Sex Wars

 

 

The divorce rate had reached a new high: 92% of people were now getting divorced. Those who stubbornly remained married were looked on with suspicion tinged with envy. Meanwhile the sexual allegation rate had skyrocketed: four out of five men had been accused of some form of sexual misconduct (from assault to insufficient attention). The new consent laws were wreaking havoc. Women were afraid of men and men were afraid of women. Political factions had grown up that fostered this atmosphere of hatred and mistrust: Empowered Women Against the Rape Patriarchy, Concerned Men for Sexual Justice. There were demonstrations, boycotts, and mass movements. And violence too: starting at demonstrations but spilling over into random mayhem. The media ate it up, fanned and fueled it. You were either for women and against men or for men and against women; dissent was not permitted. Things went on like this for a few years, simmering, sometimes boiling over.

Then war broke out. At first it took place on the streets, as gangs sought out members of the opposite sex for ridicule, roughing up, and occasional homicide. There were rapes. There were castrations. Marriage itself was deemed politically incorrect, a form of collaborating with the enemy. A new political language was spoken demonizing members of the opposite sex. Relationships between the sexes still existed, rarely, but they were fraught and frowned upon. Segregation became the norm, with men in one place and women in another (there were no men’s and women’s bathrooms next to each other any more). Neighborhoods were patrolled. If you wanted to meet a member of the opposite sex, you went to a designated neutral zone, furtively and riskily. Homosexuality was rampant, as well as sex robots. Culture split. Universities were single-sex only. There were separate TV channels. Remarkably, racism and other forms of prejudice disappeared under this new regime: men and women became united against the enemy—the other sex. Crude stereotypes and discrimination prevailed.

But that was not the end of it, because there was now a battle for power and territory. The two sides organized into armies. At first it was snipers and nighttime raids, as well as ordinary terrorism, but then it became regimented. People were trained and equipped. Walls were erected and defended, with high-casualty pitched battles. Atrocities too: mass killings, including children. Not that each sex had nothing to do with the other sex: it was recognized that each needed the other for reproductive purposes. This problem was solved simply by introducing a form of slavery: each side imprisoned suitably subdued members of the opposite sex, usually very young and docile. These were used as mothers and fathers, and discarded afterwards. Emotional connections were strictly forbidden. This went on for years with much misery and hardship on both sides. The men tended to be lazy but lethal when roused, whereas the women were better organized and schooled in hatred. There was a balance of power that kept the conflict simmering.

The end result was predictable: both sides acquired nuclear weapons and practiced nuclear brinkmanship. It was only a matter of time until nuclear war broke out and with it the end of humanity. But by that time life was not worth living for most people.

 

 

 

 

Inhuman Philosophy

 

 

Has philosophy become inhuman? Is that why it has lost its prestige and popularity? Is it doomed by its inhumanness? Or is it perhaps not inhuman enough? Is it just not scientific, merely a parade of personal opinion and undisciplined subjectivity? Must we reunite philosophy with the humanities or must we let it be swallowed up by science? Is philosophy at a crisis point where it must decide its own future, either rediscovering its humanistic heritage or opting for scientific assimilation?

What form might these decisions take? One suggestion might be that we make the parts of philosophy with more human interest into its central, or even its exclusive, concern. Thus we focus on aesthetics and ethics, politics and the meaning of life, the philosophy of race, gender, and selfhood. Then we will have a genuinely human type of philosophy—with no more logic, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, etc. An alternative suggestion may be to abandon any area of study not subject to scientific method, i.e. theory construction guided by empirical observation: we make philosophy into science’s handmaiden (or bitch, in current terminology). Both these approaches smack of extremism and ideology, not to speak of violence and destruction, and I have no sympathy for them at all. But I think it is a good question whether philosophy today, or indeed in the past, is prone to an off-putting inhumanness. More basically, it is a good question what such inhumanness might consist in—what is it to be inhuman in the intended sense? Are mathematics and physics inhuman, or biology, or psychology? Are poetry and literature always human (or humane or humanistic)? Is analytic philosophy inhuman and continental philosophy human (whatever exactly that contrast is intended to be)? Presumably the question isn’t whether philosophy ought to be (exclusively) about human beings: surely that is too narrow (what about animals and gods, or standard metaphysics?); and surely it is possible to be about humans in an inhuman way (say, the physiology of the human digestive system). It’s not a question of subject matter but of style, method, a particular type of interest.

Consider philosophical logic. I myself find this subject particularly interesting, but I don’t think my interest in it betrays my humanity. For part of my being human is that I am interested in abstract topics: to cease to think about such topics would be a human deprivation for me (I don’t the feel the same way about medieval plumbing, say). It is clearly not inhuman to be interested in topics not about humanity. One reason for this is that it is possible to be passionate about such topics (same for mathematics and physics). They excite our curiosity, get our intellectual juices flowing, and lead to heated arguments: nothing inhuman about that. Are they “dry” topics? We can say that I suppose, but again humans are not averse to a dry topic now and then: they have a certain kind of purity, a certain wan enchantment. Maybe not everyone finds them fascinating, but that doesn’t make them inhuman in any pejorative sense (not everyone finds soap operas fascinating, or operas for that matter). So the objectionable property of being inhuman is not to be identified simply with abstract subject matter or topics not dealing with human beings (is it inhuman to be interested in animals?).

It is the way a subject is discussed that attracts the epithet “inhuman”. And I think that philosophy has become rather inhuman in this sense: spuriously serious, professionalized, forbiddingly written, jargon-ridden, overly defensive, and intentionally dull. No doubt there are institutional reasons for this, having to do with tenure, job shortages, and university administrators (inhuman by definition). But there is also a certain cultural deadness abroad, a kind of humorless, risk averse, businesslike approach to philosophy. This is one reason why some people preach the assimilation of philosophy to science—as a way of making philosophy respectable. They want the prestige that the label science brings (and who doesn’t want prestige?). But that is not the solution to the inhuman tenor of so much philosophical writing (and speaking); instead we need to alter how we handle the topics of philosophy. It is perfectly possible to make a topic humanly interesting without making it about the human. We can make philosophy sound less inhuman by being more human ourselves—less like soulless machines, or corporate drones, or members of a profession. The problem does not lie in philosophy but in philosophers—they are what is inhuman. We shouldn’t castigate the subject for the shortcomings of its practitioners. That is, we should practice philosophy according to its nature, not according to the professional norms that have come to characterize contemporary academia.