SUPERHERO REPLACEMENT THEORY PT. 2

Earlier I examined the two ethical systems, of conservatism ("Keeping") and of liberalism ("Sharing"). in terms of the dynamics of human societies from ancient times onward. The same systems apply equally to the ways in which those societies determine their identities in terms of cultural matrices.

No one ever really knows why a given society, whether of antiquity or modernity, decides to dominantly pursue one cultural course over another: whether the tribe should worship one god or several, or whether it's good or bad to seethe a kid in its mother's milk. Even in modern times, pundits can make anterior comments about how some cultural development MAY have come about, but that's not the same as KNOWING how a dominant majority chooses that course. But it can be fairly stated that once the course is chosen, the Ethos of Keeping comes into play, as the majority members of the culture continue to "Keep Faith" with the choices of their ancestors. Minority cultural developments can still exert some historical influence. For instance, certain citizens of one culture may embrace the religion of another culture, ranging from Romans flirting with the worship of Cybele or George Harrison converting to Krishnaism. This can be seen as an articulation of the Ethos of Sharing, in that the majority culture shows tolerance for the tastes of the minority by not requiring absolute fidelity to the majority rule. 

Conservatism does rule the roost in most if not all societies when it comes to allowing members of other societies to join the ingroup, and in ancient times there would be zero examples of dominant societies that voluntarily changed to accomodate either migrants joining the dominant society or separate vassal societies. Minority societies did not manipulate but were manipulated. Minority "outgroups" could be (1) transported away from their native land to some other location, (2) absorbed into the majority culture under various restrictions, or (3) allowed to function in the majority culture as sojourners but subject to random expulsion. The Ethos of Sharing arguably grew somewhat stronger with the rise of pietistic religions like Buddhism and Christianity. These systems of faith stressed a latitudinarian approach to cultural differences, though one could argue that this ecumenical approach had the ulterior purpose of spreading a particular religious credo through the medium of cultural tolerance.

All of this groundwork concerning the inherent conservativism of human societies should provide context for the fact that the United States of America, for the first 150 years of its existence, tended to exclude potential immigrants who did not resemble the dominant culture. The Naturalization Act of 1790 specified that naturalization of aliens was limited to "free white persons." Isolated members of various minority groups did gain citizenship over the course of the next 175 years. Yet America immigration law was not substantially affected by any Ethos of Sharing, except in special cases, such as the Truman Directive of 1945, which fast-tracked visas for displaced persons from war-torn Europe. 

Then in 1963, President John F. Kennedy attempted, but failed, to overthrow the exclusionary strictures. Roughly two years after Kennedy's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the 1965 Immigration Act, thus ensuring a greater liberalism in terms of making American immigration law less exclusionary.

Now, exclusion on the basis of race was always wrong, so I don't take issue with the 1965 act on that basis. It's demonstrable that human beings of all ethnicities were able to assimilate to the American culture and to become valuable members of the society, and that without being as legally restricted as, say, Jews and Christians in Muslim societies. However, buried within the Democratic imperative of liberation was the assumption that immigrants of other cultures would ALWAYS be willing to assimilate to established American culture.

As with the contemporaneous Civil Rights Act, political advantage, as much any sincere beliefs in societal tolerance, informed the changes in the older exclusionary immigration policy. However, the admission that "exclusion was wrong" led to the unjustified corollary that "inclusion must always be right." Liberals promoted the sophistry that, because the majority culture had been unforgivably racist and/or sexist, members of minority cultures had no responsibility to assimilate with the majority culture. This would slowly morph into the idea that the federal government could (and should) be blocked by so-called "sanctuary policies" at the state level. In the 21st century has become an "Ethos of Sharing" in which the state expects the federal authorities to accede to the wishes of the "minority culture" of that state.

In Part 1, I mentioned how most Liberals who addressed the phenomenon of illegal immigration almost invariably resorted to the "Honest Juan" paradigm. Said paradigm always portrays the illegal as a wholesome, honest person who's just trying to make a better life for himself and his family. I will admit comic books and films didn't promote this idea nearly as much as television shows, particularly legal dramas, where the sympathetic lawyer is always on the side of the poor but honest illegal. Even TV shows with a conservative slant, such as 24 (2001-2014), didn't tend to critique lax Liberal policies with respect (say) to admitting dangerous aliens into the country.    

I don't doubt that many of the Libs who support illegal entry sincerely believe that by assisting illegals, they're atoning for the sins of "Racist America." This is currently most evident in the fanatical anti-ICE protests of the past year, both in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, though in some ways these protests are a side-development of a general Democrat meme, in which everything the opposing party does today is irredeemably racist in nature. The upshot of this Ethos of Sharing, which resulted in the growth of sanctuary cities as a consequence of the 1965 Immigration Act, is that its proponents cannot deviate from the falsehood that every illegal must be an Honest Juan. Thus, Minnesota Liberals have made the not-quite-conscious decision to share their state with a wide variety of criminals, from rapists to drug-dealers to child molesters. I've even come across a few Liberals who defend this policy on the basis that there are an equal proportion of criminals within the ranks of legal American citizens. It's as if they think there should be "equal opportunity" for criminals from, say, Somalia to rip off the majority culture, because that culture is so irredeemably evil in nature. 

While it's not totally incorrect to critique the ethics of the dominant majority, there's no concomitant guarantee that the minority is going to be any more virtuous. Surprisingly, one of the few places I saw some pop-cultural pushback against the one-sided vilification of the dominant majority appeared in the 2017-18 Marvel series called FALCON. This eight-issue series appeared in the same year that "Black Captain America" failed to replace "White Captain America" in the hearts of comics-fans. Marvel then put Sam Wilson back in his Falcon outfit, and in the first issue, Falcon-Sam explains his ethical compass to a friend in terms that reference then-recent developments in the "Secret Empire" arc:

Steve being a traitor validated every cynic who felt America was an idealized metaphor for the dominant culture's survival and the minority's suffering. I can't let that idea take hold. People need HOPE"-- FALCON #1, writer Rodney Barnes, 2017.

To be sure, that ship had already sailed. The very agenda of Superhero Replacement in the 2010s showed that some people believed the very thing Barnes' Falcon wished to tamp down, and grievance-based anti-Americanism had been around since the rise of liberation movements around both Blacks and women. The chaos in Minnesota continues to validate protesters who have subscribed to the notion that their minority opinion re: illegal immigration "trumps" the opinions of the dominant majority, to say nothing of federal law. I don't agree that this belief is, as Barnes said, merely "cynical." Rather, false idealists like the Minnesota protesters have convinced themselves of their rightness by drawing upon a very old formula relating to uncritical liberality.             

GRADING ON THE CURVE

"A friend of mine once said, 'Nerdy women like fantasy guys with emotional problems. Nerdy guys like fantasy women who are strong enough to kill them."-- reviewer Jason Bradley Thompson in OTAKU USA Vol. 8. #4 (2015).

Thus, when fictional action-heroes do their kickass thing, they are in essence "going with the flow," conforming to an archetype of male behavior based in both culture and physical nature.  When fictional action-heroines kick ass, they are in essence "swimming against the current." This current is best incarnated by the literary trope of "what women want," which in Chaucer and elsewhere is nothing less than "sovereignty over their husbands." In the real world this can only be done by manipulation of the "force that gives," by persuading the man to do her will through "dissimulation" or sexual attractiveness. 

Action-heroines, however, work their own will.  They align themselves with a reverse-archetype that describes not real experience but a gesture toward desired experience.  That implies a greater level of conflict in this reverse-archetype in that it contravenes (albeit in fiction, where nothing is impossible) both physical law and cultural experience.-- WHAT WOMEN WILL (2011).

I'd been giving some thought to the proposition in the title of a 2002 film, "Real Women Have Curves." This was hardly the first time in pop culture that attention has been given to the strategic distribution of adipose tissue upon the female of the species homo sapiens. But if one states this homily as a serious proposition, it raises the question, "If real women have curves, do real men have straight lines?"

An anonymous adage avers that "nature abhors a straight line," though I don't know whether or not that abhorrence precedes nature's dislike of vacuums. In any case, men's bodies are no more "straight" than women's even at the peak of physical development. For instance, men's "washboard stomachs" evince more definition, and hence curvilinear surfaces, than do similar stomachs on women.

So it's not true that women's bodies are "more" curved than men's. Rather, it's that the curves *mean* something different with women's bodies than with men's.

To me as a heterosexual, the sight of women's curves "means" something akin to the Chinese concept *yin,* insofar as *yin* connotes sexual receptivity. And though I am not a poet, the quasi-poetic thought came to me a while back that the difference between women's curves and men's curves is that the former "lead inward" while the latter "lead outward," I know that this is not a "scientific" viewpoint of the physical realities, but I consider it to have reality, at least in an intersubjective sense.

Now, the above statement from the OTAKU USA reviewer strikes me as having some interesting ramifications for pop cultural treatments of gender relations. I've maintained in the WHAT WOMEN WILL series that men can assume a passive/receptive role in society while women can assume an active/assertive role, but that because these roles go against the grain in most cultures, they are more often realized through fiction than in actual practice. I'd go further than the reviewer and his unnamed friend, though, by stating that I think these fascinations are far from limited to the fantasies of nerds. They may be more concentrated in "nerd-readers" than in the fantasies of "regular readers." Yet though there may many examples of "best-seller fiction" in which dominant social roles are wholly validated, I find it interesting that a novel like GONE WITH THE WIND--  published in 1936, prior to many though not all of the major *femmes formidables* of 20th-century pop culture-- nevertheless focuses on a heroine who is constantly "asserting" herself and a leading man whose greater physical strength belies his emotional vulnerability to her charms.

I cannot guess exactly how if at all these ruminations would play with persons attracted to the same sex. If your own curves "lead inward" as much as your partner's, then "receptive curves" can't be the factor that determines who plays "butch" and plays "lipstick lesbian," But then, it's not written in stone that the dominant social roles are inevitable even among heterosexuals. In all likelihood. "assertive will" and "receptive will" work themselves out via psychological factors that are far more subtle than the lineaments of the physical body.

BOOLA, BOOLA, BOULEVERSEMENT PT. 2

I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison.

The Break-Though... is also marked by the promulgation of a theory of revolution as a good in itself, and most notably perhaps, by a new concept of inwardness... Quite as influential as Diderot (or Richardson or Rousseau) in the bouleversement of the eighteenth century is the Marquis de Sade, who stands almost emblematically at the crossroads of depth psychology and revolution-- Leslie Fiedler, LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL, p. 32--33.

Obviously Jefferson and Fiedler are talking about two very different forms of rebellion/revolution, the first as purely political, the second as literary and cultural, though both of the latter are inextricably influenced by political developments, as per the American and French revolutions. Both authors are weighing the benefits of a revolutionary *bouleversement,* though Jefferson speaks of occasional attempts of the citizens to rebel against "encroachments," while Fiedler addresses a change in the history of cultural values, which he terms "the Break-Through"-- a change that transpired within one particular time-frame and influenced a variety of Western cultures.

Given my many admonitions against reading literature along overly politicized ideological terms-- seen prominently in a series beginning here-- it should be obvious that I'm concerned with art and literature, not with politics as such. In the OVERTHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT series, I took issue with what I called "adversarial criticism," which specialized in creatively misreading literary narratives in order to take aim at supposed political boogeymen. Nothing that I write here contradicts that philosophical stance.

However, because I am a real liberal rather than an ultraliberal, I find it necessary to situate even wrong-headed comic book elitists within the history of revolutionary concepts.  I don't believe there's any substance to Berlatsky's claim that the Superman character is a fascist or a bully, as he's stated in separate essays. In this essay I refuted Berlatsky with much the same way that I refuted Reece earlier:

I might understand your queasiness about "extra-judicial violence" if we were frequently seeing Superman descending on African villages to make the natives obey the colonial powers. But Superman's first heroic deed in ACTION #1 is to prevent an act of bullying, beating down a man who is beating his wife (can't remember if the text calls her that or not). Yet in your view Superman becomes a bully even when he stops bullying. How many real-life bullies do that-- unless, of course, it's for some ulterior motive?
I don't buy your objection to vigilantism because you're applying it only to narratives you don't like for whatever reason. Wonder Woman is just as much a vigilante as Superman; she acts with no authority save that of the goddess Aphrodite, whom I suspect would be considered extra-legal in American courts. Any number of WW stories have scenes in which WW slaps down bully-boys with the same ease that Superman does, so is she a bully? Is she therefore "not good" for the same reasons? Or does she get a pass because you agree with Marston's politics?

Readers of this blog may refer to the aforementioned thread to see if they find Berlatsky's response any more informative than I did. Still, even though I think the assertion itself is nonsense, it stems from a powerful, possibly archetypal motif:  the Reversal of Values.

Leslie Fiedler does not reference either Sigmund Freud or Karl Marx in his opening chapter of LOVE AND DEATH, though they are referenced elsewhere in the book, and I deem it axiomatic that both Freudianism and Marxism inform most if not all of Fiedler's judgments.  I've remarked elsewhere that these two "titans of tedium," as I like to style them, have enjoyed their dominion over much of Western thought because of their affective, rather than their cognitive, appeal.  Freud shocked Europe by asserting that the purity of the parent-child relationship was sullied by the brute mechanics of sexual stimulation and emotional entrainment. Marx preceded him, though, not only by "turning Hegel upside-down," as the saying goes, but more importantly, by promoting his secular revision of the archetypal concept that "the last will be first."

Of the two, Marx has been much more influential than Freud in terms of producing an overall "theory of revolution," to which many of Marx's latter-day fellow-travelers-- Adorno and Foucault, for two-- have subscribed. But there's a huge difference between the Marxist theory of revolution and that of Jefferson, much less that of how reversals work in literature.

Political comparisons first: Jefferson envisions a republic in which there will always be discontent, which will be expressed through assorted forms of rebellion, but which can be ameliorated through education and pacification of the electorate.  Marx is certainly aware that even in his imagined workers' paradise, there will continue to be conflicts within the body politic. But most later Marxists do not deal with this practical aspect of life. For them, every defense of an allegedly mistreated or marginalized subject is a step toward paradise, World Without End.

In literary studies this can become even more fatuous. Frederic Wertham remains the go-to guy for Reversing Values in the comic book medium. In his view, every hero is a bully and a fascist, irrespective as to the nature of the villains upon whom he wreaks violence.  In this Berlatsky is his earnest pupil, except insofar as he esteems Wonder Woman for promoting the politics that he Berlatsky agrees with.

In our exchange Berlatsky accuses me of wanting to promote some sort of "one truth" hermeneutic simply because I advocated giving every narrative a fair, close reading. In addition, I've consistently asserted that one of the cornerstones of my criticism is Schopenhauer's theory of will. For me the very appeal of literature is reducible to one form of "will" with "another," not a "politically correct will" with a "politically incorrect will."  Obviously this would apply to a literalist "mainstream" reading as much as to an adversarial one.

I'm also heavily invested in Bataillean transgressivity-- also produced through the influence of Freud and Marx, albeit with an artful mediation via Nietzsche. So I can only approve when Fiedler writes of his "Break-Through" that "whatever has been suspect, outcast, and denied is postulated as the source of good." But aside from some of the more hectoring practitioners of literature-- and Sade would be one of these-- most authors would not be comfortable with a single great revolution. Most authors take pleasure in being able to rebel even against rebellion, if it means telling a good story.

 Elitists, however, want only one revolution, one story-- and sadly, just one truth.

SEX, SETH, AND SADISM PT. 2

At the end of MAJORITY RULERSHIP PT 2 I said:

No matter how much one may dislike the particular modern manifestations of sexism, they have their roots in patterns that are as old as humankind. More on these patterns in a future essay.

I don't think I ever wrote that essay, so I may as well consider it to be my response to Heidi McDonald's screed on THE BEAT, referenced in Part 1.

On 3-1-13 I wrote this on the BEAT thread to agree with another poster:

I would agree with all of this except to add that [the Boob Song] is a bit of a joke (not a satire) on the male gender’s obsession with boobs; that a lot of hetero men will think of GIA or MONSTER’S BALL in terms of getting to see the tatas of famous actresses, not whatever the “high drama” was about.

It’s not so much that feminist statements here have been humorless; rather they’re not honest about admitting that what bugs them is that any women who show their stuff, even in art movies, SEEM to put themselves in a subservient position (call it “commodification” if you must get into the barren terrain of Marxspeak). I emphasize SEEM because I don’t think that these actresses are in a subservient position, though I understand the false logic that gets people to that conclusion. For that matter, I don’t think Jenna Jameson is subservient for showing her stuff, nor does the principle apply any male actor who does the same. Do the people who buy this argument also view nude Greek statuary as “commodification?”
 

I was 90% sure that the "they're not honest" remark would have goaded either Heidi or Laura Sneddon into a response, but for whatever reason I got none.  No one in either gender likes to be told that he or she is being dishonest in making heartfelt statements.  And of course I don't know anything about what went through their minds.  It's only their logic that I critique as "dishonest."

For example, Heidi said on 2-28:

“So what! That’s classic humor!” you say. Yes it is, and it’s also why as a FEMINIST I object to this extremely limiting form of humor that views women only as objects of outmoded social roles.
 

Heidi's cant about "social roles" is a perfect (unintended) response to my earlier statement that the nature of sexism is to be located in "patterns that are as old as humankind."

What patterns?  Well, how about the "hardwired sexual response" I mentioned in an earlier post?  While it's true that we can't easily separate the effects of culture from the effects of biology, it's dishonest to claim that men's interest in boobs is entirely the construction of culture, much less of "outmoded social roles."  We know, for instance, that in some primates the swelling of the breasts signals the female's estrus to the male of the species.  One doesn't have to be a fullblown advocate of the so-called "evo-psych" movement to speculate that even in modern civilization heterosexual men are still "programmed" to respond to primitive sexual signals.

I note that in some circles it's been claimed that the breast-attraction is not universal, citing its alleged absence in, say, early Chinese culture.  But the culture-warping schtick isn't confined to Madison Avenue.  If you grant contemporary culture the power to make men fetishize the mammary glands, then it's thinkable that some archaic cultures may have diverted a natural sexual response from one target to another-- for instance, to the fetish of tiny feet esteemed by some Chinese generations.

Similarly, Laura Sneddon said:

Lots of people here saying they don’t see how MacFarlane was undermining women or being sexist… all those people happen to be men. What a coincidence!
 

But once again, MacFarlane didn't "undermine" anyone.  He didn't put any live actors into subservient commodification-scenes.  He pointed out that such scenes (if one chooses to view them as objectification at all) had appeared in a number of high-art films, thus giving guys who wanted the illusion of seeing the actress's tits the chance to do so.  I don't think he had any "satirical" point in doing so.  It was just a funny consequence of the actresses having chosen to go "sans shirt" (as Heidi puts it). It's a consequence every actress has live with when she makes that decision, whether it's a film of "high art" or a piece of Roger Corman schlock.

There are some specific ways in which women having boobs can lead to their being victimized.  There are also ways in which it can give them wealth and power, as per my example of Jenna Jameson (OK, a little more than just breasts there).  The ethics of such sexual display would howeve require a more involved examination than I wish to pursue just now.

THE SECRET ORIGINS OF EVOLUTION

I recently finished a 1999 book by Michael Ruse, a "philosopher of science" and academic writer attached to the Florida State University: MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES, subtitled "Is Evolution a Social Construction?" 

The short answer is, not entirely.  In the course of about 250 easily accessible pages, MYSTERY grapples with the claim, advanced by certain "science critics," that science is entirely a projection of the social attitudes of its proponents.  Ruse, in surveying the life and work of several key figures in the development of evolutionary theory, traces the way that both "epistemic values" (those dealing with 'falsifiable' scientific data/theories) and "non-epistemic values" (those stemming from the role of culture in the lives of the scientists).  His first chapter provides a strong summation of the conflict through a contrast of Karl Popper, the representative of "science as objective knowledge," and Thomas Kuhn, the representative of "science as conditioned by socially significant paradigms."

I'll admit that while I don't have a problem with Ruse's "not entirely" verdict, I bought the book hoping that it would reveal the ways in which particular objectivist scientists had allowed their personal prejudices to influence their work.  Instead, I felt Ruse let a couple of them off the hook too easily, barely examining the controversies in which notorious blockhead Richard Dawkins embroiled himself.  And once I learned that Ruse himself had collaborated with Edward O. Wilson, I wasn't surprised that sociobiology wasn't examined in depth for its cultural constructions.  In contrast, though I don't doubt that at the time of the book's writing Steven Jay Gould had been marginalized in the world of evolutionary science, I felt that Ruse didn't spend nearly that much time on the reception received by Gould's frequent opponent Dawkins in professional circles.  

Nevertheless, I found it interesting that Gould's position as stated by Ruse has a strong resemblance to the philosophy of pluralism:

"...no one level (especially not the micro-level) is to be privileged... one cannot hope to explain away everything at the upper, bigger levels by expressing them in terms of the lower, smaller level."

I also appreciate Ruse's summary of the objectivist attitude re: cultural metaphors:

"The point which should be obvious to anyone (says the objectivist) is that, although metaphor is extremely widespread in human discourse, it is not essential.  It is in a sense-- an important theoretical and perhaps practical sense-- eliminable.  We all use metaphors, but they are in the last resort short-hand for literal language."

A page later Ruse refutes this by pointing out the value of metaphors as being "absolutely vital  for their 'positive heuristic' as they push one into new fields and new forms of thinking."  I agree with this in part, but it's unfortunate that Ruse-- who is arguing that science is in part a "social construction"-- does not decisively refute the "short-hand" definition of metaphor, sticking purely to metaphor's applications to science in a practical sense.  It might have proved challenging, at least in his conclusion, to have pointed out, as did Philip Wheelwright, that "literal language" was merely one form of language as such:

Wheelwright sees the two "strategeies" of language as not only complementary, but necessarily intertwined throughout history. "Steno-language" (the language of plain sense) is, he tells us, the "negative limit" of language in its more expansive form, "expressive" or "poeto-language."--  A PAGE RIGHT OF PREHISTORY.

I can appreciate Ruse's choice to hew to a narrow application of his theme, but he may have missed the boat on a greater theme, in which one might examine the role of "steno-language" in terms of scientific analysis, and of "poeto-language" in terms of cultural expression.  However, I'm not sure that anyone since Ernst Cassirer has approached these subjects in depth, so I may be expecting too much of Professor Ruse.