Motus Mentis

The term of the moment is “incel”, which is short for “involuntarily celibate”. It rose to virality after a young man associating himself with the “incel” movement ran down a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto last month. The young-adult liberal website Vox explains the term here.

There is now a bit of a reaction underway on the Left to the existence of this wholly unwelcome phenomenon. Ellen Pao, the former CEO of Reddit, offered a tweet recently saying:

“CEOs of big tech companies: You almost certainly have incels as employees. What are you going to do about it?”

One wonders what she might have in mind.

The reactionary’s impression of all this is clear enough: by destroying the social norms and pressures that once tended to make sex available only in the context of marriage, and by replacing monogamy with consequence-free sexual libertinism, we have created an unstructured sexual marketplace in which a great many males — who might otherwise have found partners, as higher-status males were removed by the pool through marriage to high-status females — are now completely excluded from all sexual opportunities. This unintended consequence of the sexual “revolution” is only now attracting notice — understandably, perhaps, as there have been so many others. (The very same problem also affects polygamous societies, which goes a long way toward explaining the way in which recently arrived hordes of young and unrestrained Muslim men have enriched formerly tranquil places like Sweden.)

In 1934 the anthropologist J.D. Unwin published a meticulously researched book called Sex and Culture, in which he documented the robust correlation between sexual mores and the fate of civilizations.

Wikipedia sums up Unwin’s conclusions as follows (another brief synopsis is here):

In Sex and Culture (1934), Unwin studied 80 primitive tribes and 6 known civilizations through 5,000 years of history and found a positive correlation between the cultural achievement of a people and the sexual restraint they observe. Aldous Huxley described Sex and Culture as “a work of the highest importance”.

According to Unwin, after a nation becomes prosperous it becomes increasingly liberal with regard to sexual morality and as a result loses its cohesion, its impetus and its purpose. The effect, says the author, is irrevocable. Unwin also infers that legal equality, and only legal equality, between women and men is necessary to institute before absolute monogamy is instituted, otherwise the monogamy will erode in the name of emancipating women, as he shows has occurred numerous times and places throughout all of written history.

Successful civilizations do not simply fall from trees. They are complex and intricate living things, depending for their existence upon conditions and interrelationships that are beyond the comprehension of any person. The traditions and moral systems that such societies preserve may also preserve them, and to assume that such things are mere artifacts, or atavistic caprices, to be discarded without care is a species of arrogance, and of solipsistic foolishness, that can have mortiferous and irreversible effects.

It is also something we seem to pride ourselves upon these days. I suppose that’s because we’re so good at it.