How often do you think about t̶h̶e̶ ̶R̶o̶m̶a̶n̶ ̶E̶m̶p̶i̶r̶e̶ Purgatory?

Too often, in my case, so I'm leaving for pastures new

A reasonable analogy for Rarely Certain’s upcoming vibe

Readership doubled in year 3 and RC just passed 1,500 subscribers, so what better moment to rock the boat.

Two reasons:

Things have changed on Substack. When Rarely Certain began, connecting different approaches to sensemaking with personal wellbeing was a niche topic. Also, former members of the leftish relinquishing leftishism as a totalising worldview were still a novelty.

So RC was a bit different then, but recently less so.

That changes today. Well, next week, actually.

There will be blood up the walls. Welcome to occasional persona non grata and general weirdness. Metaphysics, love, sex and philosophy. That kind of thing as well as look how stupid both sides are in this example of The Latest Controversy.

Plus as special offer at the end.

But, as usual, something in the n̶e̶w̶s̶ noise to talk about, before things eventually get more interesting.

We live in Mansoul 🧐

In Alan Moore's beautiful sprawling novel Jerusalem there is a 'place' called Mansoul.

Mansoul is a bit like purgatory in Christian theology or the bardo in Tibetan Buddhism as a place of transition between earthly life and a higher state of existence.

It's where you get tested, judged, purified and transformed in preparation for a more exalted state of being.

I have this sense of maturing liberal progressive culture* as a similar kind of hinterland between the material realm and a spiritual Eden. It's where we go en route from corporeal life to Paradise or Hell.

[* The occasionally sniffy references in RC to 'liberal progressive culture' do not signal a 'post-liberal' standpoint. The post-liberal neo-reactionary movement has worthwhile things to say, but I'm not signed up there. I like living in a liberal progressive culture, while recognising that it comes with several negative consequences. These include inevitable equal and opposite reactions such as the current riots Britain, as a gnarly segment of the population attacks mosques because a British-born child of Rwandan migrants went on a child-killing spree]

A stifling combination of infantilising hyper-feely culture and outright lying everywhere one turns squeezes us into this liminal living space. A between kind of place.

Personally, the worst thing that flows from the conditions we live under is that it rubs off on me.

A pernicious influence of the culture is that I become dishonest too.

Honestly, if you knew me well and then read the last dating profile I posted, you'd laugh and reach for a sick bag. It's all about how I know I'm supposed to be and not how I really am.

(More on this, exclusively for paying subscribers, soon because it's relevant)

So, basically, it's time to fully come out as one of mature progressive culture's malcontents.

It will be fun. If you like that sort of thing.

What does our Mansoul look like?

It's a place where reality is decided for you, by those who have amassed the most influence and wield the lions share of political, cultural, informational and commercial power.

And it's where teams line up to out-shout the opposition and masturbate over their respective dogmas.

Here things happen that make you feel like you just have to know where you stand, when actually there is often insufficient information to stand anywhere.

It's all noise and ritual, while everyone sorts themselves out into the queues for Heaven or Hell (as the tribes see theirs and their opponents' destinies).

Much of it is little more than entertainment. A big show. Bread and circuses for those of us insufficiently occupied with meaningful pursuits, mistaking our personal 'values' for manna which we are obliged to distribute among the masses.

There is always something going on with this.

What did you think of that boxer breaking the other one's nose at the Olympics?

You think they're a man? How interesting.

You're confident they're a woman. Thanks for sharing.

It's remarkable how everybody knew All The Facts when there was actually a dearth of facts.

The reason I can confidently assert this is that I looked for the smoking gun of maleness and the only thing I saw was that someone of somewhat dubious reputation from a defunct and corrupt organisation said last year that Imane Khelif has a Y chromosome.

Aaand they’re off …

'If there's a Y it's a guy' goes the chorus of people who have no idea whether Khelif (who has been beaten by women in the ring on several occasions) actually does have a Y chromosome and who I can confidently predict have never identified the type of gametes Khelif's body produces.

Purgatory is where this doesn't matter, though.

It doesn't matter whether Khelif is a man or a woman, or some kind of theoretical social construct arising from a disorder, because there's a side that simply loves and celebrates that Khelif is 'genderqueer'.

For those people possession of male sex characteristics wouldn't matter anyway, even if it did give that boxer an advantage over the average unambiguously female fighter.

Because that is 'progress', you see, which is always A Good Thing because we must always be Kind about differences between humans and never mention any problems arising from certain characteristics.

These are the same champions of differentness who refuse to acknowledge that anything at all is afoot when a man asserts that he's become a woman and suddenly wins all the cycling and swimming medals in his new sex class. Then you are a bigot for noticing that there might just be a fairness problem arising from conflating gender identity with biological sex.

I'm bored of it.

So are all the participants, in truth, because they'll be yelling about something else by next week, which will also Feel Very Important for them to share their feelings on.

And I can't even blame either side, really, because I often feel the same. I just check it, when I notice a difference between what I want to be true and what I know to be the case.

No. I am not in a position to know Imane Khelif's sex and nor were any of the online participants in the latest furore, as far as I could see.

At first I thought about writing some rousing phrases about it that would definitely go down well with many readers.

This was a contender at one point:

"The grotesque spectacle of a man bludgeoning a woman to the canvas in the greatest festival of sport on Earth"

Never mind that I didn’t know the actual sex of said 'man'. It literally wouldn't have mattered, because it sounded great.

Or I could have lined up with the progressives and said something like:

"What better proof of the rampant misogyny still ruling the world than the online denigration and bullying of a successful woman for being a powerful boxer instead of conforming to the patriarchal stereotype of being weak and looking girly"

Both those statements would be convenient flattenings, based on theory and rhetoric, which would both go down nicely, depending on who was reading.

Part of my objection to all this hot air is that it's just so damned banal and unoriginal. Like almost every manifestation of the Culture War.

You think I'm signalling holier than thou, rising above the fray to dunk on everyone. Thinking I'm superior.

It might be nice if I did feel that way. Ego inflation can be pleasant.

But I'm really no different. I just LOVE to feel aggrieved and judgemental.

I originally set out to find an incontrovertible argument in support of the proposition that a man broke a woman's nose at the Olympics and was a bit annoyed when I couldn't.

I wanted my priors reinforced, because I scorn gender ideology. Along with many other isms, including feminism, racism (pro and anti variants), Islamism, socialism, communism, science-ism and every other framework of normative principles that agitators would demand that I adopt.

Confirming the notion of projection, my dislike of all this bullshit is because I see a deeply dull aspect of myself reflected back.

It's deeply dull because it's unoriginal and incurious.

In this instance the incuriosity shown by the warring sides relates to a 3rd and more useful question to answer.

Instead of arguing about whether Imane Khelif is a woman or a man (which neither side can possibly know, without intimate knowledge of that person's material structure) the more interesting question is what to do about athletes with Developmental Sex Disorders that everyone knows sometimes make them different from the sex they identify as.

If this runs to different athletic performance than those without a DSD it is obviously relevant.

We don't fulminate over whether someone who takes performance-enhancing substances is male or female. We object to the un-level playing field it creates.

But these are the rules of Purgatory. Maybe Imane Khelif has differences that confer an advantage over boxers who are unambiguously women and maybe she doesn't.* I personally need more evidence than a complaint from a beaten fighter that a punch was particularly hard, though.

[* Yes, I went there. I used the female pronoun. This is because I'm persuaded by the case made by people like evolutionary biologist Catherine Hawkins that sex is binary and I'm so far unpersuaded by what I've seen online that Khelif is a man. I am not playing by the rules of Mansoul]

The more interesting point than whether someone is a man or a woman is whether they are unfairly advantaged by some misfiring of biology.

What if one of those misfirings sometimes produced people with legs long enough to complete a 100 metre sprint in one step? I'm willing to bet we'd still all be arguing about whether they were men or women.

Practical questions are overshadowed by moral assertions in Mansoul. And the purpose of life isn't to answer questions. It's to win. To be on the right side. The side of the Good. The side that prevails. 

In purgatory the vanishingly small proportion of human beings with Intersex conditions and other DSDs has become a political obsession.

Stop to think about this for a moment.

Such has been the influence of a few (typically, but not exclusively) French theorists that it actually feels edgy to say in passing that you think someone is a man or a woman.

As I finally 'came out' with a pronoun for Imane Khelif I could imagine disappointed conservatives rolling their eyes and thinking I've been captured by the Woke. And Woke-influenced people feeling approval that I'm 'on-side', at least on The Latest Thing.

This will never stop and I will never stop wanting to complain about it unless I write more often about  things.

So that's what's coming. More other things. Some of them quite personal and possibly 'brave'.

In no particular order ...

• What is love, actually (and how I realised)

• Dating websites: a perfect feedback loop for lies (including mine)

• Jungian theory seems simultaneously amazing and cultish (perfect RC fodder then)

• Trees as teachers (it's to do with symbols and vibes)

• Symbols (it's to do with Jung)

• Escaping the binary of fact and meaning (because fact is overrated)

• The Palestinian question (a confession I wouldn’t make over dinner with friends)

• Why love/hate relationships are good (give me hybrid vigour over harmony)

• On identifying either with science or religion (naive false dichotomies are dull)

• The finger of ego on the clitoris of dogma (feels good, but satisfaction is short-lived - plus I just like that sentence)

• Perception and what perceives what (possibly not what you automatically think)

• Fear of 'intellectual' sneering (some common sense things really aren't stupid - just ask my neighbour's dog)

• What’s with the infantilising public signs and ‘cute’ messages everywhere all of a sudden (something I noticed recently in Britain)

And more.

To c̶e̶l̶e̶b̶r̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶'̶e̶x̶c̶i̶t̶i̶n̶g̶'̶ ̶n̶e̶w̶ ̶d̶i̶r̶e̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ encourage more conversions there's a time-limited special offer to upgrade before at least half of Rarely Certain disappears behind a paywall. You'll get 50% discount on a 12 month subscription if you jump on by August 31st.

Thanks in advance to those who'll stick around. And especially to those who will help me to keep going.

And if you just want to say ‘I sometimes enjoy your stuff’ but don’t want the commitment of a subscription there is always an option to

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If you wondered what the hell the heading up top was, it’s a reference to this meme.