Deeper feminist regret

There is a genre of confessional writing that might be called "feminist regret". I have chronicled many examples of this genre over the years, but I came across the most thoughtful one just this week. It is called "A Requiem for the Patriarchy" and is written by Darleen Lev. 

Darleen Lev has also discussed her thoughts in a long interview with Leslie Boyce (see here) and I will be using this as well to draw out some of her ideas.

It's helpful to begin with some biography. Darleen Lev was born in 1961 and grew up in Chicago. Her (non-biological) father was Jewish and her mother Protestant (though she seems to have been raised Christian). Her mother discouraged her from being a homemaker and she was influenced by the changes in popular culture in the 1970s to think that she could do whatever a man did (she says that TV series like Charlie's Angels had this effect). When the pill became available, she and her friends took this as a freedom to be sexually promiscuous. She did eventually marry but chose to divorce her husband. She supported herself through her work as an academic. She is now in her mid-60s and childless.

Darleen Lev

She describes herself as someone who experienced two different worlds. The world she grew up in before the influence of second wave feminism and then the feminist one that followed. Surveying her life experiences she has come to a principled, and deep, rejection of feminism. 

What made her change her mind about feminism? Well, in comparing culture as it was in her youth to what followed she sees an emerging wasteland. Both family and local community have disintegrated during the course of her lifetime. This has left herself and many of her peers single, unsupported, childless and socially isolated. 

To her credit she does not take the option of blaming men. She has a more interesting analysis which I will break down into three parts.

1. Patriarchy

Darleen Lev draws a distinction between the patriarchy she grew up in and the present day matriarchy. By patriarchy she means something like a family structure in which men are present within the family, are respected for what they bring to family life, and who create stability and security for all those within the family. By matriarchy, she is referring to a social system in which this role of men has been dispensed with.

She does not have a naive view of the older family culture. She acknowledges that a small number of women were abandoned, and that some marriages were unhappy. Nonetheless, she has a sense that the masculine principle is necessary to uphold social life. Without it, communities lose a connection to both order and meaning. And, absent the masculine presence, women are less able to create local community as they once did.

She does not pull her punches in introducing this argument:

The ‘patriarchy’ was a fertile time. Life seemed to spill out of every door. The lively suburban street I grew up on had a patriarch in every home, and enough children, in most households, to form a chorus or one of those dad-trained acrobatic families who performed on the Ed Sullivan show.

But death is the essence of the matriarchy in which we now live, a time when abortion is labeled ‘health care’—the Democrats’ primary promise of a conduit to an ideal existence. Meanwhile, we’re in a fertility crisis that could bring the country to its knees; yet the matriarchy, with its tyranny of ‘care,’ scolds us as ‘right wing’ for caring about the fact that we’re not generating enough new life. 

She develops the argument by listing the people she knows with chaotic family lives or who disavow having children as a matter of principle. I understand her completely in this. My parents' generation had stable marriages and many children. My own did not. To experience this decline can be bewildering. I think, for instance, of my best friend at school who had four sisters. None of them married. None of them had children. This has always seemed tragic to me - and unsettling, suggesting some deeper social malaise.

Darleen Lev seems to be reaching toward an argument I have made myself before, namely that men bring into social life the vertical structure of reality. This is how Lawrence Auster describes it:

Symbolically, the father is the structuring source of our existence, whether we are speaking of male authority, of the law, of right and wrong, of our nation, of our heritage, of our civilization, of our biological nature, of our God. All these structuring principles of human life, in their different ways, are symbolically the father. The rebellion we've discussed is...a rebellion against the father. The belief that the universe is structured, intelligible, and fundamentally good, and that one can participate in this universe - this is the experience of having a father, which is the opposite of the experience of alienation that drives contemporary culture.

Without this, there is not the same conviction of participating in a reality that is, as Auster puts it, fundamentally good. And therefore there is not the same openness to creating new life. 

2. Choice

I recently read an essay by Ted Sadler in the Observer & Review (Volume 2 Issue 2, Number 3) titled "Suicide of the West: Towards a Universal Homogeneous Superstate".  Sadler views contemporary liberalism as a continuation of a longer project that had taken definite shape by the Enlightenment:

The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century looked to a new cosmopolitan super-culture that would replace Christianity: individuals would be uprooted not only from their national or ethnic or local traditions - which could only be the source of prejudices - but also from the similarly cosmopolitan super-culture of Christianity. The new mature enlightened individual would stand naked and proud 'above' all tradition, needing only his 'freedom' and prosperity. (p.236)

By modern times this project was expressed in terms of building a social order upon material prosperity and individual choice:

The homogenization process of the universal homogeneous state means that society is defined as an indiscriminate aggregate of individuals stripped of any other cultural identity: ethnicity, nation, tradition and religion...All individuals, it is assumed, are capable of taking their place in the economy as workers, consumers, tax-payers and benefit-recipients....The assumption is that the social and cultural identity of the universal homogeneous state is nothing in particular: this absence of identity is called 'multi-culturalism', a euphemism for the cultural vacuum that is liberalism....

Liberals themselves, of course, do not say they are affirming a vacuous negativity, but insist that their supreme virtue is freedom. The ideal liberal state is supposed to provide not just economic well-being for everybody, but the freedom of individuals to do what they like, say what they like, think what they like, live however they like, providing it does not infringe on the freedom of others. (pp. 232-33)

Sadler goes on to describe the drift of liberalism toward intolerance. Darleen Levy approaches things from a different angle. She has already identified the disintegrating effect of this project on social bodies like the family and local community. But she also questions whether the project really delivers meaningful choice the way it claims to do.

In her interview, she says (at 22:05) that:

From the moment I hit puberty all that I could think about was having babies. That was my instinct. That's what I wanted to do.

Despite this being what she most wanted to choose, it never happened. She had to contend with her mother pushing her toward careerism. But more than this, there was by this time a dating culture based around casual hookups rather than a culture of courtship as had existed in previous generations. People socialised in bars and at concerts and she found it a difficult environment to assert her desire for a more committed relationship (it had become "shameful and humiliating" to have to admit to the man she was with that she wanted more than something casual). On the occasions she did give voice to this "they would say that that's not what they wanted". 

She is describing a flaw in the liberal model. Some of our more profound life choices cannot be made through our own volition alone. They are more likely to be realised in certain cultural environments and they depend on the choices other people make. In her social milieu, there were no longer rituals of courtship leading to marriage and then to children. The expectation was that encounters were to be casual. Yes, it might still have been possible to find a way through this, but her choice was made much more difficult to realise than it once would have been.

Her solution to this is interesting. She says that,

In my generation we were fumbling around, not knowing how to get what we deep down really wanted...And the lack of community oversight also lends itself to that. You are alone in the middle of nowhere and no-one's really watching you...But if we have to decide what really is better for everyone, perhaps it would be more connection around community...that we are all families that live in this place and we collectively want to create a really nice place for us to thrive in. 

This too highlights an issue within liberalism. If there are no objective goods that contribute to human well-being, but only subjective preferences, then there will develop over time an "indifference to the good". But this then leads to the kind of abandonment that Darleen Lev complains about. There cannot be "community oversight" if there are no agreed upon outcomes to be achieved. If, for instance, you were to say to a liberal "is it not unusual for all four sisters to remain unmarried and childless?" the most common answer you will receive is "well, that is just what they chose to do". As if there were "nothing to see here" and therefore no real concern for what might have led to such an outcome.

Darleen Lev also seems to be reaching toward the idea of a common good - the idea that we might "collectively want to create a really nice place for us to thrive in". What is being recognised here is that our own individual good often depends on the health of the social bodies we are members of. So it does matter to us that others choose in ways that uphold the good of this larger body (an aspect of living in a high trust community - we can trust that others will do the right thing). 

Leslie Boyce, the interviewer, makes a similar point when the two women discuss one of Darleen Lev's female students who has chosen to be a prostitute. Leslie Boyce observes that (1:02:54),

There's a bit of a paradox here because on the individual level we tend to respect choices, let people do things and we're not going to look too hard at what they're doing. And then on the zoom out social level, it's the aggregate of these kinds of choices that end up creating exactly the trends that we're sitting here describing today.

The choices people make matter not only to themselves but to others, because the aggregate of these choices forms the culture we all inhabit. And none of us can claim to live entirely isolated from our own culture. 

3. Disposability

One of the problems identified by Darleen Lev is that marriage has become less durable, in part, because relationships with men are increasingly seen as being disposable. For instance, she writes that,

Most of the women I work with are childless, and destined to remain so. Most are not married, nor are they in lasting relationships. The relationships that I’ve heard about were generally ended by the woman because he didn’t measure up in some way.

She also recounts the story (at 33:58) of going for a walk in the park one day with a female friend and her baby. The husband of this friend had started a new restaurant and was working long hours to establish it. The wife felt aggrieved that he was not home more, but Darleen Lev pointed out that he was a faithful husband whose work was allowing her to spend time with her child. Years later the friend told Darleen that her words had helped save her marriage as her other friends had all advised her to leave. 

This shift to seeing relationships as disposable was noted by one of the first writers of the feminist regret genre, the Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger. In 2002 she wrote a newspaper article titled "The Sins of our Feminist Mothers" in which she confessed that,

For those of us that did marry, marriage was perhaps akin to an accessory. And in our high-disposable-income lives, accessories pass their use-by date, and are thoughtlessly tossed aside. Frankly, the dominant message was to not let our man, or any man for that matter, get in the way of career and our own personal progress.

We should not be at all surprised by this trend. It is not possible for loyalty to be a feature of a society like ours. If the primary and overriding good is a freedom to choose in any direction, then loyalty becomes a vice not a virtue. Loyalty means declining choice. It means renouncing options. When we are loyal there are choices we will not even consider, that are ruled out.

Worse yet if the loyalty is to a cultural identity or tradition that the homogenizing state is set against. This is then doubly an offence. Little wonder that our politicians do not feel the moral weight of betrayal. 

And little wonder that a modern day marriage therapist would argue with me as follows on the topic of what might be reasonable grounds for divorce:

She believes that the very foundation of marriage is the freedom to leave. This is our culture travelling to topsy turvy land, where the meaning of things is put upside down. Instead of a focus on fidelity, or religious commitment or even spousal love as foundations of marriage, it is the freedom to leave which takes centre stage. The notion of marriage vows would then seem to be redundant.

Depth

Some of the women who write feminist regret literature eventually lapse back into feminism. Their discontent relates to their failure to have children; once they reconcile themselves to this, they resume their former ideological commitments. Germaine Greer is something of an example of this. In 1991 she wrote "Most societies have arranged matters so that a family surrounds and protects mother and child," and complained of "our families having withered away" with relationships becoming "less durable every year." As well observed as this might be she nonetheless remained broadly within the feminist camp.

It doesn't seem likely that Darleen Lev will end up in this group of women. There is more than personal regret at her own feminist choices, there is also a recognition that something is deeply wrong at a wider social level, to the point that there is a closure to new life and to community. And she is reaching toward explanations that put her well outside of the Enlightenment project, with its limiting of values to material prosperity and individual choice. 

She clearly believes that a masculine principle is needed to provide a stabilising element within human relationships and even to provide the sense of meaningful order - the goodness - within which a commitment to future life is more likely to be made. 

And she has reached beyond the idea of a society made up of a mere agglomerate of individuals, toward something like a common good, in which communities intentionally set out to uphold the conditions for human flourishing and in which people are supported in realising the more important aspects of life, such as forming a family.

Liberalism, Christianity & entropy

In a recent debate on social media a woman asked the following reasonable question:

To which she received the following reasonable reply:

A leftist thought this to be a good opportunity to win over women to his side:

Which led to this exchange:

So here we have the modernist idea that there is no objective good, or, to put it differently, whatever we seek becomes by definition "the good". This is similar to the Hobbesian view as described below by Michael Allen Gillespie:

We are all only individual beings, determined by our idiosyncratic passions. Good and evil for each of us is thus measured not by our progress toward a rational, natural, or supernatural end but by the vector of our desire. No direction is naturally better than any other. Good is what pleases us, evil what displeases us, good what reinforces our motion, evil what hinders it.

I responded as follows:

What all this made me think of is that the concept of entropy is underused within traditionalist thinking. It is particularly useful because it is so widely accepted within science, which has a certain prestige within modern thought. 

Entropy is the idea that systems of any sort do not naturally maintain themselves but will tend toward increasing disorder and decay unless sufficient energy is applied to combating entropy. This is something we are likely to experience in our own lives as we age. To maintain the same muscle mass as we get older requires an active effort in the gym; what begin as bad habits solidify over time into vices that are increasingly difficult to wind back and so on. Eventually entropy wins, but it is part of our natures to resist and to seek to maintain the order and integrity of our persons and our cultures.

The respected intellectual Steven Pinker puts it this way:

The…ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.

And here's the thing. Political liberalism is by nature entropic. It says to people that there is no objective good to be pursued, but that we should act on "what is in our mind" or according to "the vector of our desire". But all this does is to set ourselves, and our communities, more passively in the flow of entropy that is embedded into the reality we inhabit. 

The concept of entropy, whilst not being Christian in and of itself, is an easy entry point into aspects of Christianity. It suggests that there is something like a "logos" embedded into the nature of reality, a kind of higher ordering principle that needs to be actively upheld. It fits in, too, with a Christian virtue ethics, in which there are dissolute vices to avoid, but also ordering virtues that we should discipline ourselves to, to form good habits that maintain our integrity of person. 

It is interesting that Jordan Peterson became famous for advising people to clean their rooms. I haven't read his book, so don't know the surrounding context of this, but consider the following online description (by an unnamed author) of what entropy means:

Combatting entropy requires energy. When you clean a messy house, you use energy to return the house to a previous, simpler, tidier state. This is why entropy is nature’s tax. You need to expend energy just to maintain the current state. Failing to pay nature’s tax means things get more complicated, disorganized, and messier.

We cannot expect anything to stay the way we leave it. To maintain our health, relationships, careers, skills, knowledge, societies, and possessions requires never-ending effort and vigilance.

Perhaps cleaning your room is just accepting a mindset that we need to direct energy toward "negentropy":

Negentropy is reverse entropy. It means things becoming more in order. By 'order' is meant organisation, structure and function: the opposite of randomness or chaos.

At least some of Peterson's followers have ended up converting to Christianity:

A Catholic priest who attended the Providence show confirmed that "a fair number" of recent converts he's encountered at Mass said they came to the faith after listening to Peterson.

One final point. A mistaken conclusion to be drawn from this is that we need authoritarian government to provide the "strong arm" to combat entropy in society. I don't think this is so. The Chinese government is authoritarian, but signs are that the Chinese are failing just as much as we in the West to uphold the kind of values that would help their society to survive into the future. For instance, here are Chinese people explaining why they chose not to have children:

Young people are more focused on ourselves and we don't think about the future, we just think about what makes us happy, because if you have children it costs lots of money and lots of time.

And this:

Beijing resident Four Wang, 42, and his wife have decided it is too much of a risk. "It would be just like opening a mystery box," Mr Wang said. "I have no courage to open it." The finance worker said a child would be expensive and could reduce his quality of life. The money I saved can be used for shopping," he said. "I won't need to worry about children's lives, health, safety, et cetera."

What matters is the metaphysics that people live by; the social and cultural norms within a community; and the ability of individuals to self-regulate toward a common good. To come at this from a different angle, the more that a community gets its settings right, at the level of individual, family and local government, the less that any intrusive government overreach can be justified.

Liberal modernity leads to Amanda Marcotte

I visited Dalrock's site and was interested to find the following quote on abortion by feminist Amanda Marcotte:

…[what a woman] wants trumps the non-existent desires of a mindless pre-person that is so small it can be removed in about two minutes during an outpatient procedure. Your cavities fight harder to stay in place.

That is the terrible logic of a liberal morality. For liberals there is no objective right and wrong. What is good is the act of individual choosing, desiring, will-making. For Amanda Marcotte, since the foetus cannot choose, desire or express will it is outside of the moral equation and has no rights. Therefore, all that matters morally are the wants of the mother.

Note too the dangers of the modernist view as expressed by Marcotte. She comes very close to expressing the idea that the person with the strongest will, the strongest will to power, has thereby demonstrated a superior moral status.

I decided to visit the link to Marcotte's original piece to make sure I wasn't misrepresenting her. The piece is interesting because Marcotte is very honest in the way she describes her attitudes. It's a look into the liberal, modernist mindset. Here is Marcotte explaining why, no matter what social policies are in place, she will never want a baby:

You can give me gold-plated day care and an awesome public school right on the street corner and start paying me 15% more at work, and I still do not want a baby. I don’t particularly like babies. They are loud and smelly and, above all other things, demanding. No matter how much free day care you throw at women, babies are still time-sucking monsters with their constant neediness. No matter how flexible you make my work schedule, my entire life would be overturned by a baby. I like  my life how it is, with my ability to do what I want when I want without having to arrange for a babysitter. I like being able to watch True Detective right now and not wait until baby is in bed. I like sex in any room of the house I please. I don’t want a baby. I’ve heard your pro-baby arguments. Glad those work for you, but they are unconvincing to me. Nothing will make me want a baby.

She wants her autonomy - her freedom to do whatever she likes, whenever she likes - more than she wants the fulfilment of motherhood. And she is too much of a hedonist to give up a pleasure seeking lifestyle. Which is why she is so strongly in favour of abortion:

This is why, if my birth control fails, I am totally having an abortion. Given the choice between living my life how I please and having my body within my control and the fate of a lentil-sized, brainless embryo that has half a chance of dying on its own anyway, I choose me.

What I would say to fellow traditionalists at this point is that it's not enough to merely condemn Marcotte's moral position. Her moral position points to much deeper failings within modern society which we cannot ignore or pretend don't exist. Society is trending to exactly the mindset that Marcotte is honest enough to describe - the individualistic, hedonistic one. It is an end point of liberal modernity.

Marcotte herself concludes her piece with the admission that she is selfish and hedonistic, but she believes that this is how women should be and that it is only "gender norms" that make women anything else:

So, reading those three paragraphs above? I bet at some point you recoiled a bit, even if you don’t want to have recoiled a bit. Don’t I sound selfish? Hedonistic? Isn’t there something very unfeminine about my bluntness here? Hell, I’m performing against gender norms so hard that even I recoil a little. This is actually what I think, and I feel zero guilt about it, but I know that saying so out loud will cause people to want to hit me with the Bad Woman ruler, and that causes a little dread.

Amanda Marcotte wants a society built on hedonism and selfishness. With no babies. It's not much of a plan.

The family is not a technology, part 2

If, as Jim Kalb writes, modernism is based on a scientistic view of reason, what are the consequences for the family?

Not so good. Scientism, the attempt to apply the kind of reasoning at work in the natural sciences to the whole of life, has encouraged a technological view of society. There are to be universal systems based on clear and efficient principles which can be applied and managed by experts.

The traditional family fails as a technology. Jim Kalb has explained some of the reasons why:

(a) For a rational technological system to exist, everything has to be transparent and manageable from the point of view of those on top.

(b) Traditional and local institutions - family, religion, nationality, and non-liberal conceptions of personal integrity and dignity

i) Are generally opaque and resistant to outside control. They're recalcitrant.

ii) Aren't oriented toward maximum equal satisfaction of individual preference ...

iii) Aren't based on expert knowledge ...

iv) Recognise distinctions and authorities that aren't required by liberal market and bureaucratic institutions. It follows that they're based on hate and oppression. The family, for instance, is based on distinctions of sex, age and blood ... (see p.8)

Is it possible to find examples of moderns rejecting the family on the grounds outlined above by Jim Kalb? Absolutely.

Leon Trotsky wrote the following in 1932 in defence of the attempts to reform the family in communist Russia:

The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called “family hearth” - that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution ... The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc.

Note the terminology at work: "archaic, stuffy and stagnant", a "shut-in petty enterprise". The term "shut-in" corresponds to Kalb's second point, namely that the traditional family is too opaque and resistant to outside control to function well as a technology. The complaint that the family is a "petty enterprise" makes sense if you expect the institutions of society to exist as part of a universal, centralised system managed from the top.

And then there is Tom Flynn. A few years ago he was co-editor of the Secular Humanist Bulletin. In an article titled "Replacing our Last Cottage Industry" he exhorted secular humanists to continue their attack on the family:

Pat Robertson is right - as secular humanists, we are heir to a tradition that is in many ways profoundly anti-family. For more than a hundred years humanists and freethinkers have been either center stage, or cheering from the front row, each time reform blunted the family's ubiquity and power ... humanists and other reformers have dealt the family countless body blows. Some say the family is becoming more inclusive. I say we are subduing the family, not extending it - perhaps setting the stage for its replacement.

Secular humanists should celebrate this achievement, not minimize it, and renew their assaults upon the family. This obsolete and exploitative institution must go.

What does Tom Flynn have against the family? He explains:

... At humanism's core lies enmity toward all things medieval, authoritarian, and obscurantist. As medieval holdovers go, the family is short on obscurantism, but drenched in authoritarianism. It's second only to matrimony in transmitting the idea of women as brood animals. In perpetuating the idea of children as property it has no peer. The family must go.

So secular humanists object to that which is "obscurantist". This seems to relate to Kalb's observation that institutions which are "opaque" aren't well suited for technological systems.

Flynn also objects to the authoritarianism of the family. This was predicted in Kalb's fourth point: the family fails in a technological society because it recognises authorities not required by liberal market and bureaucratic institutions.

Similary, there is Flynn's objection to the place of women and children in the family. Again this is predicted in Kalb's fourth point: the family fails in a technological society because it recognises distinctions of age and sex not required by liberal market and bureaucratic institutions. These distinctions will therefore be understood and explained in a negative sense, as aspects of oppression.

What's most intersting, though, is another of Flynn's objections to the family, the one fitting Kalb's third point: that it isn't administered by a class of experts:

... the family stands in the way of another implicit humanist goal: decoupling ... reproduction from parenting. The birth control explosion of the 60s emancipated much sex from reproduction. Yet even today, few can imagine anyone but themselves raising their kids, as though conception and childbirth imply anything about one's capacity to prepare a child for today's complex world.

The costs of cottage industry

We expect specialists to build our cars, raise our buildings, make our clothing, write our software - the list is endless. Perversely, only society's most precious products - us - are still entrusted to cottage industry. If society is falling apart as conservatives charge, perhaps the blame lies not with "alternative family structures" (more accurately, non-familial households) but simply with parents, single or married, rich or poor, for whom parenting could never be more than a hobby - pursued in naive isolation, abandoned just when one threatens to get good at it. While procreation and parenting remain yoked, most children are doomed to be raised by amateurs ...

The family, our last cottage industry, must go!

Looking Backwards - Issuing A Challenge

In 1888 Edward Bellamy published the utopian novel Looking Backwards, 2000-1887. Bellamy predicted that by the 21st Century capitalism, home, and family would be forgotten. Generations of reformers imbibed Bellamy's vivid images of happy workers who lived in dorms and ate in refectories, of children raised in large cohorts by gifted mentors, and dreamt that this was the shape of things to come. Science-fiction masters like Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and others portrayed futures in which the family had been eclipsed by licensed, professionalized alternatives. Many progressives simply assumed that one day, if not too soon, parenting would be a career like any other. Those most capable of it would be trained to mentor armies of children not their own.

Too many secular humanists no longer find such visions compelling.

It's interesting how similar Trotsky's turn of phrase is to Flynn's. Trotsky condemned the family as an archaic petty enterprise; Flynn condemns it as a cottage industry.

There is the same technological impulse at work; instead of a family run as a "hobby" by "amateurs" (i.e. by parents), children would instead by raised by "specialists", by "licensed, professionals" who would transform parenting into a "career".

Note that Flynn isn't satisfied with the degree to which children are already raised by "specialists" (i.e. via schools and pre-school centres). He wants to take the principle further, so that bearing a child would no longer be connected to parenting that child. He wants there to be fewer children and for these children to be raised by "gifted mentors" rather than by their biological parents. He asks:

Can we construct a vision of an individualist future where most sex never leads to conception; where only a fraction of the population reproduces; and where only gifted mentors parent, without regard for whose offspring the children may be?

The most direct response to Flynn's challenge is to state clearly that the family is not a technology and cannot be ordered on the basis of neutral expertise, or centralised management, or bureaucratic or market authority. It is too much an intimate, private institution based on instinct, affection, and natural forms of loyalty and distinction.

Hat tip: for the Flynn article, Pilgrimage to Montsalvat.

See also: The family is not a technology & The revolutionary family heads west

Trials of a feminist daughter

Rebecca Walker was brought up by an American feminist icon, Alice Walker. Rebecca, though, does not share her mother's feminism and for obvious reasons.

Modernity makes individual autonomy the key good in life. Feminism insists that women receive an equal measure of autonomy. Where, though, does this leave motherhood? If you believe, above all, in "independence" - in being able to follow your own will in any direction - then motherhood will be thought of as an impediment.

And so it was in the Walker household. Rebecca was brought up to think that having children was the ultimate form of servitude, and Alice put motherhood low down in her priorities.

Rebecca found it impossible to adopt her mother's feminism: as a child she yearned for a more traditional mother and she found it difficult later in life to suppress her own maternal instincts. When she finally had a child of her own, and found it such a rewarding experience, the break with her mother's feminism was complete.

Here is Rebecca West's criticism of feminism in her own words:

The other day I was vacuuming when my son came bounding into the room. 'Mummy, Mummy, let me help,' he cried. His little hands were grabbing me around the knees and his huge brown eyes were looking up at me. I was overwhelmed by a huge surge of happiness ...

It reminds me of just how blessed I am. The truth is that I very nearly missed out on becoming a mother - thanks to being brought up by a rabid feminist who thought motherhood was about the worst thing that could happen to a woman.

You see, my mum taught me that children enslave women. I grew up believing that children are millstones around your neck, and the idea that motherhood can make you blissfully happy is a complete fairytale.

In fact, having a child has been the most rewarding experience of my life. Far from 'enslaving' me, three-and-a-half-year-old Tenzin has opened my world. My only regret is that I discovered the joys of motherhood so late - I have been trying for a second child for two years, but so far with no luck.

I was raised to believe that women need men like a fish needs a bicycle. But I strongly feel children need two parents and the thought of raising Tenzin without my partner, Glen, 52, would be terrifying.

As the child of divorced parents, I know only too well the painful consequences of being brought up in those circumstances. Feminism has much to answer for denigrating men and encouraging women to seek independence whatever the cost to their families.

My mother's feminist principles coloured every aspect of my life. As a little girl, I wasn't even allowed to play with dolls or stuffed toys in case they brought out a maternal instinct. It was drummed into me that being a mother, raising children and running a home were a form of slavery. Having a career, travelling the world and being independent were what really mattered according to her.

... I came very low down in her priorities - after work, political integrity, self-fulfilment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel.

My mother would always do what she wanted - for example taking off to Greece for two months in the summer, leaving me with relatives when I was a teenager. Is that independent, or just plain selfish?

... the truth was I was very lonely and, with my mother's knowledge, started having sex at 13. I guess it was a relief for my mother as it meant I was less demanding. And she felt that being sexually active was empowering for me because it meant I was in control of my body.

Now I simply cannot understand how she could have been so permissive ... A good mother is attentive, sets boundaries and makes the world safe for her child. But my mother did none of those things ...

As a child, I was terribly confused, because while I was being fed a strong feminist message, I actually yearned for a traditional mother. My father's second wife, Judy, was a loving, maternal homemaker with five children she doted on ...

When I hit my 20s and first felt a longing to be a mother, I was totally confused. I could feel my biological clock ticking, but I felt if I listened to it, I would be betraying my mother and all she had taught me.

I tried to push it to the back of my mind, but over the next ten years the longing became more intense ...

I know many women are shocked by my views. They expect the daughter of Alice Walker to deliver a very different message. Yes, feminism has undoubtedly given women opportunities ... But what about the problems it's caused for my contemporaries?

... there is the issue of not having children. Even now, I meet women in their 30s who are ambivalent about having a family. They say things like: 'I'd like a child. If it happens, it happens.' I tell them: 'Go home and get on with it because your window of opportunity is very small.' As I know only too well.

Then I meet women in their 40s who are devastated because they spent two decades working on a PhD or becoming a partner in a law firm, and they missed out on having a family. Thanks to the feminist movement, they discounted their biological clocks. They've missed the opportunity and they're bereft.

Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating.

But far from taking responsibility for any of this, the leaders of the women's movement close ranks against anyone who dares to question them - as I have learned to my cost. I don't want to hurt my mother, but I cannot stay silent. I believe feminism is an experiment, and all experiments need to be assessed on their results. Then, when you see huge mistakes have been made, you need to make alterations.

Sacrificing humans to the Earth God

Dr John Reid is a neuroscientist from Melbourne's Swinburne University. He gave a talk yesterday on ABC radio on the subject of global warming.

According to Dr Reid, we must take radical steps to avoid an environmental apocalypse. Standards of living in the Western world will have to be cut drastically. The number of cars will have to be reduced to 10% of the current fleet. Water and meat will need to be rationed and private property rights curtailed.

But even this won't be enough to avoid turning our beautiful planet into a "Venusian hell".

According to Dr Reid we have to devise a way to achieve a large-scale and rapid decline in the earth's population. Dr Reid notes that war, pestilence and famine might kill large numbers, but he thinks only on a scale of tens of millions "which is not enough to solve the problem of over-populaton".

He suggests that a more effective and humane way to rid the world of large numbers of people might be:

to put something in the water, a virus that would be specific to the human reproductive system and would make a substantial proportion of the population infertile.

Perhaps a virus that would knock out the genes that produce certain hormones necessary for conception.

Which countries should be targeted first? Oddly enough, Dr Reid doesn't propose attacking those countries with the highest birth rates, but countries which already have a below replacement fertility rate. He suggests "fixing" the water supplies of the United Arab Emirates, the USA, Finland, Canada, Kuwait and Australia on the basis that these countries do the most environmental damage.

But if there were to be a drastic decline in the number of young people in these nations, how would the elderly be supported? Dr Reid has an answer. They wouldn't be. He states:

Societies will not be able to provide health care services needed to keep large numbers of unhealthy old people alive.

A triage approach will be necessary so that scarce medical resources go to those who can contribute most to the long-term viability of the planet. Consequently many middle-aged-to-elderly people will die uncomfortable deaths. Not every problem is soluble.

Finally, Dr Reid advocates the abandonment of traditional theistic religions:

The precepts of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam represent the quintessential perversion of the human mind. They must be abandoned and the notion of the sanctity of human life must be subjugated to the greater sanctity of all life on Earth.

What's to be made of all this? Dr Reid clearly has issues with traditional religion. Just as clearly, he wishes to substitute a commitment to "the planet" for these religions.

But a secular religion can be a dangerous thing. What is there in Dr Reid's secular earth religion to uphold a sense of the value of individual human life? What is there to place moral limits on how we serve the new earth god?

If you read the transcript of Dr Reid's speech you are struck by how readily his mind turns to darkly pessimistic scenarios of destruction, and by how coldly instrumental his solutions are.

Also striking is how Dr Reid's scientific humanism can be so un-progressive in recalling the crueller aspects of paganism, and so anti-human in degrading both the status and sanctity of human life.

A green church without children?

Katharine Jefferts Schori was recently elected as the first woman head of the Episcopal Church (the American branch of the Anglicans). A few days ago she was interviewed by the New York Times and made the following comments:

Q. How many members of the Episcopal Church are there in this country?

About 2.2 million. It used to be larger percentagewise, but Episcopalians tend to be better educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than some other denominations. Roman Catholics and Mormons both have theological reasons for producing lots of children.

Q. Episcopalians aren't interested in replenishing their ranks by having children?

No. It's probably the opposite. We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion.

I had to read that last bit twice to make sure I'd understood correctly. But it's stated very clearly: Jefferts Schori tells us that Episcopalians are not interested in replenishing their ranks by having children, but in the opposite - in not having children as a moral aim.

The whole instinct here is wrong. The very liberal Jefferts Schori has too little sense of the civilisational issues at stake when family formation and fertility rates are depressed; she is too fatalistic about the losses to her own church; and she too readily abandons the appeal of the church to those wanting a supportive environment for the raising of their families.

Perhaps Jefferts Schori has been influenced by a 2004 report on population trends within the Episcopal Church. This report found that the church had lost 829,000 members between 1967 and 2002, and that this was due to a fall in the fertility rate of white Americans, "our main constituency".

The decline in white fertility hit Episcopalians hardest, as better educated and wealthier white women have the lowest fertility rate, and there are more such women in the Episcopal Church than other denominations. The fertility rate of Episcopalians is estimated to be 1.5, well below replacement level (see p.17 of the report).

How does the report suggest that the problem be addressed? You would think the first concern of the church would be to encourage a stronger family ethos amongst its existing membership. But this is totally ignored.

Instead the report states blandly that,

The bottom line is this: given the demographic characteristics of our members, sustained growth is unlikely unless we begin to reach out beyond our historic constituency ... The problems facing the Episcopal Church are daunting due to the nature of our main constituency.

Again, it is just assumed that middle-class, white Americans aren't going to have children. This despite the fact that the church grew significantly in the 1950s when its existing members actually were having kids.

Instead, the church report simply accepts the radical changes to family life as a "demographic characteristic of our members" and suggests seeking out a replacement constituency.

Perhaps Jefferts Schori has accepted this fatalistic view and is trying to put a positive spin on it: there won't be Episcopal babies, but this is because we're smart and environmentally conscious and not because we (and other churches) have failed to hold together a healthy culture of family life.

Hat tip: Dog Fight at Bankstown