Meatspace matters.

The term meatspace, for those who did not waste their younger years on cyberpunk science fiction, is the idea that what happens to your body is immaterial. The hacker has his consciousness not in this world, but in the zone, in cyberspace, which Gibson described as a consensual hallucination. (If you have not read Neuromancer or the early Stephenson, particularly Snow Crash, go and do so. This blog will still be here). In this world, hackers want to be in cyberspace as much as an addict wants his next fix. To be held in this world, the particular, is their nightmare.

The contrast between reality, sitting in a dump, or in sleeping cubicles, and the shiny new digital world is noted. And with it an associated destruction of society. Interesting, Stephenson made a particular world our of ideological city franchise-states in his follow up, the Diamond Age, which predated and predicted steampunk.

But this is not just fiction. It is the temptation to disavow our bodies, our home, our land, our neighbourhood, our city and our neighbours. To unlove that which we should love, and unsupport that which we should defend. Like the gnostics, we seek a secret knowledge and power, and want to leave everything specific on the scrapheap of history. And this an error is.

As for His Holiness’s entreaty that Europe has been invaded before, that these rejuvenate it by allowing it to “overcome itself”, I will just point out that the matter in my body has been in many prior organisms, passing from one to another sometimes by consumption, and the tiger that hunts me may be in many ways a more youthful and energetic creature than I am, but that doesn’t mean I have to cooperate.
I sense that the heart of the matter is a false opposition between the universal and the particular, a very close analogy to the ancient Gnostics’ false opposition between spirit and material/bodily existence. Just as matter restricts form to its instantiation in a particular body, the instantiation of civilization in a particular people in a particular place with a particular history is in a sense a restriction, but a “restriction” that makes that civilization a real thing rather than an abstraction.
Historically, cultures (which I’ll define for this post as pieces of civilizations, limited perhaps by geography or language) know themselves as particular, but this is usually not true of civilizations. After all, a civilization is the largest significantly integrated cultural unit, so the existence of two distinct civilizations would seem to require that communication between them be infrequent. Often, a civilization will simply think of itself as the civilization. For example, the ancient Greeks and Chinese and 19th century Europeans knew about other peoples but thought of them as barbarians. Even when there are two closely-matched rival civilizations, like Rome and Persia or Christendom and the Islamic Ummah, each would see the other as radically defective. These civilizations had either a defining worldview/religion (e.g. Islam) or a defining organizational type (e.g. the polis) regarded as universally applicable to all civilized peoples and according to whose criteria any really distinct rival civilization could be judged partially barbaric.
Over the last two centuries, the great world civilizations have been coming into greater and greater contact. They are each confronted as never before by their own particularity, and they are being forced to learn to value themselves as such. One might say that the major civilizations are converting into very large cultures within a single world-civilization, and the West seems to be having the most difficulty adjusting.
This shows that conservatism is needed by our people especially now, because the reconciliation of the universal and the particular is one of the great signs of the genius of our school.

And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

(Mark 8:34-38 ESV)

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.

For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.

(1 Corinthians 12:12-26 ESV)

The cross we have is specific. The job we have is specific. There are roles for men and women: within the family what a husband and wife does is different and both make for better and healthier children. And there is a role for children.

What we learn is specific. To keep the body analogy going, anatomy is specific. You can not have a postmodern anatomy and say that the aorta runs between the sternum and the cardiac cavity because you feel opppressed. The only plasic organ is the brain, and there are limits with that.

So one error is to deny positions and roles and spaces.

Sadly, feminists and other modernists only value males, not females, so anything men typically do well is seen as inherently more desirable than anything women typically do well. Therefore, feminists (being terribly misogynistic toward women) have relentlessly pushed for girls to pursue any job field in which men typically excel and women do not – for example, coding, video game development, and a host of other fields.

So what happens is you get a bunch of women in jobs that they are not terribly well-suited for, and – surprise, surprise – they do badly at them and present as lazy and inept. This can give men the mistaken idea that all women are always lazy and inept.

But this is not true. Women can do very well at the work that women do well. Isn’t it rather absurd that we even have to say that? But we live in an age of mass insanity, and thus we must state the blindingly obvious. Feminists, of course, deny that there is any such thing as work that men do well and work that women do well.

Let us consider one assertion I have read, that men invent everything that is worth having. It is true that men are far superior at inventing technology and machinery. Feminists deny that men can be better than women at anything, and thus feminists push women into fields that require technological innovation, and of course they generally aren’t very good at it and proceed to annoy the men around them terribly. And then grumpy men on the internet say women are just no good at innovation, period.

But consider this ingenious woman, who came up with a better way to brood chicks than just stuffing them in a brooder box with a heat lamp 24-7; she created a mama hen substitute out of a heating pad:

There is a reason most nurses are women, and most carpenters men. If you let women choose their jobs, they will go for status and they will go for that which is clean, caring, and able to be controlled and flexible, because most women think not merely of themselves but their spouse and children. They ignore the feminists, who want to be as good a man as Bruce Jenner is a woman.

They deny who they are, and thus cannot talk about the difficulties within their role and station. WHich exist. And they want to be what they are not, as if this life consists of getting merit badges, and one should be jealous of that which is not within one’s role. There are some things one is talented and some things that you struggle with.

And these will differ. Let them.

Let us be merciful and caring to those who carry burdens that we see not as problems, for they are not our burdens.

And let is not be pressured into the moulds the elite want us in, but let us be transformed by Christ.