Sexual Propinquity & Politics

Few social scientists entirely accept the idea of a fixed human nature. Current research seems to be a constant elaboration of the relationship between what we seem hard-wired to be and how external conditions transform, and external forces manipulate, that hard-wiring.

To add to the consternation of scientists, individual minds are not merely unknowable but they can become conscious both of their own hard-wiring and of third party manipulation. They become participants in their own and social transformation, anthropologists in their mental village.

In other words, the first rule of social reality is there are no rules, only probabilities and expectations. Social and political scientists describe a world at one moment, only to see it shift from under them as their own findings get fed into the market.

Endogamy, Exogamy, Politics

Our sister company Pendry White has expressed concern that the special interests of new cognitive scientists might drive politics into dangerous territory. A memetic arms race between elites and peoples may get out of hand within a generation or two.

Nevertheless, if you treat social and political science just as frameworks for analysis of what 'is' at particular points in space and time, then they provide useful reality checks against our suppositions as well as providing tools for exploring possibility in the future.

Take the endogamy/exogamy issue and issues of propinquity and proxemics. Let's cut the jargon, here. In simple terms, social science suggests:

• People tend to marry endogamously within their locality, tribe, religious group, class and educational cohort.
• People may marry endogamously but their sexual preferences are much looser (exogamous by implication) so that they are much more prepared to date or have sex with outsiders.

A conclusion could be that social pressures are working in one direction (community cohesion held together by cultural conventions) and individual drives (self development) in another. A marriage that negotiates these two drives successfully will be exceptionally strong.

'Society' has had, historically, little time for 'adultery' or 'fornication', let alone homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, fetishism, free love and what not. Only in relatively recent years have consensual private sexual acts been completely liberated in the West.

As recently as the mid-1960s, no less than sixteen US states legislated against inter-racial marriage ('miscegenation') and the relatively liberal UK considered homosexual acts to be criminal until around the same time. The genius Alan Turing was hounded to his death by a dim-witted State.

Societies tend to deal with consequent tensions either through asserting authority or turning the 'blind eye'. The former creates the patriarchal family and the latter, variously, the institution of the mistress, prostitution, concubinage and strange permutations on the tolerated 'third sex'.

The relationship between sexuality and property and between sexual order and social order, expressed in the balance of Church and State, Constantine and the Bishop of Rome, a liberal Constitution and a religious culture in the US, also makes sexuality a very political matter.

Propinquity & Innovation

Propinquity studies tell us that attraction is a matter of proximity. If people see each other regularly in a locality or a workplace or group, then they are more likely to find points of attraction, evidently compromising on details to let the hormones take over.

Within a small circle of contacts, there is less chance to hone one's individual needs through serial relationships (though we should not denigrate 'love at first sight'). The American mixed High School seems to act as intermediary between closed and radical liberal options in this regard.

And this is where things may be getting more interesting as modernisation proceeds. Remember that modernisation is not just about the opportunities created by increasing wealth, but also about technological innovation. Three innovations have transformed sexuality within the last thirty year cycle:

• Contraceptive technology has de-linked sexuality from social cohesion and weakened the necessity for an 'ideology of binding' to protect 'surprise' children and consequently shamed women from themselves. People can be cowed easily in a shame culture with no escape.
• Mass tertiary education repeated the dislocation of the young during industrialisation but without the transfer of peasant communities as a whole into urban settings. Students not only learned independence but freedom from social constraints which they then took into the work-place.
• The internet has allowed not only anonymous expressions of sexual desire which has normalised deviances from the 'norm' but, in its social networking phase, has created a form of faux-propinquity, ideological rather than physical, where ideas can be contested freely.

The general conditions for human preference for endogamy still exist, as do the distinctions between 'married' (conventional, propertied and child-rearing) states and 'non-married' (personal and sexual development) states, but the present allows more personal choices.

It is still probable that two people who come from 'advanced' environments will be more likely to link up if they share the same form of rejection of 'traditional' (i.e. both families were originally Catholic, Jewish or Muslim in family background) than if they come from entirely separate backgrounds.

To make a leap from traditional to 'modern', a couple are likely, in effect, to have to construct a new liberal tradition, as ideologically rigid in its way as the one they have abandoned. It is probably true that we are seeing a form of liberal authoritarianism, only superficially tolerant, emerging in the West.

However, in the more advanced (we are not afraid of this term) urban environments, social mobility, secularism, propinquities that are not derived from place, church or tribe, are creating a clear minority move towards exogamy (excepting in educational and income levels).

They are also shifting the balance between social cohesion and individual development in a way that is probably far more healthy for society in the long run, despite the fears of the Daily Mail and the grumpy Tory grassroots.

The tight social cohesion model enclosed an awful lot of human misery for those who did not find it worked for them. The fact that so many individuals have rushed to leave it for the cities tells you a great deal. Child abuse was covered up, harmless fantasy denigrated and homosexuals suppressed.

Authoritarian Sexuality Contests Freedom

The authoritarian model (especially in colonial societies, like the US and Israel in particular, and in peasant societies, like those in Eastern Europe) encouraged idiotic notions of religious and racial superiority that would underpin race politics, apartheid, pogroms and prejudice.

The sexual basis of authoritarian repression may have been overstated by Wilhelm Reich but a cursory observation of Nazi sexual practices and of Irish nuns' treatment of single women not so long ago should cure anyone of complacency.

Even today, in Israel, small groups are working against Jewish-Arab sexual relations in a disturbing repetition of attitudes in the European 1930s from which they, as Jews, suffered most. On the other side, Hezbollah arrange 'mass weddings' partly for welfare reasons but also to keep the culture 'pure'.

This brings us to the political punch line. Is the current tension between a forward liberal elite, attempting to impose its standards on the wider global population in an increasingly authoritarian way, and traditionalist communities partly a sexual one?

We don't mean this in some cod-Freudian way. We mean that control of sexuality is implicit in the structures of conservative communities and an assault on their values is an assault on their cohesion. Meanwhile the mainstream liberal consensus itself is under assault from within by libertarians.

If technological innovation undermines the assumptions of superiority and 'proxemics' of traditional culture, two phenomenon appear - an increase in the 'exogamous' element in society and an opportunity for individuals to express themselves far more aggressively on either side of the debate.

On the one side, new forms of sexuality have moved from, say, individual liberation (such as gay, lesbian and tg rights) to hybrid forms such as swinging, where sexuality is separated from family, to the emergence of polyamory.

Polyamory, for example, received a favourable analysis in Newsweek. It takes a free sexual culture, re-moralises it and then constructs a new and serious-minded family culture around it. It represents a tiny minority but not a shy one, even in modern Britain.

On the other side, reactionary fundamentalism linked to community welfare and/or politics has emerged alongside a resurgence of the New Right in Europe. Some of the media have also adopted a prurient shrill line against sexual freedom but only when it appears in the lower orders.

Much of the real debate is carried out in the quality media and it has moved on from the gender wars. 'Respectable' women and old guard feminists are now at war with sex-positive feminists who, in turn are allied with libertarian males, who, in turn, are opposed by 'progressive' feminist male camp-followers.

The sex industry has also become 'respectable' to half the community while the other half is horrified by it. One side claims every prostitute is a victim of men and big business while the other side determines that lap-dancing enables social mobility and empowers women economically.

If one side uses the horror of sex-trafficking (the fruit of globalisation and poor policing, not liberalisation) to criminalise consensual acts, the other, often led by women, provokes the 'progressives' with increased determination to prove that women who like sex a lot cannot be assumed to be victims.

The Next Cycle in Sexual Politics

All this is relevant to the next cycle in politics and economics because we are probably about to see some serious culture wars emerging over sexuality, in which (paradoxically) the European mainstream centre-left are the authoritarians and the mainstream centre-right are the libertarians.

It has been New Labour that has done most for women's workplace equality and gay and lesbian rights in the UK but it is becoming exhausted. The whole programme was based on a belief that individuals, once liberated, would then become conventional and there is some truth in this.

There really was no intention to frighten the horses and 'progressives', having given the neglected half of the middle classes their rights, are terrified of what is happening elsewhere as social cohesion breaks down.

Unfortunately, the breakdown has little to do with sex and the Murdoch Press' consistent support for sexual liberation and a great deal to do with flawed economic and social policies. But the centre-left cannot admit to this and so they have started to dabble with behaviour modification.

Technological changes and the consequent psychological liberation of sexual minorities and of the mass of the population has almost certainly created new demands to go beyond the conventional. The next cycle is one of adjustment and creating new frameworks to deal with exploitation, rights and abuses.

Meanwhile, across the rest of the world, modernisation (still led from the West by the older type of women's and gay rights activist, with significant negative effects on the war in Afghanistan and relations with Iran) is coming up hard against a traditionalist reaction - whether Hindu, Confucian or Islamic.

Within a few years, we are likely to see a 'myth of the decline of the West' being pressed on the media and Hollywood just as the demand for more explicit expression of inner drives is coming from the mass below.

This is fertile ground for a cultural civil war that authority may not, probably should not, win.