Man-made modernity
Published on 21 October 2024
Where I work in government has largely abandoned the notion of ‘job performance’. If you believe in job performance, then sooner or later you’ll notice that some people are better or worse at their jobs than others, and this might make employees who are bad at their jobs feel bad. Because government is obsessed with the mental well-being of its workforce, and unconcerned with serving the public, it follows that job performance is a toxic idea which needs to be discarded.
Now it’s very obvious to me that the people most opposed to this turn of events are disagreeable men such as myself, while the biggest supporters of this change are empathetic women who care about their colleagues in a way that, frankly, I don’t.
I’m beginning to suspect the decline of state capacity over the last half-century might have something to do with the feminisation of the public sector.
Ideally this sort of question could be resolved by reading the literature from the relevant discipline, social psychology. Unfortunately social psychologists are very woke and very bad at science, so the research is rather poor. That said there’s a pattern which a few people have noticed but is seldom articulated clearly.
Men, and perhaps more accurately masculine norms, are well-adapted for co-operation between large groups of men who don’t trust each other. For this reason men prefer hierarchy, they prefer rules that are legible and which everyone must follow, they better tolerate competition especially on the basis of competence, they are more committed to abstract ideals and institutions (e.g. the nation… or their football team), they’re motivated more by duty than caring, etc. On the other-hand women are much better adapted to socially perform in small groups, in terms of affiliative behaviour, affective empathy etc.
Similarly, men have a larger scope of concern; they’re more interested in world affairs and economics, while women are more interested in local news and celebrity gossip (while celebrities are strangers they’re probably tapping into social behaviours designed to deal with kith and kin). It seems plausible that women were relegated to the ‘domestic sphere’ in part they are naturally more domestically-oriented than men.
While the above is reasonably well-known, the connection is seldom made with sociology. Overwhelmingly, the transition to Gesellschaft represents a sort of hyper-masculinisation of norms and the manner in which society is ordered. While I disagree with feminists on everything, note this lines up with their timelines as well, which is to say modernity emerged under especially patriarchal social relations.
The consequences of this can can be seen to this day in polling. Women, relative to men, don’t like modern institutions such as capitalism, the carceral criminal justice system, the system of wage-labour, standardised testing in schools, the rule-bound administration of welfare, etc. I have no doubt that as society continues to feminise, all these institutions will increasingly be undermined by women who feel they’re uncaring and impersonal (which they are – modern civilisation is built on uncaring and impersonal institutions designed by men like me). Whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of taste, but it strikes me as undeniable that’s it’s going to occur to some extent.