The term “empathy economy” has been used to describe the practice, in our feminized age, of appealing to or claiming “empathy”—usually meaning empathetic compassion—in business advertising. I think it is more useful to consider the term in a different sense, that of a resource that flows in its own system or economy.

The idea here is not complicated. Humans have various resources they spend, or employ as catalysts, to obtain things for themselves and others. The resource that dominates discussions is, of course, the external resource we call money. But humans in their quests also routinely draw on their personal stores of energy, intelligence, inventiveness, wit and charm, social status, “a sense of style,” acting ability, psychological stability, and many other traits and characteristics. Empathy—the ability to understand another’s mindset or emotional state, not in a detached way but by feeling, to some degree, what the other is feeling—is another one of these resources.

Men do not lack empathy, but women on average have a stronger capacity for it, not least in regard to empathy that triggers feelings of compassion for the poor, the hungry, migrants, etc. This trait presumably has deep biological roots as an adaptation for women’s traditional roles centering on child-rearing.

Since women, just in the past several decades, have begun venturing from their traditional domestic domain to become present and powerful in all public domains and institutions, their greater capacity for and tendency towards empathetic compassion has made this sentiment more important in the shaping of policy and culture. That’s putting it mildly—the shift has been massive. Western societies since the 1960s, the period of women’s rapid ascension to power, have embraced policies that would have been hard to imagine in the 1940s or 50s. Politicians often had low partisan motivations for these policies, e.g. liberalizations of immigration law brought in new voters, while more generous welfare programs kept poorer minorities on side. But they were able to justify such policies with unprecedented ease, thanks to women—by framing them as compassionate and therefore virtuous.

The cultural ascent of women has brought another strong albeit not-too-surprising trend: the decline of marriage, childbearing and the stay-at-home mom. The feminist movement, which both drove and was driven by women’s new power, encouraged this trend by telling women and even girls to attach less value to marriage and homemaking, and more value to career-oriented lifestyles. By the 1990s, Western societies were essentially saturated with this messaging, which could be found even in books and TV shows for toddlers. This had many knock-on effects, of course. For example, as it became the norm for women to have careers and to add their salaries to their husbands’, home prices rose—creating an ever-higher barrier to the formation of families, and limiting the average size of families that did manage to form.

What does all this have to do with the empathy economy? My suggestion here is that the ascension of women to cultural and political power, and the related trend towards a more atomized, low-marriage, low-fertility society, have greatly reduced the traditional use or absorption of empathetic compassion within the family-centered domestic sphere. Since this ancient, instinctual resource is produced naturally and automatically in women—it cannot easily be shut off—it must flow somewhere; thus, it has overflowed into the public sphere.

To put it more crudely: childless “cat ladies” and “wine aunts” have natural womanly stores of empathetic compassion, and tend to spend it on (apart from their cats and their wine) “starving African children” or “the homeless” or “undocumented immigrants”—both directly and by steering government policy—if they don’t have loved ones to absorb it instead.

It’s not hard to see as well that, as the demographic presence and cultural power of these compassion-givers have expanded, society has catered increasingly to their needs, e.g. by making it ever easier for these women to pour succor over the world’s unfortunates. And, of course, politicians, businessmen and their marketing experts have sought to exploit the sentiments and sentimentality of this important group.

By now, moreover, greater flows of empathetic compassion in the public sphere have become very much the norm. In that “cultural norm” sense—and cultural norms appear to bind women more strongly, on average compared to men—we should expect these sentiments to be prominent not only among single, childless women but even among women who have children.

My central point here, then, is simply that Western and other societies in which women have strong public presence and power are necessarily awash in empathetic compassion, which at least helps to explain many new and remarkable cultural and policy trends.

I haven’t attached a “value judgment” to all this. But the fixation on short-term emotional payoff that is typical of compassion-driven or compassion-justified new policies and cultural traits seems inherently dangerous, due to its relative blindness to long-term consequences. It is also dangerous, and frankly stupid, to assume that a trait evolved for the domestic sphere (or a relatively simple paleolithic social sphere) will work well in a modern complex social setting.

In any case, it follows from my argument here that, ceteris paribus, increasing fertility and family formation to more traditional, demographically healthy levels would eventually—against the resistance of the new cultural norm—reduce the current surplus of empathetic compassion in the public sphere. This in turn should make government policies and non-governmental actions aimed at “helping people” more judicious and sustainable, though of course Western societies face so many other problems that we may never experience a solution to this one.

***

If you have spent significant time outside the Western world, you may have noticed that non-Western peoples retain many of the traditional cultural traits that Westerners have abandoned. One of these traits is ethnonationalism: the basing of the nation upon a supermajority core ethnicity or cluster of related ethnicities.

The retention of ethnonationalism by non-Western countries is fortunate for Western tourists who value “experiencing other cultures.” If all countries were made of the same gray, global blend of ethnicities, there would be—almost by definition—little to differentiate one from another. Westerners also tacitly idealize ethnonationalism whenever they sympathize with the plight of some Amazonian rainforest tribe threatened by modern ranchers, or lament what was done to Native Americans, or take the side of ethnic minorities anywhere. The principle underlying these sentiments is that a grouping of people of at least broadly shared lineage—a family at the smallest scale, a clan or tribe at medium scale, an ethnicity or nation at the largest scale—has an inherent identity and worth, so that its preservation, and its ability to exercise a meaningful degree of autonomy, are desirable, and its deliberate dissolution is something like murder.

It is surely one of the most remarkable developments of modern human history that in the near-century since World War II—in schools, in media, in legal and political discourse—the West’s educated elites have done their best to discourage their peoples from applying this principle to themselves. “Discourage” is putting it mildly: Mainstream public opinion in the West now typically frames Western ethnonationalism as a harmful outdated attitude that lives on only in the hearts of a few embittered racists (“white nationalists”). Even “right wing” thought leaders now commonly reject the old ethnonation model and accept the new model of a heavily polyethnic, “contractual” or “creedal” nation.

In practice the term [“self-government”] seems most commonly to refer to “government by persons of the same race, culture, language, or social class or as oneself.” Since I am not, in fact, a bigot, it’s quite unclear why this should matter to me. (Curtis Yarvin, “Democracy as an Adaptive Fiction,” 2007.)

The Whys

What prompted the West’s elites to want to discard this ancient, basic, in-group-favoring element of culture?

We can’t experiment on societies to resolve such questions conclusively, but there are some broad influences that—at least to me—seem obvious:

• The principal religion of the West, Christianity, essentially was conceived as an update of Judaism that, among other innovations, would not be limited to ethnic Jews but would instead hold in its “catholic” embrace the many distinct peoples of the world—particularly those of the Roman Empire. In that sense, Christianity has always been at least mildly pro-globalist and anti-ethnonationalist. In modern times, that “we’re all God’s children” sentiment has remained as an influence on Western peoples even as the rest of Christian theology and ethics has mostly been eroded away.[1]
• In the World War II era, the development of malignant forms of ethnonationalism in Germany, Italy, Japan and other Axis countries served broadly to discredit this model of nationhood and encourage a more globalist mindset.
• That turbulent wartime era also brought large refugee flows, which reduced the dominance of core ethnicities in many Western countries, directly and by adding foreign-born intellectuals—many of them leftists who detested ethnonationalism—to the ranks of Western elites.
• The United States, throughout its history and largely for reasons of political expediency, has admitted to its citizenry a wider and wider range of ethnicities, including even a large West African-derived population for the past 150+ years. This demographic reality—a fait accompli—is plainly incompatible with the ethnonation model, even though the U.S.’s founders (e.g., the anti-German Franklin and the anti-French, anti-Irish Hamilton) would be considered far-right ethnonationalists by today’s standards. Americans didn’t really have to confront this incompatibility until their extensive racial segregation system was disbanded in the 1960s. When that happened, they began embracing the polyethnic, contractual-nation ideal in earnest, and the enormous influence of the U.S. ensured the spread of that new ideal to other Western countries.
• Over the past several decades, the unprecedented increase in the presence (and therefore influence/power) of women in public life in the West essentially has given women an opportunity to review and remodel Western civilization in accordance with their own distinct set of preferences. Women, on average compared to men, are more easily moved to compassion by stories of desperate refugees, etc. They also seem more vulnerable to feelings of guilt and shame over the West’s financial and technological supremacy and the related inequalities they observe between European-heritage whites and other ethnicities in daily life. All this has made them more susceptible to and supportive of the pro-polyethnic—or even anti-white—mindset.
• As political (the left) and demographic (non-whites, women) centers of support for the polyethnic, contractual-nation ideal grew, these proponents learned to use labels including “racist,” “white supremacist,” and even “Nazi” to stigmatize and marginalize their opponents and suppress debate, and this moral bludgeon was very effective.

So what?

Does it really matter that the ancient cultural tradition of living among one’s own kind has been rejected or at least suppressed in Western countries? Can’t we live without that potentially malignant mindset?

Perhaps the best way to answer, at least initially, is with a simple invitation to look around. What do you see? Are things going well? Do Western polyethnic societies seem healthy?

Surely it’s fair to say that, to most Westerners, the most prominent and meaningful social trends here in early 2025 are profoundly negative ones—often plainly featuring the decay of traditional Western social structures and cultural traditions.

Presumably the globalists, the anti-ethnonationalists, would blame such negative perceptions on racism, their go-to bogeyman, or would aver that a certain amount of social upheaval is necessary in the transition to a polyethnic Benetton-ad utopia.

But I think that if we specify the problems of contemporary Western countries in more detail, it becomes clear that the polyethnic-society project, while it may have created enormous economic benefits for non-Westerners and (via cheaper labor) some Western business owners, is just unsustainable:

Economic:

• Higher costs of scarce/non-producible resources such as real estate.
• Higher costs of goods and services due to higher crime, dishonesty and other difficulties associated with having non-Western customers and employees (and a lower-trust society generally).
• Suppression of wages due to increased labor-market competition (at all levels) from immigrants.
• Loss of economic opportunities (and efficiency) due to (politically inevitable?) policies that favor non-Western peoples over legacy populations in hiring, contracting, academic placement etc.
• Colossal fiscal burden from welfare programs that essentially exist to buy the votes of the less industrious non-Western residents of Western countries.

Political:

• Increasing fracturing of politics along racial/ethnic lines as one or more parties scramble to capture the votes of immigrants and/or different non-Western ethnic groups—corrupting and destabilizing electoral systems, and making consensus impossible in many areas.
• Increased favorability of extreme political parties and policies.
• Authoritarianism—ultimately the only way to hold a polyethnic society together in the long run.

Psychological:

• Greater fear, uncertainty, and discontent due to the loss of the sense of community and steep declines in social trust.
• Depression, apathy and despair from the sense that “my country doesn’t belong to me anymore,” “the leaders/elites of my country have sold my patrimony to foreigners,” etc.
• Loss of national identity, which may lead legacy citizens to seek alternate sources of identity, e.g., Israel—and of course many immigrants will alleviate their own sense of disconnectedness by flocking together with members of their own ethnicity or by joining social/religious movements that are mostly based on shared ethnicity (e.g., militant Islam).

Behavioral:

• More selfish and less communitarian behavior.
• Greatly reduced collective ability to solve problems and endure hardships.
• Greatly reduced birthrates, family formation and other pro-social behaviors.
• Reduced “provide for the future” behavior.
• Violent lashing-out by the least stable members of society.

As real and as dangerous as these problems are, it feels odd to have to list them like this. I am old enough to remember a time when we all just implicitly knew that bad things would happen if our ethnonations were dissolved.[2] We also implicitly knew that ethnonationalism (again, in the simplest sense of wanting to live among one’s own kind) was a trait that was ancient probably because it was adaptive—good for us—offering nourishment and empowerment as any collective does, but on the greatest possible scale. That implicit knowledge, that broadly shared (but seldom explicitly articulated) feeling of how things should be, is how a major, long-established cultural trait tends to manifest. The West with its imperial and catholic history, its elevation of the status of women, its cultivation of high verbal intelligence, above all its hubris, has talked itself into rejecting this healthy primordial feeling as somehow terribly sinful.

A higher order

The existence of this primordial feeling in our past, and throughout the non-Western world in the present, should remind us also that a strictly reductionist, individualistic approach to cultural traits may be missing something important—”missing the forest for the trees.”

Suppose, for example, that some biological experimenter knocked out a certain gene in a lab animal, and found that this always led to the lethal invasion of the animal by microorganisms. It wouldn’t really be adequate to conclude simply that “the absence of this gene is bad for cells,” would it? To understand properly, we would need to have the concept of an organism as a meaningful collective of cells, and we would need to identify the role of the gene in some organism-level system—such as the immune system—that normally defends against infectious invaders. Moreover, once we had this concept of an organism as a thing with its own properties, we would be able to grasp intuitively that destroying the integrity of the organism would not “free” or “empower” its constituent cells but would simply doom them.

The analogy that compares an organism and an ethnonation is only a rough one, of course. But it should clue us in to the likelihood that the destruction of a human collective will harm its members in ways that cannot be seen from a strictly individualist point of view. From there it’s no great leap to conclude that, if only out of caution, we should treat ethnonations with more respect—indeed, in the absence of signs that they have become malignant, our first thought should be to preserve and nourish them as distinct entities with their own inherent worth.

Without this higher-order perspective, how could we make sense of this famous lament by the African-American writer James Baldwin?

[Western white people] have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.

Similarly, without grasping the importance of ethnically rooted identity, how could we understand the ongoing collapse of what is perhaps the world’s oldest major political party, the UK Conservative Party? For well over a decade since 2010, this party was dominant over its increasingly feminized and leftist main rival, the Labour Party. Then, after a series of stumbles by Boris Johnson, prime minister at the time, it chose as its new leader and prime minister—in an internal process among party elites—a man of Indian heritage, Rishi Sunak. Despite the fact that Sunak was an intelligent and perfectly likeable technocrat, everything collapsed. Labour, under the whiter-than-white Keir Starmer, was swept into power in a historic electoral landslide. The Conservative elites, doubling down, replaced Sunak with another nonwhite leader—Kemi Badenoch, a woman of Nigerian heritage—and despite her preaching of conservative policies on matters such as (ironically) immigration, popular support for the Conservatives continued to bleed away to a new, white-led Reform Party, which now looks set to take the Conservatives’ place.

Is ethnonationalism recoverable?

As obvious as this ethnic factor seems from my perspective—and as obvious as it continues to be from non-Westerners’ perspective—it has been, to date, virtually un-acknowledgeable in mainstream public discourse in the West. Even among so-called conservatives in Britain, the unpopularity of Sunak and Badenoch are said—in the major newspapers and journals of opinion—to be only skill- and policy-related. To admit that these politicians are nationally unpopular and unsuitable as party leaders because of their foreign ethnicity—which is to admit that most British voters retain ethnonationalist feelings—would be too painful. The elites in Britain, the “chattering classes,” have been working for decades to erase such feelings, in part by pretending that they are harbored only by low-status types: skinheads and hooligans. If such feelings are still widespread despite this multi-generational brainwashing, then they are likely innate and resilient, which would imply that the post-ethnonationalist project was always doomed.

It would be nice if the collapse of this unsound edifice could happen in an orderly fashion, smoothly giving way to a new order—an improved version of the traditional order—in which everyone recognized and respected ethnonations as the essential collectives around which countries and their governments form. It would be nice if self-determination for ethnonations were the first principle of our politics, and love of nation/country the first sentiment among citizens. The many large and culturally/ethnically distinct groups that are currently trapped as minorities in larger societies would at last be allowed to live in worlds of their own making. And in general, at an individual level, people would benefit from the reversal of the many problems inherent in polyethnic societies—and probably would feel significantly more content just from having a clearer national identity and sense of belonging. There would continue to be ethnic mixing, of course, but at a slower pace, dominated by the traditional process of intermarriage.

Unfortunately, a re-adoption of ethnonationalism still seems a distant prospect. It would require social surgery on a scale that no democracy would countenance except amid the most severe crisis. It would require full-throated support from Western elites who, so far, have never seemed ready to let go of the polyethnic ideal. In the United States, for example, the permissible focus of public ire over mass immigration is not the dilution of the legacy ethnonation, but instead the much narrower issue of illegal immigration—a law enforcement problem. Even in the current, supposedly “far-right” US administration, both the president and vice-president are effectively supporters of the contractual nation model, being married to non-Western-Europeans who obtained US citizenship or residency long before their weddings. And of course, in Western Europe, to speak publicly about non-European immigrants’ disproportionate lawlessness, welfare-consumption etc. remains socially verboten, and in some countries is treated as a serious criminal offense punishable by a lengthy jail term.

Even if an ethnonationalist party were somehow able to gain power in a major Western country, and attempted to reverse that country’s polyethnic transformation, it would be opposed fiercely, especially by the multitude of individuals and institutions who have helped shape, and now benefit from, the status quo. Thus, to take an obvious example, any attempt to treat African Americans as a distinct nation deserving sovereignty would be met with shrill cries of “racism” by their current masters in the Democratic party. And any encouragement of that old-fashioned sentiment, “love of country”—amor patriae, meaning love of ethnonation—would be condemned by the usual suspects as a form of “hate.”

And let’s not forget that in political systems with elections this also about math: In many Western countries, white people are well on their way to becoming minorities demographically. Moreover, half of whites—the female half—have, as noted above, an innately stronger sentimentality that makes them significantly more susceptible to anti-ethnonationalist messaging.

In short, then, the traditional ethnonations of the West are still a long, long way from recovering their traditional power of self-determination—that “separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,” in the words of the American Declaration of Independence.

So, assuming that the contractual-nation model is unworkable, how will it ultimately fall apart in the West? The most obvious possibility, given the current situation, is that it falls apart in ways that chiefly benefit non-Westerners—Westerners having mostly psyched themselves out of having a future. In other words, the Western world, overrun with migrants, will splinter politically into states dominated by different non-Western or less-Western ethnic cores (e.g., Latinos/Mesoamericans take the American West and Southwest, MENA peoples control Western Europe), in a manner reminiscent of what happened ~1,500 years ago as the Western Roman Empire collapsed.

Of course, it remains conceivable that a political/social movement favoring a return to ethnonationalism by the peoples of the West—and validating the de facto ethnonationalism still practiced by everyone else on our planet—will emerge and overcome the many barricades that have been put in its way; and I believe we and our descendants would be much better off if that were to happen. I can’t help thinking, though, that such an movement, if it were to have a reasonable chance of success, should have emerged and become popular long before now.

***

[1] The somewhat related but narrower—and to me less persuasive—“WEIRD” theory of Joseph Henrich holds that some specific Church practices in the Middle Ages caused Western societies to evolve, culturally and even biologically, to be more individualistic and less communitarian than other societies.

[2]“This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” claimed Lyndon Johnson when he signed the 1965 Hart-Celler Act liberalizing immigration law. “It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives.” He said this, obviously, because he knew that the legislation (which certainly would transform the country and provide the Democratic party with tens of millions of new loyal voters) conflicted with Americans’ essentially ethnonationalist feelings.

Originally published June 16, 2014.

“Suppose truth is a woman—what then?” asked Nietzsche with a chuckle.

His aim, in that opening line of Beyond Good and Evil, was to tell us something about truth. But in so doing he touched on some old assumptions about women: their inconstancy, their irrationality. The dogmas of the day, Nietzsche meant, were neither as immutable nor as reasoned as people assumed.

That skepticism was a lit fuse that led to the destruction of many traditions, including, ironically, men’s traditional underestimation of the fairer sex. Women soon got the vote in Western countries. In one world war and then another, they entered the workforce en masse, and increasingly stayed there during peacetime. Slowly but surely they took positions of influence, becoming doctors and lawyers, editors and producers, novelists and journalists, CEOs and politicians—even presidential candidates.

By 1985, a century after Beyond Good and Evil was published, more women than men were graduating from college in the United States—and that gender gap would keep getting bigger.

This relatively quick and historically unprecedented surge of women into public life—and, in recent decades, into positions of strong cultural influence—must have had significant cultural consequences. Culture regulates the way that people think and act, especially in public life, and women tend to think and act differently than men, so it follows that their new influence should have shifted Western culture, feminizing it to some degree. Why has so little, if anything, been written and said about this shift?

One could hardly argue that there is no shift to explain. Here are just some of the major social changes that have occurred in the past fifty years in the US—changes that seem quite sudden in historical terms:

Widespread dependence on government: More than 100 million Americans now receive means-tested federal welfare benefits, which don’t include Social Security or veterans benefits. About 47 million Americans receive food stamps. Close to six percent of the U.S. working age population now receives payments from the Social Security disability fund, compared to less than one percent in 1960. In most states, welfare recipients can receive income well above the minimum wage equivalent. All in all, entitlement spending (including related debt-servicing payments) now absorbs about 70% of the federal budget, up from about 30% in 1960. However, the poverty rate is about the same as it was in 1965. Meanwhile the labor participation rate for men (see blue chart above) has been falling more or less steadily and is at all time lows.

Civil rights expansions and set-asides: including minority-preference affirmative action hiring and contracting policies, “hate crime” laws, the Supreme Court finding that the Constitution effectively bars state laws against gay marriage (and child rearing), the admission of women into combat units in the military, plus the extralegal social ostracism of any public figure uttering politically incorrect speech.

Abandonment of traditional restrictions on immigration: In the early 1960s most immigrants to the US came from Europe or Canada and thus reflected the ethnicities of the existing American population. Since 1965, immigration laws and policies have become much more liberal, resulting in a radical change in the ethnic/cultural influx. Now the top five sources of immigrants are Mexico (dwarfing all others), China, India, the Philippines and Vietnam. The foreign born population in the US, as a percentage of the total population, is almost three times what it was in 1960. From 1960 to now Hispanics have increased their percentage of the population from 3.6% to 16.4%. The number of illegal, undocumented immigrants in America is also now huge, apparently between 10 and 20 million—equivalent to a medium-sized city’s worth of illegals per state. Not only the dynamic economy but also the growth of welfare programs in the US have created huge incentives for immigrants both legal and illegal. Some states even allow illegal immigrants to have driver’s licenses and taxpayer-subsidized benefits.

A decline in the acceptability of military deaths and judicial executions: In all the years of US military activity in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan—which is to say, almost continuously from 1991 to the present—there have been only about 5,400 US combat deaths. And that has been scarcely tolerable, even though about 50,000 Americans died in Vietnam, 300,000 in World War II, and 600,000+ in the Civil War. Meanwhile capital punishment is clearly on the way out.

A nation of victims: Declaring oneself a victim of something terrible—even something self-inflicted—has become a major theme in American culture: in media stories, in modern psychiatry (PTSD and other trauma-related ailments), and even in contemporary literature where it has dominated for years. Meanwhile on campus, some consider any text a potential source of trauma and victimization, requiring “trigger warnings” to protect the sensitive.

A shift in foreign policy: The US has always been evangelical about its ideals, sometimes to the detriment of relations with countries that would otherwise be allies. That is true more than ever today, but the “American ideals” being pushed on countries like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan and Kenya now include women’s rights and even LGBT rights. Since 1997, the State Department has usually been headed by a woman (Albright, Rice, Clinton).

Back to nature: From Rachel Carson to Global Warming and the anti-GMO movement, Americans have become energized about environmental issues as never before. The increase in environmental consciousness has been accompanied by an increasing preference for more “natural” foods and medicines. At the same, more and more Americans have been joining New Ageish, nature-oriented religions, such as Wicca, which is often described as the fastest-growing religion in the country. This rise in freewheeling nature-oriented religions has been accompanied by declines in traditional, hierarchical Christian denominations such as Roman Catholicism, Episcopalianism and Lutheranism.

New modes of public argument: Debate over public policy these days seems to have less and less to do with sober calculations of long term consequences, and more and more to do with dramatic anecdotes that make immediate appeal to our empathy: the poor immigrant yearning for a new start in the land of freedom; the inmate facing inhumane execution, who just might be innocent; the gay couple who want only to be treated the same as their straight-couple friends; the rape victims of Rwanda or the Congo, or the US Naval Academy. There is also now a heavy emphasis on protests and marches, heckling, breast-baring, blood- and egg-throwing, ad hominem attacks, silencings of would-be speakers, and other non-rational or even anti-rational tactics.

Empathy and compassion

Many of these changes are consistent with a cultural shift in favor of empathetic compassion. America over the past few decades has somehow acquired more and more sensitivity to the needs and claims of traditionally disadvantaged minority groups, would-be immigrants and illegals, those who claim to have experienced trauma or injury—basically anyone with a sob story.

This is the precisely the change that we should most expect as women gain greater influence over policy and the wider culture. A greater tendency towards empathy and compassion are among the most distinctive features of the female mindset. Even Aristotle, 2,400 years ago, noted that woman was “more compassionate” and “more easily moved to tears.”

This type of sensitivity presumably is a deep trait that evolved because it is adaptive for child-rearing. Certainly it is common for women to display that trait when raising a child, for example in shielding the child from challenges or risks to which a more coldly rational father is willing to expose him. The Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, who researches gender differences, has long argued that “[t]he female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.”

Note that the empathy that moves one to compassion tends to have a certain emotional narrowness and immediacy: “I feel your pain.” It’s not a deliberate, logical weighing of long-term consequences, and it typically is meant to ameliorate the plight of an individual or narrowly defined group, with little thought for wider implications.

America’s immigration policy, to take one example, was once largely based on considerations of long-term consequences, including the adverse social consequences of bringing in millions of people from Third World societies. That policy, now deemed racist, has been replaced by a policy that is to a great extent about satisfying the immediate needs and aspirations of individual immigrants. Ditto for welfare, where the policy tends to focus more on the immediate claims of claimants and less on the adverse society-wide consequences (reducing motivation to work, eroding families, busting budgets). Ditto again for admitting women to combat roles in the military—which is about fulfilling the aspirations of a small number of individuals rather than optimizing the services’ overall warfighting capability.

I would be surprised if the new influence of women on American culture were the only factor in this shift towards more empathy-based attitudes and policies. Television, for example, which spread widely into US homes beginning in the 1960s, has tended to bias debates in favor of the side that can muster more compelling visual images—and videos of people expressing strong emotions tend to be more compelling than, say, bar charts depicting long term consequences. But I wonder if TV’s influence could have been as great, had policymakers and persuaders not become so receptive to that influence—because they were increasingly female.

Environmentalism and witchery

Pregnancy brings out some remarkable instinctive behaviors that give us further hints about the “hardwired” traits of women. I am referring to the smell and taste aversions that appear mainly in the first trimester, and the “nesting instinct” that occurs in the second or third. None of these behaviors is deliberate and rational—that is what can make them so disturbing to the pregnant woman and her loved ones—but they appear to have evolved to help keep the baby safe from toxins, germs and other harmful environmental influences.

I suggest—that is all I can do at this point; there is little published research in this area—that these deeply rooted traits, which appear to be influenced by levels of estrogen and related hormones, would also manifest to some extent outside pregnancy. They would show up, for example, in a tendency to be more concerned (than men are) about putative environmental threats.

Again, there is no definitive research on this question. But there is some evidence that women (compared to men) tend to put more emphasis on pro-environmental issues, are less likely to be global warming skeptics, and are more likely to choose eco-packaging. Women also are heavily represented in pro-environment groups such as Greenpeace and the anti-GMO movement.

Related to this “green” tendency may be women’s seemingly greater aversion (on average, compared to men) towards modern, industrially produced foods and medicines, and the recent, swift rise in popularity of “natural” alternatives—purchased mostly by women.

The trend towards natural remedies appears to be related to New Age and witchcraft religions with their pre-scientific, eye-of-newt style systems of “healing.” These alternative religions obviously strike other chords in some women, and while I’m no expert on the matter, presumably one attraction is that the new religions give women more interesting and flexible roles than they would have had in traditional, patriarchal Christianity (e.g., lusty witch vs. celibate nun).

The same suspicions of modern, technologically produced food and medicine appear to have encouraged the ongoing anti-vaccine movement, and the spurious “detox” intestinal cleansing fad, both of which have been largely female social phenomena, heavily promoted by female celebrities such as Jenny McCarthy and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Unreason, contagion, victimization

In the list of big social changes above, I mentioned an apparent trend towards the use of non-rational or even anti-rational tactics in public arguments: for example, the demonization and silencing of opponents as alternatives to reasoned debate, and the rejection of due process in many cases where women are the accusers and men the accused. Is this too part of our cultural feminization? Historically men have believed that women are less rational, less reason-guided, in contexts where they are trying to persuade. Obviously this notion is offensive to modern women and to a great extent it does stem from the casual misogyny of the past. Then again, every modern study I’ve seen that touches on this particular question—check out this one from 2003—suggests that women are indeed markedly less supportive of free speech rights, and more emotionally sensitive to speech with which they disagree.

From an anthropological perspective, it makes perfect sense that women and men in the course of human evolution would have acquired (again: on average—think of two overlapping Bell curves) cognitive and other psychological differences, stemming from differences in their traditional roles, e.g., women as nurturers vs. men as hunters, warriors and leaders. In particular, women’s apparently greater weighting of emotion and empathy implies a correspondingly reduced weighting of more abstract and emotionally neutral mental operations. It’s easy to imagine that throughout human history women in effect have been engaged in a “mental arms-race” with men, evolving their own distinctively female set of cognitive and persuasive weaponry. That we still tend to hold up the chief “male” weapon, reason, as the highest mental faculty, may be due in large part merely to men’s historical hegemony in intellectual matters—so that, as that hegemony slips, the special status of reason can be expected to slip too.

The late 20th and early 21st centuries also have been marked by tremendous social contagions, from epidemics of arguably fake diseases (e.g., multiple personality disorder) to routine media-driven outbreaks of “outrage,” particularly of the politically correct variety—commonly compared to the witch-hunts of old. Is the cultural ascendancy of women to blame for this trend too?

Perhaps it is. If empathy is the ability to feel what others are feeling, then a more empathetic person is mentally more connected—more acutely and immediately connected—to others and in general to her social surroundings. Though much of it is anecdotal (not nearly enough experimental work has been done in this area) there is some evidence that women do tend to have greater “connectedness” in this sense. For example: Women and girls, versus men and boys, are more likely (about twice as likely) to be diagnosed with PTSD after trauma. They tend to be more interested in social networking. They are more hypnotizable and suggestible (and become moreso when pregnant). They are more likely to confabulate false memories and participate in mass psychosomatic incidents of the kind that, for example, spuriously sicken anxious schoolchildren every year.

Women moreover have been the initiators and principal transmitters of the most notorious hysterical contagions in history. These include the original witch-hunts—the convent demon-possessions of early 17^th century France, for example, and the later, much more lethal bewitchment-accusation craze in Puritan New England—as well as the hysterical neurosis syndromes that so captivated Charcot and Freud, and the related recovered-memory epidemics of recent decades. (Although historically in the West these have seemed to be isolated outbreaks, there is a substantial anthropological literature suggesting that women in premodern, patriarchal societies routinely—and competitively and contagiously—use “spirit possession” and similar tactics for mundane ends.)

Note that these female-driven contagions, across wide stretches of history and culture and including our modern outbreaks, have all in some way been about claiming the status of victim, for oneself or for someone else. I don’t know that “playing the victim” is a latent reflex in the female psyche, but it would make sense in terms of evolutionary psychology if the physically weaker sex, over tens of millenia of social evolution, had developed a reliance on such passive strategies. If it did, then women’s new cultural ascendancy would virtually guarantee that victimization stories become as prominent in media and influential on policymaking as they are.

Does all this strike you as unacceptably inflammatory and insulting speculation? If so, you’re in good company. Already many areas of scientific research (e.g., cognitive differences between men and women, or among ethnic groups) are effectively off limits, and the idea of overtly banning certain types of inquiry is now almost mainstream. Interestingly, this trend has been pioneered by some of the institutions that should best symbolize the free-inquiry ideal.

Consider what happened at Harvard in 2005—a classic case of clashing mindsets. The Harvard President at the time, Lawrence Summers (later of the Obama Administration), was under pressure to increase female enrollment in technical degree programs. One day Summers gave a talk that touched on this delicate subject. He suggested, based on published data, that men as compared to women don’t necessarily have more aptitude on average for technical subjects—but they do have a wider distribution of aptitude, i.e., longer tails on their Bell curves, so that they are marginally more likely to be geniuses or dullards. The slight surfeit of male high-achievers, he went on, might help explain why men still dominate the very limited number of “tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions.”

As tame and defensible as such a suggestion might seem, Summers’s willingness to contemplate any sort of gender-based difference in aptitude was enough to trigger outrage, and a long and painful inquisition. The psychologist Steven Pinker and a few others strongly backed Summers, and Summers himself made several abject public apologies (“…I was wrong to have spoken in a way that has resulted in an unintended signal of discouragement to talented girls and women…”) but the Harvard faculty soon passed a motion of “lack of confidence” in his leadership. Summers resigned the following year.

In this episode the loudest cries of condemnation came from female academics, and the weird part of all this is how unselfconsciously some of them displayed a clichéd femininity—as if, in our brave, new, pink-tinted world, they had no further need to conceal their cognitive differentness, notwithstanding the issue at hand! Amid the uproar, for example, one woman professor dramatically told a New York Times reporter: “When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill.” [italics mine]

Here’s to the new boss

What I’ve written above will seem biased against women. But I could have constructed an argument about the negative features of Western societies before the recent ascendancy of women: much more violence and acceptance of violence, for example, and more susceptibility to complex, inhumane ideologies—given the dominance of a testosterone-driven, lower-empathy, compulsively system-building (i.e., male) brain.

Anyway this essay isn’t really about the rightness or wrongness of the social changes that have occurred in America. It is about the likely origins of those changes. Admittedly, though, if those changes arose mostly from a simple demographic shift, then that would tend to undermine the claim that they represent an inevitable Progress. Moreover, one might wonder whether, in the long run, a mindset that evolved not for the “understanding and building of systems” (Baron-Cohen’s words) but for tasks such as child-rearing can succeed in the management of complex modern societies and states. Conceivably it will succeed; conceivably it will turn out to be better suited (than the traditional male mindset) for a modern, relatively peaceful world. But just as conceivably, or maybe a lot more conceivably, empathy-driven feelgood policies in the long run will lead, even in countries that had been rich and stable, to fiscal and social collapses—creating opportunities that less feminized cultures will want to exploit.

Even if such a cataclysm never comes, the fact is that something fundamental has changed in the inner workings of the modern world. The structures of societies are already adjusting and realigning in response. But, curiously, the nature of the change is such that no one seems to want to talk about it or even acknowledge it.