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Social Isolation and the Superfluous Men
I regularly read the journal American Affairs, which is a sophisticated populist journal that wisely strays away from sticking to any politician or political movement but is vaguely right-leaning. The journal is available in print or by online subscription. Marco Rubio has been interviewed for it. There was an article in the Winter 2020 issue called “The New Superfluous Men,” which looked at the increasingly sorry and questionable state of young men in western society. It was written by Alex Glender and there were several aspects of it that I wanted to analyze and then comment on:
As the story goes, by eroding traditional norms of monogamy and family life, social and technological developments such as feminism and the birth control pill intensified sexual competition by giving women more freedom to choose their partners without consequences.
According to Pew Research Center, “only 44% of Millennials were married in 2019, compared with 53% of Gen Xers, 61% of Boomers and 81% of Silents at a comparable age.” There’s been a steady decline in marriage, more and more with each coming generation. “Reproductive freedom” has certainly had a lot to do with this and along with that also has been the institutionalization of social isolation.
People live unnaturally in the United States. They don’t know their neighbor, very few of them are part of community groups, and they take in a steady stream of consumer media that gives them nothing but anxiety and animosity toward the people that exist around them. No one seems particularly happy with this scenario, though plenty of people will nonetheless rationalize it and refuse to change it. Glender goes on to cite French writer Michel Houellebecq, who says:
Just unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never.
While I was living in California, without saying any privacy-violating specifics, I met a man who was a virgin well into middle age. Yes, long past the 40-year mark from the infamous Steve Carrell movie. There were all sorts of reasons for why he ended up in that situation, but certainly, atomization had a lot to do with it. A total abundance of sex means that a man who accumulates it is like a billionaire and a man who never attains it is a pauper. Feminists talk about men, likewise, as if they are homeless people or illegal immigrants who desperately seek something that they have.
“Incels,” or the “involuntarily celibate,” men are not simply a phenomenon in the United States, which really makes one wonder what is going on. They are called “bare branches” in China and “hikikomori” in Japan. Glender theorizes that they are a product of a world that no longer employs slave labor, drafts men into conflicts or goes exploring unknown shores and adds that the ideology they’ve arrived at through the Alt Right movement might vent their rage but hardly helps their efforts:
Understood in this way, the incel’s predicament is a bitterly ironic one. For in addition to the targets of their rage, incels victimize themselves by supporting the very same ideologies that lie at the root of their immiseration. They decry the materialism and shallowness of “gold-digging” women who only care about men’s wealth and social status while in the same breath opposing feminist equality and upholding the gender norms that enshrine men as providers.
It is worth noting here that many feminists talk about gender equity but will easily scream and shout down a man if he is not adhering to old gender norms. They’ll shout at and berate men or anyone for anything that they can get away with, don’t listen to anything men say, and only ever back off if other women who aren’t as deranged tell them to. Glender adds:
They extol marriage while opposing the sorts of economic redistributionist policies that would make it easier for men like them to attain and sustain it. They adopt white supremacist ideologies that demonize black and immigrant men instead of recognizing their common plight. And with their view of history hopelessly distorted by consumer media, they pine for “traditional” eras in which, in all statistical likelihood, they would find themselves serving as cannon fodder in some lord’s army, wasting away from scurvy at sea, or hauling stones under an overseer’s whip. But one need not have any sympathy for incels to recognize that simply admonishing them to “be better” and less entitled is an inadequate response to a confluence of technological and demographic change, and that the conditions that breed them create a more dangerous world for us all.
If the past year has taught us anything, from COVID-19 lockdowns to the storming of congress by Alt-Right zealots, it’s that society and the civilization around us can stop. The normal routine we are used to is only routine because we keep doing it. The incel is only an extreme variant of social isolation. The overworked, overeducated, and over-miserable career woman is also an extreme variant. Neither is normal or happy and the statistics show that while happiness has stayed about the same for men over the years, it has actually gone down for women in the west even as they have made historic gains.
If people marry less, if they know their neighbors less, if they talk less to each other and are involved in the community less, they will have nothing to sustain civilization. Civilization was built by people who did these things. They will have no idea of what is going on with people around them and will thus be unable to see disaster or conflict coming. We will jump right back to the world where men were “cannon fodder in some lord’s army, wasting away from scurvy at sea, or hauling stones under an overseer’s whip.”
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Published in General
American culture needs a God smitten celebrity to get into politics and eventually seek the presidency. A familiar personality like Donald Trump, except that his speech is full of references to God.
I’m reminded of studies showing that young black men, especially, have to be taught by first employers even things like using an alarm clock to get to work on time, because being on time for things was not A Thing in the homes where they grew up.
It wasn’t a thing for Early Republic farmers, either, when they left the farm and went to work in factories. It took some work by early American industrialists to get them to live by the clock. They were used to getting up early to go to their work, but they weren’t used to having their lives regimented by somebody’s clock.
You’re also assuming that singles are young, but as marriages rates decline that isn’t always the case. A lot of parishes have young adult ministries, the upper age cutoff is often around 30. There’s not much catering to singles in their 30s, 40s, and older.
Especially impressive that there are groups for the over-30 crowd, I don’t see much of that.
One of the most aggravating bits of elite condescension is this idea that men locked out of the labor market are nothing more then angry virgins.
It’s absurd. How would poor people exist at all if poor men never had sex? It’s not the lack of sex that bothers them, it’s the lack of marriage–and the status that comes from it (the marriage wage premium is literally as large as the college premium). We’ve now gone from a world that regularly lectured poor men on having too much sex to lecturing them on having too little, but having more sex isn’t going to make poor men happy–they need a credible path in life, not coupons to the local strip club.
The LDS over-30 singles ward here started not long before COVID hit, so I never got to go. It’s one of the things I’m most looking forward to for when this pandemic finally ends.
That was the whole point of engineering such a tight labor market in the 90s and forcing welfare recipients into the labor force; once it became clear the existing plethora of government training programs were a total and complete failure the only thing left to try was letting employers take a crack at ’em.
And it worked! Lots of studies have shown that employment has a powerful socializing and educational effect on extremely poor people, increasing their lifetime earnings and shoring up public finances by turning consumers of public funds into tax payers.
I think Mickey Kaus is right, no amount of public education will ever materially improve the lot of the poor–but employers can, and tight labor markets is how you make that happen.
Love can destroy us as easily as hate. We need a stoic and prudent heart. Or do you mean agape rather than love.
Bingo.
I can’t speak for other denominations, but the problem in the Catholic young-adult-group world is how explicitly religious everything is. There are bible studies for young adults. (These tend to be tiny, and they attract a hardcore — even borderline clerical — crowd.) There are semi-public lectures about theological topics. There’s eucharistic adoration. Then, there are sex-segregated groups — men’s clubs, for instance, which focus on biblical manhood and masculine charitable activities.
All these things are well and good, but they rarely lead to any dating or marriage. Occasionally, a young-adult group tries to do something more open-ended, like bowling or roller skating or trivia night, often to no avail. (A tip for organizers: If you’re going to host a Catholic social event in a public venue, find some way to signal to the poor, lonely schmucks who wander in who the Catholics are. Station someone at the entrance. Make a sign. Try something.)
Honestly, I can’t think of any social institution except college which has the ability to create relationships and marriages. So, I’ll repeat my favorite truism: Graduate single, die single. Ring by spring, or no ring at all.
When it ends?
2047 is a long way away.
What does the presidency have to do with the culture?
An original reason for public school in America was to train the young how to function in society, reading, writing, and arithmetic. The emergence of industrial production then made the public schools valuable for leaning how to do things by the clock. Production lines in factories really suffered when key slots were not filled. The Information Age probably has a hangover from this since the necessity has lessened.
Agree on the point about college. If I hadn’t met my future wife in college, I would probably not have met anyone and gotten married.
Sometimes things operate well for a period of time and then change.
A black guy who used to blog and comment at blogs…I think is blogname was Obsidian…said that in his experience, black women who are college graduates will not marry a man who is not a graduate, even if he is a skilled tradesman with a good income and even if the woman’s own degree is in some mush field.
He also said, ‘Watch out, white guys! If this hasn’t happened yet in your world, it’s coming.’
Often, women with mushy degrees aren’t as good as sex robots anyway. At least your sex robot could read the audiobook by Thomas Sowell with exploding.
And what about all the men who don’t go to college?
Mind you, I’m asking for someone else…but where does one acquire those coupons to the local strip club?
Which is another reason why open borders and letting in floods of unskilled/uneducated workers is a bad idea.
Exactly. Now, what do young men, with no chance of a decent life, turn to? Drugs…or violence. And, the social fabric is torn even further…
Actually I understand the effect of women college graduates not being willing to marry men without college degrees began hitting the white population several years ago. This creates societal problems as significantly more women graduate from college than men do.
Somewhere in all the comments or related material someone pointed out that the modern world we have created and live in is an unnatural one for the men and women. I guess we would say in a natural world behavior is mostly instinctual. In this unnatural world behavior is learned or adapted in other ways. There are always possibilities this does not happen in very effective ways. Is that where we are?
However, whenever this is suggested, many people begin to shout the notion down. Why, if the government sets up a program where all 18 year olds are required to do a full two years of activities, either in the military or in some Vista-styled program such as we had in the 1960’s, it will destroy the nation.
Perhaps a Vista style program woul dbe harmful, if under the Lefties’ control. Who would want our teenagers spending summers diapering the newly arrived immigrants’ babies for them, for instance?
But on the other hand, the way it has been these days, the 18 year olds go off to college, with so many of them spending 4 years running up tens of thousands in student loans, get out of college, find out a degree in communications is worth less than a subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. They then go off to live in their parents basement, getting addicted to vid games and to pornography.
This culture is even spreading into the mentality of young people here in my rural county. A friend just spent X amount of money buying her teen a dirt bike, thinking her 14 year old might enjoy the fresh air and scenery of the wooded tails behind his home. But nah, he insists on online gaming all day. When parents arrange for their kids to get together, you guessed it, they are all still all eyes on their screens.
Just five years ago, people in that age group were responsible for keeping evacuation camps up and running for fire evacuees. Now it is all vid games, all the time.
I was drafted into the Army in 1961. Then we had the Viet Nam War and the domestic political environment of the late sixties, which was the last time we had something comparable to today and we dropped the military draft. We didn’t do anything to replace the draft.
Jordan Peterson has been one bright star illuminating a different approach to the shallow life our affluent society has perhaps inadvertently imposed on young adults. His call to arms has affected young women as well as young men.
But life is now better in every possible way. I’m pretty sure I’ve read that right here on Ricochet.
Well, let’s put it this way. I saw a lot of nervousness when the Covid Lockdown began raising concerns about the supply chain. The just-in-time environment looked a little shaky.