Ezra Klein

So I think dueling was bad.

I'm going to make this claim.

And I think that the way we have gotten, I mean, maybe until very recent past, but over time, better and better and better at living in complex societies without falling into civil war with each other.

I think that has been a human advance.

That the kind of self-mastery we have...

developed and the virtues of liberal democracy that became taken often for granted, even if not always followed, they reflected progress.

One thing I found strange about BAP, about The Last Men, which particularly I found this flaw in, he has all this thing about how if you rub testosterone gel on men and then put them in a dominance game, they're more comfortable with hierarchy.

Is that good?

Like, am I supposed to prefer that they don't look for more win-win outcomes when you, like, slather?

Like, I don't want to be slathered in testosterone and become worse at cooperation.

I have enough trouble, like, limiting my own competitive instincts as it is.

And, you know, it's in Helen Andrews' piece, too, that, you know, what she, in some ways, if I'm going to be maximally generous, is talking about the HR-ification, right?

of, you know, modernity.

And yes, in modernity, you have a lot of big institutions.

And as institutions get bigger, they bureaucratize.

And this can be a problem.

I've written a book, Abundance, in part about the problems of institutional incentives taking over.

But nevertheless, there is a dynamic here where you are trying to make complexity and scale work at a very high level.

And that does require you to have rules, procedures, approaches to managing difference that are not dueling.

And I bring this up both because I think it's a weakness in the pieces, but also because I think it actually gets at something that is significant here, which is the implicit vision and sometimes the explicit vision of masculinity in these books I found.