Should I Apologise For This Posting? Sex & Power in the Modern World

One of the weirder aspects of our current culture is the ritual abasement of alleged wrong-doers, usually in the form of a forced apology on the advice of 'PR consultants'. My interest relates to something Jordan Peterson has raised. I am not an enormous fan of his total vision which is, in my opinion, flawed in several respects - the stoicism, the concentration on judaeo-christian values, Jungian archetypes and an over-deterministic biologism create the very model of an ideology, a trait that he claims to abhor in others. Or am I unjust and that these traits are those of his followers who have managed to miss his point about ideology? Wherever his new-found popularity leads, he is a reasoned debater with a thoughtful stance on life and he undoubtedly has insights on gender relations which are 'controversial' but none the less on the right side of the game.

His thesis (which is most observable at the point where a new cultural hegemony emerges and displaces another) is that politics is an expression of personality traits. Because sexual difference results in the emphasis of different personality traits (so much, so scientific) in the genders, shifts in the power between genders mean that the personality traits associated with the rising gender began to be valued and then affect discourse and practice under the new order and at the expense of the falling gender.

The narrative of psychopathy (where psychopathy is culturally widened to include a lot of normal male behaviour that does no harm) being 'bad' and empathy (even where an excess of empathy can be as harmful as full-on sociopathy in terms of adequate social functioning) is just one signifier of a cultural change that can be traced to a recent shift of values from the falling masculine to the rising feminine. This has been happening with gathering pace over the last three decades or so, reaching its crescendo in aggressive reaction of now-hegemonic liberals to the insurgency of democratic populism.

All talk of Jungian archetypes here is so much displacement although it is a useful poetic tool for describing what is happening. For actual causes, we have to turn back to a brute materialism. The bottom line lies not only in that women are now voters conscious of being voters as women (though this is exaggerated in its effects) but in the far more important fact that most purchasing decisions for most consumer goods, especially repeat purchases, under late liberal capitalism, are made by women,  Women also take an important role in many male purchasing decisions. Male-dominated corporations have recognised this. They have realised that the huge increase in educated women allows them to tap into this economy more effectively and that single women are also very likely to throw their energies into their work as expression of meaning far more than most men for whom the work is likely to be 'just a job'.

New centres of power have emerged in the corporate sector for women - notably human resources and marketing - just at that point when a particular form of education has introduced an ideology of empowerment for women (feminism). Peterson himself points out in addition that men have withdrawn from the universities and media relative to women so that we can see how the high ground of culture, combined with the entry of women into politics, has created a new female cultural domination where the next stage is a demand for 'gender equality' - which really means a demand that educated middle class women dominate the institutions that hire them in such numbers.

These are just facts on the ground. Economic change has not only shifted political power increasingly towards women (even if this is not yet fully equalised) but it has shifted cultural power in such a way this cultural change is working at a faster pace than the political change that will follow. In general men are giving up on politics but also on culture, the universities and the media where culture is manufactured. The fact of democracy is their last bastion against the possibility of total manipulation by a new administrative elite made up of educated women and the male elements in the 'capitalist' and 'managerial' classes who understand the profit in this revolution or who simply go with the flow of history. The dislike of democracy in liberal circles lately is perhaps a recognition of democracy's 'last fortress status' against ideology.

It is as a result of all this that the personality traits associated with women are becoming culturally dominant. Peterson's concerns are not that these personality traits are not good (rather they are just facts on the ground that come with any increase in power for women) but that we are replacing one imbalanced cultural arrangement with another (male personality trait dominance with female personality trait dominance), that this is creating the potential for the same sort of violent tensions that the first imbalance did - and that this has triggered a populist revolt which also happens to appeal to many 'conservative' women.

For this is an important point, the educated middle class feminism of the new world is deeply presumptuous in its claim to represent all women much as many men are linked by interest and sentiment to the new world of empowered middle class women. This is not a line that separates one gender from another in reality but one that separates two types of personality trait with different expressions in men and women (and which inter-mix with many other traits and histories which ultimately result in all individuals being unique even if they insist on then recombining into tribes and ideologies).

These thoughts were initially triggered by an article in the most recent British Psychological Society's Digest, "Flowers, Apologies, Food or Sex? Men's and Women's Views on The Most Effective Ways To Make Up". This article has one line that tells us that there may be a connection between general female personality traits (though we must make the central point here that these are general traits that differ considerably between women and may be part of the personality type of many men as well) and the emergence of female cultural power in the West - "... women thought their partner apologising or crying would be more a more effective way for their partner to make up than did the men."

Now, observe what happens in a scandal today and then compare it with 50 years - the insistence on apologies and the showing of remorse. The male instinct is that when something is done that is wrong, then apologies and emotion are relatively irrelevant - what is necessary is change in actual behaviour and restitution or recompense with what the wronged person wants (usually sexual relations in the case of men apparently, and there is nothing wrong with that if it is just a desire and there is no question of anything other than consent).

The female instinct is to ignore all that and demand an emotional submission and a change in language (which is symbolic for an expected if unverifiable change in thought). Showing emotion while using submissive language is a near-guarantor that the change of heart is 'sincere'. What the man thinks is important to most women whereas what the woman thinks is less important than what she does to most men. One trait finds security in knowing other minds (which can tend to household totalitarianism) whereas the other trait finds security in 'obedience' and 'compliance'. Again, this is not necessarily reflective what women and men actually do or think but is only what 'gender norms' imply as personality traits become dominant or submissive in society.

If some women might find a sexual act to be a demeaning as a means of recompense, bluntly many men consider a forced apology to be equally demeaning. In both cases, if freely given out of love and respect, there is no issue but if forced out of an imbalance of power or some form of household act of terror (such as 'not speaking'), then there is broadly an equivalence of distaste for what is being forced on the 'loser'. Sexual coercion for women and psychological coercion for men are pretty equivalent in terms of their damage to personal autonomy. The wife-beater and the persistent nag are actually perfectly equivalent when one takes into account of the nature of the victim of the act. Our society tends to recognise the first as problematic (which it is) yet willfully ignore the second as equally problematic.

The female instinct is encapsulated in the Catholic confessional where absolution comes from a verbal formula and then a 'change of heart' yet public policy at the same period of male 'dominance' through the institution of clerical power in society was rarely interested in such things. The paradox of priestly male dominance is that this interlocutor with God is, in effect, a eunuch - cruelly one might say, like many urban liberal middle class males. 'Patriarchal culture' co-existed with 'matriarchal culture' (a fact conveniently forgotten by feminists) but was not formally ideological or totalitarian (although matriarchal culture could be totalitarian within the household as patriarchal culture could be within the court). Male culture just wanted material compensation and simple submission to superior power by dint of language and acts without emotion. The formal act of obeisance is not an apology but something else.

Male dominance strategy was more interested in brute power relations rather than (primarily) control of culture even if Power did control culture through the court. Instead of a celebrity apologising for an abusive act in order to placate female consumers of entertainment products and then be obliged to show emotional regret in order to continue to be able to work, the traditional  'male' response would be to bring that person to justice for a crime but ignore the act if it was not a crime. This latter stance is, of course, now unacceptable - a wrong act is now deemed wrong, whether a crime or not, in a return to a modern version of clerical moralism. Shame (and guilt) are policing methods that are embedded in the community because they have been imposed from outside by the agents of the dominant culture.

The community itself rarely polices these issues today. It has become a matter of public discourse through newspapers, broadcasters and social media. Since the funeral of Princess Diana and Blair's calculated use of emotion to appeal to feminine and media sentiment, emotional responses to events have been manufactured from above as weapons or tools in cultural warfare by ideologically-motivated groups. The vigils surrounding the death of Jo Cox, MP were a perfect example of such manipulation, closer to Goebbels' distasteful (even to Hitler) manipulation of the killing of Horst Wessel than to any reasoned consideration of what to do about rare cases of lone fascist fanatics.

Charlie Brooker's 'Black Mirror' series has several excellent satires on this culture of manipulation but he still looks at it from within his own class, blaming the lumpen mass for its reactions and weakness rather than investigating the ideological manipulation of emotion in a competition between factions within elite groups. All elite groups now engage in this use of emotion as communications tool or weapon and not just the cultural Left. The cultural Left is perhaps simply more adept at it because they have an ideological framework for it.

Ignoring a wrong is, of course, unforgivable (perfectly reasonably) for women where the structures of power have not created the means for 'bringing to justice'. This may be the core of the problem here. After all, many solutions to alleged female abuse would require a legal system that was so intrusive on normal male behaviour (in order to catch truly errant male conduct) that men would live under a regime similar to that of 'The Handmaid's Tale' but under female domination. What is required is a balance of interest between the genders that lets individuals flourish as they are and has rules on lack of consent and bullying but creates a grey air of private life where individuals are allowed to congregate with those that are like them without wider community intrusion. The new warrior liberalism is like the old conservative authoritarianism in that it constantly expands its territory to fill a vacuum, like any empire. It is, in this respect, culturally oppressive even as it raises issues that must be raised - especially regarding the ignorant behaviour of some men to some women.

Western society resolved this in the past through somewhat hypocritical 'codes' outside the law, using shame (or guilt) but these are no longer possible and in any case were oppressive towards those women who were not 'inside the code system' by choice or lack of resources. The Irish Catholic Church's treatment of women 'outside the codes' is a lesson in pure evil. We have not found the way forward yet but it probably lies in 'values paganism' re-instituting 'codes' that permit autonomy and free speech, rewards those who show respect to others in the context of an ideology of self respect and punishes all forms of coercion (ideally, including unlawful state coercion).

We are moving here towards wanting a culture of 'good manners' for private life within a framework of law that punishes severely evidenced wrong-doing (essentially any form of unlawful coercion of the individual). Needless to say, this must include tools for the gathering of evidence and strong and impartial law enforcement. The DPP's recent behaviour in relation to alleged male rape trials was a moral disgrace but women are right to want a debate on the boundaries that dictate the correct behaviour between men and women - a debate which, if undertaken openly and reasonably, might come up with some uncomfortable conclusions for both genders as to their conduct 'in the field' and the necessity for creating social rather than legal solutions to the problem of consent.

This strategic difference between a society in which either male or female personality traits shift from private life to public policy and dominate the whole is fascinating. The shift to female personality trait dominance explains our new cultural elite's determined drive for apologies and that industry of PR people who trot out the need to apologise (rather than make restitution and be subject to material containment) in order to 'salvage' reputation. The person who apologises then has to go into the wilderness and claw their way back if they can (without any real attempt at justice), perhaps on their knees in penance for crimes that may or may not have been evidenced. The new argument that the 'victim' must be believed throws out of the window not only certain standards of jurisprudence but disallows both malice and false recollection in good faith. And yet we all know that, just as some claims are false, other claims are true and cannot be proven so that a moral injustice has been done when nothing can be done.

Social change is thus not effected by a reasoned consideration of how to change laws and regulations to deal with moral injustice but by 'exemplars' - much as medieval Churchmen dealt in exemplars to guide their flock. Regulation and law try to follow, usually finding that things are a lot more complicated than the ideologists think. Alleged wrong-doers are judged not by judges in accordance with the law but by a sort of Salem-like community of social media and mainstream media witches who are uninterested in investigation of the actual truth of claims or with context. This is dark stuff.

'Justice' is offered as a form of communitarian assault on the errant individual but it is increasingly based not on cool and fair assessment of the equality of the genders in their rights to self discovery and self creation but, in fact, on one simple truth - female voters and consumers can dictate terms to the mostly male elites who run the productive end of capitalism and who probably know their days are numbered. However, let us be clear, when this goes wrong, this is not all women judging some men but some women, the educated liberal middle class elite component of the gender, seeking out some men and judging them as representative of all men. This is no different from a minority of male priests seeking out and judging a few women and making claims about the whole sex - which is what happened 500 years ago, more recently in backwaters like Ireland.

Justice as the rational business of formal complaint to enforcement authorities involving courage on the part of the complainant and then the necessary procedures to judge truth or falsehood on the evidence is abandoned as (in effect) 'patriarchal'. The problem is that 'male' courage is socially created - courageous women obviously exist and most men are cowed by power but it has been historically far harder for women to adopt the risks of a courageous stance. Woman are thus often disadvantaged by the ideology of courage as are all vulnerable people in certain social conditions. Justice is not justice if it is not just and there are justifiable reasons for concern that our legal and regulatory systems lag our understanding of the primacy of networked human autonomy in a culture of equals rather than as a hierarchical structure of competing elites embedded in the past.

Those who feel wronged are probably right that they have to fight to get noticed in a society that ignores them until they get noisy and emotional - child abuse victims are the obvious recent example - but they are playing a flawed game in a flawed system. The real requirement here is to unravel the hierarchical elite-based system and replace it with something that starts with a reasoned understanding of what we are really like and not what ideologists think we should be.

There are reasonable arguments that 'justice' has not caught up with the needs of women but it has also not caught up with the needs of fathers or polyamorists so the problem is more widespread than feminist theorists think - it is a problem of the inappropriate parts of Iron Age ideology and industrial social structures being retained while the appropriate parts have been jettisoned. It is a problem of society not being in tune with the actually existing human condition.

This is a new world that is coming and yet it has now spawned its own resistance because not all women share a belief in the necessary extension of the traits attributed to them (such as the apology and grovel being sufficient) into the public domain (while wishing to retain them in the private domain). These 'conservative' women match in numbers the 'liberal' men who have calculated on moral and pragmatic grounds that 'equality' just means that the old order is dead and that they have to find a place in the new order.

We all chuckle when some liberal metropolitan male supporting the new order gets caught out as an 'abuser' (even if this means little more than some crass language or a blundering touch) just as we have always chuckled when some Southern Baptist Minister gets caught out in 'cheating' but both breeds of men have allowed ideology to conquer the reality of their condition which is as creatures of ideology. Both men are often subject to disproportionate witch hunts as exemplars of wrong-doing within their community. All men become 'rapists' to their critics in one world and all churchmen are hypocrites to their critics in the other world - both propositions are absurd. A better truth is that neither sets of men have the courage to be who they are and yet show the rest of the world respect. They have become stupid because they are cowards, unable to live their lives as the persons that they are because history and ideology have dictated personae that drown their true selves. The same has applied to women stuck in households and then humiliated when they escape release in a love affair.

The point is that the human condition (and society is just the public expression of the human condition) requires respect for all human traits, for difference and for variability (which is incidentally another sound point made by Peterson) This includes many other traits, whether libertarianism or authoritarianism or empathetic or (non socially harmful) psychopathic traits, as much as the traits that tend to show difference between men and women because of their biochemistry and brain structures (a difference which science accepts as partially true without drawing any valuation conclusions in relation to the principle of equality).

Our society is rapidly spinning into another round of disaster to match that when male personality traits dominated over female personality traits. You cannot exterminate the 'other'. The key issue here is a fundamental respect for personal autonomy. Autonomy emerges out of each individual's very particular model of perception, cognition and biochemistry as well as history. The uniqueness of the individual is our starting point. From there, comes respect for others and (which is where brute males fall down but also authoritarian female household matriarchs) consent. Indeed if two people want to do anything, no matter how distasteful to others, in private, or to speak of it (since free speech and struggle between persons through robust persuasion are central to the good society) then it is no one's business but their own.

So back to the apology. There is nothing wrong with the apology as either sincere expression of regret or perhaps as tactical tool to end a fruitless squabble while considering one's position (yet is it ever really healthy to apologise for something that you feel you have no need to apologise for?!). But there is a lot wrong with the public institutionalisation of the apology to meet communitarian needs that have nothing to do with the job in hand and force people into modes of submission which actually change nothing, Indeed, the public apology is often little more than cover for a decision not to resign and not to make recompense. It is not embedded within a culture of honour as in Japan where both apology and resignation are carefully encoded within a shame culture with a long history.

An apology in Western culture is simply a response to an assault, an act of obeisance on feminine lines. All an apology of this sort may do in our culture is to trigger the imposition of yet more oppressive rules and regulations that may benefit a certain type of woman in a certain situation but which may limit the lives and opportunities of other women and degrade relations between the sexes. There is no thinking-through of the problem that was demonstrated by the act that required the apology.

We should have more considered explanations to hand, more justice (evidence-based dealing with claims), more resignations, better laws and better law enforcement and fewer apologies and far fewer restrictions on free speech and normal human interaction. We should have more honour and good manners. We should pre-empt the bitter onslaught of an insane social media-driven witch hunt with better education on consent and respect. Our entire culture is in danger of becoming supine before just one personality trait and just one ideology (feminism) just as, in the 1930s, it became supine before another personality trait and another ideology (fascism).

Abraham, Hagar and Sarah - Death in the Desert

According to the Bible, Abraham took a slave girl (Hagar) as his concubine and then married her to provide an heir, in agreement with his existing wife Sarah. Hagar produced Ishmael but then Sarah conceived and produced Isaac. Sarah then demanded that Abraham drive out both Hagar and Ishmael into the desert (and so to probable death). Abraham found this difficult and he only did it when he found out that God 'wanted him to do it'. We are creeped out now by people who say that 'God wanted them to do it' but this is the Iron Age Levant.

Many relativistic excuses (mostly post-facto based on the fact that 'it all turned out right in the end') can be made for the behaviour of these persons but this story is at the very root of the mythos of three world religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). It has been accepted without thought as representing God's word and so as a fundamentally ethical story. Perhaps it is time to start thinking about this and not say simply that this is just a story that history has made irrelevant. It is a story of great cruelty and we must ask what it came to imply for later humanity.

The first implication of the tale is that sexuality is a practical matter. Production of children, not pleasure, are at the root of the story. This is perhaps the most forgivable aspect of the tale ethically because times were hard and there was a logic to the attitude. A pragmatic ethical polyamory or polygamy may be one logical lesson of this history, yet this is the one rejected by at least two of the Great Religions that derived from it. The story of Hagar understandably permits a more open attitude to concubinage in Islam but both Judaism and Christianity were to adopt a position where Sarah's matriarchal rights were to be privileged over both those of the patriarch himself and the concubine/first wife.  For three thousand years, this has been presented as moral - but is it?

Far from being patrarchalist, Judaeo-Christianity starts its story, the story that then leads to Abraham and Isaac, with a tale of matriarchal struggle and power, of female competition. It tells us straight way that the subsequent three thousand years are the story of the triumph of one woman over another rather than that of a man over women. It undermines from the beginning the claim that Judaeo-Christianity is patriarchal and only patriarchal.

The second implication is the positive denial of emotion, of love, implicit in the story and the cruelty and resentment of the dominant matriarch. Abraham is twice denied his feelings by God - both here in regard to his feelings for Hagar and later in his feelings for Isaac on the sacrificial altar. God rewards the catty older woman over the younger. The 'patriarch' himself seems to have no power himself to bring the two women into line - it is his weakness before female rivalry that is the most noticeable feature of this part of the story.

What is going on here? Levantine man clearly had feelings. He was a human being. It seems that God does not approve of feelings, of emotion coming from within. Such emotion must be subordinated to the abstract - the theory of what is destined, written long after the event - and therein lies the tale. God's law, in the end, appears to suit Sarah as dominant wife and God himself as Authority. Patriarchal authority does not belong to the human patriarch at all - his wishes are ignored and he takes the easy way out. The authority belongs to an abstract and invented entity intended to buttress the power of the matriarch. It is as if the Great Goddess (if she ever existed) has proved a lot less useful than a Great Father because only through the latter can male physical power be re-appropriated for the real head of the household, she who is to be obeyed, though perhaps I take things too far and should not over-interpret the text.

But God does help Sarah to become dominant over Abraham in this matter and then takes Abraham away later to enforce his own direct dominance over him in the matter of Isaac. This is not a tale of patriarchal power at all but a tale of the assertion of priestly power (represented by this invented abstract thing called God) over the male by means of a Godly favoured female, a female given implicit domestic power in order to define the terms of the Law. The feminist analysis of Judaeo-Christianity is thus deeply flawed. It refers to patriarchalism when the Judaeo-Christian tradition is, much as Nietzsche described it, an alliance of weakness, of priests or intellectuals and middle class, property-owning women, designed to tame the free choices (which include sexual and emotional choices) of males and exclude other women.

This may not be a bad thing in itself because it depends where you stand in the game and there is only good or bad in relation to one's stance in that game. A certain form of order triumphed and made its rules stick. It is a contingent set of rules but, whether good or bad, it should still be seen for what it is and not for what it would be convenient for us to think it is in our later age. The Catholic Church, of course, took the Judaic system and went one better by (at least in theory) sexually neutering its priests so that all sexualities in the domestic setting were concentrated on the dominance of a mother advised by eunuchs. Marriage was to transfer the male from libertine to dog and excluded females to be sentenced to be sluts or nuns. Male sexuality and any female (or homosexual) sexual competitors were shunted to one side. God stood for an exclusivity that was prepared to eliminate (metaphorically and socially) its rivals through force of customary law, an elimination performed on Hagar.

And what of Hagar? She did all right in the end, being at the core of a polygamous Islam, but we can relax only if we take at face value that her destiny was one of providence and not, in fact, chance. She and her son could have died out their in the desert and only an 'act of faith' (ho, hum!) says that that was never going to happen.

So, what was the cost of this system of social control designed to bring order to society (for that is what this story is about)? Abraham is weak - he allows his natural feeling for a woman and their child to be thrust aside by the strictures of priestly (God's) and matriarchal law. Natural feeling will be torn from him later (saved only at the last minute) but this first case is not just abandonment, it is also also attempted murder. Let us remember - both Hagar and Ishmael are sent into the desert, in effect, to die. So a weak man and a proud and manipulative woman (with a little help from an ideological construct called God) sentence a weaker woman and a child to death without once questioning the morality of their action. Yet this morality (or lack of morality) is at the very centre of Western culture. Is a murderous callousness at its very heart?