I agree that birth order inversely correlating with capability is the most plausible resolution of this puzzle, though I need to check the effect sizes more studiously, and am still haunted by the ghost of Judith Rich Harris.
As for the traits being selected, we obviously don’t know, though the idea is that selecting for homosexuality gifts the selectors an obvious manner of control of whomever makes it into the college of cardinals.
I would be surprised if that was the primary homosexuality-enriching step, given that reporting has always been that quite a lot of low-level parish-level priests are also gay. (Note, for example, how many of the sexual abuse scandal victims were boys/men.) I would guess that it operates fairly steadily at all levels, starting from simply which young boys opt for the priesthood (known to be a demand and difficult occupation even if the celibacy requirement is, for you, not so onerous) and operating from there; if I had to guess where the biggest enrichment is, it’d be at the ‘leaving your country for the Vatican’ step, given how notoriously gay the Vatican is. So going there suggests either that you are gay (and so the buggery isn’t a bug, it’s a feature) or you are highly ambitious and don’t mind it (or are willing to exploit it and again, not a bug but a feature).
I went to a Jesuit high school in the ’80′s. There were some priests who were, in the language of the day, “flaming” homosexuals. They ran the choir and theater programs, and it seemed pretty obvious that if they were outside the priesthood, they would have been gay. One of my classmates later became a priest, and he’s openly out to another alum who’s gay. While this is anecdata, there was a wide river of Denial, usu assuming someone “couldn’t be gay” if they had taken the vow of celibacy. The Church’s sex negativity makes any open discussion nearly impossible, and it’s a hard pitch to heterosexuals that they should foreswear sex for their entire life. Paul Pilgram, SJ, our principal, was later exposed as a pedophile, although he was not considered one of the “flamers” at our HS
Yeah, I think a lot of anecdata point to the fact that a pretty significant portion of the clergy are gay. The most interesting question in my view is how and why that portion might rise to very high levels ~80% once you get to Rome.
You could compare to other strongly meritocratic organizations (US Senate? Fortune 500 C-level employees?) to see whether the church is very different.
That would be tricky because you are comparing apples and oranges. Consider that for the USA, there are only 11 cardinals (of 252 worldwide), while there are 10x more federal senators at any moment (I don’t know if there would be more or less total: senators tend to be much younger but cardinals also tend to be long-lived), and I can’t even guess how many ‘Fortune 500 C-level employees’ there might be given corporate turnover and the size of many ‘C-suites’ - tens of thousands, maybe? So your suggestions span ~1-3 orders of magnitude less selectivity than cardinals do.
Maybe we could look a 4-star generals, of which there are under 40 total in the US? Not quite as selective, but a more similar process. (Or perhaps around as selective given the number of US Catholics, vs. US citizens.)
As for the traits being selected, we obviously don’t know, though the idea is that selecting for homosexuality gifts the selectors an obvious manner of control of whomever makes it into the college of cardinals.
I don’t know what you have in mind there. If they’re 80% gay, they can hardly threaten each other with exposure. At the most, the accusation would be a smokescreen, transparent to all the insiders, for those who already have the power to dispose of an enemy. Cf. the exclusion of Marine Le Pen from standing for President of France, on the grounds of an “embezzlement” which it appears that every party freely engages in.
I agree that birth order inversely correlating with capability is the most plausible resolution of this puzzle, though I need to check the effect sizes more studiously, and am still haunted by the ghost of Judith Rich Harris.
As for the traits being selected, we obviously don’t know, though the idea is that selecting for homosexuality gifts the selectors an obvious manner of control of whomever makes it into the college of cardinals.
I would be surprised if that was the primary homosexuality-enriching step, given that reporting has always been that quite a lot of low-level parish-level priests are also gay. (Note, for example, how many of the sexual abuse scandal victims were boys/men.) I would guess that it operates fairly steadily at all levels, starting from simply which young boys opt for the priesthood (known to be a demand and difficult occupation even if the celibacy requirement is, for you, not so onerous) and operating from there; if I had to guess where the biggest enrichment is, it’d be at the ‘leaving your country for the Vatican’ step, given how notoriously gay the Vatican is. So going there suggests either that you are gay (and so the buggery isn’t a bug, it’s a feature) or you are highly ambitious and don’t mind it (or are willing to exploit it and again, not a bug but a feature).
I went to a Jesuit high school in the ’80′s. There were some priests who were, in the language of the day, “flaming” homosexuals. They ran the choir and theater programs, and it seemed pretty obvious that if they were outside the priesthood, they would have been gay. One of my classmates later became a priest, and he’s openly out to another alum who’s gay.
While this is anecdata, there was a wide river of Denial, usu assuming someone “couldn’t be gay” if they had taken the vow of celibacy. The Church’s sex negativity makes any open discussion nearly impossible, and it’s a hard pitch to heterosexuals that they should foreswear sex for their entire life.
Paul Pilgram, SJ, our principal, was later exposed as a pedophile, although he was not considered one of the “flamers” at our HS
Yeah, I think a lot of anecdata point to the fact that a pretty significant portion of the clergy are gay. The most interesting question in my view is how and why that portion might rise to very high levels ~80% once you get to Rome.
You could compare to other strongly meritocratic organizations (US Senate? Fortune 500 C-level employees?) to see whether the church is very different.
That would be tricky because you are comparing apples and oranges. Consider that for the USA, there are only 11 cardinals (of 252 worldwide), while there are 10x more federal senators at any moment (I don’t know if there would be more or less total: senators tend to be much younger but cardinals also tend to be long-lived), and I can’t even guess how many ‘Fortune 500 C-level employees’ there might be given corporate turnover and the size of many ‘C-suites’ - tens of thousands, maybe? So your suggestions span ~1-3 orders of magnitude less selectivity than cardinals do.
Maybe we could look a 4-star generals, of which there are under 40 total in the US? Not quite as selective, but a more similar process. (Or perhaps around as selective given the number of US Catholics, vs. US citizens.)
A sufficiently high band in the CCP could work.
I don’t know what you have in mind there. If they’re 80% gay, they can hardly threaten each other with exposure. At the most, the accusation would be a smokescreen, transparent to all the insiders, for those who already have the power to dispose of an enemy. Cf. the exclusion of Marine Le Pen from standing for President of France, on the grounds of an “embezzlement” which it appears that every party freely engages in.
Maybe my next substack post will be trying to analyze how the
exposeequilibrium changes as a function of thepercent_gayparameter.