Sudden Increase in 'Gender Realism'

I have recently applied to a PhD program in religion, with a focus on gender and culture, and I used as my main selling point the fact that my upbringing gave me a front and center view of the way that religion was used both (1) to make people "American" and (2) to define and internalize gender norms, and (3) I have seen the way that religious constructions of "patriotism" and religious constructions of manliness go hand in hand.  I think many people with an upbringing similar to mine have had that experience.  But I have to admit, some times I'm surprised at how much norms similar to the ones under which I was raised have a reach that far surpasses the reach of the religion in which I was raised.  

I shouldn't be surprised, because I'm one of those former fundamentalists who lost their religion and then became a libertarian, and I have seen the type of masculinity that gets idealized in this corner of the political spectrum.  It's like the Baptist type of manliness, but with sin.  Not that I wasn't sinning when I was a Baptist - I was probably sinning more - but there's a brashness in libertarian-leaning conservatism that relishes looking mean and horny.  

According to Pew, Americans' views of gender became much more conservative in just the past few years.  The proportion of respondents who said that a person's gender can be different from the sex that they were assigned at birth dropped from 44% in September 2017 to 38% in May 2022, and the proportion of respondents who said that a person's gender can only correspond to the sex that they were assigned at birth rose from 54% in September 2017 to 60% in May 2022.  

As of 2014 only 25.4% of Americans were evangelical, my guess is that Americans did not suddenly start becoming evangelical or fundamentalist in these rates.  But, also according to Pew, evangelical Christianity gained a net 4% increase in adherents among White Americans during the Trump years, between 2016 and 2020.  

To me it looks like religion is a main player, but not the only player.  I think it's also important to point out that religious-like dynamics can be involved with religious belief-like norms in spaces where there is no formal religious structure present - for instance, the way my generation seems to pursue meaning through politics and astrology.  

But I think a deeper thing going on is a flight to a type of manliness where the idealized man represents strength, security, and safety.  In my view this is happening left of center just as much as it's happening on the right, and you see it not just in President Biden's vintage blue collar mannerisms but also in a younger political candidate's campaign video showing himself as a law enforcement agent against sex trafficking, as well as a loving father of White baby girls at home.  This desire for man the protector will be catered to by any venue that offers meaning, be they religious, political, or even economic.

Admissions

I am afraid I'm more of a paternalistic rice and beans state capitalist than a libertarian socialist or a champagne socialist - the latter of which is the best type of socialist to be if you're lucky.  I am afraid that we have price inflation to worry about, which is a matter of demand, and not just long term inflation, which is a matter of money supply.  Once we implement ubi, I'm afraid prices are going to shoot up just because sellers know that everyone has money to spend.  Taxing rich people to put downward pressure on the money supply might not be successful at controlling inflation when the prices are related to demand.  Of course, a lot of the noise could be political - people whose comfort depends on others being enthusiastic about putting their labor on the market have an interest in us not wanting everyone to be guaranteed some spending money.  But I'm also confident that our savviness about the self interest of rich people does not negate laws of economics.  

I want a spending policy of full employment and a higher minimum wage, and yes, I do want redistributionary taxes (aka taxes on rich people) to pay for it.  But if we want to mitigate gentrification and inflation then we need to moderate demand.  That could include what I call truth in pricing policies - policies prohibiting the display of any price other than the point of commerce price which includes sales taxes and all other fees including shipping.  I believe it should include a complete redesign of how government contracts with private business and of how private banks, which are protected by the government, should capitalize borrowers.  We like to talk about gentrification being a thing that evil real estate developers do, but we don't want to admit that the engineer at an aeronautical company browsing Zillow and the lab technician ordering ramen are among the main drivers of gentrification.  Money in your pocket is a weapon that gives you power.  (And when our state capitalist system uses the printing press - its fiat wealth-creating power - to give incredibly greater amounts of money to a shrinking group of people, it is giving a much greater amount of power to those people and those close to them than it gives to others, and it places those people in a position of patronage and everyone else in a position of servitude.  The neighborhood will look like how those people spend to make it look like.  And there will be increasing amounts of class resentment between the blue collar working class and the liberal and lucky white collar class.)

I am considering compulsory savings, for example increasing workers' payments into social security, as a way to put downward pressure on demand, and also to reduce volatility.  Supposedly middle class people in big metros are putting nothing away because of how high their cost of living is, and my guess is forcing people to save more money will force them to cut back in aesthetic spending.  Yes, it's paternalist.  Yes, most people would greatly dislike it.  But these are the choices that need to be made for these people to be economically safe and for the market system to be stable.

Untitled

The following is the first draft of an untitled short story that I started writing yesterday.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

        We were told that Moses commanded it, and since Moses is the one who talks to God, Moses' words are taken as God's.  And so we all have to line up and walk out of the camp and take turns throwing rocks at a convicted Sabbath breaker until he dies.  All you heard was he was gathering sticks for his mother.

        "Thank God he was caught before he got home," says a man in front of you.  "If she was caught lighting a fire, we would be stoning her too."

        People are singing hymns.  A lot of people are crying, especially women and girls.  A lot of people are shouting Amen or Hallelujah, especially men.

        A boy who looks eight, nine, or ten hands you a rock and says "May the Lord strengthen thy hand," and you quietly laugh because he used the archaic second person singular.

        Your hope is that the man will be dead by the time it's your turn to throw your rock.  There are so many people here, that so many people must already have thrown their rock.  The man must already be dead.

        The man in front of you throws his rock onto a large pile of rocks, turns around and whispers "Lord have mercy" and walks away.

        Now it's your turn, but all you see is a big pile of rocks.  The man must certainly be dead now.  No action from you could have been the cause of death or any harm to him.

        You pause and try to think of something good to say, like something a man in the crowd would say whenever Moses or Aaron talks -- "Praise the Lord," or "Bless God," or, like the man in front of you, "Lord have mercy" -- but none of those seem to be the right thing to say.

        You toss your rock underhanded.  It falls a cubit short of the pile.  You look around and everyone except for a woman sitting on the ground is looking at you.  You walk forward, stoop, and flick your rock with your hand.  This time it falls less than a pinky's width in front of the pile.

        You're pretty sure everyone is still looking at you.  You just don't want to turn around.

        "What do you say, Miss, should my last throw count?"  You turn to face the seated woman but she's still staring forward and completely silent.  She hasn't said a word since you got to the front, and now you're thinking she's the very last woman you should have asked that question.

        You pick your rock up again, hold it out over the pile, and drop it.  It claps when it hits the pile.

        You turn to see the boy who was handing out rocks try to give a rock to the lady sitting on the ground.  She wouldn't take it, so he sets it in her lap.  She shrieks, then wails, then falls over and lies motionless.

        It's strangely quiet back at camp this evening.  You'll grow used to the weird silence, just like you'll grow used to the heat, and to stoning other Hebrews to death.  You nibble on your ration of sweetcake and you sip your ration of water, and you look out at the red mountains around you, and you see that there is bread and water in the camp and none outside it, and you decide that, at least for now, life is less cruel with your people than without them.  And over the next forty years you will make that assessment again, and again, and again.

Corpus Hermeticum

I wanted to see what, if any, systematic theology there might be behind tarot reading. And I was struck that almost as soon as Europeans started using tarot decks for cartomancy, they attributed the practice to Egypt and the Hermetic tradition - and this was before they started putting Hebrew letters and Egyptian themes on the cards. Our scholarship of ancient and medieval religious texts has greatly developed since the 1700's, and now I am peering down into a deep, dusty rabbit hole.

Two kinds of eudaimonia

Just a quick update - I'm a eudaimonist now. And a damn statist to boot. My moral views are less Kantian than they have been in the past, and I now see "acting in accordance with our nature" as a big part of morality.

But what's "natural" for us? I agree with Mencius that the beginning of morality is the primordial compassionate urges you feel towards others. But as Steven Pinker mentions, it's more natural for us to sacrifice our self interest for family members than for a larger group - we have to socially train ourselves to include non-family into our circle.

I like the eudaimonia that's broader than merely the primordial. I generally see morality as a way to act that contributes to human enrichment, and a big part of that is an increase in human life expectancy and quality of life.

So the socialization that occurs to get people to include non-family into their circle, though not immediately natural, is "natural" enough for the purposes of my eudaimonism because it's necessary for states, which helps keep people from dying young.

When and in what order was the New Testament written?

It seems only seven books of the New Testament were written during the lives of the apostles, according to a consensus of Biblical scholars. These books are the "undisputed" letters of Paul - 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, Philemon, Philippians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Romans. All or almost all of Jesus' contemporaries were dead by the time the other New Testament books, including the gospels, were penned.

This is a relatively new perspective for Christians; but as Christians come around to this view, should they give more weight to Paul's seven letters than to the other New Testament books? If they were to, then maybe the Free Grace theology of my fundamental Baptist upbringing wouldn't seem so overstated. There would still be funny phrases to wrestle with, like "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12), but at least James wouldn't be as big a problem.

But there could be other problems. Though these seven epistles go at length about salvation by grace through faith in the crucified and risen Christ, and though they call Jesus Lord, they don't call him God, they say nothing about a virgin birth, and they say nothing about an empty tomb (though that last one might not be such a problem for the orthodox when the risen Christ is mentioned). And they don't forbid women from speaking in church, or require them to ask doctrinal questions to their husbands rather than their pastors; but to the fundamentalists' comfort, Romans does start out sounding sufficiently homophobic.

The view that Paul's seven epistles are the only parts of the New Testament written during the lives of the apostles poses a serious challenge to what I call the "Ebionite myth" - the idea popular among modern Ebionites, Black Hebrew Israelites, some liberal Protestants, and Muslims, that there originally was a purely Jewish (if subversive) Christianity that centered around Jesus' teachings rather than his death, and then Paul came and messed it up. Given that the oldest records of Christian doctrine we have are written by Paul, it gets pretty hard to say that Paul's writings about salvation by grace and atonement through Jesus' death and resurrection are a perversion of Christianity.

I bet you could learn a lot about the development of very early Christianity by studying a chronological New Testament. The most famous one right now is by Marcus Borg. He dates various books differently than does Raymond Brown, who is one of Jericho Brisance's other sources. Borg sets James earlier in the sequence than Brown does, mostly because James looks like it might be closer to earlier Christianity. (Maybe it's the egalitarianism and the "faith without works is dead." I personally think "the Father of lights" makes the book sound a bit neo-Platonic or Gnostic, but anyway Jews had been in contact with Greek and Persian religion for centuries before the author of James was born.) Also, Borg sets John earlier than Luke, which I find strange because to me John looks like the biggest weirdo of the canonized gospels. I personally prefer Brown's dates over Borg's, but Borg's book looks worth the read.

Is Disbelief in Free Will Bad for Society?

The June issue of Scientific American contains an article by Azim Shariff and Kathleen Vohs about the social impact of skepticism about free will (if you can't pay $5.99 for the issue, you can read the full article for free at Learned Citizen). Based on some surveys and studies that have been done, it seems two things could happen to people when they doubt free will - they could want less prison time for criminals, but they could also put too much hot sauce in the food of people they don't like. In other words, they could get less vengeful in theory but more vengeful in action.

The authors write that as more people loose belief in free will, one of three social effects could result from this: we could get a more merciful justice system that emphasizes crime prevention over retribution; we could descend into anarchy; or, as Voltaire said about God, we might feel we have to re-invent belief in free will.

The third possibility sounds a little fascinating and reminds me of Kant's philosophy of religion during his critical period; but I question whether it's best to promote belief in an idea that the scientific community supports less and less.

I grant that ideas can rightly be weighed in part by their social effect. But I wonder if there are long-term costs, including opportunity costs, to keeping foundational beliefs that science increasingly puts into question. The social benefit of having lots of free will believers who are individual responsibility, law and order types might be outweighed by the social cost of not basing our justice system on an accurate view of human nature. These social costs could include higher rates of recidivism, the costs born by the victims of that recidivism, and the public costs of pursuing, trying, and imprisoning re-offenders.