In response to B.R. Merrick’s article in April this year On Feminism’s Infantilization of Women1, where he observes the impact that babying women has on what they become (for example, as it relates to confidence), I posted the following comment:
Stu and Merrick are not scientists, yet they grasp essential points about human nature that our established academics do not. Whenever you confront our established academics with these issues, they resort to shaming and call you a misogynist, and they insist that “we won’t discuss that (feminism) here.” We don’t need these troglodytes in the mainstream. Our mainstream life-sciences are dead … and their resistance to further discussion on the topic is proof. When ordinary people understand basic concepts that established authority does not, you know that it is time for a change. Us ordinary folk need the confidence to realize that we are having the wool pulled over our eyes by the modern equivalent of priests in lab-coats.
My interest in men’s rights and anti-feminism is a subset of my interest in cognitive science. Usually my participation in online science forums goes smoothly enough, and other participants seem to appreciate my big-picture take on the topics at hand—that is, until I introduce the topic of feminism. Here are the sorts of responses that my critiques of feminism have elicited:
“A few years ago I read what I could stomach of SJ’s first misogynistic book and vowed never to read any more of his diatribe.”
“feminist bullshit? how many ladies are on this list? hum? fuck you, man …”
“I would sincerely appreciate it if this list would not be used to promote anyone’s anti-feminist agenda.”
“We will not entertain criticism of feminism on this forum.”
“Fucking misogynist.”
… and so on. We get the picture.
So much for science. What sort of science is this science of the mainstream that refuses to entertain any divergence from the accepted narrative? We are dealing with the same sorts of narrow-minded bigots that tried to hobble the likes of Copernicus or Galileo. This is a new kind of church with its own dogma, asserting its own bigoted agenda. Criticize feminism and you will get charged with the modern equivalent of heresy. Clearly, something has gone awry in science—or, should I say, mainstream science.
The problem is not with science (as in, the scientific method)—the problem is that scientists of the Establishment have stopped being scientific. This is borne out in the erosion of the peer review process. For example, writing for The New York Times, Carl Zimmer2 reports on the findings of Dr. Ferric C. Fang and Dr. Arturo Casadevall of a sharp rise in retractions of scientific papers. This may be attributable to a number of factors, according to the article, but most significant appears to be the commercialization of science projects as business units designed to attract government grants and funding. Dr. Fang, a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine and editor in chief of the journal Infection and Immunity, describes said rise in retractions as “a symptom of a dysfunctional scientific climate.”
Mathias Binswanger3 observes that beginning in the 1960s, in the spirit of extending the availability of tertiary education to the masses:
… the government has given up its reservations towards universities and formerly proud bastions of independent thinking have turned into servants of governmental programs and initiatives. Lenin’s doctrine applies once again: trust is good, control is better.
Hmm … these developments happen to coincide nicely with the rise of feminism, don’t they? No doubt an unspoken assumption would be that research that does not conform to the feminist narrative will not receive funding. Political correctness in research is rarely spelled out … it is a silent given where researchers relying on government funding will instinctively know what is expected of them.
While this contemporary erosion of the scientific method relates to science as a whole, throughout the rest of this article we will concern ourselves with the rot as it applies to a compelling life-science paradigm—for ultimately feminism is a distillation of the failure of our life sciences to understand how life works and how men and women make choices.
When you think about it, this divergence from the true spirit of scientific inquiry makes sense. To explain how a phenomenon as comprehensively idiotic as feminism can be as successful as it has become, we need to understand that something is fundamentally broken in the mainstream life-science paradigm. A compelling paradigm would have deflected the absurd propositions of feminism long before it had an opportunity to metastasize. The mainstream life-science paradigm relates to genocentrism—the idea that genes “determine” behaviour.
The Genocentrism in Gynocentrism
Gender differences are quite real, one would think. They are tangible, they are in-in-your-face, and they matter. They need to be explained. Beyond the mainstream’s simplistic presumption that “it’s all in the genes, silly,” there is no paradigm provided by the mainstream that explains either sex roles or gender roles. Similarly, more recent developments in epigenetics, group selection theory, evo-psych, and the like lay claim to factoring in the environment (e.g., phenotypic plasticity), but they add nothing to our understanding of how or why men and women make the choices they do. What proof do we have of this failure in science? Feminism. Nothing more need be said.
Presuming that “it’s all in the genes” (whatever that means) does not explain anything at all. And while recent developments such as epigenetics, with reference to phenotypic plasticity, seem to suggest that genocentrism has become more sophisticated by factoring in pressures from environment, it hasn’t. Its explanatory power remains about as compelling as “because God made it that way” or because “the Bible tells us so.” The failures of genocentric science are many … for example:
2) Genocentric science does not explain gender roles, and provides no indication of the ways in which men’s and women’s sexual motivations differ. A compelling life-science paradigm would.
3) Genocentric science does not explain motivation of any kind, actually. We are simply expected to buy into the narrative of information science, and accept as given the idea of motivations as somehow instinctual, somehow analogous to subroutines in a computer program, running in a brain that is somehow analogous to computer hardware. Genocentric science does not explain how a living entity defines the things that matter. A compelling life-science paradigm would. And as such, it would explain hypergamy, materialism, and why women love accumulating stuff, why they love shopping for stuff, and why they choose men who provide them with stuff. By contrast, genocentric science can provide nothing of the sort.
4) Most importantly, genocentric science is not based on an axiomatic framework of any kind. It is simply a cobbling together of several disconnected ideas by force of the logic that the more we “know,” the more gaps we fill, and it is simply a matter of time before all the gaps are filled. By contrast, a compelling life-science paradigm must implicitly be based on an axiomatic framework built from principles that are consistent across all species of living organisms.
5) Like a competent organization, a competent life-science paradigm requires a strategy and a mission statement that outlines a vision for understanding how life works. Our mainstream life sciences (based in genocentrism) provide no such mission statement (natural selection, for example, is not an axiom or principle but a mechanism). A compelling life-science paradigm will, and this will be its axiomatic framework.
6) The genocentrism in gynocentrism—Gynocentrism owes its success to genocentrism. Because the mainstream paradigm does not provide any compelling framework from which to interpret gender roles, an absurd gynocentrism has taken root. It wasn’t until the recent narratives provided by MHRAs, MRAs, and MGTOWs that we even began to notice the absurdity of chivalrous providers pedestalizing entitled provided-fors. Factor in affirmative action to compensate the provided-fors for all those millennia of oppression by the providers, and you have one nut-job of stupidity the likes of which have never been replicated throughout human history … and it is growing, the latest addition to this lumbering, heaving miasma of stoopid being the Istanbul Convention. A compelling life-science paradigm would explain not only the absurdity but also the reality.
What do I mean by a compelling life-science paradigm? We can best illustrate this by looking at an example. The Newtonian paradigm of our physical sciences, with Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion4, provides us with a compelling science paradigm complete with a reliable axiomatic framework:
2) Second law (F=ma): The vector sum of the forces on an object are equal to the mass m of that object multiplied by the acceleration vector a of the object.
3) Third law: When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body.
Is there something analogous for the life sciences? My opinion is that there is, in the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce synthesized with the biosemiotics of Thomas Sebeok and Jakob von Uexküll. Moreover, when you factor in recent developments in cognitive science (within the context of neural plasticity), these theoretical frameworks look especially promising. They compel us to ask new questions—for example, now we have to factor in the roll of the primary nurturer in wiring brains, given that 90% of a human brain’s wiring is said to be accomplished within the first four years of life (Jill Stamm, Arizona State University).
Within these frameworks, we might see parallels with the Newtonian paradigm—say, motivation with opposite force (third law), association with vector sum (second law), and habituation with momentum (first law). Motivation, association, and habituation relate to the categories first defined by Peirce.
Of what possible relevance could all this have on a men’s human rights movement? Why should we care, for example, about habits or associative learning or the source of motivation? Stu and Merrick get it, and they are not even scientists. Gender roles are habits. We become who and what we associate with.
While the importance of habituation (in the context of European history) was established as long ago as Plato, it is in David Hume’s philosophy5, 6 that Europeans might first identify the emergence of a systematic analysis of the nature of thought and the relationship between habituation and associative learning. Our semiotic frameworks formalize these sorts of ideas, and for the first time in the history of European philosophy and science, we have signposts suggesting how it might be that any living entity, male or female, animal or vegetable, defines the things that matter (pragmatism7). These topics are well beyond the purpose of this article, and those who are interested in exploring further will know how to use Google.
Conclusion
Any science or branch of science that is based neither on the scientific method nor on any kind of axiomatic framework is destined to fail. Contemporary mainstream science—where physics, math, biology, and engineering faculties are located within the same university grounds as women’s studies faculties—can no longer be relied on to subscribe to the scientific method. Formal recognition of academic achievement in STEM disciplines has generally been in the awarding of titles, such as Doctor or Professor, while these days the same titles are awarded within women’s studies faculties. A science where political correctness defines the limits of acceptable discourse is not science. Increasingly, it resembles propaganda. We judge people by the company they keep, and this should apply no less to organizations. We should judge contemporary science by the company that it keeps with women’s studies faculties and other institutions of the Left. A revolution in science is long overdue.
Bibliography
[1] Merrick, B. R. On Feminism’s Infantilization of Women. A Voice for Men, April 2014:
http://www.avoiceformen.com/gynocentrism/on-feminisms-infantilization-of-women/
(accessed August 17, 2014).
[2] Zimmer, Carl. A Sharp Rise in Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform. New York Times, April 16, 2012:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/science/rise-in-scientific-journal-retractions-prompts-calls-for-reform.html?pagewanted=all
(accessed August 17, 2014).
[3] Binswanger, Mathias. Excellence by Nonsense: The Competition for Publications in Modern Science. Opening Science: The Evolving Guide on How the Internet is Changing Research, Collaboration and Scholarly Publishing, edited by Sönke Bartling and Sascha Friesike. Springer Link, 2014:
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-00026-8_3/fulltext.html
(accessed August 17, 2014).
[4] Newton’s three laws of motion. April 22, 2014.
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/history/newton3laws.html
(accessed August 21, 2014).
[5] SparkNotes Editors. SparkNote on David Hume (1711–1776). SparkNotes LLC. 2005.
http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/hume/
(accessed August 17, 2014).
[6] Wikipedia. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. April 22, 2014.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Enquiry_Concerning_Human_Understanding
(accessed August 17, 2014).
[7] Wikipedia. Pragmatism. May 11, 2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism
(accessed August 17, 2014).
