Sunday, March 14, 2021

Freedom, necessity & the utopian dream

The past week saw the withdrawal from sale of certain Dr Seuss books. On right wing social media it was observed that we live in a society which cannot tolerate Dr Seuss but happily votes for WAP as song of the year.

Most of you will already know about the WAP song. It's by an American singer, Cardi B, and could not be more sexually explicit. It's a strange thing to listen to, as there is no modesty left in it at all, no sexual restraint. 

I've already written a post exploring the link between Cardi B's songs and the philosophy of female empowerment. The link is clearly a strong one, but I'd like to look at things from a different angle in this post, this time delving a little into human psychology.

The starting point is the recognition that we as humans often find ourselves subject to necessity, i.e. to being placed in a condition in which we do not make the rules by which we must live, in which we must follow a particular order of life and so on. 

This feeling of being subject to necessity has most likely intensified since the beginning of the industrial and technological ordering of society. We live by industrial work routines under the supervision of a managerial class tasked with using techniques to constantly raise productivity; at the same time, there has been a decline in the place of the home as a private realm insulated against the market forces ruling over public life.

There is a psychological reflex, I think, when individuals feel overly subject to necessity, to find a way to assert some level of individual freedom. The most low grade way of doing this is via moral transgression. It is a way of breaking the rules governing our existence, to relieve the sense of being subject to necessity, but it is maladaptive as it is ultimately harmful to ourselves, to the common good of the society we belong to, and, as has often been observed, it makes us slaves to our own moral vices - and therefore less free than where we started from.

There is a political dimension as well to this struggle to assert freedom when we are placed within the realm of necessity. Even in the ancient world, there were those who saw a solution in rejecting civilisation and social convention, in favour of a more radically simple life within nature. This has been a recurring theme throughout Western history, from the Arcadian ideal, to the noble savage, to Wordsworthian romanticism, to the hippy communes and perhaps even to the anprim (anarcho-primitivism) yearnings held by some younger people today.

Radical leftists have responded in a different way, through a kind of Edenic politics. In the Biblical account of creation, Adam and Eve initially are less subject to necessity, being able to freely and innocently wander the Garden of Eden. It is only when they commit original sin that they must accept burdens such as that of ploughing the fields and childbirth.

Early leftists like Shelley hated Christianity with a passion for suggesting that we must, as fallen creatures, accept necessity. In his utopia, humans would return to an Edenic existence, wandering around poetically within nature, much like Adam and Eve before the fall. Shelley believed that the only reason this wasn't a reality was the existence of social exploitation. If you abolished power structures, you would return to Eden.

Marx's utopia is similar. To give credit to Marx, he did believe that there would still be a need for productive labour. But in his ideal community, there would just be individuals wandering around choosing to do whatever work they wanted to, when they wanted to. It is Eden with a bit of fishing and carpentry and the like thrown in. Again, Marx thought you got to Eden by abolishing social distinctions and therefore structures of exploitation.

The echoes of this live on in the leftism of today. There are feminists who believe that men are not subject to necessity the way that women are, i.e. that men get to do whatever they like, thereby preventing women from doing the same. Their solution is to abolish patriarchy. Whiteness theory runs along similar lines.

It would be better if we accepted that in this life there will always be a realm of necessity that confronts the individual. There is no political or lifestyle solution to abolishing it. We can deal with it instead from two different angles.

First, there do need to be limitations put on the demands made on individuals in the workplace. If people spend all their time and energy meeting the demands of paid work, then their development is inevitably stunted. We need time to devote to family life, to physical health, to church and religion, to polis life, to the intellectual and creative life, to connecting with nature and so on. 

If this is achieved, then work itself can potentially be seen in a more positive light, as an aspect of necessity that contributes to individual life rather than detracting from it. 

Why do we allow paid work to become so excessive? One reason is that we have diminished, for ideological reasons, the other aspects to human existence. Our worldview is so materialistic that we see the earning of money and status within the paid workforce as the highest good in life. Therefore, despite our grumblings about overwork, when it comes to the crunch we accept what is demanded of us.

The first step, in other words, is to take more seriously the other aims and dimensions of life. And this requires us to have a different view of man and his purposes than what we have today. 

The other way of dealing with necessity is to integrate it with our own will, so that the two are aligned rather than set apart. When this happens, necessity impinges less on our freedom. If anything, we achieve a higher sense of freedom when we successfully cultivate our will to move and to act within the realm of necessity.

If you recall, I started all of this with Cardi B and her WAP song. Let's say that necessity gives to women the task of preserving their dignity, modesty, beauty and purity. Cardi B has two basic options in response to this. She could see it as something "external" and therefore imposed on her as part of the realm of necessity, so that freedom is to be found in the act of rebelling against it. Or she could see it as a given of life (and so as part of the realm of necessity) that expresses a good of womanhood that she would rightly be ordered to. Her will, in other words, would seek to align itself with this good, and it is in the successful ordering of her will toward these goods that freedom is achieved and necessity is no longer so burdensome (because it is no longer felt as "necessity" but as a free act of our own will expressive of our personhood).

For men, this should be even easier to comprehend, as it is part of our masculine nature to seek to order and to build. We have to "make" something of ourselves; it is not enough for us to preserve what is gifted to us. So this self-disciplined ordering of ourselves as a microcosm of the ordering to be found within the larger reality of the macrocosm should come more easily to us. 

One last point. The liberal mantra that a person can do anything or be anything they want does not help with the process of reconciling freedom and necessity. It solves the issue artificially, by pretending that the realm of necessity does not exist, that there is only an absolute freedom. Pretending only defers dealing with the issue, it does not overcome it in real life. Arguably, it makes people angrier when they do ultimately find themselves subject to necessity, and more likely to blame the malevolent intentions of others.

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.

Sunday, March 07, 2021

California takes the next step

Well, news just in is that the state of California is set to ban boys and girls clothing and toy sections in department stores. There will now only be unisex "kids" sections in these stores.

This is just one more step along the liberal path we have been travelling now for generations. Liberals believe that that highest good is personal autonomy. They consider autonomy to be a freedom to self-determine or self-define. Therefore, whatever is predetermined is thought of as an oppressive limitation that the individual needs to be liberated from. Our sex is predetermined, therefore it must somehow be made not to matter.

The bill to ban boys and girls sections was sponsored by Cristina Garcia. She justified the legislation with the statement:

Time to let our kids have the freedom to express themselves in all sorts of ways instead of limiting them to predesignated pink & blue sections. (Tweet 4:31am· Feb 21, 2021)


Note carefully the language. The aim is to free children from the "limiting" effects of something that is "predesignated". Pure liberalism.

She also justified the proposed law as follows:

To Garcia, the laws is about “not limiting ourselves and our kids into certain boxes.”

“It’s really important that toys and kids’ sections be neutral in order to give kids as many opportunities to flourish and develop and be creative,” mentioned Garcia, a Democrat who leads the California Legislative Women’s Caucus. “We should allow our kids to explore and try different things and let them come to their own conclusion of how they will identify themselves.”

Again, you have the assumption that recognising our predetermined sex is "limiting ourselves...into certain boxes" and that instead children should be self-defining.

How do we answer this ideologically driven desire to create a unisex society? That will vary from person to person. For me, masculinity is a kind of transcendent essence that gives meaning to who I am. The point is to embody it and express it in the best form that I can achieve. It is therefore not something "limiting" to who I am but something ennobling and "completing" of self. I do not want to be free from it, but free to develop along masculine lines. 

But that's not the only possible answer. Another obvious one is that heterosexuals hardly long for a more unisex society with more mannish women and more effeminate men. That is not the heterosexual vision of a society in which we are free to develop in a complementary relationship with the opposite sex. Are we really free if we do not have a realistic chance to meet an attractive person of the opposite sex to form a family with? 

And there's also the basic rejoinder that our sex is not just a social construct but has a biological basis so that the liberal aim of creating a genderless society is unrealistic. The real effect of liberalism is not so much to erase differences between men and women but to make difficult the formation of masculine and feminine character according to ideal forms. It is the lower impulses that are liberated - the reality of hard-wired sex distinctions still remains.

Finally, we can learn from experiences elsewhere. Sweden has already done the whole unisex childrens clothing thing decades ago. Pushing the idea onto children that boys and girls are the same only leads to confusion when puberty arrives and it becomes so obviously untrue. Here is how one Swedish woman, Cordelia, describes the process

When I started getting breasts and boys started changing their voices I felt somehow cheated...There wasn’t supposed to be any difference between boys and girls! But we all started changing to be more and more different.
Cordelia went on to reject the liberal unisex project:
It started becoming increasingly clear to me as if man and woman are two pieces of a puzzle that fit together because they are essentially differently shaped… That their physique and psyche complemented rather than duplicated each other. The idea that they are identical pieces seemed to me as a tremendous misconception and I was terribly irritated at having been fed an incorrect version of things all through my childhood. What I had been told simply wasn’t true. All my recent experiences showed that men and women were different and that men could no less be like women than women could be like men.

Since I wouldn’t want a man who behaves and looks like a woman, it makes sense that a man wouldn’t want a woman who behaves and looks like a man! True?

Why this ridiculous pretence that we are the same, when we very obviously are not? If I had been brought up more as a girl/woman instead of a gender-neutral being, I would have been stronger and more confident as a woman today! As it is, I had to discover the hard way that I was not the same as a man in a multitude of ways...
Until quite recently, every time I noticed a difference between me and men I kept thinking; this is wrong...I ought to be like the men...I felt like I was letting other women down unless I constantly strived towards the male ‘ideal’ that was set for Swedish women...But let me tell you, it’s hard work hiding your true nature and pretending to be something you are not!
Discovering that being feminine is not a ‘crime’ (in fact, it can be a positive thing) was a big revelation for me. I don’t actually want to be like a man!
I wish Northern European society would stop denying women the opportunity to be female! What good does it really bring? Who benefits?

California is plunging headfirst down the same path that Sweden took decades ago, with the same likely result of making adolescence more confusing and ill-preparing young people for adulthood.

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.