the natural consequences of unnaturally forced choices

Via theblogprof, I found a Reason TV report titled “LA Food Police Ban Burger Joints: Is Your City Next?”

I find it appalling that the forces of government are attempting to control our diets, but they are.

I suspect that they imagine themselves to be on the side of “nature.” You know, natural foods? Eat what’s good for you naturally and live longer? Artificial and preservatives are bad? Yet I think allowing humans to decide for themselves what to eat is more natural, even if what they prefer to eat might seem less natural.

Anyway, at 4:18 the man behind the ban (one Councilman Bernard Parks) explains that the reason the burger joints are “unhealthy” is because people don’t want to eat what’s good for them. So the forces in favor of a more “natural” diet must intervene, and impose their will. His words:

“their choices are driven by what people bring, as opposed to what may be better for them, and in order to force choice into the market, we have to we have to limit one that’s over concentrated and attract others that provide other options.”

Matt Welch later takes issue with the idea “that you can create more choices by reducing choices.” I agree, and I think choice by force is not choice.

But my analysis stopped there, because I was almost inclined to declare that forcing choice on people is “unnatural,” only then I ran into a hall-of-mirrors problem which has aborted many a blog post — the way certain words by their very “nature” (there I went again!) prevent the articulation of what I sometimes like to think are “my thoughts” into anything approaching reasonable coherence.

The last time this happened I had wanted to opine on “natural” manhood in the context of slobs and I got trapped again in that very unpleasant and very unnatural (hence natural for me) hall of mirrors.

“Natural” is a truly awful word, one of the worst weasel words which exists in the English language, because it posits a war between man and nature, setting man up as The Other and Nature all at once as innocence, savagery, and beauty, to be tamed, polluted, raped, made ugly, beautified, improved upon, or destroyed depending on the unnatural whims of human nature! And man is to be adjudged as natural or unnatural according to moralists armed with their own definition of nature, which cannot be defined to anyone’s satisfaction, and which has a different meaning for every last damned unnatural one of us.

Man is in a state of rebellion against nature and against man. Men tend to be naturally more rebellious than women. Yet women are more natural than men!

See what I mean? It is infuriating to have such a word. I know I will never resolve this, but I am hoping that maybe by trying to state the problem I can at least get closer to grappling with the dismal failure of words as communication tools.

During the several discussions of Kay Hymowitz’s book (Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys), I kept seeing references to male slobs:

“why men don’t marry, why college women get guys showing up in a dirty t-shirt, the decline of male space and all the male bashing.”

This whole guys showing-up-for-dates-in-dirty-t-shirts complaint (voiced in a video segment shown here by young women) is undeniably true. I have seen it firsthand. I noticed it on a local Philadelphia cruise a couple of years ago; the girls were well dressed, while almost to a man, their dates looked like total slobs. Almost as if that was the sort of thing to be expected. Whether they had a mutual enforcement mechanism, I do not know. Had one of the guys in the herd worn a coat and tie, I think he might have been more of a hit with the girls, but would he have faced scorn or ridicule from his slobbier friends for not conforming?

I don’t know, but the memory flashed through my mind last night when I watched the video that Ann Althouse linked showing a better dressed Latino man getting threatened by a slobbish thug — and a morally indignant slobbish thug (if such things be) — on the subway.

 

Of these two young men, who is more “natural”? The guy who scores with women by being a gentleman, or the more “manly” guy who in all likelihood, would abuse any woman dumb enough to let him near her? (What a pain it is to have to put ill-defined words in quotes.)

Anyway, I had wanted to make a simple observation about guys showing up for dates in dirty t-shirts, and my thoughts got all messed up by nature! All the more so because I wanted to contrast the “natural” character of Tom Sawyer, with his “unnatural” brother Sidney. The Tom and Sidney tension is an old issue in this blog, of course.

Do women prefer natural Tom, or do women prefer unnatural Sidney? Or do they prefer a grown, civilized, cleaned up man with a dirty, “natural” Tom Sawyer at the core?

I’m thinking the title of Kay Hymowitz book ought to be Boying Down: How the Rise of Women Has Caused Men to Remain Boys. Because I don’t think men have been turned into boys. Rather, I think that manhood has been made so attractive that many boys have lost all incentive to be men. What’s in it for them?

But does this matter? Is it my business to even be writing about it?

What is nature, and what is natural?

It is a hopeless quagmire.

Not long ago, Glenn linked what I thought was a really great comment to the Hymowitz discussion about the unnatural nature of Protestantism:

Second part: My point is that in a state of nature most men would happily spend all their time going off on grand adventures and coming home to good conversations with their pals, some alcohol and a bit of nookie with the wife. It was Protestantism that ruined it all for us.

It was Protestantism that gave us those stern impassioned feet that trudge off to work everyday, and taught us to settle for a single woman and devote our lives to family. I read once that in the 19th century US, the social expectation for a middle class man was that he build up enough property to establish his children well and keep his widow comfortable after he died. Those days are gone.

So when Hymowitz complains that men are staying boys, she’s really complaining that we’ve returned to a state of nature. When men are young they dream of Peter Pan and Wind in the Willows, later of Odysseus and Lord of the Rings. I doubt that any of us have ever grown up dreaming of marriage and raising children.

Essentially, then, for hundreds of years, women have asked men to sacrifice their dreams so that they can achieve their own. In return women, in theory and often in practice, promised companionship and a decent homelife.

There isn’t really space to go into a lot of detail, but that Protestant vision survived because it brought reasonable happiness,was bolstered by religion and society, and produced children that were socially valued. My grandparents worked like dogs to build up a small family farm. They never had any money, but in their old age they were surrounded by a large and prosperous family. It was enough for them and they died feeling proud and successful.

However, the society and ideals that made that marriage and through it gave my grandparents a sense of accomplishment in life are mostly gone.

Hymowitz herself has written about the devastating effect that absence has had on the lower classes, but I think she has missed part of her own point. That older system also provided men with something that made up for their lost boyhood. A man could take immense pride in how he supported his family and in his children, and society echoed those feelings back to him.

From what I read, modern marriage promises far less sex than any bachelor can get. A lifelong companion seems not to be part of the picture either. For that same reason, children are as likely to be a source of emotional pain as a source of happiness. And at any rate society is largely indifferent these days to whether a man has children or not, and downright negative about a man’s role in raising them.

And who in the heck wants to marry a well-used 30 something who is rapidly approaching her use by date and starting to whimper about her biological clock? I’m not convinced that particular woman would find many takers even in a perfect world.

So, if Hymowitz wants men to man up in that old Protestant sense, she’s delusional. Men are returning to their natural state and seem quite satisfied to do so. If women want something akin to that old system, they need to provide the incentive. If a woman can’t provide long-term companionship and a reasonable assurance that a man can build something with her, including a family that he knows he’ll always be part of, what attraction does she have for him?

As the song says: “When you see a guy reach for stars in the sky
You can bet that he’s doing it for some doll.” (Guys and Dolls)

If the modern woman wants a man, she needs to be the right kind of doll. Until that happens, Nintendo, here we come.

This is horrible stuff. For starters, my grandfather (whom I suspect would be a Nintendo guy today) did a pretty good job with his family) under very adverse conditions. Yet he would be arrested today if he dared to bring children into this world in a sod house on the Prairie without plumbing. In those days, man had to wage war with nature for survival. 

Now that the war with nature has largely been won, it has been turned inward, so that it has become a war with man’s nature. Man’s nature is to rebel, whether against “nature” or against natural born tyrants who use “nature” as an excuse.

God how I hate nature.

Especially human nature.

But I’m trying not to let a little thing like that get in my way, so I want to return to the two guys in the subway. First off, the above analysis might be lost on them, because they are both Hispanic, which means that not only are they likely Catholic and not Protestant, but they would most likely hail from what we would call a “macho culture.” Now, the man from Uruguay is clearly the gentleman of the two; he is wearing nice clothes (he has just come from seeing his girlfriend) and he is reading a book in public! Both of these are considered major offenses the self-appointed enforcer of Latino street culture, and remember that what set this off was an imagined affront which touched on sexual performance:

His name is Daniel, and he finally emailed us, and attached the above photo of himself. He tells us he was born in Uruguay but has lived in New York for 20 years, currently in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. He works as an analyst at a credit rating agency. On the day in question, he was riding the Manhattan-bound 7 train, returning from seeing his girlfriend in Queens.

As he tells it in his email, “I got on the subway and accidentally bumped his leg and it started. He called me a pussy and I told him ‘I am what I eat.’ When a girl laughed he went ballistic.” That’s when the video started. And the ending of it all? “The guy got off a couple of stops later asking me to get off the subway and ‘shoot it out’ with him.” Daniel declined.

In the context, it is obvious that the “I am what I eat” remark (which caused the girl to laugh) was an absolutely intolerable insult. For it meant that:

– the well-dressed guy was not rattled by being called a “pussy”

– he was more intelligent than his crude attacker; and

– he scored with women so he could not be shrugged off as gay.

So, I’m thinking that in all probability the thug believed himself to be imposed upon by the guy he had imposed upon by calling a pussy. Bullies work that way; they think that they have a right to impose on you, but your standing up to them is an “imposition.” (Which is why a bully who gets the worse of a fight will turn right around and claim “victim” status.)

Where the incident gets more complicated is in determining which man is more “natural.” Which man is the “alpha male”? Is the bully the alpha, or is the guy who refused to get rattled the alpha? Obviously, the bully considers the well-dressed guy to be a pussy, but does that make him one? What are the implications as to pussification? The man admits and even makes fun of the epithet by saying “I am what I eat.” So if he is the alpha in the equation, does he become the natural born alpha male pussy? Is there such a thing?

And what’s alpha? Who imposed on whom? Is that what Alpha is all about? It strikes me that the bully is a herd follower (perhaps he fancies himself a herd leader), while the other guy is his own man. But in the subhuman natural criminal culture from which the aggressor seems to hail, bullies sometimes have to take it up the ass before they earn the right to be considered men by the other alphas who play that sort of dominance game, so it is very confusing.

Who is more natural? The street thug or the civilized man?

Clearly, Tom Sawyer was no street thug, and I guess there was a time when he would have been expected to develop (however unnatural that might have been for him) into a civilized man. His boyish battle against the admittedly somewhat feminizing forces of civilization is admirable, while Sidney’s deliberate embrace of it at a young age is meant to be considered repulsive by readers, even though it is embraced by the nice ladies and school teachers of the town. Until, of course, they learn that Tom is noble and a hero, while Sidney has all along been an ignoble coward.

So, while I would like to propose that the forces Tom fought were unnatural, even that opens a can of worms and sends me back into the hall of mirrors. Civilization would then become unnatural. Yet the process of civilizing nature is part of man’s nature. And it is natural for man to oppose nature, especially when nature imposes, just it is natural to oppose the opposition.

Surely man can’t be at war with his own nature, for what could be more unnatural than that?

MORE: The comments below are making me wonder whether the public school system, by its failure to discipline children, is systematically creating undisciplined, childlike adults (or even feral adults like the thug in the video).

Children of course need nannying. That is their “nature.” (Damn, that word I hate again!) But adults are not supposed to need or want nannying. Is that changing? Might it be that the more childlike adults there are, the more demand there will be to regulate things like diets, cell phones, and light bulbs?

It fascinates me to see the complete failure of discipline is nonetheless coupled with a mind-numbing “zero tolerance” approach to everything else. A feral young thug can terrorize his classroom and completely ignore his teachers, while bringing an aspirin tablet to school leads to severe penalties. The result seems to be an ever-growing population in need of nannying, which unquestioningly accepts the nanny state.

Perhaps the schools are in fact preparing the kids for live in the new world they’re helping create. And if the schools are turning out adult children, the situation may be somewhat different (and far worse) than Hymowitz imagines.

Please tell me I’m wrong!

I need some reassurance.