GENDER DUALITY

There seems to be multiple conflicts in our values system. Of course, one deals with politics. For example, it is morally wrong to help poor people because you only encourage them not to want to succeed. In contrast, poor people deserve to live as well as rich people in an equalitarian society. Therefore, it is morally right to help them. Another conflict has to do with sex differences. This morning on Morning Joe (MSNBC), Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were fighting over the issue of an invitation to Elliot Spitzer to come on the program.  I tune into the program regularly to get my daily dose of right wing poison from Joe and I was not disappointed this morning. Joe’s male chauvinism came through brilliantly. Mika wanted to invite Elliot Spitzer to be a guest on the show and wanted the ex-New York Governor to explain and perhaps apologize for his infidelity, while Joe want him to talk about the cunning part he played in ending Wall Street corruption. The conflict was not resolved and the show’s producers did not invite him to be on the show.

Obviously, what is most important to Mika is not important to Joe.  As a male, Joe looks at male infidelity with passing interest—it happens but so what. To Mika, the woman’s point of view is that martial infidelity is the worst of crimes and society should not ignore such transgressions—infidelity is immoral. The question is where do these feelings come from? As a person interested in evolutionary psychology, I think I know; they are very primitive involuntary feeling and have to do with the way we sustain our species. People who believe as I do are criticized for living in the past. How can gender issues be morally wrong if based on an era when we lived like animals? Everyone knows that animals have no morals. Morality is erroneously believed to be something unique to people, something learned. Thus, the above question points out that in the minds of some people there seems to be a mental-physical dualism in human existence but the point of is this blog post is that some of us do not want to accept our biological dualism.

If there is a conflict, which there obviously is, it has to be that people placed a value on one gender over the other. It is time to stop and think about what we are saying. Being a man or a woman, has different value in different cultures; thus, such values are cultural concepts nevertheless they are based on physical reality. Although mental attitudes toward these values, hence morality changes with time; actually can change in minutes in some cases; regardless, morality has a biological base just as our physical reality has a biological base but that a base does not seem to change abruptly, especially over such a short period as 10,000 to 150,000 years. Stated another way, we can modify our hunter-gatherer morality to fit whatever we perceive to be our current needs; however, our physical being does not change rapidly, physical evolution did not stop, it is just much less volatile. So if we can quickly change what we perceive as morality, why don’t we—in the interest of peace—change so men and women look at things the same way in the interest of domestic tranquility; why does Mika look at male infidelity so different from the way Joe looks at infidelity?

The premise here is that we do not change or thinking because we cannot. Our behavior is embedded in our genes over millions of years; thus, is deterministic. We are biologically males with male propensities just as women are biologically females with female propensities. Sorry feminists, males are different from females. A male sees the propensity to reproduce differently from how a female sees that propensity—dualism is innate. A woman fights both consciously and unconsciously to keep a male subservient to her and her child’s individual needs as the best way to perpetuate the species while a male is obliged to spread his genes in the best way he can to perpetuate the species. Under the mantra of reproduction, this dualism is the best way to perpetuate the species. It is a conflict unresolved by natural selection. If all goes well, no female goes without having children but then again, neither does a male. Although I abhor the idea that if something evolved it is good, the best way, or the only way, but I do accept the idea that humankind is living proof that what evolved works even if it generates a conflict on a morning talk show on MSNBC. We have to live with what we have. My message in this blog post is that I feel comfortable agreeing with both Joe and Mika. 

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