Parts of this article have me thinking in a way that sounds like some sort of fell-Chiasm. I've heard it said, supposing that machines can never really mimic human intelligence and emotion, that instead what needs to happen to blur the line and eliminate the uncanny valley, is to usher humans into being more robotic - something like that. So it seems the same with these gender conversations: a woman can never be a man, so we will make men more like women and, vice versa. So, as per the Jensen quote and more from you, sure, "maleness" is being snuffed out, but is "femaleness" really filling that void? I would argue no, not at all. Instead it seems that many categories (human/artifice, "white"/non, male/female, jew/greek) are instead being cooked and blended in the melting pot into one horrific chimera that has no mouth and must scream - call it, an alchemical Rebis. And, this happening, it is strangely pseudo-Christian in that, regarding my allusion, it seems as though this dissolution of multiplicity is good, rather than a unification of disparateness, in Christ. Like the chiasm of roles in a married couple, or a guy who prays more than once a week.
"cooked and blended in the melting pot into one horrific chimera that has no mouth to scream..." Dang Richard. This won't go easily out of my memory... or my soul. Bravo. ANd also thanks for the nightmares.
ha, well you can credit the 3 or so other authors that I alluded to, or, did i cook and blend their works into one chimera of a comment? hm. tortoises all the way down.
I would suggest that the Divine Masculine Principle becomes toxic when it is divorced from the Divine Feminine Principle and vice versa. In holy matrimony - a state of union, they can conceive and give birth to Love. Love informs everything and thus transforms it. Without this, they are divided and locked into duality, an either/or of the mind and all that provokes...division, argument, war, opposition, domination, violence.
Indeed! I think your use of "provokes" is so good and essential. It's not that a man or woman sets out to create war, opposition and division. It's that a vacuum must be filled. A flawed union creates holes, spaces or discontinuities, and those spaces provoke something like a rushing in... an imbalance that I would call a dislocation and that I think you would call a sterility, state of being where love cannot transform those who are called "lovers".
Just to slip in a word before our conversation online: Great article! Amusing how you slyly brought us near the precipice of embracing the modern notion of toxic masculinity before applying the sledge hammer of the universal yardstick, the Tao! Brilliant!
One thing you didn't dwell on which I would like to see addressed is the fact that although they may be subject to the same demands of the Tao, men and women are very different, in ways embedded in the natural order. When those differences, strengths and weaknesses, are ignored on ideological grounds, or slowly dissolved by mainstream indoctrination, then there is confusion and corruption, and ultimately degeneration and destruction.. The African examples you refer to have maintained an intrinsic order which , though we may disagree on details, sustains stability, order and mutual respect, admiration and even affection. Once the order is capsized, as Iit has been in the West, the void is easily filled by tyrants who change the meanings of established terms to their own political and ideological ends. Hence, toxic masculinity is a fluid term deployed in the weaponization of traditional roles that stabilized our society to being about their radical agenda of unnatural, unachievable utopian equality.
Dawn, we talked at Inside Baseball, but I just want you to know here that you nailed it. I felt the same weakness in the article, but I avoided making it strong on purpose. It felt like the beginning of a brand new article! But as per your idea on a capsized order really ring true. As things stand today for us moderns, we struggle with paradox and the ability to understand the importance of left and right, male and female, up and down, God and man. But keep speaking it, we need it as the confusing and degenerate middle is about to be filled by the tyranical edges of political and ideological thought. Though I hope not.
Seems to me I remember God giving Adam and Eve animal skins and probably a good dose of animal nature (same thing?) to protect them from what they would have to contend with outside the garden.
The Fluffy people of light who come up with such abstractions as toxic masculinity and who's very existence is based on the toils of they're "lesser" toxic Brothers and sisters are ignorant of the dance of survival. They would do well to simply be grateful that they don't have to kill or grow their own food and simply sit around the faculty lunch room congratulating themselves on how sophisticated they are.
I'll stop now before I go off on a rant that will do neither of us any good. Love you work! Now go write something else before I have to go out and get a stick!:-)
The thing is this topic is such a temptation to toxicity. Which is kind of funny. But you ain't wrong. I've spent more than a few teacher lunchtimes going on and on only to realize later how dumb it sounds when all I have is a book to protect me from reality. Thanks for the support good Frank!
I think authors who use 'guess what?' in their essays should be politely asked not to, if only because the statement that follows is not - on the whole - the result of the type of guesswork that the author invites the reader to partake in (indeed, what follows is often neither incontestable nor obvious, or so obvious that even a breezeblock would be accurate in its guess). With the wellbeing of the reader community in mind, I also think that a piece of heavy mining equipment should be dropped on the big toe of authors who persist.
Great article. It was recommended by Paul Kingsnorth to readers of his substack "The Abbey of Misrule". By coincidence, I had already been searching the internet for the origin of the phrase "the Eternal Verities". The best overview I have found is in a 2014 article by Graham Collier in "Psychology Today". He says the expression was often used by his headmaster (H.G.Benson) in the late 1930s - "Dear Dr. Benson: he gave us a terrific grounding in Greek and Roman culture. He started with Heraclitus (540 to 480 B.C.) – one of the deepest thinkers of Greek antiquity. ‘Old’ Benson, as we affectionately called him, was always urging us to listen to our ‘inner voices', the means, he said, by which ‘reason’ and ‘wisdom’ would lead us to Heraclitus’ form of ‘contentment’."
Collier mentions that other ancient civilizations also believed in something similar to the Eternal Verities (Egypt, China, etc.). For modern Europe and the West in general, he says "It was Claude Buffier, the 18th century French philosopher, who named such ‘Heraclitan-like’ aspects of human consciousness as The Eternal Verities – those imaginative and creative thoughts, feelings and ‘understandings’…. which present us with what we would call moral and humane values: insights enabling us to know and ‘feel’ the ‘positivity’ of those attitudes and actions which ring true and good…. and the ‘negativity’ of those which ring false and harmful. Such ‘insights’ would seem to be contained unconsciously deep within the human psyche – ‘archetypal’ as Carl Jung described them – and can often present themselves to consciousness quite independently of what else is going on at the time."
Hmmmm - "quite independently of what else is going on" - at this point in the article I got a rare feeling of optimism. Surely if Jung is right - and certainly humanity's sense of the Eternal Verities does go very far back in written records and probably further unrecorded - then all the rubbish we are being bombarded with in the 21st century is not as significant as we fear. However, reading on, it turns out that Collier is not optimistic - fearing that "If, as I believe, Time and Inclination are necessary for such subjective illuminations to take place in the Mind, then I doubt that the future way of life will support their continuance. “Nowadays’’, said one young man to me in a campus coffee shop, “in our electronic world it doesn’t work that way anymore. We don’t have the time or the need to reflect on life. There’s always something to do, somewhere new to go…. "
Of course this article was written in 2014. Since then, there has been the "Mindfulness" movement and also the "Slow Down" movement and others which have spread rapidly around the world amongst all income groups that can afford to work fewer hours. The millions of virtual slave labourers all over the world do not have the option to say "What is this life if filled with care, We have not time to stand and stare?" [W.H.Davies, 1911] - but that does not mean that those who do have the option should deprive themselves of choosing less money and more leisure - it would make no difference to slave labourers anyway, and it might help to prevent the "Abolition of Man" that Lewis, Collier, and many others fear. Yes, mankind is a bit of a nuisance species at the moment, but that is no reason to abolish it altogether - there are so many good things about it, and anyone who has spent a lot of time with babies and infants has absolute proof of this. However, infants are not what they used to be - too much access to media at very early ages has made them unnatural mimics of what is being put into them. The GIGO of computer programmers - Garbage In Garbage Out - applies to humans too. Luckily, it seems that Peak Cheap Energy and Peak Cheap Minerals may remove smartphones etc. from the sticky grasp of 3-year-olds quite soon. For which relief much thanks.
This is a masterpiece of a comment. So wonderful to have you here with us, with me, trying to sort out so many of the eternal verities. Your comment does this thing of going back and forth, hope to fear, light to dark and back again. I think you are hovering around the royal path as we old school Christians call it. I think it must be for this that we aim!
Glad you enjoyed it - I enjoyed writing it! - fired up by your article, and mainly by this Graham Collier whose research and inner wisdom I have relayed. I am hoping he is still alive, he says he was 18 in 1940, so it does not seem very likely. The Psychology Today website says of him: "Graham Collier served with Bomber Command, R.A.F., during World War II. He was Professor of the Philosophy of the Arts at the University of Georgia and is now Professor Emeritus there; he is also an Associate Fellow of Davenport College, Yale University. Collier's previous books include Form, Space and Vision (in print through four editions from 1963 to 1995), Art and the Creative Consciousness, and War Night Berlin (1993). His most recent book, Antarctic Odyssey, is an account of his several voyages to circumnavigate Antarctica." The most recent posts by him are dated 2018 - so I think maybe he has left us - but luckily the internet has preserved his work for other searchers. His many articles for Psychology Today formed part of its exploration of "The Consciousness Question".
"In the case of the stick and my young pal Madou, my actions were sanctioned by the village because they returned proper order to my relationship with Madou. My actions were just, despite the inequality they fostered."
I think the analysis in this post is spot-on and ably summed up in the above passage. I think I might add utilitarianism to the values of the New World. In addition to "fostering inequality", actions causing negative experiences in others, especially of physical or emotional distress, is heavily frowned upon and I think would be a major aspect motivating any critiques of your actions.
This only makes sense in something like a utilitarian framework where harm = pain = bad and lack-of-harm = pleasure = good and the goal of individuals and society is to increase the latter and decrease the former.
Thanks Zach, couldn't agree more. And if it is possible to just see this as a type of epistemological "truth" and not a condemnation of all people modern, I think it helps us understand ourselves in this culture. After all, large parts of me have inherited utilitarianism because large parts of me (maybe all of me) have imbibed modernity. It's like a doctor seeing a tumor within in himself on an x-ray or whatever, and still he figures out how to live with himself, while also taking steps to heal. Like... he shouldn't go around shouting at people with tumors lol. Great insight though brother, just got me thinking and writing a riff that suddenly feels too long. Peace!
Could be brother, there is a grind that sometimes I fall into as a writer. I don't like when that happens. I thank you for this. I would take up one idea that you bring forth: Making men relate to themselves again.... Feeling the full range of emotions. These ideas imply an ideal, a time (or a hope) when men did this or could do this. It implies a way of being. For me, it implies the Tao. Or a god. But bell hooks wouldn't go down this road, as I understand her. She'd have higher ideals perhaps, a telos, but not a genuine, transcendent, seemingly objective truth in mind. In short, you and her are offering something like a way to have men "relate to themselves" but I suspect that way is simply the way of the feminine. In short, I think the way implied by postmodern gender and political theorists is ultimately always a feminine way, even when not explicitly stated as such. The androgynous even leans feminine. And the feminine is what I think you are calling "disciplined ways of channeling." I think.
Yes, I think you have identified the crux of the matter. Which is ironic and funny, the crux part. Perhaps all of these cultural conversations are somehow about the CRUX. About having something above us, something before which all must bow? Feels like that is what a coherent culture IS.
Parts of this article have me thinking in a way that sounds like some sort of fell-Chiasm. I've heard it said, supposing that machines can never really mimic human intelligence and emotion, that instead what needs to happen to blur the line and eliminate the uncanny valley, is to usher humans into being more robotic - something like that. So it seems the same with these gender conversations: a woman can never be a man, so we will make men more like women and, vice versa. So, as per the Jensen quote and more from you, sure, "maleness" is being snuffed out, but is "femaleness" really filling that void? I would argue no, not at all. Instead it seems that many categories (human/artifice, "white"/non, male/female, jew/greek) are instead being cooked and blended in the melting pot into one horrific chimera that has no mouth and must scream - call it, an alchemical Rebis. And, this happening, it is strangely pseudo-Christian in that, regarding my allusion, it seems as though this dissolution of multiplicity is good, rather than a unification of disparateness, in Christ. Like the chiasm of roles in a married couple, or a guy who prays more than once a week.
"cooked and blended in the melting pot into one horrific chimera that has no mouth to scream..." Dang Richard. This won't go easily out of my memory... or my soul. Bravo. ANd also thanks for the nightmares.
ha, well you can credit the 3 or so other authors that I alluded to, or, did i cook and blend their works into one chimera of a comment? hm. tortoises all the way down.
Amen, brother! Amen, amen!
I would suggest that the Divine Masculine Principle becomes toxic when it is divorced from the Divine Feminine Principle and vice versa. In holy matrimony - a state of union, they can conceive and give birth to Love. Love informs everything and thus transforms it. Without this, they are divided and locked into duality, an either/or of the mind and all that provokes...division, argument, war, opposition, domination, violence.
Indeed! I think your use of "provokes" is so good and essential. It's not that a man or woman sets out to create war, opposition and division. It's that a vacuum must be filled. A flawed union creates holes, spaces or discontinuities, and those spaces provoke something like a rushing in... an imbalance that I would call a dislocation and that I think you would call a sterility, state of being where love cannot transform those who are called "lovers".
Just to slip in a word before our conversation online: Great article! Amusing how you slyly brought us near the precipice of embracing the modern notion of toxic masculinity before applying the sledge hammer of the universal yardstick, the Tao! Brilliant!
One thing you didn't dwell on which I would like to see addressed is the fact that although they may be subject to the same demands of the Tao, men and women are very different, in ways embedded in the natural order. When those differences, strengths and weaknesses, are ignored on ideological grounds, or slowly dissolved by mainstream indoctrination, then there is confusion and corruption, and ultimately degeneration and destruction.. The African examples you refer to have maintained an intrinsic order which , though we may disagree on details, sustains stability, order and mutual respect, admiration and even affection. Once the order is capsized, as Iit has been in the West, the void is easily filled by tyrants who change the meanings of established terms to their own political and ideological ends. Hence, toxic masculinity is a fluid term deployed in the weaponization of traditional roles that stabilized our society to being about their radical agenda of unnatural, unachievable utopian equality.
Dawn, we talked at Inside Baseball, but I just want you to know here that you nailed it. I felt the same weakness in the article, but I avoided making it strong on purpose. It felt like the beginning of a brand new article! But as per your idea on a capsized order really ring true. As things stand today for us moderns, we struggle with paradox and the ability to understand the importance of left and right, male and female, up and down, God and man. But keep speaking it, we need it as the confusing and degenerate middle is about to be filled by the tyranical edges of political and ideological thought. Though I hope not.
I think you were right not to dive too deep here, since it would indeed be another big topic and might have taken this one sideways!
Great article brother!
Seems to me I remember God giving Adam and Eve animal skins and probably a good dose of animal nature (same thing?) to protect them from what they would have to contend with outside the garden.
The Fluffy people of light who come up with such abstractions as toxic masculinity and who's very existence is based on the toils of they're "lesser" toxic Brothers and sisters are ignorant of the dance of survival. They would do well to simply be grateful that they don't have to kill or grow their own food and simply sit around the faculty lunch room congratulating themselves on how sophisticated they are.
I'll stop now before I go off on a rant that will do neither of us any good. Love you work! Now go write something else before I have to go out and get a stick!:-)
The thing is this topic is such a temptation to toxicity. Which is kind of funny. But you ain't wrong. I've spent more than a few teacher lunchtimes going on and on only to realize later how dumb it sounds when all I have is a book to protect me from reality. Thanks for the support good Frank!
I think authors who use 'guess what?' in their essays should be politely asked not to, if only because the statement that follows is not - on the whole - the result of the type of guesswork that the author invites the reader to partake in (indeed, what follows is often neither incontestable nor obvious, or so obvious that even a breezeblock would be accurate in its guess). With the wellbeing of the reader community in mind, I also think that a piece of heavy mining equipment should be dropped on the big toe of authors who persist.
Great article. It was recommended by Paul Kingsnorth to readers of his substack "The Abbey of Misrule". By coincidence, I had already been searching the internet for the origin of the phrase "the Eternal Verities". The best overview I have found is in a 2014 article by Graham Collier in "Psychology Today". He says the expression was often used by his headmaster (H.G.Benson) in the late 1930s - "Dear Dr. Benson: he gave us a terrific grounding in Greek and Roman culture. He started with Heraclitus (540 to 480 B.C.) – one of the deepest thinkers of Greek antiquity. ‘Old’ Benson, as we affectionately called him, was always urging us to listen to our ‘inner voices', the means, he said, by which ‘reason’ and ‘wisdom’ would lead us to Heraclitus’ form of ‘contentment’."
Collier mentions that other ancient civilizations also believed in something similar to the Eternal Verities (Egypt, China, etc.). For modern Europe and the West in general, he says "It was Claude Buffier, the 18th century French philosopher, who named such ‘Heraclitan-like’ aspects of human consciousness as The Eternal Verities – those imaginative and creative thoughts, feelings and ‘understandings’…. which present us with what we would call moral and humane values: insights enabling us to know and ‘feel’ the ‘positivity’ of those attitudes and actions which ring true and good…. and the ‘negativity’ of those which ring false and harmful. Such ‘insights’ would seem to be contained unconsciously deep within the human psyche – ‘archetypal’ as Carl Jung described them – and can often present themselves to consciousness quite independently of what else is going on at the time."
Hmmmm - "quite independently of what else is going on" - at this point in the article I got a rare feeling of optimism. Surely if Jung is right - and certainly humanity's sense of the Eternal Verities does go very far back in written records and probably further unrecorded - then all the rubbish we are being bombarded with in the 21st century is not as significant as we fear. However, reading on, it turns out that Collier is not optimistic - fearing that "If, as I believe, Time and Inclination are necessary for such subjective illuminations to take place in the Mind, then I doubt that the future way of life will support their continuance. “Nowadays’’, said one young man to me in a campus coffee shop, “in our electronic world it doesn’t work that way anymore. We don’t have the time or the need to reflect on life. There’s always something to do, somewhere new to go…. "
Of course this article was written in 2014. Since then, there has been the "Mindfulness" movement and also the "Slow Down" movement and others which have spread rapidly around the world amongst all income groups that can afford to work fewer hours. The millions of virtual slave labourers all over the world do not have the option to say "What is this life if filled with care, We have not time to stand and stare?" [W.H.Davies, 1911] - but that does not mean that those who do have the option should deprive themselves of choosing less money and more leisure - it would make no difference to slave labourers anyway, and it might help to prevent the "Abolition of Man" that Lewis, Collier, and many others fear. Yes, mankind is a bit of a nuisance species at the moment, but that is no reason to abolish it altogether - there are so many good things about it, and anyone who has spent a lot of time with babies and infants has absolute proof of this. However, infants are not what they used to be - too much access to media at very early ages has made them unnatural mimics of what is being put into them. The GIGO of computer programmers - Garbage In Garbage Out - applies to humans too. Luckily, it seems that Peak Cheap Energy and Peak Cheap Minerals may remove smartphones etc. from the sticky grasp of 3-year-olds quite soon. For which relief much thanks.
This is a masterpiece of a comment. So wonderful to have you here with us, with me, trying to sort out so many of the eternal verities. Your comment does this thing of going back and forth, hope to fear, light to dark and back again. I think you are hovering around the royal path as we old school Christians call it. I think it must be for this that we aim!
Glad you enjoyed it - I enjoyed writing it! - fired up by your article, and mainly by this Graham Collier whose research and inner wisdom I have relayed. I am hoping he is still alive, he says he was 18 in 1940, so it does not seem very likely. The Psychology Today website says of him: "Graham Collier served with Bomber Command, R.A.F., during World War II. He was Professor of the Philosophy of the Arts at the University of Georgia and is now Professor Emeritus there; he is also an Associate Fellow of Davenport College, Yale University. Collier's previous books include Form, Space and Vision (in print through four editions from 1963 to 1995), Art and the Creative Consciousness, and War Night Berlin (1993). His most recent book, Antarctic Odyssey, is an account of his several voyages to circumnavigate Antarctica." The most recent posts by him are dated 2018 - so I think maybe he has left us - but luckily the internet has preserved his work for other searchers. His many articles for Psychology Today formed part of its exploration of "The Consciousness Question".
"In the case of the stick and my young pal Madou, my actions were sanctioned by the village because they returned proper order to my relationship with Madou. My actions were just, despite the inequality they fostered."
I think the analysis in this post is spot-on and ably summed up in the above passage. I think I might add utilitarianism to the values of the New World. In addition to "fostering inequality", actions causing negative experiences in others, especially of physical or emotional distress, is heavily frowned upon and I think would be a major aspect motivating any critiques of your actions.
This only makes sense in something like a utilitarian framework where harm = pain = bad and lack-of-harm = pleasure = good and the goal of individuals and society is to increase the latter and decrease the former.
Thanks Zach, couldn't agree more. And if it is possible to just see this as a type of epistemological "truth" and not a condemnation of all people modern, I think it helps us understand ourselves in this culture. After all, large parts of me have inherited utilitarianism because large parts of me (maybe all of me) have imbibed modernity. It's like a doctor seeing a tumor within in himself on an x-ray or whatever, and still he figures out how to live with himself, while also taking steps to heal. Like... he shouldn't go around shouting at people with tumors lol. Great insight though brother, just got me thinking and writing a riff that suddenly feels too long. Peace!
Well written How can this be compared to our current political leaders world wide. I'm interested to read your view
I would never use this term. It implies that there is no toxic women. I would say toxic human beings instead.
Could be brother, there is a grind that sometimes I fall into as a writer. I don't like when that happens. I thank you for this. I would take up one idea that you bring forth: Making men relate to themselves again.... Feeling the full range of emotions. These ideas imply an ideal, a time (or a hope) when men did this or could do this. It implies a way of being. For me, it implies the Tao. Or a god. But bell hooks wouldn't go down this road, as I understand her. She'd have higher ideals perhaps, a telos, but not a genuine, transcendent, seemingly objective truth in mind. In short, you and her are offering something like a way to have men "relate to themselves" but I suspect that way is simply the way of the feminine. In short, I think the way implied by postmodern gender and political theorists is ultimately always a feminine way, even when not explicitly stated as such. The androgynous even leans feminine. And the feminine is what I think you are calling "disciplined ways of channeling." I think.
Yes, I think you have identified the crux of the matter. Which is ironic and funny, the crux part. Perhaps all of these cultural conversations are somehow about the CRUX. About having something above us, something before which all must bow? Feels like that is what a coherent culture IS.