The death of the desire to win

Are we en route to androgyny?

I have long believed—imagined?—that as humanity evolves we’ll become androgynes. I’ve not deeply studied the matter as did Ursula K. Le Guin in her landmark The Left Hand of Darkness, nor did my idea originate with her, but it has seemed to me that it would be a kind of reconciliation.

The late scholar Harold Bloom, an admirer of Le Guin who engaged in a lively exchange of letters with her in the last months of her life, explores her description of androgenization in The Bright Book of Life, Alfred A. Knopf, 2020.

Along the evolutionary path we follow we’re ambushed by troglodytes like Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the five liars in black robes in our highest court. Any sort of reconciliation of our distinct parts is loathsome to them. They seek total male dominance, which means a permanent state of triumphalism and bloodshed.

Sigmund Freud believed we can never shake off our early sexual experiences, never transcend them. Taoists, like Le Guin, Jungians and many others, challenge this view. My life, and that of many others, is a quest for transcendence. Putin and Trump, if not bushwhackers are dark impediments, pitfalls, traps.

I’ve been very good at selecting role models, equally good at falling short of them. My sexual life has been peradventjurous; in it I have found epiphany, sometimes ecstasy. but more often calamity.

I say this in the belief that none of us dwell in a permanent state, There is an ebb and a flow to each life, and a slow rolling wave of human evolution. Perhaps we will become another species entirely, and if so. I pray that our female and male selves will have become durable love affairs, engines of high adventure, and, above all, a celebratory absence of the desire to win.