Shifting the attention towards community
The following is an entry from my journal. An entry from my journal. I comment at length on two articles, one about incels and the other about a scientist, to make a general point on the centrality of community.
Earlier today I read two articles:
- Do violent incels dream of orgies in the sky? by Valerie Stivers for Unherd.
- The wolverine gospel by Jeff Wheelwright for Psyche.
Both articles tell us something about the human condition. Each provides insight into different facets of it. In the first article, Valerie reports on an incel ideologue who produced a manifesto for political change and acted out of it in terrorist fashion. The manifesto incorporates thoughts that are prevalent online, while making the metapoint of what can happen when someone has means but no purpose in life. Valerie notes:
That such a philosophy [of consumerism/materialism] serves humans poorly is easily visible. The manifesto uses a dehumanizing terminology of “females” and “copulation”; elides the difference between copulation and love; assumes marriage is a mutually hostile transaction for individual benefit; and mostly lacks concern that, in its preferred future state of affairs, most women would be married against their wishes. More frightening is that all the underlying — and essentially Christian — ideals that humanized previous materialist systems and made them aspire to nobility and justice are just … missing for the incels. Moral relativism, and its corresponding ideology of individualist self-pleasure, have been espoused for generations, but it’s never previously been tried without underpinnings of some kind of vestigial morality. Hatfield — and we might here genuinely say through no fault of his own — was trying it.
I will elaborate on this story further below. In the second article, Jeff presents the deeds of a scientist, named Jeff Copeland, who studies wolverines. Beyond the details about those animals and their surrounding nature, this article teaches us how humans respond to awe and how they may then think of their place in the world:
I came to realize that the inevitability of a higher power was not something I came upon independently, rather it was something given to me by my mother, by the church, among others. I never experienced the comfort it was supposed to provide and its claim to hold ALL the answers rang hollow. As I was introduced to what science provided – information derived through a very specific process called the scientific method – I became engrossed by the objectivity of the process. The results were always open for debate but never tied to the supernatural. The answers science provided were testable and repeatable, and I felt I had found my place.
Valerie hints at Christianity as a common good in what may be a boutique view of history, while Jeff presents Jeff Copeland as a person who thinks of atheistic science, the core expression of a method of inquiry, as the midpoint of community. To me, the modalities do not matter, so long as people come together in a spirit of shared belonging. Couched in those terms, truth does not factor in: even a completely made up story is fine if it gives us the impetus to be together and, as such, the best imagined stories are those that empower us to coexist over time. When we partake in team games, for example, we do it for the fun of the moment and to strengthen our social bonds, not because we have carefully investigated all the attendant propositions and acted out in a purely rational way.
The “I” finds fulfillment in the “we” when the “me” goes through the “us”. I do not know how it feels to be an incel. In recent years I became aware of the phenomenon of porn addiction after talking with people who described their experiences. I was then informed how most Internet traffic is related to pornography. This does not surprise me, given that even your average Hollywood production is pornographic to varying degrees. This is a culture that treats people as cogs in a machine so it will naturally also see them as meat in other ways. Because I cannot relate to those men’s lived experiences, I refrain from passing judgement. Though what I learnt about this manifesto does not inspire to read further.
While I disagree with the points of the manifesto that are shared in the linked article, I think Valerie’s criticism stands on shaky ground. She effectively dismisses that man’s thoughts as one big cope. The problem with this approach is that literally everything people do can be seen through this lens, even for those who are conventionally super successfully. Pick a rich, popular, and handsome man, for example, of the sort incels obsess over: you can argue that he boasts about his alpha status as a way of coping with the fact that he is not confident enough to live a minimalist, spiritual life in seclusion. An alpha, after all, is entirely dependent on the views of others qua alpha: a function of opinion. Now you may object to that argument on the grounds that “nobody cares about such an alternative lifestyle” though this is merely an appeal to convention. I can go on with such examples but will not belabour the point: “coping” is not a good descriptive tool. Same for “projecting”, by the way. You should try harder.
The fact of the matter is that increasingly more people are feeling disconnected from the world. There is a shrinking sense of community because the historical milieux of communitarian experience are shrinking. This is especially true in cities. You live in an apartment that you pay rent for, as does everyone around you. Tenants come and go, so there is no sense of continuity. Unlike the slow-paced village life, you do not know the entire family tree of your neighbour and thus cannot know whether to trust them or not. Same for them vis-à-vis you. If you say “hello” to people in your neighbourhood, they look at you suspiciously. The starting point is one of barriers to entry: a stranger among strangers. By the time you manage to create a sense of neighbourliness, it is time for you or them to move to another apartment. The rootlessness persists and the concomitant feeling of emptiness becomes more pervasive.
I hear more about male incels but would not be surprised if related insecurites are running rampant among females as well. They are, after all, expected to be beautiful at all times and thus become prime targets of every campaign that induces and then exploits insecurity. But I will not speculate because I have not been told enough.
The more I read about these phenomena, however, the more sceptical I become of pop culture notions of evolutionary psychology. Humans are complex animals with multilayered patterns of behaviour yet the relevant talk reduces us to simple automata. If we do something other than what our putative “biology” demands, then we must be hiding something or, again, “coping”. The actual scientific study of humans is very tricky because it cannot be done in vitro: the subject responds to the experiments, while the experiments themselves are necessarily construing a relatively simple scenario that conditions the patient accordingly to become more mechanistic. Furthermore, the business of scientific publishing is such that it engenders incentives for what effectively is a glorified popularity contest (high impact factor journals, judging performance by the number of publications, et cetera). We still want science, but have to have the necessary maturity and cautiousness of the scientific thinker to not jump to sweeping generalisations. This is where we do not benefit from infusing teneous findings with conventional tokens of success, for we then only vindicate the categories we have already assumed as worthwhile.
Which brings me to the second article about Jeff Copeland and the wolverines. Though I am not religious myself, it is a mistake to think that theology, which is a branch of philosophy, does not involve debates: the “-logy” suffix (from logos, as in speech, among many others) is part of the term, after all. Do not conflate theology with any given dogma, for they have different target audiences. Theology is for a select few, while the dogma distills precepts that are practical and on the balance benign for a given social whole. Dogmas have to be impervious to discussion so that they compel people into action that is effectively pro-social, much like how a parent sometimes needs to be inflexible towards their young child in pursuit of a greater good.
At the heart of religion is hierarchy: individuals are not free to do whatever they want and must instead submit to relevant authorities. Religion incorporates a theology but is not limited to it. It also has myths, rituals, festivals, ideas about everyday affairs, and a clear framework about how social life should unfold. In short, religion is a complete system of interpersonal relations and social reproduction. Most people will benefit from it because it gives them a clear role in life while they themselves lack the means, in terms of intellectual accumen and emotional stability, to find such a role on their own without causing immense harm in the process.
I am not religious because nature endowed me with the intellect and character of the philosopher. I understand, nonetheless, that individuals need guidance at all times and society cannot be optimised around someone like me. I necessarily occupy the margins.
The Western world leans heavily on tokenistic religiosity: it appeals to the divine, it employs its symbols and imagery, it opportunistically commits to rituals and blithely synthesises different spiritual or philosophical traditions, yet is fundamentally non-religious owning to its anti-communitarian quotidian dynamics. The moment the common good, god or whatever it may be, is reduced to a personal affair along the lines of self-help doctrine, it becomes ineffective from the point of social organisation, as it undoes the essence of religiosity: hierarchy. Indeed, the very word means “holy/priest” (ιέρ-) and “order” or “structure” or “rule” (αρχή). Only when we all exalt something as sacrosanct, and only after we fasten our lives around it, do we have religion.
What religion claims about the divine is secondary to the primary function of collective integrity. The average Christian, for example, cannot argue at length about John’s «εν αρχή ην ο λόγος» (“in the beginning was the word”). They do not need to: that is a topic for philosophers. As such, when someone says that they are a Christian because they read the New Testament and think it holds the truth, I say they are doing it wrong: be religious for the sake of the community, and have theological discussions with theologians, but understand that the latter does not give you the former. Philosophy is a lonely endeavour because few people have the patience and temperance for it. Once you admit that you are being philosophical in your disposition, you accept the attendant loneliness.
And just to be clear on what I mean by “loneliness”: you cannot walk into the neighbourhood or village and just share with others your philosophical thoughts. The residents are not interested and cannot even follow you all the way. The requirement for sustained attention alone is simply too high a barrier. You literally see patterns in the world that are invisible to them. The vast majority of your social experiences will therefore come at the expense of this dominant side of yours (e.g. sitting at the Christmas table while accepting that the topic will change every couple of minutes).
Community is the greatest value. Everything we do culminates in finding others. Some of the finest thinkers of all time have contributed to religious thought in one way or another. Science has always been around, yet those sages understood that there is knowledge to be discerned beyond the particularities of phenomena. The greatest among them even realised that there is more value to be had in myths than facts, since a captivating story forever serves as a platform for discussion among members of the community that have different levels of skill (e.g. the grandparent and the grandchild, the hierarch and the peasant). Plus, they recognised something that our world is increasingly lacking: people need a sense of belonging at all costs, not truth at all costs. They do not have it organically anymore as part of their milieu, so they seek belonging in increasingly pernicious subcultures.
Jeff Copeland discovered community in science. In studying wolverines, he did not reach “the truth”. No. That is what scientists think they are after because they still have much to learn. He only found his place in the world and thrived because of it. Yes, there is a place for such people outside the confines of religion. They are the exceptions though. Your average person will not have a lifelong fascination about a field of scientific inquiry, even if they are working in the field because of other considerations such as a stable career and a prestigious position. What those people need is community: to give them boundaries, set them on a path, hold them accountable, and inspire them to tend to needs beyond their own personhood.
The moral of the story for men who identify as incels and for everyone else is to turn their attention outward. Inwardness breeds discontent as it cannot create a sense of awe: it cannot find anything greater than itself. Instead of lamenting their condition, of seeking community through shared victimhood, they can strive to make stuff happen by proceeding through initiative: to build things, to create projects that they maintain long-term, to contribute to the greater whole, without feeling that they are entitled to anything. Communities occur naturally around the artefacts we set up, while men are good at clearing the land, as it were, upon which safe spaces may be established.