Pandora Opens the Box

 

Helen Andrews has written an article for Compact Magazine arguing that “cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.”

“Everything you think of as ‘wokeness’ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.” 

“Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.” 

“Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.”

I would add an essential problem: women are mentally inclined to always see the trees, not the forest. As a result, they easily and soon stray from the mission. This explains why so many businesses recently seem to be straying from their core mission for the sake of wokeness: whether that mission is to sell beer, or movie tickets, or restaurant ambiance, or hold sporting events.

Once pointed out, this correlation seems obvious. Over the past few generations, women have come to dominate a number of fields and professions, and this has corresponded closely to these fields becoming “woke” and ceasing to perform their intended functions. 

Where do women dominate? HR departments. Public schools. Journalism and the media. Advertising. Now academia, especially the humanities and social sciences. And this corresponds perfectly with the centres of cancel culture and errant wokery.

Women have most recently begun to dominate the legal and medical professions. As these too lose their functionality and trustworthiness, civilization seems liable to collapse. “The rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.”

Our ancestors warned us of this; no doubt it was tried before, in places and at times in the distant past. A warning was surely embedded in the legends of Pandora, of Eve, of Psyche, of Lemnos and the gnostic Sophia. The Buddha warned that allowing Buddhist nuns would halve the lifespan of the dharma.

Is there anything we can do, at this late stage, to pull back from this? Not to mention feminism’s role in our collapsing demographics?

Andrews proposes banning affirmative action, and allowing employers to hire once again on merit. 

I fear she is too optimistic. When women are already in control of the HR departments, can they be counted on to hire on merit? When any profession is dominated by women, the hiring process is no remedy.

We urgently need affirmative action—requiring the hiring and promotion of men.

The Mirror Shattered

 

It is not generally understood, but Western civilization shattered sometime in 1917.

Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. – T.S. Eliot

Before this, the culture was a mirror, in which you could see the face of man. This is Shakespeare’s “Mirror held up to nature.”

Since then, what do you see?

Only a shattered land, a shattered landscape, only shards of mirror reflecting each another’s emptiness.

Green Shoots Grow from the Manure

The world is in a mess. From whence comes our salvation?

To be fair, the world was in a mess when I was young: the Cold War, the fears of nuclear annihilation, the segregation in the US South; the assassinations of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and many others; the mailbox bombs, the plane hijackings. Perhaps the world is always in a mess. Perhaps it has only been in a mess since 1914. But it is at best a crushing disappointment that we have not made it better.

Normally in the course of history, as Ibn Khaldun observed long ago, a culture that is spent is replaced by a younger, more vital one emerging from the desert.

Now there are no more deserts left.

From whence comes our salvation?

The BRICS are making a play to replace “Western” dominance with a new coalition. I cannot see it working. The nations involved have nothing philosophically in common; they stand for nothing together, but perhaps raw power. The name of their organization is only the acronym formed of their names. Two of them, India and China, have recently been shooting at one another. So have two of the proposed new members, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Most of them look politically and economically unstable, apt to collapse at any moment: Russia, China, Iran, South Africa, proposed new member Argentina. Together they control a lot of oil, but oil is not the lever it was until recently. Its importance is likely to further decline thanks to fracking, improvements in nuclear, and campaigns against carbon.

It all looks more like a rear-guard action than the future.

And so, from whence comes our salvation?

It must come from green shoots within the democracies, I suppose. From some class of people now in the metaphoric desert, from voices crying in the wilderness.

From, for example, the nomadic truckers, living in their trucks or vans. From the despised “hillbillies,” like J.D. Vance and Oliver Anthony. From the Bible-thumpers. From the salesmen, the despised hucksters, like Trump.

Not, however, from the officially designated “disadvantaged.” Anyone officially designated such is given special benefits, and so is advantaged. They are also taught to be passive and lose initiative. It will be from the folks that the “good” people shun for supposedly moral reasons: those ritually and without evidence accused by those in power of racism, homophobia, misogyny, fascism, poisoning the wells, raping our women, and so on—the usual slurs.

These are the ones Jesus called to himself in the Beatitudes.

The stone that is rejected will become the cornerstone of the temple.

Why Canada Is Broken?

 

This article makes an interesting case that affirmative action is why systems no longer seem to work as well as they used to; why you can't get a passport, a doctor, a decent book or movie, or an affordable house, any longer.

And why wouldn't it be so?

Who Follows America?

 

It is my impression that America is going down the tubes. She may have more vitality in her, but she is looking increasingly decadent. Abortion and the death of the family look like civilization-killers. Who might replace her as civilization’s vanguard?

Not Europe; Western Europe is further down the road to decay than America is. Perhaps Central and Eastern Europe; but they are fastened to a dying animal.

East Asia without China seems to lack the heft. Japan seems to have lost its energy. And I expect China, given its present regime, to collapse before the US does.

India looks like a candidate. But I wonder if Hinduism can offer sufficient moral direction and backbone. It seems a bit of a morass. 

I have hopes for CANZUK; but at this point, it would require a cultural U-turn of the four countries; some kind of cultural renaissance. I would not realistically expect it anywhere else; I should not expect it here, simply because I want it to happen. Seems like wishful thinking. Also, in population terms, CANZUK is still a lightweight.

Here’s another thought. 

Historically, when an empire declines and falls, the new power seems to emerge from just outside its zone of influence—from the barbarian fringe. Here it is able to develop independent systems, immune to the collapse, while soaking up what was best from the former power. So America replaced England. So Macedonia replaced the Greek city states, so Rome replaced Macedonia, so Manchuria conquered China, so the Arabs took Persia, and the Turks Byzantium.

On that principle, perhaps we should expect great things from Latin America. It seems the one part of the world that most closely fits that historical bill: just outside America’s zone of control. In principle, it shares the US’s commitment to liberal democracy and human equality. It shares America’s and Europe’s Judeo-Christian moral traditions. So taking over the reins would not be a cultural stretch. It has the necessary demographic strength. It has been held back until now by corruption and bad governments, but that seems to be improving. Such corruption and misgovernment cannot be inevitably embedded in the culture, since parent Spain has gotten past it. As has Romance and Catholic France. And both Spain and France have previously shown the strength to dominate the world.