On not quite getting it

This isn't quite where I'm going, but I'll say it anyway, as this is a blog post not an essay: one of the most seductive features of mythical Golden Ages is that in them, everyone seems to know who they are and where they belong. My mythical Golden Age (a 60s English childhood fading off at the edges into a very selectively drawn Edwardian or even Victorian pastoral) is certainly like that. In that kinder, mellower Hovis past, if you were dumb you knew you were dumb, and were correspondingly humble and didn't say or do much, other than doffing your cap occasionally. If you were smart, you went to Jura, spat blood and wrote books. What you didn't get is... I was going to say something catty about Business School graduates, but I'd better be careful. Ahem. What you didn't get is people like me. People who generally feel they don't get it, whether because of never having got to grips with Higher Mathematics or for whatever other reason, but who are unable to settle completely and permanently into cap-doffing mode because every so often, when they least expect it, someone they depended on to be smart and knowledgeable says something demonstrably stupid, at which a small audience of other smart people bewilderingly and onirically applaud. This is when the person like me begins to think: hmm. Maybe my inner garbage heap of random and rotting apercus might hold some value after all. This vague sense of encouragement might last a day or two before someone else, consensually doltish, turns out to be far more knowledgeable and intelligent than oneself, at which point cap is hurriedly retrieved and placed on head in readiness for further doffing. The end result being that you go through life not really knowing to which group of people, if any, you belong.

Of course, Google, YouTube and Twitter are already on the case: their lists of results and "suggestions" indirectly factor in your intelligence level, based on previous searches and likes and choices, such that if you are, as I am, politically naïve, everything shown to you will, unbeknownst to you, faithfully mirror and flatter your naivety. It would still be nice, though, if they actually told you: "your viewing history reflects a person with mediocre intelligence, some stupid prejudices, an undisciplined mind and a number of bizarre and comical sexual fetishes", so that you knew just where you stood. If you knew that, then you could either resign yourself to your own specific level of mediocrity, or seek to improve: who knows, there might even be some way of algorithmically determining just where such effort at improvement might best be targeted. I am sure we will have all this one day: for now, though, I feel I belong to the lost generation of people who, while wanting to be better than they are, have little notion of where to start, and end up wandering in endless circles in the wasteland of fringe ideas, borderline pseudosciences, bargain-basement ideologies, bowdlerized classics and hyped mediocrities in search of that elusive illumination which, did we but know it, was all the time only two clicks away.

I was never all that observant, but through these years of wandering there's one thing I have noticed: I seem to be following behind the brightly coloured arse of a monkey, who seems to have even less notion of where he's going than I have. This monkey is, presumably, a symbolic representation of that low-level personality configuration that determines the sort of ideas one is naturally receptive to. One day Google is going to be smart enough to figure that out too.

I've noticed that the older I get the less flexible and accommodating that initial configuration allows me to be. When I was in my twenties I was somehow able to take on board a particular variant of left-wing ideology which antagonized me to the core of my being. I would have said at the time that I had simply been forced to accept what was intellectually inescapable; hindsight, however, tells a different story. The truth is that I never examined those intellectual claims all that carefully, because they were made by people whose unshakeable self-confidence dazzled and intimidated me, and were hedged around with a battery of bitter denunciations of the moral turpitude of all who disagreed with them. I have always been impressionable, guilt-trippable and easily swayed by cheap rhetoric. Hopefully less so now that I am in the winter of my years. The point is that I have stopped seeing my own prejudices as an enemy, as I did back then, and now see them as a valued friend and counsellor. I like the way I see things and react to things. I like the conclusions I jump to. Not always, but most of the time. I like my own mildness and suspicion of dogma and gravitation towards the eternal, obstinate "yes, but...". I am no longer, if I ever was, a dispassionate seeker of widely applicable truth. I am a misfit and eccentric defending only his own right to exist (albeit for not much longer).

Which brings me to Jacqueline Rose.

Ms Rose, a brief Web and YT search informs me, is into Freud, anti-Zionism and feminism. I'm not into any of those things, but that's just me. I tend to think Freud was a good writer but a bad scientist, Israel is a country which has a right to exist and defend itself and its citizens (though I do disagree with how its military apparatus has done so in many cases), and feminism is a self-contradictory and intellectually vacuous ideology: all of these are minority views, and perhaps ill-considered ones, but they are mine own, and I will back them up to the best of my ability if required to. The point is, I am absolutely certain that by holding these views I am not "harming" anyone. I have never intentionally harmed anyone, and if anyone wanted to maintain I had harmed them unintentionally, I would always find the time to listen. In this spirit, then: today I happen upon an article in the Grauniad by Ms Rose, in which she maintains that insofar as I am male (at least apparently or putatively or partially or whatever other qualifications detailed examination of my unique Blohm und Voss physiology might suggest) I am harming women. Here is the relevant accusation (emphasis mine):

One of the most important achievements of feminism over the last half-century, as even Donald Trump must somewhere know, has been to get men, or at least some men, to think critically about, even to reject, the crassest version of masculinity on offer. To ask themselves what they in fact have to gain from a way of being a man in the world that harms women, but which also – since it is as ridiculous as it is cocksure – leaves all men vulnerable to exposure. (Trump will surely go down in history as the first presidential candidate to boast of his penis size).

Now, I get that Ms Rose, not being a man, will find it difficult to see how someone who is a man but who is quite unlike Donald Trump in almost every other respect could possibly take a comment like this personally. Perhaps she might find the following enlightening in this respect:

Hillary Clinton, of course, represents a particular way of being a woman, confident and arrogant to the point of absurdity, which sadly harms not only men but also other women, and which needs to be questioned and perhaps rejected more often than it is.

From what I can tell, Ms Rose has very little in common with Ms Clinton, but I'm betting she would find the above offensive as well as ridiculous, and rightly so. Ridiculous because whether one finds Clinton's personality appealing or irritating, it is hard to see how her "way of being a woman" (in the world, on Jupiter or anywhere else) could possibly "harm" anyone in and of itself; offensive because apparently, the only trait necessary for such "harm" to come about is that of self-confidence, or perhaps of confidence in one's own gender identity, depending on how you read it. In the quoted paragraph, Ms Rose accuses Trump only of being "cocksure" and of boasting of his penis size (for a Freudian, the choice of adjective is clearly mandatory): thus, we are presumably meant to infer that the only way of avoiding "harming women", if you are unfortunate enough to be a man, is to be apologetic, unconfident and hung-up, and to avoid like the very plague all those innumerable laddish pub-crawl conversations in which hyperbolic references to penis size occasionally make their way into the incoherent banter as night draws on. Well, it so happens that if this is all that's required, I am lucky to start from the advantageous position of being already deeply hung-up and supremely unconfident, as well as being too skint to even consider going on pub crawls; however, it is clear from the looseness of the definition that I am not saved, since all manifestations of masculinity, however timid, are meant to be considered, by default, as possible sources of "harm", pending some final case-by-case judgment on the matter.

To be honest, I find it difficult to get into the mind of someone like Rose, able to locate "harm" not in specific acts of force or fraud (in Trump's case, no such act has ever been proved as far as I'm aware) but in some sort of "way of being a man". I have absolutely no idea what kind of harm she might be referring to, or what on earth it might have to do with sex or gender: the only thing that seems reasonably clear is that she wants men to think critically about "versions of masculinity", sort these "versions" in order of "crassness", whatever that means, and reject those at the top of the scale (whatever such "rejection" might consist of). It does not seem to occur to her, first, that "crassness" is purely in the eye of the beholder, and secondly, that there are in reality as many "versions of masculinity" as there are men. Of course we will tend to schematize and generalize and simplify: I haven't tried it, but I'm sure that drawing up astrological charts of Man Signs is a great parlour game. But here we are seeing the fundamental mistake of all ideologues: that of abstracting reality into factitious models of cartoon-like simplicity, then insisting that such models be accepted by others, even those who are naturally capable of seeing and appreciating far better the ungraspable diversity of nature.

And yes, such diversity inevitably means that occasionally, someone will get voted in for whose personality we feel an unconquerable, visceral repulsion. My own intense dislike of Trump, on this level, very likely matches that felt by Rose: however, not only do I not see any relation between the sheer unspeakable awfulness of the President-elect's personality and the fact that he's a man (after all, there are women who are equally unspeakably awful, and in much the same ways), I also fail to see how my personal dislike of him should be presented as a political question, when it clearly isn't. But there's more:

That sexuality has been at the core of this election is clear: whether Trump’s boastful groping and denied assaults on women, Bill Clinton’s own sexual history, or the crass, illegal sexting of a 15-year-old girl by Anthony Weiner (...) If Trump’s populism relied on nostalgia – making America great again, restoring jobs and communities felt to be lost – nostalgia for sexual certainty, however oppressive, violent or degrading, was one of the most powerful cards that he played.

Hmm. I'm not sure that what is "at the core of this election" was "sexuality", so much as media opportunism and scandalmongering, but let's say I'm wrong about that. The question is, were the cited examples of "sexuality" cards played by Trump, or by his opponents? Did Trump dig up the recording of himself talking to Billy Bush and throw it to the Press saying "Here, use this"? Did he go out of his way to make mileage out of Bill and Monica? Or did he at some point promise, even indirectly, some sort of "sexual certainty", whatever that means, along with the Wall and the Reconquista and the libel suits and the protectionist policies? And then we get this:

Even when it is the men who are behaving abominably, everything wrong in the world of sexuality is laid at the woman’s door. Hillary Clinton was guilty by association – which might partly explain the endless, and groundless, charges of criminality against her.

If the first of these sentences didn't have you in stitches, read it again. First, Ms Rose somehow failed to get the memo that Clinton's use of a private email server constituted a breach of security that would have got anyone but her a two-year jail sentence - and last I checked, using a private email server was neither "guilt by association", nor yet another example of "something wrong in the world of sexuality". But more than that, we are asked to accept that all the imputation of sexual wrongdoing was "laid at the woman's door", which can only mean that the endless front page news stories featuring the words "grab her by the asterisks" were mere figments of our imagination, whereas all those endless front page news stories accusing Clinton of being a sexual predator, a rapist, a slut, and so on, are the ones we should be looking at, in spite of the fact they somehow never managed to actually enter into the world of real objective existence.

But this has to take the cake:

How do men and women relate to one another, and how do men relate to other men, if the man who gets the biggest prize of all regards women as subhuman?

If this is a serious question, and it's hard to tell, then the answer is clear: continue relating to one another just as you did before, folks. There, sorted. Even if the Presidency was a prize (it isn't), and even if Trump regarded women as subhuman (as far as I'm aware, he doesn't), neither of these alleged facts ought to have any bearing upon how anyone but Donald Trump relates to anyone else, other than Donald Trump. All I can make of this bizarre sentence is that Ms Rose thinks that people, or at least American people, feel they have to align every detail of their social behaviour with that of the President, such that before ceding their place in a bank queue to a pregnant woman, or before contributing a dollar to the janitor's leaving present, or before asking a passing Japanese tourist to photograph them by a statue, they feel compelled to ask (glancing nervously at the wrist band) "What Would Donald Do"? All I can say is I think she hasn't quite got the measure of the average American citizen. Not that I'd know, of course. Any genuine Americans, feel free to chip in here.

I mentioned earlier that I find feminism an intellectually vacuous belief system: here, in fact, is a small example of why I believe this, in those above quoted words "the man who gets the biggest prize of all". Now, maybe this is nothing more than a symptom of the eccentric personality traits I hinted at earlier in this post, but I have to be honest and say I find this description of the Presidency bizarre - and at the same time, deeply telling. As I understand it, feminism rests on the belief that women have throughout history been "oppressed" by men, and that this "oppression" consists in the manifestly unequal distribution of "power" between the sexes, at least in the highest echelons of society. Leaving unresolved the question of whether exercising power primarily to further the material interests of a certain group actually constitutes "oppression" of that group, it should be at least obvious that this view of oppression is not a historical and cultural constant, and is in fact very post-Enlightenment European: prior to that, and in many other cultures, neither equality in the exercise of power nor such things as individual freedom and autonomy counted for much in the collective value systems that have come down to us, and judging those societies by values that weren't their own (and which they were in any case materially unable to exemplify to any great degree) is surely an exercise in futility. Not only that, but what sane person in this day and age would consider power a "prize", and greater power as a greater prize? The desire for power over others - and one would have thought a Freudian would see this - is always and everywhere a symptom of a deep neurosis, one that we have come to expect in the average ambitious politician, but not one that we expect to see in the people around us, which is precisely why the idea of looking to politicians as role models is so weird and disturbing. But I can see this is something I will have to take up in a separate post. It's getting late.

Finally, Ms Rose tacks on a coda to her article in which she pleads with the reader not to "join in the murderous rhetoric of hatred", on the basis of recognizing that there are no innocent parties and no blank slates. Very worthy and unexceptionable sentiments, of course, but so little in keeping with what went before, that disingenuous has to be the final verdict. Insisting that there is something wrong with certain unspecified "versions of masculinity", that it is not only inappropriate but harmful to others if one feels confident and at ease with one's own gender identity, however defined, or that there is something sinister and dangerous in entertaining any sort of "sexual certainty" are scarcely wise or responsible messages to put out if one really does wish to avoid the flowering of hatred in a divided society.

Then again, the alternative message "forget the gender issue, it's a red herring" is, let's be realistic, not the sort of message you'd expect to fall from the lips of a self-confessed Freudian feminist. Sometimes I think I just hope for too much from people.