Men and the Matrix
The latest issue of the New Yorker has a rich, complex interview with the Wachowski siblings, science fiction storytellers who created the Matrix franchise.
If you don’t know it, the Matrix series imagines a world where the reality around us is virtual, fluid, imaginary.
They have a new film, “Cloud Atlas,” that traces the paths of a network of human souls that migrate through different bodies, points of history, stories.
One additional texture here is that Larry Wachowski has re-emerged publicly as Lana Wachowski. She has undergone that suitably science-fictiony process known as “trans-gendering.”
That cluster of data points merged weirdly in my head this week as I was reading a series of high profile articles about the cultural and economic struggles of men in our society. In his review of Hanna Rosin’s new book, “The Failure of Men,” David Brooks writes this:
It [the uncertain position of men in modern society] has to do with adaptability. Women, Rosin argues, are like immigrants who have moved to a new country. They see a new social context, and they flexibly adapt to new circumstances.
Men are like immigrants who have physically moved to a new country but who have kept their minds in the old one. They speak the old language. They follow the old mores. Men are more likely to be rigid; women are more fluid.
This is, on one level, pop psychology. But I think there’s a lot of truth here as well. We live in a frenetic, evolving, complex culture, one where all concepts — but particularly masculinity, femininity, sexuality and gender roles — are being re-negotiated in real time.
It is, in other words, a matrix. It’s a shifting and complicated pattern. This is incredibly challenging stuff and for some men in particular, it’s absolutely terrifying.
While thinking about this stuff, I came across this conversation on the Christian Bible Network, where evangelist Pat Robertson is trying to offer advice to a man whose wife clearly doesn’t love him anymore.
The guy is on the front lines of this cultural moment, begging for advice and guidance.
Robertson laments the fact that physical violence is no longer an option to resolve their domestic crisis. “I don’t think we condone wife-beating these days,” he says, “but something has got to be done to make her [more obedient and respectful].”
He goes on to describe the wife as “a rebellious child” who won’t “submit to authority.” (Watching his female co-host field these comments is worth a click-through.)
I know that sounds Medieval — on one level, it’s sort of a conversation-ender. But I think it’s also an important reminder of just how profound this shift is.
Having a black man in the White House is revolutionary. Having women out-earn and (in many situations) out-confidence their husbands, that’s intimate and for many people viscerally gut-wrenching.
One of my favorite writers, Iain M. Banks, has penned a series of science fiction novels — The Culture sequence — where he envisions a future where we have moved past all this, where identity is in a constant and comfortable state of “trans” that is no longer defined by gender or race.
His exploration of what that might feel like is riveting, one of those rare “speculative” fiction experiments that really might be giving us a sense of what our future will look like. But we’re not there yet.
Still, I think Rosin and Brooks and Wachowski and Banks are all right about one thing: It’s an adaptation moment for men.
Not “let’s behave better because it’s the right thing and enlightened men will do it” — that was the inflection point of the 1970s. This is more of a “we have to change or get left behind” situation.
Does that mean matriarchy, as Rosin suggests. I don’t think so. In fact, the idea that there is a clean, zero-sum-gain continuum between partiarchy and matriarchy is, well, weirdly masuciline.
Instead it means men being more fluid, more flexible, and learning to accept that every day will bring situations and relationships that can’t be controlled — or, to borrow Robertson’s phrase, can’t be disciplined.
But maybe, in the end, it’s Neo who says it best. “I know that you’re afraid,” he says. “You’re afraid of change. I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin.”
What Neo promises is, fundamentally, a world of constant uncertainty, negotiation and (yes) opportunity, a “world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.”
Lack of control is a part of life regardless of the century. To the degree that men and women can accept that is the degree that they can have more peace.
And here I was just hoping to have a good cup of coffee, without finding a cockroach in it.
Adaptability has always been the key to survival.
Neither the Earth nor the World has ever been stagnant. Stagnant is just another word for death. Chaos is the proof of life.
The good news for men is that most women would still like to marry a man. The bad news for men is that only a couple of men are needed to maintain the human population.
Sometimes change leads to improvement.
Sometimes change leads to destruction.
There is a counterbalancing social fact that is left out of (at least David Brook’s version) the story. Women still get stuck with more childcare than men, so maybe its only fair that they are physically and emotionally better at sitting through the boring classrooms that have become the gateway to the middle class.
Hahn, women don’t get stuck with child care if they avoid getting pregnant for men who are too lazy of too incompetent to find work.
Maybe this is why the Republican Part is so against birth control. They want to marry women and get them pregnant so that she brings home to pay check and they can stay home playing video games.
Klein – The problem seems not to be that men are lazy and incompetent but that they cant sit still and they havent figured out yet that just because they are men, they are entitled to do better than women.
It is ironic that men can sit still in front a video game console for hundreds of hours straight, but cant handle a 50 minute math class.
Kathy is right, change is neutral, it can be very good or very bad. What we can’t really stop is the process of change. Women make more than they used to, in general they do better in school than males do (with the exception of math and science), and they are making more money than the used to although it is still not at parity with men.
So as a man I can somehow fight this or try the illusion of control; or I can accept it and be happy with these good things, which I gladly do! The same goes with childcare, I have more free time so I have spent much more with our children than my wife. How is that bad?
But love requires fidelity, commitment and sacrifice, to the degree that these concepts and really love itself are done away with I think that sort of change can only be bad for all of us.
Someday we will be free of generalizations…
Oh, and did you see that Lana Del Rey will be posing nude? Apparently the Matrix still values titillation above all.
This thread is going down the rabbit hole…
Change I suppose is daunting to many or perhaps to most of us. I’ve been in a career in which the only way to thrive is to plan on change tomorrow breaking everything you’ve built today (realtime telephony-communications/data-acquisition software). One must build into the code means for it to cast away assumptions implanted on the day it first goes out the door, as surely after it goes into use in the field the target will have already moved.
For some time now, I’ve viewed these systems designs and the external conditions that place pressure on them to evolve as a metaphor for how the individual must get along in this world. Combine that with my burden of an artist’s temperament, and you’re looking at someone who is rarely satisfied with anything and is willing to toss the bugger out and start over :)
I haven’t focused on exactly how women face this fluid new world and why being newer to the role of the “individual” gives them an advantage or at least a head start, but what comes to mind often is that two of the most successful software engineers I ever hired were women. They seemed more dispassionate about their relationship with the product (i.e., this “thing” we were designing was a lessor part of their lives and they did not appear to seek identity through it) and thus were a bit more objective. I’m talking decades ago here, btw — seemingly before the post-modern phenomenon Brian identifies.
Btw, the particular page for the New Yorker article at the moment appears to be this: BEYOND THE MATRIX
I think my favourite part of the article was this: “The crew…erupted in a din of professional efficacy, preparing for the next shot, while Hanks returned to his chair to sip coffee from an NPR cup”
:–)