Damnation and Destruction
Pinker Rawls is a man adrift in a world that wishes him no safe harbour. There is nowhere left for a man like Pinker, a man who believes it is his to take whatever he wants, a man who reacts to the taunts of another with an act of brutality. Pinker Rawls is the kind of man who lives and breathes the crisis of masculinity.
To be male is not to play a role imposed by society. There are indisputable differences between the male of the species and the female. Biology determines the sex of each individual before birth. However smart it is to say, as does Simone de Beauvoir, in ‘The Second Sex’, that “One is not born, but becomes, a woman” - or a man, for that matter – it isn’t biologically true. How one expresses one’s maleness or femaleness may be susceptible to a range of influences yet, this only goes to prove the infinite opportunity for freedom open to the human individual. That one may feel constrained to be male rather than free to be male only reveals the individual’s weakness to speak up for oneself.
The answer to the crisis, as with any crisis, is not to tell the male that he is surplus to requirement. Those who advocate for their own freedom, who expect the whole world to recognize their right to express a way of life unknown until recent times, do so by denying the same freedom to the male who bought their freedom with his life.
Deny it as may be but life has not always been as easy as it is today. It may be true that our hunter-gatherer ancestors could send out the young men to risk their lives in the hunt while seeking warmth and comfort in each other’s arms at night. The Ancient Greeks may have had halcyon days in which Achilles and Petroclus could be both warrior and lovers. But history unfolded the way it did and the way it unfolded necessitated centuries of males fighting for the freedoms we enjoy today. To disparage those who went before us is to tell Isaac Newton that he spoke nonsense when he admitted that if he had “seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”.
Pinker Rawls expresses a kind of maleness that once would have brought him fame, what those wonderful Greeks termed ‘kleos’. Pinker’s problem is that the world no longer has need for him. He is surperfluous to requirement. Good riddance, you may say.
Modern society refuses to acknowledge that there are males who can no longer find a way to fit in, to be what society wants them to be. In similar fashion, there will come a day, if the scientists have their way – and the scientists always have their way – when you will be left wondering what happened to the world in which once you were glorified.
Science lacks a human heart. Science plows ahead with no thought to the consequences of its results. Those of you who now dismiss the Pinker Rawls’ way of being male will understand how he feels when Artificial Intelligence, for instance, reaches the stage where all human beings are superfluous to requirement. The more that can be done by machine the less need for human beings!
Pinker Rawls is a problem only because we made him a problem. We took away his world without consideration of what he would become afterwards. We label him a throwback, an embarrassment, a hindrance to all that we hope to be and so forget about him, dismiss him, leave him to spiral out of control.
And then we revile him when he acts out his maleness in a way that causes us pain.
We have the means to understand Pinker Rawls. As we understand that there has always been more than one way to be human (cf. homo neanderthalensis & homo sapiens), as we understand that, today, identity is fluid, so we can grasp the idea that there will come a day when we will be Pinker Rawls – on a futile quest to get back what once was ours, only to find damnation and destruction at the end of our road.
To be male is not to play a role imposed by society. There are indisputable differences between the male of the species and the female. Biology determines the sex of each individual before birth. However smart it is to say, as does Simone de Beauvoir, in ‘The Second Sex’, that “One is not born, but becomes, a woman” - or a man, for that matter – it isn’t biologically true. How one expresses one’s maleness or femaleness may be susceptible to a range of influences yet, this only goes to prove the infinite opportunity for freedom open to the human individual. That one may feel constrained to be male rather than free to be male only reveals the individual’s weakness to speak up for oneself.
The answer to the crisis, as with any crisis, is not to tell the male that he is surplus to requirement. Those who advocate for their own freedom, who expect the whole world to recognize their right to express a way of life unknown until recent times, do so by denying the same freedom to the male who bought their freedom with his life.
Deny it as may be but life has not always been as easy as it is today. It may be true that our hunter-gatherer ancestors could send out the young men to risk their lives in the hunt while seeking warmth and comfort in each other’s arms at night. The Ancient Greeks may have had halcyon days in which Achilles and Petroclus could be both warrior and lovers. But history unfolded the way it did and the way it unfolded necessitated centuries of males fighting for the freedoms we enjoy today. To disparage those who went before us is to tell Isaac Newton that he spoke nonsense when he admitted that if he had “seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”.
Pinker Rawls expresses a kind of maleness that once would have brought him fame, what those wonderful Greeks termed ‘kleos’. Pinker’s problem is that the world no longer has need for him. He is surperfluous to requirement. Good riddance, you may say.
Modern society refuses to acknowledge that there are males who can no longer find a way to fit in, to be what society wants them to be. In similar fashion, there will come a day, if the scientists have their way – and the scientists always have their way – when you will be left wondering what happened to the world in which once you were glorified.
Science lacks a human heart. Science plows ahead with no thought to the consequences of its results. Those of you who now dismiss the Pinker Rawls’ way of being male will understand how he feels when Artificial Intelligence, for instance, reaches the stage where all human beings are superfluous to requirement. The more that can be done by machine the less need for human beings!
Pinker Rawls is a problem only because we made him a problem. We took away his world without consideration of what he would become afterwards. We label him a throwback, an embarrassment, a hindrance to all that we hope to be and so forget about him, dismiss him, leave him to spiral out of control.
And then we revile him when he acts out his maleness in a way that causes us pain.
We have the means to understand Pinker Rawls. As we understand that there has always been more than one way to be human (cf. homo neanderthalensis & homo sapiens), as we understand that, today, identity is fluid, so we can grasp the idea that there will come a day when we will be Pinker Rawls – on a futile quest to get back what once was ours, only to find damnation and destruction at the end of our road.
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