Is morality something fixed, eternal, divinely ordained? Or is morality something fluid, relative to time, place, technology? In our ongoing discussion on religion, we attempt to define what progressives value and how those values differ from classical liberals and conservatives. We invoke some insights from evolutionary biology and game theory to help illustrate some of those differences, and to help explain the growing lack of trust between men and women.

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We pick up where we left off in our previous episode, discussing the faith/reason division and how it plays out in society, but this time we enlist some heavy-hitters: Milton, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. Did we reason ourselves into our present troubles, and can we reason our way out of them? Have we outlived god? Or will god outlive us?

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One of the most consequential social developments of the last 50 years has been the diminishing role religion has played in public life. "Unbelief" is on the rise, church attendance is in free fall, and every new generation is more secular than the one that preceded it. But every new generation is also smaller than the one that preceded it. How sustainable are these changes, and what impact are they having on how we date, marry and reproduce? We review our godless upbringing for insight into the past, present and future. Part I of an ongoing conversation about the role religion no longer plays in our Western culture.

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Janice Fiamengo is a retired professor of English literature who captured the attention of the Internet when a talk she was scheduled to give at the University of Toronto ("What's Wrong With Women's Studies") was disrupted by protestors brandishing bullhorns and pulling fire alarms. She has been a fierce critic of gender ideology ever since, first in her YouTube series The Fiamengo File, and more recently on the website Regarding Men. She generously agreed to speak with us on the subject of men in the modern world, the decades-long transformation of the universities, and the "gradual encroachment of ideas." 

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Men as moral pariahs. Women as monolithic sisterhood. A conversation on how men and women vote, how married couples versus singles vote, where they all differ, and how that plays out in politics and society.

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OnlyFans. What is OnlyFans? Who is it for? And what does it say about a generation of men willing to pay for an online subscription to watch naked women perform sexual acts when the internet is filled with free porn? What makes OnlyFans special? And why is this being normalized to a frightening degree?
 


Business Insider article referenced in this episode.

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On a tiny island off the coast of Maine, Kenny Corson is raising his eight year old son Odin to learn, think, explore and do for himself.

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Men today increasingly dedicate their leisure time to virtual pursuits. Global revenue from video game sales has surpassed the revenues of the music and film industries, combined. Pornography consumption has propelled the sex industry into a multi-billion dollar business, with revenue estimates placing it in competition with major league sports. 

These behavioural changes have been fuelled by social and economic changes: men’s decreased labour force participation, for example, and the dramatic decline in the marriage rate. But they have also become causal: men work fewer hours or spend less time dating because their leisure pursuits have become so dominant in their lives.

What effects are these habits having – on men, on women, and on society? And what does it say about the modern world, that so many people voluntarily plug themselves into a digital Matrix to escape it?

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Hardly a week passes without documented evidence of male violence: a mass shooting in middle America, a gangster shootout in Chicago, an insurrectionist uprising in the Middle East, a warlord brutally subjugating his own people. We measure the damage men do in bullets spent, bodies wounded and maimed, lives lost. And even those of us fortunate enough to live away from this mayhem, who only read about it in the morning paper or catch it on the evening news – we nonetheless conjure male villains in our imagination. Walking through empty streets late at night, it’s a man’s footsteps we fear.

Why are men so catastrophically destructive, and why haven’t we been able to curb their violence? Are violent video games, movies and tv shows to blame? Or maybe it’s football and combat sports? 

It’s time for an honest reckoning with male violence and destruction – and a reappraisal of the valuable role men still have to play in keeping us safe.

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Canada and the United States are in the middle of an opioid epidemic. Every year now, more Americans will lose their lives to overdose than to car crashes. The peak years of the opioid epidemic have killed more American men than died during the Vietnam War – the entire Vietnam War. So severe has the impact of this public health crisis been, that it has caused a decline in the life expectancy of white men in America. And yet what has been most glaring about this crisis is how little public commentary it has occasioned, how little impact it has had on politics or political campaigning.

It’s time to take a closer look at male pain, to speak directly about the mental health problems men face, and how these manifest in their lives – in drug, alcohol and food addictions, in epidemic male loneliness, and a retreat into the virtual world.

What social factors have changed to make these addictions more prevalent? And more importantly – why do we have so much trouble talking about male pain?

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