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The Book of Good Living: The Social Minimum

I’ve struggled for a long time to figure out the simplest way to say this, and never gotten it down to a short formulation. But here it is at last, I think:

It’s not your job to cater to others. But you DO have to live your life in such a way that they’re not forced to cater to you.

Unpacking this brings out a lot of little specific rules such as:

Don’t pee on the toilet seat, forcing the next guy to wipe it off before he can sit there. Don’t park in the supermarket entryway, forcing others to walk around you. Don’t stand obliviously with your friends in the middle of the corridor, forcing others to slither to get past you. Don’t walk away and leave your basket so it blocks the supermarket aisle, so others have to move it to get past. Don’t drop your garbage on the sidewalk, or onto the side of the highway, where someone else will have to pick it up. Don’t park blocking the road. Don’t throw your gum in the urinals. Don’t flip your cigarette butts onto the sidewalk. Don’t leave your shitty diapers on the bench at the park. When you get out of your car and go into the mini-mart, turn off your loud-ass music. Don’t stand smoking in the doorway so people either have to breathe your smoke or go out of their way to avoid you.

I’m extremely conscious of the needs of others as I move through my day. I don’t want to get in anybody’s way, or inconvenience them. I don’t want someone to have to pick up after me. I don’t want my life to be a WEIGHT on others.

No, I don’t make an effort to vanish in other people’s shadows. I’m certainly conscious that I deserve my share of our common time, space and resources, but I try to be generous and unobtrusive in my use of it.

This is a pretty ironclad cultural rule with me, and I think a lot of us. I’m not sure just where I learned it, but it seems sound and broadly applicable. I have a hard time seeing how anyone could think it a bad thing.

Yes, we meet people every day who either don’t know it or don’t care about it, but they really come across as either children or assholes, don’t they?

We don’t absolutely have to donate to charity, or adopt a homeless pet, or — bearing in mind that not everybody is up to it — even stop and render aid at the scene of an accident. But if we’re talking the bare minimum each person has to do to maintain a genteel workable society, this is it.

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Beta Culture: Being Grownups on Planet Earth

Cowboy DadFor most of the years I knew him, I unconsciously thought of my Cowboy Dad as “the grownup” in my life. Since he died, I’ve realized there were several side-effects of thinking that. One is that I cheated him out of all the years of ME being a grownup, so that we could be … well, friendly equals, fellow MEN together. The other is that I cheated myself out of all those years of me being a grownup. All the endeavors and relationships in my life were approached in some degree of a childish/childlike manner.

None of this was conscious, or by decision. It was something that simply appeared in my attitudes and behavior. If I had stated it in words, it would’ve come out to something like “It’s safe for me to be childish. I can be irresponsible. I can drift, I can put off critical decisions. I can party, I can laze around and not think about my present situation, or my future. If I screw up, he will rescue me. I can safely not worry too much about the people around me, or the larger world, because the Old Man is handling all that.”

I think a lot about religion and the effects it has on people and cultures, and I think my experience of “relating to the grownup as a child” is directly applicable to the experience of people in religion. I doubt we can imagine how much we’ve lost, how much Planet Earth has lost, by us feeling free to not be conscious adults.

In my case, I can’t place the entire blame on myself. I came into our relationship fairly  broken, and I needed the comfort and guidance, the there-for-you-ness, a real parent could provide. But that doesn’t mean the results were any less real, any less damaging.

In the case of we humans, I suppose I can’t place the entire blame there, either. As a species, we grew up without parents or wise guidance of any sort. We stumbled along figuring out things as we went, repeatedly falling back into mistakes and breaking ourselves and the world around us.

But the cost has been incalculable, and it’s something we – and our planet – can’t afford anymore.

A month or so after my Dad died, I woke up one day to the realization “Oh gosh, I have to be a grownup now.” It was a little bit scary, but mostly it was … strength. Determination. A little bit of steel injected into my being with the understanding that I could handle whatever happened, because that’s what grownups do. I understood that I had to relate to my own life and the world around me in an entirely new, entirely responsible way. And I was truly okay with that.

For any individual recovering from religion, I have to believe you have that same epiphany. After your god “dies,” you realize you have to be an adult. You have to deal with the reality of your own life, and the lives of those close to you, and even larger matters out in the world around you. But you also understand that you CAN. You — along with others like you — take each situation into your hands and change it for the better. Or you accept the fact of a bad situation and deal realistically with its cost. Because that’s what grownups do.

As an entire civilization, we’re nowhere near the point of waking up as grownups. Our world full of contentedly religious, drunkenly mystical, calmly unconcerned juveniles is this hapless, directionless child, fumbling around and breaking things, breaking each other and the world we live in, and thinking it’s all okay, because our Parent is dealing with all the hard stuff and picking up the clutter of each destructive act.

I think even most atheists inherit this mindset, and fail to notice they have it. We grow up in the culture that thinks this way, and it’s so deeply embedded we never get around to seeing it, or peeling it out of our own heads.

To all those soft-serve atheists who think we should just live and let live, that atheism will grow or not as events develop, and that meanwhile it’s all good …

I think you have no idea how deadly dangerous is the situation we live within. No idea how damaging it is to let people continue to believe in gods, and stay children. No idea what we’ve DONE, and continue to do, and will soon do.

It’s why I’m not just an atheist, but an anti-theist.

In the same way you have to cure disease in order to be well, we have to cure ourselves of religion, of the childishness of our race, in order to be grownups. In order to live and be well on Planet Earth, in order that the lot of us can wake up and see that we have to be adults now — in order to SURVIVE — our gods have to die.

We have to kill them.

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Zoning Out on Liberal vs. Conservative Issues

Con vs LibI woke up this morning with this diagram in my head.

I tinkered it up in Illustrator later. Probably could have chosen brighter colors or a better layout, but I got tired of messing with it. You may have to click-and-embiggen it to see all the details.

Especially note that the center vertical bar is labeled to indicate a gradation from Greater Factual Information (More Informed) at the top to Lesser Factual Information (More Ignorant) at the bottom, whereas the center section is labeled (along the bottom) for Lesser Emotion, while the left and right borders indicate More Emotion. In other words, in both the Conservative and Liberal worldviews, you can be more or less informed about issues, and more or less emotional and excitable about them. There are important social and political consequences that flow out of positions in each area of the graphic.

This is based on a great deal of thinking I’ve been doing lately — reflected in several recent posts — about liberal and conservative approaches to certain issues.

Mainly in this diagram, I was thinking that there’s that obvious place (lower left) on the conservative side of the line where people are both uninformed and excitable, the crazies and teabaggers and gunny Christian patriots who form the natural audience of FOX News.

Then there’s that zone up above and to the right of the Foxbaggers, a Platonic Ideal conceptual territory where rational people — Reasoning Beings — can be equally well-informed, and equally calm about certain issues, and yet still trend either conservative or liberal, according to their own personal history and experience. It is in this (sadly not-well-populated) zone that liberal-trending and conservative-trending people can meet and discuss issues calmly, and possibly reach compromise positions.

Interestingly, this is also a place where liberal people who disagree with other liberal people can meet and calmly discuss issues. On the conservative side, conservative-conservative meetings could conceivably take place to iron out differences, but that appears to be politically impossible right at the moment.

Low down on the right, there’s that other space that’s been bringing itself to my attention in recent months, the zone of the strongly liberal, excitable “OMG Screamers.” These people, with whom I would otherwise identify as fellow liberals, have begun to fall outside my fellow feeling because they react with great emotion but little thought. More than once I’ve found myself outside the apparent liberal mainstream on issues such as feminism, race relations, the homeless —  hell, even pit bulls.

I’m much in favor of marijuana legalization, for instance, but I don’t kid myself that young people smoking pot is some sort of wonderful positive end-result. I got into a discussion about feminism a year or so back in which one of the participants declared that no male, however staunchly in favor of women’s rights he might be,  should ever attempt to explain feminism to another man unless a woman was present. Despite my strong feelings about women’s rights, safety and choice, that (and a steady flow of other ridiculous assertions) persuaded me to drop out of the feminist (but not the women’s rights) conversation.

And yet I’m not, and never will be, a conservative. What I am is someone who insists on being liberal — compassionate, thoughtful, open-minded, commitedly non-religious — while at the same time paying close attention to the broader array of facts of each issue, facts that can sometimes lead you to disagree with a loud-voiced, knee-jerk mainstream.

There are people on my side of the line who believe you cannot be both liberal and wrong. Yet if you’re misinformed, if you fail to understand the entire situation, you can be not only wrong but malignantly wrong.

In addition, I’ve become aware — and I hope you have too — that quite a lot of the stuff projected at the liberal audience is designed to excite powerful emotions, while at the same time deliberately (or apparently so) failing to inform us of the full facts of each issue. I don’t like being manipulated in this way. I especially don’t like being herded to and fro by my own team.

When the manipulation comes at me from the conservative side, I can see it and defend myself by fact-checking, but when it comes at me from the liberal side, not only am I less apt to fact-check, if I DO fact-check and then disagree, even slightly, the price of that disagreement can often be a fairly nasty attack or dismissal from my own people.

There’s an over-dramatic act of line-drawing that happens in the presence of the OMG Screamers, where if you disagree with them even slightly, you get shoved over into the Conservative category and accused of hating the downtrodden of whatever issue is under discussion. This is an exact mirror of the same situation on the conservative side of the line, where, for instance, if you disagree about people with known mental illness being allowed to open-carry assault weapons, you’re a commie-fag-hater-of-America and probably deserve to die.

But obviously you can disagree with others around you on issues, in greater or lesser degree,  and yet still be arguing from within the same philosophical ballpark. Equally obviously, and in my view necessarily, you can disagree with people on details and yet still see them as allies in the larger struggle.

abortion restrictionsAs a for-instance, this graphic detailing U.S. states that have enacted strong anti-abortion legislation over the past 14 years shows a clear loss of ground for “our” side. We’re winning on gay marriage and marijuana legislation, but losing dramatically on reproductive rights, which has the potential to cause vastly more actual misery for women — but also for men, children and families. Not to mention the real social and economic cost of an unavoidable rise in numbers of unplanned or unwanted births.

Comparing the progressive loss of reproductive rights to catcalling, another subject dear to feminist hearts, one of them strikes me as something that should energize the concern of every reasonable person, the other — which probably received a thousand times more attention through the recent catcalling video — seems a minor issue designed to spur directionless outrage.

I think we liberals have to do a better job of THINKING about our issues, not only picking our battles but considering each issue and event carefully to see if we actually support the apparent mainstream position. More than anything, we owe it to our individual selves to be informed — well-informed — on any issue that we choose to speak out on.

I would much rather see myself up there in the company of Reasoning Beings than down in the region of the OMG Screamers, however effortlessly teamlike that second choice might feel.

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Looking Past the Bright Sun of Crazy

sun[ This is about somewhat the same subject as my recent “bracket” post – the ignoring of the full array of facts on a subject at hand by narrowly focusing one’s attention – but spotlighting a somewhat different aspect of it. ]

I saw some people taking a “group of happy friends” picture a week or two back at one of those highway rest stops. Watching them, I felt an urge to take the camera away from them and reshoot the picture, because I just knew what they were going to get – a silhouette with absolutely no facial details at all. Because though the group stared into the camera and smiled, the camera-wielder stared into the sun and clicked.

If you’re unfamiliar with photography, here’s what happens when you take a picture with the lens pointed toward the sun: The built-in light meter on your camera sees the sun and goes “Ooh, this is extremely bright. I’d better back off on the exposure so the final picture isn’t just a bright wash.” But when it backs the exposure down, EVERYTHING gets less bright – darker – in the final picture. The ultra-bright sun is tolerably exposed, but everything else is shifted into pitch-black shadow, with almost no detail. Your line of friends turns into a faceless silhouette with the bright sun behind it.

The proper way to do it is for the camera-holder to stand with the sun at his back, or at least the side. That way, the final picture appears properly exposed, with no detail-swallowing shadows.

It occurs to me that the situation serves as a useful metaphor for thinking about certain issues of social commentary. Because in quite a lot of current public debate, we see only the blinding wash of extremes. Moderates have become invisible.

GMOs

Example: I’ve been frustrated over and over at the GMO debate, where pro-science people, people I know and ordinarily trust, come down in favor of GMOs in an argument-impervious way.

Most of us know the GMO field of argument contains a certain number of shrieking Crazies, the people who claim GMOs cause cancer, autism … hell, exploding eyeballs, shrinking weenies, who knows what else?

Against that blinding sun, GMO fans, who honestly believe the science should proceed unhindered by crazies and that the world needs a certain amount of efficiently-engineered foods to feed growing world population, can’t see anything but US vs. THEM. There’s the progress-minded US who favor science, and there’s the crazy THEM who want to destroy all things good. If there are any moderate positions, they are overshadowed in the brilliant glare of the crazies.

It’s a somewhat understandable reaction, of course. There are people out there who are not only bugfuck insane – OMG CHEMTRAILS!!! – but who are willing to lie about anything and everything to infect others with their same insanity.

But the thing is, there ARE some moderate arguments about hazardous aspects of GMOs. Hell, just the fact that nothing is entirely safe, that everything offers some sort of downside, is a legitimate argument. But get into any discussion with a GMO fan online, and you will instantly be branded a Tinfoil-Hat Crazy. Why do you hate the starving children? Why do you hate science? What’s wrong with YOU?

If GMOs were peanut butter, the wackadoodles would of course scream that it was deadly. In reaction, the pro-peanut-butter group would say they were crazy, that peanut butter is totally safe, and even necessary. But in the middle, you’d have to recognize that peanut butter is BOTH safe/nutritious and yet – to some people – deadlier than rattlesnake venom.

To the pro-GMO crowd, there is the glorious truth and necessity of GMOs, and there are the science-hating crazies, with no nuances, no colors or gradations in between. They can’t see moderate arguments in the blinding glare of the crazy ones. EVERY critical argument blends into that one black background.

As someone who thinks of himself as a middle-ranger, it’s frustrating enough that I’ve stopped even trying to talk to the GMO fans. In the time I’ve been interested in the subject, I’ve gotten exactly ONE person to actually listen to me, and to be open to the possibility that there may be some hazards in GMOs, and that those hazards should be considered in the development of public policy.

(I’d started a multi-part post some time back about GMOs, but pretty much abandoned it after early feedback. I might attempt a second approach to it at some point in the future.)

The sad thing is that GMO advocates have reacted to the crazies with their own apparent willingness to lie, to obfuscate and argumentatively tapdance — Why, people have been genetically modifying plants and animals for thousands of years! We can’t have labels because they would only misinform people! If you don’t like GMOs, you hate the starving children in Africa! — that is as offensive to me as anything the crazies are doing, and even less defensible because it’s coming from the supposed NOT-crazies.

Other Stuff

‘Staring Into the Sun of Craziness’ applies to more than GMOs.

In the political sphere, for instance, moderate Republicans have vanished in the blinding sun of teabaggers. The teabagger-driven GOP itself can no longer acknowledge moderates.

GOP moderates exist. They even speak up occasionally. But they don’t make the news in the way the pro-Christian, pro-corporate, anti-abortion, rabidly anti-Obama and anti-government crazies do. And they appear to have almost zero power to steer GOP policy away from extremes.

There are anti-vaxxers out there, and they are, in my opinion, the enemies of public health. I know it’s good for all of us that kids get vaccinated against measles, whooping cough, etc.

But at the same time, I don’t kid myself that every individual child is going to sail through vaccination without reaction. I don’t know what negative reactions there have been, but I have to doubt there have been NONE. Heck, EVERY medicine has side effects, and legally-mandated warnings associated with it. Just poking a needle through a child’s skin carries potentially-deadly risks.

Awful as it sounds, I’m willing to accept that there will be risks to a small number of individual children, but that those risks must be borne in the face of the fact that greatly MORE children will be saved by being immunized against these killer diseases.

But if I said “Yes, I have some concerns about the safety of vaccines” – if I acknowledge the real possibility of risk there, I know some people will hear only “He hates vaccines! OMG, he must be an anti-vaxxer!”

Yet in admitting that vaccines can have side effects, I can favor vaccination AS WELL AS an ongoing push to make vaccines ever safer and less hazardous. If vaccines save the lives of 5 million kids at the same time they kill 30, I can both live with that AND want vaccine makers to do everything possible to cut that 30 to some smaller number. Anti-vaxxer arguments are irrelevant to this goal.

The pure pro-vax view, though, reacting to the blinding sun of anti-vaxxers, would probably never say anything like that out loud where anti-vaxxers could hear it. Admit that vaccines can be dangerous and have the crazies latch onto that and use it in their next anti-vax broadside? Oh, no! Vaccines are safe! Totally!

Feminism. What if I told you gender equality should take into account the sociocultural advantages and disadvantages of both women AND men? If you stood in the glare of rape jokes and death threats from the misogynist crazies, you’d have a damned hard time even recognizing that this was a legitimate point. Women are 100 percent the disadvantaged ones, and the only men who don’t agree are the evil ones who want to rape and kill us all. You can’t even hear “not all men want that,” because that statement means they’re  not listening.

But then again, from the men’s side, modern feminists themselves give off a glare of crazy. In addition to men themselves, there are uncounted large numbers of thoughtful, caring, pro-male women who want equality and safety and voice for everybody, but who vanish in the hot sun of feminist crazies.

(I once had an otherwise-sane feminist blogger – a guy – all but accuse me of legitimizing child pornography, because I said the viewing of a starlet’s naked pictures posted online was NOT sexual assault. How the hell can you sexually assault someone you never came within a thousand miles of? It might be crass as hell to view the pictures – which I didn’t – but it’s not in the same class as rape. It’s also – in my mind, at least – in an entirely different category than child pornography.)

There are quite a lot of Christians out there who believe in evolution and who are generous about the rights of gays and women and even atheists, but who get lost in the glare of the Conservative Christian crazies.

As an atheist, my opposition to religion is to its innate effects. Even the moderate Christians are wrong, in my view, and their beliefs carry far-reaching negative side effects on both larger society and individuals. Even so, I already know I can live with them. What I can’t live with are the crazies, who MUST be opposed.

In all of these cases, if you say anything from that position of the Invisible Moderate, either side looking at you will only see you as being part of the other side’s blinding sun of Crazy. They can’t make out that a moderate position might exist, that someone might both disagree with them and NOT be a crazy. That they themselves might be a little bit wrong.

But also in all of these cases, that middle ground – outside the umbra of loud, excitable adamant people – is the place where reasonable people are actually thinking about stuff, coming to their own quiet, solid conclusions.

When you think about it, that middle ground is really the only place where reasonable stuff ever happens. It’s only when you acknowledge that you can be wrong, that you might not be seeing the whole picture, the bigger picture, and THEN look into the dark places for missing facts and nuances, undertaking the further research and thought required to complete the picture, that you begin to be a reasoning being.

In the same way I’m greatly in favor of vaccination, you can still hold and voice strong opinions on any subject at hand. The advantage is that you’re better informed toward the position you finally take, and less influenced by the extremes.

It’s not your fault that, taking a moderate position, certain people will see you as one with the crazies.

But if you’re one of those people who sees only bright sun and darkness, perfect reason and absolute craziness in some important issue before you, before all of us, that IS your fault.

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Race and Culture Again: Bessie and Lois

Jim CrowHere’s a chunk of memory that bubbled up when Facebook friend Dre Morell posted on The Old Jim Crow Etiquette.

In 1950s Texas, when and where I was born, pretty much all of the Jim Crow stuff was in effect. Of course what you’ll read in the linked article was in addition to the separate white and colored drinking fountains, separate white and colored restrooms, the No Negroes policies at “white” swimming pools and schools. I remember several conversations among adults where a black teenager was shot and killed for crossing the corner of a white person’s lawn. This action was widely admired and the story passed back and forth for weeks. One visitor remarked that in Alabama, to shoot someone legally they had to actually be in your house, or at least fall inside the doorsill. The conclusion was that if you shot someone in Alabama, you’d better drag him into the house to make it legitimate.

This section here reminded me of a local black woman, Bessie, who took in ironing:

Never assert or even intimate that a White person is lying.
Never impute dishonorable intentions to a White person.
Never suggest that a White person is from an inferior class.
Never lay claim to, or overly demonstrate, superior knowledge or intelligence.
Never curse a White person.
Never laugh derisively at a White person.
Never comment upon the appearance of a White female.

None of that stuff applies directly to Bessie, but when she came to the house, she would not step up onto our porch, or knock on the door, but would stand on the front walkway and call out — not too loud — “Miz Fox! I’m heah with th’ ironin’!” My mother would step out onto the porch to pay her — 10 cents per shirt — and hand over a bag with a new bunch of laundered, wrinkled shirts.

Standing at the foot of the stairs was considered respectful, and I heard Bessie referred to many times as “a good nigger.” Carrying a load of shirts, she walked at least six blocks to our house, which was just over the dividing street in the “white” part of town. On the other side of that street was a section referred to as “them Messcans,”  with the more distant area where Bessie lived casually called “Niggertown.”

It’s interesting looking back on that part of my life, I can’t remember a single actively racist act on the part of either of my parents. I played with “them Messcans” — in their yards and ours — with full approval of my parents, and nobody in my family went out of their way to hurt any black or brown person. One of my father’s favorite places to eat was a deep-pit barbecue shack — the stone pit in the middle featuring meats grilling over glowing coals and surrounded by tables and folding chairs, with a broad roof over it but no walls —  where black and white people mingled somewhat casually.

Yet we lived in that time and that place, and we accepted the race rules — rules of language and behavior — without thought or complaint.

Bessie was, as near as I can make out from the few memories I have of her, serious, hard-working, honest and prompt. In her small way, she was a good businesswoman. The few times we drove over to drop off shirts, I remember her kids being clean and well-dressed, and her house and yard immaculate. In values and lifestyle, she was more like my own family than we could have ever thought about admitting.

On the other hand …

My mother had a friend named Lois that lived a few miles away, and we often went to visit her. Lois and her husband Smitty lived in a house that had a TV repair shop on the front of it, and there was a tomboyish daughter about my age (Dorothy? Dotty?) to play with. Their house was right next to railroad tracks, and trains came through often enough that I never went there without taking a nail or a penny to put on the tracks for flattening.

Their back yard was a clutter of rusted autos and hulking piles of random junk that must have been dangerous as hell, but that we ran and played in without a care.

As to the house … I hated going inside Lois’s house because it STANK. The back door opened into the kitchen, and the first thing to catch your eye if you went through that door was a sink full of filthy dishes that might have been, for all I know, weeks old. A reeking garbage can stood nearby, and sink and garbage both were attended by flies and roaches — in plain sight, in the daylight, and completely outside the notice or care of Lois, Smitty or Dotty. The floor was sometimes so nasty your feet would stick to it, or grind on it with a sandy crunch.  The few times I was offered food or drink at Lois’s, I quickly said “No, thank you.” (I have a weirdly vivid remembrance of being handed a glass of water there, but then not drinking it because of greasy fingerprints on the supposedly “clean” glass; after that, I drank out of the hose.)

Lois was huge and shapeless and sometimes came to the door with casual smudges of dirt on her face or arms. She wore tentlike dresses with bra straps showing, and was never without a hand-rolled cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. She had a face like a bulldog and a braying voice that would have pricked up donkeys’ ears.

I remember Smitty slouched in a rump-sprung couch somewhere deeper in the house, just inside the doorway that led into the TV repair shop. Both Smitty and couch were shiny with dirt, and the smell of the place was a wall-like solid to my sensitive nose.

I hear all the time “You shouldn’t judge people” but I would disagree emphatically in this case.  Living in filth and comfortable with it, Smitty and Lois were the worst sort of White Trash. Even at the age of 5 or so, I thought they were repulsive. I liked playing with Dotty on the railroad tracks, but her family, and their house … yuck.

The point of all this is that the Skin Color Line that determined who associated with who placed gross-as-hell Lois, who was white, on the near side of the line and hard-working, self-respecting Bessie, who was black, on the far side.

Hell.

I understand the historical dependence on race — after all, skin color is an easy feature to see and react to — but damn, I would really like for us to get the heck over it, to understand that, if anything, we’re separate by culture, by values and aspirations, and not by color.

At the same time — right this second, I’m thinking mainly of the attack on the Charlie Hebdo office in France by Islamists, but the point is a broad one — I would like for us to HOLD each other to those values and aspirations, whatever we choose as the signature values and aspirations of decent people, and understand that it’s possible to not measure up. Coexistence makes us neighbors, yes, but only shared values and aspirations — things that take some effort — can make us fellows.

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Beta Culture: Seeing The Brackets

Bracket copyLook at the illo attached to this post.

You’ll notice two main things. One is the pair of brackets with “My Thing” inside them. The other is a large space filled with other stuff, such as “data, info, facts, details, research, opinions, views, past experience, science.”

Imagine that the large space on the graphic, both inside and outside the brackets, is the universe of all possible information on some subject. Imagine further that the small space inside the brackets is that specific small body of detail I want to get you to focus on.

The material inside the brackets might be the wonderful attributes of this new underarm deodorant I’ve invented. It might be all the positive arguments in favor of legalized prostitution. It might be the glowing qualities of a political candidate, or the wonderful trueness and absolute necessity of Feminism. It might be the delightful entertaining qualities of a new TV show, or the zap-smash-zowie excitement of an upcoming movie. It might even be … me.

Whatever it is, it is right there inside the brackets, and it is there and only THERE I want you to focus. All that other stuff I want you to NOT notice.

If you noticed it, I might say “Oh, that stuff will only confuse you.  It’s bullshit, it’s lies. Besides, why do you need that? I’m telling you the stuff you really need to know. You know, the true stuff, the good stuff, the stuff that will change your life for the better. The stuff that OUR people believe, unlike the nasty stuff those ugly shits on the other side believe.” I might say “If you notice that other stuff, you hate women, you’re a commie and a traitor and you’re going to hell.”

But if I do my thing right, you WON’T notice the other stuff. Or if you do, you will automatically reject it all on your own.

Religion is a good example of this sort of thing. There’s this stuff inside the brackets — the Bible, the miracles, the soaring beauty of the chapel, the fuzzy details of glorious afterlife, the fellowship of the church, all the intense loving, tribal experience of your religion.

And outside the brackets is … everything else. Reality. Reason. Scientific facts. The undeniable conflicts of the various parts of the Bible, the historical inaccuracy, even the doubtfulness of the existence of Jesus himself. All the things atheists say. The fact that thousands of other religions exist, and that their followers all think they have the one right one.

If you notice the stuff outside, if you think about it … you maybe end up losing your religion. Giving it up. Seeing its limits and its mistakes and even its lies.

But if you stay safely inside the brackets, focused on believing what’s in there and ignoring all the other stuff, however much of it there is, you can continue to snuggle comfortably within the limits of your religion. Given that most of us are raised inside the brackets of religion, taught that only the stuff inside the brackets is true, and safe, and good, it’s not hard to see how so many of us stay in there.

The thing for an atheist such as myself, though, is that religion is the too-obvious Bad Guy. What other sorts of brackets present themselves to us in daily life?

More than you can ever imagine.  Products. People. Philosophies. Entertainment. Political parties. Even social justice movements.

Everything, EVERYTHING that someone wants you to believe, or agree with, or vote for, or buy, or devote your life and energies to, is presented to you via such brackets. Everything, EVERYTHING, presented to you for your approval or purchase is accompanied by a larger body of facts, details and data that really and truly exist, but that the seller (which may be someone you trust and love) hopes you won’t notice.

The entire job of a prosecutor is to present bracketed facts to the jury showing the defendant is guilty. The entire job of a defense attorney is to carefully prepare a bracket that spotlights the defendant’s innocence, or throws doubt on the prosecutor’s bracket-argument of guilt. The entire job of an advertiser is to present a bracket convincing you of the wonders of Helmann’s mayonnaise, or Vlasic pickles. The entire job of a political candidate is to convince you he loves babies, freedom, Jesus, and fiscal responsibility … and that the other guy molests underaged male goats.

Suppose you become a faithful bracketeer, and you buy and agree with the stuff inside your favorite pair of brackets. You’re an ardent feminist, a devoted Chevy customer, a complete and total political Liberal. You’re a passionately driven hater of war, and Justin Bieber, and Ayn Rand. You’re a vegan, a lover of pit bulls, a defender of GMOs, a staunch union man, a great fan of tattoos and piercing.

Knowing the brackets exist, and that there’s a huge amount of stuff outside them that you’re comfortably not noticing, how do you feel about yourself? Probably in this moment, while you’re still reading this, you feel pretty good. Because hey, all that outside stuff is lies, right? Only tinfoil-hat crazies believe that shit. Besides, it’s irrelevant, because you’ve got the real stuff, the good stuff, the only stuff worth noticing and knowing.

But how about if you were once a great fan of Bill Cosby, or OJ Simpson? How about if you loved your stepfather for a thousand different reasons, but later found out he was steadily molesting your little sister for all the years she lived at home? Or you supported the Iraq War without reservation, but then lost your son because his Army-supplied body armor was substandard, and worse, that the Secretary of Defense knew it in advance? Or maybe you just loved the McRib, but then found out what was actually in it? How about if you learn that some of your most closely-held bracket loyalties were drastically, horribly wrong? Then what?

Of course you’ll be inclined to rethink previous loyalties and beliefs. But you still probably won’t notice the underlying phenomenon of brackets. Which — at least so I think — you MUST do.

But it won’t be easy. If you venture outside the brackets, if you even SEE the brackets, the bracketeers around you — MOST of the people you know — are not going to like you as much as they once did. You will make them uncomfortable. You will be suspect. You will be alien, and no longer quite safe to talk to.

But you’ll be yourself. ONLY yourself, and not just a subself of one sect or another of bracketeers.

If you care about that sort of thing, I mean. It certainly does feel GOOD to be a bracketeer among fellow bracketeers. You don’t have to do all that uncomfortable reading and noticing and thinking, and you never have to reach your own conclusions about stuff. You never have to work and strain to see what’s outside the brackets. You can feel safe and loved and accepted, and in comfortable full agreement with your leaders and spokesmen and fellow bracketeers — who you already know are truly good people.

All you have to do is never question, never think, never speak up, never — even in the privacy of your own mind — disagree. Buy the lottery tickets, get the tattoos, smoke the Marlboros, eat your kale, vote only for Democrats. And shut up.

Somewhere out there, I hope there are people energetic enough, thoughtful enough, contrary enough, but also kind enough, to think their own thoughts, reach their own conclusions, and share them freely with others. People who see the brackets, who venture outside them, and who accept the social consequences in a desire to be a better person in a better world.

I hope to know them.

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A Short, Short Post on the Idea of Souls

soulsI kinda wonder how broadly the idea of ensoulment affects what we consider is acceptable to think and do. For instance, it occurs to me that war and the death penalty are easier to contemplate in a social matrix of soul-belief. Sure you’re killing people’s BODIES, but you’re not affecting their real selves.

Likewise I wonder if our rather casual approach to drug use is somehow a result of that same idea. If you think your brain is YOU, that any change or damage to it is a direct assault on your most intimate Self, it seems to me you’d be especially careful about consuming things that impact it. But if you think the REAL you is this disembodied soul-thingie, and that anything you do to “my body” or “my brain” is just another experience, you might be a lot more accepting of the idea of consuming or doing something that might dramatically alter those … mere material possessions.

Every day in my work with addicts (I’m not a counselor, just a driver), I hear clients talking about taking heroin or other drugs purchased from street dealers, and I have a hard time imagining opening up the top of my head and allowing some unwashed street hustler to diddle with the contents inside. But that’s exactly what they’re doing. Years back, I read about some kids who accepted designer-drug capsules at a party, and wound up with instant, permanent Parkinson’s disease.

Gah. Mega-creepy. Why would you even CONSIDER such a thing? Well, you might consider it if you and everyone around you had been lied to for a thousand generations, and your entire culture and society was based on the idea that we’re not really real, and that the real Self is this hovering gaseous thingie that somehow exists outside our mere bodies, safely distant from any effect of physics or chemistry.

I’ve thought a lot about ensoulment over the past several years, and it seems to me that this one idea is more pervasive, and more deeply affecting to us — from the individual level to the level of our entire civilization — than we’re able to realize.

One of the many things that worries me about present-day atheism is that those of us who free ourselves from our home religions tend to think we’re THERE, that gaining our little bit of personal perspective is the whole job. Hey, we’re free! Victory!

But the real job is this vastly more complex thing — remaking civilization itself. Reimagining and reforming a world full of lifeways that grew (and continue to grow) from the soil of  millennia-old religious conceptualization. The idea of souls may be the most basic and pervasive of the religious poisons. We have breathed it in as a species — incorporating it into our thought, our language, our customs, our daily lives, the gross structure of our societies and every little thing within them — so that we have little or no idea of how to live without it.

Our individual atheism is the first tiny step. It seems to me that a thousand-year journey stretches out before us.

I don’t know whether I feel good about being one of the pioneers, back here in the Dark Ages, or deep despair that I’ll never get to live in the sane world that might someday be.

But the idea that there’s this larger work before us, the necessary something-greater that has to follow individual atheism, is what drives me to think about Beta Culture as a next step along the path.

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Beta Culture: ‘Yeah, We’re Fucked.’ Now What?

Big Boy 1I’ll tell you about one of my sort-of-hidden motivations behind my thoughts about the necessity of Beta Culture.

I’ve told this anecdote at least once here, but I’ll repeat it: I was in New York City a few years back, specifically to meet PZ Myers at a Seed Magazine event, and I got to meet a climatologist at the same time. Drink in hand, and jokingly, one of the first things I said was “Tell me the truth. Are we fucked?” Dead seriously, he replied “Yeah. We’re fucked.”

Some years before that, I had this revelation about how to think about the future. The thing was, I could SEE certain things that were going to happen, but I lived my life on automatic, as if only NOW was the important bit. The revelation was that I should live as if that future, the stuff coming down the pipeline as sure as graduation looms for a hard-partying high school senior, was a real thing.

No, I’m not saying any of us, including me, can predict the future.  But we can look at the trends around us, and follow them out to some fairly-certain end point. The problem we have is that when that fairly-certain end point looks bad, we flip over into an instant optimism that roadblocks us from following through to preparative action. For instance:

1. No, the oil can never run out!
2. Okay, maybe it will run out, but it will take a long, long time.
3. Sure, the oil’s gonna run out, but hey, somebody will invent something!

The end of petroleum as a viable widespread energy source? Yep, gonna happen. Already happening. But SOLAR, right? Sure, except for all the things petroleum is used for that has nothing to do with energy. Plastics, for instance. Asphalt for roads – a shitload of roads, roads that have to be repaired and repaved constantly.

But we’ll find workarounds, rights? Yes, probably, but they’ll cost more, in energy, in funding, in the direct drain on your own personal wallet. Everything about life will be a little bit – or a lot – harder.

The cool thing about oil is that it has been so cheap.  The other cool thing — which flips over into being a huge disadvantage if there’s no oil to feed into it — is that we have a massive civilization-wide infrastructure built with petroleum (and coal, the other fossil fuel) in mind.

The point is, have any of us ever considered the one more option?

4. The oil is running out. It really will run out. There’s nothing that can take its place, so things are going to get really, really bad.

That instantly offends something in you, doesn’t it? Why would anybody say such a negative thing? And why bother to think about it? Because Intelligence! Because Inventiveness! Because the Soaring Unbeatable Human Spirit! Because the Good Old American Can-Do Attitude! Right?

Switching back from talking about oil and onto the more general subject of civilization-wide problems: What do we do if the solutions don’t work, or actually make things worse? What do we do if we wait until the last minute to try to solve the problem, so that panic is the most widespread reactions?

Here’s David Suzuki talking about that INEVITABLE last minute:

We optimism-addicts refuse to really grapple with Suzuki’s idea. Instead, we gaze out at the world and think only about all the technological wonders in store.

But how about this? NASA Study Concludes When Civilization Will End, And It’s Not Looking Good for Us.

According to a new study sponsored by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, we only have a few decades left before everything we know and hold dear collapses.

Or this?  Superbugs Could Kill 10 Million Each Year By 2050.

Back in 2000, I had this idea for a book, The Next 30 Years, and half of it was going to be about coming technological and social goodies, the positive progress that might be made. The other half was going to be about certain challenges to be faced, the not-so-good stuff that, extrapolating from ongoing trends, was very likely going to happen. Some part of it would be about, well … not the End Of The World, but a definite crash that would pretty much wreck civilization.

I didn’t write it. One reason was time and energy, but another was that I couldn’t bear to think about certain bits I’d be writing about. Book or no book, though, nothing I was thinking about back then has changed except we’re coming up on halfway through that 30 year period.

So. What’s my solution?

I don’t have one. Or rather, I think there isn’t one. I think we’re fucked, seriously. Civilization is due to suffer catastrophic failure, in 15 years or less, by my guesstimate. I actually think I’ve seen signs of it since the 1970s, which means it’s already in progress, and the “catastrophe” is only the phase at which it will become undeniable to everybody. Given the already-obvious limits to resources, which will sharply worsen when the panic hits, most of us — most of the people you know — won’t survive.

But I do have this idea that there’s a certain number of sane, rational people who might be convinced to work together to get through it and create a saner civilization on the other side of it.

It’s a completely bombastic idea, I admit. But … why not? And who else is doing anything that will include US?

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The Book of Good Living: Just Say No

BGL copyLooking back over my life, one of the skills that would have saved me a lot of anguish, annoyance and wasted time is the skill of saying No.

If I’d been taught to say No, just no — without anger, without guilt, without any sort of emotional spin — oh boy my life would have been different. I would have spent a great deal less time getting roped into doing things I didn’t really want to do. My life would have been more MINE — which I strongly suspect would have better allowed me to say Yes in the ways I wanted to say Yes.

Some people seem to have no trouble with it, but a lot of us DO.

The thing is, this is one of the things your parents won’t usually teach you, because you’d certainly use it against them. NO! It’s something you won’t learn in school, because you’d use it against them. NO! And it’s something you don’t really learn out in society, because everybody out there wants you to say YES, to whatever it is they want out of you. Buy this, do this, donate to this, join this, believe this, say this, do what *I* want you to do.

It’s one of the orphan lessons of life, the lessons that have very few real advocates or teachers. You only learn it via the constant inconvenience — or actual pain — you get from the repercussions of saying yes, or from not saying no quickly or definitely enough.

Here’s the thing:  Those other people don’t owe you a Yes, right? Which means you don’t owe THEM a Yes. You were born to be you, with your own interests and desires, and you can only be your best you by BEING you, doing the things you want to do, care to do. No is BUILT INTO the fact of you being an individual.

No can be friendly but definite. No can be gentle and quiet, but it can also be loud and forceful. No doesn’t have to be explained or justified or defended. It can just be No.

But it probably does have to be definite. Not: Well, maybe. Um, okay. We’ll see. Oh, well, sure, I guess. And definitely not “If I say no, they won’t like me anymore.” If they won’t like you for saying no, they ALREADY don’t like you — they like what you can do for them.

If they won’t take no for an answer, and if you LET them, they own you. Maybe a little bit. Maybe a lot. And you simply cannot allow that if you want to continue to be your own self.

It took me until I was almost 60 to really get good at it, and in just these past few years it’s saved me an enormous amount of time and discomfort. Which makes me think it’s never too late to practice and perfect this Very Important life skill:

No. No, sorry. Aw, hell no. No, I can’t do that. Not at this time. No, thanks. Nope. Nuh-uh. Are you crazy? Of course not! FUCK no! No way. Don’t think so. Don’t want one, don’t need one. No, I plan to laze around and do nothing all day. Maybe next time, buh-bye. None for me, thanks. No, that’s not my thing. Not interested; take my name off your list. I feel for you, but no. No, it ain’t gonna be me. I can’t do it; I wish you the best of luck, though. How about … never? No, I’m otherwise engaged. No, I’m not ready. I think I’ll have to say No at this time. No, I’ve got other stuff on my mind. No, I don’t want to do that. No I don’t want to try that. All booked up for now, dude. No, it’s not a good time for me. No, I’m not going. No, I’m not gonna be a part of that. No, I can’t agree. Ha! Good idea, but No.

No. Just no.

No.

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Beta Culture: A Third Approach to Gender Equality

Unequal copyI’ve been thinking about feminism for a couple of years, and I’ve actually felt a certain amount of dread when I attempted to relate it to my conceptual work on Beta Culture. It’s completely obvious that Beta can’t work without a healthy respect for the needs of women, something better than what our western society has now, but I couldn’t see how ‘feminism’ – not the thing I want feminism to be, but the thing that it presently is – could be integrated into it without overwhelming the welcoming, inclusive vibe I wanted it to have.

I may have figured something out:

Many times over the years, I’ve wondered why we humans find dichotomies so easy. Everything is

ONE THING, or ANOTHER
THIS thing, or the OTHER
FRIEND or ENEMY
LOVE or HATE.

My best guess is that it’s biological. We have two-lobed brains and bilateral symmetry, with a left side and a right. Presented with two-value choices down to our very bones, it actually takes a bit of work NOT to see things as just that simple.

And yet, very few things are as simple as Yes or No, Column A or Column B. In fact, any time you do see something as a simple dichotomy – Republican or Democrat – it’s a good bet you’re doing a disservice not only to the subject but to your own rational mind. Heck, even Alive or Dead isn’t as simple as it once was. There’s an infinity of real stuff between every one-or-the-other choice, and this is never more true than when you’re dealing with human social matters.

Black OR white: As I wrote in a recent post, if you view people through the filter of “race,” you will see “black people” and “white people,” despite the fact that none of us are actually black or white. Just the “black” people alone come in shades more varied than the rainbow. Besides which, there are many more “races” than just the two.

Liberal OR conservative: I consider myself a fairly liberal person. Yet if there was a list of 20 items that make up a staunch liberal in today’s sociopolitical atmosphere, beliefs and attitudes and goals, I might fit only 80 or 90 percent of them. There are things I disagree with fellow liberals about. Given that same list for identifying conservatives, I would fit only a small percentage of them … but I think there would be some.

The fact is, if you’re the type of person who actually thinks about things, you will – in fact, you MUST – often come up at least slightly at odds even with the people you most identify with. I loved my Cowboy Dad out of all reason, but more than once we got into discussions I cut short with “We better not talk about this.” Neither he nor I wanted to like each other less, and we could both see an argument coming that neither would back away from. It was better simply to avoid the dicey subject.

Just so, I have largely avoided the subject of feminism, here and elsewhere. Talk about a black and white issue! The way it works at the current state of the subject, you’re either 1) a feminist, or 2) you hate women. No third choice.

If you’re a feminist reading this, I know you’ll instantly want to argue that, but it’s about the truest thing about feminism I know. Every disagreement you might have with feminism in a public space will very soon spark the question – more likely the accusation – of why you hate women.

(There’s a much rarer response, only slightly more generous, that goes something like “Well, I don’t think you’re a bad person. You probably fail to understand this because you can’t see past your male privilege” – which is sort of the kindly feminist version of that Christian chestnut, “Jesus loves you anyway; I’ll pray for you.”)

Miss O. Jenny

Read the following word carefully, because you will find it in every discussion of feminism: Misogyny.

The word does not mean temporary irritation, willingness to argue, or disagreement about facts or strategy. It means “contempt,” “ingrained prejudice against” – in simplest terms, unconsidered, automatic hate.

Misogyny is to feminism as bacon and eggs is to mornings, or aspirin is to headaches. Misogyny is the opposable thumb of feminism’s grip, the stars and planets of the feminist galaxy.  If feminism was a paint store, misogyny would be Eggshell White.  If feminism was a camping trip, misogyny would be a Swiss Army Knife.

You hate women. He hates women. They hate women. Why do you hate women? She’s a self-loathing hater of women. Stop hating women. I just don’t know why you have to be such a hater of women. Misogyny! Misogynist! Misogyny! Misogynist!

And yet, in the sociocultural universe I live and move in, the true misogynist – I’m sure there are some out there, just as I’m sure there are 300-pound pumpkins – seems to be fairly rare.

I don’t actually know anybody who hates women. I know a shitload of people who have been accused of it, online at least. I know a certain number of people who disagree with feminists about certain facts or nuances. But in my social universe, I don’t know one person that actually HATES women. Even among people who sometimes strongly disagree with feminists, I don’t see them.

The conservative sociocultural universe certainly seems to contain them. All the effort spent on limiting women’s reproductive rights has to spring from the purest desire to control and limit women. I can’t see that as anything less than an arrogant disdain that sees women as things – property, or domestic slaves. That certainly qualifies as contempt, the 180-proof version of it. Hate.

But over here where I live and think, nobody wants to be like that.

And yet about 90 percent of the heat and light of feminism, the accusations of hatred of women, seems to occur well away from the conservative universe. In fact, my direct experience is that the accusation is USUALLY leveled at fellow reasoners, liberals and freethinkers.

If you disagree with anything a feminist says – say that Shirtstorm is a worthwhile discussion – you hate women. It’s one or the other. No third choice. No spectrum of nuance. No other views allowed.

1) You agree. OR …

2) You hate women.

Period.

The drawing of that line is quick and final. You could strike up a conversation with a feminist about the proper treatment of dogs in the winter, or your feelings about organized religion, or your thoughts regarding events in Ferguson, Missouri, and find yourself warm kindred spirits, both well on the same side of the liberal-conservative divide. But disagree about ONE feminist issue, however minor – “I’m not sure this NASA guy’s shirt is worth getting all hot and bothered about. It just seems silly.” – and in short order you’re branded a raging woman-hater, shoved over the line into the company of career rapists.

And that’s the thing I can’t accept about feminism. Aside from the validity of any of the internal arguments, this one first fact spoils it for me, ensures that I can’t be a part of it.

So I’m not a feminist. Not going to BE a feminist. But I’m also not a hater of women.

Imagine that there’s a third choice, though, a conceptual space in which you can  1) be a non-feminist, and yet 2) care about women.

Is such a thing even possible? If you’re reading here, I have to believe you are rational enough, intelligent enough, to know a third option is possible, even likely. You know the world is not black and white, divisible into two perfectly separate camps or concepts. So what is that third choice? Here’s my answer:

Equality and Ethicism

I actually believe the fate of civilization rests in some large part on educating and providing reproductive choice – billions of dollars in condoms, contraceptives and sex education – to women worldwide. Further, I believe there is an easily explainable reason why a woman hitting a man is categorically different from that same act in reverse.

Even if I cared nothing about women, the equality and opportunity of more than half of humanity strikes me – at this incredibly dangerous moment for civilization – as important to the survival of all of us. I’m an avid supporter of women’s rights, safety and reproductive choice.

But in my mind, there are three SEPARATE movements now occupying the social justice landscape that relates to women.

First and loudest, there is feminism. Which is quite a bit about women’s rights, but is undeniably based on a foundation of with-us-or-against-us, and contains a very big, very angry scoop of “every problem is the fault of men.” It can get spitting-nasty in an instant if you question or mistake any part of it. Wear the wrong shirt, even, and you’re international toast.

Second, there is the women’s rights movement, which focuses on the rights and needs of women, but which seems to contain dramatically less of the “you dare not make a mistake” element. It’s a sort of women-and-men together, everybody-can-pitch-in, Big Picture movement aimed at bettering the lot of women. I support it for what I consider obvious reasons.

(Whatever it was in the past, today’s feminism is NOT the women’s rights movement. It is feminism first, last and always, often rising to a level of pure rage that has nothing welcoming in it to anyone, man or woman, who attempts to disagree, question or doubt. You can get on feminism’s Shit List by using one wrong word.)

Third is something else, an alternative to feminism I refer to as “gender ethicism.”

Gender Ethicism aims at equality, but it aims at equality predicated on the needs – both common and unique – of both women and men. It’s based on the idea that well-meaning men and women must work together amicably on common issues if any useful and rational – and lasting – end result is to be reached. It is everything about goals, nothing at all about blame.

How does Gender Ethicism work?

As I would like to avoid hot-button issues for the moment, I’ll focus down on a minor, possibly even comical illustration of the idea: Public restrooms.

Gender Ethicism would make public-space restrooms fair for women.

If you’ve ever gone to a theatre or stadium and had to go to the restroom, here’s what you may have seen: There will be a men’s room, with men cycling in and out fairly rapidly, but nearby there will be a women’s restroom with a long line.

Why? Because the architects who designed the thing thought that giving each gender a 400-square-foot restroom was “equal.” But given our anatomical differences, which MUST be taken into account, those restrooms are actually a cheat for women. Inside the men’s and women’s room both, you will find five stalls and several sinks for handwashing. Equal, right? But in the men’s room, you will also find five compact urinals tucked up against the wall in front of the stalls. So if you’re talking about the number of people who can cycle through the restroom in any given period, the men’s room has twice the through-put of the women’s. Which means, out in the real world, that women’s restrooms should be about twice the square-footage of men’s, and contain twice the number of stalls.

This is an example of something I call “gender asymmetry,” and it seems to me that any approach to equality between the sexes must be based on it.

The thing I mentioned earlier, the easily explainable reason why a woman hitting a man is categorically different from that same act in reverse, is another good example of gender asymmetry.

A teenager might look at the question of equality vis-à-vis one person striking another and conclude that a woman giving a man a good slap would be no different than the same situation in reverse. Hey, if a girl hits a guy and he hits her back, it’s same-same, right? But due to our evolutionarily supplied sexual dimorphism – gender asymmetry – the average man’s MUCH greater strength means he could seriously injure (or even kill) her with a slap, whereas she, exerting herself with the same amount of anger and avidity, might only leave him with a stinging cheek.

(And no, I don’t think either sex should be hitting the other. But I recognize that it will continue to happen. A social rule “It’s never okay to hit your partner, but it’s REALLY wrong for a guy to hit a girl” is a real-world-fair rule.)

The idea of gender asymmetry is that you simply cannot make rules pertaining to equality without taking into account the actual facts of men’s and women’s biological strengths and weaknesses.

I actually don’t know why women 6 or more months pregnant shouldn’t be issued a handicapped placard so they can park close to stores and entrances. No, they’re not crippled. But they’re not in marathon-running physical condition either, are they? I would not favor the same placards for any class of men not actually handicapped according to current law, but pregnant women, in my view, deserve a little extra social consideration. If you’re carrying around an extra 35 pounds and need to get to the bathroom NOW, I want you to be able to park close. In this case, the asymmetry works in favor of women.

I am way in favor of battered women’s shelters, in every city in the country, which obviously would not admit men. On the male side, though, there are huge numbers of homeless ex-military – men, who go into the military and into combat in numbers greater than women – suffering from PTSD. I would like to see a proportionate number of shelters – in every city in the country – that focus exclusively on the psychological and emotional needs of these MEN.

Though men and women both get breast cancer, only men get prostate cancer. A gender-ethical approach would devote attention and money to breast cancer, but it would also parity-invest in research and treatment of this deadly male-only disease.

The idea of Gender Ethicism is this: In those real ways in which we are NOT biologically equal, you take those facts into account in designing fair gender-specific solutions, accepting that there will be situations where one sex could or should get certain playing-field-leveling social considerations the other sex would not.

And also that we can actually talk about this stuff, working out the details in order to be fair and generous to both halves of the human condition, without shouting and blaming.

__________________________________

 

A little final note here: In everything I write about Beta Culture, my goal is to examine each idea, to explore it by teaming up, hopefully, with a group of playful optimists and conceptual gamesters, as I/we work out some of the details of the thing.

I’m aware that feminism is a furiously hot, hair-trigger issue right now, so I will allow only reasonable, good-willed replies to this post, or to comments. I want people to be able to talk, to explore the idea, to agree or disagree, without having to tiptoe around each other. Male or female, if you want to post one of those hit-and-run zingers, I’ll delete it and sleep well that night. And yes, fuck me, but you have an entire Internet out there to do your thing. In this place right here and now, I get to decide what’s acceptable and what’s not. Pitch in or go elsewhere.

But hey, nothin’ but love for yah! 😀

(PS: I’ve also been told that Thomas Jefferson never said that thing. But it must be true — I found it on the Internets.)