Living through the other?

If you look at the website of Zali Steggall, an independent MP, you find this at the bottom:

Zali and her team acknowledge and pay deep respect to our diverse First Nations communities, the Traditional Custodians, Elders past, present and emerging, whose country we work on. We...are committed to nurturing the world's oldest adapting culture and our First People's connection to land, sea and sky.

This type of thing is very common now in Australia. There is a veneration of Aborigines as a traditional people. This stands in stark contrast to the general attitude to traditional nationalism, which is severely criticised as failing the tests of non-discrimination, tolerance, openness, diversity and inclusion. 

It is as if there are two separate tracks of development. A traditional one for certain Aboriginal peoples and a modern one for everyone else. I say "certain" Aboriginal peoples because the same veneration does not apply to the indigenous peoples of Europe. It is applied only to those Aboriginal peoples who might be thought of, in some way, as having a pre-modern culture.

How do we explain this? Usually moral positions are universalised. If it is thought good for Anglo-Australians to give up a distinct identity because it is discriminatory or exclusive it will likewise be thought good for Aborigines to do the same. Or, if it is thought good for Aborigines to maintain a unique sense of peoplehood, culture and relationship to the land, it will likewise be considered a good for Anglo-Australians to do the same.

But in this case we have a puzzling failure to universalise. What is a good for one group is an evil for the other. The difference cannot be explained on the basis of "Aboriginal groups were there first" because, as I have mentioned, this would then lead to a support for traditional people-hood for the indigenous Europeans - which clearly does not happen.

All across Australia people hold meetings where the first step is for the speaker to pay respects to Aboriginal elders past and present. Now, if it is a good for us to honour our ancestors (which I think it is) then this holds true equally for Aborigines and for non-Aborigines. Therefore, if we universalise this principle, the speaker should be paying respects to his or her ancestors or perhaps to those of the people in the room. But, again, there is a failure to universalise this moral precept. It is considered a good for Aborigines alone. 

I would like to suggest three reasons for this placing of Aborigines on a different moral plane of existence from others. All three reasons push toward the same outcome.

The first reason is the one suggested by the American historian Eric Kaufmann, namely liberal minoritarianism. Kaufmann explains that liberalism originally sought to uphold the rights of majorities, but then later on, in the 1800s, turned toward minority rights. This outlook took on a life of its own, forming a kind of emotional reflex in which majorities were looked at negatively as potential oppressors and minorities as victims:

The emotive pairing of majority with malice and minority with empathy began this way. What started as a modest habit of mind has deepened into a reflexive demonization of majorities and lionization of minorities

Kaufmann explicitly connects this to the ethnic double standard:

The result is what I term asymmetrical multiculturalism: ethnicity as wonderful for minorities, poisonous for majorities. This contradiction in the worldview of the left-modernist bohemians established a minoritarian, anti-majority mold which occupies the very soul of today’s woke culture.

What I would emphasise here is that this minoritarianism is one avenue through which Westerners lose a sense of their own positive identity. If you develop this emotional reflex, in which your own ancestors are demonised as oppressors, then you will lose a positive connection with your own tradition.

The second reason is one I have written about at length. One wing of liberal modernity believes that the end goal of politics is a freedom understood as maximum individual autonomy. We are to self-create and self-define who we are. What this means is that having an inherited identity will be cast negatively as a limitation on this individualistic notion of self. Not only does traditional nationalism give us an identity that we don't get to self-define, it suggests that we have duties to a people and a tradition, which also limits an absolute freedom to choose in any direction. For these reasons, modernity turned away from traditional forms of communal identity. To be a modern came to mean losing your place within a traditional ethnic nation in favour of a more individualistic mode of being.

The third reason is the development of technocratic means of regulating society within liberal modernity. Modernity began with a project of using science to conquer nature. However, this desire to impose control through science turned to the idea of the "rational" control of human populations. We ourselves became the ones acted upon, we became the objects of the experiments to manage and to exert control. 

For this technocratic project to work, human communities needed to be made open and accessible, uniform, unified and predictable. Aspects of common life that were embedded in particular or localised loyalties did not fit well. That's why Leon Trotsky condemned the family as a "shut in, petty enterprise" to be replaced by a "finished system of social care". What technocrats want are systems run by experts, that are efficient and where results can be easily quantified. Again, this does not fit well with a traditional communal life, which flourished on the basis of particular loves and loyalties, and so was never going to be a universal, unified managerial system based on bureaucratic expertise. And so modernity, for this reason as well, came to be associated with a disenchanted form of society, one in which deeper bonds and attachments gradually withered away.

What all this means is that there are Westerners now who simply do not have a positive communal identity of their own. It has been lost due to demonisation of ancestors, a radical individualism, and the impact of technocracy.

I'd like to illustrate this by introducing Stacy, a country vet here in Australia. Stacy is one of the nicer leftists I have debated on social media. She was as curious to understand my mindset as I was to understand hers and she did not descend to name calling but remained polite. Our debate began on the topic of the Aboriginal Voice to Parliament. Predictably she was resolutely focused on the idea that Aborigines had been uniquely mistreated historically. I attempted to correct some of what she was claiming, but eventually decided to get to the crux of our differences by probing her for her own loyalties and commitments:

This is what she came up with:

It is not surprising that she went for professional associations as career is something allowed to moderns. But, as to whether she had any deeper attachments, her answer was an "honestly, no":

She went on to describe herself as follows:

But here's the thing. Let's say you are a Westerner and, like Stacy, you have lost any deeper communal identity of your own. Is it not the case, then, that if you wish to live through communal values you must now do so by identifying with some other group who still has them? 

From a leftist point of view, it makes sense to select a "pre-modern" Aboriginal people to do so. First, because the left have historically followed Rousseau in believing that human nature was originally unspoilt and only corrupted by the effects of civilisation. Therefore, Aboriginal culture will be romanticised as being more authentic or enchanted than Western culture. Second, if modernity is marked by a commitment to individualism and technocracy, then the carriers of traditional human values will have to be pre-modern. 

This identifying with Aborigines can be seen directly in the case of Germaine Greer, who had herself adopted into an Aboriginal tribe. The emphasis on Aborigines having a more enchanted culture is seen in the writings of the leftist Australian academic Robert Manne, who described Aborigines as living in,

not an Edenic but an enchanted world, in the technical sense of the sociologist Max Weber. They discovered an intricate social order in which, through the kinship structure, every human being held a precise and acknowledged place. They discovered a world that was filled with economic purpose; leavened by playfulness, joy and humour; soaked in magic, sorcery, mystery and ritual; pregnant at every moment with deep and unquestioned meaning.

This positive evaluation then led Manne to adopt the double standard I wrote about earlier. He very clearly wanted Aborigines to survive as a traditional people, rather than being subject to modernist standards:

...if the traditional communities are indeed destroyed, one distinctive expression of human life - with its own forms of language, culture, spirituality and sensibility - will simply become extinct. Humanity is enriched and shaped by the diversity of its forms of life. It is vastly impoverished as this diversity declines. If contemporary Australians allow what remains of the traditional Aboriginal world to die, we will be haunted by the tragedy for generations.

And so we arrive at the failure to hold to universal moral standards in which what is good for Aborigines is also good for other people. Modernity has left many Westerners devoid of a deeper identity of their own, and to compensate for this loss of significant human values, they have begun to live through the communal identity of others (to some degree through "vibrant" immigrant cultures, but here in Australia increasingly through that of Aborigines).

So what do we do? There may not be immediate solutions, but I do think it is important to challenge the minoritarian narrative which filters reality to always emphasise the idea of Westerners as oppressors. This narrative disconnects people from a positive identity of their own. It leaves them bereft of important aspects of being human, which they must then search for in other cultures. We should take whatever opportunities arise to foster and to express a positive identification with our own tradition. 

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. 

Clementine's confession

Clementine Ford is notorious here in Australia as a man hating feminist who is nonetheless given considerable exposure in the media. As an example of her feelings towards men, she was criticised in 2020 for complaining that Covid was "not killing men fast enough".

What I'd like to comment on is her description of her journey to motherhood. She begins her story with the assumptions she made about marriage as a girl:

I assumed that one day I would be married. It wasn’t a question of ‘if ’ but of ‘when’. I wasted little energy worrying about the chap involved, presuming he would arrive just as the seasons did.

I've read this kind of thing from women before. It's the idea that marriage will just happen by itself without any effort or cultivation of character from themselves. It is true, I suppose, that women can find a husband due to things that happen naturally, like their looks, rather than being selected on achievement. Even so, I think this assumption that things will just fall into place is a significant error. Women do still have to preserve the things that nature grants them: not just their looks, but feminine qualities of character and, also, as we shall soon see, an ability to love and to pair bond with a man. There are also challenges that women will face as wives and mothers that girls should be raised to expect and to have the strength to deal with. 

The mentality that "everything will just fall into place, and I will get my happily ever after just as a matter of course" is a dangerous one, a Disney outlook that sets women up to be disappointed in life. 

Clementine Ford then followed exactly the modern girl pattern of life. She spent her formative years in her teens and twenties pursuing a number of short term relationships with men, before changing course in her early 30s, meeting the future father of her child and then asking for a child at age 34:

after the torrid years of my twenties, with the series of broken hearts that decade brought (mostly mine, sometimes other people’s), I met the man who would become my son’s father.

It needs to be noted here that a woman spending such a long time having affairs and having a "series of broken hearts" is terrible preparation for marriage. It is, in effect, practising for divorce. We aren't designed to repeatedly go through this process and still have our pair bonding faculty intact.

She waited until her son was four and then, predictably, dropped the bombshell on her partner (I don't think they were married) that she was leaving him. It is not unusual for women to wait until the youngest child is about this age, as the child is a little more independent by then and the mother is less reliant on the father for support.

Her explanation of why she left her partner is the one I expected. Despite the fact that he was going out to work to support her, she blamed him and resented him for the disruption to her life caused by motherhood:

In the pre-dawn hours, after another night of broken sleep and relentless feeding, I’d look at the man lying asleep next to me...and think, I hate you.

One of the things I had always valued about our relationship was how independent we could be of each other—which is to say, I had valued how independent I could be.

I am an introvert by nature, and the emotional toll of being so busy also means I have to recharge in solitude. When it was just the two of us, it was an ideal situation. But the introduction of a third, defenceless creature to our situation upended all of this.

For the first time in my life, I needed help. I needed respite. I needed to feel supported in some fairly basic ways. And like so many women stunned by the reality of the ‘happy ever after’, I felt myself to be abandoned.

I experienced the shock of motherhood and its impact on our relationship as a huge betrayal, and I blamed him for most of it.  

She blamed the one person doing the most for her for her predicament. It would have helped if she had had a more realistic view of motherhood. To her credit, she does admit that she had unrealistic views:

The genteel life I imagined for myself was cast in soft, pastel focus. I would finally be a published author. I’d have a placid, chubby little baby who cooed at all the right times and cried only when absolutely necessary, which would be never. And I’d have a loving partner who supported me emotionally in both of these endeavours, understanding without question or conflict what needed to be done and simply getting on with it.

The last part I've also heard before: the idea that some women have that their husbands/partners should simply intuitively know exactly what needs to be done and to put things right. It is a gross misunderstanding of men and of the masculine role within a relationship.

I do agree with Clementine Ford that first time motherhood can be tough and that it's best if supports can be in place for the woman experiencing it. But this support traditionally came from other women within the family, perhaps a woman's own mother, or her sisters, or her aunts. The problem with expecting a husband/partner to completely take over this role is not only that he will be away for considerable times at work, and not only that he will have no experience of what is happening himself, but even more crucially that he will then be responsible for a woman feeling comfortable in her new role and so be blamed if she does not - to the long term detriment of the marriage.

Sometimes when the topic of divorce is mentioned it is claimed that women initiate divorce in order to rid themselves of abusive men. But in my observation the Clementine Ford cases are the more common ones. Her partner loved her, but she left him and dissolved her family without even communicating to him her unhappiness or the reasons why she was leaving:

My desires were modest, but they were important. I wanted to stop feeling sad. I wanted to start feeling happy.

In the months before I decided to leave my relationship, I found myself thinking about what I wanted my life to look like. Did I want to wake up at fifty and realise that I had no idea who I even was anymore beyond being someone’s mother or someone’s wife?

I didn’t feel seen, and the knowledge left me with a deep wound.

Outside of my home, I was championed and celebrated...Yet despite this, when I laid my head down at night I felt invisible. I couldn’t understand why this man who claimed to love me didn’t also seem to notice that I was disappearing.

On an afternoon in late May, I piled the last of my things into my car and drove away from the house I had shared with a man I had once loved.

I did not cry as I drove away, just as I had not cried as I listened to him ask me again, Why? Why are you doing this?

[In fact] I hadn’t cried much over the break-up...by then my heart had sealed over. I had watched myself moving slowly out of the relationship long before I moved out of the house, but he, like so many people seemingly blindsided by the end, had not noticed.

Even being a writer with a considerable national profile wasn't enough for her. She was "disappearing" and "didn't feel seen". 

The truth, I think, is that Clementine Ford had wanted to be a mother much more than she wanted to be married. She chose a man she knew was conscientious and decent to play a certain role for a certain time and then she returned to the kind of independent girl lifestyle she was more habituated to, but with the benefit of also being a mother:

I drove to my new flat, and I looked at the new home that I had made and I wondered at all the possibilities left to me...There would be love, I knew that. There would be laughter. There would be magic. 

I love living alone. I love having my own space...

I imagine a world in which our entire notion of ‘family’ is reinvented. Where women’s desire for motherhood is divested from our belief that it can only happen if we enter into a nuclear partnership.

I feel as if I have the best of both worlds now. I am a mother, and this brings to my life a particular meaning and resonance that is important to me.

But I am also a woman outside of this, and I don’t need to struggle to remember this fact. I move easily between the two states of being, without the risk of one consuming the other.

She wants to be a mother but also to be "a woman outside of this", which I think is her way of saying she wants to be free to express her sexuality in the pursuit of affairs.

She says that she "chose well" when selecting the father of her child as he has stuck around and they still all get together at times for meals and movie nights.

So, is this a future pathway for relationships? I don't think so. If women were to generally treat men the way that Clementine Ford treated her partner, then men would quickly lose interest in the idea of family. Nor do children raised in single mother homes generally fare as well as those raised more traditionally.

And the "magic" isn't happening for Clementine Ford to the degree she expected. She is in her forties now. She recently uploaded a Facebook post of her clutching a glass of wine, drunk and talking about how romance is a lie and that it's better to be alone. 

"I had lunch today with my researcher. I'm very drunk, that's why I'm slurring. We were talking about how more women of age like us need to impart to young women that everything you've been told about romance is a lie and the best thing you can aspire to is life on your own terms." 

You can only imagine that things will get worse as she ages. She is already cynical, already jaded and incapable of imagining a committed relationship. She has banked everything on sexual attractiveness:

I took my friend and researcher Jane out yesterday for lunch and we got absolutely trollied. Evidently I then went home and made some stories and took about a million photos of me in my knickers. Reassuring to know that even when I’m absolutely plastered, I’m still hot.

 
Anyway, even though I’m sozzled here I’m going to share this because the advice is sound. As a woman in her middle years (and living her best life), I want to keep telling women just beginning the journey that they are all the ingredients they will ever need to make a bloody great meal...Don’t settle for some bozo because you think it’s better than being in your own company. My company is great! Stay single, stay hot.

Is she really going to live by this "stay single, stay hot" philosophy in her fifties? In her sixties? In her seventies? 

Clementine Ford, drunk advice

I would hope that young women reading this would take her example as a fate to be avoided. 

Let me end on a more positive note. I've been on holiday and have had the chance to spend time at the beach. Whilst there I saw three young couples (they arrived together as a group of friends) who between them had a small army of toddler children (I counted nine). The children played happily on the sand, the husbands flirted a bit with their wives (one of the husbands swept his wife off her feet and they laughed together as he carried her to the waves). At one point one of the girls accidentally knocked over her little sister. The dad took the baby out of his wife's arms so that she could comfort her daughter.

Perhaps you had to be there, but I was struck by how "right" all this was - by how powerful this idyll of family life is as a human good and as part of the design of human life. 

What is wrong with Mr Hobbes? (Part 1)

I am reading The Invention of Autonomy by J.B. Schneewind. I reached chapter five which is on Thomas Hobbes and, predictably, only read a couple of pages before becoming enraged and wanting to fling the book at a wall. This happens every time I read something on Hobbes - he is the person in world history I revile the most.

Interestingly, some of his contemporaries had the same reaction. For instance, in 1676 a German by the name of Samuel Rachel wrote: "We will give the last place to Thomas Hobbes for filth falls on the hindmost...Never...have I lighted on any writer who has put before the world views more foolish or more foul." Schneewind goes on to note that "Hobbes's theories...aroused lasting hatred and fear in some of the strongest thinkers of the time."

Why my visceral disgust? I think it is because Hobbes is incompatible with the best of the Western mind and soul. His ideas make impossible a distinction between what is noble and elevated and what is base and common. His ideas undermine the traditional concept of the good, the beautiful and the true. His ideas deny the affinities which naturally tie together human communities. His ideas are incompatible with finding a common good for human communities based on virtue or on the ordering of the social, spiritual and biological nature of man. 

Thomas Hobbes

By the time I had finished the chapter I had calmed down. Schneewind does a decent job of explaining why Hobbes took the positions that he did. Hobbes was radically committed to scientism, nominalism, materialism, determinism and voluntarism and he was concerned, in an era marked by religious and civil war, to block any justifications for rebelling against the monarch.

It is a little difficult to condense Schneewind's arguments, so I'll focus on picking out a few of the more interesting parts. 

First, Hobbes states directly that the point of moral philosophy is to avoid the calamity of civil war: "all such calamities...arise...chiefly from civil war...few in the world that have learned those duties which unite and keep men in peace...the knowledge of these rules is moral philosophy."

This is a poor foundation for moral philosophy but it shows how much the historical context matters.

Hobbes's materialism was radical. He thought that humans were just clusters of atoms. Sometimes the atoms move toward something and this is named desire. Sometimes they move away and this is named aversion. The radical consequence of seeing things this way is that the meaning of the term "good" changes. As Schneewind puts it:

When we are moved toward something, we call that toward which we are moved "good". Thus we do not desire something because we think it good. We think it good simply because the thought of it moves us to get it.

We are not moved toward the good; the good is a word we apply to whatever we are moved toward. As Schneewind puts it, "for Hobbes to call something good is only to say one wants it". 

The endless pursuit of desire is, for Hobbes, the very thing that constitutes the motion of the self. Therefore, there can be no "final end" such as contentment in the knowledge of God, because "for Hobbes the absence of desire is the absence of motion, and that is, simply, death. Felicity lies rather in seeking and obtaining whatever we happen to want."

For Hobbes, our desires "stem from the interaction between our bodies and causal chains originating outside them, and they determine literally our every move". They are simply material effects that are part of the physical world. Therefore, Hobbes believes that desires cannot be ordered toward higher goods which might then form a common good around which communities might be harmoniously ordered. 

This is not possible, first, because we will not find like-minded people, as the causal chains will act differently on people, creating desire in some and aversion in others. Second, there is no rational deity in this scheme of thought ordering the world toward harmony - the physical laws that act on people do so indifferently and without meaning. Finally, I would presume as well that Hobbes sees individual behaviour as being too rigidly determined by causal chains to allow for a process of rationally ordering goods.

What all this means is that Hobbes does not believe that you can find the civil peace, which he believes is the foundation of moral philosophy, via a common commitment to a set of goods (i.e. to a common good). He writes that there is no "common Rule of Good and Evill, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves".

Schneewind proceeds to note Hobbes's famous belief that humans form communities not out of natural sociability or through love of other people but through self-interest. Here we get to specific pronouncements about the nature of man that form Hobbes's anthropology. Hobbes thinks we share a fear of death and a desire for glory. We have "an insatiable desire for security" (Schneewind) which makes us want to perpetually have superior power over everyone else, leading to a war of all against all. Our natural state is the most low trust condition you could imagine.

For Hobbes, this means that there are two laws of nature. First, to seek peace as a means to obtain security. Second, if this is not possible do what it takes to stay alive.

I want to pause here to reflect on the ramifications of this. Hobbes was committed to scientism in the sense of believing that a moral theory had to have a kind of mathematical certainty. He was not alone in this commitment; his chief English detractor, Richard Cumberland, felt obliged to respond to Hobbes via a scientistic approach to morality as well (there had been a strain of scepticism which denied that we can know anything with certainty which was one reason why some were pushed toward scientism).

You can see where this leads. You end up with some very basic foundational propositions. Man here is almost abstracted out of existence. All that Hobbes can say about man's nature is that he wants to live and that he wants power and glory. Hobbes does later claim that you can build a superstructure of beliefs about virtues and vices on the basis of his "natural laws", but it is still ultimately motivated only by the desire for self-preservation.

In the more traditional view, man as a creature has a distinct nature that a person will seek to develop to its higher purposes and ends in order to fulfil his or her own being. There are, for instance, qualities of manhood that a man will rightly seek to embody because they are an "essential" aspect of his nature, through which he completes or perfects his being in the world, and which represent a higher good that he aspires to embody. What this traditional view requires is not one or two "mathematical" foundational propositions, but an insightful description of what constitutes a masculine ideal for men to seek to live by - and this will be relatively complex, as it will bring together the physical, social and spiritual elements of a man's being and will also include the distinct roles of men within the family and society.

This makes little sense within Hobbes's world picture, as for him there are no objects that are inherently good, as something is made good simply by virtue of us wanting it. Hobbes's view does, it must be admitted, fit well within a consumer society based on the pursuit of individual choice in the market - perhaps this is part of what gives me the unsettling sense that we are living excessively through Hobbesian values in the modern world.

(I'll finish reporting on Schneewind's account of Hobbes in my next post.)

Repression, DV & the Freudian left

Earlier this summer eleven Australian women were murdered over a three week period. It led to a debate on social media about domestic violence and how it might be tackled.

On one side of the debate were those who emphasised two things. First, that women are the victims of violence and men the perpetrators. Second, that the solution is for men to change, in particular, by becoming less repressed and by better expressing their emotions. For instance, one woman I engaged with ("Megwa") began by demanding that we "Fix the men". When I asked her what she meant by this, she replied "by taking down the patriarchal bs that inhibits teen boys from showing their emotions, oh sorry, fighting’s okay, but don’t cry."

a) The narrative

There is a strong tendency in these debates for the facts to be filtered to uphold a narrative of men as perpetrators and women as victims. This is despite the fact that men are considerably more likely than women to be the victims of violence (for instance, 70% of those murdered in Australia are men). 

It is true that men are also more likely to be the perpetrators, though not to the extent that those who believe in the narrative imagine. For instance, my female colleagues guessed that when it comes to domestic violence that 95% of the perpetrators are men. The real figure is not nearly this high. The NSW Government provides up to date data on those brought to court by police on charges of domestic violence (i.e. physical assault). In the period from October 2021 to September 2022, there were 10,790 men proceeded against by NSW police and 4,531 women, giving a roughly 70/30 split. 

If violence is caused by the socialisation of men, how then do you explain the 30% of domestic violence assaults that are perpetrated by women? There must be another explanation.

b) Men and emotions

There is a commonly held belief that problems in society are caused by boys being socialised to repress their emotions. If boys could be raised to be more girl-like in their emotions, the theory goes, then you would not have the pathologies of "toxic masculinity". 

This idea is taken so seriously that there are organisations in Australia which go to schools and conduct group therapy sessions for the boys to guide them to release their feelings as a future model of masculinity.

Where does this belief come from? It is a survival of left Freudianism, one of those "accretions" within the larger political culture. I'm not as well versed in left Freudianism as I'd like to be, but my current understanding of it runs as follows. Freud himself thought that repression led to discontent within the individual but that it was necessary for civilisation. The left Freudians, in the mid twentieth century, took a different approach. They thought that it was not enough to have a political revolution to reform society - this had been tried in places like Russia but had led only to a new type of authoritarianism. To succeed, there had to be a psychological transformation of the individual and this would occur when the individual ceased to repress their instincts, feelings and emotions.

You get a sense of this left Freudianism in the claims that masculinity is toxic because it leads men towards dominance and power which is exerted in oppressing women through acts of violence and that the path forward is for men to not be socialised to repress their emotions and feelings. In other words, we have a left Freudian claim that an authoritarian personality type is being created via psychological repression.

This is often joined together with another accretion within our political culture, namely the leftist belief that there are power structures which have denied humans an Edenic existence of living in peace, harmony and equality. In this case, the power structure most usually targeted is the patriarchy, which is held responsible for encouraging boys to repress their feelings.

The American feminist Gloria Jean Watkins (commonly known by her pen name bell hooks) wrote a book titled The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love (2004). In this work, she gives voice to these ideas about men. She complains that,

...masses of men have not even begun to look at the ways that patriarchy keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving. To know love, men must be able to let go the will to dominate.

She adds:

...by supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness. 

c) Criticisms

1. Lack of awareness

My first criticism of this common approach to ending male violence is that those who hold it aren't aware of where their ideas come from, i.e. that they are blindly following the accretions within modern political culture.

2. Rousseau

My second criticism is that there is a faulty assumption about human nature in this view, one that shares with Rousseau the idea that humans are good by nature but corrupted by society. This suggests that human nature is perfectible and that it is therefore reasonable to demand an end to male violence as an immediately achievable goal (some of those commenting on social media believe that it is within the power of men to stop other men from being violent). There is too little acknowledgement that human nature is flawed and that a complete eradication of violence is not a likely prospect, even in the most rationally ordered social settings.

3. Solipsism

Some of the women involved in the debate assume that if men are to have emotions they must be experienced and expressed in the same way as women - otherwise they do not exist. It is difficult to explain to these women that a man can have a rich inner life without being "emotional". Men are generally more able to be analytically detached from their feelings and to express them less overtly, but this does not mean that a man is incapable of love and other deeply felt inner states. 

Despite claiming that men are emotionally numb in a patriarchy, Gloria Jean Watkins makes two telling admissions. First, she admits that men are able to love women for who they are, whereas women are more likely to care for men on the basis of a man's performative role:

We struggle then, in a patriarchal culture, all of us, to love men. We may care about males deeply. We may cherish our connections with the men in our lives. And we may desperately feel that we cannot live without their presence, their company. We can feel all these passions in the face of maleness and yet stand removed...Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being. When we love maleness, we extend our love whether males are performing or not. Performance is different from simply being. 

Second, she admits that she did not like her own partner opening up emotionally because it undermined her sense of his masculine strength:

When I was in my twenties, I would go to couples therapy, and my partner of more than ten years would explain how I asked him to talk about his feelings and when he did, I would freak out. He was right. It was hard for me to face that I did not want to hear about his feelings when they were painful or negative, that I did not want my image of the strong man truly challenged by learning of his weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

4. Raising boys

The idea that the key to raising boys is to encourage emotional vulnerability is not harmless, because it disrupts one important aspect in the raising of boys, namely the "make strong" ethos. It is normal and healthy for fathers to want to encourage physical and mental strength in their sons. This does not mean that boys or men should never seek help with problems, particularly if these are acute, but this is not the general mindset by which men seek to develop who they are as men.

5. Tackling violence

If the aim is to reduce the level of violence in society, it is important to understand what promotes it. The data suggests that violence is more likely to occur within a social underclass marked by drug and alcohol abuse, unemployment, homelessness and mental health issues. Anglicare Victoria has suggested that these factors are present in about 80% of cases of domestic violence. In cases of female homicide victims:

James and Carcach (1998) suggest that almost 85 per cent of victims, and a little over 90 per cent of offenders, belong to what can be described as an underclass in Australian society.

The aim should be, therefore, to do what can be done to limit the size of this underclass in if we wish to reduce the prevalence of violence. Asking ordinary men to cry more is not a targeted solution.

6. Repression & emotions

If the aim is to promote a healthier inner life for men, then the left Freudian idea of not repressing our feelings, instincts and urges is misguided. The better aim is to rationally order these feelings, instincts and urges both toward our own good and toward the common good. It is more in the failure to achieve this that our inner life is radically diminished and that we are cut off from sources of love and connectedness, i.e. that we become emotionally and spiritually damaged or broken. 

If we truly want to help men live an emotionally rich life, then we should encourage earlier family formation; a more stable culture of family life; an opportunity to provide and protect for a family; a more secure experience of fatherhood; a reasonable work/life balance, including an opportunity to cultivate male friendships within male social settings; an opportunity for serious participation within a religious tradition; an active participation within a polis; and a culture which connects men to their family lineage and to their own ethny and culture.

Feminism & the absent father

A remarkable fact about feminism is that many of its leading figures suffered from absent fathers. To name but a few:

Germaine Greer: wrote a book titled Daddy We Hardly Knew You.

Kate Millett: her father abandoned the family to live with a nineteen-year-old.

Eva Cox: her father left the family to pursue a relationship with a pianist "leaving an embittered wife and a bewildered and rebellious daughter".

Jill Johnston: her father left when she was a baby. She wrote a book titled: Mother Bound: Autobiography in Search of a Father.

Gloria Steinem: she said of her father that he "was living in California. He didn't ring up but I would get letters from him and saw him maybe twice a year".

Rebecca West: her father left when she was three, both she and her two sisters became radical feminists.

There was another second wave feminist, Gloria Jean Watkins (but better known by her pen name "bell hooks") who acknowledged the impact that an absence of father love had made on the feminist movement (her own father did not abandon the family but he was an emotionally distant, authoritarian figure).

In the opening pages of her influential book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love, published in 2004, Gloria Jean Watkins connects an absence of masculine love with female rage:

Every female wants to be loved by a male...she wants to feel the love of father, grandfather, uncle, brother or male friend. We live in a culture where emotionally deprived females are desperately seeking male love. Our collective hunger is so intense it rends us...The male bashing that was so intense when contemporary feminism first surfaced more than thirty years ago was in part the rageful cover-up of the shame women felt not because men refused to share their power but because we could not seduce, cajole or entice men to share their emotions - to love us.

She describes the effect that a loss of father love has on a child:

No one hungers for male love more than the little girl or boy who rightfully needs and seeks love from Dad. He may be absent, dead, present in body yet emotionally not there, but the boy or girl hungers to be acknowledged, recognized, respected, cared for...No wonder then that these boys and girls grow up angry with men, angry that they have been denied the love they need to feel whole, worthy, accepted.

She believes that girls who miss out on paternal love often,

make romantic bonds the place where they quest to find and know male love. But that quest is rarely satisfied. Usually rage, grief and unrelenting disappointment lead women...to close off the part of themselves that was hoping to be touched and healed by male love.

Finally, she gives voice to her own personal experience:

As a child I hungered for the love of my dad. I wanted him to notice me, to give me his attention and affections. When I could not get him to notice me by being good and dutiful, I was willing to risk punishment to be bad enough to catch his gaze, to hold it, and to bear the weight of his heavy hand. I longed for those hands to hold, shelter and protect me, to touch me with tenderness and care, but I accepted that this would never be.  

The lesson of all this is that fathers do matter. Men should understand that the quality of the relationship they have with their children has a profound effect. Fathers have to negotiate having a dual responsibility toward the child: on the one hand, needing to socialise and discipline, but on the other hand needing to be a source of reassuring paternal love, care and protection.

And if this is absent? Then, as Gloria Jean Watkins noted, you will sometimes get the kind of lifelong rage that consumes third wave feminist Sophie Lewis. Sophie Lewis had a troubled relationship with her father and used the following quote (from Katherine Angel) to describe the subsequent emotional fallout:

The anger and rage we might feel towards a father...is not something we can expel, once and for all, and nor does it yield a clear solution. Rage has instead to be folded into everything else we may simultaneously feel; it does not simply burn itself out.

You might too get the women with "daddy issues" who are too emotionally damaged to successfully pair bond with men in marriage. 

At a larger level, the rage against the absent father can translate into political rebellion (as we have seen with the feminist leaders). Mary Eberstadt believes that those deprived of a father are prone to a form of ressentiment:

...these disinherited young are beyond furious. Like Edmund, too, they resent and envy their fellows born to an ordered paternity, those with secure attachments to family and faith and country.

For Lawrence Auster the father represents a principle of structure:

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.

Modern society cannot recognise any of this because it is committed to the view that any type of family arrangement is as good as another. The danger is that men might internalise this false view and come to believe that their presence in family life does not matter. It is important that we reject the modern view: it is an approach that will leave many young women angry, unable to pair bond and prone to rebellion not only against family but against the higher, structuring principles of existence.

Runaway rights

If you visit the website of the Castlemaine Art Museum this is what you are greeted with:

This kind of thing is becoming normal now in Australia. At meetings and sporting events we acknowledge Aboriginal elders and are welcomed to Aboriginal country. Some left-wing politicians prefer to fly the Aboriginal flag rather than the national one. About 40% of the continent is now held by small Aboriginal communities, with more to come. In NSW there is a plan to hand over management of all national parks to local Aboriginal groups. This has already led to one significant trail at Mt Warning being closed to the public. There is also a referendum to be held next year to provide an Aboriginal "Voice" to Parliament, with no clear indication of what powers this voice will have.

Back in 2015 the Canadian PM, Justin Trudeau, told a journalist that,

Canada could be the “first postnational state...There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.”

Australia is following a somewhat different course, one suggested by the feminist Germaine Greer in a book titled Whitefella Jump Up (2004), in which she claimed that an Australian national identity could be framed around Aboriginality.

How to explain all this? It is becoming increasingly clear to me that you have to understand politics as an inherited culture, with this culture being formed through accretions. The logic of each accretion plays out, each in its own way. It can be difficult to understand what is happening, because there are multiple sources that are not always entirely in harmony with each other.

One of these accretions is minoritarianism. There were campaigns to establish equal rights for religious minorities in the UK in the 1800s; these campaigns succeeded for Protestant dissenters in 1828, for Catholics in 1829, for Jews in 1858, and for atheists in 1888. Equal rights for minorities became an established part of the political landscape, but this does not explain why the identity of a majority should be stripped away and replaced by that of a minority. I think there are at least two additional points that need to be made here.

The first has been put forward by Eric Kaufmann. He has argued that the initial support for minority rights later became embedded as an emotional reflex:

Once liberalism turned from defending the rights of disenfranchised majorities to protecting minority rights, the narrative shifted. When it came to the rights of Catholics and Jews (in Protestant countries), racial minorities, or homosexuals, the “bad guys” were the majority, who menaced minorities in need of protec­tion. The emotive pairing of majority with malice and minority with empathy began this way. What started as a modest habit of mind has deepened into a reflexive demonization of majorities and lionization of minorities.

Kaufmann believes that this mentality crystalised in the US in the early 1900s. It led as early as 1916 to certain liberal progressives such as Randolph Bourne taking the now familiar attitude of lionising the culture of immigrant minorities whilst disparaging their own.

I do believe that Kaufmann is correct here and that there is an inherited emotional reflex at work that is deeply important for some people. It is noteworthy, for instance, that Germaine Greer felt so deeply about this majority/minority distinction, that she wished at one point in time to be Jewish and later on had herself adopted into an Aboriginal tribe.

However, I don't think this could have happened without a second factor coming into play. Let's say the aim is to extend minority rights. At some point in time, for there to be a workable politics, there needs to be an end point at which these rights have been satisfied. If there is no end point, then the minority will accrue more and more rights and eventually be in the far superior position. What is the logical limiting factor to ensure that this doesn't happen? It is the majority following through with a normal concern for their own common good, i.e. wanting to uphold their own existence and to pursue the best within their own tradition.

Liberalism has made it difficult for the majority to do this, thereby removing any boundaries to minoritarianism. For instance, the anthropology of the first wave of liberalism is a negative one, in which humans are selfish and solitary and only come together in society via a social contract. For first wavers, social life is to be organised around the pursuit of profit in the market, harnessing low aspects of human nature such as greed. The former PM of the UK, Boris Johnson, gave voice to this "accretion" within modern politics when he said:

I don't believe that economic equality is possible; indeed some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.

Those who hold to this view will see politics in terms of Economic Man, with the "nation" being conceived as something like a vast economic enterprise in competition with other such enterprises. They will not give much weight to traditional ties of kinship.

The second wave liberals held that human nature was perfectible. It was corrupted by institutions of power (by inequality, therefore by "distinctions"). The solution was to commit to the larger "wholes" in which humans were by definition equal, such as the human race. As Lawrence Auster wrote:

On the left, socialists and Communists...believe in larger wholes, but the wholes they believe in are seen in terms of equality: the whole of society—equal; the whole of the human race—equal. They believe that man has the ability to engineer this larger, equal whole into existence, wiping out the unequal, inherited orders of class, sex, nation, race, religion, morality, and thus creating a New Humanity. Only the largest whole—humankind—is good, because only at the level of all humanity can there be true equality and fraternity uniting all people.

White leftists, therefore, are not primed to uphold the existence of their inherited national identity. They are more likely to focus on issues relating to structural inequality that such identities are thought to create. Leftists often condemn white identities as "supremacist" for this reason - so again, there is nothing here to limit an excessive emphasis on minority rights from this "accretion" within modern politics.

The solution to all this is not an easy one, as cultures form over time and become deeply rooted. If you do criticise one particular policy it does not change the larger culture, which will continue to form people in a certain way.

There are things that might be done. Clearly articulating the negative accretions would help, as would recovering the worthier understandings that preceded them. And, at some point, there needs to be a challenge to the process of formation. This is particularly true of schools which are more focused on propagating the political culture than people realise.

To break the chain?

Earlier this month a young biracial woman denounced her white father at his funeral. In her speech she said of her father:

You’ll never be what you could have been, but only what you are. And what you are is a racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, Trump-loving, cis, straight white man. That is all you will ever be to me.

There are two striking things about this. First, it demonstrates clearly the changed understanding of the virtue of justice. In the ancient world, justice meant giving someone their due. This meant giving due respect to those entities who gave us our existence, including God, our parents and our larger national family. "Honour your father and your mother" as it says in the Bible. In Ancient Rome, this was considered to be an aspect of the natural order to be upheld through the virtue of "pietas", defined by the Encylopaedia Britannica as "a respectful and faithful attachment to gods, country, and relatives, especially parents".

Justice in our own times has mostly lost this ancient meaning. It is now focused on notions of social equality. You can see this in the daughter's speech: she castigates her father for his transgression of modern ideas of equality, i.e. for being racist and sexist and for belonging to supposedly privileged groups (white, male, cisgendered etc.)

In her mind, she is fighting to make the world a better and more just place. To more ancient minds, she is acting unjustly in disrespecting her own father at his funeral. A key question here is why this transition in the meaning of justice has taken place. I will give a possible explanation shortly, but it will help first to look at another striking aspect of the speech, namely what it demonstrates about social class.

The father in question is Donald Foss. He was worth $2 billion at the time of his death and so was part of an upper class elite. His daughter was raised in a position of immense class privilege, living in mansions and attending elite private schools.

And yet his daughter, with a furious energy, chooses to present herself as being at the bottom of the social hierarchy and as being a victim of privileged forces, such as white, male, "cisgendered" men like her father.

Again, there has been a transition here in how the upper class justifies its privileged social position. In the past, the elite would signal its status through refinement (of manners, of speech, of taste); through displays of wealth (homes, clothing, banquets); and through cultivating knowledge and an appreciation of the fine arts. There was also the important concept of noblesse oblige, meaning that if you were noble in status you should act nobly in character ("Whoever claims to be noble must conduct himself nobly"). Noblesse oblige was also understood to mean that those in a privileged social position had a duty toward those less privileged - so this concept connected the upper classes in a positive way toward those of other social classes.

The older justification of wealth and privilege barely exists today. It is true that modern day billionaires do sometimes commit to philanthropic causes, although these are often international efforts to promote some form of "identity equality". What is increasingly common, though, is for upper class people to seize upon identity politics to claim to be suffering from some form of oppression, i.e. to present themselves as lacking privilege rather than enjoying it.

Which brings me to my theory of why this change has taken place. If we consider the world picture that existed in the ancient world, and compare it to that of modern times, one significant difference is the loss of the idea of a great chain of being. There were two key aspects of this chain of being. First, it was hierarchical. Those further up the ladder had more elevated attributes. Second, every creature in the chain was necessary to hold it together and so, in this sense, each was a vital link.

It has to be remembered that this chain of being was thought of, in concrete terms, as representing the way that the cosmos was structured. In other words, reality was understood through this idea of a chain of being.

One of the consequences of understanding the world this way, is that there was both an "above" and a "below" when it came to man's position in the cosmos. Above man were the angelic beings and God, below man were the animals and the inanimate forms of creation. There was a vertical realm of existence within which man could look upwards, but also could feel set above and therefore dignified in his position.

What I would like to conjecture is this: that if your world picture included the great chain of being, then it was possible to believe that if you were higher up the social ladder that you represented something higher in the scale of being. If so, the major distinction between the social classes, of nobility and commoner, would be a relatively profound one. It would not just rest on money or power, but would signify also an "ontological" difference, i.e. of being formed in some higher way.

In the American Declaration of Independence there is a famous phrase that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal". This is not obviously true. Men are clearly not equal in many respects. It is possible that the emphasis here is on men having equal rights. Perhaps, though, it is also a move away from the older view, in which the distinction between nobility and commoners really did suggest men being created unequally.

This elevated view of the nobility can be seen to have had both positive and negative consequences (sometimes intermixed). For instance, it makes sense in such a social situation for people to look up to and to seek to emulate the culture of the upper classes, since this culture will be thought of as being higher up a scale of existence. This is clearly preferable to the situation in our own times in which culture looks downwards, so that the middle-classes begin to ape behaviours once associated with bikies, sailors or "gangtas". 

On the other hand, when you have an elevated upper class, the possibility emerges of people fawning to this social class. It's interesting in this regard that nineteenth century Australian culture strongly rejected this aspect of old world culture and replaced it with a more egalitarian "mateship" ethos (Australian soldiers in WWI had a reputation for not respecting officers as they were supposed to).

Again, if I am right here, and the nobility thought of themselves as being a breed apart, this would anchor their identity, in part anyway, on the possession of higher attributes of character that they would then have to live up to. Yes, it might justify snobbishness as well, but it softens the idea that class privilege is only about power or money. It provides a foundation for more positive ideals of what it means to be upper class.

The older concept of the nobility still retained some influence in the modern period, at least until the early 1900s. For instance, if you look at the magnates of the American Gilded Age you find a mixture of modern sensibilities (e.g. technocracy), with some admiration for an aristocratic past. J.P. Morgan, for instance, built a beautiful library in a traditional style and collected older European manuscripts. The Vanderbilts married a daughter, Consuelo, to the Duke of Marlborough. John D. Rockefeller built a museum in a traditional European style in New York, The Cloisters, and purchased many medieval artworks for display. 

The Cloisters, New York

The Morgan Library

If the secular order of the pre-modern West had a built in, inegalitarian social hierarchy, this was balanced to some degree by the clerical or religious order. I mean this not only in the sense that commoners could rise through the ranks of the church, and not even in the sense that the Christian belief that man was made in the image of God supported the dignity of the common man, but more fundamentally that the possession of the virtues most highly regarded within the religious life and the clerical orders did not depend on birth. Ascent within the clerical orders or the realm of religion was measured by faith, love, piety and sanctity, and these did not depend on birth (the New Testament, of course, emphasises that the poor are not disadvantaged in their spiritual fate). 

In this way, the existence of a hierarchical social order was most likely of great benefit to the Church, as it made Christianity that order of life through which the common man could ascend or in which he stood on equal ground. This may help to explain the discontent when the Church hierarchy too closely mimicked that of the aristocracy, as it might have seemed at odds with the true function or role of the Church.

There were radical religious movements which rejected the idea of two orders, and which wanted to abolish the hierarchy within the social realm. They sometimes pointed out that in the prelapsarian state of man, in the Garden of Eden, there were no social classes. They were levellers of one sort or another. Looking back, they seem to have missed the symbiotic relationship between the secular and religious orders. What Christianity offered was made more compelling by the existence of a hierarchy within the social realm. To put this another way, there was an important space made available to Christianity, one in which Christianity was a necessary component of a working order of life, because of the existence of a hierarchical social realm. 

Marx got it wrong in claiming that religion was the opiate of the masses. It was not anything like the bread and circuses of the Romans, nor the distractions of the modern era (Netflix, food courts etc.). Religion in Western civilisation undergirded the dignity of being for the common man - it was the order of life in which the common man held no inferior status of being.

So what do we make now of the great chain of being? I think the loss of this concept has, overall, been damaging. John Lennon boasted about the loss of an above and a below ("no hell below us, above us only sky") but this flattening of our metaphysical horizons has had mostly negative effects.

The great chain of being gave man a distinct place between the purely spiritual realms and the material. (This is, in my opinion, an accurate description of what man is made to be in this life: a creature who experiences, in a profound way, the confluence of the spiritual and the material.) The position of man spanned both realms, with space to be grounded within this material world but also then to reach into the spiritual - without which there is a disenchanting of the experience of life. 

The loss of any above or below represents a hemming in of man's being. It is, perhaps, little wonder that so much emphasis was then put on an ideal of autonomy, in which it was thought that man could be less straitjacketed or caged through a freedom to self-define or self-create. This is reasserting some ontological space but more as a subjective expression of will rather than as an objective feature of existence. 

What I would emphasise, however, is the effect of this metaphysical flattening on social class. We were clearly better off when the upper class set the tone, not only in manners or fashions, but by attempting to live as a more "noble" class ought to live. And we were better off when this upper class accepted the reality of privilege but compensated not through virtue signalling but by accepting responsibilities and duties to others of their own community. 

It is not that the concept of a chain of being can, or should, be recreated exactly as it was in medieval times. We are clearly not, for instance, going to think of the physical cosmos in terms of such a chain as was once the case. We do, however, need to assert more than a horizontal dimension of existence - there is a vertical one as well, which if denied or obscured has damaging consequences.

Dating & disorder

I've read a few posts by a young English writer for Vogue magazine by the name of Annie Lord. She writes on relationships and gives some insights into the state of dating culture among young people in the UK.

Much of what she describes is familiar. Annie Lord wants to date hot guys, but these men tend to trifle with her and so she ends up disappointed. She has occasional casual hook ups; is worried at the age of 27 about hitting the wall; and is starting to feel jaded with the whole dating scene.

To her credit, she does take some accountability. She understands that she too is undermining the culture by dismissing men on the most trivial and unreasonable grounds. It is also a positive that she acknowledges that there is something wrong with the way dating culture works today, i.e. that things are disordered.

Annie Lord

In theory, liberalism does not order human goods. For liberals, in asserting that some goods are to be preferred to others, we limit what people might choose to do or to be, i.e. we discriminate or exclude. It is therefore the case that some liberal moderns would not acknowledge a state of disorder, because they have no ordering principle, so they cannot distinguish between order and disorder.

In practice, liberals do rank goods. The highest ranked good for many liberals is individual autonomy, understood to mean having the power to act as a free agent and to enact whatever arbitrary choice one wishes to make.

Ever since the very first wave of feminism, Western women have had to choose between this good of individual autonomy and that of love and family. This has put young women in a difficult position, because the instinct toward love and family is a strong one, but it is pitted against an equally strong ideological commitment to autonomy. 

You get a picture of the ensuing internal division in Annie Lord's writing. She clearly would like to find her man, at times to the point of obsession, but she also belongs to a culture which she describes this way: 

Nowadays, for many people I know, love is the last priority. The idea of putting a relationship over your friend or career is presented like the craziest thing you could ever do. “Don’t do that for a man!” friends say because now you must do everything for yourself. And that’s what I’ve been doing.

This is a nice description of the "non serviam" attitude I discussed in my last post, in which women reject the idea of ever doing things for a spouse. Interestingly Annie Lord goes against the usual script by adding the following thought:

But what if doing something for a man is doing something for yourself?

This is interesting as it is a rejection of the zero sum game attitude to relationships, in which it is thought that if one sex gains the other must lose. It suggests, correctly I think, that we develop through what we give as men or as women to family life.

My social milieu is dominated by the most left-liberal of women, so I have some understanding of their approach to relationships. Listening to them can be disheartening. They tend to believe that women should be able to follow any passion or prompting and that men should just fall into line. For instance, if a wife suddenly decides she would like to live in Finland, there should be no barriers to her carrying through with this and that it is her husband's role to follow along. 

Oddly, they see this as a movement toward equality between men and women, because they have persuaded themselves that men are already empowered to do whatever they have a mind to do. The reality is that their concept of equality gives absolute supremacy to the arbitrary will of women; it is like a version of The Handmaid's Tale but with the sexes swapped around.

Unsurprisingly, the relationship success rate amongst these women hovers close to zero percent. 

We do need to order goods. This does not mean claiming that one good is always and in every respect a blessing, and others always evil. It is "ordering" - making a decision about what is the higher good and what is the lower. And it is not just individuals who need to order in this way. As Annie Lord's writings make clear, it doesn't work for just one individual to order rightly if the entire culture has become disordered. There are certain aspects of life that we cannot succeed in alone and that need to be ordered at the communal level.

The focus on individual autonomy has one other negative effect. It encourages a highly individualistic mindset, in which the only unit of society is the individual. Within this mindset, the concept of a spousal union is entirely lost - it no longer registers. A husband and a wife no longer act together for a common purpose, with united interests. For my left-liberal female acquaintances, if a husband acquires anything, this is considered to be to the detriment of his wife. He has gained something, therefore she has lost out. It is assumed that he will put this resource to the purpose of empowering himself, for his benefit, leading to her disempowerment and loss of control and standing. Again, this is in the most striking of ways a zero sum game approach to relationships.

How did we get to this state of affairs? It goes all the way back to metaphysics. We have inherited an understanding of man and the world from a variety of sources, much of it from the early modern period. You can recognise, for instance, the influence of Hobbes in some of this. Hobbes was very strongly materialistic and thought that everything we did was materially determined. Even so, he believed in a certain kind of freedom, namely that of having the power to enact our own individual passions rather than others having the power to have us enact theirs. 

If you accept such an Hobbesian framework, then relationships do necessarily become a zero sum game. It is no longer the case that men and women, as social creatures, fulfil their telos - their ends or purposes - in relationship with each other, as a common good. Instead, what matters is my individual "empowerment" in enacting whatever materially determined passions or desires happen to arise within my will.

The metaphysics needs to be reset.

The anti-wifely woman

There is a potential in women to develop either wifely or anti-wifely attributes.

When you observe a wifely woman, you are likely to notice an air of feminine receptivity and a higher degree of sexual modesty. She is, in marriage, more likely to focus on an ideal of "making a life together", which includes the grounded, daily, practical tasks associated with family life. Her husband is "personalised", in that he is not just there "for purpose" or as an abstracted figure of infatuation. She genuinely wants to form a family and so is less likely to hold out for an impossible list of requirements in a husband. She will often meet her future husband at a relatively young age and have children in her 20s.

The anti-wifely woman is more combative, seeing life as a struggle between men and women for power and status. She is more overtly sexual, in part, because she rejects the idea of serving a spouse in marriage and so, in the absence of daily gifts of service in marriage, relationships are based more squarely on the expression of sexuality. She is also more likely to cultivate a masculine energy in herself as she is too set apart from men to think of a husband providing this energy within a spousal union. And so she cultivates ambition, pursues masculine hobbies and interests, and creates within her own self an uneasy balance between masculine and feminine attributes.

What creates the anti-wifely woman? There are reasons to do with political ideology, such as the emphasis on individual autonomy within liberalism. But it goes beyond this to an ongoing potential within female nature to react against hierarchical forms of authority, particularly masculine authority. Anti-wifely women are often in a proud rebellion against the patriarchy, traditional Christianity and to serving (i.e. doing things for) a husband. It is a rebellion against the father and is triggered by fathers who were either absent or who did not model a loving form of paternal authority. 

In the 1800s, when Western culture was more heavily saturated with Christianity, these anti-wifely women sometimes identified with the prideful rebellion of Satan against God. Per Flaxneld has written a lengthy book on this theme, titled Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture. When you read the examples he gives, you are struck by the similarity to the anti-wifely women of today, in the sense that you have the same hostility to traditional Christianity, the same overt sexuality, and the same focus on forms of masculine and/or paternal authority in society.

Why bother to note any of this? First, I think it's important to understand that a layer of women in the modern West are not really fit for marriage and that it is misleading to suggest that there is some formula by which men might successfully partner with them. Second, there is a confirmation here of the important role that fathers play within the family. If a father is absent, or too lacking in authority, or if his authority is wielded unlovingly, this has serious repercussions down the line. Fathers do matter.

Our changing ends

One approach to life is to attempt to be fit for purpose - or, more specifically, fit for the purposes that are given to a creature of our kind. But this raises the critical question of what our purposes are.

A more traditional answer might be that there are many such purposes. A man, for instance, has the purpose to protect and provide; to seek God and the spiritual goods of life; to defend his people; to defend his church; to mentor his son to be fit for his adult life as a man; to raise his daughter so that she might be fit for her adult life as a woman; to be a good friend; to reach a potential of physical and intellectual development and so on.

There are barriers to following this path in modern life. A long time ago, an influential strand of philosophy rejected the idea that we are a being of a particular given kind, with attached purposes. The rejection of Aristotelian thought in the Enlightenment also dealt a blow to a teleological view of life. The prevailing idea now is that we are all uniquely individual and that our identities and purposes can and should be self-fashioned, rather than given to us as a part of our nature.

What this means is that rather than orienting ourselves to being fit for purpose, we are more likely to think that the world outside should change to fit whatever we fashion ourselves to be.

Having said this, there are still some remnants of the older view of fulfilling a telos in life. People do still speak of becoming their better self, even if the content of this is left vague. And there are assumptions of purpose even within certain strands of liberalism, particularly when these purposes can be easily measured or quantified, are materialistic and are held to be "rational".

For instance, there is the idea of Economic Man, who pursues a "rational self-interest" in the market, whether as a unit of labour, a consumer or an investor. This participation in the market is assumed to be the higher purpose of human life.

You can see this attitude clearly in a post written for Morgan Stanley back in 2019. In this post, titled "Rise of the SHEconomy", it is noted that very soon large numbers of American women aged 25 to 44 will be single - 45% by the year 2030. 

The author sees this as an encouraging development, as a single and childless woman is better able to participate in the market:

What’s driving this trend? For starters, more women are delaying marriage, choosing to stay single or divorcing in their 50s and 60s. Women are also delaying childbirth or having fewer children than in the past.

“These shifting lifestyle norms are enabling more women, with or without children, to work full time, which should continue to raise the labor force participation rate among single females,” says Zentner. Rising labor-force participation rates should put upward pressure on women’s wages and help increase overall consumer spending.

...The trend is set to boost segments of the economy where single women historically spend more, including apparel and footwear, personal care, food away from home, and luxury and electric automobiles.

Similarly, the author sees much promise in trends by which,

a growing population of prime working-age women in the U.S.—many single and focused on career—will have greater representation in the labor force, help boost wages and create potentially large tailwinds in a number of consumer products categories.

And so, for all the talk of a self-fashioning life, a woman's purposes are being determined here by the metaphysics of modernity. And it is a narrow account of purposes, one that explicitly rejects goods relating to marriage, motherhood, love and spirituality. Woman is becoming Economic Man and is being divested of those purposes that do not fit in with this view of her ends.

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. 

A kingdom of women warriors

The modern world is doubling down on the idea of women as warriors. This was foreshadowed as far back as the 1970s, with the advent of second wave feminism. The deal back then was that women could be shown bringing down men, as long as they remained glamorously and sexily feminine. You could see this on popular TV shows of the era like "Charlie's Angels" and "Wonder Woman".

Charlie's Angels - 1970s

Since then, there have been multitudes of female characters kick boxing their way across movie and TV screens, with a decreasing emphasis on feminine glamour. That has now progressed to the idea that female warriors were common in real history not just in fiction. I had a lengthy debate with one person on social media who claimed, in all seriousness, that half of the Viking warriors were female (on the basis of one contested grave find). And now, unsurprisingly, a film ("The Woman King") has been released about the Agojie, an all female warrior unit which operated in the Kingdom of Dahomey on the west coast of Africa.

More on the film later. The first issue is why our culture thinks it so important to establish the idea of women as warriors. My first answer is straightforward. If you are a liberal, and you believe that the predetermined aspects of life, such as our sex, are a limitation on our freedom to self-define, then you will want to erase sex distinctions. One powerful way of doing that is to assert that men can be just as emotional and nurturing as women, and women just as capable as men of acting as warriors. 

One of the disturbing consequences of holding such a belief is that it suggests that unless women can be shown to have such masculine qualities that they are somehow lacking. Women manifesting the best feminine qualities no longer suffices, as this will be thought to still support a distinction of sex. Everything comes to rest on the "girl boss" phenomenon. To put this another way, it will be assumed that supporting women means supporting a masculinised version of women.

Rey from Star Wars 2015

There is also a second possible explanation for the "women as warrior" ethos. There is an emphasis within Gnostic thought that "we are not our bodies". Instead of a positive picture of the material world as God's creation, in which aspects of the divine order inhere, Gnostics see the material world as a merely corrupted material form which has to be overcome. In this world view, our physical bodies do not point in a positive way to our ends or purposes as men and women, but are merely the limiting flesh caging our real selves. Our embodiment limits us, in this view, and therefore needs to be transcended. 

And what about the Agojie? Well, it is true that the Kingdom of Dahomey did have such a female warrior corps. However, the film that has recently been released about the Agojie has highlighted some inconvenient truths about the Kingdom of Dahomey. It turns out that this kingdom would raid neighbouring areas, capture men and women, keep some of them as slaves, sacrifice some of them on an annual festival day and sell others to the North Atlantic slave trade.

The Kingdom of Dahomey existed in what is now the country of Benin from about 1600 to 1904. It was a militarised kingdom that focused considerably on slavery:

Both domestic slavery and the Atlantic slave trade were important to the economy of Dahomey. Men, women, and children captured by Dahomey in wars and slave raids were sold to European slave traders in exchange for various goods such as rifles, gunpowder, textiles, cowry shells, and alcohol. 

Other war captives who were not intended to be sold to Europeans remained in Dahomey as slaves. There, they worked on royal plantations that supplied food for the army and royal court.

There was a history of human sacrifice using slaves.

The human sacrifice would happen once a year during the "Annual Customs" celebrations:

Since Dahomey was a significant military power involved in the slave trade, slaves and human sacrifice became crucial aspects of the ceremony. Captives from war and criminals were killed for the deceased kings of Dahomey. During the ceremony, around 500 prisoners would be sacrificed. As many as 4,000 were reported killed in one of these ceremonies in 1727. Most of the victims were sacrificed through decapitation, a tradition widely used by Dahomean kings, and the literal translation for the Fon name for the ceremony Xwetanu is "yearly head business". 

The European who has been called "the greatest slave trader", the Portuguese/Brazilian Francisco Félix de Souza, held an honoured place in Dahomey, being awarded the status of chieftain. Even today there is a statue of him in the port city of Ouidah in Benin (he also has a plaza named after him and a museum).

The British attempted to suppress these practices in Dahomey in the mid-nineteenth century:

Dahomey became an adversary to the British Empire after the abolition of slavery during the 19th century. The British sent diplomatic missions to Dahomey, in an effort to convince King Ghezo to abolish human sacrifice and slave trading. Ghezo did not immediately concede to British demands, however he attempted to maintain friendly relations with the British by encouraging the growth of new trade in palm oil instead. In 1851, the Royal Navy imposed a naval blockade against Dahomey, forcing Ghezo to sign a treaty in 1852 that immediately abolished the export of slaves. However, the treaty was broken and slave trading efforts continued in 1857 and 1858.

Historian Martin Meredith quotes Ghezo telling the British,

The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people. It is the source of their glory and wealth. Their songs celebrate their victories and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.

Dahomey collapsed during the second Franco-Dahomean War that took place in the early 1890s. Despite being equipped with quality German guns, the Dahomey army could not match a much smaller French force. The Agojie did fight fiercely, but not very effectively:

Between 2,000 and 4,000 Dahomean soldiers—including both men and women—died during the seven-week war. Of the roughly 1,200 Agojie in fighting shape at the beginning of the war, just 50 or 60 remained ready for battle by its end. Comparatively, the French side lost 52 Europeans and 33 Africans on the battlefield. 

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. 

Pope Francis on love of homeland

Pope Francis is not exactly known for being a conservative in the Catholic Church, but nonetheless he recently made a good defence of patriotism. Speaking on the topic of the morality of defending one's own country, he stated:

To defend oneself is not only licit, it’s also an expression of love toward one’s homeland; whoever doesn’t defend something, doesn’t love it. Instead, those who defend, love.

I particularly like the way he framed this, as it captures something important about patriotism. When you belong to a genuine national tradition, you see the good in it, and this naturally draws our love - it becomes a love of a significant good, perhaps even a type of transcendent good (a good that draws us to a higher aspect of reality and of ourselves). It then becomes natural to want to defend this good, which is why people will make sacrifices to uphold their national tradition, including making commitments to family life, to raising the next generation, to wanting to maintain the moral standing of the nation they are a part of, to creating a worthy national culture and so on.

The Catholic Church has something of a mixed record on the issue of defence of homeland, and no doubt it was easier for Pope Francis to make his comments, given that he was supporting the right of Ukraine to obtain weapons, and Ukraine is currently considered a progressive cause. 

Still, there are many voices within the Catholic Church arguing for patriotism, so Catholics should not be pressured into thinking that they must support globalism. Cardinal Robert Sarah is one such voice:

Cardinal Sarah is aware that globalism favours a technocratic vision in which people become "fungible", i.e. become mutually interchangeable units of production or consumption to the detriment of their personhood.

Similarly, Cardinal Burke has given an extensive speech on the issue, drawing on the work of St Thomas Aquinas. Cardinal Burke concludes by rejecting a globalist agenda:

It is clear that we and our homelands have responsibilities within the international community, but those responsibilities can only be fulfilled through a sound life in the family and in the homeland. Patriotism, in fact, fosters the virtue of charity which clearly embraces citizens of other nations, recognising and respecting their distinct cultural and historical identity.

...The divine authority, in accord with the order written upon the human heart, does not make just and legitimate a single global government...On the contrary, God meets us and orders our lives for the good in the family and in the homeland.

 

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.