A new term has been coined; the “regressive left” (or liberal), which perfectly describes a kind of thought that has become more and more prevalent of late, and it’s a real danger to real liberals, or “progressive” liberals, in fact, a danger to society in general.
Liberalism vs. conservatism
First of all, we have to define what a liberal person is. In it’s essence it’s the opposite of a conservative, a conservative is a person that doesn’t embrace change, that wants things to remain the same, because if it has been the same way for decades, centuries, or even millennia, it must be good, right? A liberal believes the opposite: we need to move forward, away from barbaric and backwards behaviors and thinking, that’s the way we progress as a species. A more appropriate term might be “progressive”, because, well, we want progress.
However, the crux of the matter is to find such things that need to be changed in order to progress. It might seem obvious to a rational person, but it turns out most liberals don’t realize this simple fact: not all change is good. Do we really need to even discuss about this? Apparently we do, as we will later see in this blog post; many liberals do not realize that just because a change is proposed, we must embrace it. Obviously just because we’ve frowned upon stealing for thousands of years, does it mean it’s time to change it? No.
So that is the key point: is the change progress or regress? Liberals tend to think change means progress, conservative that it’s regress. More often than not, liberals are right, and they end up being on “the right side of history“. Studies have shown that liberals tend to be smarter and better educated than conservatives, they tend to attend university and travel more, etc. However, society needs conservatives as much as liberals, in order to make sure that changes are going in the right direction. Sure, we need change in order to progress, but we also need devil’s advocates in order to make sure it’s progress, and not the opposite. Change for the sake of change is not good, and sometimes things are better the way they are, sometimes conservatives are right (although not often).
One of the best examples of progress in society was the abolition of slavery. In general, liberals were on the right side of history (as they often are), however, some conservative arguments did actually make sense, for example: some black people ended up worst being free that being slaves. We have moved ahead since those times, but still, in the United States black people fill their prisons and thus provide a good chunk of essentially free labor. Perhaps conservatives were right that you “can’t just abolish slavery”, maybe USA should have done it differently. Sometimes resisting change is a good thing, not just to make sure the change is in fact progress, but if change must be made, to find the best way to go about it, and not just go balls to the wall about it.
So it should now be clear what a “regressive liberal” is; a person that advocates change for the sake of change, and is in reality moving society towards the wrong direction; regressing.
Regression and reality
Lately there has been a tendency for liberals to act in an irrational manner, something that has historically not been the case. That is one of the problems with being right so often; you sometimes forget you can be wrong.
There are numerous examples of this way of thinking, too many to explore them all in dept, but I’ll mention a few.
Vegetarianism today is viewed as a liberal tendency; most vegetarians are liberal, many of them see it as a moral statement, some think we all should be vegetarians, and even go as far as saying that humans are vegetarian in nature. It’s the latter argument I want to tackle. I don’t have a problem if you are a vegetarian and say you do it for moral reasons, or health, or even push it to the rest of society for economic reasons, those are all valid arguments, and I might disagree, but the jury is still out.
The problem comes when people deny reality. It is very obvious to everyone that humans are not herbivores: first of all; we can eat meat, herbivores can’t. You give meat to a deer, and it will die of starvation. The opposite is true of carnivores as well. But we humans are in neither of these categories, we are omnivores, like dogs, and bears. We eat everything. It’s also very obvious from our physiology; we don’t have the stomachs of herbivores, nor the teeth. Since we have the technology and resources to gather vegetables from all over the world, we might be able to sustain a vegetable-only diet and be healthy, although it’s probably not economically feasible, not to mention that many vegetarians have health issues, precisely because it’s not easy to find all the nutrients with such diet (not impossible, it can be done, but it’s certainly not easy). The fact of the matter is that through most of the history of our species we have been omnivores; we are omnivores, we can eat both meat and vegetables in large amounts, and that’s an uncontroversial and undeniable scientific fact.
Yet there are some people–liberals, who deny those facts, who deny science, and claim that humans are vegetarians by nature. Things would be much easier if we were vegetarians, perhaps it would be ideal, but we are just not. When you deny reality, and reject facts in order to fit your ideal of how things should be, you are engaged in what is called wishful thinking. Reality doesn’t care about your ideals, things just are the way they are, it might not be fair, it might not be nice, but it just is. Is it fair–or ideal–for the female praying mantis to eat the head of the male during sex? Probably not, but that’s nature, that’s reality, we have to accept that such is the case.
A more controversial example is the whole idea that “Islam is a religion of peace”. In order to explore this topic I’m going to use many of Sam Harris’ arguments, which has done a superb job of shining light on the issue.
First of all, we have to understand that religions are different, that’s why there are so many of them, and they are not interchangeable. Religions are different, in the same way that sports are different; you can’t compare rugby with golf, and you can’t compare Jainism with Christianity; they are way too different to make any meaningful comparison. And you can’t generalize either; say that all sports are violent, or that all religions are peaceful. Different religions are different, and their differences matter.
Second, religions are ideologies, ideologies affect the behavior of people, and while it’s true that ideologies can be twisted to the point of breaking their core principles (at which point it can be argued you are not really following that ideology), the ideology itself remains having certain ideas, independently of how people interpret them. For example, a nazi that doesn’t consider the aryan race superior can’t really be considered a nazi, a nazi that adores the state can be said to be perfectly within the ideology. A Jainism follower that advocates violence is not really a Jane (violates the core principles), but one that is vegetarian is perfectly within.
The question then becomes; can a violent person be called a Muslim? By extension; does the ideology condone violence? There’s many verses on the Qur’an about violence, for example: (8:12) “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them”. It’s pretty clear to anyone reading the Qur’an that it not only condones violence, it advocates it.
So it’s that simple: Jainism doesn’t condone violence, Islam does; Jainism is a religion of peace, Islam is not. Yet some people, liberals, like Reza Aslan, claim that all religions are exactly the same, and their holy books interpreted in any way, the problem is not the ideologies, but the people, the followers of the ideologies. We know this not to be true with ideologies like nazism, Islam is no different; we have to look at the ideology in order to decide if it’s peaceful or not, and just because an ideology happens to be a religion, that doesn’t mean it’s inherently peaceful.
It would be nice if what Reza Aslan said was true; all religions are equally peaceful and/or violent, all religions are faces of the same prism through which we see the same truth. But just because something is nice doesn’t mean it’s true; that is wishful thinking. However, many liberals drink this Kool-Aid, precisely because of that; it would be nice if it was true, therefore it must be true. The evidence is clear; not all religions are equal, Islam is a violent religion, the Qur’an endorses violence, as much as we would want it to be otherwise, we shouldn’t deny reality, the praying mantis is the way it is, and the Qur’an is the way it is.
Now, there’s a difference between is and ought. One thing is to recognize human nature, another is accept it as desired behavior. We humans have a tendency to crave sugar, does that mean we ought to eat a lot of sugar? No. In order for humans to progress, we first must recognize our nature, in order to reject it and actively fight against it. If science demonstrates humans are xenophobic by nature (which seems to be the case), the answer is not to close our ears to the evidence, the answer is to accept it, and find ways to fight against our nature.
By rejecting evidence, and thus denying reality, liberals are doing a disservice to society, and pushing for changes that might as well be moving us backwards. If liberals push for vegetarianism because humans are herbivores, that’s wrong. If liberals want to label every criticism of Islam as islamophobe, on the basis that it’s a peaceful religion, like any other religion, that’s also wrong. Both liberals and conservatives must seek to be in contact with reality, even if reality is not nice.
Third wave feminism
This is the definition of feminism:
1: the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes
2: organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests
Once upon a time, not long ago, women did not have the same rights nor opportunities as men, so a movement was needed to achieve equality between the sexes by pushing for women’s rights, and that was perfectly fine, that was feminism.
Today, the world is different (at least the western modern world ), and women have as many rights as men, if not more, women have as many opportunities as men, some argue even more. Today, the need to push exclusively for women’s rights is just not as urgent as before, and perhaps even not necessary.
Today the discourse about sexism and gender issues has advanced tremendously, in part thanks to the first wave feminists, and that’s why today we recognize that actually men have gender issues as well, like being raped in prisons, be victims of domestic violence, much more likely to commit suicide, and die earlier than women from disease. Males are also raped, but society doesn’t want to hear about it, even ridicules them, that’s an issue, why are feminists who supposedly fight for the “equality” of sexes not fighting to change this? Why is Emma Watson’s movement called “he for she”? What happened to “she for he”?
The fact of the matter is that feminism was never about male issues, we all know that, even the name itself implies which gender was the focus of the movement. That might have been necessary in the first wave of feminists, but now?
Some people argue that in fact, women are the privileged gender today, and with good reason, yet third wave feminists continue to push to privilege women even more. Society is catching up to the fact that perhaps liberals pushed way too hard and we are in effect moving backwards in terms of gender equality.
These third wave feminists want still more change, as liberals that’s expected, but they are doing so denying plenty of evidence that goes against their agenda.
One particularly worrying aspect is that many deny that men and women are in effect different. We all know we are different from our anecdotal evidence, we have always been different since the dawn of time, and plenty of parents of boys and girls see this obvious fact. Yet these “sameness” feminists deny that fact and argue that it’s all due to culture, even though it has happened in all cultures in history.
Differences in men and women are not just obvious, they are scientifically proven. Sexual dimorphism happens through all the animal kingdom, why would humans be the exception? Yes, some differences can be explained by culture, like blue for boys, pink for girls, but certainly not all of them.
Let’s keep in mind that being different doesn’t mean one is better than the other, just different. Women seem to be better at some things, men at others, there’s nothing wrong with that. But more importantly; if our understanding of human nature advances to the point where we find that in truth, men are better than women (in general), what does that mean? Nothing. That’s just reality. But fortunately for us, no gender seems to have a leg up, and even if it did, it probably wouldn’t be by much, and evolution is always happening anyway, so things might flip in the future.
Let’s look at a very concrete example: chess. Men dominate the competitive chess scene, even though women have been given every opportunity, and many women have become indeed pretty good at chess; they haven’t reached the top positions. Why is that? “Sameness” feminists would argue that it’s all because of culture; women are discouraged from such endeavors, the culture of chess is toxic, women feel inferior, therefore they act inferior. While all of that might be true to some extent, there are always exceptions, and there are strong women who don’t give a damn about society’s expectations of them, or the culture around an activity, and that’s why many women through history have achieved great things despite the fact that they were not supposed to. Still, no woman has become a chess world champion, even come close to that, even with all the help from feminists to “empower” them in such activities.
IQ might be a controversial way to measure general intelligence, but certainly not the intelligence needed to play chess; if you are good at chess, you have high IQ, if you have high IQ, you have potential to be a good chess player. So, is men’s IQ higher than women’s?
The answer is; not likely, but this graph shows the distribution is different. You are likely to find a good amount of really stupid men, but also, really intelligent ones, on the other hand, the average woman is smarter than the average man. Does this not match to pretty much everyone’s experience? Most of the women I know are pretty smart, smarter than most men, yet, the smartest people I know, are men. And that’s why we don’t see women in the top chess competitions; exceptional men are more exceptional than exceptional women, at the same time stupid men are more stupid than the stupidest woman. It’s just a matter of distribution.
Why would we want to change that? It’s just chess. Plenty of men are bad at chess, the vast majority of men are bad at many disciplines that require exceptional people. Women are better at plenty of other things that men, and that’s fine.
The more science finds about the nature of the human brain, the more we find that there are plenty of inherent differences between the genders, that’s just a fact, that’s reality, and there’s still plenty more to find.
Why can’t we embrace and accept our differences? One example scientists have found is that a region of the brain called the corpus callosum tends to be bigger in women, what does that mean? It means women in general are more likely to associate seemingly unrelated ideas, which is very useful in the arts in general, so is it really a surprise that women are more artsy than men? Plenty of men have complained that when discussing with their partners, women often bring issues of the past, issues that–in the opinion of men–are not related at all. Why can’t we just accept this and say: “I’m sorry honey, but I just don’t see what X has to do with Y, I’m a man, remember?”? It’s not an excuse for us men, but it’s an explanation, and a reason for us to try harder.
It’s not sexist to say that praying mantises females eat the males’ heads, that’s just a fact, so if science proves that men and women are different in certain aspect, that’s not sexist either, just reality. Yet “sameness” feminists insist–and will keep insisting–that we are the same, and to argue otherwise is sexist. I don’t see a better recipe for unhappiness than denying our human nature.
In fact, studies have shown that women have become unhappier of late, in a pretty significant way, and this trend started–unsurprisingly–when feminism started. Maybe women really like to feel protected, maybe demonizing stay-at-home moms was not such a great idea, maybe there was nothing wrong with women being feminine. I personally don’t know, but what seems to be clear is that the feminist movement doesn’t seem to be moving us forward as a society any more.
Every indication seems to suggest that third wave feminism might be the first liberal movement that is actually on the wrong side of history (as far as I know). Society, especially millennials, are starting to turn away from this bitter form of feminism, and people are realizing that maybe there’s nothing wrong with masculinity. Polls suggest that the feminist movement is collapsing, and in a couple of years the amount of women that identify themselves as feminists have decreased from 28% to 18% in the US (source). Given the fact that feminism has never pushed for men’s rights, and has no intention of doing so, and really have failed completely to try to understand the male position, and discover the reality of gender differences, it seems that such backlash is well deserved. Perhaps it’s time to stop talking about feminism, and start talking about equalism.
True equality
Richard Dawkins when asked about MRAs said “I hardly know there was–is there a men’s rights movement? I mean… If there is discrimination against men, then that’s bad too. I don’t know whether there is, I haven’t heard of it”. I think that is pretty much the experience the vast majority of people, including men, and including me, until not long ago.
However, there are two possibilities: a) either there is no discrimination against men, or b) there is discrimination, but we haven’t heard of it.
There is in fact a men’s rights movement, and it is largely ignored or attacked. They do claim there are men issues, I won’t go through all of them, I’ll just focus on one: men are held financially responsible for fathering a child.
In the face of it, it seems perfectly reasonable to hold men responsible for the future of a child they bred, but let’s look at the women’s perspective. If a woman doesn’t want a child, she can just have an abortion (depending on the local laws), the father doesn’t even have a say on that, he might not even know about it, but even leaving the controversial issue of abortion aside, a woman can chose to give the baby away for adoption. Let’s look at this closely; a woman can opt out of parenthood. It also seems reasonable; a woman’s life is a woman’s choice, and the baby might not suffer at all from that choice, it might benefit him/her, and perhaps never be aware that such choice was made. Where is the man’s choice? Can a man opt out of parenthood? No. Can a man hold a woman responsible, raise the child, and demand alimony from the mother? No. Where is the equality in that? It seems to me this is a real gender issue, one that genuinely destroys many lives of men.
To be honest, I never really thought about it, but now that I’m aware of it; it’s impossible not to see the discrimination against men in this case. So, maybe it’s b): there is discrimination against men, but we just haven’t heard of it.
Well, no problem, we just have to make a social movement to bring these men’s issues to light, and surely enough society will mobilize to fix these problems, just like it happened with the women’s right movement. Wait a second, wasn’t there already a movement that claimed to advocate for the rights of both genders? I have never heard a feminist bring up this issue, in fact, I have never heard a feminist complain about any male issue.
When an educated man like Richard Dawkins is not even aware of men’s right issues, it becomes pretty clear that somebody has not been doing their job of shining a light on these issues. If feminism truly aims to advocate for men’s rights, they have done such a poor job.
We are all perfectly aware of feminism, we all know all the women’s issues, or at least the claims, some of us might not agree with all of them, or the severity of them, but we are aware of the claims.
If anybody laughed at a women’s issue, that person would be harshly criticized, but not only we can’t laugh at the issues, we can’t even criticize them. A commonly mentioned issue is the wage gap: women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns—for doing the same work. This factoid is repeated again and again by the media, politicians, celebrities, activists, you name it. In reality, it turns out to be a myth.
The only way this number could be true is if you ignore a variety of factors, like life and career choices, but if you take those into account, the gap essentially disappears. Yet we can’t even say the wage gap is a myth without being labeled as sexist, misogynist, patriarchal.
However, when Richard Dawkins claimed he didn’t know about men’s issues, the whole audience laughed, even more, I saw shows where people replayed this bit, and the host laughs as well. What is there to laugh about? The fact that men have gender issues too? The fact that some men complain about these issues? Wasn’t feminism supposed to advance equality for both genders? Maybe that was a joke too.
The fact of the matter is that feminism has managed to mobilize entire societies to the pursuit of wellbeing solely for women, while at the same time completely ignoring the male perspective. Men rights activists are mocked, bullied, and completely ignored. Every time somebody mentions a gender issue that affects men, they are ignored, and immediately people point out a women’s issue, because apparently, those are the only ones that truly matter.
Perhaps it is because men are privileged, and women are oppressed, but is that truly so? Maybe it was at some point in history, perhaps most of history, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be the case now. Yet hardcore feminists insist men are privileged, men hate women, men are patriarchal, and prefer men over women for work. None of this is really true, but I can’t provide a succinct way to prove otherwise, except for the claim that men hate women, for which I will provide an excellent comment by Karen Straughan:
I don’t think there is a universe that could exist where men, in general, hate women.
So maybe the first thing would be to stop accusing men of hating women? And to call out the women in positions of power who accuse men of hating women? And to call out the women like Quinn Norton who claim that men are raised to hate women, or Chloe Angyal of Feministing who claim that our entire society hates women?
Honestly, the Nazis hated the Jews. The Hutus hated the Tutsis. The KKK hated blacks. And yet this male dominated society, where men hold the majority of the positions of power, somehow HATES women despite not a single lynching of a woman for wronging a man, despite NOMAAS and the White Ribbon Campaign and HeForShe and a male feminist president, despite Boko Haram’s sparing of girls while burning boys in their dormitories, despite the unbelievable (and unbelievably unspoken-of) gender gap in executions and criminal sentencing in Islamic countries, despite males being the primary receptacles of violence by both males and females from infancy to old age GLOBALLY, despite not a single genocide in history that DIDN’T begin with the systematic extermination of almost exclusively men and boys.
And you think men hate women. If men hate women, then how do men feel about men? On any given day, any given male is more likely to assault a male, undermine a male, ignore a male in need, murder a male, celebrate the suffering of a male wrongdoer, hit his male child, make a decision to mutilate his male child, arrest a male, convict a male, and sentence a male to incarceration or death, than he is a female.
And yet women–yes, women–have allowed a narrative to become entrenched in all our systems and institutions that males favor other males at the expense of females. That somehow, there is a “team men” that has been oppressing, subjugating and subordinating women since the dawn of human history. That men have waged a “war on women” since we descended from the trees and first tottered on two legs on the African Savannah.
Men have bled for their women, fought to protect their women, died for their women, and admonished each other for millennia to love their virtuous women as Christ loves the Church, to treat their honorable women as queens and as jewels, to present to them the heads of the men who displease them, and to duel to the death to defend their honor. The literary canon, written primarily by men, has always lauded a masculinity that protects women–the villains identified by their willingness to harm women, and the heroes identified by their willingness to avenge those harms.
And you think men hate women?
Men have never hated women. Men will never hate women.
(complete comment)
In fact, we love women so much, that we have given them many rights and privileges without asking anything in return, so much that more and more men give up their masculine human nature, just because of the fear of being labeled as misogynistic.
We have done so much just to please women that quite honestly, it’s ridiculous.
I wouldn’t go as far as saying that men are being oppressed, but we are certainly suffering. The worst jobs are done by men (military, trash collection, construction), the most job-related injuries are suffered by men, men have a huge societal pressure to succeed, men are much more likely to commit suicide, men die at a younger age. On top of that, we can’t complain about any of these issues, because apparently we are oppressing women, and we can’t argue that either. We can’t follow our masculine nature, because doing that would be sexist, apparently now even smiling to a woman is sexist.
If a woman breaks her hand hitting a man in the face, guess who is going to jail?
Call me crazy, but this doesn’t seem to be fair towards men.
Social justice warriors
If staunch feminism wasn’t enough, we now have social justice warriors, which do exactly the same things as feminists do (most of them are feminists anyway), because well, feminism has done such great things for our society! But they do it on all aspects of it.
The modus operandi seems to be: find an ideal, make it a cause, do everything in your power to advance that ideal, ignore any evidence that it’s really not the best thing to do, and label everyone that criticizes this ideal as a backwards, close minded, bigoted person.
For example, ideally all religions should be peaceful, therefore we should tolerate all religions, some people are intolerant towards Islam, that must be changed, there is evidence that Islam is in reality not a religion of peace, ignore that, label anybody that criticizes Islam as a racist and an islamophobe, and you win.
What doesn’t seem to enter into this equation is: what if you are wrong? For some reason SJWs never entertain the possibility that they might be wrong, which is the quintessential feature of a rational person. If you don’t entertain the possibility that you might be wrong, well, you will end up being wrong plenty of times. If you are wrong with your life choices, well, so bad for you, but if you push society towards the wrong direction, that’s actually terrible.
A study showed that you only need 10% of the population to believe in an idea in order for it to spread to the rest of the population. It doesn’t matter if the idea is true or false, if 10% of the population believes in this idea wholeheartedly, it will spread. Feminists believe it’s absolutely true we live in a misogynistic society, so, we all as a society believe that. It doesn’t matter if it’s indeed true or not. Such is the danger of herd mentality, and such is the power of ideas.
Even worse, apparently universities today have a concept called “safe places”, where susceptive people can go when there’s a talk about a subject they find distressing, but even more, prevent certain talks to happen altogether. Universities are supposed to be the place where all ideas are discussed, if you can’t discuss a topic in a university, where can you? Endangering free speech because some people might find the comments offensive, especially in a university, is certainly one of the worst policies ever.
Why would SJWs act this way? Why would anybody reject evidence, reality? When you are confronted with evidence that contradicts your beliefs, you enter into a state called cognitive dissonance, which doesn’t feel good. If the objective is to better society, then you must confront your wrong beliefs, and you must risk feeling bad, and realizing you were wrong. So why don’t they do that? It seems pretty clear that their objective is actually not to better society, but to feel good about themselves, thinking they are bettering society, while in effect they might be doing the opposite.
The way forward
This is where we are today, thanks to staunch feminists, thanks to SJWs, thanks to the whole “political correctness” idea. We can’t criticize feminism, we can’t criticize Islam, we can’t criticize certain ideas, because some people find that “offensive”. It is such a recipe for disaster.
It is quite ironic that the places where most women are genuinely objectively oppressed are Islamic countries, however, even the most staunch feminists wouldn’t touch the subject, because, well, it’s not politically correct (a few feminists truly do). So the people that push for women’s rights the most around the globe, might very well be atheists (or new atheists as some people like to say). The people that prevent the women’s right to choose (pro-choice), are not actually men, or “the patriarchy”, but the ones that follow “christian values”, in fact mostly christian women.
The whole situation is incredibly depressing. Even if feminism seems to be on the way out, pretty much the same manner of dealing with social issues is spreading through liberal circles. Such an epidemic of–quite frankly–stupid liberals, deserves a name: regressive liberals.
Hopefully the majority of liberals can recognize this toxic behavior and distance themselves from these regressive liberals, otherwise we are heading to a period of pretty much no progress in society.
