Rod Dreher: Into The Longhouse

[Kamaji]

Into The Longhouse

Is American society is dominated by social norms 'centering feminine needs and feminine methods?'

Rod Dreher
Feb 23, 2023

How have I missed the whole Longhouse controversy? It started when First Things published this essay by the pseudonymous writer L0m3z, in which he defines what he means by "the longhouse." Excerpt:

In certain corners of the online right you encounter a term that is at first glance puzzling, “The Longhouse.” Maybe you have heard this term. Maybe you have wondered what it means. Maybe this term means nothing to you. Even for those of us who use it, the Longhouse evades easy summary. Ambivalent to its core, the term is at once politically earnest and the punchline to an elaborate in-joke; its definition must remain elastic, lest it lose its power to lampoon the vast constellation of social forces it reviles. It refers at once to our increasingly degraded mode of technocratic governance; but also to wokeness, to the “progressive,” “liberal,” and “secular” values that pervade all major institutions. More fundamentally, the Longhouse is a metonym for the disequilibrium afflicting the contemporary social imaginary.

The historical longhouse was a large communal hall, serving as the social focal point for many cultures and peoples throughout the world that were typically more sedentary and agrarian. In online discourse, this historical function gets generalized to contemporary patterns of social organization, in particular the exchange of privacy—and its attendant autonomy—for the modest comforts and security of collective living.

The most important feature of the Longhouse, and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother. More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. Many from left, right, and center have made note of this shift. In 2010, Hanna Rosin announced “The End of Men.” Hillary Clinton made it a slogan of her 2016 campaign: “The future is female.” She was correct.

As of 2022, women held 52 percent of professional-managerial roles in the U.S. Women earn more than 57 percent of bachelor degrees, 61 percent of master’s degrees, and 54 percent of doctoral degrees. And because they are overrepresented in professions, such as human resource management (73 percent) and compliance officers (57 percent), that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally.

So the Longhouse is a metaphor for the over-feminization of our common life. It doesn't strike me as all that controversial to raise the issue. I see that Patrick Deneen chastised First Things for publishing it:

https://twitter.com/PatrickDeneen/status/1627387391588671489

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If Patrick Deneen fears that mainstreaming Longhouse discourse opens the door to Nietzscheanism, I would say first that we should be aware of that danger. But more importantly, we should be aware that failing to have these serious discussions only drives them to the Andrew Tate margins -- which, as many of us who had no idea who Tate was till his arrest learned, is not at all the margins for males of a certain age demographic. See, this is why I try to pay attention, however limited, to the discourse to the Right of me, even when I find it distasteful (but not when I find it wicked). How do I know which topics I've made taboo for myself, and whether that taboo is justified, if I don't know what these people are saying? I recognize that there should be limits on intellectual discourse, to keep ideas like racism and anti-Semitism taboo. It is not clear to me, though, why the Longhouse discourse, at least as presented in that column, violates a taboo. It seems to follow logically from the standpoint of the man quoted in the Roberts piece from 2016, about why he voted for Trump.

One more time: if we don't talk about ways the dominance of feminized categories in public discourse and policies harm men, and hurt the common good, we are guaranteeing the radicalization of a new generation of men. Real problems cannot be suppressed forever.

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Source:  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/into-the-longhouse/