tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68329012024-03-18T14:01:15.468+11:00Oz ConservativeAn Australian traditionalist conservative siteUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2446125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-52080746391512814612024-02-11T10:32:00.003+11:002024-02-11T10:35:35.546+11:00Laurence Fox & the little spheres<p>Aristotle's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnanimity#:~:text=The%20Latin%20word%20magnanimit%C4%81s%20is,the%20modern%20sense%20of%20magnanimity.">idea</a> of the magnanimous, or great-souled, man is not an easy one to accept ("the great-souled man is justified in despising other people"). One aspect of his concept of magnanimity that is easier to relate to is that a great-souled man is willing to stand on the truth. Aristotle thought that such a man would "care more for the truth than for what people will think; and speak and act openly".</p><p>I very much admire the English actor Laurence Fox for being magnanimous in this sense - even though I disagree with his classical liberal politics. Fox recently <a href="https://twitter.com/LozzaFox/status/1755503481627062499">posted</a> his basic political principle on social media and it is simply the classical liberal understanding of individual freedom:</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgoiyFs_rMxrCQW_MUMnKJqTFcWReZ42rBZRUup89-PrqIfFZu3U5gHIGAiKo0slKAFvvWSiKEvDEYN3BlS4gBLsB2KJOtS3hB4KR0bUngDVZ-1aBoLlJBGOraDc82WvzA9YayMsz7PlQfEvSxgd5Z4KsMoyO6c0XxHK49ZDKulyXjDGeCOAZwqFA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="247" data-original-width="909" height="174" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgoiyFs_rMxrCQW_MUMnKJqTFcWReZ42rBZRUup89-PrqIfFZu3U5gHIGAiKo0slKAFvvWSiKEvDEYN3BlS4gBLsB2KJOtS3hB4KR0bUngDVZ-1aBoLlJBGOraDc82WvzA9YayMsz7PlQfEvSxgd5Z4KsMoyO6c0XxHK49ZDKulyXjDGeCOAZwqFA=w640-h174" width="640" /></a></div><p>In such a view, every individual is free to act within their own little sphere, but not to encroach upon anyone else's sphere. The government exists to uphold and police the non-encroachment of our little spheres which is expressed in the language of individual rights.</p><p>I do not think this is an adequate way to conceive of freedom or politics. It is a framework that has signally failed to uphold the strength, vitality and integrity of the Western nations which have adopted it.</p><p>One reason for this is that if your focus is on each person doing whatever they see fit within their own little sphere, then you have already ceded much ground when it comes to upholding the rational, moral or rightly ordered ends of human life. You have already committed to "whatever they see fit" as the umbrella understanding, so it becomes difficult not to fall into neutrality when it comes to the choices people make. </p><p>Fox himself illustrates this difficulty. He wishes in his social media post to make an argument against the trans movement and against the prescription of drugs for ADHD. But the best he can do is to argue against the use of ADHD drugs or trans surgery on children. He cannot take a principled stance when it comes to these issues in general:</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjRwTnvZeKwIfyOUTIOrDwr6ChaTodtr6itDMbjNdKCcaaiTWl-c0VF29pMduSd0A6pmrdlHSj7SmM92OicLmDp3tGHJLa7QKVRpxhd26QdWGg566NEikHiQU6TBpKnJjPOvivDnD2SiRwL-GdtzCRjvKpqKALuqoruUzdHdtnbJjKlYlr5X1lR3A" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="172" data-original-width="850" height="130" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjRwTnvZeKwIfyOUTIOrDwr6ChaTodtr6itDMbjNdKCcaaiTWl-c0VF29pMduSd0A6pmrdlHSj7SmM92OicLmDp3tGHJLa7QKVRpxhd26QdWGg566NEikHiQU6TBpKnJjPOvivDnD2SiRwL-GdtzCRjvKpqKALuqoruUzdHdtnbJjKlYlr5X1lR3A=w640-h130" width="640" /></a></div><br />Note that he feels compelled to underscore his general neutrality: "I've got nothing against adults dosing themselves with drugs. Or even removing their reproductive organs, should they so wish". He adopts this neutral position even though he believes that such outcomes are sad.<p></p><p>I do not think you can uphold a society over time on this basis. We <i>should</i> have at least <i>something</i> against people acting in ways that lead to sad outcomes.</p><p>If the focus is on each person doing whatever they see fit within their own little sphere, then much ground has been conceded when it comes to how we view the telos - the ends or purposes - of human life. If we were confident that there are distinctive, knowable and objectively existing ends of human life, then it would be irrational and uncaring to suggest that individuals should just do "whatever". Once we go with "whatever" we are leaning toward a telos that is self-defined and subjectively grounded.</p><p>For this reason, I don't think that Laurence Fox is on firm ground in taking a stand against the trans movement. If how we realise ourselves is determined subjectively and self-defined, then there does not seem to be a deeply principled way to argue against a man identifying as a woman. Such a man, after all, is "free" to do or to be "whatever" he chooses - that is, if we frame society along the lines that Laurence Fox himself sets out. </p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi4qYOPkrpwML8Uv67yZRSh04UF2KCqYLIOzpPgMd4BtADhswtASgUvPasELUuOXwSvigap6UNlmIBvN3Xe9ud8sKQgSueuTAkj7u_ocNvR4yq5ypm2gGR415bNnntUFYayuypv9KFfjEZaNqy0HdvHtI0-ppiKZA2CA24OzmbwktezIiTJgETXZw" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="425" data-original-width="680" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi4qYOPkrpwML8Uv67yZRSh04UF2KCqYLIOzpPgMd4BtADhswtASgUvPasELUuOXwSvigap6UNlmIBvN3Xe9ud8sKQgSueuTAkj7u_ocNvR4yq5ypm2gGR415bNnntUFYayuypv9KFfjEZaNqy0HdvHtI0-ppiKZA2CA24OzmbwktezIiTJgETXZw=w400-h250" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The magnanimous Laurence Fox</td></tr></tbody></table><br />On top of all this, there is another very radical consequence of seeing politics in terms of little individual spheres. In one stroke, an essential aspect of the human good is lost. There is no longer a larger circle, a body of people, that we belong to and have a duty to take care of. It is no longer factored in and disappears from view. There are only those little individual spheres.</p><p>I think it's helpful if we think about this in terms of bodies. We as individuals have a body. In this sense we are embodied souls. The two aspects of who we are should not be thought of as entirely discrete, not in this life anyway. Our physical body is not just an accidental feature of our self. It is not simply a machine for carrying around our mind. It is an integral part of who we are as a created being. Not only is our own good tied up with the health of our body, but our body is expressive of who we are and of our identity and purposes in this life. </p><p>There is another body that we are a member of. This is the communal body of which we are a part, to which we belong, and through which we transmit across time the supra-individual aspects of our existence, such as our ancestry, our culture, our language, our religion, our manners and mores, and other key aspects of our own distinct tradition. </p><p>And just as our own physical body carries meaning, so too does this communal body. It becomes a unique expression of the human soul in its own right, and as such is a transcendent good that inspires in its members a love of people and place. It is the body through which the individual participates in a much larger tradition that extends through time and place and that has continuity across the generations. And it is the body which contributes importantly to a sense of identity and belonging, that draws out our social commitments, and through which the individual expresses his or her social nature. </p><p>Even in the early modern period, the existence of this body was acknowledged and defended. Descartes <a href="https://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2023/05/descartes-commitment-community.html">wrote</a>:</p><blockquote>though each of us is a person distinct from others...we ought still to think that none of us could subsist alone and that each one of us is really one of the many parts of the universe, and more particularly a part of the earth, the state, the society and the family to which we belong by our domicile, our oath of allegiance and our birth. </blockquote><p>He is urging that we not just think in terms of our own little individual spheres, but that we recognise the larger spheres of which we are a part.</p><p>The <a href="https://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-double-nature-of-good.html">idea</a> is put even more forcibly by Francis Bacon in the early 1600s: </p><blockquote>he argues that there "is formed in every thing a double nature of good": "the one, as every thing is a total or substantive in itself": the other, "as it is a part or member of a greater body".<br /><br />Put differently, there are two kinds of goods found in material nature: the one, goodness per se, or any given objects intrinsic value; the other, goodness insofar as it belongs, and thus contributes to, a collective reality greater than itself.<br /><br />The appetite for self-preservation corresponds naturally to the safeguarding of a material body's essential goodness, whereas the appetite of union facilitates a basic level of material conjunction for the purposes both of self-preservation and the greater good.</blockquote><p></p><p></p><p>For Francis Bacon there is a double nature of good. There is a good that pertains to the solitary individual. But there is also a goodness that relates to our membership of a greater body, including our contributions toward sustaining it. </p><p>But how can we contribute to something that has been removed from the very design of human life? If there are only those small spheres that we are to stay within, and if goodness is represented by our choosing to do or to be "whatever" without regard to anything else, and by our committing not ever to extend beyond our own little sphere or even to think beyond it in terms of the good, then the larger body will remain undefended and, being subject to attack and to decay, will expire.</p><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-63145080225561648942024-01-22T14:40:00.000+11:002024-01-22T14:40:19.959+11:00Patria & Christianity<p>Christianity is sometimes held to be a universalist religion. I think that's a flawed understanding, given the assumption in both the Old and New Testaments that people live in God-given nations.</p><p>First, let me acknowledge that Christianity is clearly not a tribal religion. The Christian God is conceived to be the God of all nations. Second, it is also clear that we are to extend the moral code of the Bible to all people, not just to those who belong to our own group.</p><p>I'd like to focus on one particular Bible passage, from a letter written by Paul to the Ephesians (3:15). The usual translation runs as follows:</p><p></p><blockquote>For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, <b>from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named,</b> that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being.</blockquote><p>One interesting thing about this passage is that the word translated here as "family" is in its original Greek the word <a href="https://www.biblestudytools.com/lexicons/greek/nas/patria.html">patria</a>. Patria in modern English means "one's native country or homeland". And what did it mean to the Greeks? </p><p>According to the Expositor's Greek <a href="https://biblehub.com/commentaries/egt/ephesians/3.htm">Testament</a>:</p><blockquote>The noun πατριά [patria]...means sometimes ancestry, but usually family, race or tribe, i.e., a number of families descended from a common stock, nation or people...Here the word seems to have the widest sense of class, order, nation, community.</blockquote><p style="text-align: justify;">The scholars I turned to for the definition of "patria" see it as having a wider meaning than "family" in the sense that we use the term (there is a different word in the Bible for one's household). They consider it to refer to family in a more extended sense such as a clan (think of the Scottish Highland clans who share a common surname denoting a shared ancestry or lineage) or to a tribe or nation (see <a href="https://www.biblestudytools.com/lexicons/greek/nas/patria.html">here</a> for a definition).</p><p style="text-align: justify;">So Paul is writing that every extended family/clan/nation on earth is named from God the Father. What does this mean? Well, there are different interpretations, but some commentaries emphasise the idea that "patria" are divinely instituted, albeit imperfectly realised, models of community. Ellicott, for instance, <a href="https://biblehub.com/commentaries/ellicott/ephesians/3.htm">defines</a> "patria" as:</p><blockquote>every body of rational beings in earth or heaven united under one common fatherhood, and bearing the name (as in a family or clan) of the common ancestor.</blockquote>He explains the passage as meaning:<p></p><blockquote>The Apostle looks upon the fathers whose names they delight to bear as the imperfect representatives of God, and upon the family itself, with its head, as the type in miniature of the whole society of spiritual beings united in sonship to the Father in heaven</blockquote><p>Another commentator <a href="https://versebyversecommentary.com/2015/09/02/ephesians-315/#:~:text=God%20is%20the%20prototype%20Father,the%20Father%20affects%20our%20nature.">writes</a>:</p><blockquote>God is the prototype Father; He is the archetypical Father. Every other family derives its family pattern from Him. There is a policy of Scripture that relationship to God revolves around the family. Our descent from the Father affects our nature...<br /><br />...there is the idea that God formed the principle of the family as a divine institution. This is especially important in our time because of the assault on the family. The family originates in the very nature of God as Father</blockquote><p>The Expositor's Greek Testament has this:</p><blockquote>The sense, therefore, is “the Father, from whom all the related orders of intelligent beings, human and angelic, each by itself, get the significant name of family, community”. The various classes of men on earth, Jewish, Gentile, and others, and the various orders of angels in heaven, are all related to God, the common Father, and only in virtue of that relation has any of them the name of family. The father makes the family; God is the Father of all; and if any community of intelligent beings, human or angelic, bears the great name of family, the reason for that lies in this relation of God to it.</blockquote><p>On this interpretation, God created the patria which are patterned on a model of community that spans both the earth and the heavens. God is the ultimate source of all the patria and the patria function in this world as a necessarily imperfect manifestation of a more perfect or ideal model of community derived from God the Father.</p><p>Where else in the Bible do we find the word "patria" being used? Well, there is Luke 2:4:</p><blockquote>And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David</blockquote><p>Here patria has been translated as lineage, but the commentary again states that the word itself means "Lineage, ancestry; a family, tribe. As if feminine of a derivative of pater; paternal descent, i.e. a group of families or a whole race." This passage is not as meaningful as the first one but is an example of ancestry or tribe being part of the cloth of human community in the Bible.</p><p>More significantly there is Acts 3:25. This is normally translated as follows:</p><blockquote>You are the children of those prophets, and you are included in the covenant God promised to your ancestors. For God said to Abraham, ‘Through your descendants all the families on earth will be blessed.’</blockquote><p>Here, again, the word patria has been translated by "families", even though it means a more extended family of people with a common lineage or ancestry. The King James Version opts for the word "kindreds". Meyer's NT commentary insists the translation should be "nations". Barnes <a href="https://biblehub.com/commentaries/barnes/acts/3.htm">writes</a>:</p><blockquote>The word translated "kindreds" πατριαὶ patriai denotes "those who have a common father or ancestor," and is applied to families. It is also referred to those larger communities which were descended from the same ancestor, and thus refers to nations, Ephesians 3:15. Here it evidently refers to "all nations."</blockquote><p>So God is saying to Abraham that, through his descendants, all the nations on earth will be blessed. Why would there be mention of nations being blessed if nations are not part of the divine order?</p><a href="https://www.bibleref.com/Ephesians/3/Ephesians-3-16.html"></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-26588119227506637152024-01-13T10:52:00.003+11:002024-01-16T20:36:39.429+11:00On the origins of the great replacement<div><i>The following post was written by a guest contributor, Alex J. Rendell (the first ever guest post at this site!)</i></div><div><br /></div>Many explanations have been proffered as to the origins of the Great Replacement, but none thus far have been able to withstand close scrutiny: specifically, they have not been able to explain why, where, and when replacement migration has occurred. <div><br /></div><div>If, for example, the problem was “white people,” then all white nations would be undergoing replacement. And yet this is clearly not the case. Likewise for economic modernity (not all first world nations), Christianity (not all Christian nations), colonialism (not all/only former empires), Die Juden (not all/only nations with a prominent Jewish diaspora), and so forth.</div><div><br /></div><div>The one risk factor that *does* seem to account for practically all the evidence is this: the Hajnal Line, which separates Western Europe (centered on the North Sea coast) from the rest of Eurasia. With very few (and not particularly problematic) exceptions, it is fair to say that all and only countries north and west of this line (together with their offshoots in the New World) are undergoing replacement migration. </div><div><br /></div><div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij_0BHANN8JR1C672JGxS89k7pwHX1X16Ap0z_BOgD6hUmW3Odsd6yqZunNibcTIxt19VG9-qK6ZL9PnAGFIwCFqLbG_G3xv5gSZTDxH9e4GwxmsCRdTcPk4CzbSzH3bno1GTJVdKJHGtV0wT3Lxw8_t-4upSDO-xIskT8E3R_oSMx8Sn3AXOrxw/s1080/Hajnal%20line.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1080" height="333" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij_0BHANN8JR1C672JGxS89k7pwHX1X16Ap0z_BOgD6hUmW3Odsd6yqZunNibcTIxt19VG9-qK6ZL9PnAGFIwCFqLbG_G3xv5gSZTDxH9e4GwxmsCRdTcPk4CzbSzH3bno1GTJVdKJHGtV0wT3Lxw8_t-4upSDO-xIskT8E3R_oSMx8Sn3AXOrxw/w400-h333/Hajnal%20line.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hajnal line</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><div>What is it that makes this region so unique? What accounts for the fact that, as a friend of mine once put it, the average Greek communist is a thousand times more “racist” than even the most right-wing Sweden Democrat? </div><div><br /></div><div>To answer this, we first need to draw a distinction within the concept of demographic replacement. All peoples, everywhere, have always experienced demographic replacement: as one generation retires from the workforce, another steps forward to take its place; as one generation grows old and dies, another is born and flourishes. </div><div><br /></div><div>Under conditions of economic modernity, however, this organic process of self-replacement is no longer occurring (one might call it “The Great Non-Replacement”): all first world countries (including the Jewish diaspora) are affected, and <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN">TFR statistics</a> reflect as much.</div><div><br /></div><div>What is special about the West is that this process of self-replacement is not only not occurring (as is also the case in Eastern Europe and Asia), but has in fact been rejected in favour of “other-replacement,” i.e., the replacement of retirees not by their own children and grandchildren, but by immigrants to whom they are unrelated. </div><div><br /></div><div>How are we to explain this? Well, the Hajnal Line describes a pattern of marriage and family life characterised above all by what one might call “voluntary associationism”: the belief that free association among relative strangers is or should be the bedrock of life in society. Indeed, for Northwest Europeans, marriage itself has been construed primarily as a social contract entered into on a voluntary (uncoerced) basis by a comparatively unrelated (no cousin marriage) bride and groom, one that normatively gives rise to a neolocal household, detached and separate from both sets of parents.</div><div><br /></div><div>This emphasis on voluntary association is, of course, completely legitimate, and has led to a great flourishing of civil society in the West. Churches, clubs, guilds, etc. existing for the mutual benefit and support of their members: these are all good things. Moreover, it is certainly superior to a situation in which association is coerced, i.e., in which people are locked into a straightjacket of relationships appointed not for their benefit, but for that of another, and frequently at their expense. One can see here the origins of the characteristic Western emphasis on freedom and individualism, over and against what one might (somewhat uncharitably) call Oriental despotism and collectivism.</div><div><br /></div><div>This brings us to the great rallying-cry of Western modernity: autonomy (the King of Virtues)! And to the great bugbear of Western modernity: heteronomy (the Queen of Sins)! With the advent (curiously enough, in England) of nominalism and voluntarism during the Late Middle Ages, the locus of valuation was transferred from Being to volition: things were no longer seen as Good (and therefore as valuable) simply in and of themselves, but only insofar as they were (autonomously) chosen. This hypervalorisation of the voluntary (“freedom of indifference”) is what ultimately has led to the <i>reductio ad absurdum</i> of consent-based morality (anything goes, no matter how objectively bad, as long as it is freely willed by all stakeholders).</div><div><br /></div><div>What does this have to do with the Great Replacement? Well, as I see it, this hypervalorisation of the voluntary has been accompanied by an equally radical devalorisation of the involuntary, which, when applied to the realm of association, has led to the unchosen bonds of kinship being viewed (in contrast to the chosen bonds of friendship and civil society) as of at least questionable value, if not actually bad: “You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family” is the sort of quip that only makes sense on this kind of social/relational voluntarism.</div><div><br /></div><div>Initially, this seems to have taken the form of “colour-blindness” with respect to kin: one ought not to (publicly) discriminate in favour of people who simply happen to be related to you (taboos against nepotism and other forms of clannish behaviour), but should treat all socio-economic actors fairly, impartially, as individuals, on the basis of their merits, and without respect of persons. It is surely no accident that Libertarianism has been, and remains, an almost exclusively Anglo phenomenon: a fact which to this day forms the basis of liberal nationalism.</div><div><br /></div><div>Later on, this “blindness with respect to kin” was extended by New World powers to include “blindness with respect to ethny”: anyone could be an American (or Australian, under the WAP), as long as he was a “free white man of good character.” Non-whites were still, at this point, excluded on the grounds that they were too clannish, too untrustworthy to be capable of living in a society built around the free association of individuals, but replacement migration now had a foot very much in the door.</div><div><br /></div><div>It was not long, however, before both liberal (ethnic) and racial nationalism came to be seen as unfair, arbitrary, and less than ideal: the requirement of ethnic/racial relatedness (not subject to choice) seemed to vitiate the voluntary character of the social order. As long as meritocratic norms were respected, why not have a society colourblind also to race (à la the Civil Rights Movement)? And, more to the point, why not a society built entirely around other-replacement (a voluntary phenomenon: migration)? After all, would not such a (civic nationalist) polity be superior to (or at least more consistently liberal than) one based on self-replacement (an involuntary phenomenon: birth)? The Great Replacement (“immigrants are the real Australians”) was now not only thinkable, but actual.</div><div><br /></div><div>Moreover, at the same time that the involuntary ties of ethnicity and race were coming under attack, the equally involuntary ties of family life were also being deconstructed (feminism and the sexual revolution). Indeed, all three are really just variations on the same theme: the drama of natality, i.e., of birth (and of its prerequisite phenomenon: sexual difference), which, as Rémi Brague has pointed out, we do not, cannot, and could not even possibly choose, but which is always and everywhere chosen for us. </div><div><br /></div><div>For a society that so over-valorises autonomy, the fact of our birth into a body (male or female), family, ethny, race, and even world not of our own choosing simply *is* a serious problem: the ultimate affront to liberal self-determination.</div><div><br /></div><div>In short, the ideology of the Great Replacement (as also of feminism, and of many others besides) is that of the voluntary society (a phenomenon unique to Western Europe), now radicalised to an absurd extreme: whereas the Great Non-Replacement appears to be common to modernity as such (likely connected to a <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nominalism#:~:text=1,nominalist">nominalist</a> devalorisation of Being in general, and of human life in particular), only liberal modernity so devalorises involuntary association that demographic replacement through (voluntary) migration comes to be seen as superior (and preferable) to replacement through (involuntary) birth.</div><div><br /></div><div>Our line of attack, therefore, is clear: revalorisation of the involuntary, whether of existence as such, or of sexual difference, or of family, ethnic, and racial ties. This can only possibly occur if the locus of valorisation is shifted away from volition and back onto Being: if existence, if the body, if family, ethny, and race are all viewed under the rubric not of <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/agonistic">agonistic</a> imposition (and therefore as an affront to freedom), but of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agape">agapeic</a> donation (and hence as conditions of the very possibility of freedom). In other words, we must come to see Creation once again as Gift.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-73562843690436488182024-01-04T10:03:00.005+11:002024-01-21T13:57:01.108+11:00Was the feminism of the 1870s any better?<p>If we were to go back to the 1870s, and look at progressive politics in the US, what would we find? </p><p>I stumbled across a newspaper that was published at this time by two suffragettes, called <i>Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly</i>. The editors were sisters, Victoria Woodhull (who was the first woman to run for President) and Tennessee Claflin. </p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj1aO49bhYNyWMk75DWmFA0OB7K4nG_kvQ5LSGJOu-5W3rgtRRU2wg-61PV1cWgBniPgS1LywZDeNULfEmtxtBRr7tsd6ZZEed3bnTl3H8aGeIwcH2Tr-eI-LN32k8LmscFGNdOzs7XVlScT99PIW8B9X1TzPr2bEqxcAkZaQpq7bsvJ-Px1eUvkg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="285" data-original-width="237" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj1aO49bhYNyWMk75DWmFA0OB7K4nG_kvQ5LSGJOu-5W3rgtRRU2wg-61PV1cWgBniPgS1LywZDeNULfEmtxtBRr7tsd6ZZEed3bnTl3H8aGeIwcH2Tr-eI-LN32k8LmscFGNdOzs7XVlScT99PIW8B9X1TzPr2bEqxcAkZaQpq7bsvJ-Px1eUvkg=w333-h400" width="333" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Victoria Woodhull</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Reading through it, I drew the conclusions that, first, progressive politics was extraordinarily radical in that era and, second, that amongst all the failures the key one was a false understanding of freedom.<p></p><p>In what sense was the politics radical? Well, it comes through especially clearly in attitudes to marriage and to nation. </p><p>Victoria Woodhull gave a <a href="https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/rbc/rbnawsa/n8216/n8216.pdf">speech</a> in 1871 at Steinway Hall. She declared to the 3000 in the audience that,</p><blockquote>Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere. And I have the <i>further</i> right to demand a free and unrestricted exercise of that right, and it is <i>your duty </i>not only to <i>accord</i> it, but, as a community, to see that I am protected in it.</blockquote><p>She did not, in other words, respect the ideal of marriage as a lifelong union. She also advocated for women to be independent of men. She said of women that,</p><p></p><blockquote>Their entire system of education must be changed. They must be trained to be like men...it is a libel upon nature...to say this world is not calculated to make women...self-reliant and self-supporting individuals.</blockquote><p></p><p>The attitude to nation was worse. There was a <a href="https://www.victoria-woodhull.com/wc081200.htm">notion</a> that the world was progressing to global government and that American borders would soon be open to hundreds of millions. With the exploration of the last corners of the world complete:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>We have begun the unitary culture and administration of this human <i>habitat</i> and domicile, instead of the fragmentary and patchwork management which has prevailed through all the past ages...And we are talking glibly of unitary weights and measures, of a unitary currency, of a common and universal language, and finally of a Universal Government</p><p></p></blockquote><p>Elizabeth Cady Stanton <a href="https://www.victoria-woodhull.com/wc051800.htm">thought</a> that teeming millions from China would soon be arriving:</p><p><span style="background-color: white;"></span></p><blockquote>We shall have at the end of this century one hundred million of people. With the purchase of territory now proposed, we shall add greatly to this number. Forty thousand Chinese are already on the Pacific coast, but the entering wedge of 400,000,000 behind them.</blockquote><p>Victoria Woodhull <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/65477/65477-h/65477-h.htm">understood</a> progress as meaning a merging of races in the US to form a new race that would ultimately lead to a world government:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>These two processes will continue until both are complete - until all nations are merged into races, and all races into one government...the people, who will no longer be denominated as belonging to this or that country or government, but as citizens of the world - as members of a common humanity.</p></blockquote><p>So the question is why these women fell into such a radical politics. There are many mistakes to point to, but I don't want to confuse the issue by examining all of them, not when there is a foundational one that needs to be highlighted.</p><p>The foundational problem is freedom. Victoria Woodhull takes as a starting point here a position a little similar to that of Hobbes. She does not assert the idea of a God given free will. Instead, she sees individuals as natural agents whose actions are determined by how they are acted on by external forces. As these external forces differ for each person, then each person is uniquely <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/65477/65477-h/65477-h.htm">determined</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>But what does freedom mean? "As free as the winds" is a common expression. But if we stop to inquire what that freedom is, we find that air in motion is under the most complete subjection to different temperatures in different localities, and that these differences arise from conditions entirely independent of the air...Therefore the freedom of the wind is the freedom to obey commands imposed by conditions to which it is by nature related...But neither the air or the water of one locality obeys the commands which come from the conditions surrounding another locality. </p><p>Now, individual freedom...means the same thing...It means freedom to obey the natural condition of the individual, modified only by the various external forces....which induce action in the individual. What that action will be, must be determined solely by the individual and the operating causes, and in no two cases can they be precisely alike...Now, is it not plain that freedom means that individuals...are subject only to the laws of their own being.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>She has established a metaphysics here from which much else follows. In this view, there can only be individuals pursuing things their own way (and allowing others to do the same). There are no substantive goods that humans might rationally seek, nor are there common goods (i.e. my own good realised in common with others). </p><p>You can see how difficult Victoria Woodhull's metaphysics makes the defence of both marriage and nation. She defends free love on the basis that we are simply acted on to have feelings for someone else, and that similarly we are simply acted on to lose those feelings. These things are passively determined by our own being or by external conditions upon us. If true, then there is no possibility of actively upholding love and respect within a marriage, and so an expectation of fidelity becomes an illegitimate, external imposition on my own being, a tyranny. </p><p>Similarly, how can there be a defence of nation if the underlying understanding of man is that we are all sovereign individuals acting for our own uniquely formed individual goods? Where in this is the understanding that humans are social creatures who naturally form thick bonds with those they are closely related to by culture, language, religion, custom and lineage?</p><p>And what is the telos of man in this metaphysics? If we are all dissimilar in the goods we pursue because we are all determined uniquely by the forces acting upon us, then what does it mean to be fully formed as a man or a woman? What are the roles we should ideally fulfil in life? What are the spiritual experiences that constitute a higher point in human life? These questions lose sense in a world in which there are only uniquely determined, self-sovereign individuals.</p><p>What Victoria Woodhull chooses to emphasise at the beginning of her Steinway Hall speech is telling in this regard. She sets out a liberal framework for society in which individuals have an equal right to act in any way they wish as long as they do not encroach upon the rights of others to do likewise:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>It means that every person who comes into the world of outward existence is of equal right as an individual, and is free as an individual, and that he or she is entitled to pursue happiness in what direction he or she may choose...But just here the wise-acres stop and tell us that everybody must not pursue happiness in his or her own way; since to do so absolutely, would be to have no protection against the action of individuals. These good and well-meaning people...do not take into account...that each is free within the area of his or her individual sphere; and not free within the sphere of any other individual whatever...the most perfect exercise of such rights is only attained when every individual is not only fully protected in his rights, but also strictly restrained to the exercise of them within his own sphere, and positively prevented from proceeding beyond its limits, so as to encroach upon the sphere of another...</p><p>I have before said that every person has the right to, and can, determine for himself what he will do, even to taking the life of another. But it is equally true that the attacked person has the right to defend his life against such assault. If the person succeed in taking the life, he thereby demonstrates that he is a tyrant and that every individual of the community is put in jeopardy by the freedom of this person. Hence it is the duty of the government to so restrict the freedom of this person as to make it impossible for him to ever again practice such tyranny...</p><p>I would recall the attention...to the true functions of government - to protect the complete exercise of individual rights, and what they are no living soul except the individual has any business to determine or to meddle with, in any way whatever, unless his own rights are first infringed.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>What can we say about all this? First, the "freedom" she claims to be upholding is a limited one as it is justified on the grounds that we are all different in being as we are all determined differently by external conditions. So we are not really "choosing" to act in any direction, but are rather being left free to act in the ways we are uniquely conditioned to act. </p><p>Second, the freedom is limited, rigorously, to our own "sphere" - i.e. the space in which we do not impinge on others acting freely. This is more radical than it sounds. Can a wife then have expectations of what a husband might do in a marriage, or does that impinge on his freedom to act according to his own uniquely determined self? If she does have such expectations, even reasonable ones, is she then a tyrant? And how big is a sphere that is self-enclosed? Yes, I can choose what to have for dinner without impinging on someone else. Or what music concert to attend. But what can I ask or expect of others in terms of creating a well-ordered, stable, pleasant, prosperous community? In theory, very little - since others should be free to act within their own sphere however they like.</p><p>Then there is Victoria Woodhull's treatment of crimes like murder. She states that I have a right to act in any way, and therefore I have a right to commit murder. The government only prevents me from committing murder because in acting on this right I am impinging on the rights and freedoms of others. Again, this is a radical take. Yes, governments do act against murder, in part, to protect the freedoms of others in the community. But where is the sense of there being a moral issue at play here? Perhaps it is disregarded because if an objective moral dimension is introduced it might have to be acknowledged that there are principles of action that apply to all humans as moral truths - and that therefore place limits on what "self-sovereign" individuals might rightly choose to do.</p><p>Here is another significant problem with this liberal framework. In theory, it is meant to maximise my freedom. But it assumes that I am an individual level actor who is free to the extent that I can be my own uniquely conditioned self. As the 1970s <a href="https://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2007/08/free-to-be-what-we-tell-you.html">campaign</a> put it "free to be you and me". This campaign was focused on "liberating" boys and girls from....being boys and girls. And this makes sense within the given metaphysics. If I am uniquely conditioned, then I can only be free as "myself" and nothing more. But what if I am constituted, in part, by my given sex? Or by the longstanding communal tradition I am born into? Then I am free not just as "me" but as a man, or as an Englishman or as a Christian. These things form part of my self, and so I cannot be free unless I am free to be these things.</p><p>Note too the role of government in the Victoria Woodhull system. It exists only to force people to stay within their own individual spheres. It does not exist to represent a particular people and to promote the continuing existence of this people over time. It cannot do this as its sole reason for existence is to uphold individual rights.</p><p>Finally, once accepted, this system ties the hands of those who would defend their own tradition and attempt to transmit the best of it to future generations. It becomes difficult, within such a system of individual spheres, to defend goods that require cooperation between people communally. It becomes difficult to expect people to have the volition or understanding to discern and to uphold rational goods in life (because goods are thought to be unique to each individual, hence their freedom to act in any direction). It becomes difficult to assert the existence of higher, transcendent ideals that might elevate the life of a community (because, again, the one operative good is a freedom to act in any direction in order to be "oneself").</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-35871374150588567822024-01-01T00:06:00.002+11:002024-01-07T15:35:21.572+11:00Making Lady Lawyer happy<p>One of the mistakes in modern culture is the idea that a husband can, and should, make his wife happy. If he fails in this task, then she considers herself aggrieved and justified in seeking to divorce.</p><p>You can see this mindset in the following exchange on social media, with a woman going by the moniker of Lady Lawyer.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhKyPJ14Z4P37FhHtRfUtq7Q6j-LxoIAXfiaIoVPZL8b6JX-KkJwvOZI6QUVLgXtZ5Uaqlm6BEn2s2EGCZwt1C3AjKlLCO4-Swz6GQbq0wn4YUo8I0x-sXPwjk_eU32UmnF3oWhtoaIf8AsFFdZnskAKCkBKIU182AuedAZq4U3Sug777EL-Z7g_g" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="826" data-original-width="822" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhKyPJ14Z4P37FhHtRfUtq7Q6j-LxoIAXfiaIoVPZL8b6JX-KkJwvOZI6QUVLgXtZ5Uaqlm6BEn2s2EGCZwt1C3AjKlLCO4-Swz6GQbq0wn4YUo8I0x-sXPwjk_eU32UmnF3oWhtoaIf8AsFFdZnskAKCkBKIU182AuedAZq4U3Sug777EL-Z7g_g=w637-h640" width="637" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh_WjaPxiCH4cvk1nyUwMV-_zjBrgFz_qP3JBNYF-E_hlMaeule0YKc1OgJMLOey4IIMF93-GabP-Gx-IvePqTDwIRweK0ak6S7sBpQEbuMcsqig11YVw6FJRSJM6JY3vtNxbcDGo63t-aWdiD5MkA53JMibMjTFUPfpRLQTVMHvqUiO0RTt4vKKQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="695" data-original-width="818" height="545" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh_WjaPxiCH4cvk1nyUwMV-_zjBrgFz_qP3JBNYF-E_hlMaeule0YKc1OgJMLOey4IIMF93-GabP-Gx-IvePqTDwIRweK0ak6S7sBpQEbuMcsqig11YVw6FJRSJM6JY3vtNxbcDGo63t-aWdiD5MkA53JMibMjTFUPfpRLQTVMHvqUiO0RTt4vKKQ=w640-h545" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhxk-7HVRhse1Yd4o4rSQxROZrFgLNBA6a_l-YQKIWse1pb2cD_OPaXrurjWtG8vs2F9FDvRuT9CAEjtZIN0sFtBLOTu9Av6U6gaTABsM9MBl0khHqkhAz3-peeMC1yw2ngKFMaQMdHsphlOzP2EEcNQqItnnG6-56D8FaljBxjrLtLW928ftWAGA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="418" data-original-width="817" height="328" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhxk-7HVRhse1Yd4o4rSQxROZrFgLNBA6a_l-YQKIWse1pb2cD_OPaXrurjWtG8vs2F9FDvRuT9CAEjtZIN0sFtBLOTu9Av6U6gaTABsM9MBl0khHqkhAz3-peeMC1yw2ngKFMaQMdHsphlOzP2EEcNQqItnnG6-56D8FaljBxjrLtLW928ftWAGA=w640-h328" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjn3q5OZ34_E3iT6gOeS2cGxz0YPqKh7zxFI7tqRuKZBFhBr3r7q5zWEFqXrhNUcFUQolhiIrCw1GN85bA-3nytcvKeXIGfhlU3rQMF3aNFUu-6nDD5YSP1WBJtmNdXpKEB3Fgt2bLF0AjweKis_VUrq8i4OGEubmG_aq1wNw9FHlfI-oMNkG66vA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="427" data-original-width="808" height="338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjn3q5OZ34_E3iT6gOeS2cGxz0YPqKh7zxFI7tqRuKZBFhBr3r7q5zWEFqXrhNUcFUQolhiIrCw1GN85bA-3nytcvKeXIGfhlU3rQMF3aNFUu-6nDD5YSP1WBJtmNdXpKEB3Fgt2bLF0AjweKis_VUrq8i4OGEubmG_aq1wNw9FHlfI-oMNkG66vA=w640-h338" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Notice that Lady Lawyer has the expectation that the wife is "owed" happiness in marriage. This is not how traditional Western culture understood things. Being a wife and mother was thought of as a moral vocation requiring emotional self-discipline:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi4Qq5CzKwDSqmXV1in9Gw4jDdt8qxWeE4k5AV9VnIlwax_zoxmcyqPbtkazCkvr6MGCKlY1ELSURfXxHUkPJBDRgy1rfEQrpS0cl8-Jq-_JISdKj-925-5MU-61yMhNG3tls0w1dOLRrXEnRu63MdysrkQ_fEGUNHa1n-2YDhUdAoUacZzMlGp1A" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="356" data-original-width="799" height="286" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi4Qq5CzKwDSqmXV1in9Gw4jDdt8qxWeE4k5AV9VnIlwax_zoxmcyqPbtkazCkvr6MGCKlY1ELSURfXxHUkPJBDRgy1rfEQrpS0cl8-Jq-_JISdKj-925-5MU-61yMhNG3tls0w1dOLRrXEnRu63MdysrkQ_fEGUNHa1n-2YDhUdAoUacZzMlGp1A=w640-h286" width="640" /></a></div><br />Nor does it make much sense to think that you can be "owed" happiness by a husband, not when you consider the kinds of factors that generally support happiness.<div><br /></div><div>For instance, happiness can be influenced by genetic predisposition. It can depend on a healthy, self-disciplined lifestyle, on a good diet, exercise, sleep and sunshine. It can depend on the range and quality of our friendships. On the quality of the parenting we received and of our early childhood experiences. On the positive or negative influence of the culture we inhabit. In can depend on our level of connectedness to nature, to a family lineage, to a people and place, to a tradition and culture, to a history, and to a church. </div><div><br /></div><div>To be happy requires, to a considerable degree, an internal locus of control. We need, for instance, to take care with our inner monologue, to ensure that it does not talk us out of a positive mood and into a negative one (as per the Milton quote above). We need to cultivate a responsiveness to the world around us that includes gratitude, reverence and even delight. We need to cultivate the virtues that allow us to deal well with the difficulties life presents us with, such as fortitude, patience and forgiveness. We need to combat our own vices: envy and avarice, for instance, will leave us forever discontented.</div><div><br /></div><div>We need the ability to both give and receive love, but this requires us to take care in embarking on relationships, particularly sexual ones, so that we avoid becoming jaded, hurt and withdrawn.</div><div><br /></div><div>Our self-concept and world picture can influence our happiness. What kind of cosmos do we inhabit? What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be a man? A woman? How we answer these questions can make a difference to how we experience life.</div><div><br /></div><div>Similarly, it helps to have a reasonable level of self-esteem. This can come as a gift from motherlove in childhood, but achieving a certain level of mastery in some thing, i.e. being good at something and being recognised for it, can also help.</div><div><br /></div><div>Our ability to stay oriented to transcendent sources of meaning is important as well. Do we register beauty, truth and goodness? Particularly as connecting us to something meaningful outside of mundane existence? Is there a higher good embedded within virtue? Within the masculine and the feminine?</div><div><br /></div><div>Our larger identities can promote our well-being. Do we identify positively with a communal tradition of our own? One that we can take pride in and wish to contribute to? That helps to give meaning to our work and to the sacrifices we make on behalf of others?</div><div><br /></div><div>Then there is the issue of retaining a sense of integrity and self-respect. To what extent do we successfully resist the pressures toward entropy and dissolution? Are we still able to order ourselves toward the good? </div><div><br /></div><div>Having a sense of role ethics can make our inner lives more stable. This is because happiness is sometimes more a by-product of fulfilling our duties to others, particularly when we serve others whom we love and are closely bound to. I think this is what the following comment is suggesting:</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjHug_y47VzEaYN7oYhy60rhhUyKyZkIZWFDJrxnFXdbVL0iW4H8RId4QGvyJlA8aKCP7GI6xI2nQRfymrw-Ww27pRFoopL0V8hoiAvLSGxfx8f_sWHdbGh_dBOAb9yI6tbLkwCxA50MWJBMwNjANk8_4HkcUBVwwRMhM9GUUl79MVd1HO8FhJT-A" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="241" data-original-width="789" height="196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjHug_y47VzEaYN7oYhy60rhhUyKyZkIZWFDJrxnFXdbVL0iW4H8RId4QGvyJlA8aKCP7GI6xI2nQRfymrw-Ww27pRFoopL0V8hoiAvLSGxfx8f_sWHdbGh_dBOAb9yI6tbLkwCxA50MWJBMwNjANk8_4HkcUBVwwRMhM9GUUl79MVd1HO8FhJT-A=w640-h196" width="640" /></a></div></div><div><br /></div><div>Finally, a good level of self-knowledge and intelligence can help to promote our happiness. What we need at any particular moment can vary, and it helps if we know ourselves well enough to recognise what is lacking and what character flaws need addressing. Similarly, it helps if we react to those around us with intelligent insight. A woman, for instance, who makes no allowance for sex distinctions will undermine her relationships with men - she will be upset by well-meaning masculine behaviour that doesn't correspond with how she would act as a woman.</div><div><br /></div><div>I hope this is enough to demonstrate that no-one can passively "receive" happiness from someone else. It is not the kind of thing that you can hand over to a spouse. That doesn't mean that a husband shouldn't do nice things for a wife. Or that he shouldn't be concerned for her well-being. A husband can help his wife by being a source of reassuring strength, by being warmly protective, by providing material security and physical safety, by offering physical and emotional intimacy, and by being a source of practical, worldly knowledge, as well as a wisdom derived not only from experience but from a rational discernment of Logos.</div><div><br /></div><div>Ideally, also, men would cooperate together to create spaces that would best foster a good life for women and children - and this would include maintaining a healthy culture, with positive social norms, a high level of social connectedness, and a morality that encourages an elevated expression of human nature.</div><div><br /></div><div>A good marriage does have an influence on our happiness. We were not designed for solo living. There is a deep impulse within our nature as humans to connect intimately to someone of the opposite sex in marriage.</div><div><br /></div><div>But we are setting up marriages for failure if we suppose that a wife can passively expect happiness to come from the husband alone, i.e. that it is something that she is simply owed and that if it is missing, it is due to neglect on his part. A woman working within this frame will tend to have a judging attitude to her husband, focus on his faults, lack genuine gratitude for what he does contribute and, over time, develop resentments and distance herself from him. She will not achieve a genuine spousal union. </div><div><div><p></p></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-35398333184576827202023-12-17T14:15:00.005+11:002023-12-17T19:29:21.830+11:00Why the dysfunction in relationships?<p>In "<a href="https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/12/15/the-load-bearing-relationship/">The Load-Bearing Relationship</a>" Cat Orman sets out to explain the dysfunction in modern relationships. She begins with the statistical trends:</p><blockquote>In 2000, the percentage of Americans between the ages of 25 and 50 who had never married was just 21%. By 2018, the share of never-married adults climbed to 35%. The median age at first marriage was 25 for women and 27 for men in 2000; by 2022, it was 28 and 30. Today, 41% of Americans ages 18-29 are single, and about a third of never-married single adults say they have never been in a committed romantic relationship.</blockquote><p>Her explanation for the decline in relationships is what she calls the "contractual moral framework":</p><blockquote>Traditional societies held that we are born into our roles and responsibilities. You owed certain social and practical tributes to your neighbors, siblings, and countrymen, even though you didn’t sign up for them. Confucianism and stoicism made these systems of reciprocal obligations explicit in “role ethics.” Abrahamic religions treated one’s responsibility to the community as part of their obligation to God. Hinduism and the related traditions of the Indian subcontinent contain injunctions from dharma, the personal and social moral duties expected of every spiritually upright individual. While the roles and responsibilities differed greatly across time and place, all of these societies agreed on the necessity and even nobility of fulfilling unchosen roles and responsibilities.<br /><br />As a consequence, doctrines of how to be a good person centered on the idea that we hold a positive duty of care to others, be it through tithing, caring for sick family members, or raising our neighbor’s barns on the frontier...<br /><br />The last decade is defined by a shift away from a role ethic and towards a contractualist one. In a contractual moral framework, you have obligations only within relationships that you chose to participate in—meaning, to the children you chose to have and the person you chose to marry—and these can be revoked at any time. You owe nothing to the people in your life that you did not choose: nothing to your parents, your siblings, your extended family or friends, certainly nothing to your neighbors, schoolmates, or countrymen; at least nothing beyond the level of civility that you owe to a stranger on the street.</blockquote><p>This is well put. It is part of the shift toward seeing individual autonomy as the highest good in life (which itself has a connection to "voluntarism" in the sense of seeing the will as the ultimate source of value). If it is my autonomy, i.e. my ability to choose as I will in any direction, that is the highest good, then stable commitments to others are a limitation on this good, a kind of fetter or chain, that I should seek to liberate myself from. The focus becomes my freedom to revoke my commitments, rather than my obligations to fulfil my given roles in life. It is not surprising that this focus would lead to a lower trust society with less stable patterns of family life.</p><p>Cat Orby goes on to make an interesting observation, namely that if we cannot rely on the support we once received from our unchosen forms of relationships, then too much comes down to the support from a spouse, placing excessive burdens and expectations on that one relationship. </p><p>One small criticism I have of Cat Orby's piece is that the shift toward moral contractualism is much older than she realises. The idea that human society is governed by a "social contract" voluntarily entered into goes back to the proto-liberalism of the seventeenth century. Again, the first wave feminists of the nineteenth century emphasised the idea of maximising autonomy for women, which meant valorising independence rather than family commitments. A female student at Girton College in the 1880s expressed this ethos by stating that,</p><blockquote>We are no longer mere parts - excrescences, so to speak, of a family...One may develop as an individual and independent unit.</blockquote><p>Unsurprisingly, the same dysfunctions in relationships we see today were also present toward the end of first wave feminism, including delayed family formation and a low fertility rate.</p><p>Another minor criticism is that Cat Orby might have extended her argument to go beyond that of obligations. For instance, if what matters is an autonomous freedom to choose in any direction, then the qualities that we are born with, rather than choosing for ourselves, will also seem to be constraints that limit us as individuals. This includes our given sex. And so instead of cultivating the positive qualities of our own sex, it is common for moderns to think negatively of these qualities. Modern women, for instance, have a difficult relationship with their own femininity. This too disrupts heterosexual relationships.</p><p>Then there is the issue of equality. It is common now for people to conceive of the very categories of man and woman as political classes vying against each other for power in a zero sum game, where if men win women lose and vice versa. There is little sense of men and women realising themselves more fully in relationship with each other and therefore having a mutual interest in upholding family life as a common good. </p><p>Another way of framing this is that there is no longer a sense of unity governing the relations between men and women. Instead there is fragmentation and the only way of overcoming this fragmentation, within the current way of thinking, is a non-reciprocal one in which either men must strive to meet women's needs and desires or vice versa (or else, as suggested in the recent Barbie film, the sexes achieve equality by going their own way).</p><p>To be fair, if there were an emphasis again on role ethics, then this would challenge some of these other problems, because there would once again be a consideration of what we owe to others in virtue of our given roles and responsibilities. What Cat Orby emphasises is therefore not a bad starting point for tackling the current malaise.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-24475395026570450942023-10-01T17:44:00.004+11:002023-10-01T20:49:15.077+11:00A change of heart on men?<p>Most leftists today are opposed to masculinity, often prefacing it with the adjective "toxic". Their opposition makes sense given their understanding of both freedom and equality.</p><p>If you understand freedom as a self-determining, self-positing individual autonomy, then masculinity will be looked on negatively as something predetermined that is limiting to the individual.</p><p>As for equality, moderns see this as a levelling process, in which the emphasis is on "sameness" - we are ideally to stand in the same relation to each other, which then requires distinctions to be negated, at least in certain political contexts.</p><p>So leftists will sometimes reject masculinity because it is associated with inequality: masculinity is thought to have been constructed as a means to give men privilege and dominance and to oppress women. And sometimes leftists reject masculinity because it is restrictive, e.g. because of the implication that there are social roles or ways of being in the world that are for men alone.</p><p>These attitudes have been around for a long time now. In one of the earliest feminist tracts, The Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1791), Mary Wollstonecraft <a href="http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2019/11/imlay-wollstonecraft-free-love.html">writes</a>,</p><blockquote>A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head, and I will not stifle it, though it may excite a horse-laugh. I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society... For this distinction...accounts for their [women] preferring the graceful before the heroic virtues.</blockquote>Here you can see the modern understanding of both liberty and equality. She wants to level down the distinctions between the sexes (equality) because she wants to choose a masculine way of being (liberty). <div><br /></div><div>Similarly, we have Shelley <a href="https://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2018/12/shelleys-detestable-distinctions.html">writing</a> in 1811, in reference to men and women:</div><blockquote>these detestable distinctions will surely be abolished in a future state of being.</blockquote><p>Given this long entrenched approach to masculinity, it is of particular interest that a leftist journalist, Christine Emba, has questioned the modern rejection of masculinity. She has written an <a href="https://archive.md/s3YXs">opinion piece</a> for <i>The Washington Post </i>("Men are lost. Here's a map out of the wilderness" July 10, 2023), in which she calls for a more positive embrace of the masculine. Why would she go against the current of leftist thought in this way?</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhpCRqXed-86VFp3s3BImdeEHbdDQhQufHhLKbNqIzHuPLpGdule-RUTEEpcHXlFzprcloj0RL1ve_hhvxa_vfv7AqW9e3JeOcNpCn8ELNMm5MASwO7rUBaEQ3ONH0xXIBkohL7M49nsUS8mqtwkLdTTU1S1j4TTqfFhANJjqFRFWwzccTWNnOYpw" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="225" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhpCRqXed-86VFp3s3BImdeEHbdDQhQufHhLKbNqIzHuPLpGdule-RUTEEpcHXlFzprcloj0RL1ve_hhvxa_vfv7AqW9e3JeOcNpCn8ELNMm5MASwO7rUBaEQ3ONH0xXIBkohL7M49nsUS8mqtwkLdTTU1S1j4TTqfFhANJjqFRFWwzccTWNnOYpw" width="240" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Christine Emba</td></tr></tbody></table><br />She gives multiple reasons and these should interest us because they indicate some of the deficiencies in modern ways of thinking about our sex. <p></p><p>First, as a heterosexual woman she is concerned that unmasculine men are unattractive dating prospects:</p><p>She quotes a podcaster, Scott Galloway, who makes the point that women who want men to be more feminine often don't want to date such men:</p><blockquote>“Where I think this conversation has come off the tracks is where being a man is essentially trying to ignore all masculinity and act more like a woman. And even some women who say that — they don’t want to have sex with those guys. They may believe they’re right, and think it’s a good narrative, but they don’t want to partner with them.”<br /><br />I, a heterosexual woman, cringed in recognition.</blockquote>She wrote the piece, in part, because of laments from female friends about the lack of dating opportunities:<div><blockquote>It might have been the complaints from the women around me. “Men are in their flop era,” one lamented, sick of trying to date in a pool that seemed shallower than it should be.</blockquote><p>So here is a fundamental problem with the leftist rejection of the masculine. Heterosexuality is, by definition, an attraction of the masculine and the feminine. Women will therefore be sexually attracted to masculine qualities of men. Furthermore, it is through their masculine drives that men make commitments to women and to family. So the political commitments of leftist women (to modern understandings of liberty and equality) are set against fundamental aspects of their own being as women (their sexuality and desire for committed relationships with men). </p><p>Second, Christine Emba is concerned that men are struggling. She makes the good point that women should be concerned for the welfare of the men they are closely connected to:</p><blockquote>The truth is that most women still want to have intimate relationships with good men. And even those who don’t still want their sons, brothers, fathers and friends to live good lives.</blockquote><div>She does not believe that modernity is delivering good lives to men:</div></div><blockquote><div>I could see a bit of curdling in some of the men around me, too.<br /><br />They struggled to relate to women. They didn’t have enough friends. They lacked long-term goals. Some guys — including ones I once knew — just quietly disappeared, subsumed into video games and porn...</div><div><br />It felt like a widespread identity crisis — as if they didn’t know how to be.<br /><br />...Growing numbers of working-age men have detached from the labor market, with the biggest drop in employment among men ages 25 to 34. </div><div><br /></div><div>Then there’s the domestic sphere. Last summer, a Psychology Today article caused a stir online by pointing out that “dating opportunities for heterosexual men are diminishing as relationship standards rise.” </div><div><br /></div><div>...women are “increasingly selective,” leading to a rise in lonely, single young men — more of whom now live with their parents than a romantic partner. Men also account for almost 3 of every 4 “deaths of despair,” either from a suicide, alcohol abuse or an overdose.</div><div><br />...cut loose from a stable identity as patriarchs deserving of respect, they feel demoralized and adrift. The data show it, but so does the general mood: Men find themselves lonely, depressed, anxious and directionless.<br /><div><p></p></div></div></blockquote><div><p>What she is pointing to here is that our sex is deeply connected to our identity, our sense of purpose and our social commitments. Therefore, to malign masculinity and to make it inoperable in society is to undermine the larger welfare and well-being of men. For this reason, it is not liberating for a man to live in a society that is designed for androgyny.</p><p>Third, and less important for my argument so I will not dwell on it, she is concerned that if the left simply rejects the masculine that the right will step in and provide the leadership that is otherwise lacking. In other words, she fears that the left will simply vacate the field for the right.</p><p>Fourth, she makes a partial acknowledgement that our sex is grounded in reality:</p><blockquote>But, in fact, most of these features are scaffolded by biology — all are associated with testosterone, the male sex hormone. It’s not an excuse for “boys will be boys”-style bad behavior, but, realistically, these traits would be better acknowledged and harnessed for pro-social aims than stifled or downplayed. Ignoring obvious truths about human nature, even general ones, fosters the idea that progressives are out of touch with reality.</blockquote><p>This is an interesting admission, but she herself is not consistent here. It is very difficult for a leftist to hold together, at the same time, the observation that our sex is a "truth about human nature" with the idea that "freedom means being able to self-determine who we are". </p><p>This is her effort to force these two incompatible ideas together:</p><blockquote>The essentialist view...would be dire news for social equality and for the vast numbers of individuals who don’t fit those stereotypes. Biology isn’t destiny — there is no one script for how to be a woman or a man. But...most people don’t actually want a completely androgynous society. And if a new model for masculinity is going to find popular appeal, it will depend on putting the distinctiveness of men to good use in whatever form it comes in.<br /></blockquote><blockquote>“Femininity or masculinity are a social construct that we get to define,” Galloway concluded. “They are, loosely speaking, behaviors we associate with people born as men or born as women, or attributes more common among people born as men or as women. But the key is that we still get to fill that vessel and define what those attributes are, and then try and reinforce them with our behavior and our views and our media.”</blockquote><p>If this is an awkward way of formulating things, Christine Emba does do a reasonable job in defining desirable masculine traits. For one thing, she rejects the idea that a positive masculinity should be men trying to be feminine:</p><blockquote>To the extent that any vision of “nontoxic” masculinity is proposed, it ends up sounding more like stereotypical femininity than anything else: Guys should learn to be more sensitive, quiet and socially apt, seemingly overnight. It’s the equivalent of “learn to code!” as a solution for those struggling to adjust to a new economy: simultaneously hectoring, dismissive and jejune.</blockquote><p>She begins her treatment of desirable masculine qualities by quoting Scott Galloway:</p><blockquote>“Galloway leaned into the screen. “My view is that, for masculinity, a decent place to start is garnering the skills and strength that you can advocate for and protect others with. If you’re really strong and smart, you will garner enough power, influence, kindness to begin protecting others...”<br /><br />Richard Reeves, in our earlier conversation, had put it somewhat more subtly...His recipe for masculine success echoed Galloway’s: proactiveness, agency, risk-taking and courage, but with a pro-social cast.<br /><br />This tracked with my intuitions about what “good masculinity” might look like — the sort that I actually admire, the sort that women I know find attractive but often can’t seem to find at all. It also aligns with what the many young men I spoke with would describe as aspirational, once they finally felt safe enough to admit they did in fact carry an ideal of manhood with its own particular features.<br /><br />Physical strength came up frequently, as did a desire for personal mastery. They cited adventurousness, leadership, problem-solving, dignity and sexual drive. None of these are negative traits, but many men I spoke with felt that these archetypes were unfairly stigmatized.</blockquote><p>The discussion of masculinity here is a good one overall. What is particularly striking is the acceptance that men might set out to garner power and influence to put themselves in a position to protect others, as this is a departure from the "zero sum game" attitude to relationships that I have criticised in the past. It is typical for feminist women to see power in liberal terms as a means to enact our desires in whatever direction we want, without negative judgement or consequence ("empowerment"). But if you see power in these terms, then it becomes a means to have my own way rather than someone else having theirs. Therefore, if men have power, women will be thought to lose out and vice versa. There is no understanding in this view that men might use power to protect those they love rather than to act in a self-interested way that deprives others. </p><p>In other words, Christine Emba has a better anthropology here than most of her left-wing colleagues.</p><p>However, I do think the discussion of masculinity could be extended. Its focus is on men being good providers and protectors. This leaves out aspects of masculinity that are rarely defended.</p><p>Reality is marked by a tendency toward entropy, both in the individual and society. By this I mean a declining energy to uphold order, so that there is a slide into decay and chaos. One of the higher missions that men have is to resist entropy, both within their own person and in the communities they belong to. The opposite of entropy, or "reverse entropy", is "negentropy" - in which things become increasingly better ordered. </p><p>The task of bringing the individual and the community into negentropy is not an easy one. It is necessary to consider, and to find ways to harmonise, the tripartite nature of existence, namely the biological, social and spiritual aspects of our natures. It requires also a capacity for prudence - for considering the likely consequences of measures that are undertaken; an ability to rank the goods of life in their proper order; an awareness of both the good and the evil that exists within our own nature; a capacity to learn from history and past experience; and an intuitive grasp of what constitutes the human good and rightly ordered action.</p><p>In short, what is required is a certain kind of wisdom. The instinct to exercise this kind of wisdom in the leadership of a community is given most strongly to men. You can see this when it comes to feminism. This movement is, and always has been, a "partial" one, in the sense that it is oriented to issues relating to one part of society only. Nor has it ever taken responsibility for upholding the larger social order or for conserving the broader tradition from which it emerged. It is there to "take" or "demand" rather than to order and uphold. </p><p>One of the problems with masculinity in the modern world is not only the undermining of the provider and protector roles, but even more notably that of wise leadership. The fault for this does not lie entirely with feminism. </p><p>Political liberalism hasn't helped. If the purpose of politics is to maximise individual preference satisfaction, with all preferences being equally preferences and therefore of the same value, then how can a politician seek to rule wisely? It becomes difficult to make qualitative distinctions between different choices and different policies. Urging prudence might be condemned as discriminatory or even as "arbitrary". </p><p>Even worse, I think, is the influence of scientism. In part this is because scientism places limits on what type of knowledge is considered valid. But more than this, modern science, in making the advances that it did, seduced Western men into looking for technological and technocratic solutions to social (and personal) problems. I am reminded of this <a href="https://patterns.architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-177039">quote</a> from Signorelli and Salingaros:</p><blockquote>Modern art embodies and manifests all the worst features of modern thought — the despair, the irrationality, the hostility to tradition, the confusion of scientia with techne, or wisdom with power, the misunderstanding of freedom as liberation from essence rather than perfection of essence. </blockquote>I want to underline here the problem that Western man is so oriented to "techne" that he voluntarily withdrew from the field of wisdom, thereby making entropy inevitable.</div><div><br /></div><div>One further problem is that Western thought became too focused on the poles of individualism and universalism. Wisdom comes most into play when considering the particular communities and traditions that the individual wishes to uphold. If all you care about is individual self-interest, or abstract, universal commitments, then wisdom can be at least partly replaced by "cunning" on the one hand or feelings on the other.</div><div><br /></div><div>The ideal of the wise father lasted for a long time. It was still present in popular culture in the 1960s and 70s, for instance, in television shows like My Three Sons, Little House on the Prairie and even to a degree in The Brady Bunch. But then it was axed. In more recent decades, fathers have been allowed to be loveable, but never a figure who might wisely order or advise. </div><div><br /></div><div>The recent <i>Barbie</i> movie is a case in point. In that screenplay, the three wisdom figures are all female, but none of them have much to offer. The creator figure, for instance, tells Barbie that "I created you so that you wouldn't have an ending", i.e. that there are no given ends or purposes to her life. Barbie herself becomes a wisdom figure at the end of the film, but all she can advise Ken is that he is enough as he is. The men in the movie are uniformly of the "goofy" type that our culture prefers (the opposite of men having gravitas). So there is no-one who is truly fit to lead.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is in this context that a figure like Jordan Peterson has become so prominent. He is a psychologist and so has status as someone within a technocratic field. But he has pushed a little beyond this, a little into the field of "wise father" dispensing life advice, and this is so missing within modern culture that it has catapulted him to fame. Christine Emba has noted precisely this, that despite the advice being a little thin, he is filling an unmet need:</div><blockquote>In 2018, curious about a YouTube personality who had seemingly become famous overnight, I got tickets to a sold-out lecture in D.C. by Jordan Peterson. It was one of dozens of stops on the Canadian psychology professor turned anti-“woke” juggernaut’s book tour for his surprise bestseller “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.” The crowd was at least 85 percent male...<br /><br />Surrounded by men on a Tuesday night, I wondered aloud what the fuss was about. In my opinion, Peterson served up fairly banal advice: “Stand up straight,” “delay gratification.”...Suddenly, the 20-something guy in front of me swung around. “Jordan Peterson,” he told me without a hint of irony in his voice, “taught me how to live.”<br /><br />If there’s a vacuum in modeling manhood today, Peterson has been one of the boldest in stepping up to fill it. </blockquote><div>I don't want to disparage Jordan Peterson's efforts because he is one of the first to take a step in the right direction. His instincts are right. Note the title of his book: "an antidote to chaos" - he understands that it is not just about "techne" but that men are to be a force for negentropy - for the harmonious ordering of the self and society, and that he has a role to play in providing wise advice to younger men. I might wish that he could draw more deeply on "logos", but even so he has made a welcome start.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-11430480613047210252023-09-24T13:40:00.004+10:002023-09-24T17:18:18.975+10:00Empowerment and misery<p>There is a feminist by the name of Amanda Montei who has taken autonomy theory to the next level. If you recall, a key aspect of liberalism is a commitment to individual autonomy. Autonomy is thought of as a power to self-determine in whatever direction we choose, with the predetermined aspects of life, such as the sex we are born into, being looked on negatively as impediments artificially imposed upon the individual.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiaUPBhCNF5tqQ0TYSANbIVhJh4EjaCuStXz9OBfNdSqutfgKxVvrAzenJRS5tTJC1dp0CoEVCT6F_hCeZeAYsikM5pxALGm-n7rl1E-v1dZrBy7KBTMG9bwuF6Lb5-ksTA-uxv6YY8qVQuVyu8sC4wFzREkV1A6w5nFbUEhuHH9THKLjwcrVmVQ/s640/Montei.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiaUPBhCNF5tqQ0TYSANbIVhJh4EjaCuStXz9OBfNdSqutfgKxVvrAzenJRS5tTJC1dp0CoEVCT6F_hCeZeAYsikM5pxALGm-n7rl1E-v1dZrBy7KBTMG9bwuF6Lb5-ksTA-uxv6YY8qVQuVyu8sC4wFzREkV1A6w5nFbUEhuHH9THKLjwcrVmVQ/s320/Montei.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Amanda Montei</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><p></p><p>Feminists have long sought to apply this theory to the lives of women. It has led them to prefer women to be independent of men, to reject roles traditionally associated with womanhood, and to believe that the aim of life for women is to be empowered, meaning to be able to do as they wish, in whatever direction, without negative consequence or judgement. </p><p>It might, at first glance, sound nice to be "empowered" in this way. It sounds strong and commanding and in control. But the logic of empowerment doesn't foster strength and well-being. As we shall see, it leads Amanda Montei to a kind of pitiable frailty and misery.</p><p>First, though, here is Amanda Montei's brain on autonomy theory (from her book <i>Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control</i>):</p><p></p><blockquote>On those of us marked <i>girl</i>...it is not just toy dolls or our parents that insist on our inevitable maternity. Every aspect of the world...tells us how to be <i>woman</i>, largely indistinguishable from <i>mother</i>. As Melissa Febos writes in <i>Girlhood</i>, "Patriarchal coercion is a ghost", an immeasurable figure that looms, hovers, hardly seen, correcting, policing, molding. The afterimages of our gendered socialization haunt the body, telling us how to be, what to say, who to become...We are compelled toward surrender, as the whole world rambles on, telling us who and what our bodies are for.</blockquote><p></p><p>She begins by claiming that being a girl or a woman is merely a social construct, and that girls are simply "marked" as girls as if they could be assigned some other identity. This is a good example of why feminists are in no position to criticise transsexuals for undermining female identity when they have done such a good job of it themselves.</p><p>She then harps on about an all powerful, ghost-like patriarchy, hiding behind the scenes, robbing women of their autonomy by "telling us how to be, what to say, who to become". </p><p>Note the difficulty she is in already. First, she is at war with herself. She has taken her own womanhood to be something artificially and oppressively imposed upon her by shadowy forces she cannot control, rather than something essentially good about her own personhood that she can then seek to express and embody the higher forms of as a way of fulfilling her own being and purposes in life.</p><p>Second, she has adopted an impossibly radical world view, one in which the only things that are legitimate are the ones that are self-given. Therefore, she has already taken a negative and hostile stance toward motherhood as this is a "given" of womanhood and is therefore alien to her radical concept of personhood.</p><p>Third, wrapped up in this mindset she is already a hapless victim of the world she inhabits. She is not a strong woman in control of her own life. She inhabits a mental realm in which things are done to her that she does not like and that she cannot resist. The focus on autonomy has created a person who, if anything, is relatively low on self-determination and self-empowerment.</p><p>Despite this outlook on life, Amanda Montei did decide to marry and have children. This was not a good move for someone seeking to maximise their individual autonomy, as children inevitably make claims on us as parents. We sacrifice a part of our autonomy in order to serve other goods when we take on the role of father or mother.</p><p>Predictably Amanda Montei fell in a heap. Rather than being a strong woman, she couldn't cope with the idea of sacrificing for or serving her own children. Nor was she open to any of the joys of motherhood, as her sense of victimhood and resentment was too overwhelming.</p><p>It reached the point that she could not bear the touch of her own young children, feeling this to be a violation of her bodily autonomy. She went as far as to compare her children wanting to hug her to rape culture. </p><blockquote>"The book is really about motherhood after Me Too,” Montei says. “And the connections between rape culture and the institution of motherhood, the continuity between these two kinds of cultural institutions and the way that they see women’s bodies."</blockquote><p>And this:</p><blockquote>But over time I came to see that the basic tenets of rape culture run through our cultural expectations of American mothers. Just as we normalize sexual violence against women, we normalize the suffering of women in motherhood.</blockquote><p>And so you get to this version of motherhood:</p><p></p><blockquote>What I wanted, more than anything, was...to feel as though I fully inhabited and <i>had</i> my body. But all the ideas about how I should act as a mother - how I should respond to my children's near-constant requests for snacks, their demands for attention, their volatile emotions, their hands down my shirt or smushing my face - felt like insects crawling on me. I found myself frequently rubbing my face, itching my scalp, trying to delouse.</blockquote><p></p><p>She thinks of her children as being like insects requiring her to "delouse". She continues:</p><p></p><blockquote>Other times I burst into anger, yelling at my children or my husband, demanding space or help, simply because I felt so small, like a little creature myself, shouting in the wide expanse of darkness and nothingness...I struggled with the physicality of caring for children, but even more with my growing awareness that the lack of autonomy I felt in motherhood reiterated everything I had been urged to believe about my body since I was a girl. </blockquote><p></p><p>Where in this passage is the power in empowerment? Her obsession with autonomy has led her to feel small, a "little creature" lost in a "wide expanse of darkness and nothingness". Nor is she in control of anything: she is lost to her negative emotions, taking things out on those who love her, believing herself to be a victim of vast impersonal forces. </p><p>Matt Walsh made <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgZIOf8uRLE">a video</a> in response to Amanda Montei. I'm pleased to report that he began with first principles, by denying that autonomy is always and everywhere the highest good to be pursued in life:</p><p></p><blockquote>As a woman your body does not belong entirely to you. As a man your body doesn't belong entirely to you. You are not an autonomous island floating alone out in the sea. Neither am I. I have responsibilities. I have obligations. I owe myself to others, especially my family and when I say that I include my body as I am not in this life separable from my body...to be entirely autonomous in your body is to be entirely autonomous in your person, but no person is autonomous, we all have duties that transcend whatever claims we might want to make to autonomy...<i>I am not a self-created being existing only for whatever purpose I decide.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>The last sentence is particularly good, coming as it does from a relatively mainstream conservative with a large following. I might not have framed the other part exactly as Matt Walsh does (as I don't think it is just about obligations, though these exist, but more about higher goods in life, including caritas love and fulfilling higher aspects of our being as men and women). </p><p>To be fair, Matt Walsh goes on to say:</p><p></p><blockquote>The author, a feminist named Amanda Montei, has written not a revelation that she is a child of God who exists for a higher purpose, but rather a lament that everybody in the world, including her children, especially her children, are using and victimising her. This is not an expression of motherly love but a long, weird and weirdly sexualised whine.</blockquote><p></p><p>Walsh also describes well Amanda Montei's pathetic victim mindset:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>Yet another is the insistence on being a victim in all things. Notice how she describes all of her sexual encounters as horrific drudgeries that she had to cope with and endure miserably. That's not because the encounters were non-consensual, she did consent, but she is still a victim of them somehow. She's the victim of everything. She's the victim of everything that she herself does. She's the victim even of her own children's affection. She is cringing through life, waiting for every moment to be done so that she can get to the next moment and complain about that one too. </p><p></p></blockquote><p>His finishing statement is also fine. It is too long to transcribe in full, but here is an excerpt:</p><p></p><blockquote>We all have to experience hardship. There is nothing special about that. You get credit for enduring it with some semblance of dignity and strength and courage...We all have crosses that we bear. And you can choose to carry yours with grace or you can whine and cry and milk it for every ounce of pity you can get out of it. And if you choose the latter option then it is all for nothing. Suffering is an opportunity, an opportunity to become stronger, to gain wisdom, to gain perspective, but you squander that opportunity if you whimper and moan and gripe the whole time. Now you still have to suffer, but you aren't even becoming a better person through it, you're actually becoming a worse person, it's the worst of all worlds...you've only become smaller and weaker, until you become an exceptionally small and weak person.</blockquote><p><br /></p><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-68727905280038873742023-08-19T12:35:00.007+10:002023-08-21T22:06:43.999+10:00The line that did not hold - can liberalism go only so far?<p>Konstantin Kisin did a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lPHvnz_V2s">review</a> of the Barbie movie which I would categorise as being both insightful and flawed. He says in his review:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>The central destructive notion of liberalism is the idea that we're all individuals maximising our freedom and pursuing happiness. I have much sympathy for this approach when it comes to relations between the citizen and the government. I am liberal in the sense that I want to be free from authoritarian control in order to be able to pursue my own happiness as I see fit. </p><p>What I believe liberalism gets wrong is the attempt to apply this concept outside of the relationship between the individual and the state and extend it into the realm of family and human relations more broadly. Yes, freedom from intrusive government is likely to provide opportunities for each individual to pursue their own happiness but it is simply a lie to say that maximising freedom from your fellow human beings is a recipe for happiness...happiness is derived not from your freedom from other people but from the bonds you form with them.</p><p>Indeed, as any parent knows, the most meaningful things we ever get to do are the very things that constrain our freedom the most...</p><p>If the poison pill of hyper-liberalism is to encourage us to see ourselves as atomised individuals, the liberal feminism of Hollywood depicted here is worse still...the modern feminist movement is intent on brainwashing young women to see the relationship between men and women as one of competition...having retaken Barbie Land from the clutches of the patriarchy and rejected Ken's quite reasonable suggestion that he and Barbie, i.e. men and women, are created to be together, Barbie is free to ride off into the sunset, alone.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>There are some aspects of this analysis that I think Kisin gets right. He identifies as a problem liberalism setting men and women apart as competing political classes; and he observes correctly that maximising our individual autonomy by rejecting family commitments, and instead going it alone, is not a pathway to happiness for most people. I also share with Kisin his opposition to an intrusive, authoritarian state.</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh12Cyzl1bO77GcdLHBh3dXav9oWPtHJCRPwCzhNJX7St9EXCLugSD25s3Ay2HbCu3F0FYdiWh8bruLjS_RZw-2UB0K1DocPnJJSuvfC1CKw5Q22VzEg1oqlDD0ppcFcJL2wK9WnrwlZhTIKx075bfwJEzrVRKuFrx9YPmNCKoSoy1jf8fI8hR2jQ/s461/Kisin.PNG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="461" data-original-width="446" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh12Cyzl1bO77GcdLHBh3dXav9oWPtHJCRPwCzhNJX7St9EXCLugSD25s3Ay2HbCu3F0FYdiWh8bruLjS_RZw-2UB0K1DocPnJJSuvfC1CKw5Q22VzEg1oqlDD0ppcFcJL2wK9WnrwlZhTIKx075bfwJEzrVRKuFrx9YPmNCKoSoy1jf8fI8hR2jQ/s320/Kisin.PNG" width="310" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Konstantin Kisin</td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p>Nonetheless, there are problems. Kisin would like to return to a much earlier version of liberalism in which liberalism was thought of as "political", i.e. as being applied to the sphere of politics rather than the personal life of family relationships.</p><p>This attempt to keep public/political life and private/family life apart did not work. It was always likely to fail, and it did, in fact, fail. Why? Because if you establish the maximising of individual autonomy as the overriding public good, then there will be a call for this good to be applied to all the institutions of society, including the family.</p><p>As early as the 1880s in England, women were starting to apply the key liberal political principle to their own lives. For instance, a student from Girton College at this time described her liberal understanding of herself as a woman as <a href="http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/005864.html">follows</a>:</p><blockquote>We are no longer mere parts - excrescences, so to speak, of a family...One may develop as an individual and independent unit.</blockquote><p>Clearly, the firewall that was supposed to protect the bonds of family life from the logic of liberal individualism was already failing by the later nineteenth century.</p><p>Feminists hammered away to collapse the distinction between private and public goods. "The personal is the political" was a favourite slogan of second wave feminism. Similarly, feminists often drew comparisons between tyranny in politics and tyranny in the family. For instance, in 1994 an Australian feminist called Kate Gilmore unveiled a new government policy with these <a href="http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/005864.html">words</a>:</p><blockquote>You can see the tyrants, the invaders, the imperialists, in the fathers, the husbands, the stepfathers, the boyfriends, the grandfathers, and it’s that study of tyranny in the home...that will take us to the point where we can secure change.</blockquote><div>It seems like straight out man hatred, but what is really happening is a feminist insisting that political liberalism needs to be applied to family life, as there is tyranny in both to be defeated (which helps to explain the feminist insistence on female oppression within the family, as this then justifies overriding the idea of family life as a private sphere insulated from political liberalism).</div><div><br /></div><div>Just to illustrate how far we have already been through this whole cycle, here is a <a href="https://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2021/04/haili-on-love-freedom.html">commen</a>t by the Russian feminist, Alexandra Kollontai, on a novel written by the French author Colette in the early 1900s:</div><blockquote>Freedom, independence, solitude are the substance of her personal desires. But when Rene, after a tiring long day's work, sits at the fireplace in her lovely flat, it is as though the hollow-eyed melancholy of loneliness creeps into her room and sets himself behind her chair.<br /><br />"I am used to being alone," she writes in her diary, "but today I feel so forsaken. Am I then not independent, not free? And terribly lonely?" Does not this question have the ring of the woman of the past who is used to hearing familiar, beloved voices, to being the object of indispensable words and acts of tenderness?</blockquote><p>Kollontai is already using the phrase "woman of the past" to describe those women who sought family bonds rather than freedom, independence and solitude - and this in the early 1900s. The issue, then, is do we really want to keep cycling through these phases, in which the liberal principle gets applied to the lives of women, so that they pursue a lonely life independent of family love?</p><p>There is a second problem with Kisin's proposed solution. Even if our personal, private lives could be kept separate from the principle animating the public, political arena, Kisin's formula would still do significant harm. Note the way that Kisin himself puts it. He wants to be free as an individual to pursue his own happiness as he sees fit.</p><p>This sounds alright, but it leaves something out. If we are imagined as millions of individuals each seeking our own good according to our individual desires or beliefs, then how are common goods to be defended? Where, at the public and political level, are these common goods to be acknowledged and upheld?</p><p>The most obvious common good is that of nation. What if it is an aspect of the human good to belong to a traditional nation? I cannot uphold the existence of the nation I belong to at a purely individual level. The formula of people being left alone to do their own private, individual thing no longer works if you accept that the existence of a nation is important to human life.</p><p>And there is good reason to believe that it is important. Living amongst a people with whom you share thick bonds of a shared ancestry, language, history and culture provides the arena for expressing many of our social commitments. For instance, it allows us to express and fulfil aspects of our manhood, the ones by which we protect the larger polis, through the exercise of our masculine strengths, including the heroic virtues of defending the community from harm. It provides significant aspects of our identity and our sense of belonging, as well as a connectedness to culture, to place, to nature and to generations past, present and future. It makes us the bearers of a tradition, giving us standards to live up to and to make our own contributions to. It provides a warmth of familiarity of manners and mores, of humour and of the smaller, unspoken understandings that exist between a people embedded in a longstanding culture of their own. It allows us to reproduce who we are and what we most value, and it can be, at its best, a portal into the transcendent, as when we experience something like the "soul" of our nation and it draws out our love and a sense of duty that expresses something better within our own natures.</p><p>As important as it is to avoid state overreach or state tyranny, there are common goods like that of nation that do need to be upheld, and this can only be done at the level of the polis, and therefore the focus of political life cannot be only a freedom to pursue our own purely individual ends. If this is the only focus, we are left powerless to defend things that are highly meaningful to our own lives.</p><p>Finally, one more criticism of Kisin's analysis, but more along the lines of a quibble. Kisin claims that the makers of Barbie are motivated by the principle of "misery loves company" or "hurt people hurt people". I don't think this is so. The director of the film, Greta Gerwig, is married with children. The actress Margot Robbie has been with her current husband for a decade or more and writes glowingly of how fulfilled the marriage has made her. So these women are choosing one thing for themselves (marriage and motherhood), whilst promoting something else to other women (going it alone).</p><p>What is happening here is better explained by Lawrence Auster's <a href="http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/005864.html">concept</a> of the unprincipled exception. Auster explained that liberal values, if followed consistently, would make it difficult to live a decent life. Therefore, it is common for liberals to make unprincipled exceptions in order to escape the personally harmful consequences of their own beliefs. </p><p>I have long noted that upper middle-class women are sometimes adept at playing this game. They do enough to secure traditional goods for themselves, whilst also promoting modernist values. It tends to be women a little below them who take the message at face value, and who attempt, usually disastrously, to live in a more principled way along feminist lines.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-68960856635492433812023-08-12T23:05:00.004+10:002024-02-11T07:54:33.719+11:00The double nature of the good<p>Patrick Deneen has <a href="http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-rape-of-nature-left-and-right.html">written</a> of the two revolutions that liberalism brought to the West:</p><blockquote>Liberalism...seeks to transform all of human life and the world. Its two revolutions - its anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and its insistence on the human separation from and opposition to nature - created its distinctive and new understanding of liberty as the most extensive possible expansion of the human sphere of autonomous activity.</blockquote><p>This is an excellent summary of the changes wrought by liberalism. However, I have noticed in my recent reading that the anthropological individualism was not necessarily intentional, at least not from some of the early luminaries of modernist thought.</p><p>Descartes, for instance, was <a href="https://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2023/05/descartes-commitment-community.html">happy</a> to accept that we exist not only at the individual level but also as members of larger bodies, such as the family, that we belong to not by choice but by birth:</p><blockquote>though each of us is a person distinct from others, whose interests are accordingly in some way different from those of the rest of the world, we ought still to think that none of us could subsist alone and that each one of us is really one of the many parts of the universe, and more particularly a part of the earth, the state, the society and the family to which we belong by our domicile, our oath of allegiance and our birth.</blockquote><p>As it happens, Francis Bacon had a similar <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=BEYWDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA236&lpg=PA236&dq=%22Francis+Bacon%22+%22Double+nature+of+the+good%22&source=bl&ots=VWubj39DwQ&sig=ACfU3U24JMnVhzWM9IGJvWOswor0nIpJMg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjS4qvSv8WAAxVTslYBHQ5KCyI4FBDoAXoECBgQAw#v=onepage&q=%22Francis%20Bacon%22%20%22Double%20nature%20of%20the%20good%22&f=false">outlook</a>, which he called the double nature of the good. Bacon believed that matter was moved by "appetite". One of these appetites inclined objects toward self-preservation. But the second appetite was a "motion of connection", a force through which "bodies support each other by mutual connection and contact". </p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgyOEoaY5jkZVdrzZdcVX3DHwav4S1FwuTfoE6sIo3NsCwg8sKFyF-B-SROebrqR2C3YOt9iy3iduNQsaAlqbbo0LtkPREhWgZY0oFV6-sk2U0ggJ45vRytTGsrCGL-qX-v1icLwX6nRQWhwIfZD6eKRRNjYI7Vo88p6KQyA5A2Zjk_0jLAjPdlGQ" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="274" data-original-width="220" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgyOEoaY5jkZVdrzZdcVX3DHwav4S1FwuTfoE6sIo3NsCwg8sKFyF-B-SROebrqR2C3YOt9iy3iduNQsaAlqbbo0LtkPREhWgZY0oFV6-sk2U0ggJ45vRytTGsrCGL-qX-v1icLwX6nRQWhwIfZD6eKRRNjYI7Vo88p6KQyA5A2Zjk_0jLAjPdlGQ=w257-h320" width="257" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Francis Bacon</td></tr></tbody></table><br />In his book of 1605, <i>The Advancement of Learning</i>, Bacon writes that the appetites of self-preservation and union together form the double nature of the good:<p></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Here, he argues that there "is formed in every thing a double nature of good": "the one, as every thing is a total or substantive in itself": the other, "as it is a part or member of a greater body".</p><p>Put differently, there are two kinds of goods found in material nature: the one, goodness per se, or any given objects intrinsic value; the other, goodness insofar as it belongs, and thus contributes to, a collective reality greater than itself.</p><p>The appetite for self-preservation corresponds naturally to the safeguarding of a material body's essential goodness, whereas the appetite of union facilitates a basic level of material conjunction for the purposes both of self-preservation and the greater good. [<i>Francis Bacon on Motion and Power, pp.236-37]</i></p></blockquote><p>There is one thing to add. Bacon believed that the Fall had weakened the summary law of <a href="file:///C:/Users/mv/Downloads/Francis_Bacon_on_the_Moral_and_Political.pdf">nature</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote>What Bacon means is essentially that after Adam and Eve broke the moral law, matter reverted in part to its original state of chaos: a dose of recalcitrance to the summary law was introduced into nature...Bacon explains this through the appetites of matter...Left to themselves these appetites normally ‘attack, usurp, and slaughter one another in turn’ – a characteristic Bacon uses to explain the underlying cause of chaos. When influenced by the summary law, however, disorder is turned to order, and the universe acquires goodness, meaning and direction.</blockquote><p></p><p>The power of the summary law is needed to keep the right balance between the appetite of self-preservation and that of connection:</p><p></p><blockquote>The behaviour of even the minutest of natural bodies, then, is directed by a kind of moral code imbedded in the fabric of nature, a "double good" in which the greater good corresponds to the preservation of the whole...the existence of the greater good, says Bacon, is ultimately predicated upon an equilibrium which necessitates the existence of the summary law. For without the balancing power of the <i>lex summaria</i> to mitigate between the appetite of self-preservation and that of union there can only ever be chaos. [<i>Francis Bacon on Motion and Power, p.237]</i></blockquote><p>Bacon, then, was not radically individualistic in the way we now understand the term. In fact, he thought that too great an emphasis on individual self-preservation, insufficiently balanced by a concern for the greater good, signalled a loss of the law of nature originally intended by God to create order within the cosmos. It signalled, in other words, a decline into chaos.</p><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-25044203736500869652023-08-08T08:00:00.209+10:002023-08-08T09:36:35.984+10:00When it doesn't work out as you imagined<p>A woman posted the following video on TikTok, in which she describes feeling unsafe living in San Francisco:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dwDwPIo3EwFZsAEIvXYe-FcPwz-_2Zwpxy0uInTNcK2iRSc21LhHNpqTKENRibkvqyzNILyx59BoJU' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><br /><p>After experiencing an interaction with a man in which she was spat on and threatened with assault, she says of living in San Francisco "I literally never feel safe".</p><p>But here's the thing. This woman is living in what is arguably the most leftist city in the United States. And she herself is a young, single childless leftist political activist. In other words, she has helped to create a place that mirrors her own most deeply held values - and she doesn't feel safe living there.</p><p>Here is an example of her political views:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJYhvxa3mNaWuYnVr_QDLRN6eKtazVDBq5lx70jTs-mPWLBtNiBUz1QepUmm1rwv2457fH5HKKzJ19bem1LYCPlNfbVmxDFbtGLGGiToxfpe1vmanaxq_USblyMir3U_i7Tehr2XzilQzqTxX9QXv_h_EsJdI3vBbenPEJpDqa-qGtxcVMdKKL6Q/s495/Hanayla.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="280" data-original-width="495" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJYhvxa3mNaWuYnVr_QDLRN6eKtazVDBq5lx70jTs-mPWLBtNiBUz1QepUmm1rwv2457fH5HKKzJ19bem1LYCPlNfbVmxDFbtGLGGiToxfpe1vmanaxq_USblyMir3U_i7Tehr2XzilQzqTxX9QXv_h_EsJdI3vBbenPEJpDqa-qGtxcVMdKKL6Q/s16000/Hanayla.png" /></a></div><br /><p>As you can see, it is the standard leftist version of equality. She writes "Vote as if you were the most marginalized, oppressed person you know". I wrote about this type of political frame in my last <a href="https://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2023/08/mixed-messages.html">post</a>:</p><blockquote>So how, then, do you have equality? One way is to do what modern society formally does, and insist on levelling down any power structures. For instance, if white people have more power in a traditionally white society in the sense of dominating its cultural expression, then this has to be deconstructed, whereas the cultural expression of minority groups has to be supported and promoted.</blockquote><p>There is a dissolving logic to this kind of politics. First, when the majority culture starts to think this way, they turn against what is best within their own tradition, in an effort to level themselves down. And so they no longer as effectively promote what is needed to hold things together. Nor do minorities find it as easy to maintain their own cohesion as there is no longer a core majority group to define their own existence against. Instead of what leftists imagine will happen, namely a hundred different groups each equally able to culturally express themselves, you get a loss of cohesion within all the groups and a descent into a more atomised mass consumer culture.</p><p>There is an irresponsibility in engaging politically to achieve "equal cultural expression". The focus should be on what is required to successfully uphold the common life of a people, including a regard for the health of the institutions, the supporting cultural norms and moral standards, and the stability of governance. </p><p>If everyone thinks like the woman in the video, and votes and acts according to the issue of leftist equality, then why wouldn't there be a gradual decline in the social fabric? Why wouldn't there be a loss of important social and cultural norms? Why wouldn't the end result be a less safe and secure social environment? After all, who is now focused on maintaining these standards? Who now frames politics around these more traditional aims? Certainly, not the leftist single ladies living in San Fran - not, at least, until things get so bad that these young women "never feel safe".</p><p>And, even then, the most likely option is that these women will just move somewhere else, to a place they have not yet made unsafe, and subject that community to the same irresponsible concept of politics.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-12537135807490041292023-08-06T16:13:00.009+10:002023-12-17T19:46:40.487+11:00Mixed messages<p>You are probably aware that there are two very different takes on the recent <i>Barbie</i> movie. There are some on the right, like Michael Knowles, who <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2drA3fxAa3c">think</a> the message of the film is terrific. There is a scene toward the end of the film in which Barbie rejects having a relationship with Ken and tells him that he is enough as he is, but also that he has to find out who he is outside of any relationship with her.</p><p>Knowles interprets this in a red pill way. Given that all of the men in the film are shown as simps, who live only for validation from the women, he thinks this is Barbie telling Ken that he is not fit for relationships until he is his own mental point of origin, as the manosphere puts it. For Knowles, the message is that Ken needs to be more masculine, and stronger in his own frame.</p><p>This is plausible, but I don't think it is what Gerwig is aiming at. I am on the other side of the fence - I think Barbie is an unabashedly feminist film and that Gerwig believes that problems within feminism can be resolved by men and women going their own way. As I'll demonstrate in a moment, this is the message that at least some feminist women are taking from the film.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhhs6yxe5WibD8eYKLkveN0jQJuzrYYONBKmvy7NrSfq6DAu6jFB2XiKOf6FtjbDnQ8cBL4MHHyO6ocZoXAv7CTwIRC_3hLkvQljgO3dEWPUtTdT4g5bsxZqNBHHxf9Hfbs8RSEDZZ1OcuZHg1d9zhsc-y7nypzoaL_eWKWj1clqz-l1eK8bJKgA/s584/Barbie%203.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="389" data-original-width="584" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhhs6yxe5WibD8eYKLkveN0jQJuzrYYONBKmvy7NrSfq6DAu6jFB2XiKOf6FtjbDnQ8cBL4MHHyO6ocZoXAv7CTwIRC_3hLkvQljgO3dEWPUtTdT4g5bsxZqNBHHxf9Hfbs8RSEDZZ1OcuZHg1d9zhsc-y7nypzoaL_eWKWj1clqz-l1eK8bJKgA/w400-h266/Barbie%203.webp" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p>There are two problems within feminism that the film seeks to resolve by uncoupling Ken and Barbie. The first is equality. The philosophy of the film is that we have been created without any given ends and that therefore we have to make meaning for ourselves. And this then means that the power to have our self-chosen purposes and ends realised in society becomes critical. Power, though, is a zero sum game. If men have more of it, women have less of it and vice versa. In the film, this is shown as "either/or" - either the men have power or the women do.</p><p>So how, then, do you have equality? One way is to do what modern society formally does, and insist on levelling down any power structures. For instance, if white people have more power in a traditionally white society in the sense of dominating its cultural expression, then this has to be deconstructed, whereas the cultural expression of minority groups has to be supported and promoted.</p><p>There is something of a nod to this solution in the film, in the idea that the Kens must become activists to gradually improve their position, just as women must do in the real world. Still, the pursuit of power remains a zero sum game, in which whatever women gain, men must lose. And Gerwig believes that at this social level, men must lose. </p><p>So how does someone who sees the world through a modern frame resolve this? How should men respond to a world view based on a zero sum game in which they are slated to lose out? Gerwig says that there is a positive side to feminism for both men and women, one in which both have equal status. And that is that both sexes can equally act as autonomous individuals, shaping their own meaning, via solo development, without regard to the other sex. The Kens can do this just as much as the Barbies can. If each sex goes its own way, their own self-generated life aims can be pursued, without imposing on the other. There is no more reliance on the other sex, no more enmeshing, and therefore no loss of power to pursue our aims.</p><p>A feminist mother (Wendy Hahn) took her 15-year-old son to the Barbie movie so that he would absorb exactly this message. She <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/barbie-movie-teen-boys-ken_n_64cba947e4b0fd06595000e8">wrote</a>:</p><blockquote>In 2023, I am fighting to raise a son who doesn’t become the next Kyle Rittenhouse, Brock Turner or Elon Musk.<br /><br />Movies, like books, invite dialogue. As a former high school English teacher, I wish all teachers would assign their students to watch “Barbie” in place of summer reading selections like “The Grapes of Wrath.” <br /><br />....in the end, Stereotypical Barbie tells Ken to get a life that doesn’t depend on others for happiness ― a life that gives him equal status without infringing upon the status of anyone else. I want that for your sons and my son as well.</blockquote>The idea is that we can all have "equal status" if we don't "depend on others for happiness". In the context of the film, this means men and women going their own way. The purposes or ends in life no longer revolve around marriage. There is a sacrifice of love for the empowerment to fulfil our own individual ends.<div><br /></div><div>That this is Gerwig's intention is suggested by the fact that her next film has a similar message. Gerwig wrote the screenplay for the upcoming film <i>Snow White</i>. It stars Gal Gadot and Rachel Zegler. An interview with these two actresses went as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjorHEvI8z0">follows</a>:</div><div></div><blockquote><div>Interviewer: You said you were bringing a modern edge to it. What do you mean by that?<br />Rachel Zegler: I just mean that it's no longer 1937. We absolutely wrote a Snow White that...</div><div>Gal Gadot: She's not going to be saved by the prince.</div><div>Rachel Zegler: She's not going to be saved by the prince and she's not going to be dreaming about true love. She's dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.</div></blockquote><p>There is a sacrifice of love for power (I am not endorsing the Disney version of "true love" here). Marital love is sacrificed for girl power. The two are set against each other, as they have been within feminism for over a century.</p><p>The one exception to this messaging in the <i>Barbie</i> film is that there is some support for the mother/daughter relationship. I expect that this is because there is no zero sum game involved here (mothers, it is said in the film, help launch their high flying daughters into society).</p><p>The other problem within feminism that the film tries to resolve is that of cognitive dissonance. Women, we are told in the film, are oppressed because they have to walk a tightrope, for instance, by being thin but not too thin. The kinds of examples given are not all that persuasive: they do not seem, for instance, any more difficult than men having to be bold in approaching women, but not too bold.</p><p>However, feminism has, in fact, created significant areas of cognitive dissonance for women. For instance, if the aim is to attain power, then the traditionally feminine qualities will seem lesser than the traditionally masculine ones. So women need to have masculine traits and dial down their feminine presentation to other women, but still retain enough femininity that they will not make themselves entirely unattractive to men. </p><p>Similarly, women who are brought up in a modern feminist culture will absorb from an early age the idea that their role is to assert their own power against that of men. However, this conflicts with the feminine impulse women have to "let go" and be receptive for the right man when it comes to forming relationships with the opposite sex. It is difficult, in other words, for women to have a boss babe mentality and still successfully pair bond with a man.</p><p>The film does try to put forward the idea that women can be leaders and still have something of the feminine left in them, but even so you have to imagine that many women who take feminism seriously will have a considerable burden of cognitive dissonance. In my observation, there are many feminists who do not walk the tightrope successfully - they don't come across to men as sufficiently feminine and so the men look elsewhere for partners.</p><p>One way to resolve this cognitive dissonance is simply to downgrade the significance of relationships in human life. If relationships don't matter that much, then some of the burden is relieved.</p><p>What all this illustrates is how important the intellectual frame is. Imagine if the frame was different. Let's say, for instance, that the masculine and the feminine were thought of as meaningful goods that the individual gets to embody. If these are fully realised within a relationship with the opposite sex, then there exists a common good for men and women to serve, i.e. our own individual good is tied together with a larger, communal good. The focus would shift away from competing for power with the opposite sex. What would matter instead would be the way we order ourselves toward this higher good. The questions to be focused on might be how I as a man can best embody the masculine through my role as a husband or a father, or how I as a woman might best express the feminine through my role as a wife or a mother.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-78431548441748799852023-07-30T10:49:00.009+10:002023-09-27T09:07:17.265+10:00Reframing Barbie<p>I have now seen the Barbie movie. It is not a children's film, but deals with issues of the meaning of life from a feminist perspective. It is useful to look at because it connects feminist politics with a modern metaphysics - and we get to see what is lost in the process.</p><p>I do need to set out the basic plot to explain this (so...spoiler alert). We begin in Barbie land which is a matriarchy where not only do the Barbies rule politically, but the Kens (the male dolls) are merely accessories. The Kens try to impress the Barbies but the Barbies aren't that interested, as every night is girls night.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRLFTRa4JnU8OPIKmKCkZjc5RzzY5rLiZa7oZPKch8gcPeXVu75YxZwU0LstKRGKqM7X3oGUHUg3b7GsqxgacFLZhlgEof4d2SJKWaN60WNnwzdhh43mNL-o0VU0pvq1HXsaN-O5Zw_VBGXEKB9GVnTzYsHsgqvx1h19eBjzsjRwkMx_ZIa0AFfA/s750/Barbie.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="398" data-original-width="750" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRLFTRa4JnU8OPIKmKCkZjc5RzzY5rLiZa7oZPKch8gcPeXVu75YxZwU0LstKRGKqM7X3oGUHUg3b7GsqxgacFLZhlgEof4d2SJKWaN60WNnwzdhh43mNL-o0VU0pvq1HXsaN-O5Zw_VBGXEKB9GVnTzYsHsgqvx1h19eBjzsjRwkMx_ZIa0AFfA/w400-h213/Barbie.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><p></p><p>Then Barbie is afflicted with an existential angst and is forced to go to the real world (where humans live). Barbie had expected to be greeted there as a heroine who had empowered women; instead, the patriarchy still rules. Ken loves that he gets some respect in the real world and returns to Barbie land to set up a patriarchy of his own. Barbie gets to meet her creator in the real world, and then returns to Barbie land with a mother, Gloria, and her daughter. Together they attempt to restore the matriarchy.</p><p>The best place to begin in analysing the film is with the metaphysics. Barbie's creator (a God figure) tells Barbie that "I created you so you wouldn't have an ending", i.e. that there are no ends or purposes to her life, but that she must choose for herself what she will be and do. The assumption in the film is that there is no given meaning to things, none given by a creator, so that everything is made up by ourselves and that we as humans subjectively create our own meaning and purpose.</p><p>This is the essential frame through which all else follows. What you see in the film is how some things, once thought to be a core aspect of being human, radically lose meaning within this frame.</p><p>This is particularly true of relationships between men and women. Some reviewers complained that the film was man-hating. I didn't find this to be so, not directly at least. The men are nearly all well-intentioned. The problem is that they are portrayed as entirely superfluous in the lives of women. They exist not only as a potential threat to women's autonomy and agency, but even more so as irritating figures who get in the way of women in their daily lives, i.e. who are merely tolerated. There is one husband portrayed in the film (Gloria's), but he is like a third wheel to the mother/daughter relationship, and he brings no meaning or purpose to their lives.</p><p>Similarly, at the end of the film Barbie rejects having a relationship with Ken. She tells him that he has to find meaning not in relationship with her but on his own. She effectively tells him that he must go his own way, and that he is enough by himself.</p><p>It is a savagely cold message but it makes sense within the frame. If we are to aim at maximising our autonomy, understood to mean our freedom to self-define, because this is how we assert meaning, then relationships are merely limiting. We are most autonomous when we develop solo, outside of relationships with others. Hence, love is rejected in the Barbie movie, for the sake of empowerment.</p><p>Imagine if the frame was different. For most of the Western tradition, love was thought to connect us meaningfully to higher goods and purposes and was therefore worth cultivating. Similarly, to truly develop who we are as men and women, it was once thought that we would do this in relationship with each other, as husbands and wives and fathers and mothers within a family, as a natural setting for human life. A significant regard was attached to fatherhood and motherhood to the point that it was possible, for instance, to speak of maternal honour.</p><p>Relationships are regarded in the Barbie film as just meaningless flummery. In Ken's patriarchy, the men are romantic and want to help the Barbies by demonstrating masculine competence. The Barbies are happy, admire the Kens and do little things for them like bringing them beer. But the female role is to be something like a "bimbo" that does not engage the higher nature of the women (a merely "helpful decoration" as the film puts it). When matriarchy is restored, Barbie triumphantly says that the women once again have "brains and autonomy". Again, this only makes sense within the modern feminist frame. In the older frame, relationships had a significance that would ask of both men and women something of the best within their natures - it was a field of human life that would justify giving the best of ourselves to those whom we loved. There was, potentially, a nobility to this kind of love.</p><p>Which brings us to motherhood. The film is conflicted here. Early on, motherhood is given a drubbing. The film shows little girls rejecting motherhood by bashing their baby dolls on the ground. The narrator dismisses the idea that women experience motherhood as a worthwhile thing. Throughout the film what matters is women holding political power or judicial power or winning prizes for science or journalism. However, in the real world, Gloria is just an ordinary woman with a boring office job and for her the relationship with her daughter does matter. Gloria's love for her daughter is perhaps the one human touch in the entire film. Later, we are told that mothers do have a purpose, which is to launch their high flying feminist daughters into the world. There is nothing said about women who might end up with sons instead.</p><p>Why are there mixed messages here when it comes to motherhood? I'm not sure. Perhaps the one last bastion of human love in this feminist world is a purely female one between mother and daughter that has as its ultimate purpose female empowerment. </p><p>Another difficult message in the film is that of equality. Within the feminist frame there is no common ground between men and women. There is no mutual service to a family or nation, nor do men and women fulfil aspects of their own created nature in relationship with the opposite sex. What there is instead is a pursuit of empowerment so that we might get to follow our own autonomous will. This, however, is a zero sum game. If men have power to set the world to their own desires, women lose power and vice versa. This is part of the basic plot of the movie. There is either male supremacy (Ken land) or female supremacy (Barbie land). One side has to win or lose.</p><p>The film tries to take the moral high ground by suggesting that each sex might gradually fight for and win political rights within these systems. The film also asserts that equality can be achieved by the Kens accepting, just like the Barbies, that they don't need the opposite sex and that they can be self-defining autonomous agents just like the women. It is somewhat radical for the film to suggest this, as feminists usually assert that men already have this power. The film is conceding that men are more likely to still want to uphold a pre-modern ideal of the sexes being in relationship with each other. Equality is possible, according to the Barbie film, if both sexes go their own way.</p><p>But there is another problem with equality. Barbie decides, at the end of the film, that what she really wants, even at the cost of becoming mortal, is to become a person so that she can be one of the makers/creators instead of one of those being acted on. What this illustrates is that the feminist frame is necessarily elitist rather than egalitarian. Most people are not going to wield power in society - they are not going to be part of the elite who get to move things according to their will. The film is honest enough to concede this in the character of Gloria, who is an exploited office worker who does not even have enough time to go on a vacation with her daughter. In other words, the kind of power that the feminist frame suggests will allow us to make meaning will be illusory for most people. There will be a tiny number of winners at the top, but most will be losers.</p><p>There is another confusion that arises here. On the one hand, we are supposed to rise to a godlike status of being makers/creators who thereby infuse meaning into existence - <a href="https://philosophybreak.com/articles/ubermensch-explained-the-meaning-of-nietzsches-superman/#:~:text=For%20Nietzsche%2C%20the%20%C3%9Cbermensch%20is,whole%3B%20and%20fulfill%20their%20ultimate">a kind</a> of Nietzschean Übermensch:</p><blockquote>For Nietzsche, the Übermensch is...a being who is able to be their own determiner of value; sculpt their characteristics and circumstances into a beautiful, empowered, ecstatic whole; and fulfil their ultimate potential to become who they truly are.</blockquote><p>However, the film depicts women as complaining that under the patriarchy they are expected to meet standards and that this is oppressive and that, instead, people should just accept who they are, as they are (at the end, Ken comes to the realisation that he is "Kenough").</p><p>So which is it? Are we self-defining, empowered meaning makers or just good enough as we are, any way that we are? </p><p>Perhaps one problem for the feminist frame here is that there does not exist within it any basis for objective standards, so meeting these will necessarily feel oppressive and/or arbitrary. But if this is true, then why bother self-defining? If what you already are is enough, and as good as anything else, then you may as well stay with it. The power you are striving to have, that of autonomous self-definition, is not even needed. But where then does meaning come from, if we are not subjectively making up our own meaning or purposes, as an expression of our agency, but are just accepting who we already are? If I am enough as an ordinary office worker like Gloria, then why suggest that women must find meaning in being movers and shakers as creatives or executives?</p><p>So how to summarise the film? On the one hand, I think it is better if these trends within modernity are brought to the surface, as they are in the movie. Better to see openly where things are headed and on what basis. The problem, though, is that even people who are opposed to the trends tend to argue for something else from within the feminist frame itself, which can only ever slow down what is happening rather than genuinely alter the course of social change.</p><p>On the other hand, I do find it sad that things have reached such a low point, that men and women are being split off from each other within mainstream culture. It is a defeat for all of us, men and women.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-49087093467443820282023-07-21T22:29:00.008+10:002023-07-21T22:34:19.869+10:00Trouble in feminist paradise<p>I saw an <a href="https://insidethemagic.net/2023/06/kate-mckinnon-barbie-gender-roles-mw1/">interview</a> with the cast of the newly released <i>Barbie</i> film and it demonstrated that feminism is still really a creature of political liberalism.</p><p>In the interview there is a discussion of what it means to be a Ken, i.e. one of the male dolls. Two responses were given, both of some interest.</p><p>Kate McKinnon, who plays "weird Barbie" in the film, pushed the idea that the point is to reject gender roles altogether. She said "Gender roles deny people half their humanity...we just need to be ourselves". The journalist commenting on this agreed and wrote:</p><blockquote>That’s the point, plain and simple: Trying to shove oneself into a category or box, rather than simply being yourself and letting people apply adjectives to you as they see fit, limits yourself as a human being.<br /><br />Rather than thinking about whether they’re “acting like a Ken” or “acting like a Barbie,” people should simply worry whether they are acting like themselves – that is how you truly come alive.</blockquote><p>This is simply liberalism applied to the issue of our sex. Liberalism wants to maximise our individual autonomy, understood to mean our ability to self-determine or self-define who we are and what we do. Therefore, pre-determined characteristics, such as our sex, are thought of negatively as limitations that should be made not to matter.</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhaUMdcDepM1d5fs0f1Z6rJVOzECi_A86dVjoh2OIJ7t9fVrch6DcHbjeYl7x36LC5GsMpAC_mGS0Jsf7O_Jd13ruRM3SnaQ94ATRR_Zjesvug0iCRdbzU_gTRl5GNo2fFNv9DijhcSRLzelfKIDXNeOkrdiGVPWXAqDbRkjanNsNbjAZFE2WVcbA" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="159" data-original-width="318" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhaUMdcDepM1d5fs0f1Z6rJVOzECi_A86dVjoh2OIJ7t9fVrch6DcHbjeYl7x36LC5GsMpAC_mGS0Jsf7O_Jd13ruRM3SnaQ94ATRR_Zjesvug0iCRdbzU_gTRl5GNo2fFNv9DijhcSRLzelfKIDXNeOkrdiGVPWXAqDbRkjanNsNbjAZFE2WVcbA=w400-h200" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kate McKinnon as Weird Barbie</td></tr></tbody></table><br />One of the problems with this view is that it makes who we are less meaningful. In the pre-liberal understanding, I as a man get to embody the masculine, which exists as a meaningful category within reality (an "essence"), which then means that my identity and role as a man is connected to a larger, transcendent good that I can strive toward as an ideal.<p></p><p>What liberalism replaces this with is a notion that our sex is not meaningful in this way, but rather I am just me, not connected to anything outside of my own self. I could be one thing or I could be another, and either way it wouldn't matter. There cannot be, in this view, any ideals connected to being a man or a woman, nor any standards, and in this respect the categories become radically unimportant.</p>This is not the end of the feminist story. One of the ideas within liberal modernity is that the good in life is a power to enact our own individual desires rather than having to serve someone else's. This then leads to the distinct ideal of female empowerment, which is understood to mean women being able to act in whatever direction they wish, without negative judgement or consequence. <p></p><p>But this makes relationships between men and women a zero sum game. You either have independent boss babes or you have <i>The Handmaid's Tale</i>. And this comes out in the second comment made by a woman on the <i>Barbie</i> interview panel. Issa Rae said,</p><p></p><blockquote><p>I think a Ken for me is just kind of there. I think a Ken is a great accessory. That's what I loved about Greta's imagining of Barbie is that the Kens are just supplemental characters to these Barbies. Barbies can do everything, Kens are there to support and don't necessarily have their own story and I think that's not necessarily a negative thing, it's incredibly strong for a man to be in supportive roles.</p><p></p></blockquote><p>Issa Rae is drawing out the logic of the way that feminism frames reality. In a pre-liberal mental universe, men and women served common goods. They did this, in part, because the framework was not so radically individualistic. Instead of attempting individual empowerment, men and women acted to serve the larger common good of the families and communities they belonged to. There was also a common good in the sense that men and women only fully expressed who they were in relationship to each other, as husbands and wives, within a spousal union.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhb9snAtCg1NTDZEtL5IR3bG-pXCAONM3mOZrCxjdDvSRgtQsOcIbJkmZppCPVn2uzzuGEUxgkVDwAFckk4mygTfi3RutR-mwfuCESbChgpCYk0sY9BDuT6ROEiowYChbo1vT-OydmNC7i_ehGA71mOKfXbygkwpgWe5yykjICLJUwgHc5Z94xFPg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="1200" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhb9snAtCg1NTDZEtL5IR3bG-pXCAONM3mOZrCxjdDvSRgtQsOcIbJkmZppCPVn2uzzuGEUxgkVDwAFckk4mygTfi3RutR-mwfuCESbChgpCYk0sY9BDuT6ROEiowYChbo1vT-OydmNC7i_ehGA71mOKfXbygkwpgWe5yykjICLJUwgHc5Z94xFPg=w400-h210" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Issa Rae<br /><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>In the newer liberal mental universe, men and women become competing political classes. There is no mutual service toward a common good. Instead, there is the effort to self-empower to enact our own individual desires. So either the woman gets to empower, with the man serving her, or vice versa (apparently, the plot of the <i>Barbie</i> film revolves around this notion of two such alternative worlds).</p><p>This understanding of a zero sum game, in which something that is beneficial to men is assumed to be a loss for women, does not gel well with the liberal emphasis on political equality. Feminists have long proclaimed that they want equality, so how then can someone like Issa Rae endorse the idea of men as being a supporting cast for women?</p><p>The explanation I have heard from women is that men are already empowered to do whatever they want and therefore any empowerment for women is just a progressive move toward equality. I have also heard women acknowledge that it is unequal but that it is nonetheless justified because men previously dominated (so that it is a kind of historical balancing of the books).</p><p>We are stuck within this feminist framing. We are trapped within the idea that manhood and womanhood are limiting to who we are rather than adding a meaningful layer to our existence. And, perhaps worse, we cannot escape the zero sum game mentality, in which the sexes are radically set apart from each other, in non-complementary roles, and where gender war will proceed eternally because of the lack of any common ground. </p><p>The truly liberating option would be to step outside the frame.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-33386962229483591952023-07-08T19:50:00.004+10:002023-07-09T09:48:15.760+10:00Lane's New Australia<p>In the 1890s a charismatic Australian journalist named William Lane attempted to establish a socialist utopia in Paraguay. A book published about this enterprise in 1912 has been republished by Bonfire Books (<i>None but the Crocodiles</i> by Stewart Grahame). </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEga298NZ4Ab1pNnxhOq61Z0ICVv77uoiPJ7cYOsXhGKnHWK8mGPDkt1EhACTjLMEmVA7jVsAVKFE_-S2fSmGEMYwN-GxOdlc4kW9o_vPOvRdZ1huFwmqiEw7u9b-u4YdEodxg1TqWDfW0j9-u0TylLPTsZ7bRShBqFi_obGFXbdDnu9veX5YwSH1Q" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1524" data-original-width="1000" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEga298NZ4Ab1pNnxhOq61Z0ICVv77uoiPJ7cYOsXhGKnHWK8mGPDkt1EhACTjLMEmVA7jVsAVKFE_-S2fSmGEMYwN-GxOdlc4kW9o_vPOvRdZ1huFwmqiEw7u9b-u4YdEodxg1TqWDfW0j9-u0TylLPTsZ7bRShBqFi_obGFXbdDnu9veX5YwSH1Q=w262-h400" width="262" /></a></div><br />What is so interesting about the New Australia Movement is that it had so much in its favour....and yet it nonetheless rapidly failed.<p></p><p>The socialist experiment in Paraguay had every reason to prosper. Paraguay had recently experienced a war and had lost much of its adult male population. Its government was therefore keen to attract new settlers and so offered William Lane a large amount of quality land. At the same time, some bitter labour disputes in Australia led to a large number of skilled and experienced workers joining the movement. Lane himself was genuinely idealistic and principled and an inspiring leader. Nor was the experiment overly radical; for instance, members were allowed to continue to live in families.</p><p>The idea of the new society was a socialist one: what was produced would be held in common and then distributed equally to each member. </p><p>I won't go into the details about how this unfolded, as it is described so well in the book (which you can purchase <a href="https://bonfirebooks.org/product/none-but-the-crocodiles/">here</a>). It is curious, though, that the reason for failure was predicted some 600 years earlier by the medieval theologian St Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas justified the holding of private property as follows:</p><p><span style="text-align: justify;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="text-align: justify;">Firstly, because everyone is more solicitous about procuring what belongs to himself alone than that which is common to all or many, since each shunning labour leaves to another what is the common burden of all, as happens with a multitude of servants. Secondly, because human affairs are conducted in a more orderly fashion if each has his own duty of procuring a certain thing, while there would be confusion if each should procure things haphazard. Thirdly, because in this way the peace of men is better preserved, for each is content with his own.</span> </blockquote><p>All three of these principles played out in New Australia, but especially the first. </p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiww2VV8vOfgzhpsGKEJ4Sj8ruW6Wlcgc57dID0VUFFa7EHt0ZvrJGP4TeUg4zAlWGAX5YuBtM4mqRGlzAgqfFCrh5tLkdyDd5jAgaYAGYCjMTYaMNyx1dgGgvbGEwWP90MPAuLUlKR7do72HcOizVS8eMhcDz-EcCd3FJXf9MO1wmLLr7MX0Jsog" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1019" data-original-width="1400" height="466" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiww2VV8vOfgzhpsGKEJ4Sj8ruW6Wlcgc57dID0VUFFa7EHt0ZvrJGP4TeUg4zAlWGAX5YuBtM4mqRGlzAgqfFCrh5tLkdyDd5jAgaYAGYCjMTYaMNyx1dgGgvbGEwWP90MPAuLUlKR7do72HcOizVS8eMhcDz-EcCd3FJXf9MO1wmLLr7MX0Jsog=w640-h466" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Socialist Australians in Paraguay in the 1890s.</td></tr></tbody></table><br />What lessons do we draw from the failure of the New Australia colony? The basic one, I think, is that the family is one of the natural settings for human life. Men are more motivated to work industrially if they can direct the fruits of their labours to their own wife and children. If, instead, those fruits are directed toward a common store to be distributed equally, then the work is more likely to be left to others and, as Aquinas so shrewdly predicted, there will be discontent about how the work of a community is apportioned.<p></p><p>Stewart Grahame was optimistic in 1912 that the combination of the free market and Christianity would prove a winning formula. History didn't work out that way: Christianity gradually lost its influence in the culture and the bigger corporations have increasingly adopted a leftist social agenda. </p><p>One final point. Although pure socialist experiments like the one in Paraguay are doomed to failure, a certain kind of state socialism is increasingly influential in the West. This is perhaps where the real argument about socialism is to be had.</p><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-77218638915442109212023-05-28T18:15:00.001+10:002023-05-28T20:33:22.279+10:00Descartes: commitment & community<p>I found a passage written by the philosopher Descartes which I thought interesting (it is from his letter to Elisabeth of Bohemia, 1645). Descartes is recognised as a progenitor of modern thought, but he clearly did not support the radical individualism which has come to characterise liberal modernity. </p><p>He writes:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>After acknowledging the goodness of God, the immortality of our souls and the immensity of the universe, there is yet another truth that is, in my opinion, most useful to know. That is, that though each of us is a person distinct from others, whose interests are accordingly in some way different from those of the rest of the world, we ought still to think that none of us could subsist alone and that each one of us is really one of the many parts of the universe, and more particularly a part of the earth, the state, the society and the family to which we belong by our domicile, our oath of allegiance and our birth. </p><div></div></blockquote><div>What I believe he gets right here is not only the idea that we are social creatures, but that we are a part of (i.e. we belong to as an aspect of our being) certain communities. Descartes clearly accepts that our membership of some of these communities is predetermined - that we are born into them. Unlike liberal moderns, he does not push the logic of individual autonomy to the point of rejecting unchosen forms of community.</div><div><br /></div><div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjUL4BhRuBAjW6TeLLgTPrAAa3ncmdhYd9fVsUHYG8my-dmZls2GDbQbdpHn8YRy5e2B0uAuaa2TKc9dzpdrBqH9D32h_WI7vkchmGwIRSf2vb8r3Qqx5cXQEmWCv_SrSlWWELDSn7swD_z_HnR2v8AruU5WmlY6h6_ZZGdOJpai1CAhgGJJpA" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="852" data-original-width="700" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjUL4BhRuBAjW6TeLLgTPrAAa3ncmdhYd9fVsUHYG8my-dmZls2GDbQbdpHn8YRy5e2B0uAuaa2TKc9dzpdrBqH9D32h_WI7vkchmGwIRSf2vb8r3Qqx5cXQEmWCv_SrSlWWELDSn7swD_z_HnR2v8AruU5WmlY6h6_ZZGdOJpai1CAhgGJJpA=w328-h400" width="328" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">René Descartes</td></tr></tbody></table><br />The next part is more questionable:</div><div><blockquote>And the interests of the whole, of which each of us is a part, must always be preferred to those of our own particular person —with measure, of course, and discretion, because it would be wrong to expose ourselves to a great evil in order to procure only a slight benefit to our kinsfolk or our country. (Indeed if someone were worth more, by himself, than all his fellow citizens, he would have no reason to destroy himself to save his city.) </blockquote></div><div>Understood a certain way, this makes sense. If I could make money in a way that betrayed my country, then I should certainly set aside my own financial self-interest in favour of preserving the national community I belong to. Even so, the introduction of a kind of moral calculus here rings false. It is also unhelpful, I think, to focus on the idea that there are occasions when it is morally right to destroy ourselves to preserve the community. More typically, in acting to uphold the good of the community we belong to, we are also preserving our own good, as our own good can only be fully realised in common with others.</div><div><br /></div><div>Descartes continues:</div><div><blockquote>But if someone saw everything in relation to himself, he would not hesitate to injure others greatly when he thought he could draw some slight advantage; and he would have no true friendship, no fidelity, no virtue at all. On the other hand, if someone considers himself a part of the community, he delights in doing good to everyone, and does not hesitate even to risk his life in the service of others when the occasion demands. If he could, he would even be willing to lose his soul to save others. So this consideration is the source and origin of all the most heroic actions done by men. </blockquote><p>Descartes is arguing against the idea that a society can be formed solely on the basis of individual self-interest. If I act solely from selfish motives, then there is no ground for important virtues like loyalty. If, though, I see myself as being part of a community, in the sense that it is an aspect of identity and belonging, this is likely to inspire my social commitments. Descartes' views have been supported by the research of Professor Robert Putnam, who <a href="http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2007/06/professor-putnam-hunkering-after.html">found</a> that when there is less ethnic solidarity, that people tend to "withdraw from collective life" and to "to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often". Descartes' basic argument here is also one I have often made myself, as for instance in defending the continuing existence of historic <a href="https://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-transforming-moment.html">nations</a>:</p><blockquote>From this larger body we derive parts of our identity, our loves and attachments, our participation in a larger, transcendent tradition, our sense of pride and achievement, our social commitments, our attachments to place, whether to nature, landscape or urban environment, our connection to a particular cultural tradition, our commitments to maintaining moral and cultural standards, our sense of connectedness to both the history of our own people - to generations past - as well as our commitment to future generations.</blockquote></div><div>I should pause, though, to question one part of Descartes' argument. He says that we should be willing to lose our souls to save others. Perhaps he wrote this for effect, but taken literally I think he is wrong.</div><div><br /></div><div>Descartes writes in a similar vein:</div><div><blockquote>A person seems to me more pitiful than admirable if he risks death from vanity, in the hope of praise, or through stupidity, because he does not apprehend the danger. But when a person risks death because he believes it to be his duty, or when he suffers some other evil to bring good to others, then he acts in virtue of the consideration that he owes more to the community of which he is a part than to himself as an individual, though this thought may be only confusedly in his mind without his reflecting upon it. </blockquote><p>He connects this to a religious piety - to preferring to follow God's will rather than hedonic pleasures:</p><p></p></div><blockquote><div><p>Once someone knows and loves God as he should, he has a natural impulse to think in this way; for then, abandoning himself altogether to God's will, he strips himself of his own interests, and has no other passion than to do what he thinks pleasing to God. Thus he acquires a mental satisfaction and contentment incomparably more valuable than all the passing joys which depend upon the senses.</p></div><div>In addition to these truths which concern all our actions in general, many others must be known which concern more particularly each individual action. The chief of these, in my view, are those I mentioned in my last letter: namely that all our passions represent to us the goods to whose pursuit they impel us as being much greater than they really are; and that the pleasures of the body are never as lasting as those of the soul, or as great in possession as they appear in anticipation. </div></blockquote><div>Descartes clearly considers our commitments to family and nation to be higher spiritual goods, through which we follow God's will for us, and are contrasted with a selfish pursuit of hedonic pleasure.</div><div><br /></div><div>Although I do not subscribe to Descartes' larger philosophy, his views on this topic are preferable to those that were to develop later on, in which the individual was expected to pursue self-interest in the market (as Economic Man), and to develop solo as an individual outside of natural forms of community, with many intellectuals ultimately becoming not only disembedded from their own historic communities but actively hostile to them.</div><div><p></p></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-894461424323990652023-05-21T18:42:00.001+10:002023-05-21T18:42:24.604+10:00Why the incoherence?<p>One of the most obviously incoherent aspects of modern thought is the presence, at the same time, of both voluntarism and materialism/naturalism/scientism. These things would not seem to go together well at all. The voluntarism suggests that it is our own wills which define reality. If I say I am a woman, even if I am a man, then that is what I am and I should be treated as such by society. This conflicts with the materialism/naturalism/scientism which sees reality in terms of material processes. According to this outlook it would be genetics, chromosomes and hormones and such like that would determine my sex.</p><p>Many moderns hold to both voluntarism and scientism with equal force, despite the apparent incompatibility. How can we explain this? I don't personally have a modern type mind, so cannot answer with confidence, but I can suggest three possible explanations.</p><p><b>a) Accretions </b></p><p>It can be the case that certain philosophies influence a culture over the course of that culture's history. Instead of these philosophies being harmonised, they simply "enter the mix". If this is the explanation, then the voluntarism might come from a variety of sources, e.g. from the theological voluntarism of the Middle Ages, or from German idealist philosophy of the nineteenth century, or more generally from the emphasis on autonomy as the goal of a liberal politics. The scientism/materialism/naturalism is derived from the rejection of scholastic philosophy in the Early Modern period and perhaps from empiricist schools of philosophy.</p><p><b>b) Science as a servant of human desires</b></p><p>My understanding is that modern science was launched, in part, with the idea that by understanding natural processes, humans could obtain the resources to satisfy unlimited wants. In other words, if the larger aim is not to live within the natural order, but to pursue our individual wants and desires to the furthest extent possible, then science could be employed to create the conditions in which those wants and desires could be fulfilled.</p><p>If this is so, then you can understand why moderns cleave to both scientism and voluntarism. The voluntarism represents the unfettered pursuit of whatever we will for ourselves. The scientism the means by which to obtain these wants and desires. </p><p><b>c) The loss of value in nature</b></p><p>If nature is seen only from a scientistic/naturalistic viewpoint, then it will seem merely mechanical. It will no longer be a bearer of value in the way it once was when it was appealed to morally (i.e. when saying "it is natural/unnatural to do x, y or z" as a way of endorsing or condemning certain acts). </p><p>I think it can be difficult for those raised within a Christian tradition to understand this. Christians are used to the idea of a purposeful act of creation, so that our relationship to the natural world is invested with meaning (even when we apprehend a certain mystery in the created world). But there are moderns for whom nature is just a mechanical process coldly indifferent to human life. There is nothing for them to relate to in the natural world.</p><p>So values, for such moderns, must then come from ourselves: they must come from our own subjective wills. We do not discover objective values inhering in the created world; instead, we assert the power to create values through an act of will (which perhaps represents a deification of ourselves in the image of a voluntarist concept of God).</p><p>You can see, then, why the scientism/naturalism/materialism goes together with a voluntarism. The scientism disenchants and de-values; the voluntarism is then necessary to reassert value. You get both, despite an apparent incompatibility between the two.</p><p>I'm not sure which of the three explanations is the more likely reason for the coexistence of both voluntarism and scientism. Perhaps all have had an influence, or there might be some other reason I have not considered.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-26623475026935139772023-05-07T20:31:00.003+10:002023-05-07T20:40:46.342+10:00Romance & reason 3<p>This will be my final post on Eva Illouz's work <i>Why Love Hurts</i> (see <a href="https://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2023/04/romance-reason-1.html">here</a> and <a href="https://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2023/04/romance-reason-2.html">here</a> for the first two). There is a passage about equality in the book that I think is worth commenting on. The issue being discussed is whether the modern understanding of equality undermines attraction between men and women by eroding differences. Illouz draws on the work of Louis Dumont, a French anthropologist:</p><p></p><blockquote>As he
puts it: “[I]t is easy to find the key to our values. Our two cardinal
ideals are called equality and liberty.” And these values, Dumont
suggests, flatten out the perception of social relations:
</blockquote><blockquote><blockquote>The first feature to emphasize is that the concept of the equality of
men entails that of their similarity. [. . .] [I]f equality is conceived as
rooted in man’s very nature and denied only by an evil society, then,
as there are no longer any rightful differences in condition or estate,
or different sorts of men, they are all alike and even identical, as well
as equal.
</blockquote></blockquote><blockquote>Recalling de Tocqueville, Dumont adds: “[W]here inequality reigns,
there are as many distinct humanities as there are social categories.” </blockquote><p></p><p>Here Dumont is recognising an apparently strange thing, namely that liberal moderns understand equality to mean something like "sameness". In theory, someone could support equality in the sense of seeing different types of beings as having equal value or worth. But moderns tend to want to erase distinctions in the name of equality. Percy Bysshe Shelley, as far back as 1811, in reference to the differences between men and women wrote:</p><blockquote>...these detestable distinctions will surely be abolished in a future state of being</blockquote><p>Similarly, in 1837 the American feminist Sarah Grimke opined,</p><blockquote>permit me to offer for your consideration, some views relative to the social intercourse of the sexes. Nearly the whole of this intercourse is...derogatory to man and woman...We approach each other, and mingle with each other, under the constant pressure of a feeling that we are of different sexes...the mind is fettered by the idea which is early and industriously infused into it, that we must never forget the distinction between male and female...Nothing, I believe, has tended more to destroy the true dignity of woman, than the fact that she is approached by man in the character of a female.<br /><br />... Until our intercourse is purified by the forgetfulness of sex...we never can derive that benefit from each other's society...</blockquote><p>So, from early on equality was conceived as the abolition of distinctions between men and women, i.e. as a shift toward sameness. Why? I think it went something like this. There was once the idea of a great chain of being, which was on the one hand a hierarchy of being, with those at the top having a qualitatively higher nature; however, each creature in the chain was necessary to the function of the whole, so each had a secure dignity for this reason. </p><p>This idea of a chain of being meant, potentially at least, that those higher up the social scale might be thought to be more noble than those who were common. This meant that the noble class had to distinguish themselves not just through money or power but also through nobility of manner, character and behaviour. It meant, too, that most people would look "upwards" for social and cultural leadership to this noble class.</p><p>With the demise of this idea of a chain of being, a reaction took place, in which the emphasis was on "all men are created equal". Understood in historic context, this meant not only "equal in value" or "equal in the sight of God" but equal in the sense of there being no qualitative distinction in being: there was no class that due to birth or breeding stood higher in nobility.</p><p>I suspect that some moderns hoped that what would result from this loss of distinctions would be a net gain, in the sense that everyone would now stand equally in a condition of nobility. But clearly this is not what happened. Instead, we got what Dumont recognises as a "flattening" not only in social relationships but in the way that moderns think about "ontology" - i.e. about categories of being. We have increasingly lost the ability our ancestors had in discerning what is noble and what is base within the nature of things - leading to a cultural drift downward.</p><p>With the insistence on ontological sameness we have also lost a sense of "thick differences":</p><p></p><blockquote><p>Dumont is an advocate of the kind of thick differences that are played
out between different social and cultural groups in India, for example.
In his view, the right and the left hand are not simply polar and symmetrical opposites; rather, they are different in themselves because
they have a different relation to the body. What Dumont suggests,
then, is that equality entails a loss of qualitative differences. He uses
the analogy of the right and left hand because both are necessary to
the body, but each is radically different from each other. In the nonmodern, non-egalitarian view, the value of each hand – left and right
– is rooted in its relation to the body, which has a higher status. </p></blockquote><blockquote><p></p><blockquote>This shunning of subordination, or, to call it by its true name, of transcendence, substitutes a flat view for a view in depth, and at the same
time it is the root of the “atomization” so often complained about by
romantic or nostalgic critics of modernity. [. . .] [I]n modern ideology,
the previous hierarchical universe has fanned out into a collection of
flat views of this kind.</blockquote><p></p><p>The regime of meaning to which Dumont points is one in which
transcendence is produced by the capacity to live in an ordered,
holistic and hierarchized moral and social universe. Eroticism – as it
was developed in Western patriarchal culture – is predicated on a
similar “right-hand/left-hand” dichotomy between men and women,
each being radically different and each enacting their thick identities.
It is this thick difference which has traditionally eroticized men’s and
women’s relationships, at least since these identities became strongly
essentialized. (pp.186-87)</p></blockquote><p>So our difficulty runs as follows. We have inherited an understanding of equality, whose origins we are no longer self-consciously aware of, but which pushes toward making men and women the same (i.e. a flattening of the social relationships and a "thin" rather than a "thick" expression of sexual difference). This then contributes to a failure in the culture of sexual relationships between men and women.</p><p>The solution? It's important not to over-correct. There will always be both a horizontal axis of society as well as a vertical one. Even so, there does need to be a reassertion of "an ordered, holistic and hierarchized moral and social universe". It is one aspect of what constitutes the core of the West - the capacity to rise toward transcendent goods - which cannot even be attempted whilst we still, as a culture, believe ourselves to be inhabiting a flat cosmos.</p><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-67911857211613170532023-04-22T14:28:00.003+10:002023-04-22T16:11:29.743+10:00The Jena Set 2<p>I have now finished reading <i>Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics </i>by Andrea Wulf. The second part was focused, to a considerable degree, on the wayward personal relationships of the first generation of German Romantic thinkers.</p><p>I wrote in my last <a href="https://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2023/04/romance-reason-2.html">post</a>:</p><blockquote>...if we start from the point of pure subjectivity, conditioned only by our own feelings and passions, then relationships will be thought more pure and elevated the less they are based on pragmatic rational considerations and the more freely bestowed they are, without any "limiting" claims being made on the feelings or passions of the other person.</blockquote><p>The early Romantic thinkers seem to have acted along these lines, or something similar, in their love lives. August Schlegel, for instance, married a much older single mother, Caroline Böhmer, but happily allowed her to live in his house with her lover, the much younger philosopher Friedrich Schelling, while he himself (Schlegel) pursued the heavily pregnant, married sister of the poet Ludwig Tieck. Freely bestowed emotions overrode considerations of age and fertility, of marital status, of fidelity, of honour and of self-respect. Passion über alles. It makes for gruesome reading.</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjy0BVGi__SCVrkh80n7PdI-iwJQ3SihS5gdJZSafhHXbxU-dMssYBao8L9DVZ9-rZdrrQvkbId372FKP3GB7eAH4EhetuJamRWTwMum8Nz9nX24qHpnaVXNsteAEDRq2nBL8joGRXHk_qFc3xORj-r85VH5yOSSjnEUWXRe_MagVkfg-XLFFA" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="566" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjy0BVGi__SCVrkh80n7PdI-iwJQ3SihS5gdJZSafhHXbxU-dMssYBao8L9DVZ9-rZdrrQvkbId372FKP3GB7eAH4EhetuJamRWTwMum8Nz9nX24qHpnaVXNsteAEDRq2nBL8joGRXHk_qFc3xORj-r85VH5yOSSjnEUWXRe_MagVkfg-XLFFA=w227-h320" width="227" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">August Wilhelm Schlegel</td></tr></tbody></table><br />As I wrote in my previous <a href="https://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-jena-set.html">review</a> of the book, there were some positive aspects of the German Romantics. They reacted against the mechanical materialism of the Enlightenment, insisting on a more poetic experience of life. They upheld the transcendent value of beauty and promoted the idea of nature as a living organism. They were open to the culture and religion of the medieval world. We can thank the Romantics, at least in part, for beautiful neo-Gothic churches, for the nature poetry and painting of the nineteenth century, and for the music of Beethoven and Schubert.<p></p><p>But there were problems. It is said that much of philosophy is based on establishing the triadic relationship between God, man and nature. During the Enlightenment, there was an emphasis on man existing outside of nature. Man was an observer, measuring and classifying and seeking to master nature. I am going to call this a process of "exteriorisation" in the sense that man is no longer an active participant within nature, but places himself outside of it.</p><p>The Romantics reacted against this. In part, this meant acknowledging the sense of connection between man and nature, including the responses of awe and wonder to nature. However, philosophers like Fichte also created problems in establishing the relationship between man and nature. He was in the tradition of Descartes, in the sense of looking into the operation of self-consciousness to discover truths about human existence. It led him to a belief that we establish our freedom of will, as opposed to being conditioned by the material world, by recognising that it is the "ich" (the "I") that creates the limiting conditions on the self and that these therefore can be dispelled by the "ich". As Andrea Wulf describes it:</p><blockquote>As Fichte stood at the podium in Jena, he imbued the self with the new power of self-determination. The Ich posits itself and it is therefore free. It is the agent of everything. Anything that might constrain or limit its freedom - anything in the non-Ich - is in fact brought into existence by the Ich.</blockquote><p>This philosophy did not readily harmonise the relationship between man and nature. Fichte himself wrote:</p><blockquote>My will alone...shall float audaciously and coldly over the wreckage of the universe.</blockquote><p>We could call this trend in Western thought "interiorisation" in the sense that it is a turn away from the idea that we are influenced or conditioned by an external nature, or even a given nature, but that we subjectively "posit" our own self and in so doing reject the "limitations" imposed by what is outside of our own volition. Some of the critics of the Jena set complained at the time that this was a "metaphysical egotism" (p.350) and Ralph Waldo Emerson described the new age in 1837 as an "age of Introversion" (p.351). Friedrich Schlegel, the brother of August and at one time a follower of Fichte, later turned against his ideas, writing that Fichte was "idolising the Ich and the self" and that he had confused the self with the divine.</p><p>(Schelling, another influential Romantic philosopher, tried to connect man and nature, apparently by arguing that both were identical in some sense, i.e. that the "ich" was identical with nature.)</p><p>I've focused on this distinction between exteriorisation and interiorisation because it seems to me that both have been bequeathed to the modern world, even though they are not entirely consistent with each other. They are simply two of the accretions that the modern world runs with.</p><p>Man the observer, standing outside of rather than participating from within, is found in the modern liberal personality. It is evident in those moderns who enjoy observing and experiencing other cultures, as something like tourists (outsiders), but who renounce a culture of their own (or who are simply oblivious to it). Similarly, exteriorisation is also evident in those moderns who praise Aborigines for having a rich relationship to nature but who are strangely unaware of the importance of the relationship to nature expressed within their own culture.</p><p>They have inherited the exteriorised mindset in which they are onlookers, standing on the outside of both nature and culture, rather than participants from within. This explains, in part, why they are so little touched by questions of loyalty or duty - you have to stand within something, as an active participant, for either loyalty or duty to have a claim on you.</p><p>The influence of interiorisation in our own time is even greater (and more obvious). What we self-identify as is asserted to be what we really are. The "self-positing ich" is extending its reach far beyond anything envisaged by Fichte and his contemporaries. </p><p>Instead of coming to a better understanding of the triad of God, man and nature, we have just left things as history left them, to our own considerable detriment.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-82943513950253435392023-04-20T14:43:00.006+10:002023-04-20T15:03:31.584+10:00Romance & reason 2<p>In my <a href="https://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2023/04/romance-reason-1.html">last post</a> I discussed the ideas of Eva Illouz, a Moroccan born sociologist who writes on the topic of relationships. I noted that she agrees with a point that I have long made, namely that there is a tension between a belief in individual autonomy and a commitment to stable relationships. This is because autonomy requires us to be free to choose in any direction at any time and we cannot do this if, for instance, we take seriously our marriage vows. Eva Illouz puts it this way:</p><blockquote>This idea makes sense only in the context of a view of the self in which promises are viewed as posing limits on one’s freedom: that is, the freedom to feel differently tomorrow from the way I feel today. Given that a limit on one’s freedom is viewed as illegitimate, requesting commitment is interpreted as an alienation of one’s own freedom. This freedom in turn is connected to the definition of relationships in purely emotional terms: if a relationship is the result of one’s freely felt and freely bestowed emotions, it cannot emanate from the moral structure of commitment. Because emotions are constructed as being independent of reason, and even of volition, because they are viewed as changing, but, more fundamentally, because they are seen as emanating from one’s unique subjectivity and free will, demanding that one commits one’s emotions to the future becomes illegitimate, because it is perceived to be threatening to the freedom that is intrinsic to pure emotionality.</blockquote><p>A reader ("Guest Ghast") drew out something important from this:</p><blockquote>It’s something I’ve been made more aware of recently through a number of personal incidents, but there’s a real unexamined driving ideology here that emotions equate automatically to action. Eva doesn’t even question her assumption that how we behave is determined by how we feel and that people’s feelings are what we ought to be concerned about, even though she’s clearly thought about it. I can’t claim an exhaustive examination of this, but once you notice it it’s clear it’s everywhere. The so-called transgender movement is practically founded on the notion that how you feel ought to determine reality, but that’s somewhat adjacent to the, I think, larger phenomenon of action being assumed to derive almost purely from emotion. I would suspect this is a development from the ideals of the Romantic movement that lionized feeling and passion, but I haven’t investigated to find out.</blockquote><p>I think that Eva herself does question the loss of a "moral structure of commitment", but even so the main point here stands: that modernity has slipped into the idea that how we feel justifies how we act. Instead of our feelings being ordered to a notion of the good, it is the other way around: what we feel becomes the good we are to pursue. </p><p>This led to a discussion of why liberal modernity has slipped into this habit. Both Guest Ghast and I agreed that it could have something to do with the influence of Romanticism, with its emphasis on feeling and passion and its focus on individual, subjective experience. I also offered this:</p><blockquote>I wonder (this is just a thought experiment) if it has something to do with the logic of modernism itself. If what matters is maximum preference satisfaction, and preferences are equally valid, then there is perhaps less "rational" justification for any act. It just comes down to subjective preference, i.e. what we want to do and this itself may be perceived to be based on what we feel like doing or having.</blockquote><p>In other words, liberal modernity sees the good in a freedom to choose as we will, rather than in our choosing rationally and prudently what is objectively good for us and for the communities we belong to. As James Kalb used to emphasise, our preferences are seen as equally valid (as long as they do not limit what others might prefer to be or to do). But if they are equally valid they do not have to be justified by an act of reason. They are valid because they are my own subjective preferences. If preference alone is a sufficient justification, then it comes down to what I want, or feel like, or think will create a pleasurable experience, or simply to what moves me - which is often my emotional responses.</p><p>Guest Ghast replied with another significant argument:</p><blockquote>I posted a comment here some time ago...in which I worked through my own logic to show that liberalism requires only meaningless choices. In short, since choices that have consequences would influence one to make a decision in one direction or the other, freedom is maximized when consequences are done away with, but this reduces all choices to meaningless preferences. Now that you’ve suggested a connection, it occurs to me that said meaningless preferences by necessity must operate only by feeling since there’s no logical way to choose one option over another. Since we seem to hold that we are defined as individuals by having individual preferences no one else has, this would seem to elevate feeling to the dominant position we observe it in (since feelings would be the truest expression of one’s individuality). Worse, reason in fact cannot have anything to do with decision making rather than being merely subordinate to feeling.<br /><br />It also occurs to me that to reason necessarily means to discriminate, which liberals have reliably connected with oppression. cf. a previous post you wrote wherein it was said (not in so few words) that treating people differently for their choices was unacceptable and cf. the ubiquitous modern attitude that treating people differently for their unchosen aspects is also unacceptable. Basically treating people in any rational way is unacceptable. Mere feelings and preference can’t be in essence accused of discrimination, at least when you’re sufficiently reeducated and your choices are indistinguishable from random ones.</blockquote><p>There are two points being made here. The first is that if we think of choices as having consequences, serious enough to sway one's decision permanently in one direction only, then a limitation is being placed on our freedom to choose in any direction. Therefore, it is better if choice is conceived of as not having these serious consequences (or if these consequences are seen as being there artificially, as a power ploy of some sort, i.e. of one person or group wanting to manipulate others, so that they can be dismissed as an oppressive imposition that can be overridden). Another way of putting this is that the absolute ideal under the terms of liberal modernity is to be "empowered" in the sense of being able to choose in any direction, without negative consequence or negative judgement. In this case, the older emphasis on wisdom or prudence is superseded, as the vision is of a society in which it is possible to choose any self-determined path that we have a mind to travel.</p><p>The second point is that when we reason we necessarily discriminate. We make judgements as to the good, as to the worthiness of particular acts, and to the likely consequences of beliefs and behaviours. But making these judgements is not licit under the terms of liberalism, and in some cases will be condemned as inherently hateful or bigoted. Therefore it is difficult to "treat people in any rational way". In contrast, a feeling or a preference is simply a subjective state that in itself does not involve a process of discrimination (though it might still be considered illicit if it is not in line with the larger principle of non-discrimination). Perhaps this helps to explain why the liberal classes so often emphasise "right feeling" as the basis of being a good person, or why they seek these feeling states rather than grappling with the longer term repercussions of what they advocate.</p><p>Why discuss all this? We need to go back to the where the discussion began. Relationships cannot be defined in purely emotional terms, independent of reason and volition. First, because emotions change and therefore relationships grounded only on emotion will be unstable. Second, if we start from the point of pure subjectivity, conditioned only by our own feelings and passions, then relationships will be thought more pure and elevated the less they are based on pragmatic rational considerations and the more freely bestowed they are, without any "limiting" claims being made on the feelings or passions of the other person.</p><p>The very first generation of Romantic thinkers in Germany seem to have already accepted the logic of all this. Their relationships were marked by this emphasis on pure, unconditioned subjectivity. I will go into details in the next post.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-86011952785365640542023-04-15T16:43:00.007+10:002023-04-19T15:04:12.209+10:00Romance & reason 1<p>Eva Illouz is a Moroccan born sociologist who writes intelligently on the topic of relationships. In her book <i>Why Love Hurts</i> (2012) she makes an argument that I made as far back as 2003 (<a href="http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2006/12/love-dependence.html?m=1">here</a>), namely that the modern value of autonomy conflicts with stable, committed forms of love.</p><p>Why? She explains in this quote (p.136):</p><p></p><blockquote>The cultural
motif that defines and constitutes worth here is autonomy, which in
turn explains why requesting promises is conceived as exerting “pressure”...This idea makes sense only in the context of a view of the
self in which promises are viewed as posing limits on one’s freedom:
that is, the freedom to feel differently tomorrow from the way I feel
today. Given that a limit on one’s freedom is viewed as illegitimate,
requesting commitment is interpreted as an alienation of one’s own
freedom. This freedom in turn is connected to the definition of relationships in purely emotional terms: if a relationship is the result of
one’s freely felt and freely bestowed emotions, it cannot emanate
from the moral structure of commitment. Because emotions are constructed as being independent of reason, and even of volition, because
they are viewed as changing, but, more fundamentally, because they
are seen as emanating from one’s unique subjectivity and free will,
demanding that one commits one’s emotions to the future becomes
illegitimate, because it is perceived to be threatening to the freedom
that is intrinsic to pure emotionality. In commitment, there is thus the
risk of forcing the hand of someone to make a choice that is not based
on pure emotions and emotionality, in turn alienating one’s freedom.</blockquote><p>The basic point is that if I wish to be autonomous, I must have a freedom to self-determine my own life. I cannot do this if I make a serious commitment to another person as this would curtail what I might choose to do at some later time. </p><p>Eva Illouz adds depth to the argument by noting that the problem is made more pronounced when relationships are defined in purely emotional terms, i.e. as "the result of one's freely felt and freely bestowed emotions". If this is how relationships are defined, as they mostly are in modern life, then what happens in the relationship won't be swayed by reason or prudence, nor is it possible to think of commitment as being settled in the will. </p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhMnqftR1-HneU7etlTZTZtn5lsxPVaKjmeZNe5BW_J5i08Fsy9BBTtvE7_LaxWTOImhj292NW1rJRZd_IFsQpxqT5FZv_gILCUnR2y_a8xOqC2XZD375wRQNcgdIwC4BxNz7ztaTSvTgBH5PoRumEmsfTopPEtZ7yXW5R6dScfC9AZoFxvPsA" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="664" data-original-width="996" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhMnqftR1-HneU7etlTZTZtn5lsxPVaKjmeZNe5BW_J5i08Fsy9BBTtvE7_LaxWTOImhj292NW1rJRZd_IFsQpxqT5FZv_gILCUnR2y_a8xOqC2XZD375wRQNcgdIwC4BxNz7ztaTSvTgBH5PoRumEmsfTopPEtZ7yXW5R6dScfC9AZoFxvPsA" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Eva Illouz</td></tr></tbody></table><br />She repeats this argument, i.e. that there is a contradiction between the aims of autonomy and love, with a quote from Judith Butler (p.131):<p></p><p></p><blockquote>In fact, I
would even claim that it is precisely the development of individuality
and autonomy that makes modern erotic desire fraught with aporias.
As Judith Butler claims: “Desire thus founders on contradiction, and
becomes a passion divided against itself. Striving to become coextensive with the world, an autonomous being that finds itself everywhere
reflected in the world, self-consciousness discovers that implicit in
its own identity as a desiring being is the necessity of being claimed
by another.” Such a claim by another person is beset with contradictions, because “we have to choose between ecstatic and self-determining existence.”</blockquote><p></p><p>Eva Illouz goes on to make an argument I only partly agree with:</p><p></p><blockquote>I would suggest that, to the extent that in modernity men have
internalized and most forcefully practiced the discourse of autonomy,
autonomy has the effect of exerting a form of symbolic violence that
is all the more naturalized and difficult to perceive. Consequently,
autonomy is (and must remain) at the center of the project of women’s
emancipation. (p.136)</blockquote><blockquote>Clearly, men dominate the rules of recognition and commitment.
Male domination takes the form of an ideal of autonomy to which
women, through the mediation of the struggle for equality in the
public sphere, have themselves subscribed. But when transposed to
the private sphere, autonomy stifles women’s need for recognition.
For, it is indeed a characteristic of symbolic violence that one cannot
oppose a definition of reality that is to one’s own detriment. (p.137)</blockquote><p>Her argument is that men can get what they want from relationships as autonomous beings (sex), but that what women want is recognition (commitment), which is what the focus on autonomy makes difficult to achieve.</p><p>She is right that it is usually men who are the gatekeepers of commitment. However, it was feminist women who did most to impose autonomy as a value on relationships between men and women. It has been women who have changed the terms of engagement; men have played more of a reactive role (though there are exceptions to this, such as the playboy ethos promoted by the likes of Hugh Hefner).</p><p>The other difficult aspect of Eva Illouz's views is that she is committed to the values she identifies as damaging relationships. She frankly acknowledges the problem that modernity has damaged relationships, describing her book as being:</p><p></p><blockquote>the product of hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of conversations with close friends and strangers
that left me perplexed and puzzled by the chaos that pervades contemporary romantic and sexual relationships</blockquote><p>To some extent, she poses the issue as an imbalance in autonomy:</p><p></p><blockquote>On the contrary: I would contend that men can follow
the imperative for autonomy more consistently and for a longer part
of their lives and, as a result, they can exert emotional domination
over women’s desire for attachment, compelling them to mute their
longing for attachment and to imitate men’s detachment and drive
for autonomy. It follows that women who are not interested in heterosexual domesticity, children, and a man’s commitment will find
themselves more likely to be the emotional equals of men.</blockquote><p>Although this sounds reasonable, I don't think it captures what is happening. Most women have been persuaded that they should defer serious commitments and play the field whilst young; it is only when it comes time to settle down that they face the issue of commitment from men being described here, and mostly from a certain class of men. And then in later years it is women who initiate most of the breaking of commitment via divorce.</p><p>Again, she argues in the following quote that the problem is the distribution of autonomy:</p><p></p><blockquote>I argue
that such false consciousness – feeling responsible for being left – is
explained by the ways in which several features of our moral universe
intertwine with the power of men, i.e. the structure of recognition in romantic relationships (and probably in modernity in general); by the
fact that the ideal of autonomy interferes with recognition and operates within a fundamentally unequal structure of the distribution of
autonomy</blockquote><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>This, once more, is only partly true. It is predicted that 45% of American women aged 25 to 44 will be single by the year 2030 - so the issue of "recognition" does exist for women in this age group. However, this is not because of an unequal distribution of autonomy as part of the structure of society. Society has gone to considerable efforts to make women autonomous in their personal lives. For instance, when women are in their "player" phase then the expectation is that society will enable this via abortion on demand, access to contraception, the absence of slut shaming etc. Similarly, when women are in the motherhood phase, they are enabled to achieve this independently of men via subsidised child care, access to IVF, single mother welfare payments etc. And if women wish to be independent through divorce, then this too is enabled via alimony, child support payments and decisions regarding child custody.</p><p>So what is her conclusion? She is not one of those moderns who believes that love should be sacrificed to autonomy. She defends love as a meaningful bond. Her solution is to restore an ethics to relationships,</p><p></p><blockquote>...so as to devise new
strategies to cope with emotional inequalities and meet women’s
larger social and ethical goals...What should be discussed, then, is the question of how sexuality
should be made a domain of conduct regulated both by freedom
and by ethics...this book suggests that the project of self-expression
through sexuality cannot be divorced from the question of our
duties to others and to their emotions...For when detached from ethical conduct, sexuality as we
have known it for the last thirty years has become an arena of raw
struggle that has left many men and especially women bitter and
exhausted. (pp.246-47)</blockquote><p>It's a good quote (even if it is framed in terms of women's goals rather than a common good), but it is followed by this:</p><p></p><blockquote>This book is thus a sobered endorsement of modernity through
love. It recognizes the necessity of values of freedom, reason, equality,
and autonomy, yet is also forced to take stock of the immense difficulties generated by the core cultural matrix of modernity. </blockquote><p></p><p></p><p>She is walking an intellectual tightrope here. She wants to be part of the modern gang, whilst at the same time recognising the significant harm being done. Even so, her book is thought provoking and insightful - I intend to post again on some of the issues she raises.</p><p></p><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-78357683103366099552023-04-08T18:15:00.003+10:002023-04-08T18:30:19.294+10:00A local flyer<p>I saw a flyer in my local area advertising meetings for "vulva-bodied beings". It turns out that the meetings are for local women to learn how to "serve their inner queen". The facilitator explains how she was motivated to organise these meetings as follows:</p><p></p><blockquote>It took giving my body to yet another man, in the hopes of finding love, only to be thrown out like a dirty dish cloth for me to open my eyes and see it. I am not choosing love for myself. I am not protecting my heart.</blockquote><p></p><p>I found this interesting because I have been reading the work of a sociologist, Eva Illouz, who believes that women are not being well-served by liberal modernity because the focus on autonomy means that women do not really get what they need from relationships with men.</p><p>However, the local workshops do not in any way resist liberal modernity, but double down on it. The facilitator goes on to write:</p><p></p><blockquote>I went to the hairdressers that very morning, dyed my hair red, and then got a Self Love tattoo.</blockquote><p></p><p>She tells women that she can,</p><p></p><blockquote>open you to claiming the Queen within you, who knows she can have whatever they desire - <i>right now</i>.</blockquote><p>So, she believes that women really can win the autonomy game and get to do and be and have whatever they wish. This is exactly what Eva Illouz questions in her writing, because in order to sustain a freedom to have whatever you desire you must forego any expectation of genuine commitment either from yourself or from others - hence women feeling like they are being "thrown out like a dirty dish cloth".</p><p>And what is it that women might desire? What she claims women want and need is "radical self-love," empowerment and pleasure. But if you read what she writes, it is the deprivation of genuine love that most affects her. </p><p>Here she describes her moment of transfiguration:</p><p></p><blockquote>It was 2am in a drunken Lisbon club, when I finally realised how deeply I was suffering. I was out with friends when the latest man I had decided to desperately convince to love me, came up to me and said he wanted to go home with the woman I'd anxiously watched him talking to. I ran out of the club into the cobbled streets of Lisbon and started to wail.</blockquote><p></p><p>Of the man she writes:</p><p></p><blockquote>I knew it wasn't him. He was the cherry on top of an enormous cake of self-abandonment, unworthiness, desperation and despair that I had been baking myself for years. With no skills to manage my ocean of emotions I was a princess without direction, with no one to guide me.</blockquote><p>Now, I don't think we should be too sympathetic to any of this. She lived her life chasing hot guys in clubs and, predictably, was chosen only for one night stands, which did not give her what Eva Illouz calls "recognition". </p><p>What I do think significant, though, is her admission that she was an "ocean of emotions" which she could not easily self-direct. I've heard women describe their inner state this way before, that it is like a sea of emotion that ebbs one way and another.</p><p>The real lesson here, I think, is that women aren't necessarily easily able to direct themselves to their true ends or purposes, at least not without the support of the surrounding culture. To give another example, she describes taking a vow not to have any more one night stands or to sleep with a partnered man - but then she met a hot Brazilian guy and, despite him having a girlfriend, had a one night stand with him. Her response to breaking her vow?:</p><p></p><blockquote>I was reminded not to be so certain of who I am. Sometimes I don't do one night stands. Sometimes I do. I am ever evolving, ever changing.</blockquote><p>She just doesn't have what it takes to follow a moral path, nor to act in a way that might deliver what she clearly wants, which is a committed relationship with a man. As she herself states earlier, she suffers from a lack of guidance, there being precious little of it within modern liberal culture.</p><p>I don't think it would be easy to make things different for her. She has little sense that some things in her nature need to be constrained in order for her to achieve the higher good of a committed, stable love. It would have helped her, no doubt, had her father been present in her life (she has written a short essay on the impact on her of paternal abandonment). But the larger problem is that she is living in a culture which says that you can choose to act in any way you like, as long as you don't interfere with others doing the same. As long as there is consent, then everything is moral.</p><p>And so she just acts on her impulse to chase the hot guy, and so she is used and rejected over and over. And she does not have it within her to really understand what is needed - if anything, she intensifies the liberal messaging to women by claiming that women can be queens who deserve to have whatever they desire and to have it immediately.</p><p>The social norms that once existed in society were there for a reason. So too was the emphasis on cultivating particular virtues and upholding within the culture a definite concept of the human good. Without any of this, many people will be unable to find their way forward.</p><p>I will follow up this post with a longer one outlining the ideas of Eva Illouz, who, despite professing to hold to modernist ideas, nonetheless recognises that they have had some seriously negative consequences when it comes to relationships.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-59899655349551533612023-03-13T17:41:00.003+11:002023-03-13T17:53:34.847+11:00The Jena set<p>I've begun reading <i>Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self</i> by Andrea Wulf. It is about a group of German intellectuals (Fichte, Schiller, Schelling, Schlegel, Novalis) who gathered in the small university town of Jena in the very late 1700s and who subsequently had a major influence on the West. </p><p>Andrea Wulf is herself a supporter of liberal modernity and so sees the influence of these men in very positive terms. Obviously I disagree, but nonetheless the book is useful in identifying the larger trends within philosophy at the time.</p><p>The book begins with the arrival in Jena of Fichte, who in his first lecture as a professor at the university declared that "A person should be self-determined, never letting himself be defined by anything external". This idea is very familiar to us today, being a core feature of the ruling state ideology of liberalism. How did Fichte get to this idea?</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi8TjF54Wmbfh31iHOJN3JYVYAIBreUFGj1p1hefc5D-_TXxmMBXgh-0afmpY3XFlWg8CZa8O0cAFV7ybxel70TyCzSHW-Sb4qGLQHswFZhNt_VusGDhPBnResJgOda5-JjEzSx299gwI7sQKjOLgVMjIVawQvnWvLVi3zcjJFyJtRcqAuyR_0" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="470" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi8TjF54Wmbfh31iHOJN3JYVYAIBreUFGj1p1hefc5D-_TXxmMBXgh-0afmpY3XFlWg8CZa8O0cAFV7ybxel70TyCzSHW-Sb4qGLQHswFZhNt_VusGDhPBnResJgOda5-JjEzSx299gwI7sQKjOLgVMjIVawQvnWvLVi3zcjJFyJtRcqAuyR_0=w293-h400" width="293" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Johann Gottlieb Fichte</td></tr></tbody></table><br />I think it's important to go back to an earlier wave of modernity - the one that took place from about the mid-1600s. Europe had been ravaged by wars for over a century by this time, so philosophy was focused to a considerable degree on peace and security. Philosophy had, by this time, also disenchanted the external world - the new cosmology was a mechanistic one. By 1686 the following exchange was recorded (by Fontenelle):<p></p><p></p><blockquote>"I perceive", said the Countess, "Philosophy is now become very Mechanical." "So mechanical", said I, "that I fear we shall quickly be asham'd of it; they will have the World to be in great, what a watch is in little...But pray tell me, Madam, had you not formerly a more sublime idea of the Universe?"</blockquote><p>Well, this was still the situation when the Jena set were starting out. The poet Novalis complained that,</p><p></p><blockquote>Nature has been reduced to a monotonous machine, the eternally creative music of the universe into the monotonous clatter of a gigantic millwheel. (p.13)</blockquote><p></p><p></p><p>And so the focus of the Jena set makes sense within the historical context. They reacted against the previous emphasis on shoring up political authority by agitating instead for political freedoms. And this focus on freedom extended into their cosmology. They did not like the mechanistic view which suggested that everything is causally determined. </p><p>And so we come to Fichte's philosophy. This is how Andrea Wulf puts it:</p><p></p><blockquote>As Fichte stood at the podium in Jena, he imbued the self with the new power of self-determination. The Ich posits itself and it is therefore free. It is the agent of everything. Anything that might constrain or limit its freedom - anything in the non-Ich - is in fact brought into existence by the Ich. </blockquote><p>This does open up a sphere of freedom from causal necessity but at a considerable cost. There is a rejection here of the idea that human reason can perceive the given nature of things, the "thing in itself" and that there exists, at some level, a divine order to the cosmos in which humans are embedded. Instead, it is now the task of the Absolute I to assert itself against the non-I. Ficthe wrote:</p><p></p><blockquote>My system is the first system of freedom: just as the French nation is tearing man free from his external chains, so my system tears him free from the chains of things-in-themselves, the chains of external influences. </blockquote><p>One consequence of believing this is the idea of the individual will tearing down external reality as an act of freedom:</p><p></p><blockquote>My will alone...shall float audaciously and coldly over the wreckage of the universe. (p.46)</blockquote><p>It should be said, though, that Fichte did not envisage this as destroying moral foundations. Again, context matters here. There were British philosophers who thought that people were driven by sensations and by desires such as fear and greed, rather than by moral principles. For Kant and Fichte, the existence of a rational will meant that the individual was not merely reacting to external stimuli in his actions but could choose freely to act morally. In this way, Fichte was able to link freedom and morality. Again, in Andrea Wulf's words:</p><p></p><blockquote>The ultimate purpose of each individual was 'the moral ennobling of mankind', and it was the task of the philosopher and scholar to be the teacher of the human race - and to be that he had to be 'morally the best person of his era'.</blockquote><p></p><p>So Fichte did not discard the long held Western moral understanding which distinguished the noble from the base. This understanding, though, had its roots in a very different cosmology, one in which there was a hierarchically ordered chain of being. It is difficult to see how Fichte's cosmology, of the self-positing I, could adequately support the older understanding. If the point is to be free within my own subjective sense of self-awareness, and not conditioned by anything that is not-I, then how do distinctions between the quality of acts or thoughts come about? On what grounds are some ordered as more noble or more base?</p><p>The second reaction of the Jena set to the inherited mechanical view of the cosmos was to emphasise the need to rebalance reason with feeling. There was an emphasis on the imaginative faculty (drawn from Kant) and of a poetic sensibility. The poet Schiller complained of utility being "the great idol of our time" and wanted aesthetics (an appreciation of beauty) to be a bulwark against greed and immorality.</p><p>It's interesting to note how all of this came together in Beethoven, who is known to have been influenced by figures like Fichte. His music expresses not only the commitment to political freedom of the Jena set, but also the poetic sensibility and the expression of the noble and the beautiful. </p><p>The assertion of feeling against the cold rationalism of the Enlightenment is one of the more positive outcomes of the romantic movement. However, set against this is the shift into a radical subjectivism and an extraordinary emphasis on the individual will. Later on, Fichte's philosophy encouraged both nihilism and the demonic. The Dutch philosopher Paul van Tongeren explains the nihilism this way:</p><p></p><blockquote>...the affirmation of the “I” takes place through the negation of a separate
reality. But this negation of all independent reality leads to the
enthronement of the “I” in a world of complete emptiness. It has no other,
no reality to face, no communion in which to engage. There is naught but
the nothingness and loneliness in which and from which the “I” creates its
own world. The “I” becomes an endless egotist in a world that is eerily
empty. (p.21)</blockquote><p>And the demonic as follows:</p><p></p><blockquote>...this terrifying vision reflects back onto its creator:
within the world it has created, the “I” discerns its own—apparently
destructive—representations and desires! The emotions of the empirical
“I” (such as boredom, or terror) are not in response to an outside—there is
no outside, after all—but an experience of the self-positing or self-confirming activity of the (absolute) “I”. It becomes clear that the creator
isn’t the bright light of reason, but a dark force. The absolute “I” becomes
a demonic power that the empirical “I” is at the mercy of </blockquote><p>The romantic movement did not descend to this in its entirety. The emphasis on beauty and subjective experience did allow some artists, for instance, to experience a communion with nature or to be inspired by feminine beauty. But you can see the negative side there as well, from early on. </p><p>So what can we conclude from the Jena set? Perhaps I will have more to add when I finish reading the book. For now, I would point out the importance of metaphysics in the shaping of society. We are still Fichteans in the sense of connecting freedom to the self-positing individual. It is a dubious project, as it sets the individual against the givens of existence.</p><p>A traditionalist metaphysics would, amongst other things, connect the individual more positively to the created reality of which he is a part.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-57826666441089997692023-02-26T10:27:00.002+11:002023-02-26T10:27:35.884+11:00Empowered to be alone?Chrissie Swan is a 49-year-old Australian TV and radio presenter. Last year she confirmed that she had separated from her partner of 15 years, with whom she has three children. They still live amicably under the same roof.<br /><br />She recently <a href="https://www.nowtolove.com.au/celebrity/celeb-news/chrissie-swan-relationship-breakdown-76860">discussed</a> the reason for the separation. It piqued my interest because it resembles what other middle-aged women have told me about why they left their husbands/partners. <div><blockquote>...in saying goodbye to this chapter, she regained herself. When Chrissie was 45-year-old, she noticed – like many other women – she took care of everyone's needs before her own. Four years later, she is happier than ever and is embracing her best single life.<br /><br />"I was 45 and I thought, I'm not having much fun. To be honest, I was doing exactly what most women do and I was putting everyone first," she told 7News.<br /><br />Despite the pressure for women to find 'the one' in their 20s and 30s, Chrissie feels that she has rather gained a better appreciation for life and everything on offer. "I think society tells us that we don't need to be by ourselves as women," she said. "We are the mothers, the friends and the wives... we're supposed to get our life blood from being of service to people, and that wasn't true for me at all."</blockquote>What Chrissie Swan is describing, in talking about service to others, is the altruistic love that was once thought to characterise the feminine personality. For instance, in 1958 Marie Robinson <a href="https://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2020/08/four-types-of-female-love.html">wrote</a> that,<div><blockquote>Related to this feeling in her, to her sense of security, seeming almost to spring from it, indeed, is a profound delight in giving to those she loves. Psychiatrists, who consider this characteristic the hallmark, the sine qua non, of the truly feminine character, have a name for it: they call it “essential feminine altruism.” The finest flower of this altruism blossoms in her joy in giving the very best of herself to her husband and to her children. She never resents this need in herself to give; she never interprets its manifestations as a burden to her, an imposition on her.</blockquote>So here is the unusual thing. Chrissie Swan is rejecting altruistic love, even though it is how past generations of women expressed a core aspect of themselves, and even though she was not making that many sacrifices in terms of her own individual ambitions and lifestyle. After all, she was pursuing a busy, high status, successful and well paid career during this time, and she had the wealth to outsource much of the domestic work. </div><div><br /></div><div>In other words, her service to her family did not prevent her from pursuing other aims in life; nor need it have been burdensome in terms of workload. So why then choose to go solo?</div><div><br /></div><div>A possible reason is that the world picture that women like Chrissie Swan receive from the culture includes the idea that the aim of life for women is empowerment. This is defined as having the power to freely do whatever you have a mind to do without negative consequence or judgement. As evidence that this mindset has influenced Chrissie Swan there is the following social media <a href="https://7news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity/chrissie-swan-confirms-separation-from-partner-amid-dramatic-transformation-c-5825901">post</a>:</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhdTUbxy82_2u1426wpUve-pQ0JJqlUisYfeCMqeR2kVfiyNcgeIDhse6LkC0WzQ3xegaB3bCT85b8ccZr3gxZWOWw0C9U5bVbpIHkpNIvH9O2i7sArFMgGMV1lMTVkOcf9W7EkkRdWGr9joA020rt0GyurgI2PY4wUuSLwhrWZPzKivFkLUy4" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="396" data-original-width="822" height="309" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhdTUbxy82_2u1426wpUve-pQ0JJqlUisYfeCMqeR2kVfiyNcgeIDhse6LkC0WzQ3xegaB3bCT85b8ccZr3gxZWOWw0C9U5bVbpIHkpNIvH9O2i7sArFMgGMV1lMTVkOcf9W7EkkRdWGr9joA020rt0GyurgI2PY4wUuSLwhrWZPzKivFkLUy4=w640-h309" width="640" /></a></div><br />She is justifying her decision to leave her partner on the basis that "I am the Captain of my own life. And I can do whatever I like". She is asserting here her "empowerment" as an individual and her commitment to solo development.</div><div><br /></div><div>What this is leading to is a phenomenon in which some middle-class Western women are now seeing the family stage of life as a temporary aberration. They have a single girl period in their teens and twenties, then find a decent family-oriented guy to have children with in their 30s to mid-40s, before reasserting a full commitment to the empowerment model in later middle-age.</div><div><br /></div><div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgUFX4SOAeg5s5qAzP2taLUiDzwKAgPP6DTK-pcLbEtY6fLA4I9FYskq7C8J5X8YfR3DqW8TqHIfUzzQIEQoR1wywRkTr64EnExBfk2E1lKryrbzHR4xyxfqKJ1TItSNzlu3MmNXGzX3zZdJX8d0DPsFmjSI6OL5SJ6mk8Rkbd9sw1AtaVV8ZM" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2401" data-original-width="1600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgUFX4SOAeg5s5qAzP2taLUiDzwKAgPP6DTK-pcLbEtY6fLA4I9FYskq7C8J5X8YfR3DqW8TqHIfUzzQIEQoR1wywRkTr64EnExBfk2E1lKryrbzHR4xyxfqKJ1TItSNzlu3MmNXGzX3zZdJX8d0DPsFmjSI6OL5SJ6mk8Rkbd9sw1AtaVV8ZM=w427-h640" width="427" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Chrissie Swan</td></tr></tbody></table><br />The empowerment model is incompatible with marriage and family life. It is sold to women as representing the good of their sex, but this is highly questionable. Here is how Chrissie Swan describes her new <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CdXLPverflM/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=e59e7a89-cb59-401e-8f91-23bc6273ab93">lifestyle</a>:</div><blockquote>I have been spending a fair bit of time utterly alone...It’s a weird kind of exhilaration and joy from knowing all I need is myself....Last Friday I even went apple picking alone - and I highly recommend it. I’ve spent some time in my vege patch (I have no idea what I’m doing). I’ve also been buying myself flowers and taking myself out on walking dates, coffee dates, lunch dates and to the movies. Best company ever!</blockquote></div><div><div>Yes, having quiet time to decompress is important for people with high pressure working lives. I cannot believe, though, that she could not have negotiated this with her partner. And I simply do not accept the idea that a woman buying herself flowers and taking herself out on dates is the higher good for the female sex. It is, rather, a deprivation of one of the higher goods in life, namely spousal union.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is a conflict in our culture between the goods of empowerment and spousal union. The good of empowerment I think is not only a lower good, but mostly a false one. To date yourself and then later to spend old age alone does not fit the design for human life, at least not for the ordinary person. It takes a great deal of energy for someone to convince themselves otherwise and to make their peace with it.</div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>The good of spousal union, like all higher goods, is not easily achieved. It does not just happen naturally, but requires an uncommon level of commitment for a couple to work their way through difficult times. It also has a logic of its own. For instance, it makes sense for those oriented to spousal union to try to maintain a sexual polarity, so that we bring something to the union that we cannot provide ourselves - hence, no pride in being entirely self-sufficient. In the past, marital unions were conceived in terms of spouses gifting something to each other, which is difficult to do if there is a complete flattening of distinctions between men and women. </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>It is also the case that a spousal union asks of us that we be worthy of being joined together with our spouse. We are challenged to show a better aspect of who we are. The emphasis is not just on feeling, or for that matter, on receiving. There is instead a challenge of being - of what we are called to be in relationship with our spouse.</span></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6832901.post-83629564329764319062023-02-20T21:03:00.003+11:002023-02-20T21:08:49.646+11:00The original "What is a woman?"<p>The American political commentator Matt Walsh released a documentary recently titled "What is a woman?" It showed the difficulty many moderns have in answering an apparently simple question.</p><p>The question was posed, however, much earlier by the woman credited with kickstarting second wave feminism, Simone de Beauvoir, back in 1949 in her book <i>The Second Sex</i>. Her discussion of the question is interesting because it deals with the metaphysical origins of modernity. </p>She opens her argument with this:<br /><blockquote>But first we must ask: what is a woman? </blockquote><div>She acknowledges that some people would answer that there is a feminine quality that women embody and express, an "essence", that is part of the definition of womanhood. However, she rejects the existence of such a quality of femininity:</div><div></div><blockquote><div>It would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity. Is this attribute something secreted by the ovaries? Or is it a Platonic essence, a product of the philosophic imagination? Is a rustling petticoat enough to bring it down to earth? Although some women try zealously to incarnate this essence, it is hardly patentable. It is frequently described in vague and dazzling terms that seem to have been borrowed from the vocabulary of the seers, and indeed in the times of St Thomas it was considered an essence as certainly defined as the somniferous virtue of the poppy</div><div><br />But conceptualism has lost ground. The biological and social sciences no longer admit the existence of unchangeably fixed entities that determine given characteristics, such as those ascribed to woman...Science regards any characteristic as a reaction dependent in part upon a situation. If today femininity no longer exists, then it never existed. </div></blockquote><p>She claims that there are no innate qualities, and notes that in her time the sciences held character to depend on the social environment. But if there is no such thing as femininity, and we are simply products of our environment, then what does it mean to be a woman?:</p><blockquote>But does the word woman, then, have no specific content? This is stoutly affirmed by those who hold to the philosophy of the enlightenment, of rationalism, of nominalism; women, to them, are merely the human beings arbitrarily designated by the word woman. Many American women particularly are prepared to think that there is no longer any place for woman as such; if a backward individual still takes herself for a woman, her friends advise her to be psychoanalysed and thus get rid of this obsession. In regard to a work, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, which in other respects has its irritating features, Dorothy Parker has written: ‘I cannot be just to books which treat of woman as woman ... My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, should be regarded as human beings.’ </blockquote>This is interesting for several reasons. First, it shows that at the end of the long first wave of feminism, the same result occurred that we are seeing today. The term "woman" lost all meaning. Today, if you ask a progressive what the term means, they will simply say "whatever a woman wants it to mean". If you follow up by asking "can it mean anything then?" they will answer "yes". In 1949, the category was also thought to lack any signifying substance - it was held by progressives to be an arbitrary category that should be jettisoned.<div><br /></div><div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhOs9EWjnfxXDPzeVRUJ66TJfCG3w3mJHQzKsZy0efniOLXNXX0VlveUwI2l5qY--ZRXy7HRlhAKrS_dI7SnaSy_Fk7j5VRtGvQ8wylWq3LylsOivCXkSRq7b4RQ-F--0Q3bbsSefFvfVTr8yoqR76PmvRWfjEeXzUX20ReScmgHpnbqU_kTkU" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1344" data-original-width="1344" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhOs9EWjnfxXDPzeVRUJ66TJfCG3w3mJHQzKsZy0efniOLXNXX0VlveUwI2l5qY--ZRXy7HRlhAKrS_dI7SnaSy_Fk7j5VRtGvQ8wylWq3LylsOivCXkSRq7b4RQ-F--0Q3bbsSefFvfVTr8yoqR76PmvRWfjEeXzUX20ReScmgHpnbqU_kTkU=w400-h400" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Simone de Beauvoir</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>Second, Simone de Beauvoir is aware that this attitude has its origins in certain philosophical positions, including that of nominalism. Nominalism is the belief that there are only individual instances of things and that universals have no real existence but are only names. In this view, the feminine is not a really existing quality or essence that gives a distinct nature to women.</div><div><br /></div><div><div>Simone de Beauvoir's position on nominalism is complex. On the one hand, she thinks it inadequate because she believes the categories of man and woman to be real - unlike certain later feminists she rejects the idea that there is liberation in escaping the category of woman. However, she also rejects the idea of the masculine and the feminine as being innate qualities that men and women embody and express:</div><div><blockquote>But nominalism is a rather inadequate doctrine, and the antifeminists have had no trouble in showing that women simply are not men. Surely woman is, like man, a human being; but such a declaration is abstract. The fact is that every concrete human being is always a singular, separate individual. To decline to accept such notions as the eternal feminine, the black soul, the Jewish character, is not to deny that Jews, Negroes, women exist today – this denial does not represent a liberation for those concerned, but rather a flight from reality. </blockquote></div><div>Her defence of the distinction between men and women is not exactly encouraging:</div><div><blockquote>In truth, to go for a walk with one’s eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that they do most obviously exist.</blockquote></div><div>Which leads her back to the question her book is intended to answer:</div><div><blockquote>If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through ‘the eternal feminine’, and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question “what is a woman”?</blockquote>I have not read all of the remainder of her book. Part of her answer is that women have been defined only in relation to men, as "the Other". She wants, in line with modernity, for women to be autonomous. She has the following negative take on traditional womanhood:</div><blockquote>Humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not an autonomous being</blockquote><div>Her solution is the familiar feminist one of claiming that the differences that have existed between men and women are not the product of an innate masculinity or femininity but are due to socialisation:</div><blockquote>One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female acquires in society; it is civilization as a whole that develops this product, intermediate between female and eunuch, which one calls feminine.</blockquote><p>I'm sorry to disappoint, but I'm not really sure what her answer is to the question "What is a woman?". She seems to focus on the idea that women are not by nature feminine (which she takes to be a negative thing) and should be autonomous in the sense of living for themselves. She writes of her dislike for marriage, motherhood and family and promotes free love, abortion and careers.</p><p>She lived to see her preferences realised in Western society. But we do not live in a culture that can answer the question she raised back in 1949. Our culture still does not know what a woman is.</p></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4