The Longhouse Meme

What are we allowed to talk about and who is allowed to talk?

First Things published a piece by an Anon named Lom3z. It employs the image of the Longhouse to suggest that there is a deep imbalance between masculine and feminine forces, leading to catastrophic real-life disasters ranging from a sex imbalance of college degrees, increasingly bizarre HR mandates, and most notoriously, the failed Covid response. We are suffering from an excess of Den Motherism—a specific kind of feminine energy and organization. It is not exactly typical of most First Things fare.

The essay is good, even restrained, really. Lom3z notes that things are broken: “The Great and the Good have become the mediocre and the lame.” Of course, his claim, here, is not exactly groundbreaking, but it affords an opportunity to ask why. Why do we seem content to “die on history’s hospice bed” rather than muster the energy and will to change course? 

Enter the Longhouse meme. 

I’m pretty online, but apparently not THAT online. I do my best to watch and absorb and take in as much heterodox and dissident thought as I can, but I missed the emergence of the “Longhouse” as a meme or metonym in the alt-spaces of twitter. The essay resonated with what I have sensed and seen. Our conversation—about men and women, gender and sex—is schizoid. For one thing, the gender madness has devoured nearly the whole discourse, and basic confusions and lack of distinctions do not help. But even more importantly, we have lost our capacity to get along as men and women. We should not only want to get along (as no more important than the continuation of the species is at stake) but in learning how to get along we afford a future. (Check out this podcast with Auron McIntyre and Alex Kaschuta). We need to figure it out. Sloganeering has not been helpful. You may recall “The future is female” from an election cycle or two ago. This simply can not be. Forces seem arrayed against this ancient détente between the sexes, and the falling marriage rates and falling birthrates are a consequence of our having lost the civilizational thread. The scripts we have inherited from our Boomer forebears have proven to be disastrous for Millenials and Gen Zeds. We are stuck. We are unmarried. We are unfruitful.

We are stuck, Lom3z says, in the Longhouse.

The meme is itself amorphous and unstable: 

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. 

With the nod to Charles Taylor’s helpful framing of a “social imaginary” we are making an attempt to critique what we all live in and move in and have our being in. Our “social imaginary” is sick and sclerotic, suffering from a death-wish, exchanging some sub-optimal levels of security, for a lost vitality. These false comforts are a trade off. And we are not good at accounting our trade-offs in our late Liberal disintegration—a disintegration that is a feature, not a bug.

In laying out his argument, Lom3z invokes Jonathan Haidt & Greg Lukianoff, Thomas Edsall and Joyce Benenson. These are pretty mainstream sources, and I find them convincing and unobjectionable. But Lom3z invokes them in order to take aim at distinctively feminine methods of aggression management over and against typically masculine methods.

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.

He goes on to say that the “Den Mother”—the avatar of the Longhouse—is as often male as female.

His primary concern is how this overemphasis and overcorrection will effect our ability to fix the broken political world (since it is an expression of the broken social imaginary). The Pandemic response was…revealing. The Cult of Safetyism ran point:

Think of the litany of violations of our basic rights to personal freedom and choice over the last two years that were justified on the basis of harm reduction. The economy, our dying loved ones, our faith practices, our children's education, all of it served up on the altar of Safetyism. Think of the Covid Karen: Triple-masked. Quad-boosted. Self-confined for months on end. Hyperventilating in panic as she ventures to the grocery store for the first time in a year. Then scolding the rest of us for wanting to send our kids back to school, and demanding instead that we all abide by her hypochondria, on pain of punishment by the bureaucratic state.

So, all in all, it is a good piece, seeking to kickstart a conversation about masculinity and femininity. We NEED to have this conversation. As he warns in the denouement,

Passages to better places must be found. Places where the true, the good, and the beautiful may be chased with abandon, where the human spirit has not been hobbled. This is not a call to adopt pickup artist buffoonery or the shallow machismo of an Andrew Tate, or any of the myriad pretensions of masculinity that one sees on the right. Such pursuits, even when motivated by a rejection of Longhouse norms, are equally deluded, and diminish one's higher nature. 

He tells us that these “buffoons” are attractive to young people, young people who notice the adult absurdities that they all lived through the past three years. Adults kid themselves in thinking that the kids don’t judge us harshly. We shut down their schools, we sanded their skateparks, we pricked them with an experimental gene-therapy that none of them needed. And when someone like Andrew Tate goes live and says a few true things in a cluster of really stupid and malign things, they pay attention. You may not like Tate, but I guarantee you many of your boys do.

Our kids know that we are not having serious conversations. They know that they’ve been stuck in a hellscape run by Dolores Umbridges. So how are we going to start having real talk. Some feminists in the UK are doing just that. If you have not read Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, go buy it now. And when Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress (out in April) go buy it and read it. They are brave women, having brave public discussions about all the third rails. It will be interesting to see when more mainstream type men will venture out into these choppy waters. If they do not, the above buffoons will dominate the space.

But many more mainstream intellectuals balked.

Notre Dame professor and author and leader in the post-liberal space, Patrick Deneen was “disappointed”:

What? Nietzsche-lite?

There is no way that he read the same article I did, and I suspect he did not read it at all. I like Professor Deneen’s work, and his Why Liberalism Failed is a fantastic eye-opening intellectual genealogy that helped me see our present much clearer. So why the agita? Why this strange response? Why the disappointment.

I wanted to ask him.

He sends out a tweet (a rarity, I might add, as he has 38k followers with a grand total of 263 tweets) and locks his replies. What a missed opportunity to think out loud and in public. If we are trying to have a necessary conversation, why not join in? From what I can gather, he is upset that FT provided a platform for an Anon. If you disagree with something he said, say it. If you think the Longhouse meme is inaccurate, say it and explain why. If you think we are NOT stuck in Den Mother hell, then say it.

Why this reaction? Are the sources quoted the wrong ones? Are only certain people allowed to engage in such discussions?

As usual, the swarm jumped in and tried to shame the editors with versions of “how dare you?” and other Anon’s like Peachy Keenan joined in to call out the pearl-clutching. She is certainly not afraid to call them as she sees them. Some of his friends told him to block some of the more spirited but fair rebuttals.

Public intellectuals should be better at this, but alas.

As I said above and I'll repeat now: we need to have real conversations. Gate-kept conversations and rampant tone-policing are what give fuel to both the buffoons and the Den Mothers of the Longhouse. I would encourage the likes of Professor Deneen to engage in the conversation rather than pronouncing the efforts as "Nietzsche-lite." Is this a turf war? Is it about market share? If the correct people won’t have the conversations, if they will play an elaborate game of intellectual pretend, then we leave it to the dark side.

You might not like the memes, but memes are powerful transmitters of cultural capital.

Ask your kids.

I’m disappointed that we are being told what kinds of conversations we are allowed to have. Let’s not skip this one.