Sunday, January 10, 2016

The wrong resistance

I've been trying to find feminists speaking out against what happened in Cologne, without much success. However, one story has emerged of an artist, Milo Moire, who protested by standing naked outside Cologne Cathedral. Her explanation for her action was revealing:
"I stand for women's freedom to move freely. For the things we've achieved in the past 50 years – for women's emancipation," MoirĂ© told Bild.

"I don't want people to trample on these values and for women to have to adapt themselves. Women must be able to live their values of freedom, with self-determination and self-awareness," she said.

Asked why she had decided to protest naked, Moiré said "I am firmly convinced that women will no longer be treated as sex objects when a naked woman is treated with as much respect as a clothed one."

You might think that this stands in opposition to what happened in Cologne, because it is promoting Western values rather than Islamic ones. But really it is just more of what led to Cologne in the first place.

If the primary value you stand for is a freedom of individual self-determination, then that will include not just a freedom to stand naked outside Cologne Cathedral, but also a freedom to decide in what country you will live and what nationality you will be. Which means a freedom of movement across borders. Which means millions of young Arab and North African men moving into German cities. Which means events in Cologne.

So Milo Moire is part of the problem and not the solution. To be part of the solution means recognising that there are things of value in life - goods - apart from individual choice, that individuals and communities are rightly oriented to.

If you are a religious traditionalist, you might see these goods as real essences, i.e. of being inherently good in their nature. You might, for instance, see a national tradition as a distinct expression of a human collective that has an essential quality that is good, and that rightly draws those belonging to it to a sense of love for it and a willingness to defend it in order to pass it on to future generations.

Secular traditionalists might not see things in terms of essences, but they can still recognise the value of distinct cultures; of the human need for identity and belonging; and of the wisdom of maintaining strength and security through some degree of homogeneity.

In a liberal society, none of these goods, religious or secular, are allowed to matter, because the overriding value is always thought to be the one held to by Milo Moire.

The freedom to stand naked outside a cathedral is a dubious and trivial one. The freedom not to be assaulted as a result of open door migration policies is a more serious one. If all you focus on is individual self-determination you get to have the first, trivial kind of freedom. If you want the more serious freedoms to survive, you have to be willing to take a larger view of what kinds of goods matter and how they can be upheld.

6 comments:

  1. I'm not impressed with this woman's actions.

    They are selfish and manipulative and attention seeking. She puts on this parade with the assumption that someone else will pay and defend the civilization and people that made her existence and display possible.

    But she won;t be paying for it, or defending it, she's using it.

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  2. If you want the more serious freedoms to survive, you have to be willing to take a larger view of what kinds of goods matter and how they can be upheld.

    Since people in general don't show this kind of willingness, one can only conclude that they don't particularly care about the more serious freedoms.

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  3. This is the same narcissistic woman who stood naked astride two ladders while dropping paint filled eggs out of her vagina - the female version of degenerate artist Keith Boadwee. The elites deigned to call their behaviour painting.

    Milo's moral leadership clearly matches her expertise in the arts. Such is the state of elite western culture.

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  4. Feminists are tools of the neocons. They are employed by the neocons to say and do before the media what the neocons wish them to do and say. The naked stunt is a distraction intended to focus the attention of the media and the sheep on anything other than the serious matter of a jihad being waged upon the European population by a conquering army.

    The term "secularist traditionalist" is an oxymoron. There is no such group of people. Secularists are liberals who reject the supernatural and the divine order. Some secularists are on the more benign end of the liberal spectrum and by some magical thinking believe that they can deny the supernatural and preserve a form of social order. This is fanciful because the progress of revolution is linear and once started is unstoppable. Any society which departs from the supernatural and divine order creates a process of continuous revolution which proceeds until destruction.

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    1. I agree that secularism does, in practice, usually lead to modernists rather than traditionalists. Even so, I think we need to help those without religion toward a non-liberal politics. I don't believe that it is theoretically impossible to do. Think of it this way. If you have a religious world view, then a sense of meaning in life comes from the idea that we are created in the image of God. A non-religious person can't get this kind of meaning and so some of them centuries ago flipped the traditional notion on its head and claimed that human meaning and dignity came from our freedom to be self-created (rather than created by God) through our own free acts of will. It's a nice sounding formula, albeit a mostly empty one (I guess the one thing going for it is that humans do have more of a capacity to self-consciously subvert our own nature than do other creatures in the animal kingdom, so this is a kind of distinction - a way of making humans special compared to, say, horses). In order for the non-religious to fit into a non-liberal traditionalism, it's necessary to reject this particular step of making a freedom to self-determine the overriding good in life that is thought to give our lives dignity and meaning.

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    2. Mark your position is ill thought through and incoherent. Tradition, like the Bible, is for all time. It is eternal. "Modernists" are a brand word for liberals. Those who reject the supernatural, the divine order are those who reject the traditional order given by God.

      It is not possible to make them accept a traditional order because they have rejected the divine basis of that order. There may be elements of that order which they like but that is not the same as accepting it as the basis for the foundation of society.

      Liberals range in a spectrum of disorder from the mild to the extreme. They are all enemies of traditional society.

      " In order for the non-religious to fit into a non-liberal traditionalism, it's necessary to reject this particular step of making a freedom to self-determine the overriding good in life that is thought to give our lives dignity and meaning."

      The above sentence is totally irrational. To reject self determination, one must accept that one is made in the image of God. One accepts God or one does not, the distinction is final and complete. Read Psalm 1. It explains this concisely.

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