Women are the agents we can't locate
Whose outcomes are affected by luxury beliefs we don't name
I thought I was moving away from gender, but I realized I can’t. While it will not be the exclusive thing I write about, it is a dimension of everything I analyze, and there’s no escaping gendered scripts. After this post, all future work on gender will be paywalled. The market wants it, and I’m not done, so here you are.
I recently reread Troubled by Rob Henderson, followed it with The Two-Parent Privilege by Melissa Kearney, and finished with The Other Wes Moore by the current governor of Maryland, Wes Moore. I picked up Kearney to understand the data behind the moving personal narrative Henderson wrote, and Wes Moore provided a different, and incomplete, picture of what leads men down the wrong path.
My post on Troubled was one of my first attempts at public writing, but this time it is founded on structural analysis I’ve done on feminism, credentialism, and managerial capitalism, the trifecta of elite control and the source of the rigged system to which we are now reacting.
Wes Moore’s book is about the differential outcomes between himself and another Wes Moore, who ended up in prison for murder, while the author Moore climbed to the elite echelon. We have three authors with different levels of institutional membership, which colors the writing and conclusions as we would expect.
Henderson, whom I recently had the pleasure of meeting, has been highly encouraging of my writing since I began two years ago. He is quite generous to his readers and hung out with us on a cold Austin evening for four hours. This is an extension of his theory.
There was something in Troubled that stirred me. Perhaps it was that Henderson’s writing gave me permission to critique the elites he was indicting, as I had been ejected from precisely those spaces for insufficient deference to various luxury beliefs. It has been a formative book for me. We all have writers who influenced us, and he is one of my strongest.
Both Henderson and Kearney stopped short of naming women as agents in the story, though I think Kearney’s omission is far more consequential — she’s an economist wading into the thorny question of family structure and children’s outcomes, but never questions the choices leading there. This requires tip-toeing around elite orthodoxy in a way Henderson was not compelled to do, because he’s outside the mainstream academy and not beholden to the same pressures as Kearney. Henderson would understandably not indict feminization because it’s easy to dismiss a man as misogynistic.
I, however, have not had any such scruples as longtime readers know.
Incentives and tradeoffs reveal the eventual results of choices within any system
I am fully outside all these institutions, and I wade into this topic often because it’s a hidden dimension of many intractable social problems. I have said before that female agency cannot be located in women’s outcomes because of the moral prohibition on examining our individual choices, and these two excellent texts can be extended to do so. Further, Kearney is a woman, so she must not be seen blaming feminism or female-driven social norm changes for any negative outcome. This hampers her analysis such that she cannot actually name the luxury beliefs that led to broken families and wayward, miserable children.
This points to a larger problem within elite discourse — the studious ignorance of incentives and tradeoffs when considering any thorny social problem. All humans respond to incentives regardless of class, but the educated class person doesn’t consider this because we’d have to confront that we aren’t ‘enlightened’.
We imagine our education led us to act indifferently to incentives, unlike rats in an experiment. We also often cannot accept that every decision involves a trade-off, because it means acknowledging that one’s choices are naturally limited.
Modern society has duped us into thinking endless choice is liberation, such that tradeoffs don’t even enter our minds. Rohan Ghostwind astutely said that there is a god, and his name is ‘Tradeoff’, which has stuck in my mind, like Henderson’s luxury beliefs.
Kearney begins by examining the lion’s share of single-parent households — those led by a single mother. To even examine the outcomes of children raised by single mothers is radioactive among the educated class because the choices women make are beyond reproach.
It’s nigh-impossible to criticize any choice a woman makes because of the assumption of moral innocence and disempowerment. Thus, a choice with negative consequences is always excusable as the result of oppression. This is how feminism disempowers women by preaching empowerment, because we never have to really own our choices, and we always have downside protection.
In addition to the decoupling of marriage and children, marriage became a capstone after achieving stability rather than a vehicle for it, as it has historically been. This is another innovation of the countercultural period. As women delayed childbearing for education and careers, marriage became an achievement rather than a requirement.
This belief also trickled down to working-class women, who now see marriage as optional, even as the majority of college-educated women with children married first. Elites’ stated conceptions of marriage changed even as their behavior remained traditional, but the working class took these conceptions seriously and suffered for it. Tradition may be repulsive to the educated class, but the erosion of those norms has been devastating overall to everyone else.
To Kearney’s credit, in particular, are her chapters on the effect of absent fathers and the collapse in the working-class marriage market. We saw college-educated men rise in status, while society devalued working-class men and their occupations. This leads to fewer men in the marriage pool, a tragedy many writers trace to the culture of the elite, as in Christopher Lasch's Revolt of the Elites.
Wes Moore and the refusal to draw conclusions threatening luxury beliefs
Wes Moore is the furthest inside elite institutions, which creates the incentive to protect them. At the time of writing, 2010, he was climbing and riding the Obama wave, wherein we thought racism was over. It reads like the triumph of the post-racial society we imagined back then. He barely mentions racism as a factor, which was emblematic of the times.
Moore’s story is striking because he refuses to draw any conclusions from the divergence between his life and the other Wes’s. The author Moore is an elite, a shining example of black bourgeois achievement that papers over the structural issues affecting the rest of the black population. I’ve long thought that ‘representation’ serves individual ambition while dressing up as popular advancement of a group. The group doesn’t benefit, but the narrative persists, and select people from minority groups are elevated to preserve the fiction that the system is meritocratic.
The author’s parents were Jamaican immigrants, while the imprisoned Wes was presumably not an immigrant. Culture matters, and a luxury belief dear to the educated is that the broader culture that shapes parents’ actions and beliefs is more responsible for outcomes than structural forces, or can overcome them. I, and plenty of other working-class South and East Asian children of immigrants, are examples, but we have to be explained away because our success is inconvenient. Hilariously enough, Henderson is presumed to have ‘Asian privilege’ of ‘white adjacency’ at Yale by…white kids. This has also happened to me.
The author Wes was sent to military school at the first signs of trouble. This is reminiscent of Henderson, though he realized that something had to change and entered the military as an adult. Boys clearly need structured environments early in life to not become forces of destruction, as Henderson also observes about this period of his life. Joyce Benenson’s research inWarriors and Worriers also supports the idea that boys cannot only be raised by mothers, as Moore and Henderson’s stories confirm. Boys try from an early age to get as far as possible from their mothers and other adult women, while girls generally do the opposite.
Without going too far into details about Moore for those unfamiliar, the arc is that Wes’s father died early, while Wes’s imprisoned father abandoned him. The successful Wes had an early intervention, while the other Wes’s mother ignored the signs of trouble until it was too late. One was raised in a culture in which premarital pregnancy is discouraged, while another saw it normalized. The throughline in the other Wes’s story is women not choosing husband material and getting pregnant as teenagers. This is the unsayable.
Henderson was disappointed by both men and women in his life, and it’s painful as a reader to see that two fathers abandoned him. His birth mother is the most striking part of his story, given how horrendous his early childhood was with her. This is a thorny aspect to explore, because she clearly was not ready or able to care for a child, like many women who have children with men who are bad husband material. The world, however, is better off for having him.
The incarcerated Wes Moore’s story shows the difficulty of emerging from a cycle of poverty. The author Wes can’t even pinpoint the discipline instilled by his mother as a causal factor in their divergent trajectories, which is wild. I will detail what I think is a main but unexamined cause of the cycle of poverty in the next installment — women’s choices that are irrational in the collective sense but seem rational in the moment to individuals.
Moore’s non-answer about the difference in outcomes between the two is difficult to sit with, and I suspect analysis of the mechanisms is absent because it would threaten the luxury beliefs that dominate his context. Moore was climbing in the world at the time of writing, and the book’s non-conclusion ensured no ruffling of feathers.
Conclusion: male status collapse and feminization
Liberal democratic societies did something revolutionary, usually unacknowledged, in giving ordinary men a path to dignity and even prosperity. Low-status men have historically been treated as expendable by governments and monarchs, and the broad working class could not aspire to a comfortable life. Social mobility is a drastic innovation possible only in a liberal democracy, though Christopher Lasch has argued that it was a salve for the masses, allowing them to continue trusting a system that was never democratic. That gives me pause, though I benefited from that system.
Mid-twentieth-century America was stable in no small part because the majority of men had a path to flourishing, and the Black middle class expanded in the same period despite persistent segregation. We can see today that the instability of men as a class and the scant paths to social status have had strong political consequences. This collapse of status for men means fewer marriageable ones, leading many women to choose the fathers of their children less carefully than they otherwise might.
This is particularly true of educated women because we fashion ourselves as maximally liberated, so that constraints on our choices feel like oppression. I was also once unable to accept that my decisions and beliefs might have had negative consequences I didn’t foresee.
Accepting that my choices are constrained and seeing the incentives within a system has been a true liberation for me. The story of collapsing marriage rates is partially about our ignorance of incentives and tradeoffs, and especially the fact that women respond to perverse incentives with questionable choices, like men also might. We just can’t talk about it.
I always knew college was the way out of chaos. Culture and norms matter as much as the feminist and professional class frame requires denial (and here, I mean feminism as the source ideology for college-educated people).
I said long before Helen Andrews that feminist theory is the intellectual fountainhead of what we call woke beliefs, that elite leftist culture has feminized institutions, and that women are the primary drivers of this process. The conversation about feminization consistently leaves class out of the analysis, and this is intentional. Compact cannot confront its professional-managerial-class readers with a mirror.
Henderson’s memoir, paired with Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind and The Righteous Mind, led me to what seemed obvious: that professional-class liberal women, in particular, have a disempowering set of beliefs that have fomented within all the culture-creating institutions. I’ve written some version of this for two years because I suppose the gender wars are actually Hindu. Irony of ironies: I’ve used mostly male authors to reach conclusions about feminization, and none of them went there explicitly, which is one reason the wars remain. Men are structurally unable to comment.
But, this can be taken further: they’re Hindu not only because they don’t die, but because neither side has learned the requisite lessons. The culture cannot change because of incentives and tradeoffs, and so I find myself here again. Unable to let go. Maybe I haven’t learned the lessons either, but my writerly self was born out of the ashes of a woman who had swallowed the scripts of disempowerment.
Henderson’s narrative about his time at Yale seemed to imply that women are the true source of luxury beliefs through his examples — the Yale Halloween costume debacle, for example — but I’ve noticed that he generally avoids feminism as a subject. This makes sense for his position. He has analyzed female intra-sexual competition much more frequently in the past year, which I have appreciated. That’s why I write — I am both more insulated when I say it, but also an easier target for women who would police women like me stepping out of the feminist consensus. However, I’ve been policed for the past two years and thrived. A different life bolstered by more empowering beliefs is possible, and it doesn’t emerge from modern feminism.
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Your work is hard to read, and I say this as a compliment, because every sentence is packed full of complex and novel ideas. It needs to be read slowly, one sentence at a time.
I’m fascinated by the complete SILENCE about the concept of luxury beliefs (and about class prejudice in general) among prosperous progressives. It’s not as if they have a ready answer or a glib dismissal; they pretend as if these ideas simply don’t exist. They never discuss or acknowledge them.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/our-ruling-class