Rethroning nature

Germaine Greer was interviewed on British TV recently. She was putting the feminist argument against transsexualism. In doing so, though, she expressed with great clarity a fault line within Western thought. 

This is Greer's attitude to gender:

Now gender can be anything you like. It's entirely cultural. But, unfortunately, sex is not entirely cultural. It's something you're born with whether you like it or not. And most of us who grow up to be women, who have our first period, 12, 13, 14, whatever, traumatising otherwise, a body we thought we knew becomes smelly and dirty and different. And then the boys come along. They've been watching pornography and say that we're not groomed, we have to remove our body hair and so on. We've got to spend our lives removing body hair. That's femininity, which is the fake version of femaleness. Female is real, and it's sex, and femininity is unreal and it's gender, and it's a role you play. And for that to become the given identity of women is a profoundly disabling notion.

Look, I wrote a book a long time ago about how you get made into a woman. In those days we called it conditioning. And you could see it, it happens from birth...And it goes right through our entire lifespan where we're learning femininity. And it's a masquerade, it's not who we really are. There is nothing feminine about being pregnant. It's almost the antithesis of that. There's nothing feminine about giving birth...There's nothing feminine about breastfeeding. That masquerade is what is now being presented to us back as the real deal, with the hair extensions and the false eyelashes, and I think, why do you think that's real?

I'd like to acknowledge that Germaine Greer puts the modernist position on gender with admirable clarity here - it's particularly impressive for an 80-year-old. And it does seem to be modernist. She was influenced as a young woman by the libertarian philosophy of John Anderson, and he developed his mature philosophy in the 1930s.

What is a tell that we're dealing with modernist philosophy? First and foremost, the erasure of nature. Most people would think that "gender" (i.e., the characteristics we most associate with men and women) is created by a combination of nature and nurture. But note that Greer insists that gender is entirely nurture, it is wholly a product of conditioning. She spends no time at all on the nature/nurture debate, as she simply assumes that nature has no role in the formation of gender.

She is therefore left with the human body alone (the denatured human body that is simply biological and nothing more). And so Greer thinks that the only other possibility for forming gender would be via the biological fact of a sexed body. But she rejects this possibility. She insists that pregnancy and breastfeeding are not feminine. And that leaves the superficial ornamentation of the body, such as fake eyelashes or hair extensions or hair removal. But she also thinks that this is not an authentic source of the feminine.

And so there is no real source of the feminine, which means that "gender can be anything you like".

These ideas are common amongst TERF feminists. It is usually assumed that the feminine is a negative and artificial quality and that it refers only to stereotypes of female body presentation like fake nails.

None of this is at all reasonable. It is unreasonable to think that humans, as dimorphic as we are, and having developed from the beginning of our long history with very different roles for men and women, would not have distinctly sexed natures. In other words, it is strange to think that we could be so biologically distinct but that this would not be expressed in differing ways of experiencing the world.

And this is what any observant person would discern. We are not the same. This is what makes heterosexuality what it is (an attraction to a person different to us) as well as challenging (difficulties in communicating with someone with a different mind to ourselves). The workings of women can seem mysterious to men, both in very positive but sometimes also in frustrating ways. And parents who have children of both sexes will observe deeply set differences from an early age, to a degree that does not seem to be entirely a product of social conditioning.

For most people, too, our "gender" is important to our identity. It is not thought of as merely something we perform. It is an inseparable part of who we are, and of what we were made to be. And so it runs against our own lived experience for Germaine Greer to claim that the only thing real is our sexed body and that even this is a largely negative aspect of our existence. Greer leaves very little for women to go on. She empties the category of womanhood, to make it almost meaningless. There is nothing authentically or positively feminine in life that Greer attaches to womanhood. And even the fact of having a female body is denigrated by Greer. So what is left? Just a cynical attitude that womanhood might be used as a political category to get certain privileges or to identify as a political class in opposition to men. It is merely strategic, part of a game, and it is a game that can easily be lost to others with a greater claim or with more political influence.

So where did all this come from? How did it come to be that Greer can so confidently assert that "gender can be anything you like"? Why is it not seriously considered that men and women have given natures that might be relevant considerations in thinking about the masculine and the feminine?

Here I'd like to turn to Pierre Manent, a French professor of political science. He wrote a book in 1995 titled An Intellectual History of Liberalism. Manent argues that it was the Rousseau who decisively ended any appeal to nature with Western philosophy:

Rousseau's thought incarnates that paradoxical moment in political thought when man's nature is most vehemently appealed to in the political debate, and when it ceases in fact to serve as its regulator and criterion. 

The reason Manent gives is that Rousseau thought that modern society was unnatural. And so to discover what man's nature truly is you had to remove every social convention applied to man, so that you arrived at the original, solitary individual. But if natural man is pre-social, then, as Manent puts it, "Not just our society, but every society, even the best, is contrary to man's nature". This means that there is no longer much purpose in trying to conform society to man's nature. 

Pierre Manent

And so there is a breaking point between the traditional and the modern. Most traditionalists would appeal to some sort of natural law in considering how a human community should function. We would say that because it is part of the eternal, created nature of man to "x" therefore we should consider this in how we frame a human community if we want that community to flourish.

But if we follow Rousseau, then there can no longer be an appeal to nature in terms of how we might organise society.

There is a further move. Rousseau thought that man was only naturally a unity in his solitary pre-social condition. To restore this unity whilst living within a society meant forcing man to follow the general will. This required changing man's nature. For Rousseau, this was possible because man was not his nature but liberty - the power by which man gives orders to his own nature or is a law unto himself. In Manent's words "man's nature is not to have a nature, but to be free....With Rousseau, freedom....is a feeling...of autonomy....If man is liberty, autonomy, if he is the being who makes his own laws, he cannot derive his motives from nature without demeaning himself". (p.77)

And at this point we can perhaps find one of the intellectual threads leading on to Germaine Greer. Greer thinks it demeaning that a woman might derive some of her qualities or character from her given nature. If not for social conditioning, she would not be subject to any of the qualities of the feminine at all. 

This position, inasmuch as it derives from Rousseau, rests upon a false premise, namely that man is not by nature social, but is a unity only as a solitary, pre-social individual. And so it is up to us to correct this misstep within the Western philosophical tradition. We need to rethrone nature. 

Manent set himself this task in a recent essay, in which he expands upon the role of the social contract theorists in undermining the idea of natural law. I'll take a look at this essay in my next post.