Heterogeneity
Hello. I miss writing, so I’m going to write. Part of why I’ve not been writing is that I’ve had a bit of a lack of coherence in my ideas recently. This is still true, so I’m just going to haphazardly point at a bunch of things and maybe the wild gesturing will be interesting and useful to some of you. Have fun reading it it either way.
Anyway, for the sake of this essay, let us take it as read that the only path to true virtue is the completion of the great work, the alchemical transformation of humanity into the Rebis, the divine hermaphrodite.
Let us also take it as read that ascending to godhood is, for the moment, quite difficult.1
Emotionally, I’m very much on team normativity, what Sarah describes as “the view that good is better than bad”. I have a bunch of practical and intellectual caveats about it, but good is better than bad and I want there to be more good and less bad.
But, you see, here’s the thing: Normativity is comparatively easy to advocate for (“good is better than bad” is a take so banal that anyone objecting to it is probably being contrarian), and comparatively hard to execute on because “do you want to be good or bad?” is rarely the moral dilemma people find themselves in. Instead, what you have to choose is what sort of good do I want to be?
The normative answer is “the best one”:
Being rational means you’ll never say “I expect to regret this choice I am making, relative to some other choice I could make.” Never ever ever. You are literally always “trying your best”.
With the greatest of respect to Sarah, who I have a great deal of time for and generally think highly of, and noting that I am generally a big fan of this piece despite this one bit getting my back up, this is bullshit and not how regret works. If trying your best were enough to avoid regret, the world would be very different than it is, and every choice would be an easy one.
In reality, hard choices exist. For example, deciding whether you want to have children. Either branch of this choice cuts out a huge number of life paths. You will probably have regrets either way.
Every time you make a hard choice you are giving up good things that you can regret the loss of. If that weren’t the case it wouldn’t actually be a hard choice.
You can have regrets without thinking you chose wrong. You can choose who to be, and you can endorse that choice, while still mourning the other versions of you who never got to exist so that you can live.
There’s a phrase that’s been bouncing around my head for a couple of months now: Love is continuing to choose what’s real.
You can acknowledge that other choices lead to different worlds, different yous, and that many of them would be in some way better than where you are, but this is the one you are in, with the life you are living, and the people you are with, and you as you are now would choose no other.
Hard choices are transformative experiences.2 You have to make them knowing that who you become after the choice will not necessarily agree with who you are now about what’s important.
Anyway, gender.
I was talking to Eurydice yesterday about the gendered expression of virtue, and starting from this part of this Cartoons Hate Her essay about gender disappointment:
I can’t help but notice that all the positive traits that used to be associated with boys are now considered gender neutral (strong, capable, intelligent, ambitious), while most of the positive traits that used to be associated with girls are still associated with girls (nurturing, empathetic, detail-oriented, polite).
I would, personally, characterise a lot of this about virtues. Previously there were masculine virtues and feminine virtues, but now there are virtues and feminine virtues3.
Anyway I slept on this and decided the distinction was fake. It's what people say they associate with men and women, but I think this is lip service only and as soon as it comes to actual practice people are back to enforcing the old distinctions.
Consider e.g. a weak man is called a wimp and punished for it, and a strong woman is called a bitch and punished for it. The claimed "gender neutral" positive association is secretly treated as if it were masculine all along, you're just supposed to pretend it isn't.4
Personally, I think this sucks. I’m broadly against lying to people about how things work, especially gender.
But it would also suck if it were true.
I am, broadly speaking, in favour of anything that increases human flourishing, and taking half of the human race and half of the virtues and saying “These ones are not for you” doesn’t do that.5 It’s not good for men or women.
I do not want to live in a world where you have to be a particular gender to exhibit a particular virtue. If you want to be a strong courageous woman, great. If you want to be a polite nurturing man, wonderful. I want you to be good, in whatever way you choose to be.
But if you want to be a courageous temperate liberal magnificent magnanimous patient truthful witty friendly modest and righteous human being of any gender, I might have to take you aside and politely enquire about your conceptions of modesty and suggest you spend some time cultivating wisdom.
Because you’re not the fucking Rebis. You can try to be if you want. You will fail, but I hope for your sake that you fail gloriously, but I expect you to fail in mediocrity. If you try to be good at everything, you’ll probably fail to be particularly good at anything. You are a finite human being with only so much time and energy, and excelling at two opposing things is much more than twice as hard as excelling at only one of them.
You can try to be kinder. You can try to be braver. You can try to be more honest, more friendly, etc. You probably should. But… not necessarily that hard. You will express some virtues more than others, and in being good you will likely embrace that. The first step - and every step after it - in being good is to choose how it is we are going to do that.
And a key part of that is deciding who it is you’re going to do that with. We learn how to be people from people, and people who are trying to achieve the same things as us have had similar problems and worked through them and have insights into them you lack. They’ve refined their sense of the good to achieve what they’ve set out to achieve, and this includes many nuances that you won’t necessarily be able to derive from first principles.
Anyway, I was going to include a large section on community and normativity and how you only really get working normativity from norms, and the nature of norms as providing you with defaults to remove the cost of decision making, but… I’m not going to. Maybe later.
Because the actual point I want to make is that if you took this seriously, and you form your communities around the cultivation of virtues and got yourself a community of the bold, and a community of nurturers… you’re going to get something that looks awfully gendered. Most of your nurturers are going to be women, most of your bold are going to be men, and they’re going to carry along a whole lot of gender-specific traits for them. If it’s all you’ve done something very wrong in building your communities. If it’s genuinely fully ungendered across all the virtues… well, I don’t think we’ll be there for a while. Maybe never.6
A lot of this is going to be cultural. Some of this is going to be biological7. I don’t really know which. I don’t much care for the purposes of this discussion.
But I will note that I seem to become more rather than less characteristically male over time as my emotional health improves, and would expect this to be a relatively common experience for men (and similarly in reverse for women). Emotional health is ties very closely to getting in touch with our bodies, and a lot of the messages our bodies send us have quite gendered patterns.8
So, honestly, it probably does make sense to think of many of these virtues as masculine and many of these virtues as feminine, and to expect their expression to follow those lines on average. As long as we don’t punish people for crossing gender lines, that seems mostly fine to me, as long as we value both.
This doesn’t of course mean that men can neglect the feminine virtues, or women the masculine virtues. All beings should express all virtues… to some extent. All it means is that, as we see each virtue imperfectly expressed in each person, we will tend to see some expressed more thoroughly in women and some more in men, and our understanding of those virtues will in turn be coloured by our understanding of masculinity and femininity.
The ideal is the perfect expression of all virtues in all beings, unifying both these masculine and feminine virtues (and all of the ones that weren’t gendered in the first place), but even there I don’t think you end up with something ungendered, you end up with the Rebis - something that combines both masculine and feminine traits, seamlessly integrating them without erasing the distinctions between them.
In the meantime though, as mere humans, one of the things we use to make sense of the world and operate within it does seem to be gender, and we should probably try to figure out a way to do that well rather than hide from the fact that we’re doing it badly.
I’m not saying I can’t punch a hole in the sky but, apologies, it might take me a few years.
I find the concept of “transformative experiences” important and useful to have a label for but I don’t actually recommend LA Paul’s book. She spends the entire book going “Sure seems like this incredibly common human experience is incompatible with our overly simplistic normative theories of rationality… but what if we bend over backwards to try to pretend it’s compatible anyway?” and as a result as a reader I spent the entire book going “You’re so close… just one step further…” and being frustrated that she never seems to get it.
“Virtue” here means something close to the Aristotelian sense - the skilled practice of a character trait that disposes you towards good. “Feminine virtue” could also be used to mean something like chastity, demureness, etc. I don’t mean that
Though Eurydice correctly points out that other-gendered virtues are rewarded as long as you exhibit them only a bit and also first perform all your gendered virtues well.
“But David”, you may say, “we’re not saying that men can’t have these positive characteristics, only that they’re associated with women. Men can still exhibit them if they want”. To this I respond: “Ah, I see you’ve never tried being a man exhibiting feminine-associated characteristics”.
This is, incidentally, also what you’re going to see even if the claimed gender-neutral virtues and feminine-virtues split were true. There’s an interesting study from a while ago called The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education which talks about how increased gender equality results in STEM being increasingly male. Why? Well because as women get more options, they take more options, and apparently while there’s not much gender gap in STEM ability, there’s a significant gender gap in something in STEM being your best subject. So you end up with a situation in which many boys are choosing “Do you want to do your best subject or something you’re much worse at?” and many girls choosing freely between several different subjects, and the result is that many boys go into STEM when the girls who could be competing with them are going into e.g. medicine.
Is this study true? Well… I don’t know. I think it’s an interesting mechanism that if the claimed facts are true somewhat has to work this way, and the data seems solid, but I’ve not done a deep dive investigation and the replication crisis is a harsh master. It’s at least interesting and plausible though.
If nothing else, hormones are a hell of a drug family, and being physically bigger and stronger or weaker and smaller ends up being very impactful
Hormones again. Sorry. One of the reasons hormonal therapies work so well for trans people I imagine.
This is a great essay!
It hits on many things I've been thinking about.
First- Charles Taylor has a great essay on transformative choices. I assume LA Paul quotes him, but if not he's worth reading as he explores what kinds of decisions have these tradeoffs built into them inherently. "Responsibility for Self"
But more importantly, on gender.
My thinking about this changed when my daughter was born. I used to think many virtues that I wanted for myself and my three sons were masculine virtues. But as my daughter (only 1.5 yrs old) became part of my life, I realized that they were just plain virtues.
A good example is toughness. Not crying from small things. Another one is courage and facing fears. Assertiveness.
Now its true, she's very gendered. She gets different compliments on beauty and cuteness and so on. And I live in a very gendered environment, where there is a clear cut distinction between roles (and people will openly be derisive of women doing masculine virtues and pity their husbands). But I wonder if there's something here that's better described than a different set of virtues. It might be that the virtues are actually very similar, but the roles people are expected to play are different. The way the virtues of the father and the son, or the king and the subject, soldier and priest- are not in the virtue set, but in their relation to the roles.
This might seem like its a cop-out, but it might not be a very big one. I imagine a single businesswoman would have a virtue set that is more similar to a businessman then either would have to a father or mother. I would imagine that businesshumans are more similar to each other, but gender roles in parents create division of labor that is customary and useful.
So I don't really see a way to change the virtues of gender, without changing the roles of gender.
I totally agree that it's very likely that a whole bunch of characteristics are affected by gender, for both cultural and in-built reasons.
But. I think there's vastly more overlap than there are extremes, and that by making space for women who are strong and men who nurture we both give space for people who are on the other side than whatever expectations "we" have, and also for people to express parts of themselves that might otherwise get covered up.
My daughter's nursery has about 20 carers. About 5 of them are men. There's clearly a gendered skew. But 5 years ago there was only 1 male carer. And it turns out that the kids are delighted to have both male and female carers, and that that opens up more options to all kinds of kids to be more themselves.
So maybe pretending that things are more equal than they already are will give people the chance to be themselves more, and that's a good thing to do.