Monday, May 13, 2013

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.

24 comments:

  1. Ah, the motivational literature of the Junior Anti-Sex League.

    "Hope is illusion. Existence is suffering. Sex is bad."

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    1. A 1984 allusion. Are you suggesting I'm a closet totalitarian? On the contrary, I criticize all large social organizations for subordinating our religious and aesthetic interests to duties that inevitably corrupt the group's members. As for that slogan, I disagree with the first of its three parts. Mind you, the point of this particular article is hardly to say that sex is bad. I've said that elsewhere, though.

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    2. Anti-sex movements and authoritarian structures are the same goals, expressed differently. That's why almost all totalitarian governments will use force to control sexual expression.

      Sex brings life together with life, driving it into itself in an attempt to force interaction, development, and love. Love and lust make repression difficult, so sterility and shaming is necessary for any kind of long term totalitarianism.

      If you're a closet totalitarian, you're a very clever one; if you genuinely believe the things you say (which seems more likely, but then, wouldn't it always?), then you're being used.

      When you distribute an anti-sex outlook, you're the carrier of a deadly disease. Whether you delight in, fear, don't care about, or are unaware of the bleakness that will result, you're still spreading those germs.

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    3. Well, what I say is that some degree of ascetic, intentional detachment from nature is good, when it's based on an appreciation of our existential predicament. But I don't tell people what to do. I'm just exploring a form of atheistic spirituality. When it comes to sex, I don't say people should stop it. I don't have to say that sex is bad. People's ambivalence about sex speaks for itself, and I'm interested in explaining that ambivalence. Christianity isn't the only reason people are ashamed of sex, which is why we keep our sex lives secret. I talk about this shame in "Embarrassment by Sexual Ecstasy."

      When you say that sex brings living things together, I think we should take Schopenhauer's distinction seriously, between what's good for the species and what's good for the individual. Sex is good mainly for the genes, which are essential to life but which are undead rather than alive. We're very good at rationalizing, so we talk about love and fun and soul mates, and I'm sure those stories satisfy many people. But we need to consider whether those stories are delusions or good myths. Do those stories live up to ethical and aesthetic standards in terms of how they deal with our existential facts? Do they acknowledge and then creatively overcome those facts or do they ignore or paper over them?

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    4. Furthermore, High Akra seems to romanticise sex to a degree here. While the sex drive may "force interaction, development, and love", it is also the cause of many atrocities in the world--rape and other sexual violence, for instance, just as this article points out in the actions of Ariel Castro.

      Akra, your use of the word "force" is interesting as well, due to its oppressive connotations, especially in light of your assertions of totalitarianism. We could see sex as a form of natural totalitarianism, with its nigh inexorable control over humanity (and all other species). We shouldn't look at sex and "romantic" love through rose-tinted glasses.

      I would go on a rant here about the ridiculousness of the concept of the "significant other" but I am much too drunk for that. Cheerio!

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    5. Well, it comes from sexual desire. That would probably be a better way of putting it.

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    6. Dear Benjamin,

      Imagine yourself in the act of crafting a similar essay about eating. This may help you to understand where the antilife comes in.

      Consider: there are acceptable public forms of courtship, such as meeting for supper, holding hands, embracing next to a trio of Italian violinists, kissing after supper, then winking to your friends and climbing into the limo with arms wrapped about each other. People celebrate ritualized weddings, joining (faux-) virgins to groom-owners, asking about the due dates for children, and--as life advances--making open, ribald jokes about it even in large company (elders talking to elders tend to be quite open, even in western religious communities).

      The private embarrassments that you identify as "ambivalence" about sex are caused by centuries of monotheism-derived antisex cultural trends, of which you are engaging in one of the more advanced modern forms.

      On another note, the "secrecy" of our sexual lives is not something we all want. Any number of internet sites demonstrate how desperately very many people want their sex lives to be completely open. You can even find fat male virgins posting about how often they masturbate in their parents' basements, where they still live, as long as they're discussing the dirty stories they like.

      Talking about, and sharing, sex, is as intrinsic to our nature as it is to monkeys and all our other predecessors species. It is a very, very recent, and very sickening, development, this "secrecy" you refer to, and people are desperate to be free of it. All the dating drama shows, where main characters discuss the frustrations of the dating scene (based on mandatory social lies and gamesmanship) are elite ways of channeling these frustrations into humor.

      Despite our genes, many people don't seem to mind sex that occurs in conjunction with birth control pills. In fact, the more aware of such pharmaceuticals people are, the more they seem to be interested in using them to have more sex. How do our genes deal with that? Why are men even more driven to sleep with women when they find out there's no risk of having children?

      10:40 Anonymous, your understanding of rape and sexual violence is mistaken. Political correctness and neo-feminism are a prior generation of antisex movements, designed to associate sex with violence. Rape and sexual violence, though, are caused primarily by war and economic circumstances. You might find it enjoyable to read Michael Ghiglieri's "The Dark Side of Man." He's a popular primate biologist, if that helps.

      As to "force," it does tend to have pejorative associations, but consider the way we're "forced" to eat, breathe, and sleep. We are "forced" to live, such that if you stand against life, you hate it for the things it "forces" on you. If you love life and others who live, then you can delight in the things it guides you to do.

      If I said "significant other" anywhere, I apologize. Dear god, how I apologize. :)

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    7. High Arka,

      I agree that Christianity has made Westerners ashamed of sex, but I make the case in "Embarrassment by Sexual Ecstasy" that there are also underlying, existential reasons for the shame (sex reminds us of our finitude, robotic nature, etc). I'm not causing any shame of sex. I'm just trying to explain the shame that persists despite the waning of Christianity in the West.

      I identify the paradox that sexuality in the abstract is out in the open in Western cultures, because sex is used to sell products (to manipulate the masses), whereas our private sex lives are usually kept secret. The people who speak freely about their sex lives on the internet are either speaking anonymously, as is usually the case on the internet, or they're exceptions that prove the rule.

      http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2011/11/embarrassment-by-sexual-ecstasy.html

      Where we differ here is our evaluation of nature. You say that life is a blessing, that life is essentially good, and so anything that opposes life is bad. Thus, sex is obviously good because it produces more life or it keeps our spirits up. I think life is only potentially good. When living things fail to overcome their existential situation, whether because they lack awareness or the power to change their circumstances and fight back against the indifference of natural forces, life is not simply good. On the contrary, the life of most creatures is, for the most part, horrible and absurd.

      The goodness of anything, for me, comes down to an aesthetic judgment, and the story told by most living things is abominable, uninspiring, sickening. For example, recently I've been watching a lot of nature documentaries, such as a multipart series on Africa. In all the animal documentaries I've seen, the story told is invariably about the life cycle. That's the only narrative frame that's available, because the lives of animals revolves around the undead process of natural selection. But natural selection acts for the "good" of the genes, not for the good of the hosts. Thus, whenever you're talking about a creature's life cycle, you're talking about an abuse of the individual.

      Life is good/beautiful when living things show heroism, to give the viewer something to cheer for, to make for an uplifting story in the face of the antagonist who is Mother Nature. There are hints of this heroism in all species, but humans have the greatest freedom and thus the greatest potential for rebellion/detachment.

      If you say, with the Buddhist, that individual lives are illusory and what's good is Gaia or some collective organism that we're all parts of, I don't think we'd know enough about that superorganism to know whether its life is good or bad. The data we have is about the life and death struggles of individual organisms and about the relatively small groups they form.

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    8. "Heroism" and "rebellion," of course, being normative terms. In the absence of complete evidence, you've drawn your conclusion.

      If you're right, then none of it matters. If you're right, then I'm just as right as you are, because neither of us knows anything meaningful, and never can.

      If I'm right, it all matters. If I'm right, you're completely wrong, but it'll be okay, because you'll eventually find out.

      If you're right, you're wrong, because you used leaps of faith, tiny slices of imperfect sensory experience, hearsay claims from the age's high priests, and whispers from your own personal bitterness to construct an edifice that rejects all the foundations upon which you've built it.

      If I'm right, I'm right, because I was already connected.

      We stand here as paladins of life and antilife. You, death knight, are a contradiction. You exist only because of life, and are a part of the very life that you claim to have come to end. Our existence disproves your quest; but a single moment of our existence proves that you have already lost, and that the thing you set out to destroy was impossible to destroy. The melody you thought of as rebellious and discordant was, in truth, part of the composition from the beginning. I thank you, and I forgive you.

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    9. Well, let's not argue about these philosophical principles. I'm still trying to work out the basics of this philosophy/religion, and much of it's a speculative attempt at art made of ideas, as far as I'm concerned.

      Still, I think you're going after a bit of a strawman here. Soon I'm going to write on Emile Cioran's nihilism, to contrast my view with it. But you seem to be making me out to be a nihilist. I think we can know meaningful things, unless you're talking about scientific, propositional knowledge. Normative knowledge is more a matter of experience, of knowing how to live, not of what the facts are. Ideals either inspire us or they don't. We're talking here about the experience of being in the presence of great art or even of something sacred. But although I construe moral questions in aesthetic terms, I specifically deny that that lands us in the postmodern quagmire of relativism in which everything becomes equally as good or bad as everything else.

      Anyway, I hope we keep wandering through each others art galleries and so challenging our viewpoints. Maybe our writings will rub off on each other for the better.

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    10. Well, it comes from sexual desire. That would probably be a better way of putting it.
      As far as I've heard and understand it, no.

      It's not like guys who don't have $200 bucks (or less) to go to a prostitute.

      Anyway, you might not agree the idea is the case, but atleast form the idea fully that rape isn't about sexual desire or sex. It's about power. It's an entirely different game to what you think is going on. Okay, you don't agree. But just imagine the idea of a entirely different game, and we can leave there for time being.

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    11. I predicted that you might respond with the argument that rape is a power thing, not a sex thing. But sex and power are not mutually exclusive ideas--power and sex are intrinsically bound with each other. Michel Foucault and Sigmund Freud wrote about this connection in great detail. By trying to compartmentalise sex and power you are not only simplifying the issue, you are misrepresenting it.

      So yes, we don't agree.

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    12. Look at the way people apply gender to sexual attributes, for instance. To use stereotypes as an example (which display power in action), men should like cars and manual labour, and women should do the dishes and look after the children. We base these ideals on our sexes. Sex is therefore ideological, and ideology is the way people see the world, and the way people perceive the world is inherently political. Power is everywhere, baby!

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    13. In so far as "sex" is a biological term, rape includes the sexual act. I think the point you want to make, Callan, is that rape isn't lovemaking, since "lovemaking" is a psychological and not just a biological term.

      One of my articles that's relevant here is "Sex is Violent: Why the F-Word is Taboo."

      http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2012/02/sex-is-violent-why-f-word-is-taboo.html

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    14. Anon, that's like saying kinetic energy is involved in both hitting someone with a dodgeball (in a dodgeball game they wanted to play in) and also in getting a fired bullet to connect with someones skull.

      Yes, utterly so.

      I totally misrepresent the kinetic energy element/power element.

      Or you do by including no sense of scale, let alone consent. Indeed that scale and consent don't even occur to you - that's problematic.

      Maybe the subject does apply if one associates sex and power without any real structure, rhyme or reason. Then they name dodgeball as a kind of murder substitute?

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    15. So how do you define power then? What is the "essence" of power? What constitutes power? It isn't a self-defining concept; it is constructed by a multitude of things in human thoughts and actions. I maintain that power is everywhere, in all human interactions, including sex. Rape is a power situation, but it is also sexual. How can rape not be sexual? So you think when someone rapes someone else there is nothing sexual involved at all? It's just pure "power", whatever that means?

      I understand that there is consent in sexual relations, but even in that relationship there is a power dynamic, and sex is a part of that. I'm not saying all sex is rape, I'm saying that power is intrinsically bound to sex and ideas surrounding it, like all ideology.

      Also, kinetic energy is involved in both dodgeball and shooting. All you're saying is that one is more benign than the other, which I agree with. But they still originate from the same force/principle, don't they? Just like the velocity of the dodgeball and the bullet come from the same source (kinetic energy), rape and consensual sex both come from a sexual drive.

      I'm not trying to say sex is inherently bad; just that it can manifest itself in different ways depending on the individual. There is positive, consensual sexual activity, but there is also horrific sexual abuse. I absolutely condemn the latter, but both of them have to do with power relations though, in my opinion.

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  2. I think if you start saying libraries are a support for the idea of slavery (of an intellectual kind), atleast the idea is consistant.

    What's next - maybe if you happen to remember a sexual event you see in RL (maybe because you have sex sometimes) and then recall it latter, that's keeping a little porn stash in your skull and thus sex slavery?

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    1. Callan, I think you're trying to parody my point about porn stashes by comparing porn to libraries. But there are differences. What would the library substitute for? And libraries aren't kept secret and secured under lock and key. Well, libraries do have locked doors so the books don't get stolen, but the people who borrow the books don't have that control over them.

      The point about porn is that it functions as a virtual substitute for sex. Instead of a flesh-and-blood body, you have photos, pixels, or movies. And I think it's interesting how those substitutes are treated. They're stashed away somewhere, for the obvious reason that porn is even more shameful than regular sex. But on top of the secrecy, there's the thrill of having complete control over the porn. On the internet you can look at whatever you want, whenever you want. And when you're done with it, you put it away. The porn substitutes thus act as sex slaves, and what disturbs everyone about Ariel Castro is that he had the same control over real people. He could do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted, and he kept the whole thing secret, stashed away.

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    2. Exactly, there isn't a substitute involved - it seems empty as a parallel to you, when really that's the point being made.

      So if Ariel Castro instead had a stash of porn mags instead of three girls, that'd be the same deal?

      I've heard of some refer to porn as a substitute for imagination. And it is potentially really sad to let someone elses imagination that far into ones own head. I don't know if there's some other thing your refering to, but how do you explain a seperation between imagination and hard copy imagination?

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    3. It wouldn't be the same deal, but it would be a substitute. This article speculates that the difference might amount to a conflict between barely imagined hyperobjects (natural selection vs culture and technology). It just strikes me that although men who don't rape are more moral than Castro, men who have porn stashes do have something in common with him: they express the same polygynous instinct, albeit in different ways.

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    4. I dunno - you're trying to blend two issues at once, it seems - polygyny and...forced captivity and rape? Or is that three issues at once?

      If you intimately tie polygyny with rape...seems odd? Sure, it's own boatshed of issues - but it almost seems like as soon as anything seems amoral to you, its connected to everything that also seems amoral? That's really a false connection and tribute to the low resolution of our moral view - we don't see in shades of bad. Bad comes in any shade you want - as long as it's black. Lacking distinctions, we draw false connections between things that land in the bad category.

      You seem to take things and dial them to an extreme - were a goldilox species, we live in between too hot and too cold. I was going to give this example before, of dialing things up: In the book neuropath the villain alters the brain of a daughter to 'uncap' and dial to an extreme the daughters love for her mother - turning it into a sexual lust for her mother.

      You seem to identify emotional components (perhaps the ones you don't participate in or don't participate in as much) and then you dialed them up to 11.

      I'm pretty sure I could reference your own emotional map, take a component of it at random and dial it up for various fairly amoral ramifications. After all, usually we all love our mothers.

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  3. One long essay deliberately omitting the fact that rape is bad BECAUSE WOMEN DONT LIKE OR WANT IT. The entire point of this is to deny them sentience and satiate your ego. It seems your nihilism is just anguish at the female body, like Schopenhauers and all the other right wing male bloggers.

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    1. Sorry you feel that way, but I prefer not to state the obvious (e.g. that rape is bad) and this article isn't about the rightness or wrongness of things. I'm trying to expand our perspectives to appreciate the work of hyperobjects. Still, I say, "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..."

      Also, on most issues I'm not right-wing. See, for example, my article on conservatism as shameless propaganda for dominance hierarchies:

      http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2011/08/conservatism-myth-making-for-oligarchy.html

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