Incels, Multiculturalism, and the Dissolution of the Social Mandala

When that second-wave feminist slogan, "The personal is political," was coined in the 60's, probably no one imagined anything like incels entering the fray to fight for their right to get laid. But if sexual orientation can be politicized, then so can sexual frustration, and that most reviled of sexual deviants—the male loser—can turn insurrectionist.

In the past, male losers in the sexual arena were diverted into other causes. They took up some form or another of political extremism. Or they became religious zealots. Islamist terrorism draws from a nearly bottomless well of feckless young men with no access to mates, thanks to widespread polygamy in Islamic cultures. Incels merely drop the religious and ideological pretense and get straight to the point: they're angry because no one wants to fuck them.

Jordan Peterson recently stepped in it, again, by stating in a New York Times interview that the solution to the problem of violent incels is "enforced monogamy." I never thought I'd live to see the day when promoting monogamy would provoke an outcry, yet here we are. Leftist outlets immediately jumped on this as confirmation of Peterson's misogyny. In addition to Peterson the actual man, there are at least two Petersons occupying at least two cultural niches in the public imagination. There's the messianic Peterson, an emissary of the divine Logos to our benighted SJW age, who will induct us into the sacraments of Cleaning Our Damn Rooms and Sorting Ourselves Out as imitatio Christi. Then there's the strawman Peterson, a wingnut who envisions a fascist totalitarian order in which wives are parceled out to young men in state-sanctioned monogamy.

The only problem is, as Peterson himself clarified, "enforced monogamy" doesn't mean enforced by the state, it's an anthropological term that means monogamy enforced by sociocultural norms. Peterson is right to point out that the natural human tendency to sort itself into polygamous sexual hierarchies with top-tier males hogging all the females must perforce exile the sexual losers of the mating game, who form violent, rapey bachelor herds. Monogamy, though imperfect and prone to problems such as widespread cheating, does tend to produce better outcomes for women, who get stable fathers for their children, for low-status males, whose odds of mating improve drastically, and for society as a whole, which solves its bachelor herd problem by eliminating permanent bachelorhood. In a single elegant solution, monogamy is a cultural improvement on our natural inheritance. And it has the added advantage of having withstood the test of time—the Lindy effect at work, a heuristic that states you can expect an idea or an institution to stick around for a long time if it has already stuck around for a long time. And here we're talking about a time scale the encompasses the beginning of agriculture.

The incel phenomenon is not an isolated one. It belongs to a class of similar phenomena, all characterized by a sexual hysteria that has taken root as we begin to witness the fallout of discarding our ancient sexual bargain. Just three or four years ago, it suddenly became heretical to say that women don't have penises and men can't become pregnant. Challenging this complete negation of gender categories is liable to get you excoriated in an auto-da-fé of social justice, which will definitely also call for your reputation and career to be destroyed if they can discern your real identity. These phenomena, as well as the furor raised over Peterson's monogamy comments, collectively are indicators of how extensively we've gutted our cultural traditions in the West.

It's not just the sex thing, either. It's also the fact that we now live in multicultural societies—an oxymoron, and I'll explain why.

The doctrine of multiculturalism has never been particularly well defined, so I won't attempt to define it. I think we all know what it means, anyway. It has been pushed to most harmful effect perhaps in Europe, but North America has not been spared. What multiculturalism isn't is a monoculture. But forget multiculture and monoculture—what is culture? Culture is not just the colorful customs, outfits, and cuisines of a people. A culture is a system of beliefs and values that govern social behavior.

These values are malleable but not arbitrary. They are adapted to social, economic, and geographical niches by a Darwinian process of selection. They range at every level from how men treat women to how you hold your fork and knife, even to how you dispose of garbage or how long you maintain eye contact. In other words, culture defines protocol for even the most minute of social behaviors. And when two people have two different protocols for an interaction, they are going to clash. That clash could be benign, from fumbling some behavior and muttering an embarassed apology (best case scenario), to downright dangerous—violence, riots, and even war (worst case scenario). Further complicating the problem is that we cannot assume that both agents in such an interaction are acting in good faith.

Historically, neighboring cultures had to interact with each other, but they didn't have a common protocol. So how did they do it? They resorted to the lowest common denominator within which the boundaries of social protocol are easiest to define because you can put a number on them. That is, commerce. When two parties can negotiate a mutually profitable arrangement, it tends to equalize all other factors. Merchants from one culture would additionally learn points of etiquette of the other culture, to signal respect and good will and make trade go as smooth as possible.

So what happens when you throw many cultures into the same crockpot and turn up the heat? What happens is two things: First, members of multiple cultures, to the extent that they interact, resort to the lowest common denominators. Commerce and consumerism become the outstanding features of the society, which replaces the arts with entertainment and ends up with something like our current dumbed-down pop culture.

The second thing that happens is that the multiple cultures don't maintain their distinctive qualities. After simmering in the crockpot for long enough, the various ingredients lose their individual flavors and take on the flavor of the stew. Multiculturalism is a paradox because it ostensibly promotes cultural plurality within a single society, but it does the reverse: it dissolves all cultures into the bland stew of pop culture and consumerism. The name is Orwellian, it means its opposite. Multiculturalism destroys cultures.

As a Buddhist of mainly Anglo-American stock, I am at the margin of my ancestral culture. Hence it might seem weird for me to argue against multiculturalism. After all, I seem to be in some way a product of it. But to be at the margin of a culture is to be at the margin of a culture. There can be no periphery without a center. And whether you are at the center or the edge of the mandala, you're still in the same mandala.

The difference between multiculturalism and, say, a culturally anchored society that tolerates plurality, which would be my ideal, is that the latter has a center and a periphery, and the center tolerates the periphery. Multiculturalism has no center and no periphery. It is nonculture. It is not unbound and free—it is unmoored, rootless, blown about in aimless drift. A multicultural society is a society in a state of dissolution.

By contrast, a tolerant society is one in which, implicitly, Buddhists or Muslims say, for example, "I will respect that Christian humanism and the liberal democratic tradition define the values and the center of this society if you will allow us to exist at the periphery," and Christians say, "You've got a deal." Break the terms of this contract and the center is not bound to honor it. One way I could breach the contract is by engaging in vegetarian activism in an attempt to force my religion's nonviolent, animal-loving principles on the general public. Another way I could utterly break it is to engage in terrorist insurrection or organized rape against the center.

So here we arrive at the unifying theme of our time, the thing that explains everything from the populist electoral upsets of 2016 and the rise of rightwing ethnonationalism in Europe to #MeToo and incels. It's the breakdown of the social contract through the top-down dual enforcement of (a) coerced cultural renovation and high immigration flows against popular will by the Brahmin Left and (b) corporate welfare and neoliberal globalism by the Vaishya Right. (The astute reader will note the degree to which the interests of these competing elites align; the overlaps are by coincidence the areas getting the strongest pushback from populists.) The Brahmin Left doesn't want to loosen its stranglehold on the informational organs of society, while the Merchant Right just wants to ensure that all this unrest doesn't harm their profits. Likely both elite groups will emerge from this storm badly bruised at best, although my money is on the capitalists to navigate these choppy waters more skilfully.

So we can see the falsity of the widespread notion that the current wave of populism is rooted in economic frustration. It's not about the economy and will not be forestalled by improving the economy. It's about exactly what it purports to be about: identity, culture, and ethnicity and the mismanagement of our societies by the dual elite system. The populist reaction to the breakdown of the current order is to hit the reset button and reassert the supremacy of Christian and Western cultural identities. They represent the exiled center and they are gathering strength, so we who find ourselves at the periphery of Western societies had better be prepared to strike a deal with them. If we don't find a way to absorb this force, we will be engulfed by it.