Segway on JJ’s vid, Steven Pinker explains how biology sets limits on what sorts of social goals are humanely realizable:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRRHAXxLs5M
Interestingly, he almost exactly paraphrases Rothbard (though I’m sure inadvertenly as I doubt very much that Pinker has read Rothbard):
“Suppose, for example, that it has come to be adopted as a universal ethical goal that all men be able to fly by flapping their arms. Let us assume that “pro-flappers” have been generally conceded the beauty and goodness of their goal, but have been criticized as “impractical.” But the result is unending social misery as society tries continually to move in the direction of arm-flying, and the preachers of arm-flapping make everyone’s lives miserable for being either lax or sinful enough not to live up to the common ideal. The proper critique here is to challenge the “ideal” goal itself; to point out that the goal itself is impossible in view of the physical nature of man and the universe; and, therefore, to free mankind from its enslavement to an inherently impossible and, hence, evil goal.” [emphasis added]
- Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature
The more I think about the new normal in polite society - that women are to be thought of as essentially every way equal to men and made equal in any ways in which they might be at a disadvantage - the more I realize it’s just absolute insanity. The female brain is, as Pinker says in another lecture, not indistinguishable from the male brain. This is a wry litotes - women think about life, the world and other humans in ways very different from men and they react to similar situations in very different ways than men do. In particular, I believe that the integration of women into the workplace has created a huge set of new social problems with no obvious solutions.
When you go back to the origin of male/female behavior in humans, you see that the female brain evolved to cope with a very complex set of circumstances that are largely irrelevant in the modern world. Our pre-human ancestors engaged in socialized reproduction, that is, the father was unknown or, even if he was known, did not take responsibility for the care and feeding of his children. The mother - as in most mammal species - was the primary provider for her children and any other support that went to the children was provided socialistically, that is, by genentic non-relatives motivated by a communal instinct.
Eventually, the idea of monogamous (from the female PoV) attachment to a single male (at least, for some duration) - who would both father children with her and contribute to the care and feeding of those children - emerged. We can see how this is a “privatization” of the costs of reproduction (I got this from Hoppe, can’t remember the cite right now) and how such privatized reproduction would lead to reproductive advantages over time as things that are owned are cared for better than things that are unowned (socially owned). Biologists believe that the uniquely human trait of concealed fertility played a crucial role in making this situation possible as women who knew when they were fertile would be able to “cheat” the system by copulating with the genetically best male while she is fertile and pretending to be faithful to the less genetically excellent “provider male” the rest of the time. Male jealous rage also evolved in tandem with these developments (see the book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters by Miller and Kanazawa).
I think that a lot of distinctly female behavior - credible threats of doing something absolutely insane in order to invoke a response from her male partner, gambits for sympathy through crying or other ways of being pitiable, etc. - probably originated in the Ancestral Environment where there were no family law courts or recognized child support rights in divorce or separation, and so on. A woman who could get the father of her offspring to take pity on her plight or shame him into cooperation or - the darker side of female nature which is never discussed nowadays - credibly threaten the survival of his offspring with her, would have had a reproductive advantage over other women who could not prod their children’s father into acting. Thus, modern women are the descendants of those mothers who survived that environment and passed on their genetic disposition to “crazy” behavior.
OK, I’m going to stop kicking the hornet’s nest for now.
Clayton -