Lawrence Auster: A social conservative who just doesn’t get it

I didn’t want to have to write this. I really didn’t. Unlike the other conservatives I’ve skewered, Lawrence Auster is an intellectual who I admire and respect. I don’t think it is too hyperbolic to describe him as one of the wisest conservative minds writing today. Yet, on the topic of sexuality, Mr. Auster is as ignorant as the rest of the right-wing. His comment on this Dennis Mangan post concerning my manifesto could not go unanswered:

The kind of thinking on display in this thread, in which people look at the human race in terms of “alpha male” and “beta male” and talk about organizing society along those lines, is symptomatic of a social catastrophe.

This is going to hurt me far more than it’s going to hurt you. Auster complains here that individuals such as myself want to “organiz[e] society along [the] lines” of alphas and betas. Newsflash: society has already organized men into those two groups. All the writers of the Roissysphere have been doing is relaying this fact. Acknowledging reality is not the same as endorsing it, any more than my saying “the sun rises in the east” means that I WANT that to happen.

The catastrophe results from the twin developments of biological reductionism and sexual liberation, and it consists of the reduction of human beings to competitors/commodities in the sexual marketplace.

According to the link Auster left in his comment, his objection to “biological reductionism” is based on the fact that reductionists “[are] unable to articulate and defend our civilization, because [they are] unable to articulate the things that make up our civilization, such as religion, philosophy, political science, morality.” How does stating that these things sprang from a certain social and sexual configuration based on biological realities make me and others incapable of defending Western civilization? I and other bloggers have specifically stated that the unique, provider beta-centric arrangement of the West is what made it the greatest civilization in human history and set it apart from any other society that came before. What Auster denounces as “reductionism” is the only way to understand how our society came about and what we need to do to preserve it.

It’s a vision of man and society in which there is no sense of social and cultural order, no shared vision of an inherited or higher good, but just the competing desires and needs of people conceived of as biological/sexual units.

“Social and cultural order” and the “shared vision of an inherited or higher good” are not nebulous concepts that spring up out of nowhere – they arise from practical, material concerns. If you want people to give a four-letter word about society, you have to incentivize them into doing so. Why should men have a “sense of social and cultural order” when society is actively working to keep them down? If your answer to that question is “because God/society/the church/I say(s) you should,” or some variant on that, Mr. Auster, you will lose the argument – as you deserve to.

Is this really the way you see, and want to see, other human beings? Is this really the way you see, and want to see, yourself?

To paraphrase Clint Eastwood, “want’s” got nothin’ to do with it.

Can you imagine any decent society coming out of such a vision? Do you think any civilization could ever have been created or preserved on such terms?

Oooh, oooh, I have one: Western civilization. The West was created and sustained on the terms of incentivizing beta males to work for the public good. The day that those incentives stopped is the day the betas began dropping out of society and going their own way.

When you look at the world through this reductionist, Steve Saileresque lens, you’ve already given up on humanity, you’ve given up on civilization.

My manifesto outlined a plan to restore Western civilization, sir. Where’s your ideas on the subject? Like most conservative complainers, Auster is long on explanations and denunciations but short on solutions.

And even more desolating is the impact of someone like Roissy.

When Mr. Auster was first directed to Roissy’s blog a year ago, he wrote this:

The notion that the whoremaster Roissy–for that’s what he is–has anything to offer about restoring our civilization is beyond ludicrous…

I can understand someone of conservative Christian morals being offended by a graphically-written blog about sex. But even if you disagree with Roissy’s approach, his ideas on the lapse of Western civilization into African-style savagery and sexual anarchy cannot be ignored. I don’t regard his advice of having men emulate alpha males as a complete remedy for the problem, but his prognosis is much closer to the truth then Auster has ever come. Additionally, Roissy offers solutions for men who are lost in the jungle and looking for a way out. Mr. Auster offers nothing aside from arrogant moral condemnation. If you’re unable or unwilling to help men, don’t be surprised if they ignore you in favor of someone who is willing and able.

Auster also fails to consider the underlying reasons as to how a Roissy or any individual advocating hedonism could gain a wide following. Like every other conservative who opines on this issue, he attacks the symptoms without considering the causes. The causes are unrestrained female hypergamy and the weakening of the cultural institutions that constrained such hypergamy. In a world in which women instinctively gravitate to a handful of alpha males, the only option for a beta male who wants female company is to emulate alpha behavior through game. The rise of an entire subculture of blogs and websites discussing the most efficient ways to get a woman into bed is a unique facet of our modern culture and should give conservatives pause beyond their predictable “I am SO offended” kvetching.

If Lawrence Auster was just a garden-variety conservative with a head full of platitudes and a mouth full of shaming tactics, this would be the end of this post. But since I’m a reader of his, I’m well acquainted with the depth of his foolishness on human sexuality. These two posts from last May show that Auster and many of his commenters are not only uninformed on this issue, they’re “not even wrong.”

The two threads are a discussion on the predilection young women have for thugs, bad boys, and other men whom a normal society would regard as vermin, and how these women keep getting maimed or killed by these men. Aficionados of game can answer this easily: women love socially dominant men, and thugs and bad boys are socially dominant. Bingo! Problem explained. In fact, one of Auster’s commenters, Mark P., actually says this:

Regarding your post, it’s a very good article, but I think there is a simpler answer: today’s woman/girl is attracted to thuggish, violent, high-testosterone men. These are men who are usually physically powerful and attractive to a lot of other women, so the marginal value of any single woman to them is much less. Furthermore, their high-T natures put them into contact with other high-T men where violence is inevitable.

In other words, wrestle with Rottweilers, and you will get bit.

Liberalism has not so much thrown out a woman’s common sense but it has created an environment where the attributes their grandmothers looked for in a man are no longer necessary. Society has allowed women to pursue “bad boys” and “alpha” males for excitement and sexual thrills, instead of the more stable, committed and “boring” mass of men their grandmothers went for. This is why we’re seeing a gaping maw sucking down young women.

Look at some ot the pop-culture that is out there. One of the most popular movies to date is Twilight ($390 million worldwide) This is a story about a teenage girl falling in love with a vampire. This movie encapsulates everything about young women and their choices. The vampire represents the ultimate alpha male because of his superhuman strength, speed and sexual magnetism. At the same time, this superior man finds the woman unworthy because, after all, being human, she is his food. Despite this contradiction, he is somehow attracted to her in a non-foodie way and he protects her against other vampires who don’t care for this unnatural relationship. Oh … and this complete nonsense was written by a Mormon housewife and mother of three.

In the real world, women seek the love of clearly superior men who find them unworthy, resulting in the carnage we see around us. Women are putting themselves in these situations in an effort to get what they want.

I would also disagree with the idea that somehow family is the natural state of mankind. In reality, the natural state of mankind is a mother and her children (as the feminists claim). The family, instead, is the natural state of civilization. The monogamous marriage of patriarchal control and exclusive sexual access guarantees each man a woman and thus gives hima stake in the civilization around him. This reduces one major source of conflict and allows men to cooperate more easily. In fact, this exclusive sexual access is a hallmark feature of Western Civilization and a major reason why it surged ahead against the various polygamous societies of Africa and the Middle East.

What women want today is a polyandryous society that still maintains a “Sex and the City” civilization. They somehow expect to limit sexual access to the five percent of men they find attractive while the rest toil away to make life easier and more comfortable for them. It ain’t gonna happen. Ask the women of Iran, Lebanon and Afghanistan what happened to their freedom when Western feminism was overthrown.

Another comment from Mark P.:

Aggressive, powerful men stimulate a woman’s primitive instincts. Humans have only lived within civilization for 5-10 percent of their history. 90 percent of that history was spent in stone-age primitivism, a primitivism typified by transient males and by the “family” being the mother and her children. Without patriarchy and its male investment in society, it stands to reason that human reproduction was, for a good chunk of that history, based on murder and rape. The selective pressure on this existing population probably produced female offspring who would be receptive to alpha males who were very good a killing their rivals and taking their women. For 10k years, civilization has controlled this instinct, but it has not eliminated it. With civilization breaking down, this womanly instinct is now re-asserting itself.

By the way, women despise weakness … they do not “tend” to it. Aggressive, even abusive, behavior, even behavior that leads to injury, is a mark of alpha-ness. Show me the bruised face of a battered woman, and I will show you the face of a woman in love.

Yes, I just wrote that women love their abusers … which is why they put themselves in the position of being killed. Lydia McGrew hints at this very fact when she references Theodore Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom. Dalrymple noted the extensive number of female nurses and doctors that had thug boyfriends and the case of a woman who went back to her boyfriend after he treated her for a broken arm. In general, one can watch cops and see women who refuses to press charges against their abusive boyfriends, or Lifetime Movie Network shows about the woman who just “couldn’t leave her abusive husband.”

The most famous recent example of this phenomenon is Rihanna. Her physical abuse was widely publicized. And what did she do? This woman … a famous celebrity, considered by many to be one of the most beautiful women in the world, who is independently wealthy and would have no scarcity of suitors … went back to her abusive boyfriend. Only under massive public pressure did she even file charges against him. Occam’s razor: She went back because she loves him. And she loves him because he beats her.

Of course, neither Auster nor anyone else on the thread can deal with this. Auster’s response to the second comment:

I think Mark P. has taken an idea that has an element of truth it it and taken it too far. He’s treating sick behavior as though it were the norm.

In a dying society, “sick behavior” IS the norm.

So what is Auster’s explanation as to why women prefer violent men? IGNORANCE. I’m dead serious:

This isn’t about some wild attraction to dangerous and exciting men. It’s about pure insensibility, pure dullness, the quality of being tuned out from reality.

Funny that’s its only women who are drawn to physically abusive lovers. Are men not capable of stupidity? Any animal is smart enough to avoid actions that cause it pain, and yet the Western members of the female sex of the only sentient species on the planet can’t do the same.

Have you considered, Mr. Auster, that the two explanations are not mutually exclusive? Namely, that in the absence of social conditioning, women will blindly follow their genitals straight into the arms of violent dirtbags? Those men are socially dominant by dint of their nature, which is why women are drawn to them and why, when they get slapped both silly and senseless, they almost always go back to them. Tennessee Williams knew this. Auster doesn’t.

And then there’s a commenter, Ian B., who pulls out the tired “not all women are like that” card:

I think the main weakness of Mark P.’s theory is that he is presenting a dysfunctional minority subset of women as if they represented all women. We all know women who sleep around with a bunch of lazy thugs in their youth, before settling down after 30. But here’s the thing: most women don’t do this. Most marriages don’t involve the woman sticking her husband with bastard children from previous trysts. These normal relationships just don’t get as much attention, because dysfunctional train wrecks always attracts more notice.

Again, its funny how the population of badboy-chasing women is much larger than it was a hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago.

In general, women want a guy who will provide security and well-being for them and their children. This is undoubtedly biologically hardwired to a large degree. So women are attracted to signs of strength. Of course, it stands to reason that, regardless of the time period, the best protector and provider is going to be a guy who is both capable of violence when needs be (to protect his wife and children, not to use it against them), as well as a competent and invested provider. The majority of women understand this.

The welfare state and female economic emancipation have eliminated women’s need for a “provider,” leaving them free to pursue the “protector” at their leisure.

However, some women recognize certain signs of strength more than others. Some are primed to recognize primarily capacity for violence, and fail to be turned off by the fact that the guy is a no-account loser who is none-too-intelligent and likely to use violence mainly on her (an “alpha male” as Mark defines them). Most women aren’t like this, but there are enough of them that a thug type can usually find a few.

Because of the aforementioned factors, the primary factor a woman takes into consideration when considering a man is how sexy she finds him. The fact that many of these men are “no-account loser[s]” has no bearing whatsoever on this.

I don’t see why this requires positing some time in the deep past when violent, transient, no-count “alpha male” thugs were the ideal catch. Again, most women are not like this, just like most men are not like this. Mark describes himself as a “beta male” (which is a lot more common that the sorts of men he’s talking about). Does this mean we need to posit some period in the deep past when beta males were the dreamy ones? Human personality traits exist on a long continuum. I don’t see the need to posit particular scenarios in the deep past to account for each and every one of them.

Since when did the pre-1965 West count as “the deep past?”

Oh, btw, Mark suggests that these women stop dating thugs when they get older, and go after more reliable guys, because their looks are starting to fade. There may be some truth to that, but I think that the primary explanation is a lot more straightforward: It’s simply that people (both men and women) in general become wiser, less reckless, and more perceptive as they mature.

Yeah, older women are sooooooo wise, which is why when they end up single and infertile, they always blame men for their failure in the sexual marketplace.

Auster ends the thread with an attack on his favorite boogeyman, Darwinism:

So what is the truth? The truth is that there is a human nature, and that there are also classic distortions or derailments of human nature, which are best explained in Christian terms, as the result of sin. Darwinism is unable to explain them.

The inadequacy of Darwinism is also seen with regard to the behaviors being discussed in this thread. In reality, women are attracted to strong men because that is the female nature, period. Now this norm of female attraction to male strength also has its classic derailments, its excessive or negative expressions, e.g., being attracted to criminal brutes. But we don’t need Darwin for that. It is very clearly and satisfactorily explained by Aristotle in the Nichomachian Ethics.

There are other anti-Darwinists who recognize that the standard explanations for why women are attracted to certain types of men are wrong. What, precisely, is Auster’s issue?

The Fifth Horseman left this comment on this Roissy post:

I can’t believe how stupid social conservatives are. They are so occupied with issues that are done deals (abortion) or affect a very small number of people (gay marriage) that they fail to see this mortal threat to everything they claim to want to preserve. What idiocy.

A folk myth holds that while the Turks were laying siege to Constantinople, the Byzantines were busy arguing what sex angels were. Conservative intellectuals, including Lawrence Auster, are doing exactly that. In the case of Auster, his petty and pointless jihad against Darwinism blinds him to the real problem – the unrestrained female hypergamy that is silently bringing the West back into the Dark Ages. I have yet to see Auster or other conservatives inveigh against no-fault divorce, punitive alimony and child-support payments, or any of the misandrist laws and government institutions that have weakened beta men and empowered women to behave in socially destructive ways. They might as well be arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Because of conservatives’ collective ignorance on this topic, their efforts to turn back Western civilization’s decline have amounted to less than nothing. If Lawrence Auster and other like-minded right-wingers don’t get their act together, not only will society continue its descent into savagery, but future generations will curse them as idiots and fools who wasted their time on irrelevant side issues only to let the civilization they were ostensibly defending fall to pieces. I criticize them because I care.

For further reading, see Mr. Mangan’s response to Auster.