[This post was submitted by Meistergedanken]
In the science fiction/satire novel Brave New World, humanity has become divided into distinct classes based on genetically engineered levels of ability and intelligence. It’s all very tidy – and artificial, and implies that such a society would severely limit our innate freedoms, even though most of us wouldn’t notice.
But as it so happens, I have seen the same thing beginning to happen within the last decade. However, it is occurring precisely because people have complete freedom to choose – or at least compete for – their partners (I would say spouses, but with roughly half of births occurring out of wedlock, I want to keep this discussion broad).
Anecdotal evidence is often scorned and summarily overlooked by pundits and other aspiring members of the intelligentsia, but observations gathered from your personal surroundings can hardly be anything but anecdotal, so I tend to accept it. And so, just in my own little circle of acquaintances, I know:
- a doctor who has married another doctor
- a lawyer who has married another lawyer
- a musician that has married another musician
- a minister who has married another minister
- and an engineer who has married another engineer (actually, I know several of those).
Let’s face it, these people tend to end up in their own little specialized bubbles. It’s incestuous, I tell you – and annoying at parties. Have you ever been the odd man out at a cozy gathering of lawyers or musicians? You can’t substantively contribute to the conversation, and it soon becomes obvious that these people have zero interest in you. In short, it blows. But I digress…
There are other, more innocuous pairings, of course, that are forming the bedrock of a reconstituted 21st century middle class: engineers with nurses/teachers is a popular category (one to which I myself fall into), or, current economic crisis notwithstanding, the real estate agent and the mortgage broker (which require less education but perversely can be more lucrative). And while opposites may attract in the short term, (and then repel or annihilate each other), like tends to go with like.
The unexamined mechanism for all this is underpinned by two recent developments in the Western World:
- Women are completely free to select their mates, without being subject to familial or societal approval (part of the freedom from responsibility so crucial to feminism’s core philosophy)
- Women are just as likely as men to become educated and engaged in well-paying professions
In the past, you married your high school sweetheart or hooked up with someone in college, and if you were still involved with them by the time you graduated, chances were pretty good you would eventually marry them also – it’s the whole “shared history” thing at work. This will still occur in limited instances, but with men and women marrying later and later, it is far more likely that coworkers, or at the very least vocational peers, become romantically involved. This means intellectual compatibility. This means smart people begetting smart children, driven people begetting driven children, creative people begetting creative children, and so forth. Before that, it was a crap shoot. A man may have been a great writer or artist or scientist, but if he married the “girl next door” because of looks or convenience or wealthy parents, his children may have inherited none of his abilities. Conversely, how many stodgy, unimaginative bankers or merchants had genius children that seemed to come out of nowhere? The answer is that the talents were inherited from the mother, who never got to explore those talents because of gender restrictions. I realize the situation is more complex than this, but I stand by the fundamental premise.
Now those restrictions are removed, and women are working, for better or for worse for their families, and the game is different…
Although the resultant dual-income households were supposed to yield a measure of security due to an “earning redundancy”, and in fact have had a demonstrable impact on consumer spending and the greater economy in general, the far greater long-term effect in my opinion is that the practice of eugenics, abandoned (prematurely, in my view) back in the 1930’s due to ethical qualms and incomplete knowledge of genetics, has been inadvertently revived – and I suspect that this is ultimately for the greater good. Unfortunately, this particular “ultimately” may refer to a time centuries from now, and there will be a lot of discord to work through before then.
Liberals talk about class in America, but constantly get sidetracked by fixating on race, or more infrequently, gender (haven’t heard screams about the “feminization of poverty” lately – must have something to do with the fact that more women are attending college than men now, and the bulk of the lost jobs within the last two years have turned the recession into the “mancession”…). And while the paramount importance of education is acknowledged by all, the quality of the “raw material” upon which this instruction must be focused is rarely accorded significant consideration. Being ignored, the possibility of its improvement due to greater refinement and predictability through what is essentially “good breeding” has been slim. But after all, a sculptor requires that his hunk of marble has suitable quality before he can produce his masterwork.
We have highly educated people – married to each other now for the first time in history, who are scaling to, if not the top echelons of society, than to a comfortable place indeed. Actually, as I have read in several MRA articles recently, marriage seems destined to become a hallmark of the affluent class. Meanwhile, an immense underclass – predominantly created out of wedlock – is forming beneath our feet. For on the one hand, we have people who are surfing the internet, carefully researching financial info for their retirement plans, are up on the latest nutritional recommendations for their children’s meals, and are savvy enough to search online and compare deals on everything from airline tickets to interest rates, but on the other hand we have even more people that can barely read, let alone use computers, have little knowledge of geography, history, science or economics, and furthermore are not troubled at all by their ignorance. Of course it is inevitable that society becomes more and more stratified! As my mother always said, “water and people always find their own level”. As pointed out so effectively in The Origin of Species, the important concept to keep in perspective is that given sufficient time, only a tendency is necessary to bring about dramatic change.
Now it is true that, having come up with these thoughts a couple years ago and independently of the HBD theorists that I have only just been made aware of, they lack the seasoning provided by the knowledge I have imbibed lately from such sources as The Spearhead. And although it’s refreshing to have a “jargon-free” article once in a while, I realize that the MRA sphere contributes a lot of content that lends needed sophistication to this thought experiment and other related matters. For starters, women can’t always get the mates they choose – or perhaps I should say, they can only get them for one night, particularly if they are “alphas” (there’s that jargon)! For another, some women beget offspring with one male and end up having another male, like the “beta-provider” (more jargon), raise it. Such factors muddy the waters, and even set up counteractive forces. The question then becomes: which set of forces will dominate? At stake is the Fate of Man: have we reached the zenith of our evolutionary potential because liberal nanny-states have sabotaged the process of natural selection, or will some segment of it branch off and attain greater heights, leaving its erstwhile brethren in the dustbin of history like so many other ancestral precursors or Neanderthals?
Now, obviously, at one end of the socioeconomic spectrum there are always the few guys gaming the system and skimming the cream off the top for themselves via unscrupulous means, and at the other end there are the unfortunates screwed over through no fault of their own and often by misandrist policies, as I am sure some readers will remind me. But I am writing about the Middle, the center of the curve, just like most of the articles posted here deal with the typical woman (and hence explain why we dismiss the standard counterargument from female apologists that “they’re not all like that”). Therefore, it still must be said: there remains a profound ethical consequence of all this. As the generations roll by, it will be increasingly difficult to honestly say that poor people don’t deserve their poverty, and that affluent people didn’t earn their prosperity. And that’s when the true “culture wars” will begin, because to the masses being preached to by the populists and liberals with all their class warfare rhetoric at the ready, socialism and other more draconian forms of “wealth redistribution” will never seem more tempting – even as they become far less justifiable.
