SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES, AGAIN PT. 3

   "I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you."-- God to Eve, Genesis 3:16.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          This familiar Biblical phrase testifies to the ease with which many men and women in traditional cultures validated the discrepancy of power between male and female. Genesis never says anything about the possibility of men ruling simply because they have more physical power, or even that they should rule because they're the ones who sally forth to defend home and family from dinos and dragons and the like. Eve allowed the serpent to beguile her, and Adam transgressed as well because of her, so Eve's female children must defer to their husbands while her male ones will labor to "till the soil." After that the question of male and female power is dropped to get into the Cain story in Genesis 4. We don't read about any particular "contrary desires" on the part of wives-- who function mostly to breed-- until Genesis 21:10. There Sarah more or less orders her husband Abraham to kick out the bondswoman Hagar and her son by Abraham, so that Sarah's child will occupy the catbird seat. So Sarah takes primacy as the first post-Eden female to master the Power of the Nag.                                                                                       

                                                                                                               Of course, there will be various other conflicts of "contrary desires" in various parts of the Bible, and I think it a fair generalization to say that a lot of them come about because of the conflict between "men of violence" and "women of sex," for which the narrative of Samson and Delilah stands as an archetypal example. On occasion, as with the tale of Jael and Sisera, the woman is able to use sex to once more beguile the violent male into lowering his guard. So at long last, I'm making the claims that from these "contrary desires" are the source of "the blues" I see rising from the exigencies of sexual dimorphism.                                                                               

  Even for those with a strong religious belief, the dimorphism of the sexes must seem a very arbitrary decree by God, especially since said decree is not expressly recorded in the Bible. It's even more so from the POV of the evolutionist, who can only argue that in their archaic development into homo sapiens, women remained smaller and less able to defend themselves because (say) their function of raising children remained paramount. Either way, archaic or modern, the physical inequity remains a foundational fact of life. This leads to psychological inequities rooted in compensation, with the woman being a nag to the man and the man being a bully to the woman. And yet, the history of religions does indicate-- as I argued in the SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE series-- that human beings have sometimes been able to invert the expected roles, imagining the archetypes I termed "the Barbarous Woman" and "the Compassionate Man." I don't have any solution to any of the grievances that arise from the embodied inequities of the two sexes. But I will repeat, just to be clear, that mere representation and opposition to the "status quo" functions more to exacerbate the suffering than to alleviate it.                                                        

SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES, AGAIN PT. 1

I style this essay "again" because it's not a "Part 2" to the original SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES, which was simply a review of a non-fiction book based in bad pseudo-feminist ideology. It recently occurred to me that the same phrase would apply much better to the cultural "blues" that come about as a result of real and perceived issues stemming from sexual dimorphism. If anything, this post might be a loose sequel to the following statements from SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE, PART 2.                                                                                    

   

My re-interpretation of Nietzsche's "will and willingness" would not quite fall into the trap of viewing men as entirely active and women as entirely passive. Yet Nietzsche's dichotomy does apply in a more specific biological sense: male humans are biologically positioned to specialize in violence (a rough analogue to Nietzsche's "will") , and female humans are biological positioned to specialize in sexuality (an analogue to "willingness," up to a point).

I specify "humans" here since my main concern is human expression of its own propensities and limitations. Yet the biology doesn't start with human beings, but applies to the majority of humankind's nearest simian relations. With some exceptions, the so-called "great apes" follow the example set by a majority of birds and other mammals in that most male apes possess greater size, about 25 percent larger than the females. This gives the biggest ones a generally greater capacity for imposing their will, either on females or on other males. Meanwhile our nearest DNA-relations, the common chimpanzees, seem to have stolen a march on their earlier relatives by becoming experts in sexual promiscuity, in a "willingness" to indulge in sex for purposes not entirely defined by procreation.                                                     

Now, the purpose of the SACRED AND PROFANE series was to explore male and female archetypes rather than the sociological stresses of culture, but I'm still seeking to build on the dissonance created between the sexes when one of the two incarnates "will" and the other "willingness." At least this Nietzschean metaphor applies to all species in which the male is bigger and the female smaller, thus excluding outliers like the black widow spider and the blue whale. To be more specific, though, only human females, with their control of the estrus cycle, can be deemed "masters of sex" as all the big male creatures are "masters of violence." These metaphors for evolutionary abundance are, I admit, not in line with the dominant evolutionary dogma. As I am a Gene myself, I do not approve of Richard Dawkins' theory of a bunch of selfish genes that just want to keep making copies of themselves. I much prefer the Stuart Kauffman concept of coevolution.                                                 

   "...at the high risk of saying something that might be related to the subject of consciousness, the persistent decoherence of persistently propagating superpositions of quantum possibility amplitudes such that the decoherent alternative becomes actualized as the now classical choice does have at least the feel of mind acting on matter. Perhaps cells "prehend" their adjacent possible quantum mechanically, decohere, and act classically. Perhaps there is an internal perspective from which cells know their world."-- Stuart Kauffman, INVESTIGATIONS, p. 150.                                                                                                                                                            Kauffman here is speaking only of evolutionary alterations at the cellular level, and so I do not know if he endorsed the notion I'm loosely stumping for here: that fully formed organisms might "prehend" the need to change to suit a particular physical challenge. The relevant challenge here would be the response of both males and females to females' diminishing outward signs of the estrus cycle, which in turn came about once human females needed to bond males to them for the purpose of nursing children, which in turn became more neotenous than many mammalian offspring in reaction to bipedal evolution. Males' greater propensity for body mass might have been genetically encoded by their anthropoid precursors, but said propensity may also have been reinforced once males were more regularly competing with one another for sexual opportunities.                                                                                                                                                                                                                     And that's enough on sexual dimorphism theory. Part 2 gets into the "Blues" part.                                                                                             

HETERO FORMATIVE

The idea that sex functions to provide variation for natural selection to act upon was first advocated by August Weismann and it has dominated much discussion on the evolution of sex and recombination since then...  In summary, although Weismann's hypothesis must be considered the leading candidate for the function of sex and recombination, nevertheless, many additional principles are needed to fully account for their evolution.-- NIH abstract.

All normal human beings have soi-distant mixed-up glands. The race is divided into two parts: those who know this and those who do not. --Robert Heinlein, FRIDAY, 1982.

I haven't written as much as I used to about the excesses of academic "queer theory" since the Hooded Utilitarian site closed down. But HU's demise was not an indicator of a general trend. This is confirmed by a recent jeremiad from London's School of African and Oriental Studies regarding philosophers who were too "white" and "heteronormative."

SOAS, perhaps after thinking deeply about this for the past seven years, is now reviving the debate. It has issued a “toolkit” for secondary schools and universities who wish to teach philosophy (although you’d hope that other universities would have ideas of their own)... The toolkit sets out its position from the start. “Much academic philosophy in the UK, US, Australasia and continental Europe masks its structural antagonism to everything that is not white, bourgeois, male, heteronormative and able-bodied,” it begins. The document continues along very much the same lines for 27 pages.-- Roland White, THE TELEGRAPH, 2024.

The only possible defense for anyone to use a term as stupid as "heteronormative" is that they've allowed their minds to be polluted with Mickey Marx bullshit, and the knee-jerk inclusion of the word "bourgeois" confirms as much. And this narrow-minded, neo-chauvinist screed is rendered even more fatuous than usual when one views "normative sex" through the lens of evolutionary theory.

On a slight tangent, I read a lot of academic film criticism in the eighties and nineties. I'm not sure when I realized that almost all of the critics worshipped at the altars of either Marx, Freud, or some syncretic combination of the two, possibly to be named "Marfreud." Film critic Richard Grenier was a welcome exception. While I didn't agree with every essay in Grenier's 1990 collection CAPTURING THE CULTURE, he made clear how much the academic world had been influenced by Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who used the phrase "capture the culture" to describe the devious social conditioning of the bourgeoise. Grenier wittily pointed out that modern Leftist academics were just following the same program Gramsci projected upon "normative" culture, by undermining everything that "normals" valued. An example, from some book whose title I forgot long ago, was the assertion that the "romantic clinch" seen at the conclusion of countless Hollywood movies was merely a social construction designed to please the bourgeoise-- which was stupid even if the forgotten author didn't use the word "heteronormative."

I probably read that lunkheaded judgment sometime in the nineties, long before anyone thought of using four-or-more letters to mainstream the idea of "homonormative" pride. But even then, the judgment struck me as amazingly presumptuous. If there was no heterosexuality, there would be no human race to give birth to new offspring of any sexual proclivity. Heterosexuality was not something that existed to shore up non-Marxist values, as one might argue with some logic regarding racism. Nevertheless, some thirty years later, Marxists are still whining that if most of the world still trends boy-girl, it's a terrible sin against the Marxist ideal of totally capturing the culture so that homosexuality of one kind or another becomes "the norm."

Now, had evolution not chosen the path of heterosexual conjugation as August Weismann theorized, asexual reproduction might have continued, but there's little if any reason to suppose those life-forms would have arisen to their current level of complexity. Thus heteronormativity, which gets such massive disrespect, is the factor that promoted the immense variety of life-forms on this planet.

Now stating that fact in no way supports real bigotry against any of the many paraphilias-- which includes LGBT etcetera in my book-- that also evolved alongside vanilla old hetero sex. Contrarian conservative Robert Heinlein was certainly being facetious when he had the fictional characters of his novel speak of "mixed up glands." I largely included the quote because I happened to reading FRIDAY for the first time while planning this essay. Yet even back in the early 1970s, Heinlein somewhat charted the course for many non-Marxists, who simply looked upon "gay rights advocates" as justified in their rhetoric, striking back against a chauvinism that often made the homosexual paraphilia illegal. This aspect of history should always be acknowledged, not least for the many abuses perpetrated by various types of heteronormative chauvinism. But the answer to one chauvinism is not another chauvinism, and statements like those of the SAOS are nothing but a chauvinism that exaggerates the significance of homonormative behavior at the expense of the entire range of human sexual behavior.

I feel sure, for example, that there exist other persons with non-homosexual paraphilias who view their sexual persuasions as being just as opposed to "the normal" as are homosexual paraphilias-- but some if not all of these may be able to produce offspring. For instance, a macrophiliac who's stimulated only by very tall women may not have a large range of potential mates, but mating and producing offspring is not impossible. But if he (and it's usually a "he") only gets stimulated by literal giants, then he will probably contribute no more to the gene pool than anyone confined to purely homosexual hookups.

 But paraphilias like macrophilia will never get courses devoted to their kink as universities, partly because most of them keep a much lower profile than LGBT. A truly liberal philosophy would embrace all sexual variations-- with the obvious exception of the one that will and should remain illegal-- without regard to who's given the most attention by lunkheaded academics.

READING AGAINST REALITY: NOTES, LAST PART

 In the last couple of days I was able to finish the remaining portion of Donald Hoffman's CASE AGAINST REALITY. One reason is that it's both an easy read and just a little over 200 pages. But the other reason is that I could skip over a lot of Hoffman's fine points about tests of perception. This sort of slow case-building is necessary in science. But it wasn't strictly necessary for me to grasp his main thesis: the idea that all human perception is seen through the matrix he calls an "interface," as opposed to the common notion that "what we see is what there is." Hoffman's main concern is to demonstrate the superiority of his interface model, and for most of the book it appears he has no interest in inquiring into whatever aspects of reality that we, as products of evolution, are not privy to.

In the next to last chapter, "Scrutiny," Hoffman repeats examples from earlier chapters regarding creatures whose evolutionary instincts, which should promote fitness, may lead them down blind alleys. One prominent example is that of the Australian jewel beetle, which came near extinction because the males kept trying to mate with beer-bottles which resembled the markings of female jewel beetles. However, in an earlier chapter this was presented as no more than a comedy of mating errors. In "Scrutiny" the author goes a little further, claiming that fitness-conditioned entities as a whole cannot help but prefer "extreme" versions of normative stimuli, termed "supernormal stimuli."

Astute readers of this blog (or, more likely, of the works of Joseph Campbell) should recognize these two words. I believe Campbell first used the term in his 1959 book PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY, and he derived the phrase from ethological writings of his time. I printed a representative excerpt from said tome in my 2012 essay VERTICALLY CHALLENING. I'm not surprised that Hoffman doesn't mention Campbell, but his only footnote on the stimuli-subject is for a 2010 book that uses that very phrase for its title, SUPERNORMAL STIMULI. Maybe that book properly credits the ethologists of the 1950s. 

Now, Campbell did make a somewhat similar argument, that on some occasions certain creatures seemed to prefer the more "unnatural" stimulus. Hoffman, perhaps in line with his 2010 source, goes so far as to claim that ALL creatures do, including humans. "A male Homo sapiens doesn't just like a female with breast implants as much as a female au natural: he likes it far more." His footnote for this and similar assertions also cite the 2010 book, but whatever that work's data, I find the conclusion fatuous. I have no doubt that Hoffman embraces the notion because it supports his general theory regarding the limitations of fitness-based perception.

Only in the last chapter does Hoffman venture some thoughts about the excluded perceptions. I was sure that, even though he makes a brief reference to Kant, that Hoffman had no interest in either Kant's philosophical project or any of the religious systems to which Kant was somewhat indebted. What I did not expect was that his version of excluded perceptions would sound not unlike the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.

The claim of conscious realism is better understood by looking in a mirror. There you see the familiar-- your eyes, hair, skin and teeth. What you don't see is infinitely richer, and equally familiar-- the world of your conscious experiences. It includes your dreams, fears, aspirations... the vibrant world of your conscious experiences that transcends three dimensions.-- p. 186.

And here's Whitehead writing about his version of "conscious experiences," almost a hundred years ago:

There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt. Also there is nothing which belongs merely to the privacy of feeling of one individual actuality. All origination is private. But what has been thus originated, publicly pervades the world.-- PROCESS AND REALITY.

However, philosophy is not Hoffman's metier, and he proves it later in the same chapter, when he cites this statement by Richard Dawkins:

Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims.

Immediately after, Hoffman says:

I agree with Dawkins. If a system of thought, religious or otherwise, offers a claim that it wants taken seriously, then we should examine it with our best method of inquiry, the scientific method.

A little later, Hoffman claims that his "conscious realism" system might effect a "rapprochement" between the worlds of science and spirituality. But how could any detente be forged if science alone, even one based in Hoffman's "case against reality," is in the driver's seat? 

I understand that for scientists, religion's history of infringement upon "existence claims" like those of Galileo cast a long shadow. But if Hoffman really valued what he terms "conscious experiences," the hallmarks of a consciousness not yet explained by current science, then he might have seen that a religious "existence claim" is substantially different in nature from one of science. A story about humanity's origins in the Garden of Eden does not compete as an "existence claim" with the story of evolution. The latter is about viewing the universe as what Whitehead called "inert facts," allegedly objective evidence. The former is about the full range of subjective human feelings, extrapolated into a system of mythopoeic correlations.

And so Hoffman's case fails in the light of superior testimony by Alfred North Whitehead. But Hoffman's argument is at least less polarizing than that of science-worshipper Dawkins, and so the court of public opinion may see a better thinker come forth to forge the desired rapprochement.

MYTHCOMICS: "EVOLUTION GOES HAYWIRE" (WONDER WOMAN #9, 1944)

 

For my second "March to Womanhood" post, I return to the well of Classic WONDER WOMAN. To be sure, this one is a good bit wackier than the last time I looked at a Marston WW story, the highly imaginative ICEBOUND MAIDENS. This time Marston, instead of producing a free flow of mythic and religious images, chose to riff on a "haywire" vision of evolution.

Kicking off the adventure is a mama gorilla who's lost her baby and decides not to go through the usual adoption process to obtain new offspring. Wonder Woman, in her Diana Prince ID, happens to witness the child-napping and pursues the angry anthropoid, who just happens to make tracks for nearby Holliday College.

The gorilla barges into the classroom of Professor Zool (short for zoology, apparently), who just happens to be giving the Holliday Girls a lecture on evolution, and about his new invention. The gorilla breaks in and tosses some students around, but the Amazon Princess outwrestles the beast with the help of the girls, who just happen to have lots of ropes lying around in the classroom. (Hey-- it could happen!) Steve Trevor, whose niece was abducted, wants to put down the damn dirty ape. Zool suggests an alternative: he can use his "electronic evolutionizer" to change the unruly critter into a human being. Presumably Zool has been waiting to come across just the right test case. Everyone's okay with it, including the zoo people, even though they stand to lose an expensive attraction.

And so we get the origin of long-lived WW foe Giganta. Though she attains a human physique, she pretty much forgets about having lost an ape-child but retains an unreasoning hatred of Princess Diana. They fight, and in the scuffle the evolutionizer is damaged, and we get William Marston's "magic wand" theory of evolution in detail.

I jest, for I'm sure Marston didn't think any evolutionary process could be turned backward, nor did he think he was infecting young minds with any such beliefs. Turning back time was just a fun way to illustrate said process, with crocodiles becoming dinosaurs and so on. Wonder Woman and her buddies, who look about the same but have supposedly devolved to cave-people, flee one of the dinos. They run into Giganta again, but the she-ape has no use for Women's Lib, and won't live with a "tribe led by a she." She seeks out a patriarchal tribe and immediately finds one in the "Tree People," so I guess the evolutionizer threw everyone back to a period when human ancestors were just starting to leave the trees for the ground, and these Tree People are the holdouts. Of course in no real-world model of ancient times were those tree-dwellers any sort of humanoids, not even "Missing Links" like the ones shown here. Apparently the Tree People, whom I presume to be modern citizens devolved by the machine, acquire a race-memory of antagonism toward "Cave People," even though the only cave-tribe they ever see is Wonder Woman's little band.

The Tree Men capture the 20th-century cave-dwellers and threaten to sacrifice them. Wondcr Woman once more demonstrates female agency by defeating a devouring dino, and that's pretty much it for the caveman fantasia.

After a few more challenging incidents, Zool gets his machine running again with a little help from Ben Franklin-style science. But with the next jaunt forward,  the time-travelers appear in a period of Greek history that most moderns consider purely mythical: "The Golden Age, when the world was perfect." Naturally, for Marston this is a time when there are no hierarchies between the sexes, and one that discourages the acquisition of wealth. 

Giganta, the savage who reflects the aspects of modernity Marston dislikes, allies herself to the "lower classes," who are individuals who like to accrue wealth. Giganta seduces them into wanting rulership as well, and though the Golden Age is not meant to be identical to the Garden of Eden, it's no coincidence that the rebels speak of gaining "the knowledge of good and evil." Wonder Woman eventually quells the rebellion but the queen sadly observes that, "The Golden Age is over-- people now know they can be wicked if they choose."

Moving into a new phase, but without another time-jaunt, Queen Darla's peaceful rule is challenged by male subjects who think that their superior strength entitles them to supremacy. Wonder Woman easily defeats the lead challenger, and for good measure the heroine scoffs at the man's wife for wanting to take pride in her man's might. However, the woman's perspective shows a chink in Marston's system. The author perhaps couldn't conceive that some women, not being aggressive or martially inclined, might want men to be dominant on the assumption that this made a tribe stronger-- which in a broad sense was true for most of human history.

In any case, this sort of negative "woman power" unseats Queen Darla. She and a small coterie join Wonder Woman and friends in seeking to found a new kingdom. Since they end up in a location geographically comparable to that of the Amazon kingdom, Marston probably meant Darla's voyage to be comparable to the later journey Queen Hippolyta takes to found Paradise Island. This would make Darla's group the ancestors of the Greek Amazons, despite the former's lack of martial tendencies. This is illustrated when Giganta once more activates the evolutionizer, flinging Wonder Woman's group into Greek Amazon times. In due time the heroine comes face to face with her own mother, thousands of years before Diana has been "born." Hippolyta explains that the city of Amazonia faces attack by the army of Achilles, at least partly because the Amazons sided with Troy against Greece. 

Most of the Amazons are off hunting husbands-- one of the few times Marston drew on the family-making customs of the warrior women-- so Diana suggests that Hippolyta send runners to bring the fighters back to Amazonia. In the meantime Wonder Woman challenges Achilles, another representative of patriarchal rule, to single combat. She wins, the other Amazons arrive to drive off the Greek army, and the adventure gets a quick wrap up, implying that the 20th century is freed from the evolutionary backstep and that everything goes back to normal. 

For some reason, though, the evolutionary erasure does not apply to Giganta, though her actual fate is left up in the air at story's end. The gorilla-girl only made one other Golden Age appearance. In that tale, it's disclosed that Giganta, like other WONDER WOMAN rogues, was sentenced to an Amazon reformatory-- until a group of lethal ladies break free to menace Princess Diana as "Villainy Inc." Given that she's a gorilla, in this story Giganta takes on an interesting "serpent in Eden" persona as Marston guided his readers through his narrative of the "rise and fall of sexual equality."

READING AGAINST REALITY: NOTES PT 2

 I've finished Chapters 3 and 4 of Hoffman's CASE. I'm getting very strong indications that he's not concerned with disclosing aspects of the reality that human, fitness-oriented senses cannot disclose. His main concern seems to be for countering the dominant opinion that human senses endow their owners with a selective advantage. Future chapters may address what this does or does not alter about humans' place in the evolutionary chain of being.

Two interesting quotes I may use in the future:

The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual world as in the physical. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.-- Thomas Henry Huxley.

This accords with some of my perspectivist essays regarding the freedom to make choices depending on particular circumstances.

There is, as we have discussed, genetic drift -- the chance spreading of a neutral allele, which has no effect on fitness, throughout a population. This is more likely in smaller populations. Such drift, some claim, accounts for most of molecular evolution. It is possible that today's neutral drift might, as niches change, become tomorrow's game changer. -- Hoffman, p.71.

If one extends the principle of the "unexpectedly useful allele" to that of the "unpopular philosophical concept" or "obscure literary trope," one could make a good case for a scientifically supported take on "the stone the builders rejected."

 

 

READING AGAINST REALITY: NOTES

Though a lot of my philosophy-oriented posts read against simplistic conceptions of reality, whatever notes I make in this possible series are my responses to a 2019 book by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, THE CASE AGAINST REALITY. I don't know that I will finish the book, but after two chapters I already have some comments to record.

Roughly three centuries ago Immanuel Kant argued that human beings do not see reality "as it is," that they only see a series of "phenomena" which do not represent the conceptually known "noumenon" beyond human sense. Hoffman uses evolution to argue a theory that our perceptions are in large part an "interface," and that this interface came about in order to promote the fitness of the human subject.

Hoffman defends his thesis fairly well in the opening chapter, though of course I can't yet judge the full extent of his logic. But in Chapter 2, "Beauty," Hoffman seems to lose track of his own argument.

So there's nothing new about the idea that human genetics are responsive to socially and biologically determined perceptions of beauty. Like many lower animals, the humans in which all those genes reside often privilege various physical attributes, considering them indicators of good health and thus worthy candidates for mating. In Chapter 2, Hoffman focuses on just one indicator of both youth and good health: that of the eye. Apparently he either did detailed research on this attraction-factor himself or chose to focus only upon this single factor. But, given that in human culture there are a fair number of artifacts celebrating the beauties of the eye, it's a fair example.

However, though CASE is Hoffman's fourth published book, he throws out some unjustified statements. On page 30, he states that "a woman's fertility is not the same as her reproductive value." They certainly sound like the same thing to my ears, but Hoffman doesn't offer a solid distinction. He further remarks that a woman at 25 may be more fertile than she was at 20, but that at 20 her reproductive value was greater. What? Why? Is he assuming that the 25-year-old is simply going to turn out a few less offspring because she's five years older? That seems a reach.

On the same page he states the truism that older males who want offspring are more likely to seek younger females, rather than older ones, because of the former's superior fertility. So far, so expected. But then he makes the unsubstantiated claim, which he claims has been supported by "experiments," that "Men over twenty prefer younger woman. No surprise. But teen males prefer women who are slightly older." Hoffman supplies a footnote to a study that presumably supports this conclusion. But he himself does not explain the conclusion, or why he believes the purported evidence is relevant to his primary assertion that males select mates based on physical markers indicating fertility and fitness.

I can think of social and/or psychological reasons that "teen males" might seek older female sex-partners, and I assume anyone else can do the same. But Hoffman's trying to prove that sexual selection is determined by physical indicators, to support the genetic interpretation of how beauty is reckoned. He didn't even need to speak of what teen boys like to make his main point. My impression is that he knew of the cited research and wanted to reference it, but didn't realize that it was an unnecessary side-point.

That's my only note so far. More may be coming.

VERY NEXT DAY ADDENDUM: Though Hoffman does not mention Kant or his "noumenon" thesis anywhere in the first two chapters, the subject comes up in Chapter Three. There Hoffman quotes from correspondence he maintained with the famous biologist Francis Crick of "double helix" fame. Crick brings up the Kant conception as a way of illustrating the difference between what humans perceive, and the reality that may be beyond their ken. Not sure if Hoffman will pursue the comparison except to illustrate various scientific positions re: perception.

CHAOS OVER ORDER PT. 2

 This essay won't discuss any of the authors mentioned in Part 1, and in fact it deals less with "impossible things" than "unlikely things." The stimulus for this essay was a blogpost dealing with a vaguely "evolutionary psychology"  approach to what I called in 2019 "the pervasiveness of the Amazon archetype."  Said blogpost, however, did not in my opinion make any valuable observations, so I'm not troubling to cite it.

The image of amazon-like women in world cultures are not all subsumed by the specific Greek myth of the Amazon tribes. Some figures evolve from purely polytheistic concepts of war-goddesses like Athena and Anath. Others may evolve either from figures believed to be real, but actually purely legendary (the Chinese Ha Mulan), to those clearly rooted in history, like the pirate Anne Bonny. The element most of these would have in common would seem to be females who in some way challenge males on the field of battle, and so would not include other archetypes like sorceresses (Morgan Le Fay) or women who kill men with deception (the Biblical Jael, who lulls an enemy general into sleep and then kills him).

That said, one may fairly question the provenance of the Amazon archetype. I've stated that I can engage philosophically with the archetype, whether it's rooted in any historical reality or not, simply because the archetype reverses the expectations of normal life. The norm, even in prehistorical eras, would have been the division of labor arising from sexual dimorphism. Even in tribes where the men might not have been much taller than their women, the men always had greater body mass thanks to testosterone, and this hormone usually, though not universally, encouraged males to be the foremost protectors of their respective tribes against marauding males from other tribes, or from predacious animals.

By and large, it seems likely that most females in all eras accepted the division of labor, not least in the belief that offspring were best nurtured by the female of the species. If there were individual women of this or that tribe-- what moderns sometimes call "tomboys"-- who pushed back against the division of labor, seeking to compete with men in various ways, no feminism existed to champion their outlying nature. Archaic women are as likely to have been just as conservative as archaic men, condemning any females who deviated from the norm.

Given this likely tendency toward conservatism from both genders, then, why would any archaic tribespeople come to imagine goddesses of war, which is at least part of the makeup of the Greek Athena and the Ugaritic Anath? 

Though the pure appeal of "unlikely things" could be the reason for the appeal of the archetype, there's one "evo psych" influence that might have provoked the development of the archetype, and that is the influence of the Ha Mulan/Anne Bonny type, the woman who joins male ranks to fight alongside them for whatever reason. 

To the extent that tribes all across the face of the Earth have always been fighting with one another for supremacy, it's not impossible that "women warriors" fighting alongside men, possibly in disguise more often than not, could be a cross-cultural phenomenon that spurred the equally cross-cultural archetypes of "warrior goddess" and "Amazon society." A few societies may have normalized the participation of worthy females alongside males, such as the Brazilian woman-warriors whose storied existence led to the naming of South America's Amazon River. The roving tribes of the Scythians, which allegedly included both horsewomen and horsemen, is often nominated as a real-world source for the Greek myth of a society ruled by dominant female warriors.

I'm familiar with only one resource that went into great detail regarding the widespread phenomenon of women fighting in the battlefield with men: Jessica Salmonson's 1991 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMAZONS. I read the book long ago, and primarily remember some interesting narratives regarding women who fought in male guise during the American Civil War. I have not found any detailed reviews of the Salmonson book online, only this indirect disparaging comment in the course of reviewing a separate book about "women in war." It's quite possible that Salmonson's book is not well sourced. However, since I'm concerned more with the archetype than with real history, even stories with no basis in real history, like that of Mulan, are relevant to my line of thought.

It's not demonstrable that "women warriors" were a continuous presence in any historical society. For all we know, even the horsewomen of the Scythians might have been a temporary aberration from the norm of whatever "nurturing vs. protection" division of labor existed in Scythian society over the centuries. However, as I said primitive societies were liable to being attacked more often than not, and that could have eventuated in the irregular but consistent appearance of "tomboy heroines." Greeks and Romans sometimes explained individual warrior-women like Camilla and Atalanta as virgin huntresses devoted to Artemis/Diana. But there need not be a specific allusion to religion. In some versions of the Brunhilde story, she seems to be a mortal woman despite being termed a "valkyrie." Her strength is such that she can easily repulse the advances of the weakling warlord Gunnar, though not those of the hero Sigurd, who in one iteration masquerades as Gunnar, overpowers Brunhilde in the marriage bed, and so deceives her as to Gunnar's masculine prowess, causing her to marry an unworthy man.

In the fantasy-novel THE LADIES OF MANDRIGYN, a group of women have to train themselves to fight men to achieve a particular goal. In the course of that training, author Barbara Hambly has the trainer impress the women with a crucial difference between the sexes, to wit: "Women fight because they have to; men fight because they want to." But even if one takes that as an absolute, there could have been countless instances where women, even those who were not disposed to be tomboys, took the field purely to defend their homes and children. And that is the one factor of "evolutionary psychology" that I can imagine as pertinent to the evolution of the Amazon archetype.

MYTHCOMICS: [“ORIGIN OF A SPECIES”] (THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF CYCLOPS AND PHOENIX 1-4, 1996)

 

       

 

I wasn’t regularly reading Marvel’s line of X-books in the late eighties. I did purchase secondhand issues, so I was vaguely aware of the debut of two major X-villains, “Apocalypse” in Louise Simonson’s X-FACTOR and “Mister Sinister” in Chris Claremont’s X-MEN. But few such developments had any personal resonance for me once I was no longer reading with a sense of total involvement. I even scoffed at the latter villain, since his design seemed derivative of the X-Man Colossus. Eventually I came to understand that Sinister was some sort of clone-maker, which became significant in the long and winding “Madeleine Pryor saga," and that Apocalypse was an immortal badass dedicated to “the survival of the fittest.” Most of the stories collected in the TPB “X-MEN: THE RISE OF APOCALYPSE” didn’t make me any more invested in the two villains. The one exception, though, was the mini-series THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF CYCLOPS AND PHOENIX, written by Peter Milligan and illustrated by John Paul Leon and Klaus Janson. The four issues possess no over-arcing story-title, so I’ve chosen one of the intertitles to designate the whole narrative: issue #2’s “The Origin of a Species.” The cover-copy promises the reader a more specific origin—that of Mister Sinister—while the cover itself shows the figure of Apocalypse, Sinister’s sometime partner-in-evil, looming in the background.

 

Origin-tales require their authors to turn back time’s winged arrow figuratively, but in “Species” the time-shift is literal. With the help of your basic “time lord intervention,” X-heroes Cyclops and Phoenix are charged with journeying back to 19^th-century England to prevent the immortal Apocalypse from wreaking havoc in that timeframe. The heroes are dropped Terminator-style (i.e., buck naked) into 1859 London—which date Milligan clearly chose because it was the year in which Charles Darwin published ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES. It’s also a time-period when Marvel-Earth harbored no mutants except Apocalypse, who was spawned in ancient Egypt. In effect Cyclops and Phoenix have entered a “terra incognita” for their kind, a singular era in which the scientific idea of mutation was first codified—as well as one in which the conflicts between humanity and inhumanity took on new dimensions.

 

Coincident with the arrival of the heroes, Apocalypse awakens from hibernating in a time-capsule beneath the sewers of London, without much detail about when and why he chose that site for his big sleep. Upon awakening, the villain doesn’t seem to have any particular big scheme in mind, though as always, he’s raring to unleash the dogs of war upon humanity as part of his personal eugenics program. But by dumb luck he happens to learn the name of a scientist named Essex—and thereby hangs the story of the first collaboration of Apocalypse and Sinister.

 

The reader meets Nathaniel Essex and his wife Rebecca before either Apocalypse or the heroes. Following a two-page teaser which takes place in “real time,” Milligan and Leon send us back one extra month, to show us the background of the Man Who Will Be Sinister. Essex, a prominent English biologist, is seen at his estate reading the recently published Darwinian magnum opus. He complains to Rebecca—who is pregnant with the couple’s second child—that Darwin is “still shackled by too many moral constraints.” Rebecca, a mother-to-be who’s already lost their previous child to illness, defends the need for morals to structure society. But Essex, despite never having seen a super-powered mutant in his life, intuits that “some humans might, in time, evolve into gods,” and so he has no use for anything reminiscent of a Christian god and his restrictions.

 

Later, Essex unveils his radical theories to a conference of the British Royal Society, which the celebrated Darwin himself also attends. The obsessed scientist confirms the influence of “incremental changes” upon the flow of life, but also argues for the position we now call “saltation theory,” which allows for sudden, rapid transformations as well. To illustrate his almost religious conviction, Essex imitates one aspect of the Frankenstein mythos—constructing a hybrid organism out of corpses, apparently “mutated” by the addition of angel-like wings—though he stops short of the Full Victor, since the corpse-construct is no more alive than any other medical cadaver. The gathered scientists are revolted by this mix-and-match approach to biology, and Darwin opines that Essex has been addled by the loss of his son, broadly implying that the new theory is compensation for that loss. 

 

Essex’s reaction to this rejection is precisely that of Frankenstein: he buries himself in experimentation on unfortunate “freaks” taken prisoner by a local band of cutpurses, “the Marauders” (figurative ancestors of a similar group of henchmen Sinister will use in the 20^th century). Rebecca sees her husband more and more consumed by his inhuman crusade, and by the end of this jaunt into “one month ago,” she intuits that he may even have defiled the grave of their first son for his experiments. This is the resolution of the two-page teaser I mentioned earlier, wherein pregnant Rebecca is seen feverishly digging up her first child’s grave—and finding an empty coffin. A reader might reasonably expect that Essex exhumed the corpse to revive it, but Essex doesn’t do resurrections, and Milligan doesn’t ever say what the scientist did with the boy’s remains—though the fact that the kid was named “Adam” brings in yet more Shelleyan overtones.

 

Around this same time, Apocalypse wales up and just happens to question one of Essex’s Marauder-henchmen, which makes the villain eager to talk with the scientist. Cyclops and Phoenix not only arrive naked, they also get separated into very different venues. Cyclops manifests in the depths of the sewers from which the Marauders cull their deformed quarry, and, despite an early contretemps, he ends up making allies of London’s quasi-Morlocks. Phoenix gets to make a more celestial descent, crashing through the roof of Westminster Abbey during services. Leon and Janson (whose inks here are some of his best work ever) get quite a bit of visual mileage out of the contrast between the “upper” and “lower” worlds, which contrast is of course something Milligan exploits throughout the SPECIES script.

 

Milligan explicitly refers to the relationship between Essex and Apocalypse as a “Faustian bargain,” but like Faust, Essex hasn’t completely given himself over to evil. Essex does put Apocalypse (deftly wearing a human disguise) in contact with a society of corrupt aristocrats whom the mutant can manipulate, and these sordid rich guys are also an X-reference, for they make up the 19^th century Hellfire Club—albeit long before it was taken over by the full-time villainous club-members who make life difficult for the X-heroes in the 20^th century.

 

When Cyclops and Phoenix finally encounter Essex, they recognize him as the man who caused them endless suffering with his cloning science, and Cyclops is mightily tempted to play “kill baby Hitler,” even though Essex has not yet become Mister Sinister. Apocalypse fights with the duo and spirits away Cyclops, after which he binds the hero and makes him listen to screeds like, “You cannot combat strength with goodness and loyalty, only with greater strength.” Meanwhile, Essex regains a little of his humanity by succoring Phoenix when she’s injured. However, it’s too late for the Man of Science. Rebecca dies in childbirth, taking her second child with her, and leaves her husband with his new identity, that of being entirely “sinister.”

 

Apocalypse continues his plot to make Earth into a “modern Golgotha” (by which one assumes he means a “hill of skulls,” not the site of a transcendent savior). Phoenix tries to rescue Cyclops, but the villain subdues both crusaders. Apocalypse then confers super-villain status upon Essex, so that he becomes “forever branded” as Mister Sinister. However, the machinations of the high and mighty are laid low when some of Cyclops’ lowlife-allies venture into Apocalypse’s lair and free the X-heroes. By that time Apocalypse is off to foster the, uh, apocalypse. Phoenix manages to restrain Cyclops from killing the nascent super-villain Sinister, and to some extent Sinister responds by telling the heroes where they can find Apocalypse. The two of them prevent Apocalypse from one of his dastardly deeds, but the time-spell starts wearing off, drawing them back to their own era. Apocalypse, his plans foiled by both Sinister and the X-Men, returns to his hibernation chamber, the better to set up continuity with whatever Marvel writers had him do next.

 

In my review of GOD LOVES, MAN KILLS, I noted that only rarely had X-writers managed to use the implicit themes of the X-concept to best effect. “Origin of a Species” can take its place as one of the few times an author managed to use those themes to meditate on the divided nature of humanity. There are no super-powered mutants, but our myths of exaltation and damnation are as real as the proverbial Berkleyan stone. “Species” concludes in 1882, as the mutated Essex attends the funeral of his former colleague Charles Darwin. The story ends with the villain reaffirming his commitment to inhuman experimentation—and yet, the last image is that of a music box that once belonged to Essex’s wife. Sinister discards the trinket, trying to put the past behind him. But the “camera’s” focus on the box, uttering its bell-like sounds, may be sounding the toll for the eventual overturning of his evil devotions—to the extent, that is, that any comic-book super-fiend’s destiny can ever come to an end.

SOCIAL DECONSTRUCTIONISM

For a politics forum, I wrote the following mini-essay as a means of expressing some of the ambiguities in human "ingroup chauvinism" as a counteractive to the poorly reasoned ideology of "race as socially constructed." I largely anticipated that the reasoning would be lost on the ultraliberal ideologues, and my prediction proved true. One moron thought I was trying to float some sort of racial murder-fantasy, when it should be entirely evident that the standards I'm applying to my hypothetical African tribe are being applied across the board to all human ingroups, all of whom participate in the same practice of phenotypic chauvinism.

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First, so I don’t have to type “social construct doctrine” over and over, I will abbreviate it as SCD.

SCD came about as an overreaction to European theories about human racial groups from the 19th and 20th centuries. Many if not all of these theories tended to promulgate absolutist ideas about the respective capacities of the racial groups, often with the probably intentional effect of putting the white race on top of the heap. A reaction against this polemic was natural.

SCD, however, decided that the best solution was to claim that race was a social construct. Sometimes the rhetoric asserted that “race” was given the context of “species,” but I seriously doubt that even the most xenophobic theorist would have claimed that the various human races could not interbreed, given so much evidence to the contrary. The principal purpose of SCD was to assert that racial differences had been invented by Evil Overlords seeking to stigmatize some differences and champion others. The use of the term “cline” came into vogue as a way of discussing phenotypic differences between groups without bringing the taboo word “race” into the question.

To test the validity of SCD, one must abandon both the worlds of Eurocentric pundits and their equally impaired opponents, and seek to imagine how phenotypic differences might have resonated with homogeneous groups “in the wild” as it were.

So I imagine a homogeneous Black African society in pre-colonial Africa, far removed from contact with any heterogeneous societies. Since there’s nearly no exogamy, most everyone in the tribe shares the same hair and skin color. There could be a few neighboring tribes, but they’re genetically almost identical to Primary Tribe. The natives have no cognizance of any humans who are not black skinned and wiry haired, and if they imagine the forest beasts taking on human form, the magical animals share all the routine appearance of the tale tellers.

Given this scenario, the tribe can have no concept of race, and no overlord would seek to advance one. But given that humans like to feel good about themselves, the phenotypic norm would still be the tribe’s aesthetic baseline. If your skin looks black, you’re healthy, but if it turns grey from illness, that will be physically repugnant.

Now imagine that into this tribe is born— the first albino infant ever. Imagine further that the child’s mother and father are the only ones present when the baby is born.

They look over the infant. There’s nothing in their experience to account for this. They exchange looks, and simultaneously opt to smother the child and bury it.

Now, we are not privy to their thoughts. SCD would say that, even without the tribe having a concept of race, they kill the child because they’re afraid that their neighbors will abominate the atypical infant, and that this would be the equivalent of “constructing race.”

But what if their primary thoughts are aesthetic? What if the parents themselves are repulsed by the infant’s color, and they feel shame at having produced such a bizarre creature? In the real world, we certainly have ethnological evidence of parents who have slain or abandoned offspring for no better reasons.

Proponents of SCD are stuck in a box. They MUST believe in some form of “race construction” by the society in order to remain on-point against the Evil Overlords. But often it’s the people, not the Overlords, expressing preferences that have nothing to do with social controls as such.

Ah, that was good exercise. Wish I thought the bulk of responses would provide me with as much.