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If Tocqueville is to be our guide, there are two great alternatives before us. The first involves an imperfect liberty requiring strength of soul, neighborliness, and an understanding that perfection is not the lot of man. The second involves a despotic form of equality still without a name . . .
There's a lot to be said about the cultural problems we experience today (and a lot has already been said). On this forum, we've discussed everything from the genesis of these problems, their root catalysts, their effects, and their appeal to those men and women who feel they have no stock in the social well-being of humankind.
But, because today's academia is so hostile to a 100% honest approach toward cultural today, we rarely see our concerns addressed by modern scholars. One interesting exception is Joshua Mitchell's Tocqueville in Arabia: Dilemmas in a Democratic Age.
Mitchell—political theory professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University (having spent 2005-2010 teaching in the Middle East)—writes a book with real intellectual worth that caters to no cultural marxist agenda. And it boldly addresses some of our modern problems in the process, including the idea of perfect equality, gender "sameness," the current "delinked" nature of social media, the even deeper isolation of people in a democratic setting, and the relevance of institutions like religion.
While it often takes some reading between the lines to extract the full red pill message of the book, Tocqueville in Arabia is a blatant and bold attempt to evaluate and ameliorate the cultural tomfuckery of our time. For those who don't have time to read it, I'll try to condense some of its more noteworthy points below.
If you do decide to read the book, you'll find an intellectually stimulating argument on the genesis of things like feminism, cultural marxism, "mutual misunderstandings" toward the Middle East, etc. But even more than that, you'll find a refreshing confirmation that there are still sober-minded academics out there with the balls to write something like this (well, at least there were in 2013, when the book was published).
How Tocqueville Is Relevant to the Modern Discussion
A few people have tossed around de Tocqueville's name already on this forum, namely in reference to his book Democracy in America. Written in the early 1800's, this hugely influential book addressed the new democratic society that had developed in America, foreshadowing America's future cultural-political dominance over the rest of the world.
Tocqueville in Arabia applies Tocqueville's classic text to the modern era, using his ideas to explain the developments in the Middle East, as well as the quagmire of cultural problems we have yet to address in America. The book is largely a comparison of America and the Middle East, contrasting a place beginning to feel the effects of the "delinked democratic man" with a place that is already there and struggling to come to terms with it. And Tocqueville is the lens through which he makes this comparison.
Naturally, he defaults to Tocqueville a lot throughout the book, and while at times it seems like he's stretching the Frenchman's ideas, it works. And the way he uses Tocqueville's explanations is often incredibly on-point.
One of the deepest truths written in this book summarizes just how relevant Tocqueville's ideas still are:
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In Democracy in America, Tocqueville suggested that the conditions of social equality would soften our hearts and habits; he worried that in the distant future democratic man would feel overwhelmed by even the slightest challenge.
That distant prophecy is now fully upon us, I fear. Almost everywhere we look, the hard lessons of failure are ruled out. In our universities, grades have become so inflated that they are almost meaningless. What, really, can be expected from our children if from the very moment of their birth they have been told that they are "special"?
Mitchell's Attack on "Gender Sameness"
Another great quality of Tocqueville in Arabia is the way it discusses "gender sameness." This is a concept we're all familiar with—the idea that there is no discernible difference in ability, thinking, or emotional state between the two genders. Mitchell criticizes this idea throughout the book, in the context of both American and Middle Eastern societies.
Some notable examples:
Mitchell's Views on Modern Courtship between Men and Women—
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Whether during the school week or on the weekend, it is the exception rather than the rule to see a young man and a young woman walking together on the main campus, lost in sustained conversation, and clearly oriented by each other alone. . .
More In-Depth Look on Courtship in Today's Context of Gender Equality—
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I mentioned in the previous chapter that both the ease of social relations and natural affection only fully emerge in the democratic age, and that they are generally salutary. The conditions of equality that bring them about, however, also undermine the formalities that choreograph the relations between the sexes. Equal and without the benefit of the protocols through which a man and a woman may diminish but never wholly overcome their misunderstandings and civilize their longing for one another, my students have been taught that there are no natural differences between men and women around which durable roles can be formed.
On the Consequences of Deconstructed Gender Roles in Courtship—
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What Tocqueville envisioned has largely come to pass: young men and women on the main campus are taught that there is nothing natural about their sex—that they are, instead, "gendered" beings, who are what they are mostly because of the socialization they have received. I am not sure they fully believe it. Nevertheless, when they meet, it is understood that they must "negotiate" the terms of their engagement with one another. Absent roles on which to fall back, their encounters must consist in frequent contestation and not a little irony.
Indicating the Historical Roots of Gender Sameness—
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As Tocqueville put the matter: "There are people in Europe who, confusing the diverse attributes of the sexes, intend to make of man and woman beings not only equal, but alike. They give both the same functions, impose the same duties on them, and accord them the same rights; they mix them in all things—labor, pleasures, affairs.
On the Impact of Popular Acceptance of Gender Equality and Its Detriment to Interpreting Tocqueville Today—
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As if (Tocqueville's ideas being used to support anti-communism) wasn't enough for his detractors, Tocqueville's reservations about the coming equality of men and women sealed his fate. Attempts to explain the complexity of his thinking on the matter would fall on deaf ears during the classroom lecture and at academic conferences. It was simply not possible in a public setting to doubt the complete equality—indeed the sameness—of men and women.
On Social Equality in General—
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We lose our bearings, in part, because the condition of social equality itself bids itself to. This much my students have taught me. For them, no other single idea is more taken for granted and tacitly obvious than that equality should be the first idea we consider when we think about justice—or "social justice," as they now call it, which presupposes just this equality. The corollary, which is seldom stated and never examined, is that no one should have to endure failure.
We all know gender sameness is a problem, but his approach to it is unique in that he frames his attacks on gender sameness in the critique of a deviance from human nature—a deviance that Tocqueville predicted as an inevitable consequence of the "democratic man."
Mitchell's Thesis behind the Cultural Decline—"Democratic Man"
While the book weaves together Mitchell's personal accounts of teaching students on the main campus of Georgetown and the Middle Eastern universities (Georgetown campus in Qatar/American University of Iraq), historical context, his own social insights and the greater teachings of Tocqueville, it is bound by one over-arching thesis: the concept of the evolving "democratic man."
According to Mitchell, this is basically the modern man. The man born in an age of dying social roles and institutions to bind him to his neighbor. A time where the man is "de-linked" from his old traditions through a social and political repudiation of them. A time that both freed and alienated people, leaving the man to negotiate his identity and the world more to himself than to others—to pseudo-philosiphize his plight via one-sided memes on Facebook an Instagram, and to know only to reject all facets of conservatism and tradition. Really, to know nothing. To grow more distant from others, to lose his old social skills in courting women and making friends, and to see politics through competing ideologies which promise perfection as if perfection as achievable. To achieve the dream of social justice.
This man, Mitchell claims, was predicted and described by Tocqueville as the democratic man. The entire book is on this central thesis, so there's no point in picking out short quotes to show this argument, since the whole book is the argument. I will explain why this argument is relevant to you.
It's easy to diagnose a problem, and it's easy to see the problems of feminism and the anti-man rhetoric of today—anti-man rhetoric that only grows as restrictions are placed on us, since the rhetoric is based on a phantom of male domination that can be chased forever. It can be chased forever because it cannot be caught. That's easy to see; that's easy to diagnose.
In this book, though, is the work of an academic who treaded dangerous territory to publish a deeper diagnosis. We see the cancer, we're aware of its deeper causes, but Mitchell explores the causes of those causes, and he furthermore does this through the lens of a classic work (i.e. a work that can be relied on not being tainted with our time's special kind of obstructed view of society).
Here is a book that explores the effects of one development that influenced the great changes of our time, and even connects it to American foreign policy with the Middle East.
The development of democracy is something that is rarely connected to the problems of our time, and to my knowledge, it has never been explored in the way Mitchell explores it. He brings a unique interpretation to our dilemma, and in presenting it in the compact, direct manner he does, I think it's worth every man's attention.
The Middle East—Appalled, But Not Immune
Another reason Tocqueville in Arabia is useful for men like us is that it is structured in a unique manner—a manner in which such a large problem can be tackled. That is the way we have addressed these problems: personal experience. From the way we exchange data sheets, talk about social happenings, and break down the generalizations we use to explain the world, we default more on experience and personal observations than on data points and scientific analysis.
While individual case studies and scientific evidence exists, we must combine them to form an underlying explanation for what we see—in short, concrete scientific data is not wide-ranging enough to encompass the social ills we see, and Mitchell employs the tools of social observation and political theory to explain it. This way, he enables himself to tackle problems that are complex, and he doesn't confine himself to the narrow scope more "concrete" social analysis is bound to.
This approach is familiar to members of the forum, and his language often sounds more like a forum data sheet on American and Middle Eastern campuses than anything else. So, while we have the benefit of seeing a familiar mode of analysis—one that we can easily verify with a bit of our own experience and the experience of others (because it's hard to call bullshit on an obviously dubious survey without pulling up the survey, checking its sample size and question validity, etc., but easy to go outside and see a feminist lost in social justice)—we also get to see a hard academic tackle a huge problem with enough latitude to make a real attempt. While the thesis behind this problem is the concept of democratic man, the focal conflict is U.S. relations with the Middle East.
For the most part, he tries to educate American readers on the cultural nuances in the Middle East that our PC culture has us taking for granted. More than ever, our cultural superiority complex has clouded the manner in which we see the world, and the thought of a woman pursuing a college degree to "marry up" a social class rather than to go off on her own, or the thought of a religion becoming more entrenched in response to secular Western ideas being introduced, completely baffles most average Americans.
In giving some cultural context and a bit of red pill language to jar average American out of his social justice arrogance, he tries to show why foreign relations in the Middle East have been troublesome. The "democratic man" has not developed in much of this region, and Mitchell tries to explain that a superficial understanding of this region—one where "face-to-face" experience does not educate actions, and social justice arrogance acts like social media in replacing a real confrontation with how people are—is a proven recipe for disaster.
For the most part, he sees how people in the Middle East are repulsed by the American lack of respect (citing how Middle Eastern students were shocked at how visiting American students in Qatar addressed Mitchell so informally), the Western ease of losing ties with the family, and—as he quotes one Saudi Arabian man as saying—"women renounced their place in the home granted to them by nature and by tradition." At this moment, or at least in the moment when the book was written, the Middle East had not seen the full modernizing fruits that its early "devil's bargain with the West" had guaranteed it. But Mitchell predicts that the Middle East is not immune, and that the influences of the "democratic age" are starting to sink within the culture.
Roosh isn't the only person to see the decline in cultural structures being marked by the spread of the smart phone. And we're all familiar with Roosh and others writing about how one place that was once a poosy paradise is now a cess pool of women passing themselves off as cheap American copies with accents. The Middle East, the extreme last great stand against the effects of the "democratic age," is, as Mitchell sees it, already eroding into the world it is so appalled by. People are glued to their smart phones, the family ties are loosening, and people are coming to terms with the contradictions of our modern world and Western values.
The implications of this? The final stages of the globalization of America, of the democratic age, are upon us. For the first time in history, we will see, most of us in our own lifetimes, a world where every single corner of civilization has entered the era of Western values.
And us Americans still haven't figured out how to reconcile its contradictions of social justice and isolation.
The Proposed Solution
The solution Mitchell proposes basically boils down to a plan to ameliorate the problems and maximize the benefits of the democratic era, rather than try to create a perfect a world. The "-isms" of the world that captivate people's imaginations now offer little promise and much regression, according to Mitchell.
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When delinked citizens draw into themselves, their imaginations invariably wander into "isms"—capitalism, corporatism, socialism, communism, environmentalism, feminism, postmodernism, multiculturalism, et al—that promise to fill the void in their lonely souls but cannot.
He gets even more explicit into why his (and Tocqueville's) vision of a solution is ignored in the following passage:
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Hovering over the world, but no longer in it because they are distracted rather than engaged, delinked citizens dream of a perfect world, free from the stain and corruption that our neighbor perennially reminds us is the lot of man, and whose face brings an abrupt end to our dreamy imaginations. When citizens only look upward to the visible power of the state, when the neighbor is lost from view, is it any wonder that our national politics becomes a battleground where one fleeting dream of perfection is set against another, and that lonely somnambulant, self-absorbed citizens increasingly die alone, and with cats?
Looking past the humorous feminist stereotype he subtly alludes to, the reason we're trapped in a jockeying of false solutions to the real problems is clear. But what exactly is his plan of amelioration?
His plan is Tocqueville's plan—an antidote where the isolated modern man voluntarily "relinked" himself into the greater body of mankind, "through civic associations, freely chosen marriage, freely chosen churches, and participation in political life." While simple enough, actually doing these things is difficult in this age of distraction, especially if one is a social justice warrior who is stuck in the mode of thinking where "isms" are the default ways to address the world, not, as Tocqueville wrote, "modest politics." But this isn't an antidote, it's an amelioration, for Tocqueville "knew that man was an imperfect creature, whose fugitive dreams of perfection can never see the light of day in this world below."
The Overall Value of the Book to You
Is the solution for our problems in itself convincing? To me, no. While the point of amelioration is valid, I think the solutions for addressing the cultural implosion of our time is not enough. Like the cliché goes, it's easy to diagnose a problem, but a lot harder to fix it.
The real value in the book isn't that it's a guide to fixing the world; its value lies in that it is an interesting guide in understanding the world in a way you probably haven't thought of. The vague idea of a delinked modern man is familiar to many of us, but the explications Mitchell provides, coupled with his extensive experience on U.S. universities and abroad, are thought-provoking and new.
Also, it's a contemporary view of our society that is sober and still written by an accepted mainstream academic. Those are rare to come by, and when the book is as short and easy a read as Tocqueville in Arabia, it's worth reading.
Overall, I think Mitchell's ideas presented in this book are worthy of being tossed around and critiqued on the forum, as this book hasn't been posted about yet (at least as far as my searches have led me to believe) and delivers some fresh spins on topics like feminism, social justice, and gender equality.
Quote:PapayaTapper Wrote:
you seem to have a penchant for sticking your dick in high drama retarded trash.
