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.
10 Comments
It’s not just sex. With major decline in the number and reliability of formal social rules in general, the winners are people who are best at finely judging what they can get away with – at identifying and taking advantage of the *real* unwritten, unspoken rules. There are always rules.
Those who are worst at this complicated exercise of social skills no longer have learnable formal rules to fall back on (the advice they *are* given is sadistically unhelpful), are excluded from all of human society except for 4chan, Counterstrike, and – for the time being – tech jobs. But the Ellen Paos of the world are out to put a stop to that.
Incels don’t feel one tenth as sexually entitled as fat women are, but that’s another subject.
WH,
Quite right. That’s an important point. It’s now the law of the jungle as far as such people are concerned.
I’ve shared the same exact sentiments. Basically, we’ve evolved so much as a species that we see our past as beneath us, however, it’s the greatest tool we have to determine a greater future for ourselves. These leftists are trying to bring about a vision of which there is no true goal, it’s just to make everyone feel good and happy, at the expense of civilization. The perfect analogy is the child/teen rebelling against the wise words of his predecessors. As a result, the rebel pays for his foolish decisions, and the ancestors look in shame.
Assuming that this gradual descending into degeneracy destroys civilization as we know it, it would be a relief to know in the future that some civilization somewhere would see between the lines, recognize where others in the past have gone wrong, and make sure those mistakes never take place. But there’s always the possibility of the rebellious child….
I’m gonna cast a somewhat dissenting vote on the proposition that we are only now diverging from our past by allowing sexual freedom. Rather, I think, monogamy is a divergence from our natural state. The integrity of our genetic stock depends upon the best among us having disproportionate reproductive success. My eyes were really opened up to this by reading ‘Progress Debunked’ by Samuel W Thomsen. What’s really going on is that women’s preferences are filtering out the degenerating genes of each generation. If everyone reproduces equally the quality of the genetic stock will decrease with each successive generation. Most children are inferior to the average of their mother and father. This is due to mutations. But a minority are as good or superior. So it is the job of women to filter out those who are inferior and to propel those superior genes into the next generation. The natural state is that only a minority successfully reproduce but they have more than their share of offspring so they replace the previous generation. You cannot sustain the genetic quality with a girl for every guy. It’s depressing but it’s true. I think monogamy is a genetic dead end. Polygamy is a dystopia. You can’t beat this game. There is no perfect arrangement.
It’s quite true, SGC, that other primates are not monogamous. It’s also true that if your goal is purely eugenic, you can do a better job by having a far smaller number of supremely elite males mate with large harems of women. Indeed it seems that in human history a far greater percentage of females have reproduced than males.
So males are, as you say, expendable; population growth is strictly capped by the number of females. (That’s why in every society males are the ones who fight and die.)
But there are other considerations: in polygamous societies you have to do something with the excess males. Sending them off to war is a great approach. (So is sending them from polygamous societies, like the Islamic world, to monogamous ones, like Sweden, as “refugees”.) In general the excess males are going to be grumpy about their status, and poorly socialized. (They might even do things like run people down with vans.)
So it’s a question, really, of what sort of society you prefer to live in.
Meanwhile, what do we have in the modern West? The worst of both worlds, that’s what: sexual libertinism that snaps its fingers at the very idea of monogamy, and the social stability that monogamy enforces —
combined with a mixture of birth control and abortion that completely divorces sex from both ritual and consequences, while causing birth rates to plummet.
So what do we get? A civilization collapsing into hedonistic decadence while at the same time hurtling headlong toward demographic extinction.
Good times!
Well, SGC, I’m not sure about the “natural state” part, but I’ll grant you that other primates are not monogamous.
It’s also true that if your goal is purely eugenic, you can do a better job by having a far smaller number of supremely elite males mate with large harems of women. And indeed it does appear that in human history a far greater percentage of females have reproduced than males.
So males are, as you imply, expendable; population growth is strictly capped by the number of females. (That’s why, in every society, males are the ones who fight and die.)
But there are other considerations: in polygamous societies you have to do something with the excess males. Sending them off to war is a great approach. (So is sending them from polygamous societies, like the Islamic world, to monogamous ones, like Sweden, as “refugees”.) In general these excess males are going to be grumpy about their status, and poorly socialized. (They might even do things like run people down with vans.)
So it’s a question, really, of what sort of society you prefer to live in.
Meanwhile, what do we have in the modern West? The worst of both worlds, that’s what: sexual libertinism that snaps its fingers at the very idea of monogamy, and at the social stability that monogamy fosters —
combined with a mixture of birth control and abortion that completely divorces sex from both ritual and consequences, while causing birth rates to plummet.
So what do we get? A civilization collapsing into hedonistic decadence while at the same time hurtling headlong toward demographic extinction.
Good times! Enjoy it while it lasts.
Of course if polygamy is so eugenic you have to wonder why those places that practice it aren’t more prosperous. It could be that the genetic quality of those places has risen faster than in the West but they haven’t caught up yet. I don’t know, I don’t know much about the details of who has kids and who doesn’t and whether it really the best and brightest that have multiple wives in these places. In theory, it should work to raise the genetic quality of those places.
SCG,
How do you measure “genetic quality”? The places that practice polygamy were once among the most prosperous in the world.
One has to look at these things in terms of what, exactly, is being selected for. Contexts change.
The question, I think, is whether it’s inevitable for prosperous societies to become more libertine. Are there instances of societies that, having achieved a significant degree of sophistication and wealth, chose not to go this way – and continued to thrive?
Or are prosperous societies simply doomed to this desire to throw off the outdated moralistic shackles of the past.
kga,
The latter, I fear.