Square pegs and round holes in cultural change
Here are two examples of something.
A sad story erupted a few weeks ago in academic economics, in which one well-known professor accused another well-known professor of (kind of) sexual harassment. The names are known in the community, and I won’t mention them here. I want to think about a broader social process, I’m only going to use some broad-brush impressions of the specific case, and for the avoidance of doubt, I have no special inside knowledge. I am just going on what is publicly available. So I’m not here to adjudicate Professor A versus Professor B, but to think about something more general. (It is kind of inevitable that by doing so, I risk doing injury to the truth of a specific case. I think the risk is worthwhile.)
The basic accusation of Professor A was that she had collaborated with Professor B over several years on several papers. And at the same time they were in a sexual relationship. And as she put it, the collaboration was fun and exciting, but he was more interested in the sexual side of things. And now she is older and is worried about her fertility, and Professor B has started a relationship with a younger academic at the same institution.
The point I am aiming at is that on the face of it (again, on the face of it) a moral problem of one kind is being addressed using ethical language of another kind. A square peg is being fit into a round hole.
The ethical language is feminist and is about sexual harassment and the abuse of power. But it is not clear that there is a case of sexual harassment here. I don’t think Professor A has claimed that the relationship, including the sex, wasn’t consensual. To put it another way, “two people collaborate on some things, it’s fun, but the man is more interested in sex than the woman” — isn’t that a description of, um, a relationship? Or indeed a marriage?
The moral problem is that a powerful man has started and ended a relationship, has not committed, and now the other person feels used and that her time has been stolen away. This is not necessarily a moral problem with a villain, or even an unequivocal victim. But it is a real moral problem, and quite a common one. Put another way, the problem is not the content of this relationship, but its shape.
(I want to be crystal clear: I am not saying that economics has no problems of sexual harassment or abuse of power. There are, I’ve seen them. For what it’s worth, I’m also not saying that there no problems of mob justice and cancellation in academic economics, and I’m also not saying that those two problems mightn’t have a common root in the fixed pies and top-heavy power structures of modern academia. Put that all to one side. I am just claiming that here, it isn’t clear that sexual harassment is the issue; and more generally, sometimes the language of sexual harassment gets used to address issues that it does not quite fit.)
Here’s the second example.
Taken in Hand (NSFW link) is a micro-movement of people who structure their personal relationships like… well, I’ll just quote the link:
The root of the idea of a Taken in Hand relationship is that the female will submit to the male in matters of everyday life. To what extent and which areas this covers varies from couple to couple, from a general avoidance of conflict by letting the male partner ‘get his way’ to almost complete submission to the preferences of the man in matters such as clothing, friendships with others, styling of hair and many other things. It is quite common in TiH relationships for the woman to generally curtail her social life significantly so as devote more time to the relationship. Unlike BDSM relationships, TiH relationships are strictly ‘real life’ rather than consisting of negotiated scenes.
OK, curtail your immediate reaction and, as Timothy Treadwell might have said, bear with me. These guys clearly came out of the BDSM community, a bunch of people who like to play naughty sex games in the bedroom. Taken in Hand is not a naughty sex game, and they are specific their lifestyle is not about naughty sex games. But it’s coming from that place, and so the ideology they used to justify their return to the family structures of the nineteen- sixteen-fifties is “this is just a lifestyle we… like to enact?” For bedroom games between consenting adults, this justification works fine! It doesn’t seem so adequate, though, for organizing, oh say, a family life which might include children and the expectations of third parties.
So again, there are some people who are seeking a solution to the question of modern family life. (I don’t think it’s a good solution, by the way!) And they figure out a solution, which, well, I assume it works for them or they think it works. But the idiom they use to justify it is not quite up to the job.
In The Savage Mind, Claude Lévi-Strauss describes primitive thought as involving a kind of conceptual bricolage — a French word meaning something like DIY or bodging. Rather than having a specific vocabulary to describe e.g. their social structure, tribespeople might repurpose concepts from nature, and so you get the Snake Clan and the Monkey Clan and so on.
There is a sort of bricolage going on here. There’s a set of dissatisfactions with the contemporary organization of social life. But instead of being expressed explicitly, they’re expressed inchoately, using whatever tools are to hand: the language of feminism, sexual harassment and power imbalance, or the libertarian language of sexual freedom.
Another example might be the language of Catholic integralism on the contemporary right wing. There are problems with modern liberalism, sure, there are problems with contemporary democracy! But it is just very hard to believe that Thomas Aquinas has the solutions to those problems, or that the High Middle Ages have much to teach us about social welfare. These ideas get used faute de mieux, because no better competitor has appeared.
Bricolage is not optimal. When you can’t name your problems, it is harder to fix them right. Bricolage might also lead to the monsters of Gramsci’s famous quote “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. The Taken in Hand movement does seem to fit that. One reason I write this newsletter is to push and stumble towards more accurate conservative ways to understand our social problems. But bricolage does show there is a demand. Old forms of life are dying, new ones are struggling to be born. They need intellectual midwifery.
… which is also a reason to buy my book! Wyclif’s Dust: Western Cultures from the Printing Press to the Present is available from Amazon. You can read more about it here.
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