A Famine of Violence

by @extradeadjcb

Over the last few months, conservative politicians and pundits have been smugly delivering to progressive academics & “public health experts” the Ultimate Kill Shot: “What is a woman?”

But the answer turns out to be easy for progressives to give: a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman. This makes “woman” a nonsense word, of course, but who cares? It’s just a word.

This is the key to understanding the “gender critical” perspective: they view this conversation as semantic and descriptive, like “is the platypus a mammal” or “is Pluto a planet”. You’re using a word to draw a box, which could be drawn some other way — and they’re simply telling you, “we would like to draw the box differently.”

They don’t feel owned when you tell them that it’s obvious, because in the details, it isn’t obvious: there really are weird exceptions where judgment calls have to be made, and if you’re trying to describe the world as it is, they’re right to insist that you accommodate the whole picture. Even if legitimate exceptions are much rarer than they think, and unlikely to be relevant to most people’s lives, certainly the law has to do something with them.

When conservatives argue that the difference between men and women is obvious, they are being prescriptive: they’re thinking of Man and Woman as platonic concepts. In other words, they’re not talking about what men and women are; they’re talking about what men and women are for.

But mainstream conservatives don’t like to talk about this in too much detail, partly because all questions of telos are uncomfortably strident for them; but more importantly, because acknowledging that Man and Woman have a purpose means admitting that millions of real-life men and women — by choice or by tragic circumstance — fail to accomplish that purpose.

So the conservative asserts that Man and Woman are real concepts that exist for a reason — generally something to do with having children — and then the progressive simply dares the conservative to explain out loud what this implies for the infertile and the disabled. Are they failures? Are they incomplete? Are they “less than”? And, unlike the conservative’s Ultimate Kill Shot, this one usually does terminate the conversation.

But Man and Woman are real concepts, and they do exist for a reason; so what would the conversation look like if we were not afraid to pursue it? Sure, men and women are different, but so what? Why are they different?

Women have all sorts of physiological and psychological adaptations to bearing and nurturing children and building community. Despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth when you point this out, this is actually the easy part, because most of us agree that nurturing children and building community are things that ought to happen, even if it’s “reductive” to suggest that that’s the point of being a woman.

But nearly everything that defines manhood as distinct from womanhood appears to be an adaptation to violence. Male grip strength is intended for grappling, and buttressing the bones in the fist to strike. Male upper-body musculature is adapted for grappling, striking, and throwing projectiles. Testosterone alters the bones and muscles of the face to increase bite force and reduce damage from blows to the jaw, orbital, and forehead.

Psychologically, men are of course more prone to aggression, but the adaptations to violence are much more granular than that. Men experience novel positive stimuli much more intensely than women, and novel negative stimuli much less intensely — causing them to crave dangerous, rewarding experiences and shake off trauma. Men’s emotional reactions are processed in an area of the amygdala segregated from memory, which causes them to be more emotionally detached and less responsive to violent or disturbing memories. Men are less capable of empathy, which is useful when you have to hurt people.

From an evolutionary perspective, this suggests that our ancestors resolved an awful lot of their conflicts through violence, and men did most of the killing and dying. This is described in the literature rather bloodlessly as “acquiring and protecting reproductive resources”.

A progressive would say, “Maybe being a remorseless killer was adaptive in the past, but we live in a much less violent world now, and we don’t need people like that anymore — and anyway, just because something is adaptive doesn’t make it right.”

This is where Toxic Masculinity emerges — basically this entire package of masculine psychological adaptations to violence is framed instead as a set of “behaviors” and “attitudes” which are culturally constructed and which can therefore be educated out of young boys. The phrase suggests the existence of a Non-Toxic Masculinity – a way to “be a man” in a socially positive way – but press them on what that would look like and it basically comes down to “why can’t you be more like your sister?”

Of course, masculinity is not culturally constructed, and it can’t be educated away — and trying to do so twists men and boys into furtive, neurotic, miserable creatures. But the progressive is right in at least one sense: physical confrontation is much less useful for us than it was for our ancestors. Full expression of the masculine impulse to violence is basically only available to professional soldiers, and not even most of them; hence:

Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.

—Samuel Johnson

This isn’t particular to soldiering; soldiering is just the only place where this fundamental need can still be met. This longing is far too old to be a product of militaristic propaganda. Director Francois Truffaut famously said that it’s impossible to make an anti-war film — “to depict it is to ennoble it” — but that isn’t actually true. You could definitely make an anti-war film if you shot it from a cubicle farm in the finance department of Raytheon. What you can’t do is make a film that is persuasively anti-violence.

(Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners is the best attempt at an anti-violence film that I’ve seen, but the narrative hoops that Villeneuve has to jump through to make Hugh Jackman’s vengeful dad appear to be even debatably in the wrong winds up proving the point in the other direction.)

This is also why we love fictional or speculative depictions of social collapse: they’re an expression of the poverty and suffering and tragedy that we imagine we would be willing to shoulder, if it meant that we could live in a world where these impulses had a place. Probably some of us would regret that fantasy if it were ever realized, but we have tens of thousands of American men who have seen both combat in a sweltering impoverished sewer, and civilian life in the modern liberal West, who wish they could get back to the sewer.

This condition of stasis (peace is the wrong word) is not the result of conflicts being laid to rest, or resolved amicably — all the hatreds that people would like to fight and kill over are alive and well. Instead, the instruments of violence have grown far beyond the scale of individual humans, and personal violent confrontation has simply become unwinnable. The reason you don’t teach your son to deploy personal violence the way he might have learned in, say, frontier America, is not that there are fewer conflicts worth fighting about — it’s that you don’t want him to die in prison.

That’s not the defeat of violence, it’s the overwhelming triumph of violence — Alexander weeping, for there are no more worlds to conquer. Violence put the predatory animals in zoos, pacified the hostile barbarians, made the world Safe for Democracy; and now the institutions that wield violence argue that they have done all the violence that needs to be done, and that whatever remains should be left to the professionals. If you encounter an event that calls for violence — a riot, a rape, a beating — your job is to scream for help and wait to be rescued.

The state’s “monopoly on violence” is not a new concept: it’s nearly as old as the state, and was articulated explicitly by Thomas Hobbes in the 1600s. Political violence and the punishment of crime have always been the exclusive province of the state — but no state in history had the capacity, let alone the will, to insist on such a totalizing monopoly. The idea that a civilian could be forbidden to physically defend himself, or intervene to protect others, or even that the state could restrain you from addressing certain categories of personal injury and insult, would have struck people from almost any pre-modern culture as tyrannical and absurd.

But we are all weaklings relative to Leviathan now, and are punished ruthlessly for the independent exercise of violence — so our conflicts don’t escalate to the physical violence that we are built to prosecute, where they might be settled; instead, they take place in legal and political arenas where power is won through kvetching, currying favor, and dramatizing one’s grievances in order to appropriate the violence of the state. And since both sides know that the battle is never really “won” — that advantage is only obtained temporarily through chicanery — all these conflicts hang open like sores, and are never settled.

If conflicts can only escalate into wars of gossip, resentment, sabotage, passive-aggression, and (at worst) public struggle sessions and decades-long lawsuits, it’s not at all surprising that so many men have become increasingly conflict-avoidant and withdrawn from the pursuit of status. Most men would much rather lose a fistfight than “win” one of these endless, effeminate power struggles; and why would anyone want to rise through a hierarchy that is defined in this way?

Because society has been over-sterilized of violence, like a human body that spends too much time in a sterile environment, its immune system has run out of legitimate targets and begun to attack healthy tissue. For most of us, agents of the state are much more likely to punish us for independently responding to a violent situation than they are to protect us from one.

This pressure gradient against conflict exists because one side fanatically abhors masculine personal violence, and the other side is ambivalent. Most Westerners who have a problem with this cult of safety are conservative Christians, who would like to take seriously the admonition to turn the other cheek and love their enemies – but how to reckon with the violence embedded in their body (and, by extension, in the image of God)?

Nobody really knows what to do with this. Progressives have tried to purge masculinity from Western males with relentless propaganda and drugs, but conservatives want to pretend that masculinity is just something to do with working hard, and cracking open a cold one with the boys, and being a stand-up guy; that it can easily be made compatible with, let alone complimentary to, the pacified Western world order. Smart, capable men can maybe find solutions for themselves at the margins, but until this error is corrected and we restore the proper social role of personal violence, the ordinary Western man will remain frustrated, enfeebled, and sick.

Find author at @extradeadjcb on Twitter and extradeadjcb.substack.com.