ABORTION AND MANAGERIAL LIBERALISM

OUR ENTRY INTO BIOPOLITICS

Right off the top, I apologize to any readers for whom abortion is an issue of great ethical and/or emotional weight. I appreciate the psychological investment people have in these kinds of issues. As will be seen by the end of this post, I’m not one of those people. As a biological realist, I tend to be pretty modest about my moral outrage.¹

First, though, this whole kerfuffle about SCOTUS overturning Roe v Wade just seems so funny to me. But let’s not laugh too much at the foibles of others, don’t we all live in our own glass houses? So, look: I’m no U.S. constitutional scholar. Heck, I’m not even an American. But, correct me if I’m wrong, I do not believe that overturning Roe v Wade results in abortion being outlawed in the United States. I’m pretty sure, in fact, that the only thing which changes is that states in which abortion is not acceptable to local community standards are not required by dictate of the central government to provide such.

In fact, all these distraught protestors I’m seeing in various video clips, in L.A., D.C., and elsewhere, will experience no impact at all upon their abortion options by the overturning of Roe. What we have here, of course, instead, is simply the standard imperialism of managerial liberalism – as I’ve sketched out elsewhere. That this imperialism is executed in the name of “human rights,” be those humans women or otherwise, is par for the course (see here). This whole discourse is constantly leveraged to justify and legitimize managerial liberalism’s social engineering of everyone’s life. That the stormtroopers of the managerial class are outraged that they may not be able to impose their managerial liberalist agenda upon middle American rural and small-town communities, which overwhelming disapprove of abortion as inconsistent with their values is neither surprising, nor particularly interesting.

Why should states like Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, or West Virginia – that (according to Pew Research data) dramatically, overwhelmingly disapprove of abortion – have it forced on them by edict of the central government? Because the central, “federal” government of the United States has long been captured by the ruling faction of the managerial class, and their ideology of managerial liberalism, fueled by its logic of imperialist social engineering. Nothing mysterious here at all. If you’ve been a regular reader of this substack you’ve had every reason to greet the whole kerfuffle with detached amusement.

I do have a little more to say on the topic, though. And here’s where things get interesting. I know I’m going to lose some of you at this point, but to thine own self be true and all that stuff, right? I began this substack with the intention of exploring the cross-section of three key ideas: pathocracy (i.e., political psychopathy), the interpretation of the managerial class through the lens of the Italian political realist school, and what I’ve vaguely identified as biopolitics. Needless to say, the latter topic hasn’t gotten much attention. That though is about to change. Now, don’t get me wrong. 1) I’ll certainly return to discussions of the other topics when something current arises that invites sharing of my analysis. 2) The biopolitics stuff will indeed eventually work around to becoming relevant to the other two topic streams. The idea is to find the intersection and mutual influences between these three ways of thinking.

But the biopolitics stuff has been largely neglected to this point, so it’s going to start getting a more central place for the next little while. I hope those of you who have a natural predisposition to distrust biological explanations, biological determinism, biological realism, and the like, will give the arguments in that topic stream a fair chance. But I understand it’s not going to be for everyone; if you decide to be more choosey about what you read here, I understand, and I appreciate your continued support and interest – even if you can’t go all the way with me. Though going all the way is more fun. Or so I’m told. So, watch out for some more ambitious pieces this month that start to unpack the biopolitics/biological realism themes.

In that spirit, allow me to briefly return to this whole abortion business. A great book, which I highly recommend, is Weeden and Kurzban’s The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind. This book does extremely data-driven analyses of how demographic distributions of political preferences are predictable based upon evolutionary fitness conditions. There’s lots of great material in the book, but let’s focus on abortion: it turns out that the best predictor of someone’s position on abortion is their own phenotypic sexual strategy. Again, there’s a lot of detail and nuance here, so I’ll leave it to you to follow up if you’re so inclined. In broad strokes though: those with faster sexual strategies (i.e., more inclined to greater promiscuity – if I might use that word without any kind of moral judgment) are more inclined to support readily available abortion. Those with slower sexual strategies (less promiscuous) tend to oppose readily available abortion.

It’s probably obvious that those with faster sexual strategies will want abortion readily available as a failsafe should that faster strategy wind up in pregnancies, which – under modern conditions – could hinder future pursuit of the faster strategy.² The attitude toward abortion of those with slower sexual strategies may not be as obvious, but it makes sense. Since those with slower sexual strategies will seek out mates also with likewise slower sexual strategies, eliminating the abortion failsafe reduces the risk of potential mates sending dishonest signals of their slow strategy, since the absence of an abortion option reduces the possibility of deceptive fast strategists having their cake and eating it too: i.e., presenting as a slow strategist, to successfully woo a high-investing slow strategist, while secretly exercising a strategy faster than advertised, but having an abortion option to bail them out – avoiding detection of their deception by their slow strategy mate – if needed.

This kind of insight is obvious and predictable to a biological realist. It gets more interesting though as we try to flesh out the political consequences of this. First, and I’ll provide no evidence for this (though, I’m sure, if I had to I could), do you accept that the general anonymity of big cities provide facilitating conditions for faster sexual strategies? Fast strategists are more likely to find willing fellow fast strategists – and less likely to be shamed or ostracized by slow sexual strategists – living in big, anonymous cities? If that seems like a reasonable surmise, then it can hardly be surprising that it is the most urbanized states in the U.S. which have the strongest support for readily available abortion. (Though, I’ll concede, Alaska is an interesting outlier, here.) If we accept this as a good general rule of thumb, everything we’re seeing makes perfect sense. Of course, the L.A., N.Y. and D.C. type places are going to lead the charge in moral outrage over this issue. Though, again, as discussed above, the outrage isn’t over them losing access to abortion, it’s outrage over the danger of losing their capacity to impose their preferences on those places in which the majority of the population don’t want it.

That though isn’t the only interesting wrinkle in all of this. As I’ve pointed out, this is all in keeping with the imperialist social engineering ethos of the ruling class’s ideology of managerial liberalism. Of course, they want to run everybody’s lives. And, as will be discussed at greater length in the posts to come on this substack, it’s entirely predictable that the managerial class’s social engineering aspirations would take the form of biopolitics. That we are being socially engineered and administered through biology is thoroughly predictable. (Anyone who has been paying any attention during the last two years of the COVID regime will not be surprised by that observation.) All this, again, will be addressed in the months ahead. There is another issue, though.

Let’s say the managerial class is going to socially engineer our life choices through some form of biopolitics, and abortion would be an obvious entry into such biopolitics. Why wouldn’t the managerial class use this leverage to prevent us from having abortions? Wouldn’t that policy in fact be more in keeping with the general spirit of social control exhibited by the ruling faction of the managerial class? Why would they be so determined that we have the choice of having an abortion? Indeed, some abortion advocates even romanticize abortion, bragging about having abortions or even lamenting having never had one. Doesn’t this seem like a strange configuration of phenomena?

If the premises underpinning my analyses in this substack are valid, there needs to be some kind of credible explanation for why things have shaken out in this specific way. After all, for a determinist/realist like me “random” is just a way of saying you have no explanation. So, these interesting wrinkles will need to be explained. To do so, though, it will be necessary to deliver on the fuller promise of this substack: exploring how the pathocracy and Italian political realist streams intersect with the specific concern for biopolitics, and indeed with biological realism more broadly.

So, stay tuned! And, if you haven’t yet…  

 

1. Those interested in a deeper understanding of biological realism should check out my (other must read) book called (amazingly) Biological Realism.

2. I won’t go into it here, but obviously fast strategies have evolved for certain conditions, to optimize reproductive quantity. However, as all evolutionary theorists acknowledge, humans currently live in a “mismatched environment,” in which many of our evolved traits no longer operate with the effectiveness that they did when they were originally selected. When considering human nature, it is important to consider the actual evolutionary environment of selective pressures. But that’s a discussion for another day.