The Meaning of Manhood; Romantic Greens; & a Modern Day Moby-Dick.
In his Editor’s Column this week, Michael Walsh considered the Left’s complete inability to appreciate the nature of masculinity.
In Praise of 'Toxic Masculinity'
Like a dutiful submissive, "Second Gentleman" Doug Emhoff—husband of the soon-to-be-former vice president—recently went on MSNBC with journalist Jonathan Capehart to discuss a topic neither of them seems to know much about; to wit, genuine masculinity. In this, both males ("men" would be too strong a word) are thoroughly representative of our current, emasculated era:
JONATHAN CAPEHART, MSNBC: A moment ago I asked you about gender roles. I want to dive in even deeper on that. Can we just talk about masculinity for a moment? Has being second gentleman changed your view of perceived gender roles and what it means to be a man?
DOUGLAS EMHOFF, SECOND GENTLEMAN OF THE UNITED STATES: Oof. This is something I have thought about a lot, I've spoken about a lot. There's too much of toxicity -- masculine toxicity out there, and we've kind of confused what it means to be a man, what it means to be masculine. You've got this trope out there where you have to be tough, and angry, and lash out to be strong.
I think it is just the opposite. Strength is how you show your love for people. Strength is how you are for people and how you have their back and how you stick up for other people and pushing up and out against bullies. And that's what I believe it is. So every time I can speak against this toxicity -- we are seeing it with our younger people, we're seeing it in our discourse and politics, in the media you are seeing it as it relates to so many of the issues we are pushing back on, so I think it's a problem and I am going to continue to use this platform every time I get to speak out against this toxic masculinity that is out there.
By equating his Eloi view of maleness with the bestial ferocity of the Morlocks, Emhoff establishes a typically Leftist false premise: that males are innately predatory bullies whose basest instincts are irremediable. "You've got this trope out there where you have to be tough, and angry, and lash out to be strong." It never occurs to him that a real man is one who has those qualities but keeps them in check. It never crosses his mind that there are times when "toxicity" is precisely what's called for in order for men to protect their lives, their women, their children, their possessions, and their nations, as real men are obligated to do. To a real man, a bully is not "tough" but contemptible, and never to be admired.
Clarice Feldman wrote about the growing acceptance among environmentalists that nuclear energy makes more sense than so-called renewables.
Reality Bites as 'Greens' Embrace Nukes
It's beyond doubt that without nuclear power a nation cannot meet the current and foreseeable energy needs of its people without increasing CO2. If you listen to the environmentalist crowd either nuclear will kill you or CO2 will. It’s amusing in a way, since neither poses a significant risk to your health, and "green energy" — which is both unreliable and requires fossil fuel backups — do cause significant social and economic harm in the same way our Covid responses created real damage far in excess of their actual benefits.
Personally, I believe that we will ultimately get our energy from whichever sources can provide them reliably and at the lowest cost. In this respect it is amusing here on the sidelines to see one faction (the anti-nuclear power crowd) facing up to the other ("climate change" cultists). And the cause of the conflict is exacerbated by experience: Green energy sources, as predicted, proved insufficient to meet needs and were, as well, intermittent, which can be economically catastrophic. You simply cannot turn off countries in summer when the wind doesn’t blow or in winter when the wind blows so hard that turbines lose functionality. You cannot gather electricity from the sun when it isn’t shining.
And then there’s the Ukraine war which hammered home the foolishness of Europe's policy of relying on so-called renewables backed up by Russian oil and natural gas. It's left them with, at best, spiking gas and electricity prices, and at worst with actual energy shortages and general volatility.
It may be overly optimistic, but there are signs that the nuclear crowd are beginning to win out, something which Leftists like Ralph Nader (who nearly killed nuclear energy in the United States with his Critical Mass Energy Project), must have a hard time accepting. Indeed, it seems as if the rising cost of energy has forced people to reevaluate nuclear energy worldwide. Jenny Ping at Citi Research has demonstrated how significant and rapid has been this new attitude. Since the Ukraine conflict began a year ago, a survey of 100,000 voting-age citizens of Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the U.K. showed that two-thirds of them are in favor of nuclear power. Germany’s government may be reluctant to revisit its decision to shut down its nuclear plants (though even there 41 percent of those surveyed favored changing course) but in France, Britain, Poland, and even Belgium, there was significant uptick in support for building new nuclear generating plants.
Jack Dunphy looked at the distortions that government’s embrace of sexual confusions are bringing to crime fighting.
'Misgender' This, Copper
At the outset of a trial, the opposing parties often enter into stipulations in which both sides agree on certain facts. This is done to streamline the process and relieve jurors from hearing testimony about issues that are not in dispute. We have reached a pretty pass when, in some criminal trials, the parties cannot even stipulate to the sex of the defendant. And we have truly entered Bizarro World when a prosecutor can be punished for failing to share a male defendant’s deluded fantasy that he, the defendant, is a woman.
Currently viewing life from the wrong side of the looking glass is Los Angels County deputy district attorney Shea Sanna, who has been suspended from his position under an allegation that he “misgendered” and “deadnamed” a convicted child molester and accused murderer. The intellectual contortions and factual distortions required to arrive at the conclusion that Sanna is deserving of punishment are beyond the capabilities of anyone but the most ideologically devoted leftist, one of whom, alas, currently holds the office of district attorney in Los Angeles. As you read on, be confident it is not you who has lost your mind.
Recall the case of James Edward Tubbs, who in 2014, two weeks from his 18th birthday, sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl in a Palmdale, Calif., restaurant bathroom. Tubbs avoided arrest for nearly eight years, and when finally captured he claimed to be a woman who now went by the first name of Hannah.
Despite the heinousness of the crime, despite the fact that Tubbs was nearly 18 when he committed it, under policies instituted by “progressive” district attorney George Gascón, Tubbs was not prosecuted as an adult as the law permits in such circumstances. Instead, he was allowed to plead guilty in juvenile court and be sentenced to two years in a juvenile facility.
You are surely having difficulty grappling with the logic in this, but to understand where the left has taken us, one must untether one’s mind from what is logical. Yes, Gascón allowed a 26-year-old man convicted of sexually assaulting a young girl to be incarcerated with children. And it gets even stranger. While in custody awaiting his day in court, Tubbs gloated about the lenient treatment he would receive, even making crude remarks about his young victim. Tubbs made the comments on recorded jail telephone calls, calls which Shea Sanna, in the course of prosecuting the case, reviewed and brought to the attention of his superiors.
“So now they’re going to put me with other trannies that have seen their cases like mine or with one tranny like me that has a case like mine,” Tubbs says to his father in one of the calls. “So when you come to court, make sure you address me as her.”
Tubbs was gaming the system, Sanna told his bosses, in an effort to receive more lenient treatment. In the twisted, non-Euclidian moral universe that is the L.A. County District Attorney’s office, he succeeded. And not only did Tubbs profit from his manipulations, Sanna is now being punished for, while bringing those manipulations to the attention of his superiors, being insufficiently deferential to Tubbs’s claim of having magically transmuted into a woman. Yes, it’s Bizarro World.
Tom Finnerty contributed a blog post about the anti-scientific foundations of the Green movement.
'Saving' the Planet? Surely You Jest
The nationalist economist Michael Lind has written an excellent essay at The Tablet entitled "Why I Am Against Saving the Planet," in which he explains his objections to the Green movement. Two of these are particularly worth highlighting. First, after discussing the quite recent provenance of much of the now-ubiquitous environmentalist vocabulary, Lind pokes a hole in the Greens' self-proclaimed devotion to The Science. In fact, environmentalism is a direct descendant of Luddite, anti-scientific movements of the Romantic era:
The term “ecology” was invented in 1873 by the German scientist Ernst Haeckel, and his work owed much to his own environment of 19th-century Romanticism, typified by a bias against society and civilization and a pantheistic awe before an idealized Nature. German romantic culture is the native soil from which our own modern environmentalism has grown, and many pseudoscientific elements of popular environmentalism that are unthinkingly assumed to be rational and progressive are in fact legacies of a passionately reactionary 19th-century Romantic tradition.
One is the dubious idea of the web of life—no species of plant or animal can become extinct without harming all the rest. This is nonsense, because species have come and gone for billions of years, without necessarily causing the extinction of great numbers of other species. In some cases the disappearance of some kinds of plant and animal life has opened up opportunities for others, in the way that the extinction of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to expand into new niches.
Now, the German Romantic movement of Goethe, Schiller, and Wagner contained multitudes, much of it good, true, and beautiful. Even so, it had at its heart an anti-civilizational— think of their passion for ruins— and even anti-human sentiment, which has been magnified and distorted by their less artful descendants. And on that score, Lind also has a lot to say on the "unscientific nonsense" that's constantly peddled by the green lobby which asserts the existence of "a self-regulating ecosystem disturbed by human activity that would automatically restore itself to a “natural” condition if not for human interference."
Here’s a slightly unusual inclusion for us — Steven Hayward wrote a two-part review of David Mitchell’s 2004 novel Cloud Atlas. He read it on the recommendation of our editor, Michael Walsh, as well as the journalist Michael Shellenberger.
A Walk in the Clouds of Cloud Atlas, Part 1
The Committee of Esteemed Michaels are right: Cloud Atlas is a work of genius, though it does require some careful attention and effort by the reader, similar to James Joyce. I think it has a chance to become the Moby Dick of our age, likely read with interest a century from now and beyond. Moreover I think it is a profoundly small-"c" conservative book, explicitly rejecting the background noise of so-called “progressivism”—the twin pillars of historicism and nihilism—and defending natural right, though this is possibly no purpose of the author. Rather, like all great art, it is an imaginative mirror of nature, in this telling once again “red in tooth and claw.”
The novel comprises six separate stories and timelines spread over five centuries, each with a distinct story genre and prose style, making for an initially jarring reading experience. The first four stories feel familiar because they all belong to the recognizable past or present. The first is a Herman Melville-style ocean-going explorer’s yarn set in 1849 (there are distinct echoes of Typee and Omoo); the second is an interwar take on a striving classical composer whose eventual suicide reminds slightly of Stefan Zweig of The World of Yesterday; the third a Chandleresque thriller-suspense mystery set in 1970s San Francisco; the fourth a comic farce about a slovenly, disreputable London publisher whose later fictionalized film account of his involuntary institutionalization set in 2012 becomes an unlikely bridge to the distant future—a suggestion that it is not necessarily “classic” literature or philosophy that can command consciousness.
The last two stories are set in far distant time—one a dystopian sci-fi tale set in “New Seoul,” Korea, 200 years from now, in which genetically engineered humans known as “fabricants” exist as a brainwashed slave class to serve the materialist needs and desires of “natural” born “pure bloods.” The regime type is self-consciously known as the “Corpocracy,” guided by the ideology of “The Unanimity.” This section reads more vividly amidst our increasingly conformist universities of today, and especially in the aftermath of our recent Covid regime. (The “Corpocracy” of New Seoul is a “bio-state” complete with “DNA sniffers” to detect social deviance through biological markers.)
The prophet of rebellion is fabricant Sonmi 451 (the number surely an homage to Ray Bradbury). She is being interrogated about her views just prior to her execution by an “Archivist” who represents the Unanimity—an homage to Winston Smith’s interrogator O’Brien in 1984 just as “The Unanimity” parallels Big Brother. The Archivist asks Sonmi for “her version of the truth,” to which Sonmi replies: “Truth is singular. Its ‘versions’ are mistruths.” Try saying this on a college campus today, and watch how fast you are cancelled. The bedrock principle of the novel is the metaphysical freedom of the human mind and the importance of individual choice. It implicitly rejects all modern ideologies of a historical dialectic, the easy progressivism of “the right side of history,” and the concomitant leftist materialism that individual choice has no effect amidst the larger forces determining our future. Our universe is not simply random, reduced to matter in motion.
Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by Rich Trzupek, Peter Smith, and Richard Fernandez. All this and more this week at The Pipeline!