The Politics of "Muddling Through"

"Muddling through" seems to me definable as managing to accomplish a task or solve a problem in spite of a lack of suitable organization, vision or even understanding of the issue, or any decision to acquire any, as when one gets by by on the basis of small ad hoc adjustments.

Those who have a high level of confidence in the wisdom of existing arrangements, messy though they may be; and who are not much given to planning, science, system in meeting major challenges, and may be inimical to them as such; tend to have a high level of confidence in the chances of "muddling through" even in the face of large and/or novel economic, social, political problems.

Those who have less confidence in existing arrangements, and who think that planning, science, system have their place, tend to be less confident in muddling through.

As this implies different political tendencies have different attitudes toward muddling through--with those leaning right more inclined to it, those leaning left less so. Thus was "muddle" a bugbear of H.G. Wells, while that champion of that form of conservatism called "centrism" Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was a vehement proponent of "muddling through" as the only approach suitable to the pluralistic, pragmatic, "free society" for which he stood, and (showing his, and centrism's, conservatism again) sneered at those who disagreed with that position as sad head cases unable to deal with life's complexities.

However, one should add that besides general predisposition there is the matter of how seriously they take the problem in question. Confidence in "muddling through," after all, is often a matter of complacency toward an issue, or more cynically, an evasion. Those on the right can and do have a capacity for supporting quite drastic action--as seen in their greater readiness to support a use of military force--while the confidence of many on the right that society will get along in the face of, for example, climate change reflects that they are simply not all that exercised about the problem. By contrast those who really do see in climate change an urgent problem are apt to look at society's record in regard to redressing climate change and see in it the affirmation of their worst suspicions about muddling through as the do-nothingism of people who simply don't care about the issue and have no interest whatsoever in inconveniencing powerful interests over it.

The Professionals and the Public

That social category we consider to be the "professional" occupational groups in society is less studied and discussed than it ought to be, but has not been wholly ignored by social scientists--as Thomas Frank shows when giving the general reader a handy round-up in the first chapter of his 2016 book Listen, Liberal.

In considering that category--and especially how the professionals see themselves standing in relation to the rest of the society--it is useful to remember the root of "professional" in "profess." If many identify professionals and professionalism with modernity, rationality, science, the professional's perception of their place, now as much as ever, can be understood as that of a priest in relation to the laity, in their having a monopoly of activity and (presumably) wisdom in some important sphere of human life. This puts them in a position of power and privilege over them which has as its obligation an ethic of service to the public--but they also regard themselves as unaccountable to that public on the grounds that it is incompetent to judge of what they do.

For those who are egalitarian or rationalistic or both in outlook, who distrust authoritarianism and hierarchy, who think that those who have power are prone to abuse it and must be held accountable accordingly, this situation can be described as "problematic" at best--all as a great many of those who may not have particular ideas about society generally find it very uncomfortable dealing with professionals. This is especially when they are not used to dealing with professionals, when they are looking up at them rather than down at them socially, when poverty forces them to have an eye squarely on the bill, when in the likely emergency situation they are desperate for straight answers and for assurances professionals too rarely give--the "god in a white coat" who responds to a frightened and desperate patient's questions with evasions and condescending smiles. Professionals, whose training and position makes them creatures of authoritarianism and hierarchy, and scornful of those "not of the priesthood" who would dare judge them, or even just try and make sense of that sphere in which they consider themselves supreme, tend not to be terribly sympathetic or accommodating to their clients' anxieties and disadvantages, with this carrying over to their larger view of the world--with, as Frank argued in that book, important implications for our politics today.

The "Crisis of Masculinity" and the Conservatism of Prescription

I previously remarked how, speaking of a "crisis of masculinity," feminists have often sounded like conservatives--making similar arguments in similar ways. Admittedly for those who, in contrast with the mainstream's simple-minded and false equation of "feminist" with "left," regard the feminism prevailing within the mainstream as "bourgeois feminism," and the postmodernism supplying it with intellectual foundations an ideology not of the left but of the right, this may not be a surprise. However, this parallel seems to me to bear some examination for those at all interested in a deeper understanding of the point at issue, not least because of how the whole conception corresponds to one of the classic canons of conservatism as laid out by Russell Kirk, the valuation of "prescription"--for the purposes of this discussion, people unquestioningly doing what unquestioned custom says that they should do simply because unquestioned custom says so. One of society's most fundamental prescriptions, of course, is that reaching "adulthood" a young man should let go his passions, pleasures and freedom as "childish things" as they instead concentrate on establishing and raising a family, and then proceed to do the latter by marrying and having children, with their role as "breadwinner" for said family the center of their existence--as, indeed, they argue that men failing to take this path, with all its burdens and sacrifices (it is not for nothing that the stereotypical paterfamilias is, by middle age, pretty grouchy and grumpy), will mean nothing less than the downfall of society.

Of course, one can hardly have a prescription for men centered on marriage and family without also having a prescription for women--and indeed there is a traditional expectation that women similarly let go their passions, pleasures and freedom as "childish things," and, assuming their mate has succeeded at being a family's breadwinner, acquiesce in financial dependence on him as they concentrate on having those children and making a home for them and for the spouse who supports them. In short, women had to play their part so that men could play their part, but all this, as a George Gilder complained a half century ago, was complicated by social developments such as what was then called the "Sexual Revolution" and "women's lib." Gilder's response to these developments was that men and women alike ought to return to the old ways rather than going down what he held to be a disastrous path. Of course, the conservative call for women to center their lives on motherhood and children never went away (indeed, prior to her marriage becoming the only thing the Media Masters of Distraction wanted to talk about Taylor Swift's singleness was a culture war issue), with, indeed, it seems talk of "trad-wives" resurgent. Still, the right would seem to have on the whole become less insistent on women adhering to the entirety of the traditionalist package, while being no less insistent that men play their part to the full--as one sees comparing a Ross Douthat to a Gilder.

As it happens feminists speak the same way as they raise the "crisis of masculinity" they see as a matter of men's old script no longer being viable, but, even as they insist on women's right to decline marriage and children for the sake of pursuing their passions and pleasures and retaining their freedom viewing men who would do the same with suspicion. This is at least partly a matter of feminists associating "men going their own way" in this manner with certain tendencies within the alt-right, but it is also a matter of feminists' essential conservatism--as well as the plain and simple fact that conservatives, supportive of a society with "orders and classes," do not recognize it as incumbent upon them to treat everyone the same way, with their judgments gentler in the case of some than others, and frankly seeing those whose privileged positions they are given to defending as able to honorably refuse what is conventionally required of "everybody." Thus, just as natalism-minded conservatives may see a genteel man of means being a "confirmed old bachelor" as not wholly without honor because of their respect for socioeconomic privilege, feminists see respectability in, even valorize, a woman's refusing the old script, while seeming little concerned that women should have a new one--the very suggestion that there should be a script, that a woman shouldn't write her own script--oppressive, even as they take it quite for granted that men need one, and hold that their eschewing the obligations of the old script is something feminists should not countenance. The upshot is that they sit in judgment on a male gender they see as both dysfunctional and, at the same time, without any claim on anyone else's consideration if it is to make itself otherwise. Indeed, considering feminist criticism of male behavior generally one may be put in mind of how much they sound like conservatives speaking of the poor, or of minorities or foreign groups they view with distaste or worse, particularly where the combination of Othering and harshness is concerned. Thus they say that they are the authors of their own problems, and no nonsense about "society" or anything else is to be brooked, no claim for sympathy or support recognized. Indeed, if they want to improve their lot they had better "take responsibility" and "get their act together." And if in the meantime in protecting ourselves from them a few of them get treated unjustly, well, they have only themselves to blame for that because of their collective failings. That the prevailing feminism is, in the main, the feminism of those highly privileged likely makes it very easy for an upper-class bourgeois feminist to simply apply upper-class bourgeois attitudes regarding one group they do not like to another as, conservatives that they are, they readily express admiration of and offer apologia for the associated injustice, misery and brutality.

Traditionalists and Feminists in Agreement?

I think it worthwhile to repeat that I have been, and remain, skeptical of the claims made for the current cohort of males just reaching adulthood turning right, and in particular the idea that the much talked-about "manosphere" and its message has great appeal to them. In fact I think it worthwhile to repeat that the belief that this is so is a matter of politicians and the media endeavoring to keep attention on the culture war, with the Democratic Party's (pseudo)intellectuals in particular continuing to repeat the line (the lie) that they were defeated by the right-wing sympathies of "deplorables" rather than their refusal to break with the neoliberal-neoconservative policy positions that not just their traditional electorate hates, but which even the Republican's own voters despise. It is also the case that the functionaries of the "liberal" media like the manosphere's brutal attitude toward young men, that brutality is what they want those young men to want, and so they persuade themselves and the public that they do want it, in spite of at best questionable evidence.

Still, I do not go so far as to deny that the "manosphere message" should thus be ignored, and indeed there is an aspect of its message that I have been thinking about as of late, namely the way the manosphere's personnel insist that men live up to traditional expectations, often without being insistent on women doing so, as even figures the aforementioned media condemns as toxic tell men "Don't blame women for your frustrations." Nevertheless, traditionalism for one gender is simply impracticable without traditionalism for the other, men unable to marry and start households the way they are expected to do unless women are prepared to do so with them, and just like women men are unlikely to do so unless it seems to them to be worth doing (all as, however much many do not want to deal with the fact, it is undeniable that under the current dispensation men are expected to give more and get less than before, within a marriage and family life as well as in an economy where the returns to effort have been falling for a long time).

I have tended to think of this as a matter of these right-wingers being hesitant to take on feminism in a head-on way, all as men have less protection against such admonitions or pressures. (Putting it bluntly, they would like to tell women to get back into the kitchen, but know it would be counter-productive to do so--the more in as bourgeois feminists, at least, have been such consistent and helpful allies to the right--and so they focus on browbeating young men who can expect no succor from the feminists, all as they have no movement which will push back against the way the kulturkampfers bully them.) Yet it also seems possible that they simply do not worry so much about women's break with traditionalism as others may think. So far as they are concerned, however much we hear of the social construction of gender it is genetics that calls the shots, and in the end women will act as they have traditionally done, embracing marriage, family, domesticity, and doing so on the most traditional lines, not least in their favoring the high-status male who is a promising provider and protector. That indeed, much of what feminists say on this score is a hypocrisy it is better to ignore than to call out. (Thus feminists treat as illegitimate the idea of men thinking of women as prizes--but women still expect to be courted and "won." Thus they consider it an outrage to say that women care how much money a man has, but no one denies that the rich, high-status man has opportunities with women that a poor, low-status man doesn't, as seen in how for all the feminists' denunciations rich old men continue to marry attractive younger women, as women despise and moralize at the low-status man, insisting that he is that because of his personal flaws, that he is lazy, irresponsible, immature, and that is why they have contempt for him, not his lack of money, which is the proof that he is contemptible. And women wouldn't really have things any other way, benefiting too much from things as they actually are.) And so their propaganda tells their audience "Hold up your end of the bargain," implicitly because the game has not changed, relations between men and women, in spite of much sound and fury over the matter, and perhaps even actual perturbations (they will admit that #MeToo didn't make things easier for men), the same as they ever were and always will be, and any "crisis of masculinity" only a matter of men having believed the hype about a change.

Larry Summers, and the Stupid Person's Smart Person

I have had occasion here in the past to write of the "stupid person's smart person"--someone who will seem intellectually impressive to a stupid person, but not to the more intelligent, who can see right through the impressive c.v. and the showing off and is unlikely to be impressed by what is behind them. There are different dimensions to this, but underlying them is the claims conformists make for differences in intellect being the grounds for society's extreme socioeconomic inequality, and the deference of the public to figures of the Establishment, such that the perks of position and the arrogance that goes with them are in their small and feeble minds proof positive of superior intelligence. Larry Summers is an excellent example of the latter, given his lifelong association with elite institutions, and attainment of very prestigious positions in academia and policymaking at a relatively young age--and of course, his notorious personal arrogance and contempt for other people.

David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's crappy Facebook movie seems to me worth reexamining from that standpoint, because of how it presented Summers as insensitive and impatient and graceless with the students coming to him with their problems when he was President of Harvard, certainly to go by the experience of the Winklevoss brothers. Watching the scene where they turn to him for help, I think, the intelligent viewer will note Summers' lack of regard for his responsibilities as administrator of an educational institution and its students. But the stupid person will instead be impressed by Summers' being a large man behind a large desk in a large office, the more in as he is identified to them as President of the supreme object of the Cult of the Good School that is Harvard University (a cult that the deeply elitist makers of the film champion rather than challenge). Moreover, being impressed by all that they will take his impatience and gracelessness and disrespect as indicative of a man too much concerned with higher things to attend to such "trifles," not least because they have no idea what else Mr. Summers was up to during his time at this post. (Ask them who Andrei Shleifer is. They won't have a clue. Ask them about the investment of Harvard's endowment, and you will have to explain what all that means in very small words.) However, this will also be because the stupid, in spite of likely being a Facebook addict, will not make much of Summers' obliviousness to the potentials of the technology and the stakes of the conflict over what has become a trillion-dollar company. They give him a pass for an error of judgment as they would not others, and go on insisting "But He's So Smart!" to anyone who would doubt the Not So Great Man's pronouncements.

The Two Bills

Remembering the 1990s one may remember quite pointedly the prominence of two men named Bill through it. There is the Bill who, son of a poor single mother, became a Rhodes Scholar and rose to the highest office in the land, from which he presided over an era of unexampled national prosperity. And there is the Bill who not unlike him a "self-made man," followed the path of business rather than politics and became the richest man in history through the part that "the good things he brought to life" played in that '90s boom over which the other Bill presided, central as the "tech industry" and the proliferation of personal computing and the Internet were during it.

Of course, this view of the two Bills--Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, respectively--is the Establishment claptrap version so beloved by singers of nonsense about "meritocracy." What Bill Clinton's political career teaches is in fact the benefit to be gained by siding with the winners in a political battle (the Neo-Liberals, and neoliberals, ascendant in the Democratic Party and the country at that time, at whose forefront Clinton put himself), as well as the lucky break one catches when a competitor self-destructs (for had Gary Hart remained a "frontrunner" Clinton might never have become a national figure).

Meanwhile Bill Gates' story is not, as some have it, that of a rise from rags to riches but of the rich getting richer because in fact born rich they have the inherited capital and family connections (say, a mother who knows the chair of IBM through her position on a charity's board) that enable them to take advantage of opportunities with which others can do little or nothing--such as exploiting the genius of others. Rather than a tale of opportunity for all it is, properly understood, a tale of how the system works for the few and not the many, especially in the era of which the other Bill was such an icon, his eight-year presidency representing above all the neoliberal-neoconservative consensus that was virtually unchallenged in any significant way for a generation (1993-2016) that was itself part of a half century of neoliberal-neoconservative dominance (1978-), with all it meant for the chances of the other Bill to enrich themselves in a time in which talk of national "prosperity" usually meant a paper boom benefiting the super-rich as the long-run decline in the standard of living of the many just went on and on.

It seems highly symbolic of that time, and this one, that both Bills' faces are being seen so much in the news lately--along with a certain other famous face, that of Jeffrey Epstein, as said individual's secrets are drip-fed to the public. In its coverage of the revelations the mainstream media is, of course, being its usual, cowardly centrist self, downplaying the aspect of political scandal--especially insofar as political scandal meant more than the "embarrassment" of political figures by revelations regarding the sordid details of their sex lives (Epstein was a player in some very high-level affairs of the other kind)--and the way in which this is an indictment not merely of certain high-profile figures that knee-jerk defenders of the status quo consider Great Men who merely lapsed, or at worst bad apples, but a whole elite stratum.

Thus true to its relentless fixation on identity politics over class the Guardian's Marina Hyde's relentless reduction of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal to the gender first, last and always, male villains and female victims, narrative her paper is ever ready to flog, with any reference to class and politics a mere distraction from the "real" and indeed only issue at hand in tones implying that anyone paying attention to anything else is an idiot. Fortunately, obtuse as the public so often appears to be where these matters are concerned, I suspect that no amount of spin will allow that particular bit of obfuscation to fly, however slight the consequences are likely to be for the friends of Epstein in a context where the malefactors are so squarely among the "protected but unbound" as the outraged can only wail and gnash their teeth as they endure the lot of the "bound but unprotected."

What the Web of Today Teaches Us

Rather than some gigantic cyber-agora where wide, deep, societal participation makes the shape of the web and of its traffic a reflection of genuine consensus the Internet has proven to be an essentially broadcast-type media, gatekept by a handful of profit-driven corporate colossi, all as resources, the leveraging of legacy media, and the support of the more privileged part of the public, decisively affect what is likely to be seen on it. Especially with past success being rewarded with greater visibility and vice-versa, such that those rich in the "attention economy" get richer and the poor poorer; and the increasing elusiveness of success for the newcomer and small-timer as the web fragments, and the pattern of usage becomes less exploratory and involved in a way making "surfing the web" a thing of the past (don't expect comments or backlinks for your little blog these days); the result is that a small number of well-resourced platforms may be increasingly monopolizing Internet traffic, the story going that a mere hundred domains account for ninety percent of all activity as the part played by the smaller fry dwindles, and these indeed seem to be going extinct amid the Internet's "Maximum Era."

Unsurprisingly the discourse is no more democratic now than it was before, as indeed the web is dominated by those who dominate everywhere else, with a predictable result the fact that they have succeeded in making it another prop to their power, enabling them to that much more thoroughly dictate the political agenda (the web has been very useful indeed to those who wanted the culture war with its obfuscations and diversions to be at the center of political life), and rehabilitate extremist views previously thought permanently marginalized. (Remember the talk about a post-racial era when Barack Obama was elected President? Don't see anyone talking that way now, do ya?) Still, it isn't just leftists and liberals who have been disappointed, those on the broader right endlessly feeling themselves betrayed by those personages and institutions to which they lent their support, online as in other places. The result is that those who championed cyber-utopianism--I suspect, much less a view of liberals or the left (or any sort of grass-roots right for that matter) than the propaganda of corporate PR in the '90s (before woke capitalism there was market populism--would seem to have earned every bit of the contempt that those skeptical of the stupidities they talked held for them, with even those who are not dissenters, experiencing the general enshittification of online life. Alas, I suspect very few have learned the lesson, let alone shown the mental capacity to remember its significance as the successors of those who foisted that particular dreck on the public perpetrate the frauds of the present day in a world falling apart.

Of the Question "Will the Future Need Us?"

In discussing the possibility of automation it is a commonplace for those speaking or writing of the matter to ask whether in a world where machines do all of what we conventionally call work more efficiently than humans can there will be any "need" for human beings. Indeed, the question is so much a commonplace that so far as I can tell few if any register its implications, which seem very telling of the essentially elitist and misanthropic outlook that is the conventional wisdom about human life in this society, unpacking which it is not inappropriate to start with Aristotle's Politics. In Book I, Chapter 4, of that work, Aristotle observes that were tools capable of obeying humans' will--if the kind of automation that had already been imagined in the mythology of his own time had actually existed--humans would not need slaves.

Note that Aristotle spoke not of humans, but slaves. Humans, after all, do not need to justify their existence through toil to serve the needs of other humans, and so were unthreatened by any possibility of tools that rendered such service. Only slaves--less than fully human--could be so threatened, because they existed to serve others, such that Aristotle termed them "animated instruments." That we should see automation as calling into question the need for people bespeaks the conventional wisdom's still being the same slave-owner's mentality in which nearly all people--the few masters, perhaps just the van Arkady-Rothkopf-Davos Man 0.0001 percent who certainly act as if they consider themselves the real human population of the planet excepted--are "animated instruments" which cease to have any warrant for their existence when the technologists replace the crude animated instrument that is a trained, conditioned, order-executing slave with a fully artificial alternative superior in every way for their masters' purposes.

In the absence of that disgusting slave-owners' mentality the response to the prospect of an automated world would be that it is one in which no person need ever be degraded to the level of an "animated instrument," let alone devote their whole education, their whole life, to being one; in which every human could actually be human; and, as H.G. Wells had it in The Shape of Things to Come, the Martyrdom of Man would be at an end. Look for such thinking--and its absence--as you watch the dialogue about these matters for what it says about much, much more than how "society" will deal with the mere "technological displacement of labor" in an age of automation.

Crisis of Masculinity, or Crisis of Economic Individualism?

A particular view of the male lot in life goes something like this:

Males are from early childhood subject to a deliberately brutal and brutalizing upbringing in preparation for a life which will be centered on a brutal and brutalizing status-resource competition for the sake of winning and keeping females by way of his ability to support them and the offspring he has with them materially. Said competition will have far more losers than winners; exact its toll on the humanity of the indisputable winners; and by and large make men miserable--to the decreasing extent that they are still able to feel anything at all.

It is not a particularly pleasant vision of life. Many call it tragic, and hold that men for the most part know it, such that it is far from uncommon for men to desire to escape it one way or the other, in spite of the extreme disapproval of attempts to do so on the part of "society" as it insists that every male cheerfully throw himself into the competition and "give it his all," that doing so is what it means to be an "adult" and a "man"; and judges those less than successful in the scrum less than adults and men--even as the already horrid terms of the contest grow ever more removed from reality. After all, the game sets up women as the prize in the contest, and in Life After Feminism the conventional wisdom no longer abides men seeing women as a reward or a prize, all as it no longer countenances men expecting women to conform to the standards that traditionally made men think of them as prizes (a sweet and deferential temperament, sexual attractiveness and availability, will-make-a-house-a-home domesticity, etc. in that way Jerry Hall rather pithily summed up years ago). Indeed, today men are collectively chastised on a constant basis for "entitlement" for expecting, or even simply desiring those qualities in women, as indeed they demand that men value women for other qualities (not least, traditionally masculine qualities such as intelligence, self-assertiveness, "toughness," and conventionally masculine achievements in the aforementioned "game") which, frankly, may elicit less genuine feeling on men's part than those they traditionally sought in women, and even contradict what they really do find attractive. Moreover, feminists also demand that men, even while given no respite from the aforementioned competition and its costs, and judged as harshly as ever for how they do in it, bear an equal share of traditionally female burdens such as care for the home or the rearing of children, and doing the "emotional heavy lifting" in the relationship. Indeed, the thinking now goes that the man should be as prepared as his female partner to be the supportive helpmeet to his spouse--sacrificing his own "career" to hers if need be (never mind that according to the logic described here that career is the sin qua non of his being with her, or anyone else).

Without the prize the (again, miserable) competition and all associated with it lose their incentive structure--all as men find themselves subject to increasingly numerous and contradictory demands, such that a man can feel that he is increasingly punished for what his upbringing makes him, for his being what society requires him to be as that hardened competitor whose ways of thinking and acting he cannot simply "turn off" and would surely suffer even if he could in the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation (with it feeling all the more bewildering, and unjust, that the same feminists so often celebrate what they denounce as "toxic masculinity" in men as exemplary #Girlboss behavior in women). Still, society brooks no balking at their declining to throw themselves into the competition for all that, doubling down on its demand for conformity--as it panics that young men understandably refuse to submit to that demand, opting instead to play video games all day long.

This incoherence is not a very surprising response where the cultural traditionalists are concerned. After all, they are traditionalists because they are committed to the old ways, and hostile to any sort of critical thought about them, the more easily in as they are not too anxious about the world being a fair or peaceful or comfortable place for its less privileged inhabitants, or for that matter, any sort of rational consistency in lifeways. It is more surprising that a great many feminists seem to also think that men should go on living in the old ways--embracing the competition with all the old earnestness, just not expecting the old satisfactions, or any compensation for the loss of those old satisfactions, out of it. After all, if the patriarchy feminists denounce is indeed more than a piece of rhetoric, is this vision of life as a brutal competition not central to that order to which they are so opposed? Is it not therefore imperative on feminists to oppose the brutality and brutalization for which women as well as men ultimately pay a very high price? And indeed would doing so not win to their cause a great many "male allies" who would be ecstatic at the thought of putting a stake through the heart of this heartless vision of life, of a vision of "women's liberation" that would bring "men's liberation" as well? Moreover, if such enlightened self-interest of this kind does not avail, would women's own increasing subjection to the same demands and pressures, the same brutalizing experiences in school and work, sports and military service and all the rest, producing similar alienations, not make women question this vision of life and what it does to women for their own sakes? (Even if it sits poorly with a media narrative that prefers to counterpoise female triumph and male failure it is not just men who, confronting the raw deal that is "adulthood," elect to drop out of what they also see as a scam--and even spend their life playing video games instead.)

Alas, the reader has likely already registered a factor preventing all this from figuring significantly in their position, namely that the competition we are talking about is ultimately economic individualism. A left-wing feminist--left-wing in the sense of her desire for a world beyond economic individualism, beyond capitalism--may very well countenance a different kind of society, in which a different kind of male life-path is at least a plausible, honorable, choice. By contrast a bourgeois feminist, for whom the issue is not the social system but the share of the more privileged women in the rewards going to those at its top, does not. Indeed, for her economic individualism is non-negotiable, There Is No Alternative, and so to the competition the men must go (and the women too). That men, brutalized, become brutal, is just an occasion to turn a structural, systemic, societal issue into an individual one and moralize at them about "choice" and "personal responsibility" in that way so dear to every cold, cruel, sanctimonious bourgeois heart (or whatever it is they use for hearts). Acknowledging that what the "thought-leaders" of today would have us believe to be a matter of gender--a supposed "crisis of masculinity"--proves on closer inspection to be a matter of economics, the crisis of masculinity in fact a crisis of economic individualism, whose outcome is unlikely to be settled by hectoring from either the traditionalists, or the sort of feminist who gets so much of a platform in the media from which to make her pronouncements.

The Guardian Reports on the African "Manosphere"

As readers of this blog are likely to be well aware I have long been skeptical of the claims made for the popularity of the "manosphere" and its cultural influence among young males--the extreme media attention to it less a reflection of the manosphere's actual part in their lives (as yet little studied, still less understood, and perhaps actually rather small) than a matter of that media's own reactionary sensibility, susceptibility to getting sucked into and fueling moral panic, and as always, its desire to talk about identity, gender, the "personal," rather than the large issues confronting all of us, let alone doing so in an intelligent way precisely because proper attention to that is the last thing those in charge of it want. (Consider, for instance, how much more congenial it is for the Democratic Party and its supporters to go on flogging the stupid lie that the manosphere brought the young male vote over to them than to admit that the voters once again refused to "hold their nose and vote" for them as they rejected their umpteenth neoliberal-neoconservative-centrist Democratic presidential contender carrying forward the unhappy Clinton-Obama-Biden tradition--">even after the polling data that gave this a semblance of plausibility was debunked by validated voter information.) It was thus no surprise that a major purveyor of the "panicked" view of the matter, the Guardian, was on about it again, and only slightly less surprising that it found a way to take this seemingly covered-to-death subject and "make it new" by talking about how sub-Saharan Africa now, apparently, has its own online ecosystem of the manosphere type, with Zimbabwe having its own Andrew Tate in Mr. Shadaya Knight.

As I have argued over and over and over again, not just in regard to this issue but every other, the hacks of the media don't "do" context, or background, or real analysis, instead bombarding us with disconnected factoids and offering as the only aid to making sense of it "opinion," most of the time simply the Establishment position on a topic, and that not even in the manner of the notorious "both sidesism," but the "one sideism" of which we hear too little. It seems to me fair to say that they are par for the course in this article, starting with how the article neglects to mention that as of 2025 only 36 percent--roughly 1 in 3--people in Sub-Saharan Africa even has Internet access, with the figures actually lower in several of the countries from which the personalities they focus on hail, namely Kenya (35 percent), Somalia (28 percent) and Ethiopia (22 percent, just 1 in 5 Ethiopians online). This seems to me not just a reminder that the digital divide remains with us decades after it seemed "everyone is online" to many in "the First World" (and this, a reminder of the miserable failure of economic development everywhere on the planet in the past half century on the whole, save in orthodoxy-flouting China), but properly a significant piece of the background to any news story presumably telling us about the use of the Internet in the developing world, and the influence that it is having on its people. But if, as I have remarked many a time in the past, the Guardian affords more space to discussion of such matters as the failures of neoliberalism than, say, any major newspaper in the United States (especially in the era in which the New York Times brought Bret Stephens onto its staff in the name of ideological "diversity"), it remains a centrist organ that, while reliably fire-breathing on identity politics, is also far, far less interested in matters like poverty, economic inequality and neoliberal failure, with which the impulse of those running that publication to give us yet another moral panic-feeding tale of the manosphere and its vicious idiocies is all too consistent. So, too, is the fact that overlooking the detail would be cause for doubt as to the actual reach of figures like Mr. Knight--for if it is very possible that the young men of the far better Internet connection-supplied First World "barely know what the manosphere is," let alone look to it for guidance, one may plausibly imagine it matters that much less in countries where Internet connections are relatively few--and time online a comparative luxury.