On the economy of Care and Honor; On Justin Smith-Ruiu and maladapted male misfires
Reading in relatively recent feminism (recall my podcast on Serene Khader’s Faux Feminism; see also
here) reminded me of the significance of an economy of care. (I think the insight within feminism goes back to at least Sophie Grouchy.) One of the bad features of patriarchy is that the carers risk systematically being under-cared for themselves.A real problem in the economy of care is that it is essentially zero-sum. This point is at least implicitly recognized in societies and religions that frown on or reject polygamy. In situations of polygamy, the care economy and wealth mutually reinforce each other so that systemic benefits flow upwards. And this makes intra-society violence extra fierce. This is especially so, in societies where total wealth itself is relatively fixed.*
Now, the care economy, so understood, is an important instance of a more general dynamic in the economy of attention, which is also zero-sum. Our celebrity culture gives so many examples of this I need not comment further on it. (And please know, my dear reader, I do not take yours for granted.)
However, a very important category in the economy of attention is recognition and honor (in what follows I use them as rough synonymy, but obviously one can make a further distinction here). So, if we plug in the foregoing, we can see that Plato’s Republic recognizes the dynamics involved; in the Kallipolis he separates quite starkly the economy of material wealth among the population from the economy of recognition/honor among the property-less ruling classes.
It is no surprise, then, that a kind of consistent feminism leads into species of material egalitarianism which may not be able to deliver care equality, but at least not make it much worse. And one of the problems for people like me, otherwise wholly unmoved by the desire for material equality (although open to caps on politically dangerous forms of wealth), is that while I can articulate a litany of problems for the economic egalitarian in practice, I have no better suggestion for how to deal with the zero-sum nature of the care economy.
So much for set up.
On social media Liam Kofi Bright and I responded quite warmly to a recent essay, “My Kind of Conservatism,” by
, which may be the most literary satisfying versions of public penance I have ever read. Liam summarizes one of Justin's key political points nicely, that “while smug lib puri-teen moralists are annoying and zany they're nowhere near as much of a threat to society as the authoritarian right.” While true you read Justin for his style and analysis of our mores and culture, and connecting these to literature and the most arcane of ethnographic and philological insights, not for his political thought.However, along the way Justin makes the following remark that is both a form of conventional wisdom and actually misses his own better insight.
And man do I ever hate what we’ve got now. In spite of appearances, we don’t even really have a Big Man in power — we have a bunch of little men, a regime of incels and gooners and other species of maladapted male misfires, duds, abortions, driven by nothing but unprincipled ressentiment. [This is one of the pull-quotes by Liam.]
Now, this recalls Menno ter Braak’s analysis of fascism. Back in 1940, the Dutch essayist Menno ter Braak committed suicide the day he realized that the Nazis would occupy the Netherlands. In any other age he would despite his fondness for modernism (he loved and was an early student of cartoon films) have been a Germanophile reactionary — he admired Nietzsche and wrote a dissertation on Otto III —, but he quickly grasped the nemesis of Nazism. In fact, Ter Braak’s focus on ressentiment was framed by his study of Nietzsche.
The problem with relying on ‘ressentiment’ is that is not clear what is driving it. In Nietzsche it is intrinsically tied to slave morality. And while this is undoubtedly often true — think of the Rawlsians fondness for no-envy principles —, this way of conceiving things naturally leads to a mistake. And it is a mistake that Hobbes warns against.
For Hobbes, “to Value a man at a high rate, is to Honour him; at a low rate, is to Dishonour him.” The definition is not intrinsically zero sum. But when Hobbes immediately goes on to explain it, we can immediately see the problem seep in: “But high, and low, in this case, is to be understood by comparison to the rate that each man setteth on himselfe.” Here honor is comparative in character, and the measure is set by each of us. Only in a society of saints should we expect a non zero sum distribution of honor; and in that society we need not care about this altogether.
The desire for Honor and pride are closely related, and crucially the pridefull man denies: “That every man acknowledge other for his Equall by Nature.” As countless readers have noted, in Hobbes, the honor loving man is dangerous because he may well love honor even more than fear death. From the political perspective this is a dangerous form of madness.**
So, my more Hobbesian interpretation of the proto-typical fascist is that this is somebody who has a frustrated sense of honor. This helps explain a number of related phenomena: why failed academics and nerds are so attracted to fascism; the odd choices to be nostalgic about (Byzantium, the Norse, medieval gothic, etc.); the loathing of bourgeois virtues; and the easy slide into various forms of natural inequality (of race, ethnicity, etc.)
I don’t think this is at odds with Justin’s underlying insight. For at one point he notes, that “it was only during the Biden presidency that the various pathological specimens of online adolescent masculinity grew just old enough to transfer their alienated thymos from the screen into actual politics.”
As an aside, what’s fascinating about the MAGA coalition is that aside from proto-fascists and maladapted male misfires that Justin focuses on (and the Christian nationalists I have not mentioned), there is Trump’s own kitschy aesthetic, his undeniable humor, and (often aggrieved) sensibility and vanity which are wholly unrelated to a desire for honor. A winning deal — even one with winners and losers — is wholly alien to the desire for honor. There is, in fact, nothing honorable about firing an employee.
Okay, let me wrap up. As I understand it the Achilles heel of liberalism is not a lack of resources to respond to the formal mercantile political agenda of the moment. The real problem is that there are no easy intellectual or social responses to programs that thrive on discontent rooted in the zero-sum economies of care and honor. Restricting myself to the latter, this zero-sum quality also means that a polity excessively focused on the latter is itself quite skewed and over time generates non-trivial amount of discontent if it doesn’t opt for permanent warfare.
*A peculiar fact of socio-biology back in the day is that it would recognize the same dynamic but only talk of offspring rather than care. Obviously, in real life there are complex interactions.