Canadian Cincinnatus

Why compassion is not morality

Small-l liberals always go on about compassion, hailing it as the greatest of virtues (as Kim Campbell famously once did). As if to counter this sentiment, it is a commonplace observation among conservatives that compassion is the easiest of virtues. Lately, after personally observing the sordid dealings of a number of compassionate people that I have long known, I am compelled to go one step further and ask this question, is compassion even a virtue, however easy?

After contemplating the behaviour of these compassionate people, the answer I have come up with is no.

To see why, we have to first ask what morality itself is. I contend that morality is a collection of social rules that have evolved through the ages to prevent people from doing things that they want to do but that they should not do because they have a negative impact on other people and society in general. This is why morality involves mostly negative rules, “thou shall not kill”, “thou shall not steal”, etc. It is also why morality rarely exhorts us to do things that we want to do anyway. Morality doesn’t tell us to make money and have a lot of sex with young women. We don’t need morality to tell us to do that because we will do as much of that as we are able. What morality deos is tell us what to do when we are confronted with the choice between a hard alternative that is beneficial to the social order and the easy choice that is harmful to that order. In short, morality is there to guide our actions when somebody has our nuts in a vice.

So what about compassion?

To answer this question, let’s conduct a thought experiment. Consider a kitten that gets run over by a car. If you see that happen and you feel bad, you are demonstrating compassion, but are you being morally good? The answer is no, because you did nothing; you didn’t choose the hard good over the easy bad. In fact, you could do nothing. By the time you were able to react, the kitten was dead.

So, does that mean that an absence of negative feelings over seeing a kitten die is morally neutral? Well, it’s hardly something to brag about. The act of not empathizing with the kitten may be morally neutral but it is also strong indication that you are a sociopath - a potential danger to society because you can’t empathize with other people. And if you actually enjoyed seeing the kitten get run over, well that puts you into the 1% of mankind who are active sadists – the lowest of the low. Similarly, having feeling of compassion for the doomed kitten doesn’t make you good, but it does mean that you belong to the 95% of the human race who aren’t sociopaths. But finding out you belong to the 95% of people who are normal is hardly something to shout from the rooftops either. It’s like getting a good attendance award for showing up to work. Unlike the number of sociopaths in society, which seems to be fixed by the laws of genetics, the actual portion of people who are good and bad varies with the times. In good times, when little is required, the good greatly outnumber the bad. When the times change for the worse, and morality demands more of people, the proportions change, but the compensation for the fact that there are fewer good people in bad times is the fact that the remaining good people will be more virtuous.

In bad times, nobody cares that those compassionate people who I observed, and who precipitated this discussion, are compassionate. They only ask, what have you done? And that - not what you feel - is the real moral question.

Middle aged women going crazy

A disturbing trend I have been noticing for a while among my circle of friends, acquaintances and coworkers is the break-up of a long-term marriage that is initiated by the wife, who then proceeds to cavort about like a teenage girl, quite often ending up with some tattooed scumbag several orders of magnitude lower on the socioeconomic ladder than the ‘good provider’ husband she just left. These divorces are almost always initiated by the woman and usually the husband is shell-shocked and says that he ‘didn’t know what hit him’.

The motivation of these late-blooming slatterns is easy to divine. Women in their early forties can still be fairly attractive if they are well preserved, but in a few short years, they are decisively into grandmother territory. By that point, their sexual appeal will be a distant memory and that can be hard to take. It is a regrettable fact that, sexually speaking, women hit a wall in their late thirties to mid forties that is fairly hard. Men, in contrast, can be desirable well into late middle age if they stay in reasonable shape, dress reasonably well and don’t lose their hair. But understandable or not, the popularity of ‘spiritual adultery’ among married women has serious consequences for our society. 

The obvious victims are the children. Instead of growing up in a stable home, secure in the knowledge that both of their parents will always be there for them, they have to make their own way through the wreckage of a broken home. 

Unfortunately, we as a society so obsessed with victimhood that we ignore other - possibly greater - damage that this sort of thing causes. Let me explain. It is a fact of human society that it is the job of women to select men and not the other way around. This is because men, by nature, are more wanton in their lust. Because women are the choosier sex, the type of men they tend to choose is a powerful normative force that shapes what is considered acceptable male behaviour. When women choose men on the basis of their ability to be a good provider, men will respond by working hard and being responsible. When women prefer the charismatic, bad-boy type, why make the effort to go to school and work hard? Just hang around, be an asshole and pick up the beta-male provider’s loopy wife (as well as his house, because the wife inevitably ends up with the matrimonial home). A lot easier to live the life of a Jersey Shore goon. 

Of late, there has been a lot of hand-wringing about what is wrong with today’s boys, in that, for the first time, girls outnumber boys in university. At the same time, it has also been noted that an alarming portion of young men today choose to be underachievers, content to play video games, drink beer and game women in bars. I think part of the reason women outnumber men in college campuses is because university attendance is too high. This makes a university degree less important and I think men are picking up on this fact better than women. Nevertheless, I also believe the rise of Generation Slacker and the renewed preference of women for charismatic love-em-and-leave-em types like Alex Rodriguez is not unrelated.

If you want to see the negative social consequences of a society where women prefer this sort of sexual partner, look at Africa. There, women do all the work, raise the children and bear all the responsibility. The men hang around, flex their muscles, drink and screw. The result: abject poverty, broken families and a background level of violence that is jacked through the roof. Not good.

Evolutionary psychology teaches us why women desire alpha male thugs. In the hunter-gatherer era where most of our DNA developed, mating with the leader of the pack was the best way a woman could ensure the survival of her children – and her. The further down the pecking order she had to go to find a mate, the worse it was for her in a harsh, unforgiving world.

Our social environment has changed considerably since those days so that such preferences have become a maladaption. In a civilized environment, it is much better for the well being of the woman - and society – if she chooses the conscientious beta male instead, the proverbial ‘good provider’. He would be low down on the pecking order of Genghis Khan’s hordes but is high up in the civilized world. Think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

For this reason, civilization has evolved over the centuries to strongly encourage women to select the beta-provider mate and shun the alpha-cad. In the West, Christianity has played a prominent role in this regard, but all advanced societies have independently developed customs and traditions that serve this purpose. If they hadn’t, they would have self-destructed.

Which brings us back to today’s society. In the sixties, the sexual structure of our society broke down as people rejected the traditional family in favour of sexual freedom. While my instincts run libertarian in most things, the freedom to shun the customs and traditions regulating human mating behaviour has huge externalities (to borrow the language of economists). Society restricts our freedom to steal a lollypop from a variety store because exercising this personal choice corrodes the institution of property without which organized society is impossible. Society used to restrict our freedom to commit adultery for the same reason: significant external costs born by everybody when the institution of marriage is broken.

Because it is permissible in the age of feminism to bash men, it remains socially acceptable to frown upon married men who indulge in the universal male desire for cheap, throw-away sex. This is good. Unfortunately, because of feminism, it is not socially acceptable to frown upon married women who exercise their equally primitive desire to fuck alpha males. If our society is to survive in the long-term, this must change.

 

Why men and women are no longer attracted to one another

There has been a lot of hand wringing lately about the decline of men that has accompanied the rise of women. Recently, Kelly Parland wrote about it in the National Post and Margaret Wente did the same in the Canada’s most boring newspaper, The Globe and Mail. The basic worry is that while women are increasingly successful in the workplace, they are surrounded by man-childs, who are content to sit around, drink beer and plays video games. Today’s single career woman hungers for real men, who live in the real world and are ready to take on that world every day. Where are they? Not surprisingly, men are to blame. Especially if you read female writers, the proscription is that men just need to grow up.

To see why this analysis is wrong, one needs to ask what changed, i.e. what mechanism is discouraging male ambition that didn’t exist in the past?

To identify it, it must first be recognized that, in a society built around the nuclear family (which is historically not as typical or prevalent as the feminists have led us to believe), women have an important normative role in shaping male behaviour. In other words, boys act in the way that maximizes their chances of getting the girl. In the past, girls wanted breadwinners for husbands because society expended a great deal of psychic energy convincing young women not to be attracted to the antisocial bad-asses that they are naturally attracted to in a state of nature (“good girls don’t go out with boys like that”). But if today’s single women are complaining about all the slackers around them, why aren’t today’s men listening to them the way their grandfathers did?

Answer: because the women doing the complaining aren’t very attractive.

Why aren’t they attractive? Mostly because they are in their late thirties and even older. Members of each sex are programmed to pursue the highest status member of the opposite sex they can get. And for men, female status is based of youth, beauty and virtue (i.e. chastity). The financial status and career prospect of women doesn’t enter into the equation. This is the root cause of the problem facing many lonely career women: they put off marriage until they could no longer can ignore their biological clock, when it is almost too late. Even if they were hot and popular in their prime, that is in the past. And the likelihood that they have had a succession of relationships under their belt by the time they want to settle down only debases their sexual currency further. An 18 year old boy will do cartwheels to get an 18 year old girl; a 40 year old man not so much, especially when a 40 year old cougar with an MBA and a high powered financial job comes calling.

But what about the 18 year old girls? The problem with them is that they are no longer encouraged to seek out responsible providers. Their parents tell them that whatever they do is A-OK as long as they are ‘true to their feeling’s’. In practice, following this nitwit advice results in girls throwing themselves at confident bad-boys while ignoring all the ‘boring nerds’ around them. By the time they figure out that in a knowledge-based economy the computer geek is the alpha and the swaggering scum-bag the omega, they are 40 years old and their influence over men is much more limited.

Look at this dynamic from the male perspective: Female hypergamy demands that women seek out ambitious, powerful, alpha men. The reason a lot of grown men aren’t competing in civilized ways is because that wasn’t the way they got girls when they were growing up. They either strutted about like peacocks from fling to fling, or they became undersexed nerds, invisible to the female species. Either way, both morphed into the middle-age slackers that middle-age career women find so unappealing. The only real winners in this arrangement are those males who can successfully pull off being alpha in both the primitive and civilized sense: basically celebrities (cf Alex Rodriguez) and CEO’s (cf Donald Trump). Unfortunately, celebrities and CEO’s aren’t very common, so a lot of career women end up unsatisfied, except for the occasional torrid affair with a Bill Clinton wannabe.

So there you have the end point of the sexual revolution: a bunch of single men and single women mutually repulsed by each other.

Of course, things aren’t nearly as bad as this description suggests. But to the extent that it isn’t, it is because of the old morality lingering on, in the face of pop culture hostility. It is almost as if an arrangement that evolved organically over a long period of time is superior to one that popped ex nihilo out of the ivory tower.

 But nah, that couldn’t be. For if that were the case, it would mean that our intellectuals are full of it.

 

Mitt Romney, Mormonism and Obama’s attack machine

Mitt Romney’s campaign has publicly said that they expect a nasty negative onslaught from the Obama campaign in the case where Romney wins the nomination. But I wonder if Mitt Romney realizes to what extent that they will demonize his religion to get him.

There are many Mormon beliefs that non-Mormons likely consider kooky, or that non-Mormons have a kooky understanding of: like that Mormons believe in multiple universes; that they believe American Indians are the lost tribes of Israel; that they wear ‘special underwear’; and let’s not forget polygamy. You can bet your bottom dollar that the mainstream media will contrive to find as many ways as possible to highlight all of these things – in the worst possible light, of course. So, do Mormons think that God is a UFO?

Mormon teachings are, ahem, problematic with regard to black people. You can bet your bottom dollar Mitt Romney will be asked about that: So Mr. Romney, do you agree with your church’s teachings regarding African Americans? And if he answers no, then the follow-up will be, so do you disavow your church?

And you can just bet the old leftist soldier, David Letterman, can be counted on to contribute a top ten list of the craziest things Mormons believe in.

The kind of attacks the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints will receive will be so extreme that if similar smears were directed against Muslims, the attackers would be hauled off to the International Court of Justice.

Let us not forget that our Liberal friends only believe in tolerance and diversity with regard to themselves and their allies. If anybody doesn’t belong to a liberal-allied group, heaven help them, cause the liberals won’t.

And let us also remember who Barack Obama is. Mr. Hope and Change won his first Illinois Senate seat because he had a court rule that most of the signatures on his principal Democrat opponent’s nominating petition were invalid. In a heavily Democratic district, he coasted to victory. In his 2004 Senate election, he had his surrogates unseal his Republican opponent’s messy divorce records, allowing him to skate to victory a second time.

Buckle your seatbelts, it’s going to be really nasty.