I've often thought the reason women tend to be more religious than men is an evolutionary consequence of paternity uncertainty.
Until the recent advent of DNA testing, men throughout human history have never been able to be 100% certain that the children they were raising were theirs. (I suspect this fear also explains most of the behaviors we now classify as "patriarchal.") But most religions teach chastity, especially for women. So religious women, other things equal, make more desirable wives, because they're less likely to cheat. Of course, religious women also raise their children to be religious, particularly their daughters, and especially since it would make them more desirable in the marriage market. So it persists.
Thanks for your thoughtful piece. Not at all socially acceptable line of inquiry, but also quite important. As a father of three little girls, I'm particularly interested in this topic. I hope to be able to successfully help my daughters to navigate the minefield of sociocultural development in the coming years. Thank you for helping me to preemptively think through some things.
I'm familiar with some of the work you've drawn upon for your thought process here. The five personality traits/types is something Peterson brings up a good deal. It always smacks of Enneagram and Myers-Briggs to me, but I guess it is real. It ties into a larger concern I have with determinism. While I'm fine with certain correlative observations, there does come to be a sense that certain social levers can be pulled to achieve a desired result. While it doesn't seem exactly like rocket science to argue that tearing apart all institutions and value structures will result in an alienated population, it also has this sort of reductive affect on the conversation. I guess I don't always care about that very much, but in this particular scenario, I'm finding myself wanting to make the case for the activity and power of the Holy Ghost to counteract these and other phenomena that you'll be outlining in follow-up pieces. I have no doubt that the FBI, CIA, and other three-letter agencies believe they have worked out a system of social manipulation to keep us miserable, alienated, and turning on one another. I want to believe that, despite their powerful intervention in American public life, the power of the Holy Ghost can and will upend them. Sorry to go conspiracy theorist and religious extremist on you in the same thought.
Areas of engagement I notice between your article and other stuff I have read: overlap of birth control and anxiety/depression, mimetic learning of mental illness on TikTok, correlation of alienation with the transsexual impulse noted by Abigail Shrier, general critique on women thinking they are entitled to have it all pursuing career over family and then being distressed to find that they have missed the boat on a decent husband and healthy biological children, also the contrasting metrics of homeschooled children with those subjected to government schools.
Finally, I tend to believe that there are equal but different pathogenic byproducts for boys. While the things we are seeing in girls are distressing, I can't help but feel great concern for boys. I don't notice their right-leaning impulses to be particularly measured. And in many ways they seem to be more alienated, even if not as depressed, as women. None of this is offered in an argumentative spirit. Just letting you know where your writing put my headspace. Thanks for being a good writer and thinker, friend!
As my mother says, some people are not happy unless they're upset about something.
Mothers tend to have a pretty good notion of what "happiness" means. Mine did. Does. Even if she couldn't/wouldn't ever care to discourse on it formally, she nudged and cajoled and frowned and smiled us toward the right ends of life. Warmer... Colder...
Happiness, though different on the classical and the Christian views, was always an objective state of being. The pursuit of happiness was personal growth toward a known ideal. Not a feeling, nor a subjective experience. There was no such thing as a happy junkie, a happy hooker, a happy gangster, even if these got everything they desired. That's not happiness.
But is that what they mean when parents today say, "I just want my kids to be happy"?
So if there is no vision of maturity today—and I think it's brilliant to suggest that we no longer have one, and that this makes us unhappy, and that girls are the early adopters of this faith—then how can we attain maturity? How could we possibly be happy if we don't know what it means to be happy?
But I suspect that the case may actually be worse than that. Because there is ALWAYS an end in view, always a telos, functionally, even if we deny its existence. We seek some good. It is an a priori of moral behavior that we seek a/the good, and avoid the bad. We are moral animals.
What is our good then? Isn't it a state of discontent over the state of the world, sophisticated anxiety over the conditions of our hiero-, hetero-, patri-, supremo-, oligo- world? Maturity as perfect angst? Refined ressentiment?
As a father of teenaged girls this one smarts. I really like the questions you raise but find the answers you hint at to be deeply unsatisfying.
Some tentative reactions below-
1. The factors affecting the trend might be different than the ones affecting base rates: Percent of teenagers feeling persistently sad or hopeless grew 21%->29% for boys, 36%->57% for girls from 2011 to 2021. And yet most of the gap in men and women self identifying as liberal showed up 2012 onwards. Why the uptick in angst for teenage boys who were part of the relatively more conservative cohort?
2. What if teenagers (especially girls) are more like overloaded engines rather than social barometers? They may be the ones doing the real cognitive reengineering for all of us. Struggling for ways to process the inconsistent, uncanny, and painful lessons of history while simultaneously seeing through the untenable traditional and liberal dogmas. What if they are the ones reaching for a more plausible tragic vision for humanity to imbibe -- against the advertising from priests and entrepreneurs alike? I can't point to any sincerely tragic voices amongst leaders of churches, temples, corporations, governments and universities in our world today. Isn't that a lot of pressure for young humans? Even if equipped with insta and tictoc.
3. What about economic thinking: It is surely not the best path to happiness. And it is a type of thinking that women have been imbibing to a greater degree over the past several decades (https://www.brookings.edu/essay/the-history-of-womens-work-and-wages-and-how-it-has-created-success-for-us-all/). Play acting as homoeconomicus is no walk in the park when you are actually working on ways to reenegineer and implement homosocialis in your down time.
4. Lastly, what if becoming smart smarts, period: Intelligence reveals problems before it offers solutions. Becoming intelligent might entail mental suffering. Might this not be a truth in what we are seeing? Maybe our youth sees that the grown ups don't know what the heck they are doing and will need to become intelligent sooner than before, and maybe this is the cause of their suffering? And maybe young women are finding the need to become smarter faster than young men? At least until a system and vision is established that allows us all to do a lot less thinking and become happier again. What if we are closer to such a vision than we can imagine? Teenagers are more important to history than we like to believe.
I've often thought the reason women tend to be more religious than men is an evolutionary consequence of paternity uncertainty.
Until the recent advent of DNA testing, men throughout human history have never been able to be 100% certain that the children they were raising were theirs. (I suspect this fear also explains most of the behaviors we now classify as "patriarchal.") But most religions teach chastity, especially for women. So religious women, other things equal, make more desirable wives, because they're less likely to cheat. Of course, religious women also raise their children to be religious, particularly their daughters, and especially since it would make them more desirable in the marriage market. So it persists.
Thanks for your thoughtful piece. Not at all socially acceptable line of inquiry, but also quite important. As a father of three little girls, I'm particularly interested in this topic. I hope to be able to successfully help my daughters to navigate the minefield of sociocultural development in the coming years. Thank you for helping me to preemptively think through some things.
I'm familiar with some of the work you've drawn upon for your thought process here. The five personality traits/types is something Peterson brings up a good deal. It always smacks of Enneagram and Myers-Briggs to me, but I guess it is real. It ties into a larger concern I have with determinism. While I'm fine with certain correlative observations, there does come to be a sense that certain social levers can be pulled to achieve a desired result. While it doesn't seem exactly like rocket science to argue that tearing apart all institutions and value structures will result in an alienated population, it also has this sort of reductive affect on the conversation. I guess I don't always care about that very much, but in this particular scenario, I'm finding myself wanting to make the case for the activity and power of the Holy Ghost to counteract these and other phenomena that you'll be outlining in follow-up pieces. I have no doubt that the FBI, CIA, and other three-letter agencies believe they have worked out a system of social manipulation to keep us miserable, alienated, and turning on one another. I want to believe that, despite their powerful intervention in American public life, the power of the Holy Ghost can and will upend them. Sorry to go conspiracy theorist and religious extremist on you in the same thought.
Areas of engagement I notice between your article and other stuff I have read: overlap of birth control and anxiety/depression, mimetic learning of mental illness on TikTok, correlation of alienation with the transsexual impulse noted by Abigail Shrier, general critique on women thinking they are entitled to have it all pursuing career over family and then being distressed to find that they have missed the boat on a decent husband and healthy biological children, also the contrasting metrics of homeschooled children with those subjected to government schools.
Finally, I tend to believe that there are equal but different pathogenic byproducts for boys. While the things we are seeing in girls are distressing, I can't help but feel great concern for boys. I don't notice their right-leaning impulses to be particularly measured. And in many ways they seem to be more alienated, even if not as depressed, as women. None of this is offered in an argumentative spirit. Just letting you know where your writing put my headspace. Thanks for being a good writer and thinker, friend!
As my mother says, some people are not happy unless they're upset about something.
Mothers tend to have a pretty good notion of what "happiness" means. Mine did. Does. Even if she couldn't/wouldn't ever care to discourse on it formally, she nudged and cajoled and frowned and smiled us toward the right ends of life. Warmer... Colder...
Happiness, though different on the classical and the Christian views, was always an objective state of being. The pursuit of happiness was personal growth toward a known ideal. Not a feeling, nor a subjective experience. There was no such thing as a happy junkie, a happy hooker, a happy gangster, even if these got everything they desired. That's not happiness.
But is that what they mean when parents today say, "I just want my kids to be happy"?
So if there is no vision of maturity today—and I think it's brilliant to suggest that we no longer have one, and that this makes us unhappy, and that girls are the early adopters of this faith—then how can we attain maturity? How could we possibly be happy if we don't know what it means to be happy?
But I suspect that the case may actually be worse than that. Because there is ALWAYS an end in view, always a telos, functionally, even if we deny its existence. We seek some good. It is an a priori of moral behavior that we seek a/the good, and avoid the bad. We are moral animals.
What is our good then? Isn't it a state of discontent over the state of the world, sophisticated anxiety over the conditions of our hiero-, hetero-, patri-, supremo-, oligo- world? Maturity as perfect angst? Refined ressentiment?
Some people aren't happy unless they're upset.
As a father of teenaged girls this one smarts. I really like the questions you raise but find the answers you hint at to be deeply unsatisfying.
Some tentative reactions below-
1. The factors affecting the trend might be different than the ones affecting base rates: Percent of teenagers feeling persistently sad or hopeless grew 21%->29% for boys, 36%->57% for girls from 2011 to 2021. And yet most of the gap in men and women self identifying as liberal showed up 2012 onwards. Why the uptick in angst for teenage boys who were part of the relatively more conservative cohort?
2. What if teenagers (especially girls) are more like overloaded engines rather than social barometers? They may be the ones doing the real cognitive reengineering for all of us. Struggling for ways to process the inconsistent, uncanny, and painful lessons of history while simultaneously seeing through the untenable traditional and liberal dogmas. What if they are the ones reaching for a more plausible tragic vision for humanity to imbibe -- against the advertising from priests and entrepreneurs alike? I can't point to any sincerely tragic voices amongst leaders of churches, temples, corporations, governments and universities in our world today. Isn't that a lot of pressure for young humans? Even if equipped with insta and tictoc.
3. What about economic thinking: It is surely not the best path to happiness. And it is a type of thinking that women have been imbibing to a greater degree over the past several decades (https://www.brookings.edu/essay/the-history-of-womens-work-and-wages-and-how-it-has-created-success-for-us-all/). Play acting as homoeconomicus is no walk in the park when you are actually working on ways to reenegineer and implement homosocialis in your down time.
4. Lastly, what if becoming smart smarts, period: Intelligence reveals problems before it offers solutions. Becoming intelligent might entail mental suffering. Might this not be a truth in what we are seeing? Maybe our youth sees that the grown ups don't know what the heck they are doing and will need to become intelligent sooner than before, and maybe this is the cause of their suffering? And maybe young women are finding the need to become smarter faster than young men? At least until a system and vision is established that allows us all to do a lot less thinking and become happier again. What if we are closer to such a vision than we can imagine? Teenagers are more important to history than we like to believe.