There’s a whole in your reductionism

One reasonable criticism of the notions of a “sexual marketplace” and a “marriage marketplace” is that as reductive concepts they fail to capture the full reality they purport to describe.

But of course this is true of all reductionism.  Reductive methods can be extremely useful as a way of finding or describing partial truths.  Reductive descriptions of real things are never complete: it is literally impossible to capture a part of reality and bottle it up into formal expressions.

At the end of the day, the concept of an economic marketplace is every bit as problematic as the concept of a sexual or marriage marketplace.  They are useful concepts, and they help us come to grips with true aspects of reality.  But they are also inherently limited, and the modern tendency is to be blinded by reductionism.

I realize I’m not saying anything especially new or novel here – hey, welcome to blogging.  These thoughts were prompted by reading this post over at Siris.  Whether “hypergamy” is or is not a good term for a largely intuitive and not rigorously researched-and-documented notion of the operation of the sexual marketplace and (distinctly) the marriage marketplace is certainly a legitimate question.  (Every time someone in the manosphere says “game theory” I think of John von Neumann and get mildly annoyed at the cooption of the term.)

But terminology aside, a lack of scientifically reductive rigor and comprehensive social science documentation isn’t enough to make me dismiss a whole set of ideas – especially ideas about as squirrelly a subject as sex – as moronic.  In fact when it comes to matters of sex, I tend to find pretensions to scientific rigor rather suspicious.

Pitiless egalitarianism

There is all the difference in the world between pity and contempt.    The former expresses caritas for someone who suffers from a disadvantage or is lower in the social hierarchy.  The latter treats someone as an outcast from civilized company.  There are times and places for both; but the time and place for the latter obtains only when the person has brought it upon himself.

Parents of illegitimate children have brought it upon themselves.  The children themselves have not.  To express contempt rather than pity for the latter is, itself, contemptible.

Egalitarian modernity struggles with the difference between pity and contempt, because to be “in” society at all just is to be equal.   To egalitarian modernity anyone who isn’t an equal isn’t anyone at all.  He is worse than contemptible: he is subhuman.

Newtonian Game in a Lorentzian world

Simplicity can be both a strength and a weakness.   Static models can be helpful in getting a picture of the world that remains fairly consistent from the perspective of a particular  person.  But they are only a starting place, a way of grasping concepts without having to take in everything all at once.

Consider the ideas of “alpha” and “beta”.  The hypergamy model predisposes us to think of them as absolute categories; but most of the time this is not really the case.  For example, there are likely many men who seem “alpha” to less attractive women and, at the same time and in the same man, are “beta” orbiters of more attractive women.  Most people find themselves dissatisfied because they know that something “better” is on offer — they can see it, right there, just beyond their grasp.

The trashy cafeteria approach is a consequence of the universalization of our modern, atomized, self-centered consumer society.  Instead of going to a mechanic we go to an oil change place, a brake place, and a tire place; and that is fine in itself, applied to automotive needs.  But then instead of courting a whole human being on a track to marriage, modern amoral people get their sexual needs[1] fulfilled through a composite of different “products” offered by different “providers”.  The reductionist approach has become totalizing, and the world has become a cafeteria.

Christendom took a cafeteria approach to God a few centuries ago, during the Protestant Revolt, laying Him out on a buffet table where everyone gets to take what they find appetizing in the Christian religion while rejecting the rest.  So is it really any surprise that we find ourselves simmering over a can of sterno?

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[1] I use the term “sexual needs” very broadly here to include all of the wants and needs traditionally fulfilled through courtship and marriage.

That’s my bowl of turtle soup

A recent discussion got me thinking about how prescinding from claims about the origin of a thing is often represented as undermining a claim about the essence of a thing. In other words, the idea is that if we can’t clear up controversy about how a thing came to be, that undermines our claims about what it is now.

This is an example of the genetic fallacy.

The discussion in question was about property and ownership. I’ve been very critical of libertarian conceptions of property rights in the past, and remain so today. But just because liberalism misapprehends the nature of property, it doesn’t follow that property is arbitrary, or is a creation of the sovereign. The relation between owner and property is a part of the natural law, prior to any government:

For, every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own. [...] The right to possess private property is derived from nature, not from the law of man; and the State has the right to control its use in the interests of the public good alone, but by no means to absorb it altogether. The State would therefore be unjust and cruel if under the name of taxation it were to deprive the private owner of more than is fair. — Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum

… and …

That the State is not permitted to discharge its duty arbitrarily is, however, clear. The natural right itself both of owning goods privately and of passing them on by inheritance ought always to remain intact and inviolate, since this indeed is a right that the State cannot take away: “For man is older than the State,”[34] and also “domestic living together is prior both in thought and in fact to uniting into a polity.”[35] Wherefore the wise Pontiff declared that it is grossly unjust for a State to exhaust private wealth through the weight of imposts and taxes. – Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno

Ownership is an example of a kind of authority, and I would suggest that modern concepts of authority tend to totalize will and eliminate nature. “Ownership” thus means either libertarian individual demi-godhood over specific material things or it means socialist government (sovereign) demi-godhood over material things.

Part of what gives this totalizing-eliminative view its apparent force is appeals to origins:

I am trying to imagine how, just exactly how, you came to own a piece of land. Did you make the land? Dig it up out of the river or the ocean? If so, well then maybe it really is “yours”. But no, you (with 99.99% probability) bought it. From whom? Oh, from some other guy who made, invented this land? No. He got it from someone else and so on. A sovereign entity once granted squatting rights on this land, and since he was sovereign no one challenged him.

The “turtles all the way down” approach here is thought to cast doubt upon Church doctrine that private property ownership precedes the sovereign, as opposed to following the sovereign as a creation of the sovereign will. But what that indicates to me is a problem with the reasoning process which produced the approach, not a problem with the reality of ownership as a legitimate authority which – like fatherhood – precedes the State.

At the present time we have no idea how (for example) single-celled organisms came to be in general; and we certainly can’t give a specific account of precisely how a specific randomly chosen bacterium came to be. It does not follow that therefore single-celled organisms don’t exist, and that our knowledge of their properties is in doubt. For any real thing we can play the curious child’s game of asking where it came from, repeating the question for each answer given, on into infinite regress, until we hit the wall of silence. But in general, lack of a definitive and comprehensive account of the specific origin of a specific thing doesn’t cast doubt upon our knowledge of the nature of that thing.

Turtle regression doesn’t cast any more doubt upon private property ownership – as an authority which legitimately precedes the authority of the State – than Zeno’s Paradox cast’s doubt upon our ability to cross all the way to the other side of the room.

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Standard disclaimer: When I swipe commenters’ words as a springboard for discussing ideas I am not attempting to paraphrase the views of commenters. The fairest authority on the views of any commenter is the commenter himself; followed by his own words in the original context.

Where is Danny DeVito when you need him?

Suppose I am the manager of a large investment fund, ZipFund.  I have a little of my own personal money in ZipFund; but the vast majority of it is investments from small Mom and Pop investors.

Suppose my fund had invested in Cyprus Corp a few years ago by buying interest-bearing bonds.  We’ll call these Zip bonds.

Cyprus Corp has other bond investors.  Many of them are small investors like the majority of investors in ZipFund: we’ll call their Cyprus bonds Mom-n-Pop bonds.  There are also some larger Cyprus investors who bought FatCat bonds.  Mom-n-Pop bonds are senior to FatCat bonds: they are insured by the company, so they get redeemed at face value before the uninsured FatCat bonds are entitled to any proceeds.

Cyprus Corp is in big financial trouble, and the board of directors has been replaced by a judge.  The new board has a fiduciary duty to make the best possible financial choice for existing Cyprus bondholders, and complete authority to make decisions.  The company is about to go belly up if it doesn’t get an infusion of cash, which will make Zip, Mom-n-Pop, and FatCat bonds all virtually worthless.

The ZipFund partnership has voted to allow a deal to provide that additional cash, buying WhiteKnight bonds from Cyprus, as long as in doing so the value of Zip bonds is preserved going forward.  Our goal is not as much to make a profit as it is to minimize losses on the capital we have already invested.

I offer the Cyprus board of directors a deal, and after shopping around a bit ZipFund is the only offer of new cash they get.  Our deal preserves the value of both Zip bonds and Mom-n-Pop bonds.  FatCat bonds are required to take a 40% haircut.

New cash from the deal would immediately change the viability of Cyprus going forward.  It might not create overall value; but the board thinks it has a good chance of preventing wholesale value destruction.  If they don’t do my deal, any Cyprus bondholders will be lucky to get pennies on the dollar and the uninsured FatCats will most likely get nothing at all.

If the Cyprus board accepts the deal, has anyone done moral wrong?

Indian givers in Cyprus

I wonder how people’s attitudes would change if, instead of Cyprus, we were dealing with an Indian tribe that had borrowed far more US dollars than it could afford and was operating its own internal banks on the reservation (its sovereign territory) that the Mob was using to launder money and evade taxes.

I’d have a strong inclination not to offer any additional financing at all. But if I was going to offer additional financing I’d definitely have very strict terms. Every big player would have to take a haircut on the deal, including those with an equity stake (whatever it is labeled: labeling it “deposits” doesn’t change its fundamental nature) in bank operations.

They would of course be free to take it or leave it.

Women have harems too

The term “slut” is a female-specific insult referring to a woman with loose sexual mores. Egalitarians are frustrated by the supposed fact that no insult with equivalent social sting applies to men, which, like all double-standards, is just not fair. The unfairness of it all has become so acute that, taking their cue from militant homosexuals, sluts now literally organize themselves into parades proclaiming their sluthood. The only way to rid themselves of the unfair and hypocritical stigma associated with their evil behaviour is to shout to the heavens that evil is good and good is evil. Otherwise they’d have to do that whole repentance thing; and what fun is that?

The manosphere, impressed by the unfairness of the double standard and doing its level best to help, has proposed that there actually is a roughly equivalent insult for men: coward. This is a useful comparison in terms of the social sting of the evaluation: a man labeled coward bears an approximately equivalent social sting to a woman labeled slut. It is also useful because sluthood is unladylike behavior and cowardice is unmanly behavior, generally speaking.

But sluthood refers to specific concrete behaviors and attitudes, while cowardice is a much more general category. Furthermore, cowardice is not a specifically sexual behavior. So we may be able to gain a deeper insight into what is going on in the modern dysfunctional intersexual dynamic if we look at the male side of the dance a bit more concretely.

The punch line for those who need a motivation to read my further rambling – or a reason not to – is that from an intersexual behavior standpoint, the male equivalent of a slut is the beta orbiter. Modernity has turned sexuality into a buffet: what used to be a loving commitment for life to a particular person, where sexual intimacy and provision formed the mutual society of a family, has turned into cafeteria sexuality wherein people are encouraged to assemble their ideal virtual mate from the disparate contributions of different real people. Like the slut who gives away her sexuality on the cheap, accepting sexual attention with no commitment or provision, the beta orbiter gives away his provision and commitment without any corresponding receptivity to his sexual attentions.

In what follows I will use the term “sexual attention” to refer to those interactive behaviors wherein a woman takes a man seriously as a potential mate. I will leave it deliberately vague; but it doesn’t have to imply escalation to intrinsically immoral behaviors. As usual on this subject I am attempting to clarify the theory: how well or comprehensively that theory corresponds to reality is something about which I’ve expressed any number of doubts myself, though I do think it is useful as a foundation for discussion.

The theory of hypergamy proposes that the top (say) 20-ish percent of men are more than willing to shower sexual attention on the top (say) 60-ish percent of women[1]. That doesn’t mean that the average male nine is generally willing to marry or commit to the average female six: just that he is willing to give her sexual attention. So at one point in the buffet line the average socially functional female six can scoop some male eight or nine onto her social plate.

Because the modern world is a sexual cafeteria the notion of monogomous pairing in marriage to one partner for life is largely dead, and as a result the modern woman can assemble her ideal virtual man from the disparate contributions of different real men. This results in a situation where most young women find it relatively easy to attract sexual attention “above their marriage grade”. They become accustomed to finding the men actually in their marriage grade unattractive.

Beta orbiting is a male behavior which is symmetrical to slutty female behavior: mirror image graphics could probably be drawn. (I haven’t thought through exactly what they would look like, but if there is interest I may give it a go). The key difference is found in the premise (goes the theory) that women are the gatekeepers of sexual attention, while men are the gatekeepers of commitment and provisioning. In the modern sexual cafeteria attractive women are generally willing to accept some providing attention from less attractive men, while rejecting their sexual attention. Attractive men, on the other hand, are willing to shower sexual attention on less attractive women while rejecting commitment to those less attractive women.

In addition to being a form of lie on the personal level this results in a very dysfunctional social dynamic, especially as virginity-at-marriage becomes almost nonexistent. Women become accustomed to sleeping with men who would never marry them; they find the men who are willing to marry them unattractive. And even when a woman has managed to stay chaste she has become accustomed to getting male sexual attention well above her marriage grade.

What this gets us to is a definition of slutty behavior that doesn’t require a reductionist accounting of certain kinds or numbers of sexual acts, and at the same time is not reducible to some ineffable interior disposition or attitude. Slutty behavior is when a woman accepts sexual attention from a man without any corresponding commitment and provisioning. This raises another interesting point: the female version of caddish behavior is the LJBF (lets just be friends) acceptance of the unrequited attentions of beta orbiters.

Just as the cad doesn’t feel a social sting for having his harem of sluts, LJBF-girl doesn’t feel a social sting for having her harem of beta orbiters. And what follows, I think, is that things will just keep getting worse unless and until fewer women engage in slutty behavior and fewer men engage in beta orbiting behavior. Shaming the cads isn’t going to work.

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[1] For the sake of simplicity my graphic only shows a single slice of what is actually a set of multidimensional gradients. The ‘picture’ viewed from the point of view of an average male nine and an average female six will look different from the picture viewed from the perspective of an average male seven and an average female four; but the relative shapes of everything, and the intersexual dynamic it generates, remain more or less how I’ve drawn it.