If I don't entirely agree with your thesis here, David, I don't entirely repudiate it either. We are most aligned in the idea that the collapse of the practices of virtue ethics (surviving only in the negative, 'virtue signalling', which is not virtuous) has caused wretched problems downstream. But a lot of this seems to me to spring from the atomisation of society. I would suggest men are in psychic dire straights these days largely because individuals have been set adrift, not because they aren't storming battlements. And this proposition applies nearly as well to women, too...
I have personally had a rich interior life and if, in my youth, it caused me trouble, then I would also reflect that I got through it because I had close friends who I talked to often and intimately. As a consequence of this experience of 'neuroticism' (as you flag it here), I have become a more creative thinker, which has aided me in my career. I rather doubt I could have been a person who 'acts rather than thinks', and although I would never presume that my experience was automatically applicable to others, neither would I want to extoll a path that counselled the tearing apart the tapestry of my own life.
I agree, Chris, my circle of male friends do not have trouble expressing their inner lives, unless they're going through a depression--which is when they seek help from friends to help get to the bottom of their trouble. This difficulty with interiority is also not gendered. Plenty of women have no idea what's going on within themselves. The number of women that fill robotic rolls in HR or other administrative positions in which they play at being important sticklers for rules and procedures is evidence aplenty. That said, many, upon discovering the language of psychology, use it to excuse their nasty behaviour, and others use the language of spirituality and religion to stand-in for actual practice. Violent behaviour in classrooms these days is, for instance, is characterised as just "acting out" because of the abusive environment they come from. Such excuses get carried over into later life. Religious and spiritual folk will point a finger and reprimand others when they are being impious, while they themselves use pious actions to cover their cruelty. Nineteenth-century novels are full of these types.
Also echoes of Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade." "Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die." Since the lockdowns, I'm feeling a little wary of this notion, which I formulated as "Only stupid people ask questions; smart people do as they're told."
On this latter point, I think we've travelled far from David's point, but I'll happily walk through this door. 😉
I'm not sure if your formulation nails the essence of the problem, but I think you're gesturing at something like the maxim that "if you were smart, you would understand why we have to do this"... I think many who conformed, including many well-educated folks, did so out of trust that the institutions (especially but not exclusively those with a scientific orientation) knew what they were doing.
In this regard, the invocation of Dunning-Kruger came up for me once or twice: "I'm not an epidemiologist so I'll trust the advice being given". Of course, the instructions came from advisory boards comprised of *sociologists* and not epidemiologists. Ironically, revisiting Dunning-Kruger has revealed that there is no such 'effect' - the original research shows that "all people rate their talents slightly higher than they are". This is nothing like the effect claimed! And such is the world of contemporary sciences, where hermeneutics supplants empirical study all while denying any role for hermeneutics!
You are correct of course in representing "the other side's" perspective. There is of course also good reason for my formulation and why it's worth throwing in the face of one who espouses the view that we ought to take things on authority, and that such is the smart thing to do, when in fact it is the lazy (and unscientific) thing to do. This debate regarding the role of authority in our lives has been going on for many centuries. The foundations of our present civilisation have been clear on this matter: we reject that worldview.
I'll have to disagree about your refutation of the Dunning-Kruger effect. There very much is such an effect. The more ignorant one is, the more one believes one knows. The idea that "all people" do any one thing is fallacious. But that's hardly the point. Perhaps most do. But to give an example from language studies, the deeper one goes in one's native language, the more likely one is to rate oneself lower than standard benchmarks of fluency in a foreign language than one who is a poor but fluent speaker in one's native language. That's how "the effect" works. No doubt there are other "effects" in play, as I've been discussing re left-brainitis, but there too a form of ignorance comes into play to augment one's sense of knowing more and more difinitively than one in fact does.
Intriguing... my own experience runs largely counter to yours here. Formal education in my experience seemingly dovetails with an arrogant overestimating of one's capacities in a way that, say, learning plumbing doesn't seem to. I am agnostic as to whether this is an effect of the education itself, or selection bias in those who pursue higher education.
But my point above was rather that those who revisited Dunning and Kruger's data showed that this particular study data did not actually demonstrate the claimed effect, but merely that 'everyone slightly overestimates their talents'. Don't shoot the messenger! 😂
From the disadvantaged viewpoint of a woman, but having a son and having had a father, husband, brother etc, I agree with David and instinctively feel that men need 'action' - to different degrees according to personality - otherwise like any frustrated innate desire, it can become distorted or perverted. Despite current cultural expectations, men ARE different to women as any cursory observation of children in a playground will show.
Thanks for the essay. I wonder how far those who advocate for obsession with the inner have reflected upon the capacity people have to really deal with their own demons? How many people have the emotional and intellectual capacity to stare inwards? Our society hyper-prioritising feelings is perhaps like insisting we all do extreme sports with no regards to athletic ability.
Thanks David, what an interesting discussion about someone whose behaviour is so maladaptive. On average men and women have different personality profiles and women generally are higher in neuroticism. The feminisation of the public sphere has led to an overemphasis on neurotic behaviours and an emphasis on safety to the detriment of our societies. There are still men who long for adventure and seek their fortune, in fact the small boats migrants are a whole class of men exhibiting these characteristics, but the lack of our ability to recognise their innate masculine imperative means we are unable to see their journey for what it is and we respond inappropriately, to the detriment of our communities. There are some British young men who also travel for the same reason such as Lord Myles who went to Afghanistan to explore and seek his fortune, gets banged up but seems unbothered by the experience.
Broadly agree with your thesis but I don’t think it is only applicable to men. The idea that you can start living your life once your mental health improves is ruining so many lives. People need to find their own way of doing what matters to them.
A lot here to parse, David. For once I have to disagree with the claims you're making. It would take some time to address it all, and indeed my own substack is dedicated to refuting precisely what you're saying here: i.e. that we ought to ignore or diminish our interiority. As Ted Hughes put it: "The inner world, separated from the outer world, is a place of demons. The outer world, separated from the inner world, is a place of meaningless objects and machines." The case you're focused on does not support your thesis, essentially because you're reading something into it rather than reading it. Gustavson is an exemplar of Hughes's observation about what happens when the inner world is divorced from the outer.
Indeed, Hughes was prescient in this regard when in the same essay ("Myth and Education"), he developed the idea of "the morality of the camera." Briefly, Hughes fixes on the camera as a manifestation of the narrow, objective view and tells a true story about a photographer who snapped pictures of a woman being ripped to pieces by her pet tiger instead of intervening. He called this “the morality of the camera.” Since then, our camera has become ubiquitous, and we’re witnessing people who mediate their lives through their cell phones. Hughes’s image of “A bright, intelligent eye, full of exact images, set in a head of the most frightful stupidity,” strikes one as prophetic. (I'm quoting here from own piece on the subject.) A further quotation from the same Hughes essay puts a finer point on what I'm after: "The exclusiveness of our objective eye, the very strength and brilliance of our objective intelligence, suddenly turns to stupidity — of the most rigid and suicidal kind.” I'm sure you can see the relevance here to Gustavson. You may recall the incident some years back when a group of subway travellers filmed a rape on their phones rather than intervening.
I would also argue that the notion of men having trouble accessing or relating their interiority is an urban (and frankly misandrist) myth as all the art ever made and poetry ever written by men is evidence to. To claim that men are pre-Shakespearean two-dimensional characters or that they ought to be is an entirely misguided understanding of the history of consciousness. In fact, I would argue that your reading of Beowulf is naive because it rests at the surface level and disregards the language and even the notion of storytelling. The Beowulf tale is all about interiority and the nightmare world of monsters. How exactly do the inner qualities you talk about like courage and honour arise without interiority?
In short, what we require is a training of the inner world, an education of the imagination, not its repression or neglect, which is in fact the root cause of all our societal troubles, and something brought about by naive materialism and Darwinist assumptions that dismiss any reality to internal forces.
Where I find common ground with you (in this present essay of yours, David) is the all too common trouble of indulging in and egotistically focusing on one's own psychology. There's a danger of narcissism in talk-therapy-type approaches to self-development. Indeed, there are many pitfalls that may claim a psyche embarking on the journey of self-development, but Gustavson is a poor example of this type of problem. The solution is education of the psychological world unearthed by Shakespeare, not its neglect. The trouble you're pointing to here with Gustavson has everything to do with our notions of objectivity and the disconnect from our interiority especially due to the mediating technologies guiding our culture. Social media is the problem and the woke perspective that in fact exteriorises identity and hollows out the individual.
Great comment. I think my point wasn't made very effectively if I'm being interpreted as making materialist or Darwinist assumptions!
What I am really trying to say is not all that different to what you have said here. It is important to have a grasp of one's emotions and to choose how to respond to them based on what one wants to achieve, rather than being led by them. This, very often, though, means understanding them to be 'mere' feelings that do not have to have any bearing on how one conducts oneself. It's not a matter of suppressing them, but putting them in their proper place. This is what zen meditation is I think all about.
The problem of social media as I see it is that it does everything to discourage that way of thinking: it makes everything a chiefly feelings-led reaction to what one is passively consuming on the screen.
"It's not a matter of suppressing them, but putting them in their proper place." Exactly - this is also what the Christian spiritual tradition teaches (it's why pride - the focus on oneself to the exclusion of all else - is the deadliest sin)
Right. Outrage is the social media driver. The whole medium is based on an exchange of that one emotion. Attempts to convey other emotions may get likes, but not reactions and shares. This is why I left them all but Substack. And even Substack writers who provoke outrage net substantially wider followings.
When you mention Zen, I think of stoicism. And now I'm thinking that perhaps that's the concept you were hoping to convey here. If you caught that recent Djokovic reaction at the Australian open, when an audience member heckled him with, "Get vaxxed, mate!" His stoicism was exemplary. I used to enjoy sports for those types of heroes in my youth. I quit taking an interest when it became about image, branding, celebrity, mega-sums of dosh, and "the franchise." Our culture truly has lost the plot in all domains.
This I think is an interesting discussion but like many similar articles it doesn't pay much attention to the biological, only the socio-cultural.
I think genetically we struggle with the socially imposed narratives and laws regarding equality and that genetically we have evolved towards hierarchies and inequality.
There are good reasons for this, the main one being that hierarchical formations improve species fitness through competition.
The emphasis in our post modern western cultures is equality and cooperation, but if one looks closely, these 'virtues' are bounded with competition, in that, those that profess and demonstrate equality and cooperation on the basis of race, gender, sex etc (wokeism) are in actual fact in a competitive race.
The inversion of this competitive virtue signalling is the likes of Marius Gustavson with his own version of highly distorted competition.
My point here is that human law has become reified to the point that it seeks to supplant natural law (genetics and evolution) and in particular the importance of competition and inequality in ensuring species fitness.
In some ways this is the difference between contest competition and scramble competition with contest competition ensuring stable population dynamics and strong fitness levels and scramble competition creating unstable and often collapsing population dynamics and low fitness levels.
I'd agree that contest competition has to be within limits to protect against cheating and the normalisation of cheating, but the extent to which contest competition has now been sublimated and suppressed by human law is I think the cause of postmodern neuroses.
If I don't entirely agree with your thesis here, David, I don't entirely repudiate it either. We are most aligned in the idea that the collapse of the practices of virtue ethics (surviving only in the negative, 'virtue signalling', which is not virtuous) has caused wretched problems downstream. But a lot of this seems to me to spring from the atomisation of society. I would suggest men are in psychic dire straights these days largely because individuals have been set adrift, not because they aren't storming battlements. And this proposition applies nearly as well to women, too...
I have personally had a rich interior life and if, in my youth, it caused me trouble, then I would also reflect that I got through it because I had close friends who I talked to often and intimately. As a consequence of this experience of 'neuroticism' (as you flag it here), I have become a more creative thinker, which has aided me in my career. I rather doubt I could have been a person who 'acts rather than thinks', and although I would never presume that my experience was automatically applicable to others, neither would I want to extoll a path that counselled the tearing apart the tapestry of my own life.
Stay wonderful!
I agree, Chris, my circle of male friends do not have trouble expressing their inner lives, unless they're going through a depression--which is when they seek help from friends to help get to the bottom of their trouble. This difficulty with interiority is also not gendered. Plenty of women have no idea what's going on within themselves. The number of women that fill robotic rolls in HR or other administrative positions in which they play at being important sticklers for rules and procedures is evidence aplenty. That said, many, upon discovering the language of psychology, use it to excuse their nasty behaviour, and others use the language of spirituality and religion to stand-in for actual practice. Violent behaviour in classrooms these days is, for instance, is characterised as just "acting out" because of the abusive environment they come from. Such excuses get carried over into later life. Religious and spiritual folk will point a finger and reprimand others when they are being impious, while they themselves use pious actions to cover their cruelty. Nineteenth-century novels are full of these types.
Also echoes of Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade." "Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die." Since the lockdowns, I'm feeling a little wary of this notion, which I formulated as "Only stupid people ask questions; smart people do as they're told."
On this latter point, I think we've travelled far from David's point, but I'll happily walk through this door. 😉
I'm not sure if your formulation nails the essence of the problem, but I think you're gesturing at something like the maxim that "if you were smart, you would understand why we have to do this"... I think many who conformed, including many well-educated folks, did so out of trust that the institutions (especially but not exclusively those with a scientific orientation) knew what they were doing.
In this regard, the invocation of Dunning-Kruger came up for me once or twice: "I'm not an epidemiologist so I'll trust the advice being given". Of course, the instructions came from advisory boards comprised of *sociologists* and not epidemiologists. Ironically, revisiting Dunning-Kruger has revealed that there is no such 'effect' - the original research shows that "all people rate their talents slightly higher than they are". This is nothing like the effect claimed! And such is the world of contemporary sciences, where hermeneutics supplants empirical study all while denying any role for hermeneutics!
What a crazy time to be alive.
You are correct of course in representing "the other side's" perspective. There is of course also good reason for my formulation and why it's worth throwing in the face of one who espouses the view that we ought to take things on authority, and that such is the smart thing to do, when in fact it is the lazy (and unscientific) thing to do. This debate regarding the role of authority in our lives has been going on for many centuries. The foundations of our present civilisation have been clear on this matter: we reject that worldview.
I'll have to disagree about your refutation of the Dunning-Kruger effect. There very much is such an effect. The more ignorant one is, the more one believes one knows. The idea that "all people" do any one thing is fallacious. But that's hardly the point. Perhaps most do. But to give an example from language studies, the deeper one goes in one's native language, the more likely one is to rate oneself lower than standard benchmarks of fluency in a foreign language than one who is a poor but fluent speaker in one's native language. That's how "the effect" works. No doubt there are other "effects" in play, as I've been discussing re left-brainitis, but there too a form of ignorance comes into play to augment one's sense of knowing more and more difinitively than one in fact does.
Intriguing... my own experience runs largely counter to yours here. Formal education in my experience seemingly dovetails with an arrogant overestimating of one's capacities in a way that, say, learning plumbing doesn't seem to. I am agnostic as to whether this is an effect of the education itself, or selection bias in those who pursue higher education.
But my point above was rather that those who revisited Dunning and Kruger's data showed that this particular study data did not actually demonstrate the claimed effect, but merely that 'everyone slightly overestimates their talents'. Don't shoot the messenger! 😂
From the disadvantaged viewpoint of a woman, but having a son and having had a father, husband, brother etc, I agree with David and instinctively feel that men need 'action' - to different degrees according to personality - otherwise like any frustrated innate desire, it can become distorted or perverted. Despite current cultural expectations, men ARE different to women as any cursory observation of children in a playground will show.
Thanks for the essay. I wonder how far those who advocate for obsession with the inner have reflected upon the capacity people have to really deal with their own demons? How many people have the emotional and intellectual capacity to stare inwards? Our society hyper-prioritising feelings is perhaps like insisting we all do extreme sports with no regards to athletic ability.
Thanks David, what an interesting discussion about someone whose behaviour is so maladaptive. On average men and women have different personality profiles and women generally are higher in neuroticism. The feminisation of the public sphere has led to an overemphasis on neurotic behaviours and an emphasis on safety to the detriment of our societies. There are still men who long for adventure and seek their fortune, in fact the small boats migrants are a whole class of men exhibiting these characteristics, but the lack of our ability to recognise their innate masculine imperative means we are unable to see their journey for what it is and we respond inappropriately, to the detriment of our communities. There are some British young men who also travel for the same reason such as Lord Myles who went to Afghanistan to explore and seek his fortune, gets banged up but seems unbothered by the experience.
Broadly agree with your thesis but I don’t think it is only applicable to men. The idea that you can start living your life once your mental health improves is ruining so many lives. People need to find their own way of doing what matters to them.
A lot here to parse, David. For once I have to disagree with the claims you're making. It would take some time to address it all, and indeed my own substack is dedicated to refuting precisely what you're saying here: i.e. that we ought to ignore or diminish our interiority. As Ted Hughes put it: "The inner world, separated from the outer world, is a place of demons. The outer world, separated from the inner world, is a place of meaningless objects and machines." The case you're focused on does not support your thesis, essentially because you're reading something into it rather than reading it. Gustavson is an exemplar of Hughes's observation about what happens when the inner world is divorced from the outer.
Indeed, Hughes was prescient in this regard when in the same essay ("Myth and Education"), he developed the idea of "the morality of the camera." Briefly, Hughes fixes on the camera as a manifestation of the narrow, objective view and tells a true story about a photographer who snapped pictures of a woman being ripped to pieces by her pet tiger instead of intervening. He called this “the morality of the camera.” Since then, our camera has become ubiquitous, and we’re witnessing people who mediate their lives through their cell phones. Hughes’s image of “A bright, intelligent eye, full of exact images, set in a head of the most frightful stupidity,” strikes one as prophetic. (I'm quoting here from own piece on the subject.) A further quotation from the same Hughes essay puts a finer point on what I'm after: "The exclusiveness of our objective eye, the very strength and brilliance of our objective intelligence, suddenly turns to stupidity — of the most rigid and suicidal kind.” I'm sure you can see the relevance here to Gustavson. You may recall the incident some years back when a group of subway travellers filmed a rape on their phones rather than intervening.
I would also argue that the notion of men having trouble accessing or relating their interiority is an urban (and frankly misandrist) myth as all the art ever made and poetry ever written by men is evidence to. To claim that men are pre-Shakespearean two-dimensional characters or that they ought to be is an entirely misguided understanding of the history of consciousness. In fact, I would argue that your reading of Beowulf is naive because it rests at the surface level and disregards the language and even the notion of storytelling. The Beowulf tale is all about interiority and the nightmare world of monsters. How exactly do the inner qualities you talk about like courage and honour arise without interiority?
In short, what we require is a training of the inner world, an education of the imagination, not its repression or neglect, which is in fact the root cause of all our societal troubles, and something brought about by naive materialism and Darwinist assumptions that dismiss any reality to internal forces.
Where I find common ground with you (in this present essay of yours, David) is the all too common trouble of indulging in and egotistically focusing on one's own psychology. There's a danger of narcissism in talk-therapy-type approaches to self-development. Indeed, there are many pitfalls that may claim a psyche embarking on the journey of self-development, but Gustavson is a poor example of this type of problem. The solution is education of the psychological world unearthed by Shakespeare, not its neglect. The trouble you're pointing to here with Gustavson has everything to do with our notions of objectivity and the disconnect from our interiority especially due to the mediating technologies guiding our culture. Social media is the problem and the woke perspective that in fact exteriorises identity and hollows out the individual.
Great comment. I think my point wasn't made very effectively if I'm being interpreted as making materialist or Darwinist assumptions!
What I am really trying to say is not all that different to what you have said here. It is important to have a grasp of one's emotions and to choose how to respond to them based on what one wants to achieve, rather than being led by them. This, very often, though, means understanding them to be 'mere' feelings that do not have to have any bearing on how one conducts oneself. It's not a matter of suppressing them, but putting them in their proper place. This is what zen meditation is I think all about.
The problem of social media as I see it is that it does everything to discourage that way of thinking: it makes everything a chiefly feelings-led reaction to what one is passively consuming on the screen.
"It's not a matter of suppressing them, but putting them in their proper place." Exactly - this is also what the Christian spiritual tradition teaches (it's why pride - the focus on oneself to the exclusion of all else - is the deadliest sin)
Right. Outrage is the social media driver. The whole medium is based on an exchange of that one emotion. Attempts to convey other emotions may get likes, but not reactions and shares. This is why I left them all but Substack. And even Substack writers who provoke outrage net substantially wider followings.
When you mention Zen, I think of stoicism. And now I'm thinking that perhaps that's the concept you were hoping to convey here. If you caught that recent Djokovic reaction at the Australian open, when an audience member heckled him with, "Get vaxxed, mate!" His stoicism was exemplary. I used to enjoy sports for those types of heroes in my youth. I quit taking an interest when it became about image, branding, celebrity, mega-sums of dosh, and "the franchise." Our culture truly has lost the plot in all domains.
This I think is an interesting discussion but like many similar articles it doesn't pay much attention to the biological, only the socio-cultural.
I think genetically we struggle with the socially imposed narratives and laws regarding equality and that genetically we have evolved towards hierarchies and inequality.
There are good reasons for this, the main one being that hierarchical formations improve species fitness through competition.
The emphasis in our post modern western cultures is equality and cooperation, but if one looks closely, these 'virtues' are bounded with competition, in that, those that profess and demonstrate equality and cooperation on the basis of race, gender, sex etc (wokeism) are in actual fact in a competitive race.
The inversion of this competitive virtue signalling is the likes of Marius Gustavson with his own version of highly distorted competition.
My point here is that human law has become reified to the point that it seeks to supplant natural law (genetics and evolution) and in particular the importance of competition and inequality in ensuring species fitness.
In some ways this is the difference between contest competition and scramble competition with contest competition ensuring stable population dynamics and strong fitness levels and scramble competition creating unstable and often collapsing population dynamics and low fitness levels.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contest_competition
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_competition
I'd agree that contest competition has to be within limits to protect against cheating and the normalisation of cheating, but the extent to which contest competition has now been sublimated and suppressed by human law is I think the cause of postmodern neuroses.