In the world that porn has built, young men’s efforts are literally infertile: explosions of violence or otherwise that yield a big, pleasurable nothing. Hatfield’s anti-porn crusade paradoxically embodied this fundamental impotence.

The man was clearly unstable, and his manifesto, with its frequent references to knowledge of secrets that remain “almost entirely hidden from people,” betrays delusions of grandeur. But the manifesto is also of cultural significance, considering the ascendancy of the incel ideology among swathes of the online Right and the percolation of many similar ideas about men, women, and dating in the mainstream. Its Right-Left ideological flattening — Hatfield was both anti-liberal and anti-capitalist; he rails against transgenderism and Western cultural supremacy  — is significant, too, representing the bitter end of Christian metaphysics, even on the Right. 

Hatfield’s manifesto is the first, but possibly not the last, appearance of hypergamy, a new buzzword of the online Right, in a mass-shooting. The word has its origins in an Indian caste law that required women to marry men of the same or higher caste and, in modern parlance, means “dating up.” The desire to “date up” could generically be assumed to be shared by both men and women — aspirational mating is a universal human urge, after all — and to include desires for partner-benefits like social status and finances. But in today’s manosphere and as embraced by Hatfield, it concerns only physical attractiveness. In Hatfield’s definition, this is the only quality that matters when a woman chooses whom to have sex with — which she can do freely in contemporary culture. He defines it as a “phenomenon in which females simply copulate as they please with a plethora of attractive males, as opposed to monogamy, in which the same females would be bound legalistically [sic] and culturally to just one male.”

As the theory goes, a man’s height and physical attractiveness are signs of “health” and “genetic quality” which are desirable qualities in a mate because they suggest healthier offspring. Hatfield is cribbing from evolutionary psychology, which argues that women are more invested in any individual child than men are, since men can have hundreds of children, and women only a few. Thus women are supposedly especially motivated by attractiveness — which signals health, meaning a better chance for survival of the offspring — in their choice of sexual partners. Women are also choosier about partners than men are for the same reason: the sum number of chances a woman has to pass on her genes is very limited; men have hundreds, or theoretically even thousands, of such chances, no childbearing or nurturing work required. 

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The sexual revolution was always a failure

By Valerie Stivers

When you combine the female preference for tall, attractive men with a liberal sexual culture, according to the incel theory, you get a situation in which tall, attractive men are having lots of sex with multiple female partners, and the other men are having no sex at all. This, supposedly, has nothing to do with the men’s habits, personalities, or physical presentation, but is purely genetic. In the “hypergamy state,” as Hatfield writes, the “common man” is hopelessly “cast out of the divine realm of truly intimate love and attraction” through no fault of his own. “The only things that matter when it comes to experiencing love as a male … are the length of the bones in your legs, and the shape of the bones in your face.” 

All this takes many wild leaps, but it is to some extent — and more than Hatfield actually references — based on theories of evolutionary biology and psychology that are becoming increasingly popular. One such popular, biology-based idea about the psychology of dating is the conviction among very-online Zoomer young women that the birth control pill “makes you choose the wrong guys.” A groundbreaking work on the matter is evolutionary psychologist Dr. Sarah E. Hill’s book, How the Pill Changes Everything, which focuses on the Pill but also provides a fascinating walkthrough of the evolutionary view of modern dating. According to Hill, the preference for healthy offspring is — and in many more ways than Hatfield’s manifesto suggests — encouraged by female biology, and gene-maxxing in fact does play a significant role in women’s partner choices, though the standard seems more likely to be highly complex issues of genetic compatibility, which is predicted by sexual attraction, rather than brute height-and-looks measurement on some objective scale. Hill would also argue that social and psychological traits such as female partner-choosiness are hardwired by evolution. 

Hill’s research doesn’t support incel conclusions throughout. She has found that women in the pre-ovulation phase of their menstrual cycles are more likely to choose men they find sexier or better-looking. Post-ovulation, the preference switches to men they find rich, nice, or reliable. Her argument is that since hormonal contraception sets female hormones at a permanent “post-ovulation” state, it may be skewing partner choice toward provider types,  and away from the men women are most attracted to. The skew is bad in that it affects birth rates and marital happiness, since couples who have good sexual chemistry also seem to have better child-health outcomes (due to genetic compatibility) and lower divorce rates. Given that around 30% of women in their 20s are on hormonal birth control of some kind, with the share presumably higher among the sexually active, many women in the dating pool, artificially influenced by hormones, in fact should be seeking personality over looks. 

Still, the underlying premise that sexual behavior follows rules of hard science is shared by both men and women. And distorted through a million video clips and Reddit threads, such material could make the position of short, unattractive men seem desperate indeed. Hatfield calls it the “ghastly state of things that the Western world has found itself in” and a “situation of terrible loneliness, isolation, and social degradation.” 

In his theory, this problem for men is particular to the modern world, because while hypergamy ruled in the state of nature, the misty dawn of agriculture and civilization somehow naturally produced monogamy, supposedly a great leveler against the tyranny of female choice. He discounts or is unaware that Christianity was the foundation of monogamy in the West, and that it substantially improved women’s cultural position. Instead, he views monogamy as a spontaneous “stabilizing” development that served the purpose of bringing formerly discarded men into useful social participation by giving them something to live for — subservient wives. “Having gained secure and steady access to intimacy through the institution of monogamy,” he writes, “these men could now experience copulation and romantic love, thereby attaining self-actualization, something which was previously inaccessible to them.” 

Now, Hatfield says, capitalism has eroded monogamy, pushing women into the workforce and giving them the freedom to return to their preferred state of hypergamy. Hence, his call to social violence seeks to end “high capitalism,” and to return women to enforced monogamy with the type of men he refers to as “common” — not tall and attractive. The manifesto concludes with a list of 12 categories of  “class-A targets” that would hasten this state of affairs; section V — yes, he uses Roman numerals — addresses targeting the headquarters of players in the porn industry. “Be unflinching, go forth and KILL THEM ALL!” he commands.

It’s nothing new to say that incels hate and dehumanize women, viewing them purely as sex objects. A description of one woman as a “vaguely female-looking clump of humanoid biomass” in Hatfield’s manifesto is fairly typical. Nor is it new to say that for all their talk of love and intimacy, what such men are really focused on isn’t even sex, but instead status and self-worth. Hatfield’s rant is clearly envious of the kind of dominant man he claims to despise. His fever-dream descriptions of the vile and disgusting life of pleasure and bliss lived out by attractive men are almost touching in their transparency. “And let nobody convince you,” he writes, “that the more wealthy of these males do not occasionally indulge in the blackest depths of depravity and twisted perversions, together with countless attractive women of differing backgrounds, within various orgies and other such hideous events, that take place in their skyscrapers, mansions, and at many luxury hotels in major cities.” Sounds terrible! 

Moreover, the length of the section in the manifesto where Hatfield responds “in dialectical format” to “objections” that he could get a girlfriend if he just changed his behavior, suggests that the whole thing is a desperate cope to avoid accountability, and that the incel project really is just the Right-wing version of progressive victim culture. 

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Cole Tomas Allen is a postmodern symptom

By Sohrab Ahmari

However, the fully consumerist, materialist understanding of love and dating is, to some extent, a new and unwelcome development. Materialism, according to natural-law philosopher Heinrich Rommen, “regards man as nothing more than a highly evolved animal” and puts “in place of a personal God … a doctrine of impersonal eternal force or of perpetually recurrent changes of matter in accordance with the blind necessity of the laws of nature.” Marxism is one form of materialist metaphysics — society is determined by “the conditions of production” — though Marx, unacknowledged, retained much of Christendom’s old framework of good and evil. What Hatfield calls “biological consciousness” is another kind of materialism — everything happening between men and women is in accordance with our lower animal natures. 

That such a philosophy serves humans poorly is easily visible. The manifesto uses a dehumanizing terminology of “females” and “copulation”; elides the difference between copulation and love; assumes marriage is a mutually hostile transaction for individual benefit; and mostly lacks concern that, in its preferred future state of affairs, most women would be married against their wishes. More frightening is that all the underlying — and essentially Christian — ideals that humanized previous materialist systems and made them aspire to nobility and justice are just … missing for the incels. Moral relativism, and its corresponding ideology of individualist self-pleasure, have been espoused for generations, but it’s never previously been tried without underpinnings of some kind of vestigial morality. Hatfield — and we might here genuinely say through no fault of his own — was trying it. 

In this sense, Hatfield is one of an emerging cohort of young people — and not only men — committed to violence for causes that are either overtly or covertly in search of self-esteem. The confusing new reality in which the political sides seem to be getting mixed up is often attributed to “internet extremism” looking the same in any flavor, but it actually represents a deeper convergence. Is Tyler Robinson — the pro-trans youth accused of assassinating Charlie Kirk — on the Right or Left? It’s hard to tell. Is Luigi Mangione, who allegedly shot an insurance executive, a Left-wing freedom fighter? Is he any different than the failed Seth Scott Hatfield, his Right-wing-ish doppelgänger? And don’t the armed or violent ICE protesters in Minneapolis feel like they’re on the same continuum, despite their arguments of righteous civil disobedience? 

The search for self-esteem, without any kind of restraining hand, isn’t going well. Hatfield targeted the porn industry for peddling a false and humiliating substitute to a good he believed every young man somehow deserves: unfettered “copulation” with an attractive woman. He pathetically failed in his mission, but was highly successful in terms of fully living out the mandate to take only himself and his group’s interests into account, as dictated by the framework most contemporary young people now share. To do otherwise is the kind of hard, self-denying work that the Christian commandments were rather good at, and no materialist version has come close to. Without this kind of work, all activism is masturbatory — and fruitless. 

His speech spoke to the unbreakable sense of unity and purpose that defined the Greatest Generation, but it was also indicative of how Americans conceived of their politics and government. Throughout the modern era, from the Industrial Revolution onwards, politics was fundamentally about conflict over the material conditions of life: the organisation of production, the focus of investment, the contest of classes and interests — these were always up for grabs. Indeed, in his soaring inaugural speech 10 years earlier, FDR was eminently grateful that, despite the depths of the country’s Depression-era troubles, they nonetheless concerned “thank God, only material things”.

But then something happened not long after the Roosevelt era. In the post-war years, as the children of the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, grew up and came of age amid an unprecedented level of mass middle-class affluence, a different conception of politics took hold. By the Sixties, issues relating to self-expression and cultural recognition became more important than economic questions. Ronald Inglehart, the late political scientist and founder of the World Values Survey, saw this shift reflected in survey data and called it “post-materialism”: a seismic break with the practical orientation of generations that gave rise to culture war as the new paradigm of American politics.

It began on the Left with the emergence of the counterculture and the various political and lifestyle movements associated with it. By the decade’s end, though, the Right under the leadership of Richard Nixon and Phyllis Schlafly eventually caught on and began to mobilise voters primarily on the basis of their own conservative moral, symbolic and affective attachments as a means of fighting the counterculture.

This was something new in US history. Up to this point, the main cleavages in each era were grounded in differences over competing models of political economy. Hamiltonian nationalism against Jeffersonian agrarianism; the Southern slaveocracy against Northern industrialisation; New Deal liberals against small government conservatives. This is not to say that earlier Americans were not moralistic: they pursued moral and material progress together, often channelling their deeply held moral convictions into larger projects of material economic transformation. Other cleavages either arose from economic divisions (racial inequities stemmed from the legacy of slavery — an economic institution) or were secondary to it (Prohibition, for instance, borne of lifestyle differences between Protestant and Catholics, may have been prominent in its day but it never superseded the centrality of the economic divides).

Every decade since the Sixties witnessed a reversal of this logic, whereby moral and cultural issues largely determined whether one was on the Right or Left, even more than policy differences over taxes or regulation. By the Nineties, even as the two parties claimed to be fighting over the size of government, the motivations underlying vicious partisan feuds became rooted more in irrepressible cultural antagonisms. This was evident in the strange, outsized significance placed on the personal foibles of Bill Clinton by his conservative enemies, who treated the first Boomer president and his feminist wife Hillary as the ultimate embodiments of the Sixties ethos, even as he shared their programme of free-market globalisation. In effect, the culture war amounted to the de-politicisation of the economic and the ultra-politicisation of the personal: the persistent polarising power of social issues such as abortion, guns and battles over school curricula — as factories were leaving the Midwest and widespread economic inequality was taking off — can be understood in light of this paradigm.

These trends reached their fullest expression in the latter half of the 2010s, after the failures of both the post-racial aspirations of the Obama era and the lopsided recovery from the Great Recession laid bare the exhaustion of the status quo on both the mainstream Left and Right. The election of Donald Trump has been interpreted as a revolt of conservative America and as an escalation of the culture war. And while that was the ultimate result of his presidency, his first campaign for the White House was actually, in many ways, a repudiation of the logic of the culture war and a bold reassertion of materialist politics.

After all, underneath the vulgar and bombastic Trump-style that debuted on the day of the escalator ride, there was a pointed critique of globalisation and the outlines of an alternative political economy. Candidate Trump criticised free trade and financialisaton while his bromides on immigration, though needlessly crude and provocative, could be read as a blueprint — not for a white ethnostate — but for a system of greater labour market security that could materially benefit working-class Americans of all races. Even on wedge issues, Trump, a socially liberal New Yorker, rejected the dogmatism of social conservatives in his party: he happily held up a Pride flag and said he didn’t care where Caitlyn Jenner went to the bathroom; he also had little time for the abortion issue, pointing out that Planned Parenthood did “very good work for millions of women”. As if mocking the pieties of the GOP, Trump said: “I’m a conservative, but at this point, who cares?” It seemed for a moment as if Trump would attempt the politically impossible: to reduce the salience of intractable moral issues while refocusing America’s energies on rebuilding its decaying towns and cities, perhaps even presiding over an industrial renaissance while punishing Wall Street plutocrats — just like Roosevelt did.

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Biden's IRA hasn't saved America

By Michael Lind

However, upon entering office, the promise of a genuine materialist revolution evaporated. President Trump made two tacit bargains, one with conservative elites and another with liberal ones. To please Republicans, he governed like a conventional Reagan-Bush conservative on economics as well as culture: he passed Paul Ryan’s tax cuts for the benefit of multinationals, who used the money for buybacks (and made only the most halting progress on trade); he then assented to the hard-line demands of social conservatives such as Mike Pence, reinforcing the rigidity of the culture war.

With liberals, the bargain was more subtle but no less cynical: by upping the intensity of his culture-war antics and abandoning the heterodox economic positions he ran on, he provided his foes with cheap fodder for their own media circus, galvanising the “Resistance”, giving “rocket fuel” to the New York Times, and handing the Democrats victory in 2018 and 2020. (Had he taxed the rich or expanded healthcare, he would have confounded the Democrats — maybe won a second term.) In exchange, the President got to sit back, act out, not put in the work of governing, and still endlessly occupy the spotlight.

Nowhere is Trump’s collusion with the Swamp he was supposed to drain more glaring than in his failure to settle the immigration issue: he passed over the chance for comprehensive reform when his party had full control of Congress and refused to endorse the policy of mandatory E-Verify, which would have worked a thousand times better than a symbolic wall (which, by the way, was also not built). Beneath all of Trump’s bravado and slogans, he essentially sustained the open borders status quo which enriched both red and blue-state elites — not to mention his own family business — and passed it on to Joe Biden.

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Hillary Clinton still doesn't get it

By Ashley Frawley

With another election looming next year, the compelling economic critique that Trump introduced seven years ago has vanished; and in line with the purely symbolic thrust of post-materialism, Trump himself — having been detached from any specific, discernible policies — has become a symbol that signifies nothing tangible; he’s a mere trigger for the emotions of both supporters and detractors. The unending psychodrama of the Trump indictments has taken up all the attention of the media and political classes while saying nothing about economics, trade, immigration or anything else of substance. Where America could be debating the best way to re-industrialise the Midwest or the most efficient means to fund infrastructure, it is lost in a sea of legal trivia about misplaced documents and hare-brained conspiracy theories about stolen elections. Republican efforts to make Hunter Biden the centre of the national psychodrama are just as illustrative of America’s decline as a serious country.

While ordinary Americans are still concerned with bread-and-butter issues and consistently remain moderate on most culture-war issues, their bipartisan leadership has succumbed to post-materialism, which is, at the end of the day, an elite disease. One may be tempted to hope that, since Inglehart first recorded its symptoms among Left-wing Boomers over 40 years ago, the post-materialist mind virus will eventually die out with that decadent generation. However, worryingly, the very same symptoms are even more visible among Millennials and Gen Zs. In fact, it’s come full circle, with the countercultural Right now openly proclaiming its desire to imitate the post-materialist sensibilities of the Sixties: the result is that young conservatives, no less than their progressive enemies, are just as incapable of thinking in practical economic or institutional terms and now only covet the immaterial “cultural power” that they believe is their due.

Here, the unfortunate tale of Nate Hochman is most telling. Once heralded as a champion of the young Right, he was disgraced and fired from Ron DeSantis’s campaign after he was revealed to be the maker of a bizarre video that appeared to feature an obscure Nazi symbol. As today’s young Americans become the first generation ever that’s set to be materially worse off than their parents, this rising star didn’t die on the hill of any grand policy or programme that might have been too radical for his superiors to contemplate; instead, he was felled by his attachment to a set of aesthetics, demonstrating how the next generation of American elites is effectively trapped in a self-referential world of symbols and memes that is everyday more removed from reality. This is post-materialism in a nutshell; and it is why America can’t have nice things and — if this is what the future looks like — why America will never have nice things again.

In days that seem unprecedented, we cling to the familiar. I do, anyway, and Christmas has been familiar to me all my life. The excitement and the anticipation that I felt as a boy is felt now by my young son, and I can live vicariously through him: the lack of sleep, the mince pies for the reindeer, the presents waiting, if he’s lucky, under the tree. Christmas has its rituals, and we don’t have many shared rituals left in the modern West.

But the rituals disguise the radical strangeness of the claim that Christmas makes, and the radical strangeness of the religion that makes it. That God took human form, that he was born into persecution and poverty, that he came to put the world back into its right shape. That this God does not demand burnt offerings, but will instead sacrifice himself to correct our errors. That He shows us a path both straight and narrow and leaves it to us to decide whether to follow it. A virgin birth in a cave, a risen corpse and an empty tomb: there is no sense in any of this. None of it is normal, even by religious standards. It is some kind of revolution.

But here we are, celebrating it with turkey and crackers, and yet not really celebrating it, because — well, because this is now, and that was then. We all know that Christmas has become a commercial horror show: complaining about this is another part of the ritual. We all know that most of us will barely genuflect towards the Christ whose mass this once was: hearing bishops lamenting this is also as traditional as watching the Queen’s Christmas message, or refusing to watch it and reading the Guardian in the corner instead.

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The West has lost its roots

By Paul Kingsnorth

The world has been upended these past two years, and it feels to me as if the ructions, which are far from over, are not merely temporal. It feels like we are being shaken out of some slumber; as if the spirit is on the move. Perhaps I feel this way because of the unexpected turn my life has taken, coincidentally or not, during the corona era. Just over a year ago, much to my own surprise (and initial resistance) I became a Christian. Some people might call it a “conversion”, which always sounds a bit shiny-eyed to me, but I didn’t really feel like I’d converted to anything. I felt like I’d come home. I can’t explain it, though I keep wanting to.

It is always ridiculous to write about religion. When I say “ridiculous,” I mean “dangerous”, I think: dangerous in the West, anyway, which is the only part of the world in which the rejection of religion and the denial of God has ever really taken off. This does not seem to be working out well for us, but try talking about that in public. Since I became a Christian, and as the daily practice of the faith has deepened my understanding of it, I have found it harder and harder to relate the Christian worldview to the worldview I used to have, and which the culture around me encourages in us daily. This is not just a Christian problem: everyone I know who follows a faith seems to understand it. It might just be a manifestation of how new I am to this, and how inadequate my understanding is. Still, the gap between the world and the Way — as the early Christians called the path of Christ — seems more and more like a widening gulf.

This will be my first Christmas in the church. The Orthodox church, into which I was baptised just under a year ago, has a deep and old and demanding practice around this festival of light. For the last forty days, we have been fasting: today the fast is broken. A child is born, and everything has changed. The birth of Christ marked the beginning of a new age. The Orthodox church talks of Jesus of Nazareth as the “second Adam”. The first human messed up by rejecting God — by choosing control over communion, and falling into self-love. The incarnation of God in human form corrects the error: we get a second chance to turn from ourselves and look to the greater whole.

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The myth of 'pagan' Christmas

By Tom Holland

It is, as I say, a strange story: frightening, glorious, thrilling, radical, impossible, repulsive to some. Jesus remains the most controversial man in history, and his followers have always been looked at, like him, through narrowed eyes. Here in the West we are still emerging, both psychologically and structurally, from a period in which Christianity was associated with authority: with power and Popes and state churches and holy wars. Now that this authority has been overthrown, Christians are increasingly regarded again as they were for the first four centuries of their existence: with suspicion, if not open hostility.

Some Christians regret this, and long for the return of a West in which church and state again hold sway in tandem: a world of faith, in which the people live, at least in theory, by the way of the cross. I understand this: it’s an enticing vision. I would like to live, I think, among the symbolic splendour of the high medieval Christian world. Certainly I’ve never felt comfortable in this one. But for better or worse, that world is not coming back, and it seems right that a faith built on sacrifice and renunciation should again require some of its followers. Throw down your nets and follow me. If the world hates you, know that it hated me first. The Way was never supposed to be comfortable. Christ and power don’t mix.

This is how it seems to me, but I am still new. One thing I have learned though — or had brought home to me, because I knew it before I became Christian — is the necessity of ritual in a human life. One reason I joined the Orthodox church, despite being an Englishman who lives in Ireland, was because of its deep understanding and practice of this. We reject ritual in the modern West. We don’t see why we should submit to any authority or respect any tradition. We believe that every one of us can invent the world anew. We are wrong about this, as we are about much else.

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The sad loss of our common rituals

By Eleanor Parker

The rituals of the Orthodox church are sometimes florid and always long, and like Christianity itself they can look strange or off-putting from the outside. But the first time I attended a divine liturgy, I knew where I belonged. Something had happened to me that I couldn’t put my finger on. This service, largely unchanged for 1600 years, has a spiritual and psychological impact that can’t be outlined in essays or explained in words at all.

Church rituals, like those of all religions, fit into a wider pattern — that of the ritual year. As a Christian celebrating my first real Christmas, I have come late to the realisation of how much this matters. I think this is why many Western Christians hanker for the Christendom that is gone: not because they desire power, but because of the container, the guiding light, that the ritual year offers, and because they see what we have lost by abandoning it. Christmas, Lent, Easter, Whitsun — we still know the names, but we are long detached from the symbolic pattern they provided, and the understanding of our place in the universe that they formalised in daily life. What comes together in the bread and the wine, changed into the flesh and the blood — this can never be replaced with turkey and sherry.

Something is missing here, and not just for Christians. I have come to believe that humans are above all religious animals. If we do not have a religion, we will make one for ourselves, or substitute politics or ideology for it, to assuage our need for ritual, worship and meaning. But ideology or self-help can’t fill the gap, because what is missing is the thing we are all fleeing from, like the fire it is. The real meaning of Christmas, I think, and maybe the real meaning of all faith, is simply: look up. Raise your gaze. When we lose the religion that made us, and the rituals that contained it, however imperfect those things were, we lose our understanding of the heart of the matter, the thing we turn from and scorn and then are returned to because nothing else will fit into the empty space in our hearts: God.

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O come, all ye faithless

By Boyd Tonkin

Good, say the atheists, about time. I disagree. I think that understanding that there is something higher than us — that we are part of a greater pattern, that a higher intelligence is at work, that we are not in charge and that this is good. I think that without this understanding we find ourselves back in the garden, tasting the apple all over again, every day of our lives. We choose self over other, control over communion, power over sacrifice. Of course we do: we all do. We want to walk that way. But I think we can see now where it is leading us.

Like I say, it is ridiculous to write about religion. Ridiculous for me, anyway. But there is nothing else I can say today. It is deep winter, but some light is rising. It has been rising for a long time. Everybody should celebrate today, whatever they choose to raise a glass to. It has been a hard year. I will try to turn my scattered mind, before the feast and after, to the words that made us, and which still linger in the air, waiting to settle on the holy and the profane, the weak and the strong, the willing and the broken and the unsuspecting:

 Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.