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Boys and Girls
I raised five sons, and two things I tried to convey to them as they grew up were that it’s easier to destroy than to create, and that it’s easier to be great than to be good.
The first point is pretty obvious. Boys want to have an impact on the world. More than girls, boys feel a need to impose their will on nature, on the environment, and on the people around them. In young men, that’s expressed as a desire to build things, break things, dam up streams, and cut down trees. As they grow older, that desire to affect the world becomes a wish to scrawl graffiti over it, knock it down, shoot it, or otherwise bend it to their will.
My late wife once approached me after she’d read a book by James Dobson on the topic of raising young men. She was skeptical of a claim Dobson made: that young men often thought of blowing things up. I answered “Honey, I often think of blowing things up. Not a month goes by when I don’t imagine launching a grenade into that old barn at the edge of our pasture.” Which was true. She said that she was surrounded by aliens, and started to cry. And I understood why she did.
Boys want to have an impact on the world. Once upon a time, not that long ago, they’d have been able to set off on their own by the time they were fifteen. They could fish, build a hut, find a wife: when one’s entire youth was spent in vocational training, being an adult was pretty easy.
Today young men need educations, credentials, and a bunch of skills that have nothing to do with surviving and a lot to do with getting along, with getting permissions and identification and jumping through all the hoops that adults have to jump through just to rent a home and drive a car and have a bank account. Their bodies are ready at fifteen, ready to change and populate the world. But modernity demands another ten years from them — ten years of yearning and frustration and banking the embers of youthful passion and the need to change the world around them.
It’s no wonder that they feel the tug of mischief and destruction. That’s a way to change the world that doesn’t require the world’s permission, that doesn’t require you to tick all the boxes before you can make a difference. I get it. I watched my boys go through it, and I think I understood their frustration. I’d felt it too, once upon a time. Some days I still feel it.
When you want to change the world and you know you can’t, when you know that the world is too complicated and you’re just not ready to go out and make a serious contribution, it’s tempting to pursue something nihilist but consequential. I think that’s a lot of what we’ve seen in the past year or two, in the riots and the protests and the seemingly senseless destruction. I think that’s a lot of what we see in our inner cities today. Young men want to matter, and it’s hard to matter, now, when you’re a young man. Violence is easy; creating something is hard.
My guys behaved themselves and are fine men today. I’m proud of them. But I know it wasn’t easy, for them or, some days, for me.
It’s different for young women. For young women, creation is actually easier than destruction. Girls can create the most precious and valuable thing in our universe with almost no planning or forethought: in fact, they have to be cautioned not to create it, and society throws up elaborate systems to help them avoid performing the one act of creation which women are uniquely gifted to perform.
And today, in a truly tragic example of good intentions gone wrong, the great creative act of womanhood is marginalized and devalued, as women are reinvented as inferior men, expected to live down to the level of their male counterparts, and told to sacrifice that which has always made women worth placing on a pedestal and shrouding with honor.
There is no greater act of creation than birthing and raising another human being. That needs to be said more often.
That other thing, about it being easier to be great than to be good, was more nuanced. It’s tempting to dream of changing the world, of doing something great and important. It’s harder to live each day as we should, to consistently do the small things that, in summation, make up most of our lives — the little acts of integrity, of responsibility, of service, of kindness, and of sacrifice that leave a lasting mark. There’s an interval, when young men are young men, when we imagine doing great things — and would like to ignore those more prosaic and quotidian obligations.
Dostoevsky addressed this more deeply in the character of Raskolnikov, but it’s a challenge for many enthusiastic young men who are eager to make their mark on the world. Dream big and ignore the small stuff. A lot of us who imagined we’d write novels fall victim to that, I think.
Published in General
I don’t think we have this whole democracy thing down. It’s super new.
The dropping of requiring property ownership to vote was probably far more significant, but still… I sometimes ponder and pose it as a kind of thought-experiment: evidence is pretty strong that women tend to vote more liberal/leftist/socialist/even communist, because of “nurturing” and “compassion” instincts or what-have you. If that’s the case, if having women vote really ends up leading eventually to the collapse of millennia of Western Civilization, is it worth that just so that women could feel good about themselves – “empowered” or whatever – for 100 or so years?
I think we have intellectual and property requirements and it would fine to have the XX Chromosome people vote.
Maybe, but I’m still concerned.
Sparta required all men to marry a woman and reproduce with her, but was otherwise tolerant of homosexuality as men were deemed better company than women. But basic idea without the punishing of homosexuals.
Women are also seeking security over freedom. The more free women have become with men (not marrying, engaging in risky sex, etc), the more they expect government to step into the role of secure protector and provider.
Feminism is rot for making women think it was healthy to be sexually promiscuous and independent in all things.
The Dilbert cartoon shows the kind of people we don’t want voting. I think there is a good argument for screening out people who think like this girl. Such a process would remove more women than men according to most studies.* I would prefer implementing this process before removing the right for a female to vote.
*Bryan Kaplan makes the case for that.
This is also why married women to strong male providers tend to vote conservative – they are more secure and don’t need government to protect them.
Except they’re not really independent, if they’re dependent on government.
One problem being that the left – or women, for that matter – could not be trusted to come up with a useful test, nor would they likely agree with such a test devised by anyone else that they deemed to be “sexist” or whatever. It would also likely become easy to “cheat” the test by memorizing answers etc, which is also why the citizenship test is largely a joke.
The citizenship test isn’t a joke. I think that about half of voting age Americans can’t pass that test. Making the regular person study anything is immensely difficult in my experience. Any test would need to be immensely simple or it would start to bias itself towards one partisan side or the other.
My point is that nobody has to really study or understand anything to pass the citizenship test, just memorize some answers. If passing the same citizenship test that immigrants have to pass, became a requirement to vote, you can be sure the teachers unions etc. would have maybe a one-day class or something where they get all the mush-minded mini-drones to memorize the necessary answers (like they memorized the hymns to Obama etc) but it wouldn’t MEAN ANYTHING to them.
Ultimately something like “owning property” could be bypassed too, by – for example – a decree just before election day that everyone who rents an apartment, “owns” it for election day and then doesn’t own it the next day. If you make it so that they have to own “land” then they say that all the renters “own” a small portion of the land that that apartment building is on, for election day… Nothing really enforces anything that people don’t want to be enforced. As I’ve said and written many times, here and elsewhere, no great hand comes down from the sky to make people do things right.
Ultimately it’s an issue of people really believing and understanding, as what Adams said about the Constitution only working for a moral people: if the people are decent, no micro-managing rules are needed, and if they’re not, no micro-managing rules can really fix it.
Dambiso Moyo would disagree. While Teacher’s Unions would memorize the test, they would have a heckuva time getting anyone else to memorize the test on their behalf.
I am in no way proposing this a cure-all but rather an improvement.
After what we’ve seen for the past many years, where the teachers get the students to remember all kinds of other BS, you think they’d somehow stop at – or not be able to – getting students to memorize enough to be able to vote for Dims?
I talked about this in my review of a well-written book I’ve been meaning to relisten to.
It’s an illusion. They think they are independent. Government doesn’t count.
Well, for sure I’ve noticed that women seem to have a lot of illusions. Way more than men. And liberals/leftists/”progressives” the most of all.
Do you think women grossly underestimate what it takes to undo total government control once that state is achieved? Maybe because that will likely require violent overthrow.
It could be that there are women who like dependence, but they just want to be dependent on the baddest bad boy, which is the government. Whether dependent on men or on the government, they could end up in abusive relationships, but there are some who are remarkably defensive about their abusers and their relationships.
And the abusive government is far less likely to abandon them.
I don’t really think the government turns on their female collaborators. They need them for building up population after destroying all the dissidents.
I don’t know how modern government would fare with their sterilized, privatized uteri, though.
I don’t know what to do with this, but I have to remember it.