender.

It is worse news for gays—the religious Right can’t/won’t tell the difference between gays and lesbians and gender ideology—and the Left is giving them no reason to make the distinction. The Left is utilizing the social capital of gays to provide cover for the more radical claims of genderists—hoping that the newly-won unpalatability of homophobia will bias people towards accepting the full LGBTQ+ umbrella. Meanwhile, the religious Right is attempting something of the reverse—using the insanity of gender activism to seed doubt about the gay rights movement too.

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1. Some thoughts on my discussion with Louise Perry about the “need” for religion. 

2. Gripes about TERFs / feminism. 

But first, a job posting for a WEB DESIGNER:

I need a personal website. I should have put one out ages ago, but now I’m doing it and am looking to hire someone to design it. I don’t want anything complicated, but a high degree of tastefulness is a must, as is the ability to design/create all the pages from scratch. I don’t know why all websites are starting to look as if they are all using the same template, but I just hate it. I would love something unfussy that is also…unexpected. “Subtly creative” might be the word.

If that sounds like something you could do, or if you have a good reference, please reach out by replying to this email, or here if you are on the app/website, with links to any portfolios.

Do We “Need” Religion?

Louise Perry (author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution) had me on her new podcast to discuss motherhood, religion, and (in the extended version of the podcast) courtship rituals and the therapeutic language infused in modern life. 

She titled the episode “The Need for Religion”, which is not wrong...but a tad misleading. I don’t feel religion is “needed”, but I do think that in a more general sense, we need a sense of community and duty towards one another, and the shared values and shared understanding of the world that religion brings are a useful “glue” for in-group formation. (Obviously, I think religion brings a lot of garbage alongside those helpful communitarian impulses, and in many faiths, the costs are greater than the benefits.)

I also suspect that religion only functions well in this aspect if most in the faith community actually believe that it is the true word of god. In other words, the social benefits are dependent on the sacred beliefs, and if they are not held as true by a majority in some significant sense, they will not be sufficiently “sacred”, and the social benefits will fade away.

In this respect, even if there are “good” and “healthy” religious faiths that are preferable to secularism—is it possible to put the genie back into the bottle? Can young people with access to the internet ever be convinced to believe in the “truth” (not just the usefulness!) of a miraculous revelation? 

Why I am not a TERF 

As I’m finalizing the Unbeliever’s Manifesto, I’m feeling a bit nervous about the audience such a strong position is bound to attract.

I am fascinated by gender because I am interested in irrationalities and how social dynamics distort our thinking, and this topic is a goldmine where both are concerned. Additionally, I want to “speak out” because I believe this particular irrationality will hurt a lot of people.

However, not all who are on my side of the aisle have arrived through the same path, nor do we share the same commitments. Highly religious people, as one obvious example, undergird their anti-gender stance in their faith, which I obviously do not share. What I also don’t share, however, are some of the commitments of the feminists, who make up the other significant cohort.

To be clear, on the whole I give a lot of credit to gender-critical feminists, and find many of their most powerful voices both admirable and interesting. 

But they also get on my nerves. 

At least the conservatives can claim, justifiably, that they had no hand in fostering the gender movement. But feminists are not so intellectually distinct from the gender crowd, no matter how much at odds their movements might be today. 

For instance, even in the radical/gender-critical camp, too many feminists are happy to deny biological sex when convenient. Yes, GC fems, we agree that men are (on average) more prone to sexual violence. Are we now willing to acknowledge that they might be more prone to other things too–even some that are valued by society? Men are (on average) the more criminal sex, sure. Can we acknowledge that they are (on average) the more courageous sex, too? (That, indeed, those are two manifestations of the same drives?)

I notice a second-order denialism, too. Feminists will blame John Money for pioneering the concept of gender, and I will agree that he shares some blame. They might also point to queer theorists like Judith Butler for laying the intellectual groundwork for gender ideology, and I will agree that they played an important role. But what about Shulamith Firestone? What about the decades of campaigns by feminists downplaying the role of biological sex differences, casting all apparent dimorphism as a result of “socialization”? Wasn’t this priming necessary to arrive where we are today? I could go on (and maybe I will eventually), but suffice to say that an honest appraisal would find that not only did the feminist movement play a part in paving the way for the gender movement, it was in many ways the most crucial stepping stone. 

Beyond these ideological differences, it seems I look upon gender ideologists in a different light than do many feminists—a difference that became clear a few days ago when I made the mistake of showing some sympathy for the trans TikTok star, Dylan Mulvaney. I understand why many find Mulvaney terribly offensive–I share this feeling. I understand that Dylan is popularizing a trend that is bound to hurt many people. It is possible that this person1 is a cynical manipulator–many in “show business” are. Or perhaps, Mulvaney is simply a run-of-the-mill attention addict, desperate for any claim to fame. 

But a more sympathetic interpretation is possible, too. 

It is possible that many people who gravitate towards gender ideology are seeking a solution to some unformed distress, it is possible that they honestly believe what they say, it is possible that they are simply wrong, not “evil”. 

It is not my instinct to automatically view my ideological opponents as my enemies–even if they are causing a great deal of harm. Insofar as they are honest about their convictions, I see them instead as the followers of a false god, victims as much as anyone else. Detransitioners will often characterize their transition as a form of self-harm–and indeed if the anti-gender camp is correct, then that may be true of many current transitioners, who are taking on enormous risks with their health. 

It is possible that one’s opponents are doing something harmful mostly because they are bad, or that they are doing something harmful mostly because they are wrong, and don’t know that what they are doing is harmful.  

I’m not naive, and don’t imagine that everyone at the table has fantastic intentions and is simply mistaken. I just think it is possible that, more often than not, the intentions of both sides run in the same direction–that most people do feel that what they are doing is good–and that the difference lies largely in how one understands what is good.  

I realize that this is easy enough to say—many people struggle with managing their feelings in this arena, especially if they have been personally harmed. Anger and even hatred are not unwarranted emotions here, and I don’t shame anyone for having them. I won’t say the same about acting on them, however—anger (even when understandable and thus, rational) can easily mutate into irrationality and, then, injustice. So it seems to me that it is good/smart to work to temper such feelings, for the good of one’s own self-interest, if nothing else.

In the meantime, I thought I would address some of the more substantial critiques of the Manifesto in shorter posts, of which this is the first.  

The most common criticism was with the distinction I made between gay rights movement and the gender identity movement. My claim in the draft Manifesto was that (roughly), the gay rights movement was a fight for equal rights, while the gender movement makes a claim for special rights (indeed, it is more fully understood as a “liberation from reality–from the very fact of our sex”).

However a few of you thought that this wasn’t all that clear, listing conservative/religious arguments you recall hearing at the time when the debate for gay marriage legalization was most intense. For example: Can’t one make the case that that gay rights is also based on a claim of “special rights”, in that gay marriage asked for an evolution in the traditionally understood definition of marriage? And don’t gays also ask for a kind of liberation from reality, in that they go “against the design and purpose of our bodies”?

In this post, I will address the first question: What did the inclusion of gays do to the institution of marriage?

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Reader Nicole said:

“My one quibble is with the distinction made between gay rights and trans rights. To the extent that people understood the normal rule/definition regarding marriage as a union between one man and one woman, a reasonable argument could be made that the fight for legalizing same-sex marriage was indeed a request for special rights, in the sense that it necessarily required a change in the traditionally understood definition of marriage. I personally supported same-sex marriage but I understand the arguments against it.”

This argument is reasonable–but I will argue that it was based on a misunderstanding. While explicitly, it seemed that the question up for debate was whether marriage was between a man and a woman or two consenting adults of any sex, it misses the deeper, more important contest.

I argue that the question up for debate was whether marriage is primarily:

1. A social institution formed to incentivize the carrying out reproductive roles in a manner maximally beneficial for offspring and society

   
   OR
   

2. A public commitment between two people who love each other very much 

Let’s call #1 “traditional marriage” and #2 “sentimental marriage”. 

If marriage was primarily the first, then of course, it must be between a man and a woman. Many feminists note that this marriage places the woman in a subordinate position to the man, and thus hold that it is an institution created for the benefit of males. They are mistaken. Despite the male’s privileged position within the family unit, both sexes are restricted in this union, albeit in different ways. Neither is the primary beneficiary of this arrangement.

Although biologically, a man is naturally free to sow his oats widely, traditional marriage aims to restrict him to one woman, which allows his labor and resources to be consolidated for the benefit of fewer mouths—mouths he is obligated to feed. This is a bad bargain for the man, unless he can be fairly sure that those fewer mouths are his. This need for certainty in paternity drives society to restrict the female in all manner of ways, limiting her to a life of near servitude. However, one might say (and indeed, I do), that despite the fact that the woman bears the greater restrictions, the principal target of the institution is the male, correcting for the imbalance that nature itself brings. 

Sex is a potentially life-altering event for a woman, but costless to men. He may “cut and run” after the act, but the woman will be bound should she conceive a child—her body captive and her mind transformed to better meet the needs of the offspring that is, unjustly, still only half hers. Worse, she does not need to consent to this arrangement–he has the strength and the desire to compel her by force. He can “succeed” reproductively by sheer sociopathy. But a culture that allows a man this level of freedom will be crippled—the misery of woman and the impoverishment of her offspring will have wide-ranging and injurious ripple effects. 

Societies throughout history have sought to rectify this state of affairs, crafting various arrangements to provide the female with protection and her children with support. The maternal family may be enlisted, for example–the brothers of the mother providing for their sister and her children (who are guaranteed to be at least somewhat related to their uncle).

But if the simple fact of mass adoption is anything to go by, the best method is the institution of marriage. 

This is sounding a lot like amateur anthropology (and in a way it is), but what I am describing is the marriage of my parents. Arranged for them by their families in Pakistan, neither had much of a say in the matter. But all in all, the deal was a necessary one for my mother–her own father had passed away before his time, and her brothers could not sustain their many sisters forever. The girls had to find another “sponsor”—a husband. For my father, however, marriage was the track to respect—he would not be thrown into a life of poverty if he fought for his independence and remained single. But he would never have children (and probably, sex). He would also find himself increasingly stigmatized as he aged–the unsettling bachelor who rejects the offer society has made as favorable for him as possible. “In marriage”, society tells him, “you will have offspring nearly guaranteed to be yours, in marriage, you will become a real man, and upon you we will confer privileges, esteem, rights”. (Note: patriarchy literally means “rule by the father”, not by “males”. In focusing on maleness, modern critics of traditional societies miss the fact that men are not equally and automatically privileged–the place of highest esteem is set aside for fathers). 

As the blogger Noah Millman put it in his 2003 post on gay marriage (thank you to a reader whose name I have forgotten for sharing), marriage is a “difficult good”— a plate of vegetables. In order for it to remain robust it must be incentivized in many ways–using both a carrot and a stick. This marriage requires a broader context that reinforces it. In a world without reliable access to safe birth control, in which infidelity is deeply stigmatized, where bastards are restricted from various privileges and have no right on their father, where women can enter into only the lowest rungs of the workforce, where divorce is prohibited, where there is no such thing as “alimony”, where welfare is not accessible to single mothers, etc, etc…..marriage isn’t just a “nice to have”, it is a “must have”—existentially for the woman, but also for the man insofar as he wishes to reproduce and have a standing in society.

For society, however, the benefits are well, well worth the restrictions the institution of marriage places on individuals: the married household is an exceptional environment for child-rearing in a brutal world, and indirectly contributes to a whole host of valuable social goods. 

It is worth noting that romantic love isn’t even necessary in this arrangement, nor is “sexual fulfillment”, and in that sense, homosexuals are already “included”.

But in the modern world, the sticks are (thankfully) either entirely gone, or greatly limited. The carrots are still there–marriage is still a smart, even admirable, choice. But it is now one among many possible good choices, and at the end of the day, who really likes carrots?

I remember when I first heard of the gay rights movement, and the fight for gay marriage. I believe I was about 13 or 14 years old, and the issue seemed like a no-brainer to me. I knew many people whose parents were divorced because they didn’t like each other, and some whose parents never were married. Evidently, they didn’t believe marriage was all about raising children. Nor was the gendered aspect of marriage all that clear—I recall one friend whose mother was a high-powered lawyer making enough that her father didn’t need to work. I didn’t think about all this explicitly at the time, but revisiting it now, it is clear that my environment reinforced the notion that marriage was already primarily a sentimental union—so why couldn’t we include gays? Isn’t their love and commitment just as meaningful, just as important?

Of course, not everyone agreed with me…but many Americans did. In thinking about this topic, I recently asked on Twitter whether followers could share the best argument they encountered against gay marriage, and I was struck by how many couldn’t think of a single one: these are the many, many people for whom Traditional Marriage was already dead at the time of the debate.

Moreover, teenage me had intuitively understood it as a social good, one that gives but does not take, as Andrew Sullivan explicitly declared in his classic case for gay marriage. “Gay marriage… allows for recognition of gay relationships, while casting no aspersions on traditional marriage. It merely asks that gays be allowed to join in,” said Sullivan.

Clearly, he was on the right side of history, but nevertheless, his argument was based on a false premise—gays could not “join in” traditional marriage, nor would they. Traditional marriage did not exist to “recognize” committed loving relationships like some sort of societal stamp of approval, it existed to enforce specific roles and duties which make sense only in the context of men and women.

Instead, gays joined into the more modern, sentimental marriage—the form of marriage in which their message of “equality” made sense. “Love is love” relied on an understanding that marriage was now primarily about romance. Gay marriage would have violated the old norms, indeed, been nonsensical (“reality-denying”)—but it did not violate the new one, which was already gaining dominance in American society.

Through its legal validation, it did, however, crown a winner in the Marriage Battle Royale.

In the next post (dropping soon), I will address a few more reader critiques and expand more on my distinction between gay rights and the gender movement. Is there a “slippery slope” that inevitably led to our current gender mania? 

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I’m surprised that in many of my readings regarding hate crimes and hate crime hoaxes, the following obvious note is neglected: Hoaxes proliferate widely not when hate crimes are the highest, nor when the victims are most at risk: but at the times when they are commonly believed to be most at risk and when this treatment is widely believed to be unjust. 

In other words, hate crimes proliferate in an intolerant society. Hate crime hoaxes proliferate in a society that hates that intolerance. 

That sounds counter-intuitive, but it must be true. In order for a hoax to “work”, it must be presented to an audience that would find the act both believable and appalling. There is no use, for example, for a single Jew in Nazi Germany to make up a hate crime—not many would have found the idea objectionable in the first place. But if the single Jew becomes a small community, the incentive for a hoax can exist. Now, at least among a small group, the fraudster can expect both belief and support. The incentives to invent victimization increase as the base of sympathy towards the victimized group increases. We can invert that same scenario to illustrate this as well: There were countless lies made up to defame Jews in Nazi Germany among the mainstream German population, which worked despite clear evidence of Jewish persecution.

There are caveats to this, of course. It is possible, for example, to have a society so divided and fractious that it is both extremely hateful and also brimming with people who hate hate. But as a general rule, hoaxes are one indication of the social power of a group within a larger community. Jussie Smollet could benefit from a victimization story in 2020 America, not in 1950 America (nor, it is worth mentioning, 2020 Saudi Arabia). More interestingly, if there is a “believable perpetrator”, hoaxes may also be evidence of the stigmatization of another group.

In the Antebellum South, for example, popular culture painted black men as depraved, hyper-sexualized brutes and white women as pure, virtuous, and uniquely desirable. When a white woman falsely accused a black man of rape, the accusation alone was as good as a death sentence. It is sometimes said that such false stories were spread to stigmatize black men, and no doubt they were, but I think the truth is much more circular than that. The black man was a believable villain in her fiction because he was already expected to be a rapacious monster. 

Today, we recognize the evil of slavery, and broadly acknowledge that the aftereffects of black subjugation remain with us even now. Interestingly, in some parts of society, the old stereotypes have been inverted: black men now cast as virtuous victims, white women as hateful victimizers. In line with the new conventions, the expectation is that the white woman will use her vulnerability to unjustly demonize a black man. So when that appears to be the case (like with the “Central Park Karen”), we jump to the conclusion we’ve already made, and ignore evidence that there may be more to the story. 

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But the so-called Karens, while deemed to be believably guilty in most scenarios, are not the true social lepers of our world. That dubious honor is held by white men. Accordingly, it is white males who are almost always the invented villain in outright hoaxes, as they are “the most believable perpetrator” (and can be made more believable when described as wearing red hats). Of course one might say “it is easy to believe that a white man is a bad guy because white men often are bad guys”. And this may very well be true. But anyone with an understanding of the history of oppression knows that popular belief and truth are almost never well-aligned, and it is dangerous to assume that belief is always evidence of reality. 

However, hoaxes are useful to understand the psychology of a society at any given moment because they elucidate what that society expects to see, the sympathies the hoaxer hopes to exploit. In other words, they illustrate our biases. Sometimes those biases are based on reality (yes, biases can be rational), but sometimes, they are based on the reality of another time. We are slow to update our mental models, and by the time “everyone knows” about a particular injustice or power relation, it may not even be true at all. This is what I call the Lag Problem of Progress–the most marginalized people in any given society are those whose victimhood is not even recognized as victimhood. Meanwhile, those whose victimhood status is widely agreed upon are now necessarily better off now than they were before it was acknowledged at all. In some cases, the lag presents a paradox: if a group attains popular status as “most victimized”, the recognition itself is an indication that the status is no longer true. 

The lag is, of course, natural and not in itself a problem—social power is always shifting, and it takes time for the collective consciousness to be “updated” with the more current data. However, if the “reality update” is artificially thwarted—if the information is suppressed deliberately for any number of reasons—a variety of social ills, and even outright injustices, can rapidly multiply unseen. 

So in this sense, victimization hoaxes can be useful. Every society will see some hoaxes, from time to time. But a conspicuous rise in hoaxes is a sign of a Lag that is being exploited, of assumptions taken too long for granted.  

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1. A society in which one sex occupies most high leadership positions. (Cabinets, c-suites, etc…) 

2. A society in which the average member of one sex is more powerful in everyday terms than the average member of the other. (More money, more social status, or generally more agency in life…)

3. A society in which one sex faces the brunt of deliberate, legal discriminations.
   

Which of these conditions, if any, are necessary for a society to be accurately deemed a patriarchy (or matriarchy)?

For example, imagine a society in which #2 and #3 are true and in favor of men—the average man is doing better generally and faces less legal restrictions. However, #1 is also true, but in favor of women—somehow in this legally misogynist society where the average man wears the pants, all the important leaders are ladies.

Given the concentration of highest power in the hands of women, can this society be called a patriarchy? Given the poor state of the average woman, can this society be called a matriarchy?

What I’m trying to get at is: Which of these conditions earns the patriarchy label? Is there a key combination, or can one do the job alone?

Let me know what you think below, and the comment section is open to all, so feel free to share to others.

First, the context: Reeves begins his book with a focus on education, specifically, on the fact that males are falling drastically behind in nearly every measure. The delay begins early, starting in elementary school and follows them into college and beyond. In the US, for example, 57% of bachelor's degrees are now awarded to women, and that trend is mirrored across the world. “In every country in the OECD, there are now more young women than young men with a bachelor’s degree”. 

Looking into numbers sent to him from an analysis of dropouts in the New York Times, Reeves finds that “taking into account other factors, such as test scores, family income, and high school grades, male students are at a higher risk of dropping out of college than any other group, including poor students, Black students, or foreign-born students.” (Emphasis mine.)

If one holds a “structural” view of inequality, it appears that being male is a massive disadvantage, the kind that equity politics are designed address. But it is not being addressed, or at least, not publicly. Colleges really are concerned about the skew, but largely because it is bad news for admissions in the long run—few males will make the college less attractive for women too. In this self-interest, it appears private schools are employing what Reeves calls a “stealth affirmative action” in favor of men. 

But getting into college is one thing. What about the enormous difficulties of financing an education?

It isn’t as easy to grant “stealth scholarships”, so men remain left out in that regard, as Reeves briefly notes. I wanted to find out just how left out, so I went through some of the top scholarship aggregators hoping to get a feel for what the landscape looks like for a young man trying to fund their education. Here are some notes from what I found through my (admittedly, rough) search:

As far as I can tell, “Male” is the only noticeably underrepresented demographic in college that is also highly underrepresented in the scholarship world. 

In fact, it is the only demographic where the majority receives many more exclusive scholarship opportunities than the minority. According to a study by the SAVE Title IX Equity Project analyzing scholarships exclusive to one sex in 115 universities, “among 1,161 sex-specific scholarships, 91.6% were reserved for female students, with only 8.4% designated for male students.”

Not surprising, exactly. Perhaps a bit more surprising: Despite a lot of crowing about how few men go into female dominated fields, as far as I could find, there is little money offered to encourage them. Women who wish to “break barriers” in STEM can look forward to diving into a mountain of money, but men who wish to do the same in a profession like Speech-Language Pathology (90%+ female) can look forward to nothing of the sort. 

Male-exclusive clubs and societies care about men, and that’s about it. 

Most aggregator sites don’t even have a separate category for male-only scholarships. Scholarships.com does, and so I went through their list just to see who might actually be interested in men. Here is what I found after a rough search: Out of a list of 68, ~10 weren’t actually male-exclusive or seemed to be tagged incorrectly. Out of the rest, 11 were only open for black men. A couple were funded by religious groups, aimed at men training to be clergy or otherwise take on leadership roles in the faith community. Out of the remainder, a full 37 were affiliated with fraternities, making them the largest funder of male-only scholarships on that list. If one includes the few associated with boy or eagle scouts, male-exclusive associations make up ~70% of the academic scholarship funders.1

Meanwhile, a far more diverse group is interested in helping women, particularly women in STEM. I didn’t do as thorough a search of the list for females, but from a quick overview it is clear that women do not have to rely on sororities or sorority alumni at all. Many of the scholarships come from various women’s professional associations, or “women’s groups” within larger associations. Still others are sponsored by companies, family foundations, or even nonprofits. The largest scholarship listed (full-tuition for four years—orders of magnitudes higher than any amount offered in the male category) is funded by the party game, Cards Against Humanity. The women’s list is also 4-5 times as long as the men’s list.  

The Wrong Kind of Victim

Why don’t scholarships reflect the reality on the ground, and indeed, may be making the disparity worse?

I’ve been involved in the charitable world for most of my life, and although it has many merits, one of the clear faults is that it is a sector that is highly responsive to cultural signaling. The explicit question donors might ask themselves is “who do I want to give to”, but there is an implicit question too: who do I want to be seen giving to? A long-time progressive might earn some social credit if they give to the homeless, but they may earn more if they give to racial justice. The latter would signal more than their selflessness: it would prove that they prize certain values, and are “woke” to certain truths about the world. “Homeless” is too general and traditional of a category to grant that additional benefit. (From this perspective, Sam Bankman-Fried’s donations to the effective altruism movement are very interesting. If one understands much of his public persona as a deliberately-crafted front to distract from colossal fraud, it is clear that his interest in effective altruism was mostly related to its effective social signaling. A kind-hearted person gives to local shelters. A kind-hearted, smart person gives to malaria prevention.) 

One way to think about the effect of signaling might be to imagine how the shape of philanthropy might change if it was somehow completely anonymized (that is to say, the charity would not know who gave the funds, and the donor could not reveal who they gave to). I know from personal experience that donors are often hesitant to be associated with controversial causes, regardless of how important they think the work might be. With complete anonymity, there might be a great deal less giving overall, and of the remainder, it would certainly be different giving. 

But even if we got full anonymity, the advantage in the scholarship game might still go to women, as what people know to be a “good cause” is determined by their understanding of what is true, which is necessarily warped by the culture they inhabit. 

And our culture hates men. 

In his book, Reeves notes the prominence of the idea of “toxic masculinity” and the absence of a female equivalent. Of course, this prominence doesn’t come out of nowhere—it is part and parcel of a worldview fixated on power-relations and with casting groups of people into neat boxes of have and have-nots. In this conception of the world, men have power and the powerful, by definition, can only be victims of their own volition. Hillary Clinton’s infamous “women have always been the primary victims of war” comment was not just a slip of the tongue—there is a whole class of politics that cannot imagine men as deserving of sympathy. As the true agents in the world, they are to blame for victimization—even their own.

But this explains why no one else is interested in giving scholarships to men—so why are fraternities sticking around?

I’m not sure, but here is my guess.

What if fraternities are a kind of counter-culture, and therefore able to see a need invisible to others? Strange to imagine, I know! But counter-culture doesn’t have to be hippies and beatniks, it merely has to be an undercurrent that pushes back against mainstream thought. Of course, there is little evidence that Greek culture fosters any kind of deliberate thinking at all, much less counter-cultural thinking, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the environment fosters a reflexive distrust of the veracity of mainstream cultural narratives.

Besides literal hate groups, there are few associations quite as despised by the culture-making industries as the American frat—allegedly a veritable hotbed of “-isms” and “-phobias”, the personification of privilege. (I myself am not free from this bias. Although my personal interactions with fraternity guys were never bad, I did think of them as “obnoxious” for reasons I can’t clearly justify). Worse, Greek culture is exclusive in a literal sense—a moral crime in the eyes of campus activists and administrators who scheme to get them permanently removed from campus. Alumni of such societies might be more willing to resist the narrative that men don’t need help. 

Or maybe it is something else entirely. Not altruism, but just an extension of the in-group loyalty fostered by Greek culture. They may not see this as the area of “greatest need” (or care whether it is), but feel a powerful duty to lend their help regardless. The steady decline of male-exclusive clubs and associations might be, at least in this sense, a bad thing.

Finally, the wage gap myth helps perpetuate unfairness in scholarships. 

I was amused to note that several scholarship platforms / aggregators had enough awareness to feel the need to justify their category for female-exclusive scholarships, prefacing their lists with half-baked essays on why they are a necessary good. The cornerstone argument was often the “wage gap”—the myth that refuses to die, no matter how many times it is refuted.


Well, that’s it for this rabbit hole. Look out for my upcoming full review/essay of Reeve’s book, and if you value this work, please consider sharing, or becoming a paying subscriber. 

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I grew up Muslim so never really celebrated the gift-giving aspect of Christmas until adulthood. Now that I think of it, there aren’t many personalized gift-giving holidays in Islam. There is Eid-ul-Fitr, in which younger people receive money from older people, and Eid-ul-Adha, in which people sacrifice an animal and then send choice cuts to family and friends—but nothing like the personalized giving of Christmas. (Is this strange? Or is Christmas strange?) I did, of course, receive gifts on my birthday as a child, but no one does that with adult birthdays, so sadly that too has come to an end.

But I love gift-giving and receiving, and wish I had more excuses to do it. I love that giving gifts forces me to think deeply about another person, to consider what might bring them joy, and to anticipate their enjoyment. I’m too scatterbrained to do that regularly, but every time I stop and meditate on my loved ones, I feel lighter afterwards.

By far my favorite kind of gift to receive is a book, preferably, non-fiction—and these days, in audio form so that I can readily find time to consume it. But although everyone knows this is the kind of gift I love the most, no one gifts me any. Ever!

I can only remember being given two books in my lifetime. One from an old boyfriend—a copy of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh in latin (“Winnie Ille Pu”), from the original 1960s print. It wasn’t expensive, but I was delighted by the gesture. He knew I loved Pooh1 and that I took latin seriously because I was a big Rome nerd. (Fun fact: this is the only book in latin that has ever made it to the New York Times bestseller list.)

Then there was the time before that. I was 10 or so, and had completed my first full reading of the Quran. As a gift, a cousin of mine gave me her copy, a large and magnificently-decorated tome, with translations of the Arabic text in Urdu and English. Since I was a believer at the time, I felt this was sure to be a source of profound wisdom, and was thoroughly in awe of it.

That’s it, that’s the list of books this book-lover has received. Woe is me. :(

But now that I think about it, I can think of some good reasons why people might avoid giving me books. First, is the obvious: I already have a small library’s worth, so there is a risk of getting me something I already have.

But I think there is also another. Have you ever shown someone something you think is funny—a video, a movie, a meme—that you think they might like too, but they clearly do not? That feeling of anticipation turning into mild embarrassment as you wait and wait for their face to break out into a chortle or even a smile…but it never comes? No matter how polite they are, or skilled at breaking through the awkwardness—it is always a bit crushing, like a personal rejection.

I think books can carry the same risk, or perhaps, a greater one. Unless you simply grabbed something off the bestseller list, a good book gifting is a deeply personal act, it is something you have read and enjoyed before. Because you found it good enough to share, in the act of giving you are admitting something about yourself. “This sparked a light in me…challenged me…intrigued me,” and you share because you hope the receiver will feel the same. But what if they don’t?

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I once recommended a book about the art of writing to a young man I was sort-of mentoring. He read it, but scoffed it off—declaring that he knew everything in it already, and further, that he finds these kinds of “self-help” books to be a waste of time and money. Now, if I wasn’t 1) in a position of superiority 2) a person of remarkably thick skin 3) confident in my own intellect, I might have found his remarks to be more than just insulting—I would find them hurtful. In his rejection, he was implying that my own knowledge or intelligence or skill was limited in a way his was not. And through the act of recommending, I was admitting to being impressed by something decidedly unimpressive. Recommendations are one thing, gifts are far more fraught. You want the receiver to actually enjoy the gift—you’ve spent the money after all—and hopefully to think better of you after. Give a bad clothing item, and one might think you have bad style. Give a bad book, and one might think you are an idiot.

This is partially why I find “top book recommendations” from famous people to be unbelievable and fairly useless. Bill Gates, for example, is brilliant and reads quite a lot, and reviews some of these books on his website. But I would bet the content of my bank account that what he chooses to highlight on his site is, for the most part, not the reading that was actually most valuable to him. But rather, the books on his site are those he thinks would benefit the public the most, the books he wants to be seen as reading for various signaling purposes, or favors he is doing for author friends. Does he really think that Trever Noah’s memoir is worthy of highlighting (or, for that matter, that Noah’s Daily Show is “every bit” as good as Jon Stewart’s, as he claims in his review)? Did he even write the thing himself? Doubtful.

But it makes sense that Gates wouldn’t want us to know what he is actually reading, because that would reveal what he is actually thinking. Not something you might want everyone to know—perhaps for nefarious reasons, but more likely, for mundane ones. It is just quite a personal thing to be revealing to millions of strangers. But this, I think, is what I love most about the idea of receiving book gifts. The act brings me closer to the giver—I learn about what they value, what they find delightful, what to them is worth knowing or thinking about. And in the act of reading from the same source, we share a “headspace” for a brief period of time, draw from a now-more-similar knowledge pool…it is a kind of intimacy.

With that being said, I thought about doing an “honest” recommendation list, deliberately setting aside what they might signal about me, but I think the most honest thing is to simply disclose what I am actively reading at the moment.

Here are the currently active audiobooks:

(And yes, that is a total of 85 titles in progress—but obviously I have given up on most of them, only the first few are active.)

My kindle/physical reading is far more haphazard than audio, I tend to skim rather than actually read. But at the moment, I am focusing on Richard Reeves’ Of Boys and Men (related post coming up), and Edward Banfield’s The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1967). The latter is an ethnography of a poverty-stricken region in southern Italy, in which Banfield highlights the social dysfunctions, distrust, and envy that prevail within the community—leading to the death of the common good and any sense of “community”. Very interesting.

I’ll leave you with a question: If you could gift me a book, what might it be? Or, if you don’t know/care about me very much (how hurtful!), what are you currently reading now?

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On a recent episode of my podcast with Meghan Daum, A Special Place in Hell, the question of surrogacy came up.

I’ve been troubled by the practice for a while, and am putting into words some of the reasons why in this post. I am excluding a big one: the exploitative nature of the trade on the surrogates, as it is covered well enough elsewhere. 

To be clear, I don’t feel that powerfully about surrogacy as an issue in itself–but I do feel powerfully about the assumptions behind it: the commodification of children, the disregard of the unique nature of motherhood (as opposed to fatherhood), and even more fundamentally, all the ways in which our beautiful, abstract notions of equality, freedom, and choice fail to map to reality, and therefore, misguide us as we navigate ethically murky waters.

So let’s dive in.

First, I reject the idea that anyone has a ‘right’ to a child.

I realize why others may disagree. In our very liberal society, we consider any inequality inherently unjust, and further, we believe it is our duty to collectively address that inequality. Some of us are not fertile, or cannot gestate, and others cannot have biological children with the partner of their choice, it is not ‘fair’ that they cannot build families as many others can–the joy of related-children denied to them on account of what they cannot control. 

These people want the kind of family available to everyone else, and if technology allows for it, why shouldn’t they have one? Why shouldn’t, for example, a straight couple in which the woman cannot carry the child hire a surrogate to carry her fertilized egg for her? Why shouldn’t a gay male couple have related children of their own–borrowing (or renting) a willing womb? Or, more controversially, why shouldn’t a superstar celebrity whose career depends on her beauty hire someone to turn her eggs into a child? If she has the money, why shouldn’t she have a child whose eyes match her own, without losing her flat and attractive abdomen? 

Perhaps I would say ‘why not’ before I myself became a mother, and learned in detail about what actually happens in pregnancy and labor. It is a myth that a pregnant woman is simply a vessel: The act of the carrying itself transforms both her body and her mind: she changes as an organism to better meet the needs of the child she is producing and long after delivery. Meanwhile the child's DNA remains in her body, affecting it in ways that are not yet understood—the child quite literally remaining a part of her. Mothers of young babies will tell you about the “baby radar” in their heads—how they will snap out of deep sleep in an instant at hearing even the slightest whine of their baby (while their exhausted husband can snore throughout purple-faced cries). They wonder at the way their bodies change to accommodate the baby even after birth–body odor increasing and areolas darkening so that the newborn can better sense his mother, and as the he ages and his eyes improve, witnessing their body revert. Their breastmilk itself “grows” with the baby–changing in its composition to meet its needs, even enhancing its protective properties when the baby is sick. Exactly how the breasts know to do this is debated–one of the many ways that the maternal-infant bond continues to mystify. 

After going through all this myself, it was clear to me that a mother is more than just a female egg-donor. The process of pregnancy and labor too “create” the mother, psychologically and physically. In an ideal scenario (and indeed, throughout most of human history), the mother is also the sole source of nourishment for a child in its early days, and the primary caretaker long after that, cementing an already-unique bond.

Thankfully, human societies have made life easier for mothers by easing her burdens. She no longer needs to be the one forced to look after her children–her partner can take on the primary role, or otherwise, a paid professional can step in. She does not need to feed the child from her breast–first there were wet-nurses (largely available to high-status women) but now there is the relatively cheap, accessible and healthy option of formula. Finally, a new frontier of freedom: if she has enough money, does not even need to gestate her child. 

But at that point, what is a mother, anyway? 

Social progress and technologies have freed women from our biological restrictions (and there are so, so many of them). Inarguably, this is a wonderful thing…for the woman. Is it wonderful for the child?

This question is a dangerous one, and I can practically feel the anger of some readers. (I advise that if your feelings are getting the better of you, to refer again to my throat-clearing above. This is, some will note, the same argument that lies at the heart of the abortion debate. I am not going to go into that one today, but I will say: I do not believe one has the “right to be born”, but neither do I believe “my body my choice” is an honest or accurate encapsulation of the multi-people being that is a pregnant woman). To assuage any unpleasantness somewhat, let me disclose that I myself am a working mom who pays others to help with childcare, and consider breastfeeding a “nice to have” luxury. Having said that, I do not believe that such behaviors, while good for me and (on the whole) good for my family, do not come without a cost. So what is the “cost” of outsourcing gestation itself? 

Put another way: Does the child have the right to be both gestated by and biologically-related to the same person? Unlike childcare or formula, without severe intervention of cutting-edge technology, such a thing would be biologically impossible. But thanks to the miracles of modern science, the woman who has undergone material changes in body and mind to better meet the needs of a child and the woman who shares that child’s DNA need not be the same. What are the consequences of this division of roles–especially given the intense needs of an infant? More interestingly, is there a case to be made that in this scenario, there are three biological parents? Does the child have a right to a “full” mother (or any mother at all)?

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In these conversations, I feel a division in myself.

There is the individualist liberal on the one hand, who feels emphatically that it is a social good to grant as many people as many freedoms as possible–to allow them to decide for themselves what is good and healthy for them. This person is inherently suspicious of ‘limits’, especially if they are imposed by society. More abstractly, this person has a transhumanist bent and looks forward to a future where more and more of our biological restrictions can be overcome through technological progress–freeing us from the constraints of our own bodies.  

The other self, the realist pragmatist, recognizes that freedoms are not entirely free, that with every gain, there is a corresponding loss. Sometimes that loss is a moral good too, but other times, it is more complicated. The pragmatist also notes that much of the ‘individualist liberal’ discourse rests on assumptions which are not necessarily true, such as “more choice = more happiness/satisfaction”. This person does not regard biology as a set of physical impositions which hold us back from being true to some deep inner-self. Instead, she denies that there is an inner-self separate from the body at all. Our biological limitations do not constrain us, they are us. 

The liberal wishes to believe that humans are equal in our capacities–that mothers and fathers can be equally good parents and equally important in the lives of a child. The pragmatist agrees–but adds that while both mothers and fathers are parents, a mother is not a father and a father is not a mother. That is to say, biological roles are highly flexible but they are not interchangeable. The specific maternal bond, when lost for any reason, cannot be fully replaced by a different bond. (That is not to say that the loss is inherently damning–children of devoted single fathers are proof that one can still be raised in love and enjoy a beautiful life. Nevertheless, it remains a loss.)

The liberal wishes to grant every person the ability to experience every joy–including the joy of parenthood. The pragmatist takes into account that some joys require the presence and participation of other human beings, whose joys and experiences too must be taken into account. 

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