Pleasantly surprised

 A woman on social media asked the following question:

I was not expecting much illumination in the replies. In our times, masculinity is often described as toxic or else it is redefined as being something much more akin to the feminine. So I was pleasantly surprised when one woman proffered the following list:

It's not a bad list. It could be added to, but it does capture aspects of the masculine personality. What's especially surprising is that this woman is not anything like a traditionalist. Though married, she is generally critical of men, and she has a materialistic, transactional view of relationships (her husband is supposed to enable the luxurious lifestyle she desires). Her life aim is to always get what she wants, and though she wants children she denigrates the motherhood role as being beneath her:

Some of the women in the discussion then challenged her to come up with a list of feminine traits. Again, she immediately produced a set of qualities that does seem to capture aspects of the feminine personality:

I would query the idea of magnanimity as being a more feminine quality, but apart from that it seems like a reasonable effort to me.

Just a couple of further points. First, if you read the social media timeline of this woman, she is at the most disagreeable end of the female personality spectrum. This makes her come across badly, but it has the benefit of allowing her to speak her mind freely, which perhaps explains why she did not just resort to the usual liberal platitudes when this topic was raised.

Second, a few thoughts occur to me regarding female sensitivity. This is a quality that can have both negative and positive expressions. On the negative side of the ledger, women can sometimes be overly sensitive to criticism. It can be a tough job for a husband to criticise his wife. No matter how diplomatically he frames the criticism, the response can be something along the lines of "This is a day that will live in infamy...." Similarly, women can be overly sensitive to tone, and can overdo the "tone policing" at times.

Nonetheless, sensitivity is part of the making of a woman. Women can be sensitive to the moods and emotions of others, which then supports their ability to nurture. There is a connection too, I think, between a sensitivity of feeling and a delicacy of manners and mores in women. You notice this sometimes in women who are more brashly insensitive - there is not the refinement that you normally expect in a feminine personality. Finally, men respond to women who are at least a little more emotionally sensitive than themselves. This is part of the quality of expressiveness listed above. It might lead a woman to react more emotionally, for instance, to a sad scene in a film or to express compassion for a person or animal in distress. When done well, it balances men's greater level of emotional reserve.

Deeper feminist regret

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

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

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

Darlene Lev

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

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

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

1. Patriarchy

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

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

She does not pull her punches in introducing this argument:

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her solution to this is interesting. She says that,

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Disposability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Depth

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

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

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

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

Staying on course

I was reading up on the origin of the word "sin". We often use the word today when referring to a person who breaks a moral law (emphasising the idea of transgression). However, the origin of the word for sin (both the Hebrew word in the Old Testament and the Greek word in the New Testament) means something like "missing the mark". I find this interesting as it describes something we all experience in life. 

One aspect of our inner life is the effort to stay "on course". We try to build habits in our everyday behaviour that keep us "on target" in terms of what we should be, i.e. in terms of our integrity as a person and the kind of qualities we should ideally be developing. If we fail in this we find that we suffer a kind of "dis-integrity" - we experience disintegration.

This is where the idea of cultivating virtue and avoiding personal vices is at its most relevant. It is part of the effort to avoid the waywardness or crookedness of human nature and to remain ordered toward the good (and to avoid slipping away into an alienation from it). 

Which is where the clash with aspects of liberal modernity arises. If you want to remain "on target" then there needs to be an aim. There needs to be an account of the good that you either hit or miss. Liberal modernity tends to deny that there is such an aim, at least one that exists outside of our own desires or subjective reality. 

An example of this would be a man who begins to identify as a woman. In previous societies, this would have been thought to be, at an objective level, an example of waywardness, of going off course and therefore needing to be corrected. But liberal modernity claims that identity is self-defined. And so there is no larger picture of what it might mean to develop in an integrated way as a man. And therefore no possibility to take cues as to our own success or failure in steering a particular course.

It is a similar case when it comes to womanhood. The most "progressive" moderns famously will not define what a woman is. This is true for both the terf feminists and those who support transgenderism. The first group limit the definition of woman to "adult human female" and deny that it can mean anything more than this. The second group are often left confused and rattled when asked to define what a woman is. They sometimes say something like "a woman is whatever someone who identifies as a woman takes it to be". 

For both groups, there is no possibility of an objectively ordered good within womanhood that represents an aim to be either hit or missed. There is no course toward a feminine integrity of personhood that a woman might be either steering closer to or further away from. There are no virtues associated with being a woman to be cultivated, no vices to be avoided.

There is a challenge here for traditionalists in putting forward an alternative to this aspect of liberalism. It doesn't make sense to be a lazy traditionalist and to reduce life to one or two "clear and distinct" ideas. Yes, we could talk about ultimate aims, such as an ever closer union with God, or remaining in a state in which we are receptive to grace and so on. But there is no avoiding for us an account of what it means to live an ordered, virtuous life and this is not easily reducible to sound bites. What does it mean, for instance, to be a good father? Or a good wife? How do we rightly order the different loves we might have and the duties corresponding to these? What aspects of masculine character do we consider virtuous? In what contexts?

Traditionalists therefore can be ideology busters but not ideology makers. This does not mean failing to set out a positive vision. It does not mean we just let things take their course absent corrupting ideology. We are not writing abstract ideologies but trying to observe, discern and describe what an integrated personhood looks like and requires, and how we might frame or harmonise the sometimes contending claims of different goods upon us. This is a complex task that our own individual reason can only partly grasp and that therefore requires some element of humility when we undertake it. But seeking this kind of understanding, to the extent we are able, is commendable.

Social bodies

Something similar is at play when we consider the social bodies that we belong to (that make up a part of who we are, and that carry part of the good that we participate in). 

There is still a requirement to keep these bodies "on course" so that they do not dis-integrate. Let's take family as an example. For a family to hold together, the marriage needs to be stable. Marriage, in its very nature, is meant to be as stable as possible: that is part of the aim of married life.

But it is difficult for liberal moderns to concede this. For them, the focus is on maximising the autonomy of the individuals within the family. And so they will be increasingly reluctant to define marriage as requiring stable commitments, not if this is thought to limit individual choice. As an example, take the following exchange I had on social media with a marriage therapist. In the context of a discussion about marriage and divorce she wrote:

She is arguing that a woman doesn't need a good reason to divorce her husband. It is her choice to leave at any time, even if the reason is shallow and superficial. I pointed out in response that this position alters the very nature of the institution itself:

There is not, and cannot be, for this woman any real content to the term "marriage" because this would mean putting a limitation on individual autonomy. And so the social body of family automatically dis-integrates in theory, because it has no definite quality to it anymore, and increasingly in practice as well, because it is no longer possible to set marital stability as the aim that individuals and the wider culture might try to stay "on course" with. 

And what of the social body of nation? This is an interesting one because when you have a traditional ethno-nation it will develop along the lines of a particular people. There will be, in other words, a degree of particularity when it comes to lines of development, because this will reflect the different temperaments and histories of each people. For instance, the joyous style of religious worship of some Caribbean groups might feel very alien to some Northern European nations which seek dignity and solemnity as part of worship. Anglo-Saxons might prefer a village style of habitation (even when living in cities) compared to the willingness of those on the subcontinent to live in close proximity in densely packed urban areas. The greater tendency toward rule oriented living in parts of Northern Europe can seem a little alien even to those with a British heritage, but both groups are more oriented to creating high trust communities than in some other countries.

What this means is that there are two potential ways for such social bodies to dis-integrate. The first is internal: some of those within the nation might put things off course by introducing aspects of culture that undermine the true spirit of that nation. Here in Australia, for instance, I would suggest that the high rise housing commission towers that were built in the 1960s and 70s were alien to local sensibilities. Similarly, Anglo-Australian culture developed for a long time around outdoor leisure pursuits, which the shift toward a more Japanese style corporate work culture has also undermined.

The second path toward dis-integration is the one we have today of combining different cultures together. It's not possible to organise public spaces and a public culture around the differing sensibilities of many different peoples. A Western liberal would most likely not recognise this as a problem as their mindset is to think only in terms of individuals pursuing their own aims, with "society" being conceived of as a multitude of individuals within a state - with the expectation that the state will give individuals equal opportunity to pursue these aims.

But nonetheless the issue can't be ignored, even by those who accept the liberal framework. What kind of housing is to be built? The garden suburbs with bungalows beloved of the Anglo population? Or fortress style housing closed off to the street popular elsewhere? Or the more densely packed high rise housing more common in East Asia? How are young men to interact with young women in public? Where is the level of trust to be set? The level of rule following? Of privacy? Of conformism? Of statism?

What I am suggesting is that each people is likely to develop a way of life and that the aim is for this way of life to best represent the good as reflected through the particular temperament, history and nature of that group of people. The development of each culture can, to a varying degree, either stay on or go off course, leading to higher levels of integration or to dis-integration. Even Western liberals will ultimately notice the effects of dis-integration, because the truth is that societies are more than conglomerations of individuals within a state.