On complementarity

From Twitter:

There is, of course, a corresponding instinct in men to want to protect and provide for a woman so that she can, as Rachel puts it, fall into her femininity. This is the instinct that is physically embodied in relationships when a man draws a woman toward him, inviting her to lean into him and feel supported. Or when at night in bed a man puts his arm around a woman and draws her into him, enveloping her.

It is one aspect of the relationship between men and women that can be genuinely complementary (not all aspects of relationships are). And it is a significant part of how men and women interact, as without it part of the bonding instinct is lost. It should, therefore, be defended within a culture, rather than taken for granted.

It seems to me that part of the dysfunction in modern relationships is because of interference with the provider/protector instinct in men. There is, first, the insistence in liberal societies that women be autonomous, and therefore independent, powerful and self-standing. Young men will grow up watching women kickboxing their way across TV and cinema screens. The softer qualities of women will be downplayed. Men will begin to feel that women are no longer a "complement" to their protector instincts.

Second, when a man sets out to protect and provide, there is always a risk that a woman will abuse his efforts. If a woman follows her lower nature, she might see an opportunity to exploit his willingness to work on her behalf. A lower natured woman might string him along and then at a certain time in the marriage reveal the deception. A man in this situation will lose his wife, his children, his house, and a considerable portion of his material assets and future income. Worse, he will be zeroed out existentially, as his efforts in life will have been revealed to have been chimerical. Some men never recover.

So defending complementarity between men and women, and the depth of connection that goes along with it, requires support within the culture. First, women need to balance being generally capable in life with a willingness to show their softer side to men. The image fed to men should not be the "tough warrior woman" but something more genuinely feminine. Nor is it really wise for a society to aim at women out earning men, particularly not via artificial means of quotas and so on - as this too undermines men's provider instincts.

As for the risk of exploitation, we need a better balance within family law that protects men from "divorce rape". Even more than this, it's important that men do not make it their entire life mission to protect and provide for a family. As much as a man might feel the truth of the complementary nature of his protector instinct and a woman's desire for a strong man to create a protected space for her, it is better for this to be the domestic side of a man's larger mission in life (rather than being the larger mission itself).

Women themselves don't really want a man to sacrifice his entire life for her. Women don't see relationships this way: they recognise their own sacrifices on behalf of family, but find it difficult to conceive of a man doing the same. They are attracted to men who go out and make their own way in the world rather than men who sacrifice their interests for women - to the point that it is difficult for them to register that a man might do this.

And if a man has a mission outside of his marriage, it leaves him far less exposed to deception by a lower natured woman (one who sees relationships in transactional terms and who cannot genuinely reciprocate a commitment to build a loving relationship within a marriage). If he still has his core mission, then as deep a blow as the deception might be, he will not have lost the existential ground to life as much as a man who puts everything into his role as a husband.

I'm not writing any of this to discourage men from being masculine enough to "allow a woman to fall into her femininity". It's to try to establish an understanding of how men might be encouraged to do this, rather than feeling demoralised and stepping back from this part of their nature.

D.H. Lawrence on sex distinctions

In 1920 the English poet and novelist D.H. Lawrence drafted an unfinished work titled Mr Noon. It's an account of his life around the year 1912 when he ran off with Frieda Weekley. Frieda was German born and had been part of a circle of German radicals who espoused, amongst other things, free love.

Lawrence is not easy to categorise politically. In his ideal political order,

...each man shall be spontaneously himself – each man himself, each woman herself, without any question of equality entering in at all; and that no man shall try to determine the being of any other man, or of any other woman.

That's partly in line with modernity (the emphasis on autonomy, on a self-determining individual) and partly not (the lack of interest in equality). Nor did he really follow through in an intellectually consistent way with autonomy - he recognised that there was a given nature that we either lived within or suffered the consequences of, and he thought too that we were dependent in significant ways on others (in marriage, in having a sense of a homeland etc.)

The upshot is that from a traditionalist point of view Lawrence is flawed but nonetheless still interesting - more so than most other modern authors (for me, his great appeal is that he writes as an embodied creature living within a created reality with spiritual meaning).

This is Lawrence, in Mr Noon, affirming a relatively traditional view of sex distinctions in which the aim is to uphold a sexual polarity between the masculine and feminine:

Ah the history of man and woman...the fatal bond that binds man to woman and woman to man, and makes each the limit of the other. Oh what a limitation is this woman to me! And oh what a limitation am I to her almighty womanliness.

And so it is, the two raging at one another. And sometimes one wins, and the other goes under. And then the battle is reversed. And sometimes the two fly asunder, and men are all soldiers and women all weavers. And sometimes all women become as men, as in England, so that the men need no longer be manly. And sometimes all men become as women, so the women need no longer be womanly. And sometimes - but oh so rarely - man remains man, and woman woman, and in their difference they meet and are very happy.

But man must remain man, and woman woman. There is something manly in the soul of a man which is beyond woman and in which she has no part. And there is something in woman, particularly in motherhood, in which man has no part, and can have no part. For a woman to trespass into man's extremity is poison, and for a man to trespass into woman's final remoteness is misery.

So there we are - the old, eternal game of man and woman: the time-balancing oscillation of eternity. In this we live and from this our lives are made. There is a duality in opposition, between man and woman. There is a dual life-polarity. And the one half can never usurp the other half - the one pole can never replace the other. It is the basis of the life-mystery. 

Note that Lawrence felt that in his own time women had become mannish - not a surprising result given that by 1920 there had been 60 years or so of first wave feminism in England. It's to Lawrence's credit as well that he recognised that it is a struggle - a cultural achievement - to keep the polarity of men and women balanced, i.e. that it was not something that you could passively assume would always be there.

Lawrence went on to urge men to uphold their masculine side of the polarity - even if they came under pressure to give way:

For a woman doesn't want a man she can conquer: no, though she fight like hell for conquest...Ultimately, a woman wants a man who, by entering into complete relationship with her, will keep her in her own polarity and equipoise, true to herself. The man wants the same of a woman. It is the eternal oscillating balance of the universe.

Lawrence did not get everything right. His criticisms of conventional sexual morality seem misguided now, given what has happened following the sexual revolution. It's not that Lawrence wanted people to follow their base instincts, but he does seem to have underestimated the potential for this to happen in the absence of traditional social norms.

Duality & the traditional family

I saw the following tweet recently:

I found it interesting as an example of the duality that can exist between men and women (she clarifies later that she meant to say "filling" it with love). Obviously there are points of difference between men and women that set the sexes apart, but there are also points of difference that are complementary, through which the sexes "fit together" in a significant way.

Men do have an instinct to be the providers and protectors who create a protected space in which women like Rachel Bock can then exercise their nurturing and homemaking instincts.

This is an example of duality in role or function. If the role or function of men and women were exactly the same ("gender role convergence") then the basis for relationships would become thinner. Men and women would no longer need each other as much, nor would we have as much to gift to the other sex, nor would there be the same feeling of gratitude to the other sex.

This "gender role convergence" is what is happening in modern society. It explains, in part, why modern women so often express the feeling that they don't need a man, or why so many people in the most "gender" advanced societies, like Sweden, live alone. If complementary roles are lost, then the motivation to establish and maintain relationships will be less compelling.

The novelist Rachel Cusk discussed this issue some years ago when writing about her divorce. She believes that her parents brought her up to follow male values, so that when she married and had a child she felt confused in her identity. She couldn't readily embrace the more feminine values described above by Rachel Bock, namely to make a house feel warm, to fill it with love and children, food and comfort. And so she did a role reversal with her husband, who agreed to stay home to do this while she pursued her career.

To act as a mother, I had to suspend my own character, which had evolved on a diet of male values...motherhood, was not a place where I could actually live...its values, its codes of conduct, its aesthetic were not mine.

So for a while I didn't belong anywhere. I seemed, as a woman, to be extraneous. And so I did two things: I reverted to my old male-inflected identity; and I conscripted my husband into care of the children. My notion was that we would live together as two hybrids, each of us half male and half female. He gave up his law job, and I gave up the exclusivity of my primitive maternal right over the children.

It didn't work out. She wanted both herself and her husband to be hybrids, half male and half female. That was her notion of equality. Instead, her husband seemed to be content with the homemaking role and with being dependent - and Rachel Cusk had been brought up to value independence above all. And so her feelings for her husband changed:

I had hated my husband's unwaged domesticity just as much as I had hated my mother's; and he, like her, had claimed to be contented with his lot.

Why had I hated it so? Because it represented dependence

Which brings her to an interesting insight about duality. Rachel Cusk admits that rather than her mother being dependent on her father, both were dependent on the other and that in this arrangement there was a duality between the two that connected them closely together:

...it might be said that dependence is an agreement between two people. My father depended on my mother too: he couldn’t cook a meal, or look after children from the office. They were two halves that made up a whole. What, morally speaking, is half a person? Yet the two halves were not the same: in a sense my parents were a single compartmentalized human being. My father’s half was very different from my mother’s, but despite the difference neither half made any sense on its own.

But she herself had a notion of equality in which people remained disconnected:

My notion of half was more like the earthworm’s: you cut it in two but each half remains an earthworm, wriggling and fending for itself.

She was aware of one of the negative consequences of being entirely self-sufficient:

Sometimes my awareness of my own competence alarmed me. How would I remain attached to the world if not by need? I didn’t appear to need anyone: I could do it all myself. I could do everything. I was both halves: did that mean I was whole?

The official model now is the earthworm one. Men and women are no longer supposed to have complementary, interdependent roles. Equality is understood to mean sameness in role and function. It is common to hear feminists complain that men aren't fully embracing the earthworm model by doing as much of the "emotional work" as women, by which they mean the kind of homemaking work described in Rachel Bock's tweet.

The danger is that this model will undermine the duality between men and women. If we become self-sufficient, we have less need to be in a relationship with the other sex. We won't have the same compelling need to fulfil ourselves in a significant way in a relationship with the opposite sex. We will then become fussier, more demanding, less grateful and less willing to compromise in relationships.

As it happens, Rachel Cusk's vision of marriage crumbled. She ended it and then sought desperately to regain some of the maternal role she had relinquished, even to the point of insisting that the children belonged to her, by right, as the mother. She began as well to accept aspects of her feminine psyche:

...when my children cry a sword is run through my heart. Yet it is I who am also the cause of their crying. And for a while I am undone by this contradiction, by the difficulty of connecting the person who acted out of self-interest with the heartbroken mother who has succeeded her. It seems to be the fatal and final evolution of the compartmentalized woman

Traditionalists do not put individual autonomy at the front rank of human values. And so we are more likely to accept the interdependent model of relationships, one which upholds the duality between men and women.

The traditional model does, however, have drawbacks which have to be considered. First, it does leave the husband and wife more dependent on each other, both emotionally and materially, and so it is a difficult model to work with in a liberal society which encourages people to act out of self-interest and which tells people that there should be no limitations on their choices.

If we want an interdependent model to prosper, then we have to make wider changes, both to culture and the law. At the moment, for instance, men are asked to take considerable risks in supporting a wife financially. She can leave for any reason and he can then be forced to continue to support her financially, even as an ex-husband. It is understandable that many men see this as an unacceptable condition of marriage.

Also, the traditional model requires a husband and wife to pair bond deeply enough to survive the more difficult times in a lifelong relationship. It isn't likely to succeed in a culture in which men and women are damaged or jaded even before they marry. The drawn out culture of casual relationships doesn't fit well with the traditional model.

Finally, traditionalists should be sensitive to those women who want to pursue interests outside of the motherhood role. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. Perhaps some women could devote their younger, fertile years to motherhood and then pursue a career option (including part-time) afterwards (most people feel like they've proven everything they need to after spending 15-20 years in a career, it doesn't have to go on for the standard 40 years). Perhaps there is work that women could do in the community, alongside their maternal role. Perhaps there is creative work that women could do at home whilst also fulfilling their nurturing role. There are options.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Are we limited by our sex?

The liberal idea is that we are free when we are autonomous, so that we can self-determine or self-define our own lives. The logic of this principle means that any aspect of life that is predetermined is seen as a negative limitation or restriction on the individual. Our sex is predetermined and therefore liberals describe it pejoratively as a "prison" or a "box" or a "straitjacket" that the individual needs to be liberated from.

How do liberals seek to liberate the individual from their sex? In a variety of ways, but in general they seek to make our sex not matter. The aim is to move toward a unisex society in which men and women become more the same. There is an assumption in liberal society that men and women should be equal and equality is understood to mean sameness.

The fact of being a man or a woman is, in a philosophical sense, a kind of limitation. It means we are not all things, but are created to be a certain kind of being. Our nature is "limited" in this very particular sense that we are not "omnibeings"  - creatures without a distinctive nature who can instead be or become anything they wish.

If you accept this basic limitation, then the existence of sex distinctions in society will no longer be seen as restricting individual development but as promoting it. If I was created to be a man, then I will want to develop my nature as a man to fulfil who I am and what I was made to be. Therefore, a unisex culture of sameness won't liberate me, nor will it remove limitations on me, but will instead impede my self-development.

This is true, for instance, in the way that we come to a deeper sense of who we are through the "gender binary" that liberals are so keen to deny and dismantle. A man in the presence of an attractively and impressively feminine woman will be brought to a stronger sense of who he is as a man. Men and women respond to each other instinctively and viscerally, as a kind of interplay between the sexes. 

Women feel this as much as men do:

The American academic Camille Paglia noted something similar when she wrote:

When an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then women will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, women will never attain a centered and profound sense of themselves as women.

We do not develop entirely solo. It helps our own self-development when the opposite sex is obviously and admirably "sexed".

And, unless we believe that we are gods, without limitations on our being, then our sex is not a restriction to be dismantled, but a significant aspect of who we are that needs to be developed rather than suppressed. Which is the point that this man is making:

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

The radical centre?

One of the more unusual posts I've read this year is a piece titled "Driven to the Edge" by Ronald Dworkin. Dworkin's background is with right-liberal think tanks promoting smaller government. He sees his mission as bringing people back to the centre of politics, which is not an unexpected aim for a right-liberal type, but his analysis of what is going wrong is based on Marx's theory of social alienation. I didn't see that one coming!

Using Marx's theory of alienation has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that Dworkin doesn't follow the usual script of explaining discontent along the lines of "it's people who are uneducated" or "it's people who don't want to give up power". Instead, he sets out clearly why people are increasingly alienated in modern society; at times he sees the same things that traditionalists see.

The disadvantage of using a Marxist theory of alienation is that Dworkin brings everything back to the economic system. He is not anti-capitalist, but he sees the way that advanced capitalism works as being at the root of the problem. As capitalism isn't going away anytime soon, he thinks that there is no way of bringing back the older, more functional forms of society. He proposes instead some economic policy reforms to ameliorate the situation we find ourselves in.

Dworkin is right that capitalism presents challenges to the survival of traditional institutions. But mixed in with the influence of the economic system are ideological beliefs which also push society in a particular direction. And if you control the institutions within a community which enculturate young people, you also have some power to influence the shape of that community.

A good example of this is Dworkin's analysis of our growing alienation from the opposite sex. Dworkin correctly notes that the economic system wants us as fungible units of production and consumption and that sex distinctions have no utility within this system:

Advanced capitalism takes alienation a step further. It has stripped men and women of their “otherness.” Men and women once had a sense of mystery about them—a gender specific nature—causing each to remain slightly inaccessible to the other, while at the same time stoking admiration in the other’s eyes. This disappeared when advanced capitalism pushed gender-neutrality to wring more profit from exchangeable bodies working in space. With male and female nature denied, men and women became consumers with needs; gender itself became a consumption good. The new state of affairs heightens MGTOW suspicions about women, as the charm of “otherness,” rooted in nature and designed to foster sympathy and understanding between the two sexes, is eclipsed by a paranoid fear that women scheme to meet their needs...

It gets worse. The lack of “otherness” detracts from sexual excitement, as people lose their allure in each other’s eyes. As a woman’s mind and nature cease to be any different from a man’s, only her body stimulates some men...In all this, the number of men living alone has more than doubled since the 1970s...

If the loss of sex distinctions is due solely to an advanced capitalist economy, and that economy is here to stay, then androgyny is inescapable:

At the same time, advanced capitalism cannot be reversed. Gender neutrality is inevitable. The alienation between men and women will persist, even as it continues to be glossed over...today’s political center cannot be what it was in Tocqueville’s America, with the latter’s strong two-parent families, small businesses, robust local communities, and widespread religious belief. That center belongs to another age.

Dworkin reasons that children give a purpose to life, so there should be economic policy reforms to help people have children. For instance, women might get money to raise children as single mothers:

Social Security might be adjusted over the coming decades, such that, instead of people getting large monthly sums starting in their late 60s, they would get smaller monthly sums starting in their 20s. This would make raising children, often by single parents, more feasible.

One problem with Dworkin's analysis is that the aim of making sex distinctions not matter goes back some way, certainly before the arrival of advanced capitalism. And it was initially justified as part of the "liberty and equality" levelling mindset that took hold amongst the leftist intelligentsia by the later 1700s. The proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft wrote at this time:

A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head, and I will not stifle it…I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society

There was a contest in Western culture about what constituted freedom. Those who saw human nature as corrupted and imperfectible tended to view freedom as a matter of restraining our own vices, i.e. as a contest between the noble and the base within human nature reflecting on individual character; those who thought human nature could be acted on and perfected tended to think in terms of a social progress toward an ultimate state of human community, one in which there was no need for restraining social norms, or institutions, or hierarchies, but only the sovereign individual motivated by an abstract, universal love.

The latter group did not like sex distinctions, seeing them as limiting to the individual. An example is the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, writing in the early 1800s. In his attitude to marriage, you see the shift from the idea of individuals needing to exercise restraint in order to access the higher aspects of their nature, to the idea of restraint being a merely arbitrary and regressive block to choice and change:

That which will result from the abolition of marriage will be natural and right; because choice and change will be exempted from restraint.

Predictably for someone with this mindset, Shelley looked forward to the abolition of sex distinctions:

...these detestable distinctions will surely be abolished in a future state of being

You have a combination, then, of a change in mindset in which sex distinctions are thought to be regressive and a limitation on freedom with an economic system in which individuals are prized as interchangeable units of production and consumption, with sex distinctions having no positive function within the system (except for the need to create a future labour force - but in an era of mass migration this has been outsourced).

Can we change mindsets? Yes, we can, but we're unlikely to be funded to do so by those possessing large amounts of capital. That's the conundrum. One possibility is to start small and create institutions that can enculturate young people within a more traditional mindset (e.g. via churches, schools, political organisations, fraternities, independent media sites). Another possibility is a frontal assault on the failed ideology of individual autonomy, not just by one isolated writer, but as a movement of Western intellectuals.

I mentioned earlier that a strength of Dworkin's approach is that it pushes him to take more seriously than most other mainstream writers the sources of people's alienation in modern life. I can't quote as much as I'd like to (it's worth reading the whole article), but as an example he clearly recognises the difficulty of family formation for women who accept the usual modern life path:

...the sexual revolution and capitalism’s promise of meaningful work have tempted some women with a plan for life that requires perfect timing and cooperation to be executed: A woman, too, will satisfy her sexual urge during her twenties and egotistically pursue her career, just like men. Then, when the maternal instinct kicks in, she will find the right man whose ego will not be threatened by all the men she has slept with, who will marry her and give her children, while also supporting her in her career. The plan is untenable...Today, 45 percent of Americans are single, the highest percentage in history.

The phrase "that requires perfect timing and cooperation" is well observed. Women are encouraged to sleep around in their teens and their 20s and then, having undermined the family guy ethos among the men of their age cohort, find a man willing to commit to them and have children in the relatively short space of time left to them. It's extraordinarily ill-conceived.

Here, too, Dworkin is too much of an inevitabilist. It is not just advanced capitalism that pushes young women to be imprudent. It is also the mindset I wrote about earlier, the one that claims that we should be able to choose in any direction without restraint or limitation, even from the logical consequences of our choices. Young women are generally told that if the life script isn't working it's not so much because it is ill-conceived but because men or the patriarchy or sexism or toxic masculinity are somehow subverting it. That there is nothing in nature to limit what we might choose to do and if there is it can be acted on through the use of some technology (e.g. freezing eggs). Some women report simply not being brought up to focus at all on the issue of family formation, the assumption being that it will happen of itself.

In other words, if the messaging were different, so too might be the results. If political concepts were different, so too might be the results. If the understanding of life and what brings meaning were different, so too might be the results. Yes, you would still have people with power preferring to encourage ideas about a lifestyle based on career and consumption, but within a community that cared about family formation there could at least be counter-messaging.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Terf or trans?

Maya Forstater

Maya Forstater is a feminist who believes a man cannot be a woman. For uttering this thought on social media she was fired from her job. An employment tribunal in the UK upheld her dismissal. The judge found that holding to the idea that a man cannot be a woman violated the dignity of transsexuals and was "not worthy of respect in a democratic society".

Now, I'm sure that most traditionalists will be appalled by the case. The assertion of a basic aspect of reality is being declared by the courts to be "not worthy of respect" and therefore not a protected belief. It is a sign of our disordered times.

I'm sure, too, we can agree with Maya Forstater when she declares:

I struggle to express the shock and disbelief I feel at reading this judgment, which I think will be shared by the vast majority of people who are familiar with my case.

My belief … is that sex is a biological fact, and is immutable. There are two sexes, male and female. Men and boys are male. Women and girls are female. It is impossible to change sex. These were until very recently understood as basic facts of life by almost everyone.

… This judgment removes women’s rights and the right to freedom of belief and speech. It gives judicial licence for women and men who speak up for objective truth and clear debate to be subject to aggression, bullying, no-platforming and economic punishment.

So do traditionalists stand with Maya? Well, yes and no. I have no doubt we would support her in speaking up for objective truth when it comes to the issue of sex being an immutable, biological fact.

But things are not as straightforward as they might seem. After all, feminists like Maya Forstater also push their own version of unreality.

Both the "terfs" (feminists like Maya Forstater who believe that sex is immutable) and "trans" have a common philosophical starting point. Both believe that we should be subject only to what we ourselves determine as individuals.

But they have a different take on this liberal principle. For feminists, the unchosen fact of sex, of being male or female, exists as a biological reality, but it is to be made not to matter. Feminists achieve this by separating out sex and "gender". Feminists declare that our sex is real, but that masculinity and femininity are mere social constructs, based negatively on an attempt by men to oppress and exploit women. Therefore, the aim is to deconstruct the distinctions between men and women, so that there is something like an equality of sameness.

Transsexuals also separate out sex and "gender". But their take on this is different. They believe that gender is innate but is not connected to our biological sex. Therefore, I can identify as a woman even if I am, as a matter of human biology, a man.

If you look at this dispassionately, is the feminist idea any less radical or any less damaging than the transsexual one? Both are based on the idea that you can separate out sex and "gender". (There is an argument to be made that feminists, in separating the two, paved the way for transsexualism.)

Maya Forstater spoke at a feminist conference in May of this year and said:

I think the position that women exist as a sex is something like gravity. That's going to be held by people across the political spectrum. I think it's important to make the distinction between people who say men should be men and women should be women meaning that sex is innate and is linked to masculinity and all the gender stereotypes we are trying to fight against and the position that says that sex is innate and that gender is something that is imposed on us.

She declares that women exist as a sex but denies that there is any meaning to being a man or a woman as "gender is something that is imposed on us". Sex exists but is wholly irrelevant to who we are is the feminist mantra. This separating out of sex and "gender" is a radical denial of sexual reality, just as is the transsexual claim that we can be a woman if we are a man.

If we accept the feminist view we are forced to live a lie just as much as if we are forced to address a man as "ma'am". Let me give just one example of this. Every year at my workplace we have a lunch before the Christmas holidays where we farewell people who are leaving. By the end of this I am always struck by how different women are to men. When a woman steps up to give the farewell speech for another woman, she is already struggling. She starts to fan her eyes to try to stop the tears, she tries not to look at her friend who is leaving, her voice starts to fail her, she stops to try to compose herself, but fails and the tears begin. She is handed tissues, she starts again, now her colleague is also crying, then other women in the audience. One year the whole process had to be abandoned because of the emotional scenes. I just sit there in wonderment, not thinking badly of women (it's touching in a way), but struck by how different the interior life of a woman must be to that of a man.

But Maya Forstater wants me to think that no such differences exist and that what I am observing is just "gender" that is "imposed on us" and that has nothing to do with our existence as men and women.

I think we have to call out the lack of commonsense in both the feminist and the trans positions. And we have to recognise that both are engaged in a common project of separating out sex and "gender" - a project that we as traditionalists very firmly reject.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Can feminism be reformed?

PragerU, a classical liberal website, has published a video on feminism. The argument made in the video is that feminism has done great harm to society but only because it has veered away from its founding, liberal principles. Therefore, a new feminism is needed which returns to these principles.

Although I find it encouraging that a right-liberal organisation is so clearly acknowledging the damage done by feminism, it's not difficult to show that the larger argument is wrong and that modern day feminism is a logical development of those foundational liberal principles. Returning to them is just starting over and repeating the process. What's needed instead is a rethink of those early liberal principles.

Here is the video itself:

Tammy Bruce, herself once a leading feminist activist, sets out the first principles when she says:

Dignity is at the core of what feminism should always be about. Dignity means that a woman should always be able to freely choose her own path in life.

Liberalism was an attempt to create a post-Christian philosophy for the West. It argued that human dignity rested on man's ability to live according to self-determining choice, i.e. on his autonomy. Feminism applied the same principle to the lives of women.

Tammy Bruce believes that modern feminism has betrayed this principle. Her complaint is that:

Feminism has downplayed the desire for women to have a family and hyped the rewards of career and casual sex.

She goes on to complain about modern sexual mores as witnessed in music videos and the hookup culture.

However, if the aim is dignity, and dignity means always being able to choose freely what we do, then it is logical that women will reject traditional family roles of being a wife and mother and focus instead on careers. It is also logical that sexual mores will become increasingly libertine.

Let's start with sexuality. I wrote a post some months ago on the popular singer Cardi B. She made a music video showing a dozen or so women twerking - the kind of thing Tammy Bruce is complaining about. One woman on social media did criticise Cardi B for doing this. Cardi B defended her video on the grounds that,

It says to women that I can wear and not wear whatever I want. Do whatever I want and that NO still means NO.

She is defending her twerking video based on the very liberal principle that Tammy Bruce wants to base a "reformed" feminism on, namely that it displays women choosing for themselves as an act of empowerment.

A legion of other women chimed in as well to defend the video for much the same reason. A selection:

Leah: It's because we're free to do what we want with our bodies.

Fatimata: It shows that women can do whatever they want with their bodies...Encouraging women to be themselves and act as they please...

The Hoarse Whisperer: You seem troubled by women having autonomy over what they choose to do with their bodies...

Ahkweah: It shows that as women we can do whatever we want.

The mistake is to see dignity not as a quality in itself to be upheld as a matter of character but as something we gain as through the act of choosing or through self-defining our own good.

This is a debate that goes back quite some way within Western culture. I wrote another post earlier this year about a pamphlet published in 1620 on the topic of transvestism. In the pamphlet there is a woman who chooses to dress like a man and she initially defends this choice on the basis that it represents a genuine freedom. In her mind we are not free if we are subject to any "restraint from those actions which the mind of its own accord doth most willingly desire".

Yes, it's old-fashioned language but it's the same argument being put forward by the followers of Cardi B.

Her opponent in the debate rejects the notion that freedom is a liberty to choose as we please, as this encourages "unbridled appetite" and a "wilfull liberty to do evil":

...what basest bondage, or what more servile baseness, than for the flattering and soothing of an un-bridled appetite, or delight, to take a wilfull liberty to do evil, and to give evil example? This is to be Hells Prentice, not Heaven’s Free-woman.

There was a pre-liberal understanding in the West that we achieved dignity not by asserting our power to choose as we pleased, but by rejecting the baser aspects of our nature in favour of the nobler ones. The debate ends with the male character declaring:

From henceforth deformity shall pack to Hell...we will live nobly like ourselves...ever worthy: true men and true women.

Let me reiterate the basic point I am making here. If what matters is dignity, and dignity is based on a freedom to choose as we will, then you are going to end up in the long run with Cardi B, because that is what the "I will not be restrained or limited in what I choose to do" looks like. If you prefer a culture that has some level of modesty attached to it, then you need something besides the liberal definition of dignity to support it.

And what about women being wives and mothers? At one level, this sounds like it fits the liberal principle logically. If it's about dignity to choose, then why shouldn't some women choose to prioritise family over career?

But there's a catch. If what matters is my own autonomous choice, then I should, as a matter of principle, choose to do things that maximise this choice. And being a wife and mother fails this test. First, it is based on a predetermined gender role, i.e. on an aspect of self that is not self-determined. Second, it is not uniquely chosen but is based on a biological aspect of human nature that is shared by all women. Third, it is based on a notion of interdependent, complementary roles within the family, rather than on independent and individual self-achievement. Fourth, because stable, lifelong commitments place restrictions on who we might choose to live with.

For all these reasons, feminist theorists have often looked down on women choosing to prioritise family. Many have gone so far as to denounce the family as a patriarchal construct that oppresses women. And those who have accepted the family often want to reconstruct it so that it allows for female autonomy, for instance, by delaying family formation; or by having gender neutral roles within the family; or by outsourcing the traditional maternal role to the state; or by having easy divorce laws that favour women.

So you cannot uphold the family on the principle that human dignity rests upon a freedom of autonomous choice. Instead, you have to reassert the idea that we bring our own natures as men and women to fulfilment, in part, through participating in the offices of being a husband/father or a wife/mother, or that we express the principle of sacrificial love through what we give of ourselves to our families as husbands/fathers and wives/ mothers, or that we uphold the common good for ourselves and our progeny through the transmission of our own distinct culture, tradition and lineage through our willingness to uphold a culture of family life.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that some of the failings of modern feminism that Tammy Bruce criticises were in evidence from the very start of first wave feminism. It was not unusual for the leading figures of first wave feminism to believe that free love should replace marriage, or that the distinctions between men and women should be dissolved, or that women should prioritise independence via career rather than marriage and motherhood. First wave feminists were also criticised for hating men whilst nonetheless copying them, just as modern feminists are.

I can't give a complete account of this in a single post, but one general point I'll make is that once intellectuals accepted the liberal principle that they should not be subject to the will of another, only their own, they rapidly drew the conclusion that there should be a levelling of society, in which distinctions between people were abolished, so that there was something like an equality of sameness. It was thought to be "bigotry" for distinctions to matter.

Here, for instance, is a founding theorist of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, wanting women to become more man-like:

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.

Wollstonecraft was a believer in free love, travelled to Paris during the French Revolution in the 1790s and had a love child there with an American businessman (though when he abandoned her she tried to drown herself in a river).

Wollstonecraft later had another child, Mary, with William Godwin - himself a believer in free love. This child ran away at age 16 to live with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley too wanted to abolish sex distinctions in society. He wrote in 1811:

...these detestable distinctions will surely be abolished in a future state of being

Shelley was also a free love enthusiast who abandoned his first wife Harriet when she was pregnant with their second child. Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine River. Shelley's reasons for opposing marriage are exactly the liberal ones you would expect:

That which will result from the abolition of marriage will be natural and right; because choice and change will be exempted from restraint.

If we jump forward to 1837 we have the early American feminist Sarah Grimke also complaining about the existence of sex distinctions:

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.

... Until our intercourse is purified by the forgetfulness of sex...we never can derive that benefit from each other's society...

John Stuart Mill was an influential first-wave feminist. In 1833 he theorised that higher character was androgynous rather than distinctly masculine and feminine:

...is there really any distinction between the highest masculine and the highest feminine character?

In the 1860s, Eliza Linton addressed the feminists of her era as "you of the emancipated who imitate while you profess to hate" and as the "bad copies of men who have thrown off all womanly charm".

In 1889 a student of Girton College, a feminist college at Cambridge established in 1869, summed up the spirit of her education as follows:

We are no longer mere parts - excrescences, so to speak, of a family ... One may develop as an individual and independent unit.

Here you have the idea that what matters is developing as an independent individual rather than as an interdependent member of a family. Note the negative terminology applied to family roles: "mere parts - excrescences".

By the early twentieth century the radical wing of first wave feminism was just as extreme as that of today. Alexandra Kollontai, for instance, grew up understanding feminism to mean:

That I ought not to shape my life according to the given model ... I could help my sisters shape their lives, in accordance not with the given traditions but with their own free choice ... I wanted to be free. I wanted to express desires on my own, to shape my own little life.

Therefore, as you might predict, she disliked the idea of sex distinctions, wanting them to be levelled away. She gave public lectures in which she prophesied that even the physical differences between men and women would, as a matter of progress, dissolve. A record of one lecture recounts how she,

...longs for the female body itself to become less soft and curvy and more muscular ... She argues that prehistoric women were physiologically less distinct from men ... Accordingly, sexual dimorphism may (and should) again become less visible...

She even thought that love itself should be subordinated to the objective of individual autonomy:

this motive was a leading force in my life ... to shape my personal, intimate life as a woman according to my own will ... Above all, I never let my feelings, the joy or pain of love take the first place in my life...

We are stuck in a loop. We adopt an inadequate principle for our society, it does damage, we retreat a little but still keep to the principle and then we suffer another wave of harm. At some point in time we need to reconsider the underlying principle itself, the one that keeps setting us down the wrong path.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

UK judge: Christian belief incompatible with human dignity

The UK was once a very Christian nation. I've been reading a biography of the radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Shelley: The Pursuit), who, unusually for his time, was an atheist. In 1811 he met his future wife Harriet Westbrook. This is how she described her initial reaction to his beliefs:

You may conceive with what horror I first heard that Percy was an Atheist...at first I did not comprehend the meaning of the word; therefore when it was explained I was truly petrified. (p.67)

But how things have changed. A UK judge has recently declared Christian belief to be incompatible with human dignity. In a way, this is not surprising, as Christianity does not fit in with the ruling state ideology in the UK, namely liberalism.

The story runs as follows. Dr David Mackereth was employed by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as a disability assessor. He was queried by a supervisor about whether he would, hypothetically, refer to a 6ft tall bearded man by female pronouns. He answered that he couldn't in conscience do this given his Christian belief that we are created male or female by God (Genesis 1:27) and that we cannot change our sex according to our own will.

There is some dispute about whether or not Dr Mackereth was then directly dismissed from his position or not, but regardless the case ended up at an employment tribunal hearing. Judge Perry found in favour of the DWP and it is the reasons he gave for his decision which are the most significant part of the story.

Judge Perry began by noting that according to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion

So what's the catch? Well, another judge, J Burton, (in the case of Grainger v Nicholson) defined what constituted an acceptable "philosophical belief" or religion. And one of his criteria was the following:

(v) It must be worthy of respect in a democratic society, be not incompatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others

Judge Perry then ruled that:

belief in Genesis 1:27, lack of belief in transgenderism and conscientious objection to transgenderism in our judgment are incompatible with human dignity and conflict with the fundamental rights of others, specifically here, transgender individuals.

And this:

We accept Dr Mackereth’s account that his beliefs are inherent to his wider faith. In so far as those beliefs form part of his wider faith, his wider faith also does not satisfy Grainger.

According to Judge Perry, the orthodox Christian view "does not satisfy" the criteria for acceptable belief in a society because it is incompatible with human dignity and conflicts with the fundamental rights of others. Therefore, orthodox Christianity is not protected under the convention of human rights.

The underlying problem is not that Christianity is incompatible with human dignity but that it is incompatible with liberalism. A Christian might argue that the belief that our male and female natures are God-given and a part of God's plan for us enhances the dignity of our persons. But for a liberal human dignity comes from the act of autonomous choice in which we self-determine our own personhood.

For a Christian, the moral thing is to fully develop our given natures as men and women, i.e. to order ourselves toward ideals or standards of masculine and feminine virtue. We discern what is best within our masculine and feminine natures and attempt to fully develop these qualities, as a way of completing ourselves and meeting one of our missions in life (our telos).

For a liberal, the moral thing is not only to author our own identity but to respect the right of others to do the same. Because liberals do not like the idea of a given nature, it will be held to be particularly moral to act against "stereotypes" when it comes to masculinity or femininity (hence the banning in the UK earlier this year of a car ad which briefly portrayed a mother sitting next to a pram, the image being ruled to be a harmful and offensive stereotype).

Given the logic of the situation, it seems naive to me to expect that orthodox Christianity will be well tolerated within a liberal system. Either it will change to fit in better with liberalism (which usually means becoming irrelevant, as it then loses its animating principles) or else it will have to more self-consciously recognise the difficulty of the situation and use whatever power it has to defend its own place in society.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

The tyranny of nature?

Patrick Deneen, in his excellent book Why Liberalism Failed, focuses on two strands within liberalism. The first is the one that I usually write about, namely the liberal belief in maximising individual autonomy. The second is one that was mostly new to me, but that deserves consideration. According to Deneen, Sir Francis Bacon, ushered in a new way of thinking about our relationship to nature and this is a core aspect of the liberal project.

Deneen set things out as follows:

The modern scientific project of human liberation from the tyranny of nature has been framed as an effort to "master" or "control" nature, or as a "war" against nature in which its study would provide the tools for its subjugation at the hands of humans. Francis Bacon - who rejected classical arguments that learning aimed at the virtues of wisdom, prudence and justice, arguing instead that "knowledge is power" - compared nature to a prisoner who, under torture, might be compelled to reveal her long-withheld secrets.

This post takes the form of notes that I wish to make in regard to this, rather than a final position. I need to think about this more, but it does strike me initially that Deneen is onto something important here, something that explains aspects of modern liberal politics.

Let's take the issue of the war on masculinity. Why would liberals feel so comfortable describing masculinity in negative terms, as something that is "toxic"?

Part of the answer is the one I have always set out. If liberals want to maximise autonomy, and autonomy means being self-determined, then individuals have to be "liberated" from predetermined qualities, like the sex they are born into. Simple - and this is how liberals themselves often frame things (with talk about autonomy, self-determination, choice etc.).

But the Baconian revolution in the way we think about nature also supports the liberal mindset. Think of it this way. If you are a traditionalist you will believe that we are a part of nature, i.e. that we stand within it and that therefore a purpose of life is to order ourselves and our communities harmoniously within the given framework of our created nature and of the nature of the world we inhabit. We will also seek for the beauty, truth and goodness of our being within this larger created order.

If, however, you adopt the Baconian mindset, then you will assume that we stand outside of nature, seeking control over it, wishing to subdue it. Value is no longer so much to be found within given nature, but in its use as a raw material to realise human purposes and desires that are separate to it. It is the realisation of human desires and purposes that now carries meaning, and this occurs through our sovereign rule over nature, our conquest of it.

Therefore, the "truth claims" of traditionalists and liberals when it comes to masculinity hardly even intersect. Traditionalists will be oriented to the value inherent within masculine nature; liberals will see value in "manipulating" men's behaviour (as you would a raw material) to suit the purposes set by society.

Liberals are likely to be focused on what purposes masculinity has been "socially constructed" for and to think it normal to debate how masculinity might be reconstructed to fit a more "progressive" social narrative - such as a feminist one (at the same time, the autonomy strand within liberalism will insist on there being "masculinities" as a sphere of choice).

The traditionalist attitude might run from a light traditionalism to a deeper one. Most traditionalists would hold that masculinity is hardwired into a man's nature and that this gives definite limits on how men might be "reconstituted" within a culture.

The deepest form of traditionalism would hold that masculinity exists as an "essence" within nature, i.e. that it exists not only as a characteristic of individual men but as a principle of reality, and that there is a quality of goodness within the higher expression of this essence. Therefore, an individual man has the opportunity to embody a "transcendent" good through his masculine nature. Our forebears therefore put much emphasis on pursuing what was noble within a man's nature, and rising above the base.

You can see why it's so frustrating when liberals and traditionalists argue on this issue. The frameworks are so different, so set apart, that it's not possible for the arguments to intersect, let alone for the two camps to come to any form of agreement or compromise.

There are a few additional points to be made when looking at the influence of Bacon on liberal thought. I find it interesting that the poet Shelley, writing in 1820, identified Bacon as one of the key early figures in liberal thought:

...the new epoch was marked by the commencement of deeper enquiries into the point of human nature...Lord Bacon, Spinoza, Hobbes, Boyle, Montaigne, regulated the reasoning powers, criticized the history, exposed the past errors by illustrating their causes and their connexion...

The Baconian aspect of liberalism has also possibly contributed to some of the features you find within modern political thought.

1. Blank slatism. If nature is thought of as raw material, that humans stand outside of and subjugate for our own purposes, then this supports the idea that we are dealing with a "blank canvas".

2. Humanism/universalism. If you think of politics in terms of a revolution in which humans stand outside of nature and conquer it to relieve the human condition, then the key protagonist is "humanity" rather than particular nations. Also, if we are not standing within nature, then we won't have the same focus on the need for identity and belonging as constituent parts of our nature and this too undermines support for particular forms of community.

3. Functionalism. If we are no longer seeking meaning within nature, including beauty/order/harmony, but see nature instead as raw material to be used for social purposes, then it makes sense that there would be an emphasis on functionalism, for instance, in the architecture of the middle decades of the twentieth century.

4. Progress. If the aim is a humanism in which humans stand outside of nature, using it for our own purposes, conquering and subduing it, then it stands to reason that some liberals might see progress in terms of a history of economic and technological development and growth. They might then see this as a good in its own right, so that development is not thought of as helping to preserve or enhance an existing community, but as being in itself the higher aim or measure of success that all else is to be subordinate to, even if this means radically undermining communities for the purposes of maximising economic growth. (Some left-liberals do see progress as a moral arc rather than an economic one.)

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Liberalism & the body

Below is a tweet from Teen Vogue:

There is no binary, coherent thing called “biological sex”.

Watch and learn: https://t.co/24ZZ1m6HXZ pic.twitter.com/PSkDmTprnM

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) March 30, 2019

The logic of liberalism is continuing to unfold. There is a strong assertion in this video from Teen Vogue that there are no male and female bodies, i.e. nothing about the body that would reasonably qualify a person as male or female.

Chase Strangio, an attorney for the ACLU, claims in the video that,

We all have characteristics that are typically male and typically female and it is really about political choices, social factors, ideological choices that we assign meaning to different parts of our body.

Katrina Karkazis says,

The body doesn't have just one place where we can sit there with a microscope or something else and say, hey wait a second, this is really who you are, this is your true sex. In fact, who you are is who you say you are.

There are people who are now claiming that their body parts are male or female depending on what they identify them to be. In other words, if someone has breasts then this is not objectively an aspect of female biology. They are a part of either male or female biology depending on what the person who has them identifies as.

One of the trans participants in the video asserts,

When I say I'm a woman I don't just mean that I identify as a woman, I mean that my biology is the biology of a woman regardless of whether or not doctors agree. 

It was almost inevitable we'd arrive at this point. In a liberal society what matters is maximising individual autonomy, which means that anything which limits our ability to determine who we are or what we do is seen as a limitation which the individual needs to be liberated from.

We do not get to determine our biological sex. Liberalism's first response to this "problem" was to say, well, we'll make a person's sex not matter in life. There will be no "sexism', meaning no sphere in life and no social role pertaining to one sex and not the other. To achieve this, it was claimed that traditional sex roles were based only on "gender" and that gender was an oppressive social construct that could be deconstructed.

But this was inevitably only a first step, as it still left people with a biological sex that they did not choose for themselves. Being a man or a woman no longer meant as much socially, but I still didn't get to choose for myself which one I would be.

And so the next step is to make the idea of biological sex itself something that is chosen by individuals. Hence the claim by Chase Strangio that there is no objective meaning to being born with certain body parts; the meanings are socially constructed, through political and ideological choices or through social forces.

Teen Vogue chose an interesting week to make all these claims as it coincided with the public release of research showing that differences between the brains of boys and girls begins in the womb, and therefore before any possible social influences. Science continues to suggest that at least some differences between the sexes are hardwired rather than being created by culture and socialisation.

Finally, it should be pointed out that Teen Vogue is not alone in pressing forward with these sorts of claims. The Tasmanian Government has just decided to put forward legislation that would make abortions legal for men:

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Hell's Prentice or Heaven's Free-woman?

In 1620, transvestism became an issue in England. There were complaints about women who had taken to wearing masculine clothes. One of the pamphlets written at this time, Haec-Vir, is particularly interesting, because it considers arguments both for and against the practice. It gives us some insight into the proto-liberal thought of the time.

The pamphlet sets out a debate between two characters. Hic Mulier is the mannish woman and Haec-Vir is the womanish man (but I will just refer to them as the man and the woman).

The man begins by criticising the woman for behaving in a base, unnatural, shameful and foolish manner. I won't focus on this part of the debate, except to note how important acting nobly was to moral thought of this time.

The woman then has a right of reply:

First, you say I am Base, in being a Slave to Novelty. What slavery can there be in
freedom of election, or what baseness to crown my delights with those pleasures which are most suitable to mine affections? Bondage or Slavery is a restraint from those actions which the mind of its own accord doth most willingly desire, to perform the intents and purposes of another’s disposition, and that not by mansuetude [gentleness] or sweetness of entreaty, but by the force of authority and strength of compulsion. Now for me to follow change according to the limitation of mine own will and pleasure, there cannot be a greater freedom.

She is arguing that liberty exists when there is no "restraint from those actions which the mind of its own accord doth most willingly desire". Freedom, in other words, is being able to choose to do whatever I autonomously have a mind or a will to do. Freedom is the pursuit of desires, as long as they are my desires ("which the mind of its own accord doth most willingly desire"). It is not that far removed from the modern liberal understanding of freedom.

She goes on to deny that she is behaving unnaturally. She argues that she was born free and she suggests that men and women are constituted in a similar way ("we are compounded of like parts"), and should operate in much the same way, namely along male lines. Sex distinctions, she argues, are often based on mere custom and that,

Custom is an Idiot, and whosoever dependeth wholly upon him without the discourse of Reason will take from him his pied coat and become a slave indeed

The woman has put her case forcibly and at length, but the man is having none of it. He does not submit to proto-liberal ideas about freedom but replies:

You have wrested out some wit, to wrangle forth no reason; since everything you would make for excuse, approves your guilt still more ugly: what basest bondage, or what more servile baseness, than for the flattering and soothing of an un-bridled appetite, or delight, to take a wilfull liberty to do evil, and to give evil example? This is to be Hells Prentice, not Heaven’s Free-woman.

He is pointing out that to seek no restraint in doing what "the mind of its own accord doth most willingly desire" or to be limited only by "mine own will and pleasure" is to justify "unbridled appetite" and a "wilfull liberty to do evil". This, he says tellingly, will not lead her to be "Heaven's Free-woman", i.e. it is not a virtuous understanding of freedom.

His argument draws on an older pre-liberal understanding of freedom in which we are at liberty when we are not slaves to our animal passions or to our sins, but are directed instead by our reason. (This understanding of freedom has potential problems of its own which I'll discuss in a future post; it's enough for now to acknowledge that the older understanding was set against "unbridled appetite", i.e. it was set against the idea that "my desires are justified as long as they are authentically my desires".)

The man wins the argument in the end by appealing to the teaching of the church. There is a passage in Deuteronomy which clearly forbids transvestism and so the woman agrees to give it up, albeit on one condition - that the man himself gives up dressing in an effeminate, foppish way.

The woman then claims that she only did what she did as a strategy to force men to give up their effeminacy:

Now since according to your own Inference, even by the Laws of Nature, by the rules of Religion, and the Customs of all civil Nations, it is necessary there be a distinct and special difference between Man and Woman, both in their habit and behaviors, what could we poor weak women do less ... than to gather up those garments you have proudly cast away and therewith to clothe both our bodies and our minds?

She quotes a section of the poem Orlando Furioso, in which the knight Ruggiero has been beguiled by the sorceress Alcina and made effeminate:

His Locks bedewed with waters of sweet savour;
Stood curled round in order on his head;
He had such wanton womanish behaviour,
As though in Valor he had ne’re been bred:
So chang’d in speech, in manners and in favour,
So from himselfe beyond all reason led,
By these inchantments of this amorous Dame;
He was himselfe in nothing but in name.

Again, this is very different to the proto-liberal view expressed earlier in the pamphlet. The proto-liberal view is that it is our inborn nature to be free, which means being subject only to our own reason, which means choosing whatever we authentically desire. The poem, however, suggests that we have fit ends or purposes, that reason holds us to, and that therefore in the loss of reason, we fail to hold to these purposes, and are no longer ourselves.

The woman ends her part by promising that all will be set right if men return to their masculine role:

Cast then from you our ornaments and put on your own armor; be men in shape, men in show, men in words, men in actions, men in counsel, men in example. Then will we love and serve you; then will we hear and obey you; then will we like rich Jewels hang at your ears to take our Instructions, like true friends follow you through all dangers, and like careful leeches [physicians] pour oil into your wounds. Then shall you find delight in our words, pleasure in our faces, faith in our hearts, chastity in our thoughts, and sweetness both in our inward and outward inclinations. Comeliness shall be then our study, fear our Armor, and modesty our practice.

The man decides to return to more masculine wear:

Away then from me these light vanities, the only Ensigns of a weak and soft nature, and come you grave and solid pieces which arm a man with Fortitude and Resolution...From henceforth deformity shall pack to Hell, and if at any time he hide himself upon the earth, yet it shall be with contempt and disgrace...Henceforth we will live nobly like ourselves, ever sober, ever discreet, ever worthy: true men and true women. We will be henceforth like well-coupled Doves, full of industry, full of love. I mean not of sensual and carnal love, but heavenly and divine love, which proceeds from God...

Shelley's detestable distinctions

Percy Bysshe Shelley

My last post was about the Austrian statesman Metternich and his far-sighted observation, way back in 1820, that liberals would seek to erase nationality because of their desire to base society on every individual being subject only to their own will (i.e. autonomy).

I found evidence for his claims in a play published in 1820, Prometheus Unbound, by the English poet Shelley, who, sure enough, thought that in a reformed society man would be "uncircumscribed", the "king over himself" and therefore "tribeless and nationless".

There is more evidence that the liberal "intellectual and philosophical brew" (as one of my readers put it in the comments) was already well and truly set in place by the 1820s and that is Shelley's attitude to sex distinctions (Shelley identified as a liberal, collaborating with Byron and Hunt in 1822 to produce a literary periodical titled the Liberal).

It was not only nationality that Shelley wanted erased, but also distinctions between men and women. That makes sense from the liberal point of view. If the idea is to be unconstrained in your will as an individual, then our inherited, biological sex will be thought of negatively as something unchosen and predetermined. It then makes sense for liberals to want to make it no longer matter.

In 1811 Shelley wrote a letter to Elizabeth Hitchener in which he regretted a character in a Southey poem being made a male, and then, in the context of this reference to biological sex, continued:

"these detestable distinctions will surely be abolished in a future state of being" [1]

Nor was Shelley alone in the literary and political current he belonged to in holding such a view. Shelley would later marry the daughter of the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1792 Wollstonecraft had written:

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

You can find the same view in the writings of other early feminists. For instance, the American feminist Sarah Grimke wrote in 1837:

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.

... Until our intercourse is purified by the forgetfulness of sex...we never can derive that benefit from each other's society...

Unsurprisingly, Shelley (despite marrying twice) was also in principle opposed to marriage. Again, if the aim is to be subject only to your own will, then it becomes difficult to accept the ideal of a commitment to a lifelong, exclusive union. In the same letter to Elizabeth Hitchener quoted above, Shelley writes:

Miss Weeke's marriage induces you to think marriage an evil. I think it an evil - an evil of immense and extensive magnitude...Marriage is monopolizing, exclusive, jealous.

(Interesting that Shelley makes some sort of appeal to an ideal of inclusiveness here.)

In the next post I intend to look a little deeper into the development of the words "liberal" and "liberalism" as I believe this sheds some light on how literary figures like Shelley and Byron ended up with their world view.

[1] Letter to Elizabeth Hitchener, 26th November 1811, p.119 here.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Grown ups make a guess?

This is from a book being used at American kindergartens:

The text reads: When babies are born people ask "Is it a boy or a girl?"

The next page:

The idea here is that our bodies don't tell us whether we are male or female; our sex is something now cut off from our physical self, they are two different things. At best you can make a guess whether someone is male or female from looking at their body.

If we were to accept this, then the body would no longer hold the same depth of meaning as it does now. If a man looks at his body, at how he is built physically, he can read there some of his telos - of what he is supposed to develop toward in his whole person.

There is a French group, Vigi Gender, which seeks to uphold the more traditional view about our bodies being sexed. In their manifesto they write:

Become what you are

We are born male or female. Our whole being is gendered in its physical, psychological and spiritual dimension. Male and female cells are different: all male cells are XY and all cells of the woman XX. Sex hormones of men and women are different: testosterone in men; in women, estrogen, the hormone of femininity and progesterone, the hormone of motherhood...

Man is an incarnate being endowed with a mind capable of reason and will. Our body is a source of meaning; it expresses the person, "my body is me." To deny the body, to deny the influence of the sexed body on behaviour, interests, psychology, skills, not only contradicts numerous scientific studies, but is to deny that the human person is an embodied being and to make of it a pure spirit, a being which only defines itself.

We are born male or female and all our life we fulfil ourselves as man or woman, we become what we are in completing what we received at birth (nature), and by what we receive throughout our lives through culture (relationship to the father and the mother, education, history, language, customs ...)

If what we received from the culture was completely separated from our bodies, we would not be united, as we would be torn between the meaning carried by our body, and what we received

The next page of the kindergarten book has this:

This is the page that fits most readily into the beliefs of liberal modernity. It suggests that I am truly myself when I am no particular ready made sexual category. Being "just me" means being both a girl and a boy, or neither, or perhaps one of countless boutique sexes, making me a uniquely sexed creature.

Liberalism tends to see our sex negatively as a potential fetter on our autonomous self. Being born either male or female is something predetermined, and therefore potentially limiting to the liberal, autonomous self. These categories therefore have to be made not to matter.

And so the kindergarten book sets "being me" against being either male or female. The two things are set apart rather than being interwoven. The book also promotes the idea that there are any number of possible sexual identities, making this aspect of the self more amenable to a liberal "self-expressive individualism".

Pope Benedict (as Cardinal Ratzinger in 1997) observed this larger trend within liberal modernity, describing it this way:

The idea that 'nature' has something to say is no longer admissible; man is to have the liberty to remodel himself at will. He is to be free from all of the prior givens of his essence. He makes of himself what he wants, and only in this way is he really 'free and liberated'. Behind this approach is a rebellion on man's part against the limits that he has as a biological being. In the end, it is a revolt against our creatureliness. Man is to be his own creator - a modern, new edition of the immemorial attempt to be God, to be like God.

It is not a step up in our dignity as humans to be denatured in this way. The liberal understanding is that I am "just me" either as a desexed personality or as a uniquely sexed one. And so there is no essence that exists as part of the created order that I share in and that gives substance and signficance to who I am and that gives a coherent unity that integrates - gives integrity to -  mind, body and soul.

Our limits as a biological being are also how we are concretely "natured". It is within this given, created nature that the deeper aspects of our self are to be experienced, not within what we make up ourselves as an "expressive choice".

In other words, we will find more, and be more, if we fully develop the masculine essence given to us as men, than if we assert, as an act of choice, our independence from this, either as a desexed personality or as a personality with a self-created sex, one that fails to connect our physical being and sexual being, body and mind.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

The rape of nature, left and right

I'm re-reading Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed. One of the arguments Deneen makes is that when proto-liberals reconfigured the Western understanding of liberty in the early modern period, one prong of their attack was an attempt to overcome "the dominion and limits of nature." The proto-liberals favoured a belief "in an expanding and potentially limitless human capacity to control circumstance and effect human desires upon the world."

Deneen argues that there were two phases in this attempt to assert dominion over nature. In the first wave, the emphasis was on the conquest of the natural world:

Liberalism...embraced and advanced as well an economic system - market-based free enterprise - that similarly promoted human use, conquest, and mastery of the natural world. Early-modern liberalism held the view that human nature was unchangeable - human beings were, by nature, self-interested creatures whose base impulses could be harnessed but not fundamentally altered. (p.36)

By the later 1800s, however, a second wave of liberal thinkers criticised the earlier view by asserting that human nature itself could be conquered or mastered. Deneen goes on to make the following interesting distinction:

First-wave liberals are today represented by "conservatives," who stress the need for scientific and economic mastery of nature but stop short of extending this project to human nature. They support nearly any utilitarian use of the world for economic ends...[my emphasis]. Second-wave liberals increasingly approve nearly any technical means of liberating humans from the biological nature of our own bodies.

Deneen writes further that,

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." [my emphasis]

It is this second revolution, namely the liberal insistence on the human separation from and opposition to nature, that I want to focus on.

I attended a victory celebration today. Some "conservative" (i.e. right-liberal) councillors gained the upper hand in the last council election and suddenly announced that they were going to sell off 17 public reserves in my suburban area of Melbourne, with the idea being that they would be sold to developers to build more units.

A lot of us were shocked to hear the news. Why would anyone want to sell off these pockets of nature within suburbia just for short-term profit? Well, the mentality of these councillors fits in with the description provided by Deneen of first-wave liberals: they assume that human nature is self-interested and that nature is there to be exploited for utilitarian ends.

But there are a lot of lefties in the area I live in. They campaigned against the sell-offs, mobilised public support and ultimately saved most of the reserves (hence today's victory party). In my dealings with these left-wingers, I noticed that they were genuinely non-utilitarian in their attitude to the natural environment. They spoke at times about the importance of the beauty of nature and of its spiritual effects.

But here's the thing. When it comes to human nature, the left-liberals are no better than the right-liberals. They are just as willing to slash and burn, and to tread all over whatever there is of beauty and spirit within human nature, in order to assert a conquest and dominion over it.

They are no better - it is just that the focus of their efforts differs.

For prime evidence of this have a read of how left-liberalism operates in Sweden's preschools. The teachers at these schools have, as their prime mission, to eradicate distinctions between the boys and the girls. They are fiercely dedicated to this aim of destroying one significant aspect of human nature. They do not care if, by doing so, they eradicate what is beautiful within womanhood or what is strong and admirable within manhood. Just like the right-liberals, they assume that humans should stand separate to and in opposition to nature - to our nature as men and women.

From the New York Times article:

Science may still be divided over whether gender differences are rooted in biology or culture, but many of Sweden’s government-funded preschools are doing what they can to deconstruct them. State curriculum urges teachers and principals to embrace their role as social engineers, requiring them to “counteract traditional gender roles and gender patterns.”

It is normal, in many Swedish preschools, for teachers to avoid referring to their students’ gender — instead of “boys and girls,” they say “friends,” or call children by name. Play is organized to prevent children from sorting themselves by gender. A gender-neutral pronoun, “hen,” was introduced in 2012 and was swiftly absorbed into mainstream Swedish culture

This began in 1996 in Sweden when Ingemar Gens, a journalist, realised that preschools were a good place to suppress sex distinctions:

Preschool struck him as the right place to do this. Swedish children spend much of their early life in government-funded preschools, which offer care at nominal cost for up to 12 hours a day starting at the age of 1.

Two schools rolled out what was called a compensatory gender strategy. Boys and girls at the preschools were separated for part of the day and coached in traits associated with the other gender. Boys massaged each other’s feet. Girls were led in barefoot walks in the snow, and told to throw open the window and scream.

The teachers are expected to watch videos of how they interact with the students, to pick up on any subtle differences in how they treat the boys and girls:

“It was hard at first to see patterns,” she said. “We saw more and more, and we were horrified at what we saw.”

In Sweden the idea that any distinctions based on sex might still exist is considered "horrifying".

One trainee teacher so much dislikes it when she sees her friends dressing their children as boys or girls that she makes a point of trying to re-educate them:

Ms. Gerdin’s friends have begun to have babies, and they post pictures of them on Facebook, swathed in blue or pink, in society’s first act of sorting. Ms. Gerdin gets upset when this happens. She feels sorry for the children. She makes it a point to seek her friends out and tell them, earnestly, that they are making a mistake. This feels to her like a responsibility.

Finally, you can see in all of this an error that is often made in politics. The left-liberals reacted to something they didn't like in right-liberal politics, but opposed it from within the same political framework. They weren't able to think outside of the framework itself.

You have to be careful that you don't become merely reactive to the thing you have grown to dislike. What should exist instead is an independent orientation to the truth.

Traditionalists do not want to live outside of nature, whether that refers to the natural world or to human nature. We want to be connected to it, deeply, and to draw from it what is best within the human experience. We orient our lives, in part, through our place within a natural order (an order of existence that encompasses the biological, the social and the spiritual). That does not mean rejecting efforts to employ technology for useful purposes, but this is not the principle we live by, or that we wish society to be ordered by, or that we measure progress by.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.