Swipe Left

In the great Tinder app of world relations the US and Israel are currently in the process of ‘swiping left’ on Iran’s leadership¹. The Epic Furists and Roaring Lions were not altogether taken with the head honcho. Which is kind of surprising given The Washington Post’s description of him

According to WaPo, then, his world Tinder app profile might look something like this

Am I sorry that this gigantic cockwomble has met his fate? Not in the least, but I can’t say I’m happy that seemingly the only way to rid the world of diseases like Khamenei is to bomb the crap out a country. War is a serious and ugly business and we hope those charged with making those decisions on our behalf are equally serious, but not ugly, people.

For all my vilification of extreme Islam, and there is so much to vilify, I acknowledge that they do, at least, get one thing right. This is the importance they attach to family. The methodology they employ to ‘achieve’ this noble goal is somewhat sickening - which I suppose is another instance of the road to Hell being paved with good intentions.

Islam in either its moderate or extreme form is very strong on family. It recognises that family is the foundation of society.

You can see the importance that is attached to family in the interview clip from this Note (click to see the Note and the contained video)

I do feel that The Patriarchy™ in the West is kind of amateurish in comparison.

What is concerning, and might ultimately prove suicidal, is that more and more people in the West seem to be swiping left on the family.

I’m a big fan of Evolutionary Psychology, although a lot of uninformed people do seem to dismiss it out of hand as a ‘pseudoscience’, at best. The basic principle behind it is that evolution did not only shape our bodies, but our behaviours, emotions, and thoughts too². Evolutionary Psychology, then, is the science of trying to figure out the details of that.

The big problem EvPsych faces is that it has to ‘project’ back into the past in order to try to put the jigsaw pieces together. But certain things can be approached more rigorously. If you’re interested then I’d recommend David Buss’ excellent introductory text Evolutionary Psychology : The New Science of the Mind for a great introduction to what it’s about. If you read that book you’ll see that, whilst far from being able to lay down hard and fast ‘laws’ in the way that physics does, it is also firmly based in science and the scientific method.

Evolution, however, especially when applied to something as complex and complicated as the human mind, is not some kind of deterministic algorithm. It doesn’t even fully operate that way in the rest of the animal kingdom even though there is less capacity there for an individual to override evolutionary nudges. I’m sure there are a few male peacocks out there who can’t be encouraged to strut their stuff no matter how attractive Ms Peacock might be.

Over time the idea of a ‘nuclear family’ emerged in human societies as the way to raise the next generation. The likelihood of this being all about ‘social construction’ is pretty much indistinguishable from zero. There’s clearly a very strong evolutionary nudge for humans in that direction - what’s the whole thing about the intensity of a mother’s love for her children about if not that? Fathers love their kids intensely too, of course they do, but stand between a mother and her children and you’ll know what epic fury really is.

We could have evolved into a more communal model in which kids were the ‘property’ of the tribe and there was not much more direct involvement of the mother other than popping one out. But that didn’t really happen, in general.

My musings today have been inspired by a clip of Milton Friedman I saw on Notes (and, as usual, I can’t find the bloody thing quickly enough now) in which he was talking about incentive and an audience member piped up saying that 100% inheritance tax was the way to incentivize people. Friedman’s answer, whether you think he was a half-decent economist or not, was very interesting. He made the claim that throughout human history, the family, and not the individual, has been the primary driving force.

That’s a broad claim, and I know pitiably little about history to know to what extent it’s true, but it seems to me to be at least pointing in the right direction, if not already half way to the target. If we extend the concept of ‘family’ outward to one’s tribe, and outwards further to one’s country, there is a lot to be said for this idea.

It would be my assertion that even if we judge everything to be about power - and the tyrants and kings and emperors of the past certainly accrued a lot of that - power is really a proxy for status and in evolutionary terms, status confers breeding rights. None of it may be consciously about sex and procreation - but I’ll lay good money on these things being the foundation of everything in terms of what drives us at the primordial deep level. History, then, is the history of humping.

But let’s suppose Friedman is right³ in that assertion. The last few decades, maybe even longer, in the ‘west’ has been a steady progression towards individualism. The individual, not the family, has become the core unit of society.

The micro-brained Mamdani’s of this world want us to go even further and entirely subsume the individual into the state and this notion of ‘the collective’. But maybe the strict libertarians have also got it a bit wrong by focussing too much on the individual too.

Interestingly, this whole notion of ‘the collective’ is heavily emphasized within Islam too. Back in the day when I was active on religious forums and (respectfully) discussing things with Muslims it was extremely common to hear arguments couched in terms of ‘what is good for society’. Is that wrong, per se?

I can’t say that it is, because I would have to make similar arguments for a lot of things. Is it ‘good for society’ that we lock up dangerous scumbags instead of giving them a mild slap on the wrist and trying to ‘empathy’ them into good behaviour? You fucking bet it is. I’d rather be inhumane to the scumbags than let them do their inhumane things on the innocent. We’ve got that the wrong way round today with a ridiculous amount of sympathy being given to the violent scumbags instead of to their victims.

There’s also a great deal of political bias involved. Khamenei can wipe out over 30,000 protesters with no problem and little condemnation from certain quarters. ICE get a bit over-antsy with just two? All Hell breaks loose. Very different determinations of what is ‘good for society’ being applied here.

If we do think this perspective of the family being the fundamental driving force, the ‘atomic unit’ if you like, for a healthy and productive society is correct then what are we to make of the various pushes from the ‘left’ to attack and dismantle the nuclear family? In this light it becomes something much more sinister than merely trying to achieve a ‘just’ and ‘equitable’ world stuffed to the gunnels with empathy and oozing compassion from every orifice.

Should we swipe left on those who would attack the family?

1. I suppose one could say they’ve been ghosted

2. I genuinely do not understand how it is possible to deny this. Pithily, but somewhat incorrectly, the field is often captured by an assertion of the form “evolution did not stop at the neck”

3. And please remember that I’m talking trends here - not some kind of algorithmic determinism imposed by whatever forces (evolutionary or social) have shaped us