Polygyny, Porn Stashes, and the Clash of Hyperobjects

I begin with a familiar news story and use it as fodder for philosophical and religious speculation, borrowing Timothy Morton’s idea of the hyperobject to explain the connection between Ariel Castro’s alleged imprisoning and raping of a trio of women for ten years, and the norm for men of calling upon porn as a technological substitute for a flesh-and-blood harem.

Real vs Virtual Polygyny

American news stations are saturated with coverage of the Cleveland man, Ariel Castro, who’s suspected of having abducted three women, holding them captive in his home for ten years, and using them as sex slaves. The women recently escaped and are safe. Castro’s alleged deeds are horrible, as is the ghoulish attention they’re getting in the media; we rubberneck even when we’re not in a car. But I think part of the context of this news story is missing from the headlines. Castro will be held up as a psychopathic freak, but here’s an ironclad statistic that should give us pause, before we congratulate ourselves for being normal and quite unlike the repulsive archfiend Ariel Castro: 90% of mammals practice high degrees of polygyny. Monogamy is rare in mammals. Polyandry, meaning a minority of females having sexual rights to the majority of males is even rarer. The norm is for the elite, alpha males to have privileged sexual access to the majority of females in the group. Sometimes this takes the form of a harem, in which a single dominant male mates with a group of females and guards them and their offspring. When there’s competition between males in these unequal societies, the rival males will often kill the infants or systematically harass the females to force them to miscarriage.

Now, you’re thinking this zoological information is irrelevant since most human males don’t normally do any of this--at least, they haven’t for thousands of years and certainly not in modern societies. Indeed, modern men don’t normally abduct women, hold them captive, and rape them. However, that’s at least partly because these men have a substitute, which is called in technical terms the stash of porn. For decades, men have been by far the main consumers of pornography, because men are more turned on by visual cues. But the practice doesn’t end with looking at a dirty picture or movie to facilitate masturbation. No, the images are typically collected and stashed away somewhere, in a secret trunk, drawer, or other hiding place. Before the internet, the stash would consist of a stack of pornographic magazines or videotapes. Now that most porn is online, the stash is made up of computer files, stored on DVDs, hard drives, or just on the internet itself, and the files are often password-protected so that they’re symbolically locked up.

Notice, then, the differences but also the similarities between Castro’s alleged deeds and modern male sexual behaviour. The main difference, of course, is that most men don’t harm women by using pornography and so they don’t thereby commit a crime. (You can say porn stars are indirectly harmed by the demand for porn, since the actors are abused or exploited, but this is controversial and anyway it’s not as bad as rape.) But while Castro is said to have chained actual women in cages, holding them as his secret prisoners to molest them at will, so-called normal men do something similar with images that substitute for real women, collecting the images, keeping them secret, stashing them away, and calling upon them at will.

What this shows, I think, is that however enlightened we may think we are, we have a polygynous instinct that’s usually expressed now in a relatively harmless way, thanks to the marvel of a technological substitute. Clearly, this is only one example of a much broader phenomenon. We still have primitive urges, but we’re under social pressure to repress or to sublimate them, and technology offers us many ways of doing so. Often, the artificial means of satisfying the urge is less rewarding than the natural one, and so modern people are plagued with anxiety and depression. For example, feminism gives women equal rights of personhood as well as control over their reproductive systems, while Christianity has popularized and romanticized monogamy. So while modern men still fantasize about having sex slaves, as evidenced by the prevalence of the porn stash, these men can’t act naturally on that impulse without breaking the law and modern moral standards. Technology comes to the rescue, satisfying the demand with artificial versions of women which satiate men’s sexual appetite as long as they can suspend their disbelief. Still, porn has a dark side, leading men on a downward spiral to social alienation and perverse preferences. And men are at best inured to porn, since the pleasures of porn naturally pale before those of real sexual contact.

So while law-abiding men should feel morally superior to Ariel Castro, since any way you slice it, porn isn’t as bad as abduction and rape, still we shouldn’t lose sight of the nature of social progress. We don’t progress by creating perfectly original ways of living; instead, we transform old ones. The surface features change, but ancient patterns still play themselves out. In modern societies, polygyny is abnormal, but the polygynous instinct is still active, seeking release. And where there’s a will there’s a way. The next time we have a look at a nude photo of our favourite porn star, we should reflect on the fact that a stash of porn is a virtual harem. I doubt such a reminder would kill the mood.

Culture as Hyperobject

But I’d like to return to the point about how social pressure modifies our habits. We live in three kinds of environments, the natural (biological, geological, meteorological, etc), the ideational (cultural), and the technological (artificial). Over long periods of time, natural environments shape the bodies of organisms, by killing off unfit ones before they breed more of their kind. As I’ve explained here and here, the ideas that make up culture serve as models that inspire us to humanize the natural environment, to modify it with technology, or at least to prefer to operate in such an artificial world. This is the process by which values indirectly replace facts with virtual, human-centered worlds, where facts are mind-independent elements of the wilderness we find before we modify it. This is also the process by which we evade our existential responsibility to abandon the goal of happiness and to suffer for knowledge of the tragedies and absurdities that define natural life. So feminism and Christianity are big ideas in certain cultures, and just as natural environments shape bodies through natural selection, cultures shape minds by forcing us to come to terms with the ideas by the process of reflective equilibrium, of thinking hard until the ideas are assimilated in our personal worldview even if only because we discount them as farfetched.

The philosopher Timothy Morton has introduced the interesting idea of the hyperobject, of a massively distributed thing so enormous and old that we can’t even directly observe parts of it, but can approach it up to a sort of event horizon. Among a hyperobject’s properties, Morton says, are its nonlocality, meaning that it’s never found by us in its entirety in any specific region of space or time, and also its being phased, meaning that it occupies a higher dimensional phase space, from our point of view, which nevertheless might be localizable for a higher-dimensional mind. For example, global warming, Styrofoam, and water are hyperobjects. A tornado is local, but the global warming that’s thought to cause a tornado involves much more than any such transient weather event as a particular swirl of wind.

Metaphysically speaking, water is a kind of stuff, as indicated by the mass noun “water.” Indeed, decades ago, analytic philosophers like Quine analyzed mass nouns and drew conclusions about the ontology of sums of stuff like water. Compare bottles of water to the compound water itself. A bottle of water is a discrete thing and it may come and go within a matter of years or even minutes, whereas water is distributed all over the planet and is hundreds of millions of years old. You get a sense of the myriad processes water’s involved in by recalling the water cycle. Water is contained mostly in the oceans, and these evaporate, cool off in the atmosphere to form clouds, fall as raindrops, are stored as snow or ice in mountains, run off through dew on plants to reach rivers which flow back to the oceans. Water is essential to life as we know it and will likely be around long after our species vanishes.

As the object-oriented philosopher Graham Harmon’s book, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, makes clear, there’s a cosmicist aspect of objects or even, I’d say, of facts. Contrary to the philosopher Kant and other metaphysical idealists who think that reality--or at least the only relevant part of it--is mind-dependent, since all we can know of is what we construct with our categories and ways of knowing, object-oriented philosophers say that there are objects whose being isn’t exhausted by any mental capacity. Facts are interchangeable with objects in this respect, since each is defined as being objective, or independent of minds; their properties are what they are regardless of how or whether we think of them. So there’s at least temporarily more to an object or a fact than how it relates to a mind. If we add that there’s necessarily more, we have the makings of the mystical/mysterian/cosmicist thesis. For example, a temporarily hidden part of an object would be the side of an apple that’s turned away from you as you look at it. When you look at an apple, the object contains more than the part that’s related to you, as the light bounces off of its surface and strikes your eyes. You could walk around the apple to look at that once-hidden side, but then the other side would be hidden from you view. The far side of the moon always faces away from the Earth, but astronauts have orbited and observed it, so it’s not necessarily hidden from us. Perhaps some facts, though, including parts of objects or indeed whole objects, are immutably beyond our comprehension. Even if try to relate to them, to perceive or to categorize them, our feelers may slide off their alien surfaces. Morton’s hyperobject is more nearly an object in this pessimistic sense; it’s an object that doesn’t fall within the field of things we can fathom.

Cultures and even environments in general seem to be hyperobjects, although perhaps faddish subcultures are too fleeting to fall under that heading. Still, you get a sense of the superhuman aspect of a city, a civilization, or a culture if you happen to notice a building in the neighbourhood in which you grew up, which was there before you were born, has changed in the years since you’ve been around, and will remain there for years after you’re gone. You may travel widely in a city, but to fully understand such a complex place, including its architecture, geography, economy, politics, criminal elements, plant life, weather patterns, and so on you need quite a synoptic viewpoint. Even just the subway or sewer tunnels are usually hidden to most people. Perhaps a city’s mayor oversees most of the terrain here, but likely no one understands everything there is to know about a city, just as even an expert on an ideology like feminism doesn’t appreciate all aspects of modern culture which encompass it.

War between Hyperobjects

Now, the reason I bring up these metaphysical concepts of objects, facts, and hyperobjects is that the connection between Ariel Castro, polygyny in mammals, and porn stashes suggests a tantalizing possibility that here’s an event horizon, or what Morton calls a footprint of a hyperobject. In terms of hyperobjects, here’s how I imagine a hyperdimensional being would think of these sexual behaviours. There is perhaps a conflict between two hyperobjects here. First, there’s polygyny as a mating strategy, in which case the genes and the environments that select for them force the host organisms into humiliating, dangerous positions: the females become objects possessed by the strongest or craftiest males, while the males are coarsened as they submit to their instinct to abuse the females to keep them in line. Castro didn’t so much choose to perpetrate an original crime; instead, he succumbed to a naturally selected preference, likely being aided by a sociopathic disregard for other people’s feelings. That emotional block allowed him to act on his polygynous impulse without his having to resort to the politically tolerated substitute.

Now, the hyperobject here is natural selection, which includes our genes, our ancestors, our ancient environment, and all the connections between species that have influenced our development. In the widest sense, natural selection includes all the processes that design the body types of all living things on this planet. Instead of thinking of processes as ways or relations, think of them as elements of some enormous pattern that we’re much too small to take in at a glance. So instead of individual organisms living and dying in their environment and gradually turning into a new species, from one generation to the next, you have massively distributed stuff, like water which is spread across millions of years and all over the Earth in its natural cycle; in hyperspatial terms, organisms might be like the cells in your body, forming a much larger structure. Just as a microscopic organism on your arm can’t grasp the shape of a whole person, let alone discern the mental and social aspects of her life cycle, so too we can barely imagine the hyperobject of natural selection even though this colossal object leaves its footprint in Castro’s alleged enslavement of three women.

But there’s another hyperobject at work and it’s one to which Castro may be denied access by his sociopathy: the culture in which we sublimate politically incorrect instincts with technology, using the substitute of porn as a sex slave. Although other species use tools and have cultural styles, this second hyperobject emerges mainly with us, and each of these two hyperobjects leaves its different footprint in the strata of the human brain. The forces of natural selection have thrown up a self-aware species that’s risen from the herds to control some of the forces that designed it and to create its own value-driven game which has transformed much of the natural environment. In fact, we are hyperdimensional beings compared to other species, precisely because we can see much of the hyperobject of natural selection whereas the other species are merely slaves to natural forces. And we can see the younger hyperobject of culture in its interplay with technology. We can see Ariel Castro as a holdover from our prehuman past, as a traitor to the new world order in which we ironically grant each other equal rights even as we serve the new master of our technological world. We think we’re in control when we call upon porn to satisfy our lusts, but porn is addictive and so just as the polygynous instinct is the first hyperobject’s foothold in our brain, so too the second one uses porn to redirect that instinct, to humiliate men and reduce them to the absurd position of getting off on flashing lights on a computer screen. 

Likewise, feminism emasculates men and so increasingly deprives women of the alpha men they instinctively want, but the question here is whether women are to blame. Are women responsible for the women’s rights movement? On the contrary, those rights seemed inevitable once personhood was discovered. On the ground level, of course, individual women needed to fight for their rights to overcome male chauvinism. But once the first hyperobject supplied us with unique cognitive skills, we created the second hyperobject, the interplay between the ideational and technological habitats that have largely replaced the wilderness for us. Instead of adapting to the wild, then, we came to adapt to the new worlds. For example, we came to the vain conclusion that the universe revolves around us, that we’re all-important, because the new world we create caters to our whims and embodies our values. We then theorize that we’re free, ultrarational, and highly conscious superbeings. With that concept of personhood in effect, women’s personal equality with men becomes a matter of logical consistency. But although we are higher-dimensional beings compared to other species, and we do create culture and technology, the new hyperobject that’s emerged evidently has a will of its own. We add to that object, but our minds also adapt to its contours. No one controls all culture and technology, and human nature would disappear were we to try to deprive ourselves of the new air we breathe.

So when we permit men’s hiding of porn, but lock up Castro if he’s shown to be guilty of imprisoning and raping the three women, even though the same polygynous instinct seems to be expressed in either case, we’re at the crossroads between two hyperobjects. The reason it’s shameful to have a stash of porn is that we sense that connection between the hyperobjects, that the new one is a remodeling of the old. Still, we’re torn as to which master we should serve. Legally and morally, the choice is clear, but then we remind ourselves that we shouldn’t be cooped up indoors all the time, that we have to get back to nature, that we should protect the natural ecosystems because they sustain us, which means that the human-centered world depends on the inhumane world in which species are forced to suffer in countless ways for the absurd end of proliferating their mindless chemical replicators. Imagine being a fly during WWII. Guns are firing all around you, soldiers are shouting and dying, tanks are rolling over bombed-out houses, and the fly has no idea about the gravity of the situation. The fly can’t see the global war because it lacks the classification scheme as well as the depth of being to perceive such large-scale structures as the Axis and the Alliance. Likewise, when we look at polygyny, porn stashes, and so forth, we usually don’t broaden our perspective and approach the larger objects or processes at issue.

Caught between Perspectives

We should distinguish between explanatory reduction and abstraction. For the most part, the sciences reduce complex phenomena to simpler ones, analyzing wholes into their parts and filling in as many of the explanatory gaps as possible, even if only with heuristics, or informal rules of thumb. We don’t understand nearly as well how local objects might fit into a hyperobject, if only because we can barely imagine the latter. The object-oriented abstraction here is more a religious speculation than a scientific concept, I think, and the lesson is the cosmicist one. We have hints of larger processes at work in our personal affairs and we’ve traditionally attributed them to unseen ghosts, monsters, or gods. Morton’s quasi-scientific idea of the hyperobject is just another placeholder, except that this speculation has greater mythical power than the outdated theistic or superstitious notions.

The upshot of all this is that you can look at Ariel Castro in quaint moralistic terms and see him as having chosen to commit a horrible sin, and to some extent this folk psychological explanation is correct, assuming he’s guilty. We do have a limited degree of self-control and there are better or worse ways of behaving. But we shouldn’t confuse the practical benefit of this level of understanding with profundity. In fact, the individualistic and moralistic notions presupposed at this intuitive level are increasingly obsolete. However, the alternative is either religious/philosophical speculation or social scientific abstraction. The latter is typically the same as the former but with a mathematical veneer to lend it a more scientific appearance. If we think in religious or philosophical terms about Castro, we find ourselves engaging in poetic speculations, at best, in which case we might imagine that Castro is only a pawn in some universal, hideous process. Castro is missing his capacity for empathy so he falls prey to an instinct which is a mechanism for spreading genes and so for amorally perpetuating the hyperobject of Life on Earth.

And Castro is socially condemned as a traitor to the rival hyperobject of Artificiality (culture plus technology). The media attend to this sordid tale with a happy ending, to remind the masses to be content with masturbating with the aid of their stashes of porn; sure, we should respect the untamed lands and get back to nature and surround ourselves with plant-life and love all the little birds and fishes, but let’s not imagine that we humans are natural creatures. Perish the thought! We’re all supernatural. No need to look for ghosts drifting down the staircase. We all represent progress away from nature, because we belong to a postnatural hyperobject, one we create, sustain, and are modified by in turn. Our ideas give us hyperdimensional insight, as we lift our heads above the treetops and look squarely at the footprint of natural selection, at least; like gods, we reshape the jungle in our image, creating artificial worlds that serve us better than the wilder places. Even though rape is perfectly natural and normal in mammals, rape is a crime for gods of the supernatural new world.  

But is the highly abstract idea of the hyperobject or megaprocess theoretically useful? Is expanding our minds in this way worthwhile or is missing the forest for the trees sometimes the wiser course? For example, if we abstract away from our individuality and think of people as cells in a megabody that itself is only one part of a hyperobject, we may lose sight of our importance and sneer at our so-called rights and values. But this is the curse of reason, which is that we can objectify with more and more detachment from local circumstances, searching for higher ideals and more objective truths, even if we envision the former with artistic speculations rather than with scientific experiments. The higher vision decenters us and so mocks our anthropocentric bias. However, our existential task is to live in the absurd limbo between higher and lower perspectives, to realize we’re worthless even as if we’re stuck feeling otherwise. To suffer at that crossroads and to creatively overcome that suffering may call for the greatest heroism.