Academic corruption 2: Emasculated culture

Saturday summers, when I was a kid
We’d run to the schoolyard, here’s what we did
Pick out the captains, choose up the teams
It was always a measure of my self-esteem
Cause the fastest, the strongest, played shortstop and first. . .

“Right Field,” Willy Welch (popularized by Peter, Paul and Mary)

I enjoyed this podcast with Joyce Benenson, about her book, Warriers and Worriers. She and Roy Baumeister are the rare social scientists who see that (a) men and women differ on average in their behavioral tendencies and (b) male tendencies are not all bad.

Her book is grounded in observations of young boys and girls. My memories of my boyhood align perfectly with her picture of boys, and with the song lyrics above. We played team sports without supervision, put a lot of effort into setting rules, and competed to demonstrate skill. When we weren’t playing sports, we imagined ourselves fighting the “bad guys,” either in the Old West or in World War II.

One of her ideas is that men have a social strategy that works well in war: organize unrelated males, fight other groups overtly according to rules, then reconcile after battle. Women have a social strategy that works well for protecting their individual health and the health of their children: emphasize safety, covertly undermine the status of unrelated females, and exclude rivals rather than reconcile with them.

This leads me to speculate on the consequences of adding a lot of women to formerly male domains. Over the past several decades, a number of important institutions that were formerly almost exclusively male now include many women: academia, journalism, politics, and management positions in organizations. These institutions increasingly are discarding the values that sustained them when the female presence was less.

1. The older culture saw differential rewards as just when based on performance. The newer culture sees differential rewards as unjust.

2. The older culture sought people who demonstrate the most competence. The newer culture seeks to nurture those who are at a disadvantage.

3. The older culture admires those who seek to stand out. The newer culture disdains such people.

4. The older culture uses proportional punishment that is predictable based on known rules. The newer culture suddenly turns against a target and permanently banishes the alleged violator, based on the latest moral fashions.

5. The older culture valued open debate. The newer culture seeks to curtail speech it regards as dangerous.

6. The older culture saw liberty as essential to a good society. The newer culture sees conformity as essential to a good society.

7. The older culture was oriented toward achievement. The newer culture is oriented toward safety. Hence, we cannot complete major construction projects, like bridges, as efficiently as we used to.

I think that in each case, the older culture was consistent with male tendencies (what Benenson calls “warriors”); the newer culture is consistent with female tendencies (what she calls “worriers”). Keep in mind that men can have worrier personalities and women can have warrior personalities, but those are not the norm.

Overall, we have made institutions harder for warriors to navigate. College no longer helps men to make the transition to adulthood. It keeps them sheltered and controlled, and after graduation they end up living with their parents.

Why did opening up opportunities for women lead to this outcome? One can imagine other outcomes. Perhaps women would have assimilated into the male culture, adopting some male tendencies in the process. Perhaps women and men would have retained their different behavioral tendencies but agreed to accommodate one another.

Instead, both men and women seem to have agreed that a purge of male tendencies is in order. Some women scorn male values as tools of oppression, and most men would rather accommodate this view than voice disagreement.

I note that the readership of this blog appears to be overwhelmingly to be male, at least based on those who leave comments. Note also that this is the long-postponed “cancel-bait” post.

86 thoughts on “Academic corruption 2: Emasculated culture

  1. I would not have guessed that this is “the long-postponed “cancel-bait” post.” I wouldn’t be surprised if it fails to garner the attention and outrage you expect.

    I predict no one will be able to come close to canceling you over it. Like all real predictions, this one could be wrong. We will see.

    This post seemed interesting and reasonable to me but bit speculative and untestable in the way that most sociology is.

    • *This* is the cancel bait post? I would not have guessed it. Perhaps time will bring to light hidden land mines that will detonate without warning.

      A paradigmatic confirmation of this as cancel bait would be the following. Professor Kling comes to be eventually be stripped of his academic affiliation by a committee of female administrators.

      The following could be the milestones of that series of events.

      1. Viral panic instigated by angry twitter mob, with the most vocal antagonists apparently female based on their twitter handles.

      2. Gossipy and inaccurate “hit piece” NYTimes _Magazine_ article (cover story) written by a female journalist (ideally B.S. Economics, Yale, ca. 2018) who never heard of Prof. Kling until a few weeks earlier and doesn’t seem to know his work.

      3. “Is Arnold Kling racist?” speculations later follow in NYTimes and WaP. Professor Kling sues for defamation and loses.

      4. Eventual banning of Prof. Kling from academia, final determination made by decision makers who are women.

      • Not sure whether this is tongue in cheek, but I don’t believe Arnold is in academia, so this scenario isn’t happening (particularly 4). I don’t think Arnold is well known enough for (2) or (3) either.

        I think the biggest thing is it’s difficult to cancel someone who is retired and unaffiliated with any institution. At some level, members of any potential mob recognize this, which puts a damper on anything from taking off.

        If Arnold worked at Google or was editor of a journal or something, it’d probably get him fired.

        As is, here is an alternative cancel test with a much lower bar: whether Patrick Collison keeps him on his list of interesting people whom he regularly learns from. My guess (92%) is it’ll remain unchanged. Yeah, this is mostly because PC being a busy guy who prob doesn’t update his site regularly, but also because this post is not that big of a deal.

        • Thanks for your comment. I’m not sure what my point was–I just wrote according to my intuition, trying to imagine a “worst case scenario.”

          According to the internet,

          “Arnold Kling is a Senior Affiliated Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He specializes in housing-finance policy, financial institutions, macroeconomics, and the inside workings of America’s federal financial institutions. He also is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC. ”

          Your point is a good one–I’m not sure what the difference is between being “Senior Affiliated Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University” and having an adjunct position there. It’s not clear to me.

          Getting back to what I wrote, in case anyone cares…

          My scenario was whimsical but not frivolous. I composed it on short notice–I think my goal was a thought experiment to imagine the exact set of unfolding circumstances that would be most consistent with the hypotheses that (1) cancel culture exists in academia, (2) women especially drive it, (3) bad hit pieces are written in the NYTimes by people who seem not to have read or at least understood the work of the person they are criticizing, and (4) accusations of racism are often made frivolously and without obvious penalty by the NYTimes.

          and also, (5) a lot of university administrators seem to be engaged in punishing individuals at the behest of Twitter mobs by firing or expelling them. And also, (6), Economics is taking a “road to Sociology.”

          Cancel culture is new enough that it’s hard to pin down. Some of the victories seem to be symbolic. What exactly happened to Joseph Epstein, for example? If he has not been a lecturer at Northwestern University since 2003, was he cancelled? Beats me.

          https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2020/12/joseph-epstein-statement/&fj=1

    • Points 3 to 6 strike me as a bit of stretch. Witch hunts, moral panics, and pressure for conformity aren’t exactly a new development in human history. Relative to 90s and 00s era liberalism I might agree.

      I’m not sure it’s really a gender issue either. I don’t think women have meaningfully more political influence now than they did 30 years ago.

    • To expect any given ‘cancel-bait’ to result in cancellation is to show you misunderstand the newer culture, and reflects the reflexive rule-based reasoning of the older culture.

      Cancellation is not about the content, and requires flexibility (this is how you see people getting canceled for things that were printed without remark in the New York Times just years before, and is a feature not a bug), because it is about the ‘mean girls’ social dynamics of coalitional warfare and social ostracization. Cancellation is when enough enemies of that person feel that the relative strengths have shifted that they are able to coordinate and team up and be victorious; it is the knife in the back when your friends join the condemnation, while assuring you in backchannels they feel sorry for you and wish they could speak out on your behalf but just can’t oppose the tide. It is about creating a vicious feedback loop, causing one’s allies to retreat and surrender, and best of all (which is why they insist on it so much) when the victim apologizes and grovels.

      If an activist objected to everything cancel-worthy, it would fizzle out and they would be the boy who cried wolf – their objections reveal nothing useful about the hidden social dynamics and ebbing strength. One must bide one’s time, waiting for the critical moment to strike: enough allies, or an additional incident, or a vulnerable period like a tenure application. When you look into these incidents, if there is enough documentation and insiders spill the beans, there is usually someone who has something to gain: a rival or underling, frequently. That high school student recently who held onto a compromising video for years until the victim announced her top college choice had accepted her (but not in a legally binding way), and struck *then*, showed that he understood this perfectly. Or consider the Papa Johns ouster.

    • Professor Kling might be thinking of me, an economist at Indiana University. I retweeted a quotation from an article titled something like “Why Women are Destroying Academia”. It was picked up and criticized by a women’s dating site called “SheRatesDogs” with 400,000 viewers. Business School Dean Idalene Kesner and Campus Provost Lauren Robel freaked out and issued a call for confidential informants to turn me in so I could be properly disciplined. Beware the scholar who offends the ladies’ magazines.

  2. I am female, and this is the most original and interesting insight I have heard on the sexes since listening to Roy Baumeister on EconTalk.

  3. You’d be canceled if you were an untenured academic at a top 50, or an actor, or in Silicon Valley. But race is the third rail, and you didn’t touch it here.

  4. “5. The older culture valued open debate. The newer culture seeks to curtail speech it regards as dangerous.”

    About ten years ago I saw a Gallop poll that showed around 55% percent of men supported free speech whereas 45% of women did and thought this alone was all the explanation that was needed to see why America’s high standard of free speech would eventually end in the U.S. It won’t be known for a long time if it comes back due to other shifts in attitudes.

  5. Arnold;
    Just for your potential discussion – the Army was told to suspend the implementation of the new physical fitness test because

    1. it would discriminate against women
    2. it would force out many non-combat specialties (cyber, medical) – lack of training time, increased injuries/risk of injuries, etc.

    The response is to change the HR system so that low scores for women have less impact on promotion. May have unintended consequences in those non-combat specialties…

  6. Another difference that I have noticed is that men are much more tolerant of “arrogance” in males than are women. Also, it is very rare for a female to be described as arrogant.

    • Well yes. One of the many differences between men and women is that the insults are different even when the behavior being criticized is similar.

    • My general experience is that haughty individuals aren’t particularly well liked regardless of sex.

    • Here is my favorite story about an arrogant guy. Actually, both of the guys in this story are pretty arrogant.

      This story illustrates how distinguished physicists, even when they won the Nobel Prize for the Quark theory such as Murray Gell-Mann, can make mistakes like you and me (mostly you).

      I have heard it all. Since I have lived in the US, I have heard my name pronounced in all kinds of interesting ways “Yawn Lee Koon”, “Yen Leh Kahn”, “Yan Lee Chun”. All kinds of badly programmed computers thought that “Le” was my middle name. Even the science citation index knew me as “Y. L. Cun”, which is one of the reasons I now spell my name “LeCun”. Telemarketers call my home asking for a “Mr or Mrs Cun”, to which I respond “there is no one by that name here” and hang up. The confusing morphology of my name has some advantages, like receiving colorful junk mail in chinese or vietnamese, receiving telemarketer offers for cheap international phone service to china, and even being on the mailing list of AT&T employees with Asian origins.

      So where does my name come from anyway, and how is it pronounced?

      My name is pretty typical of Bretagne (or Brittany as it is known in English), the western part of France that sticks out in the Atlantic Ocean. The indigenous population there has Celtic origins, just like the Irish, Welsh, and Scotts. Some people still speak the local Gaelic language called Breton.

      “Yann” is the Breton form of Ian/John/Jean/Jan/Johannes in Irish/English/French/Dutch/German. The French pronounce it “Yahn”, but the real Bretons pronounce it “Yawnn” with a short “awn” and a long “n”.

      “Le Cun” derives from the old Breton form “Le Cunff”, which means something like “nice guy”, and originates from the region of Guingamp in northern Brittany.

      Back to Murray Gell-Mann. I was once at a very interesting workshop on the Physics of Computation at the Santa Fe Institute. At the break, Murray Gell-Mann, who was sitting accross the table from me, told me: “your name is Breton, isn’t it?”. Not realizing that his favorite hobby is linguistics, I complimented him on the breadth of his culture. He then asked “How do you pronounce your name?”. I said “Le Cun” with the nasalized “un”, which sounds kinda like the “uh” in “huh?” (in other words, the “n” is silent).

      He paused for a minute and said “There are no nasalized consonnants in Breton”, then added with the assertive tone of a Nobel-prize-winning Caltech professor “your name cannot possibly be pronounced that way”.

      Many scientists (myself included) take a sadistic pleasure in proving other people wrong, but here he was telling me how to pronounce my own name. I was so flabbergasted by so much chutzpah (pardon my French) that whatever I knew about the Breton language was temporarily obliterated from my cerebral cortex. I just sat there for a while with my jaw dropped on the floor. The only response I could come up with was “uh, my grand-father pronounces it that way, and uh, he can speak some Breton, so it must be right.”

      Not only are there nasalized consonnant in Breton, Professor Gell-Mann, but there is a veritable deluge of them. In fact, you would have a hard time finding another language with so many nasalized sounds.

      For a minute, I was impressed though.

      Incidentally, be advised that Murray Gell-Mann gets upset if you do not pronounce his name Gell Mahnnn (with a hard “g” and a long “ah”), but pronounce it Gelmin, or Jelmin instead.

      http://yann.lecun.com/ex/fun/

      • Wow. Just wow. I always admired Gell-Mann’s work (and I do know how to pronounce his name). What a prick.

        I do not see any arrogance in Mr. LeCun (or Le Cun)’s side of the story, and I’m glad he left out the horrible jokes the French kids must have made about his “blue” sounding name in middle school.

      • There’s a mental quirk named for him that uses the ingredients in that story, but in a slightly different way…

  7. The old culture valued open discussion and competence?
    Have you ever been in a corporation or the army?
    The only values are blind obedience, craven submission and competence in backstabbing your colleagues.
    As Winston Churchill once said to a meeting of admirals:”The only traditions of the Navy are rhum, lashes and sodomy”.

    • Untrue, my experience in the military was very different. We had little support from above but had to adapt and innovate solutions to a wide variety of crises. It built resilience and a problem solving mindset

    • Yes, I have been in both corporate and military environments. Males will argue over everything. Not always against your superior – that’s rarely welcomed in the military – but there’s a good and specific reason for it.

  8. I think there’s a lot of merit to this perspective. I would also add a couple of comments:

    1. I think men are more comfortable with hierarchies, either social or professional, form them naturally, and are better able to keep them stable, because they have a better intuitive grasp of what one’s obligations are to those above and below them in the hierarchy (also because disrupting the hierarchy can result in violent retribution, so tread carefully, son). Institutions don’t work well without clearly established lines of authority and divisions of responsibility, and I perceive dysfunctional or disrespected hierarchies as a cause of institutional breakdown.

    2. That said, I don’t know if I’d say male psychology is quite as chivalrous or honorable as you’re making it out to be. I think men are just as likely to want to banish rivals as women, at least in some contexts, if not more so. Remember Machiavelli’s maxim: enemies are to be caressed or destroyed.

  9. One objection that I have is that characterizing many of the “old culture” features as “male” may be interpreted by some as somewhat of a (in my view unwarranted) concession to post-modernists, critical theorists, etc. Things like meritocracy, open debate, rule of law, liberty are best viewed as universal values of liberal societies, at least in our Enlightenment-based “natural law” tradition. It’s the post-modernists that chide our intuitions as biased by (oppressive) Western culture, etc. I think it would be a mistake to inadvertently give credence to notions that meritocracy is sexist, for example, or that “math is racist” (as the most extreme critical theorists have tried to claim).

    “covertly undermine the status of unrelated females, and exclude rivals rather than reconcile with them”

    Tempting to see the roots of cancel culture here. However, censorship and cancel cultures appear universally throughout history in many male-dominated societies. (That’s why our Founding Fathers felt the need to enshrine the First Amendment in our Constitution in the first place.) The original McCarthyite, Joe McCarthy himself, was not only biologically male but certainly at least tried to project a “masculine” image.

    In my view, still best to view “old culture” vs “new culture” instead as liberal vs. illiberal in a framework of Enlightenment reason understanding and constraining (hu)mankind’s baser instincts.

  10. The reason why this got this way is to be found in this post.

    The whole stance is passive. A whole lot of writing on what happened to men, and almost nothing on what Men have to actually do to successfully deal with the inclusion of women.

    Obviously things needed to change, but women have worked a lot harder than men at figuring out how to do this.

    • I am unconvinced that men have lost the strategy of initiative. Crypto, IT, AI, flying machines are mostly male dominated visions. Male societies are doing quite well, in the near term, incorporating female decision making and are better off.

      In the end, it comes down to birth rates. But that’s a problem East Asia has with very different sociological parameters than our own. Much of sociology is biology, which is universal. Less physically demanding work, including more synthetic computation, means biology responds by allocating resources elsewhere (“use it or lose it”). As “productivity” goes up, so birth rates decrease; more allocation to economy, less to home & hearth.

      Eventually the women who believe that they weren’t able to enter the workforce and are achieving something will die off with no offsprings, and the women who knew all along that they were more than capable, but choose to build the next generation, will survive & thrive, even if they suffer severe short term penalties.

  11. I have worked in nearly-all-male, mixed, and nearly-all-female environments. The differences are of kind and not of degree. They are consistent, profound, and undeniable across almost any dimension and to anyone with eyes to see, but more to the point, obviously originate in the natural and normative inclinations and predispositions of the modal colleague.

    The attitudes regarding the purpose, usefulness, and best manner of conducing meetings could not be more opposite. The corporate cultural equilibria which emerge from these tendencies are simply not at all equally competent at accomplishing every kind of mission. One will be better for some things, the other will be better for other things.

    It seems to be ok to say that a group of men would be worse than a group of women at accomplishing one particular task. It is not ok to make the equal and opposite true claim, and certainly not to try to do anything about it. As an inevitable consequence and cost we must bear for ideals, we end up tolerating a certain amount of mismatch and dysfunction.

    • Yes, men and women are very different. I remember seeing an interview with the male coach of what I think was the first world championship American women’s soccer team. He was asked if it was different coaching men and women.

      As best I remember he said, “Oh yes. If I say to a locker room of men that not everyone here is pulling their weight, every guy in the room is convinced I am talking about the other guy. If I say the same thing to a locker room full of women, they each feel like they have been singled out for abuse.”

      Even so, in my experience women tend to be much harsher when judging each other than they are when judging men.

      • “Even so, in my experience women tend to be much harsher when judging each other than they are when judging men.”

        I’ve definitely seen that. But it’s complicated and depends on particular details and circumstances.

        But in the scheme of things, I’d rank “harshness of judgments”, and whether applied fairly or not, pretty low on my list of “Sexually disparate tendencies which, when manifested in the overall corporate culture, are really harmful to the accomplishment of certain missions.”

        • >—“But in the scheme of things, I’d rank “harshness of judgments”, and whether applied fairly or not, pretty low on my list of “Sexually disparate tendencies which, when manifested in the overall corporate culture, are really harmful to the accomplishment of certain missions.”

          You are probably right about that but I really can’t tell what type of missions you are referring to. I’d be interested to hear more about your experience with that.

          I’m retired 13 years now but for the 30 years before that I owned and operated a store selling mens clothing and shoes. I hired almost exclusively women. Men tended to think the job was below them even when they were under performing the women employees. They didn’t stay long. We found that, by offering women as much flexibility as we possibly could to tailor their schedules to their family obligations, we got a lot of loyalty from them. That fringe benefit just wasn’t valued the same way by men.

          The point is, I had a long time to watch the way women interacted with each other at work. Men tend to naturally form and be comfortable in hierarchies. With women it is very important to them to see themselves as part of a more collaborative group with a lot less emphasis on who has authority and who is subordinate (especially as regards to other women). This worked very well for us but I can see how the trade offs could run the other way in some corporate situations.

          Long ago I also played in a lot of local tennis tournaments in men’s and mixed doubles for about 10 years. The norms around athletic competition were very different for men and women especially in regards to making claims about your own skill. It was considered by everyone to be perfectly normal and even a bit expected for men to engage in boasting before and after matches. If women engaged in any of that they were despised by other women and this resulted in feuds between them that the men sometimes failed to even notice.

          I liked mixed doubles for a number of reasons. Not the least of these was that, if you lost in men’s doubles, your partner tended to blame you. If you lost in mixed doubles, your partner tended to blame herself.

  12. To paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt, no one can cancel you without your permission.

    I have observed that most “cancellations” these days are done in show trials, with “Darkness At Noon” confessions and abject grovelling of the defendant.

    What would happen if people fought back? Shane, come back!

    • This is why every ambitious young person needs two goals. Goal 1 is to earn “F*** You” money, to be free to pursue goal 2 without social pressure to conform.

  13. Your soul forgot her joys, forgot
          Her times of teen;
    Yea, this life likewise will you not
          Forget, Faustine?

    … …

    What sterile growths of sexless root
          Or epicene?
    What flower of kisses without fruit
          Of love, Faustine?

    – Swinburne, Faustine

  14. Good post; I’m glad you put it up. I suspect you fly under the radar of the paladins of cancel culture, and will suffer very little.

    As for politics: The “nanny state” has an obviously feminine cast, but what do you make of the (apparently masculine) tendency of the U.S. to fight little wars in hotspots around the globe?

  15. This post would get you cancelled instantly were you a professor at pretty much any university or college not called George Mason or Hillsdale.

    If you posted it in a series of tweets, you would probably be put on a time out for a week in order to convince you to take them down, and on refusing, have your account terminated.

    If you wrote in a company e-mail, you would be fired within a week.

    If you work with children not your own in the blue parts of Maryland, it is likely your work with them will be questioned and ended within a month or two, after an investigation is launched.

    I doubt you are big enough to get cancelled by WordPress, but it does happen to others.

  16. One of the most fascinating books I have read is “Self-Made Man” by Norah Vincent. Vincent decided to disguise herself as a man for a year, with the intention of learning more about males and then writing a fascinating book about it. Among other things Vincent sought out male bastions that were generally closed to females – a bowling club, a monastery etc. One of the things that amazed her were how men were focused on excellence rather than dominance. She joined a bowling club but she was a terrible bowler. Even so, men on her team encouraged her and didn’t shame her, and a few times men from the competing team came over to her and gave her tips on how to improve her game. (Even though money was riding on these games.) Vincent writes that women don’t naturally act this way. I am not qualified to judge if Vincent is right but it fits right in with what Arnold is getting at.

  17. Instead, both men and women seem to have agreed that a purge of male tendencies is in order.

    Isn’t it something more like ‘women and just enough men to form a majority’ who have agreed? It may even be a minority, but a loud and insistent-enough one to get its way, no?

  18. An old Hollywood there was an expression, “Include me out”

    To this post I say, “Cancel me in.”

  19. Based on personal experience working as an expat in a former communist country many years ago, opening up opportunities for women (which had occurred under the communist system) did not lead to this outcome there. I’d say the work culture was a mix of the second and third outcomes: some exceptional women assimilated into the male culture, while others accommodated. But political correctness hadn’t taken hold there, and still hasn’t, as far as I know.

  20. Roy Baumeister’s book Is there anything good about men? is my favorite book about gender differences and I’d recommend it to anyone who is interested in learning more about the ideas in this post.

    One specific thing he notes IIRC is that women for the most part have not themselves formed large organizations and imbued them with a feminine-oriented culture. Instead, they have sought inclusion in organizations that men initially created and then sought to change the culture of those organizations.

    • Status envy causes people to want to get into high status fields and positions. One thing to notice is the question of which scenario gets more enthusiastic and fawning press attention: a mostly female-worked company, or a mostly male-worked, but female-*led* company, like Theranos or Ebay or Facebook (kind of, it’s not like Zuckerberg wasn’t calling the shots).

  21. “Why should I remain in a country that is on the eve of woman’s suffrage and prohibition?” Ambrose Bierce

    I read this quip twenty or thirty years ago, and wondered if this was some kind of prophetic utterance by a sage who was concerned about the ultimate consequences of making the rules of our morals the products of our reason, or just an old crank trying to get a reaction out of someone.

    I personally prefer a social order based on reason and egalitarian norms, but it’s a garden that we’ve cultivated in very thin topsoil atop evolved tectonic plates with their own rigors and momentum.

    I’m increasingly concerned that the ultimate product of the enlightenment will be a culture that reasons itself into extinction once it’s finally supplanted the emergent with the designed.

  22. Princeton went coed while I was a student there. Before in most courses our grades were determined mostly by 3-hour-long final exams. When women came they pressured professors to assign and give a lot of weight to term papers, I believe because of risk aversion. They could assure themselves a good grade by writing an extremely long paper, which I suspect might often go unread.

  23. Listened to the podcast and totally agree. I’d like to ask her: what are the factors that make people more likely to behave atypically for their sex? Obviously inherited capacity for health, strength and hormonal function will play a role. But I also wonder if having very high or very low intellectual capacity is a factor. It seems to me I know a lot of high IQ people who don’t play their own sex’s game, as it were, either because they don’t intuitively understand it or because they wish to transcend it.

  24. It seems to me there’s an assumption (sometimes implicit, other times less so) of this post: older culture = good, newer culture = bad. I think what is missing is the focus on transition and how such transitions are inherently messy until an equilibrium is established (though that isn’t a foregone conclusion). Not sure how good of a comparison it is, but I can’t help but think of religions and how they tend to be more disruptive (ie, violent) in the early phases and less so over time.

    • ps, I think the following (just one example of several) is another instance where the OP harms his overall point and likely repels readers who might otherwise be open to it.

      “College no longer helps men to make the transition to adulthood. It keeps them sheltered and controlled, and after graduation they end up living with their parents.”

  25. I greatly enjoyed the linked audio interview with Joyce Benenson.

    I’m disappointed that this was Kling’s long anticipated “cancel-bait” post he had been teasing. Most normal people would nod and agree with the gender differences. Kling isn’t influential enough to be targeted with a big coordinated cancel effort like say, Gina Carano.

    I’m sure some of this does explain today’s woes of academia. The solutions still seem similar. I’d still like simpler mechanisms for pursuing education and job training and measuring and certifying skills.

  26. “The older culture uses proportional punishment that is predictable based on known rules. The newer culture suddenly turns against a target and permanently banishes the alleged violator, based on the latest moral fashions.”

    Maybe you simply thought the punishment proportional when you disapproved the punished. Now that people you approve of are being punished, you think it is disproportionate punishment. Al least, I do not see what was so proportional about blacklisting Hollywood leftist in the 1950s or disgracing Turing. Funnily enough, especifically about extra-legal punishments (blacklisting and the like), Conservatives used to mantain they were just free people exercising their freedom of association (and dissociation).

    • I have always wondered why Turing didn’t go back to Princeton, where he earned his PhD and where his homosexuality wouldn’t have been nearly as serious a problem as it was in England at the time.

    • I think it’s true that homosexuals were “cancelled” by the community at large during the early part of the movement, but I think we (as a homosexual) should be equally concerned that this same tactic is now being used as a weapon by the homosexual community against others.

    • I recently saw it claimed that nearly everyone who was blacklisted really was a communist. I would think that that being blacklisted was not a excessive punishment for supporting Stalin.

    • Jason, I don’t recall you as having commented before, so you may be new to this blog. You are totally wrong to accuse me of having changed my views based on who is being canceled. It is true that the “older culture” that supported free speech was, back in the day, on the left. Conservatives were wrong back then, but I was not a conservative back then. I spent most of my life on the left, and as I drifted to the right I kept some of my old-left values. Free speech is prominent among them.

      • “Conservatives were wrong back then”

        The conservatives opposed free speech exactly when precisely? Please provide examples. Or, is this just another trope from the libertarians somewhat similar to how they like to call the conservatives the party of Jim Crow and racism. Please.

          • From the link…

            “A culture of free speech does not mean that you have to share your personal space with people with whom you disagree. But trying to ruin their lives is quite a different matter.”

            As you know, it’s more complicated than this. Example: Did Google try to ruin the life of James Damore or did they just decide to voluntarily disassociate from him? Likewise, many people chose to voluntarily disassociate themselves from alleged communists. Is that ipso facto anti-free speech? If so, how so?

            You and I may not like the results under either scenario, but here we are…freedom of association vs. free speech.

            For the record: Absolutely, no disrespect intended and I’m sorry that I hit upon a tender moment in your family history. That was not my intent.

    • Were people who merely supported homosexual rights, as opposed to engaging in homosexual acts, ever punished?

      Were people who merely support communism, as opposed to being an agent of the Communist Party (which, remember, was a Russian-funded organization devoted to overthrowing the US government) ever blacklisted?

  27. I think the trend is easily explained: there are more worriers in the population (men and women) than there are warriors, so the new culture is comfortable to more people. In an environment of plentiful “good enough” products and outcomes, it’s OK to be mediocre and compliant.

  28. 1, 2, and 3 seem to betray some inexperience with actual corporate culture (I’m assuming ‘management positions in organizations’ includes corporations). It might be my industry, but every company where I’ve been employed (and the ones I’ve encountered through my networks) has had rigorous performance reviews – more rigorous than what I experienced in the military decades ago. #2 seeks to present a contrast, but the two aims in #2 aren’t incompatible – it’s quite possible to both seek competence and nurture the disadvantaged to build new sources of competence. Industries with talent shortages are doing this today. #3 fails to appreciate that a lot of work, knowledge-based work especially, has shifted from the individual to the team in many large corporations – the ‘new’ corporate culture doesn’t disdain the individual standout per se, but does disdain the individual standout who can’t work effectively within and across teams.

  29. Are you self-hosting this blog or do it via WordPress.com? If its the latter, you might want to look into moving out to your own server ASAP, in case someone attempts to pressure WordPress to cancel you.

  30. I’m sure Black America would be fascinated at the notion that “older culture” was so devoted to liberty and predictable, proportionate punishment, just as GLBT America would love to know that “older culture” valued standing out so highly. This “older culture” was of course not just male but also straight, white, and Christian, and it wasn’t merit that made it a monolith. It was actively excluding people of competence, not seeking them out. Those people outside the “older culture” were only admitted because they fought for their admission. You can’t make a compelling argument that “Ladies are infecting male institutions with their ladyness!” without addressing either how those women got into those institutions or why they weren’t there before, let alone without addressing how those institutions have simultaneously been forcibly opened up racially and otherwise. There are intelligent criticisms of cancel culture to be made, but this is just a thinly-disguised elegy for the monolith of old.

    • The difference between the old culture and the new SJWs is that the older culture realized that its abuse of power was a bug, but the SJWs think of their abuse of power is a feature.

      • A couple questions about this:
        1) Can you give evidence to support that the older culture realized its abuse of power was a bug? It’s an honest question.
        2) Not sure what to make of the statement that SJWs think their abuse of power is a feature. I suspect SJWs would object, but I’m not sure. Regardless, might this be a timing effect? That is, how long before the older culture came to their realization? Have the SJWs continued in their abuse longer than the older culture?

        • Read any history of the Civil Rights movement. Many whites participated.

          If you read current debates about the filibuster, one point that is often made about it is that it prolonged Jim Crow. That is because the majority of (whites) in both houses of Congress were for Civil Rights decades before legislation passed, but it was blocked by the Senators from the Solid South (solid because all of them were Democrats).

          • I don’t understand this response. The original post was about masculinity (old culture) and femininity (new culture). I realize that SJW brought in the issue of race, which may have resulted in us talking past each other. Regardless, I asked (1) for evidence that the older culture realized the bug, and (2) whether this comparison of older vs. newer culture might be leaving out the issue of timing (ie, age of the culture). I’m honestly struggling to understand how your response addresses either of those issues.

    • This “older culture” was of course not just male but also straight, white, and Christian, and it wasn’t merit that made it a monolith.
      ————————-
      In 1969 straight white men put a man on the moon when engineers had to use sliderulers. Now we cant agree on what bathroom to use as a culture, you call that improvement? Look at Detroit before and after the civil rights movement, look at the daily shootings in Chicago, the mass homelessness in Los Angeles, the government debt. You really think things are improving?

  31. This whole post is a kind of alternate reality. A few comments:

    [1. The older culture saw differential rewards as just when based on performance. The newer culture sees differential rewards as unjust.] Differential rewards are THE defining and growing feature of our current economy and organizations. The discomfort is with both the corrupting scale of the differential, and also that the “performance” of so many is rooted in the achievements of their parents and community. The backlash against that is a kind of enhanced individualism – what have you done yourself that demonstrates your brilliance and drive. From a company perspective, it takes long term vision – how can we find the people who are brilliant and driven when they’re (we’re) up against the wall, and don’t just look like they’re brilliant when the budget’s plump and everyone is on their side. If sales are good and you’re interested in next quarter and/or your org is heavily dependent on connections, go head and hire the prep school kid (who is likely smart and driven enough, to be clear). If you’re interested in weathering storms 10 years out, maybe dig a littler deeper in the talent pool.

    [2. The older culture sought people who demonstrate the most competence. The newer culture seeks to nurture those who are at a disadvantage.] Same as above. First, no, it doesn’t. Sat in a VC meeting lately? Looked at the pedigree of most politicians and CEOs? Second, nurturing the disadvantaged is a way of discovering and enabling talent. It’s a deadweight loss to everyone if whole groups or regions are working menial jobs for structural or historical reasons. So the smart money says let’s look closer at that group or region and make sure that everyone with with ambition has the tools they need to get into knowledge work (mechanic, technician, tradesman, etc. are all knowledge work too).

    [3. The older culture admires those who seek to stand out. The newer culture disdains such people.] I take it you’re unfamiliar with social media, talking heads, cable news, TED talks, puff pieces, and the rest of the prestige celebrity circuit? Publicly, we love stand outs. In a company, we do to, but there’s no point bragging because everyone else is just as good – ego just doesn’t fly in peer meetings. “Oh, YOU delivered a project? Great, so did everyone at this table, every single year.” And in those rare cases where talent is truly extraordinary? You get acqui-hired for 50mil.

    [4. The older culture uses proportional punishment that is predictable based on known rules. The newer culture suddenly turns against a target and permanently banishes the alleged violator, based on the latest moral fashions.] Blacklists and exclusion are not new. The difference is that whiplash media/comms results in whiplash exclusion. And the charges in many cases (not all by a long shot, to be clear) are more defensible. Instead of “corrupting the youth”, it’s “your colleagues and clients don’t want to work with you anymore because they find your views odious”.

    [5. The older culture valued open debate. The newer culture seeks to curtail speech it regards as dangerous.] See above. We have more debate on more topics being done by more people right now than at any point in history. That a narrow set of views on a specific topic have come in for a lashing lately isn’t a swing of the pendulum, it’s just an unfortunate reminder that we’ve still got some work to do.

    [6. The older culture saw liberty as essential to a good society. The newer culture sees conformity as essential to a good society.] I’m having trouble putting my finger on this putative “older culture” that didn’t brutally enforce conformity. Time was, in our own Anglo-American past, you could be beheaded for going to the wrong church, or be lashed for wearing the wrong hat. You can be more non-conformist today than at any point in history, though I regretfully acknowledge that there do still seem to be a few norms that will get you a slap on the wrist if you break them. Maybe do a quick refresher on the early days of America, both the cultures that were built here and what they were running away from.

    [7. The older culture was oriented toward achievement. The newer culture is oriented toward safety. Hence, we cannot complete major construction projects, like bridges, as efficiently as we used to.] First, safety rules are just a tiny part of long construction timelines, which can be seen by fast(er) project times in Europe. Maybe we can shoehorn “trying to please everyone” into “safety” (call it caution), and then we agree. Second, this goes back to MORE individualism. The bridge worker realized that he didn’t get anything out of dying on the job, so he asked for a rope, and didn’t care if it meant a slower, more expensive bridge. If your idea is that we should all be willing to take on much greater risk of death and injury in order to build faster and bigger (or invent more), you might actually be able to make a reasonable utilitarian argument taking into account the value of future lives, but that’s typically a hard sell.

  32. The Masculine vs. Feminine description doesn’t seem to hold up when I think about historical analogues to “Cancel Culture”. Maybe it’s so much milder that its incomparable to the Cultural Revolution or the Reign of Terror or the Reformation and Inquisition, but history is full of cultures that took on this sort of cannibalistic dynamic.

    Someone posted recently that “The Right is always seeking converts and The Left is always seeking heretics”. I think that’s true now, but I think it’s evident that it’s not historically constant. And of course, you can see situations where the roles were reversed (e.g. the Nazis).

    Thus, better, and more generalized question is what conditions make “witch-seeking” profitable?

    • Hitler spent huge effort in making converts. He purposely downplayed anti-Semitism and up-played anti-Communism 1931-33 so as to attract conservatives and centrists. It’s unclear whether we should call him “Right” or not, though— his party was anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, and anti-nobility, though he also downplayed all those things during that period.

  33. The comments, for the most part, are as interesting as the initial claims.
    Papa Kling writes ‘the older culture’ and ‘the newer culture’.
    Are these generalizations applicable to historical trends, or only reflective of present circumstances?
    The fear of ‘feminization’ is a major theme in ‘Huck Finn’.
    But modern feminism has devolved into an ugly war-between-the-sexes divorce proceeding.
    The SawStop table-saw owes its surge in popularity not to its other fine features, but to the fact that the blade will slam to a stop if a finger nears the blade. It is a wonder. But it is really out there as far as shop safety needs. And, as woodworkers have noted, it is the kind of thing that makes all other tools more dangerous as a result. (Akin to the seat-belt problem.) This is an expression of creeping risk-aversion. And blindness to the law of unintended consequences.
    But I know that masculine crazy is still celebrated. Did professori not see the video of the guy a few weeks back who cleaned his driveway of snow with a homemade flame-thrower?
    Righteous!
    “Hold my beer!” is still uttered on occasion.
    ‘Animal spirits’, for you Keynesians.
    Trump inspired ‘animal spirits’ in the lower orders. Biden is the continuation of secular stagnation. Pelosi v Trump has been like watching Detective John McClane versus Connie Corleone (GF3 incarnation) in some inspired skit.

    What terrifies me is the abandonment of reason. (If mathematics is ‘racist’ then what of the syllogism?)
    And humor.
    And courage.
    And charity.
    (God cannot be abandoned. God is life.)

  34. So the difference between men and women is that men are team-playing, self-sacrificing egalitarians and women are greedy traitors. First of all, it is correct to label such a thesis “cancel-bait”. Secondly, this narrative effectively blames gender equality for all the problems caused by economic inequality. Nice rhetorical shift if you can manage it.

    I prefer a simpler explanation: Peter Turchin’s secular cycle theory. It suggests that increased competition over fewer resources is sufficient to produce the effects of economic inequality and societal disunity. No need to invoke the unnecessary middleman of “feminized culture”.

  35. This post would be made instantly better if you changed the structure of each point to something like, “The older culture aspired to…”

    There is always a disconnect between who people tell themselves that they are and who people really are. The former is important, but the latter is maybe more so. I would go so far as to say that much of what defines the “new culture” is the realization of all the ways that the “old culture” was lying.

    • There is always a disconnect between who people tell themselves that they are and who people really are. The former is important, but the latter is maybe more so. I would go so far as to say that much of what defines the “new culture” is the realization of all the ways that the “old culture” was lying.
      ——————————
      But the goal of inclusiveness is not just to make us all pliant cogs in the machine. As Mr. Kalb himself notes, the regime takes savage pleasure in crushing dissent. The moral thrill our rulers get from “fighting bigotry” is surely more important to them than the possible efficiencies of running a society of robots rather than people. The regime’s highest psychic reward is self righteousness.

      The trouble is that the forms of exclusion and hierarchy the regime forbids are founded on real differences; there are reasons why “marginal” groups are marginal. Once the regime has decided that differences don’t matter — or are “social constructs” — it denies reality:

      Any flaws in the groups promoted from the margin to the center are whitewashed, the more glaring the flaws, the thicker the coating. AIDS has sanctified homosexuality, Muslim terrorism has made Islamophobia a horrendous sin, and black dysfunction has led to the insistence on the hipness and nobility of blacks, the stupidity and tackiness of ordinary whites, and the sterility and oppressiveness of white society.

      When reality conflicts with ideology, ideology wins. If high standards exclude blacks or women, they cease to be standards and instead become acts of oppression. Education means “closing the gaps,” because all groups are equal.

    • “Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue”. It’s actually crucial whether a society aspires to free speech, or says it’s a bad thing.

  36. The older culture saw liberty as essential to a good society. The newer culture sees conformity as essential to a good society.] I’m having trouble putting my finger on this putative “older culture” that didn’t brutally enforce conformity. Time was, in our own Anglo-American past, you could be beheaded for going to the wrong church,
    ———————-
    I remember the beheadings of the 1950s well.
    ————————————-

    The search for bigotry stretches into the past. Every person who lived before the reign of inclusiveness was a brute, so our elites can safely look down on everyone who is dead. Aside from formerly “marginalized” groups that are now America’s special pets, history has nothing for us to admire; only gradations of benightedness.

  37. I’m sure Black America would be fascinated at the notion that “older culture” was so devoted to liberty and predictable, proportionate punishment,
    —————————–
    more blacks have been shot by other blacks in the last 18 months in the city of Chicago than were lynched in the 80 years of the Jim Crow south. Italians were also lynched in the Old South in roughly proportions to their propensity to commit crime, a fact even the NAACP admits. Homosexuality was discouraged in the not so distant past because it is a disease vector – 10 years after sodomy was decriminalized we had the AIDS crisis. 70 percent of criminals come from single mother households.

  38. Doesn’t it seem like the masculine/feminine strategies you describe apply to the competition between the strategies themselves, explaining the losing position of the masculine outlook?

    The “masculine” strategy tries to defend its own virtues against the “feminine” strategy by playing openly and according to rules (i.e. trying to debate facts and pointing to its achievements, being willing to compromise/reconcile)… and loses to the feminine strategy of covert undermining and exclusion (i.e. appeals to emotion, character assassination, cancel culture).

  39. You’re very first claim, that most social scientists reject the empirical fact that males and females (generally) have different behavioral tendencies, seems unlikely to me. While I’ve noticed a frankly strange refusal of many to acknowledge biological differences between the sexes, it seems to be that both laypeople and academics are increasingly focused on behavioral ones. Popular concepts like “toxic masculinity” rely on the existence of these distinctions. Over-hyped studies about how men are more likely than women to cite themselves rely on these distinctions. At the moment, male-traits seem to be devalued, but the basis of that devaluation is seemingly a (new-ish) preference for female-traits (i.e. the behavioral tendencies distinction is assumed).

    The initial framing seems to undercut that first claim as well–I’m not certain how a) most social scientists could reject the claim that men and women have, on average, different behavioral tendencies while contending that b) male tendencies are generally bad.

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