The Office as Utopia

I am quite aware that a professional office in an interesting company with a solid mission is a really nice place to be.

I would not like to live in any part of a neolithic or feudal society. I'll leave it to others to hanker after Viking raiding parties.

I loathe the horsing-around mateyness of the combat-facing armed forces.

I'm repelled and disoriented by overt displays of emotion, emotional appeals which make no sense, excessive moralising on emotional grounds.

No, I am truly a psychological creature of mature-capitalist cool: the NTs bred to dwell in cupboards and back-offices: useful when needed.

Nevertheless.

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A fragment:

"They talk about the feminisation of society. How in the absence of a mortal, existential enemy the liberal world has become a supersized hearth and home. No room for the masculine virtues of the warrior, or for the disinterested seeker after truth.

Yet this is only half-true. The liberal world is not modelled after the family but from an idealised model of the modern, capitalist workplace, where:

• emotion equates to transactional sociability between strangers
• strong emotional bonds would violate rational outcomes
• interpersonal violence would undermine systemic processes.

The middle-class, professional work-environment is optimally populated by lesbian women and gay men*: personality-types combining diffuse, non-aggressive, impersonal pseudo-warmth together with loyalty to corporate-outcomes rather than individuals.

Think ESFJ.

The office as utopia."

Modern liberal ideology - woke culture - seeks to make this protean, historically-conditioned target-state the foundational theory of normative human nature. A mass exercise in self-delusion, orchestrated by the ideologues who have captured the media in all the advanced western democracies, where an entrenched capitalism has already done its selective work.

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* In MB terms, people at the centre of the F-T axis: not too feminine, not too masculine. See "Capitalism is for wimps".

The Elephant in the (Catholic) Room - David Torkington

David Torkington has a piece in "The Catholic Universe" entitled, "The elephant in the room that threatens to bring our Church to its knees".

I found it shocking:

"It is perhaps understandable that in the past gay men were attracted to communities of men as the safest and most desirable place to seek God. When I tried my vocation even before the Second Vatican Council, of 45 others, at least six were gay, although I only realise this with hindsight. At the time gay seminarians kept their heads down; they were there but they were latent. I know several who went on to become excellent priests.

A massive disillusionment after the Vatican Council led many tens of thousands of young priests and religious to leave the priesthood and religious life. The usual figure quoted is 50,000 but I think that is an underestimation. For obvious reasons the vast majority of gay seminarians and priests remained behind. When, in the sixties and seventies, celibacy in general became a taboo subject for the majority of the younger generation, vocations to the priesthood suffered. However, many gay Catholics continued to be attracted to the priesthood and the religious life.

When, in 1979, I was giving a lecture tour in South Africa I came across a seminary entirely populated by gay seminarians. I found the whole atmosphere sick and depressing. They openly admitted that for them, the vow of celibacy meant that this obliged them to refrain from sex with women — but it did not prevent them from having sex with other men. "

The Second Vatican Council affirmed: "The synod does not wish to leave any doubts in the mind of anyone regarding the Church's firm will to maintain the law that demands perpetual and freely chosen celibacy for present and future candidates for priestly ordination in the Latin rite."

"Just as later Rome forbade all talk about women priests, in the 1990s Rome forbade all talk about homosexuality. It was strictly forbidden. It was and has been the green light for homosexual males to flood into and take over many, if not most, seminaries. Later this happened to whole dioceses, with more and more homosexual bishops, archbishops and cardinals, many encouraging and promoting people similar to themselves with what now appears to be disastrous consequences.

One of the most conservative but highly respected Catholic moral theologians in the USA, Professor Janet Smith, has said that many dioceses in the USA are full of homosexual priests and many are run by them. In fact, she claims that well over 70 per cent of clergy in the US are gay.

I don't just mean 'gay' as friends of mine were gay and as many good priests have been and still are gay, but rather militantly gay: not celibate but pushy, pugnacious partisans with agendas hardly distinguishable from secular LGBT communities, which they wish to impose on the Church. This can be seen in parishes they have taken over in the USA. ...

The impression from 'on high' at present is that the sexual horrors which have depraved the Church for all too long are all but over, but that is far from the truth. If paedophilia is finally under control and dealt with, which I very much doubt then pederasty is all but out of control, especially in countries like the USA. "

I had not appreciated that level of homosexual dominance at all levels of the Catholic hierarchy. This is beginning to look unreformable.

I note that David Torkington is a conservative, 'mystical' theologian. His religious position would be considered out-and-out reactionary by most liberals (and by me). He expresses his own views thus:

"Let me be quite clear, sodomy was not only considered an abomination in the Old Testament, but in the New Testament, too. If it was committed in the early Church it had to be admitted publicly and the offenders had to undergo the sacrament of reconciliation throughout Lent with all the appropriate penances. If they continued to offend after that they were permanently excluded from the Christian community.

Nothing has changed nor can it change - sodomy is a very serious sin and permanent offenders who are priests. bishops or cardinals are commiting a mortal sin and cannot administer the sacraments lawfully whether there has been an official condemnation from Rome or not. It would be the same if your parish priest installed a mistress in the presbytery.

Their seriously sinful actions ipso facto (by the very act of performing them) instantly separate them from the mystical body of Christ. They cannot therefore perform any of the sacraments lawfully, nor is it lawful for any of the faithful to approach them to do so. Parishes run by such priests are in effect under an interdict whether such an edict has been issued from Rome or not. They simply do not belong to us nor we to them despite all the external similarities. "

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My thoughts on reading this article were these.

1. David Torkington is surely not long for this world. No doubt the phones on the desk of The Catholic Universe's editor are ringing off the hook with calls from senior functionaries demanding his instant exclusion: 'incendiary charges offered anecdotally, without proof, leading to the Church being brought into disrepute'.

2. Torkington's 'Quietist' philosophy leads him to prayer and meditation as the solution. That's not going to cut much ice with the regional Churches and in Rome itself.

David Torkington's latest book (Amazon, Jan 2018)

3. Any student of public choice theory could tell the Vatican that its predicament flows entirely from the perverse incentives it set up. The Church will always have a disproportionate number of gay clergy - numerous psychological studies show that the traits align. The problem is one of balance .. and not placing theological barriers to powerful human drives. Saintliness is rare while hypocrisy is regrettably common.

The Catholic Church will not make the necessary reforms. Even the Church of England, as theologically light as it is possible to be, is rent asunder on these issues by the global schism between American and European liberals and African/Asian traditionalists.

We live in such interesting times.

Only engineering convinces

Amazon link

I'm only in the earliest stages of Steve Keen's critique of neoclassical economics (above). He's very successful in exposing their logical inconsistencies and utterly implausible assumptions.

From my own amateur reading of the standard texts, I recall authors conceding these points on the excuse that (i) we can learn something from pure models, and (ii) that despite the flawed assumptions the results seem surprisingly accurate.

I know that Dr Keen is underwhelmed by such hand-waving and will address those points in later chapters.

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Keen is somewhat puzzled by the fact that leading economics journals won't see the force of his (undoubtedly correct) arguments or publish his erudite papers. He has some explanations in terms of cultural inertia, the apparent successes in the past of the neoclassical programme and even the usual lack of real-world consequences of getting the foundations so very wrong. He admits wryly that economics just isn't like physics or engineering.

This seems to me the crux of it:

• People will believe all kinds of things if doing so underpins their self-interest.


• If there are no practical consequences (ie nothing that can't be explained away), mere argument will never gain traction.


• If you believe humans will never fly (“if God wanted man to fly he would have given him wings”) then only an aeroplane will refute you.

I'm waiting for the final chapters where Keen unveils his alternative macroeconomic model which, I believe, successfully outperforms those of the neoliberals.

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Remember those stories of how racist AI systems were categorising criminals by their mug shots? Plainly, said liberals, crime was a matter of unfortunate circumstances. How could faces (which identical twins suggest are genetically shaped) have anything to do with it?

Yet it was engineering - hard to argue against.

The Economist (liberal susceptibilities very much on hold) reports today: "Advances in AI are used to spot signs of sexuality".

"When shown one photo each of a gay and straight man, both chosen at random, the model distinguished between them correctly 81% of the time.

When shown five photos of each man, it attributed sexuality correctly 91% of the time.

The model performed worse with women, telling gay and straight apart with 71% accuracy after looking at one photo, and 83% accuracy after five. In both cases the level of performance far outstrips human ability to make this distinction.

Using the same images, people could tell gay from straight 61% of the time for men, and 54% of the time for women. This aligns with research which suggests humans can determine sexuality from faces at only just better than chance."

Sexual orientation not so much a lifestyle choice after all.

Gay genes or gay pathogens?

What are we to make of this? (Hannah Devlin, The Times, Feb 14th 2014).

"Scientists have found the strongest evidence yet for the existence of genes that increase the chance of a man being gay. The study, which involved more than 400 gay brothers, identified two small areas on the male genome that appear to be linked to sexuality.

Michael Bailey, from the Northwestern University in Chicago, who carried out the research, said: “Sexual orientation has nothing to do with choice. Our findings suggest there may be genes at play and we found evidence for two sets that affect whether a man is gay or straight.”

In the study, presented yesterday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Chicago, scientists took blood from 409 gay brothers and heterosexual members of their family. On average, siblings share 50 per cent of their DNA, but ought to have a higher chance of sharing any genes involved in determining sexuality.

In the 1990s the American geneticist Dean Hamer identified an area that appeared to influence male sexuality on the X chromosome, which men inherit from their mothers. The results, however, have remained controversial.

The latest research confirmed that this region on the X chromosome, known as Xq28, is more likely to be shared by the gay pairs of brothers than by the brothers and their other siblings. The study also identified a second genetic region, on Chromosome 8, which also appeared to predict whether a man would be homosexual.

While the pairs of brothers shared gene variants in these regions, however, there were not individual genes that stood out across all the participants in the study.

The findings suggested that overall a man’s sexuality depends about 30 to 40 per cent on genetic factors, while the rest depends on environmental factors, such as the hormones a baby is exposed to in the womb."

Putting aside discredited "nurturist" theories of homosexuality, a leading non-genetic explanation is the pathogen theory advocated by Paul W. Ewald, a biology professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and Gregory Cochran, an independent physicist in Albuquerque, New Mexico (outlined in this article by Caleb Crain). Their argument against "gay genes" is that these are so detrimental to reproductive fitness that they would have been removed from the population through natural selection. However, Hannah Devlin's Times article has this to say:

"Previously, homosexuality has been viewed as a “Darwinian paradox” because if male homosexuality were genetic, and gay men reproduced less than heterosexuals, the trait should eventually disappear from the population over time. This has led some critics to dismiss the genetic argument.

"However, there is now some evidence that genes linked to male homosexuality could increase fertility in women. One study by Italian scientists found that female relatives of gay men tended to have more children than those of straight men."

Ewald and Cochran rejected this argument as explained at the end of the Caleb Crain article:

" ... perhaps homosexuality is an unintended side effect of a gene for something else—a side effect more marked in one gender than the other. That might explain why more men than women are exclusively homosexual. Hamer, the discoverer of the Xq28 link, favors this explanation. “Suppose you had a gene that tended to make men gay, but the same gene in women made them more reproductive,” Hamer suggests. He proceeds to give examples. “If you had a gene that made people more attractive and intelligent, it might make men gay, but it might make women more likely to reproduce. Or suppose you had a gene that made people attracted to men. If you gave it to a guy, he would probably be gay, but if you gave it to a woman, she would simply be . . . well, let’s say, ‘exceptionally attracted to men.’ ”

"But Cochran and Ewald doubt this explanation, too. Evolution tends to balance out any gender inequity as severe as Hamer describes. After a while, some mutation would come along that jiggered our hormones to reduce the gene’s fitness cost to men, while retaining its benefit for women. “In the long run,” Cochran says, “sex-antagonistic genes are tamed.”

The argument for a sex ratio of 1:1 male-female (which means reproductively-capable males and females) was one of the first great triumphs of quantitative population genetics, going back to Ronald Fisher in 1930. Here's the argument as presented by W. D. Hamilton.

1. Suppose male births are less common than female.
2. A newborn male then has better mating prospects than a newborn female, and therefore can expect to have more offspring.
3. Therefore parents genetically disposed to produce males tend to have more than average numbers of grandchildren born to them.
4. Therefore the genes for male-producing tendencies spread, and male births become more common.
5. As the 1:1 sex ratio is approached, the advantage associated with producing males dies away.
6. The same reasoning holds if females are substituted for males throughout. Therefore 1:1 is the equilibrium ratio.

In modern language, the 1:1 ratio is the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS). In a population of individuals playing the ESS (i.e. producing equal numbers of sons and daughters), any other strategy (e.g. 51% sons and 49% daughters) would have lower fitness, and hence would be selected against.

What would resolve this debate would be to know more about the genes hanging around the Xq28 region and on chromosome 8 and what they do. Then some modelling of the evolutionary dynamics. Without a quantitative analysis this debate will run and run, even without all the social agendas swirling around.