Missing from view

Carl Benjamin, otherwise known as Sargon of Akkad, wrote a post on X this week which I think is worth a read. The first part runs as follows:

The worst thing about every single person who considers themselves as "liberal" or "left wing" is that they are raging against the very soul of humanity with no understanding of what it is they are vanquishing with every step they take. It's so embedded in everything they do it is invisible to them, beyond their comprehension, absurd to even contemplate. It's just babble, to them, to speak of honour, heroism, sacrifice. It's been observed for a long time, but we're reaching the true reification of this paradigm now. These people cannot think or speak of anything other than negation, impulse, and a kind of grasping immediacy that makes them seem at once ludicrous, unsensible and, when viewed from a certain perspective, the terrible footsoldiers of a world order that will destroy the very spirit of man--indeed, they themselves have had their own spirits torn from them before they were even able to properly spell their own names. They were baked into a uniform human type, with uniform lifeless terminology, so that they communicate with each other like ants. No extraneous information is transmitted, just the base material of communication alone.

Look at what they're offering: a dead, flat world, lacking in vitality, energy, fidelity, passion, righteousness. They have no parallel concepts to explain these dimensions of the human soul, either. These things are all nonsensical sounds to them. They simply don't have the language required to be able to explain dimensions of the human experience that have been forever closed off to them by their upbringing and belief system, but the result is making them miserable and isolated, forced to live as something less than human. 

Carl Benjamin

Benjamin is here noticing the absence of the vertical dimension of reality within modernity (hence the idea of a "dead, flat world"). In other words, there are no longer qualitative distinctions between the high and the low. There has instead been a levelling or a flattening of existence. This stands in stark contrast to the longer pre-modern Western tradition which was an aspirational one, in which the human soul was directed to the higher and more noble aspects of human existence. St Paul gave voice to this tradition in the following passage:

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things and the God of peace will be with you. (Philippians 4:8)

Benjamin goes on to make the following interesting observation:

This is why everything about their worldview is designed to be therapeutic, rather than curative or restorative. The world in which they exist is bad and they go to therapists to brainwash themselves into accepting the negative normal because it is literally beyond them to conceive that there might be an alternative to the personal torment they inhabit. This is why they're all on antidepressants and go to therapists in the first place. The very nature of "therapy" is to trap you in this paradigm.

Leaving aside the issue of whether therapy does or does not help people, it is interesting how therapy has become the "go to" for so many people. There is some legitimacy to the claim that we live in a therapeutic culture, and that this is connected to a worldview in which the higher aspects of reality, and of personhood, are placed out of view and out of reach. 

He continues:

It's also why they're so desperate to protect their "rights". They don't have any frame of reference for any alternative; what else is there in life, if not my personal rights? It's inconceivable that people might have been happy, purposeful, contented, successful without them. They can't even fathom it. No, the past was evil, my right to X or Y has determined this must be so because those people had an absence of this right. 

But they had something you don't even know exists. They had nonmaterial possessions which the average lib can't even recognise as having an existence, let alone having value.

However, the lib does know they've lost something. As soon as they come across a metaphysical culture, they venerate it as if they were zookeepers who have been given a particularly rare species of animal. Oh we must not interrupt their sacred rites because there is something they possess which we, the Westerners, don't!

They don't understand that, actually, we did indeed possess our own sacred rites. They died when we decided we were self-authoring, atomic rights-bearing individuals, and not part of the civilisation that birthed us. When we had something metaphysical to carry forth with us through the ages, we were just like them, only the liberal feels disgust at this concept, bringing them back down to time and place, and in their arrogance believes they've transcended their own particularities, when instead they have slipped beneath them into the morass of common filth that such metaphysics raised us out of in the first place.

Benjamin addresses two issues here. First, he identifies the problem of autonomy being the first principle of Western society ("we decided we were self-authoring, atomic rights-bearing individuals"), therefore placing ourselves outside of "the civilisation that birthed us".

Second, he raises the issue of the veneration of aboriginal peoples. I have heard different theories for this veneration. Benjamin's explanation is possible, albeit somewhat complex. It involves Western liberals on the one hand not wanting a metaphysical culture for themselves, because they are proud to have "transcended their own particularities" but on the other hand sensing that the aboriginal peoples have a connection to the sacred that they themselves do not - and, as such, being bearers of something significant. As a possible example of this mindset, here is the left-liberal Australian academic, Robert Manne, defending the traditional Aboriginal way of life as being,

not an Edenic but an enchanted world, in the technical sense of the sociologist Max Weber. They discovered an intricate social order in which, through the kinship structure, every human being held a precise and acknowledged place. They discovered a world that was filled with economic purpose; leavened by playfulness, joy and humour; soaked in magic, sorcery, mystery and ritual; pregnant at every moment with deep and unquestioned meaning.

Another theory (that some of my colleagues at the Melbourne Traditionalists prefer) is that it comes back to Rousseau's notion that man is corrupted by civilisation, i.e., it is a form of primitivism, in which organised, civilisational building religion is thought to be corrupting, but primitive forms of religion, at the very least, get a pass. As one colleague noted:

Witness the bizarre fascination that some feminists have for astrology, witchcraft, and other "spiritualities" that allegedly pre-date the invention of writing, patriarchy etc.

Benjamin finishes by prophesying that,

The lib is thereby doomed to be a singular "global citizen", unloved and unplaced, forever belonging to nowhere and appreciated by no-one, until they eventually expire like Rousseau's savage, "without anyone noticing that they have ceased to exist, and almost without noticing it themselves."

One final consideration. Benjamin has in the past described himself as a classical liberal. He seems to have gone beyond the usual limits of right-wing liberalism in what he has written (and now describes himself as a postmodern traditionalist). Right liberals generally have a low view of human nature, seeing people as being motivated primarily by greed and self-interest, and their world view is often focused on the pursuit of economic self-interest on both the individual and national level, rather than on higher, spiritual values.

I can only hope that the descent of Western culture is encouraging men like Benjamin to look outside the current right and left liberal political paradigm, and to consider the source of error as being more foundational, i.e., as being connected to faults in the underlying metaphysics of modernity.

Repression, DV & the Freudian left

Earlier this summer eleven Australian women were murdered over a three week period. It led to a debate on social media about domestic violence and how it might be tackled.

On one side of the debate were those who emphasised two things. First, that women are the victims of violence and men the perpetrators. Second, that the solution is for men to change, in particular, by becoming less repressed and by better expressing their emotions. For instance, one woman I engaged with ("Megwa") began by demanding that we "Fix the men". When I asked her what she meant by this, she replied "by taking down the patriarchal bs that inhibits teen boys from showing their emotions, oh sorry, fighting’s okay, but don’t cry."

a) The narrative

There is a strong tendency in these debates for the facts to be filtered to uphold a narrative of men as perpetrators and women as victims. This is despite the fact that men are considerably more likely than women to be the victims of violence (for instance, 70% of those murdered in Australia are men). 

It is true that men are also more likely to be the perpetrators, though not to the extent that those who believe in the narrative imagine. For instance, my female colleagues guessed that when it comes to domestic violence that 95% of the perpetrators are men. The real figure is not nearly this high. The NSW Government provides up to date data on those brought to court by police on charges of domestic violence (i.e. physical assault). In the period from October 2021 to September 2022, there were 10,790 men proceeded against by NSW police and 4,531 women, giving a roughly 70/30 split. 

If violence is caused by the socialisation of men, how then do you explain the 30% of domestic violence assaults that are perpetrated by women? There must be another explanation.

b) Men and emotions

There is a commonly held belief that problems in society are caused by boys being socialised to repress their emotions. If boys could be raised to be more girl-like in their emotions, the theory goes, then you would not have the pathologies of "toxic masculinity". 

This idea is taken so seriously that there are organisations in Australia which go to schools and conduct group therapy sessions for the boys to guide them to release their feelings as a future model of masculinity.

Where does this belief come from? It is a survival of left Freudianism, one of those "accretions" within the larger political culture. I'm not as well versed in left Freudianism as I'd like to be, but my current understanding of it runs as follows. Freud himself thought that repression led to discontent within the individual but that it was necessary for civilisation. The left Freudians, in the mid twentieth century, took a different approach. They thought that it was not enough to have a political revolution to reform society - this had been tried in places like Russia but had led only to a new type of authoritarianism. To succeed, there had to be a psychological transformation of the individual and this would occur when the individual ceased to repress their instincts, feelings and emotions.

You get a sense of this left Freudianism in the claims that masculinity is toxic because it leads men towards dominance and power which is exerted in oppressing women through acts of violence and that the path forward is for men to not be socialised to repress their emotions and feelings. In other words, we have a left Freudian claim that an authoritarian personality type is being created via psychological repression.

This is often joined together with another accretion within our political culture, namely the leftist belief that there are power structures which have denied humans an Edenic existence of living in peace, harmony and equality. In this case, the power structure most usually targeted is the patriarchy, which is held responsible for encouraging boys to repress their feelings.

The American feminist Gloria Jean Watkins (commonly known by her pen name bell hooks) wrote a book titled The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love (2004). In this work, she gives voice to these ideas about men. She complains that,

...masses of men have not even begun to look at the ways that patriarchy keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving. To know love, men must be able to let go the will to dominate.

She adds:

...by supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness. 

c) Criticisms

1. Lack of awareness

My first criticism of this common approach to ending male violence is that those who hold it aren't aware of where their ideas come from, i.e. that they are blindly following the accretions within modern political culture.

2. Rousseau

My second criticism is that there is a faulty assumption about human nature in this view, one that shares with Rousseau the idea that humans are good by nature but corrupted by society. This suggests that human nature is perfectible and that it is therefore reasonable to demand an end to male violence as an immediately achievable goal (some of those commenting on social media believe that it is within the power of men to stop other men from being violent). There is too little acknowledgement that human nature is flawed and that a complete eradication of violence is not a likely prospect, even in the most rationally ordered social settings.

3. Solipsism

Some of the women involved in the debate assume that if men are to have emotions they must be experienced and expressed in the same way as women - otherwise they do not exist. It is difficult to explain to these women that a man can have a rich inner life without being "emotional". Men are generally more able to be analytically detached from their feelings and to express them less overtly, but this does not mean that a man is incapable of love and other deeply felt inner states. 

Despite claiming that men are emotionally numb in a patriarchy, Gloria Jean Watkins makes two telling admissions. First, she admits that men are able to love women for who they are, whereas women are more likely to care for men on the basis of a man's performative role:

We struggle then, in a patriarchal culture, all of us, to love men. We may care about males deeply. We may cherish our connections with the men in our lives. And we may desperately feel that we cannot live without their presence, their company. We can feel all these passions in the face of maleness and yet stand removed...Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being. When we love maleness, we extend our love whether males are performing or not. Performance is different from simply being. 

Second, she admits that she did not like her own partner opening up emotionally because it undermined her sense of his masculine strength:

When I was in my twenties, I would go to couples therapy, and my partner of more than ten years would explain how I asked him to talk about his feelings and when he did, I would freak out. He was right. It was hard for me to face that I did not want to hear about his feelings when they were painful or negative, that I did not want my image of the strong man truly challenged by learning of his weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

4. Raising boys

The idea that the key to raising boys is to encourage emotional vulnerability is not harmless, because it disrupts one important aspect in the raising of boys, namely the "make strong" ethos. It is normal and healthy for fathers to want to encourage physical and mental strength in their sons. This does not mean that boys or men should never seek help with problems, particularly if these are acute, but this is not the general mindset by which men seek to develop who they are as men.

5. Tackling violence

If the aim is to reduce the level of violence in society, it is important to understand what promotes it. The data suggests that violence is more likely to occur within a social underclass marked by drug and alcohol abuse, unemployment, homelessness and mental health issues. Anglicare Victoria has suggested that these factors are present in about 80% of cases of domestic violence. In cases of female homicide victims:

James and Carcach (1998) suggest that almost 85 per cent of victims, and a little over 90 per cent of offenders, belong to what can be described as an underclass in Australian society.

The aim should be, therefore, to do what can be done to limit the size of this underclass in if we wish to reduce the prevalence of violence. Asking ordinary men to cry more is not a targeted solution.

6. Repression & emotions

If the aim is to promote a healthier inner life for men, then the left Freudian idea of not repressing our feelings, instincts and urges is misguided. The better aim is to rationally order these feelings, instincts and urges both toward our own good and toward the common good. It is more in the failure to achieve this that our inner life is radically diminished and that we are cut off from sources of love and connectedness, i.e. that we become emotionally and spiritually damaged or broken. 

If we truly want to help men live an emotionally rich life, then we should encourage earlier family formation; a more stable culture of family life; an opportunity to provide and protect for a family; a more secure experience of fatherhood; a reasonable work/life balance, including an opportunity to cultivate male friendships within male social settings; an opportunity for serious participation within a religious tradition; an active participation within a polis; and a culture which connects men to their family lineage and to their own ethny and culture.