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.

Living through the other? Part 2

 In my last post I set out an argument the gist of which is:

1. Liberal moderns in Australia are not universalising their moral claims. They are asserting that traditional forms of community are a good for Aborigines but an evil for others.

2. One reason for this is that liberal moderns can no longer identify with a communal tradition of their own. However, the goods associated with communal traditions represent important human values. 

3. Therefore, there are liberal moderns who seek to access these values, not through their own tradition, which is lost to them, but through pre-modern cultures, which in Australia means Aboriginal culture.

I had an intelligent reply to my argument in the comments, which proposed a series of other reasons for the failure to universalise:

1) It’s perhaps possible that promotion of “minority” traditional identities is used as a weapon to further undermine the majority identity and thus advance liberalism in the net. It seems a very sure way to deracinate a man by making him promote foreign cultures and peoples over his own

This is most certainly true. If an Anglo-Australian is welcomed several times a week as a guest to Australia, what is left of his own communal identity? It is an effective method of erasure.

2) It’s possible some liberals view the liberalization (and thus destruction) of Aboriginals as being another form of oppression visited upon them.

As we shall soon see in the case of Germaine Greer, this is also true. You would think it would create cognitive dissonance in the minds of liberal moderns (that the political beliefs they hold to are to be regretted for their destructive effects on Aborigines), but they are not called out for it.

3) The anti-human strain of leftism, particularly dominant in environmentalist sects, sees advancement as bad and primitivism as good. Primitive cultures, such as Aboriginals, are thus likely to be celebrated and mythologized.

Well, yes. This is a similar argument to the one I made myself in the post, namely that some leftists have inherited the idea that civilisation corrupts and that therefore pre-modern cultures are more genuinely human. Again, we will see this idea expressed with Germaine Greer.

4) There are, of course, certain groups throughout European-stock countries that are implacably hostile to European peoples. Promoting other groups, deracinating whites, and forcing or encouraging them to acknowledge and praise ancestors and cultures other than their own serves to weaken them.

Yes, this is part of the picture, though it does not explain why Anglo elites themselves should adopt such views.

5) Of course, the aesthetic and superficial trappings of Aboriginals is not really any threat to liberalism, even amongst Aboriginals.

Again, it is true that promoting Aboriginal traditional identity will not disrupt the working through of liberalism in Australia in the same way that promoting the mainstream identity would.

As you can see, I agree with all of these observations, particularly the first three. Even so, I think my argument still stands - that traditional values are human values and that if they are made inaccessible within our own group that some people will seek to share in them or identify with them or uphold them, via their continuing existence elsewhere.

I want to use the Australian feminist Germaine Greer as my prime example. Some years ago she wrote two long essays on Aboriginal issues. The first was called "Whitefella Jump Up: the Shortest Way to Nationhood" (2003). At the time, her central thesis was startling. She wanted all Australians to embrace Aboriginality as a path to nationhood. She wanted Australians to declare themselves Aboriginal "as if by an act of transubstantiation" (she uses deeply religious terms to express her hope that the Australian identity might become an Aboriginal one). She was ahead of her time. What seemed crazy in 2003 is now increasingly the model of Australian identity.

Germaine Greer

Even more startling, though, is her essay "On Rage" (2008). In this essay she explains the propensity of some Aboriginal men in remote communities to be violent toward Aboriginal women. She blames white men, of course, but it is the detail of her argument that is interesting. For instance, she sympathises with the lament of an Aboriginal woman that "Our communities are like a piece of broken string with women on one side and men on the other". This suggests that it is important for the intactness of a community that men and women not be placed in opposition to each other - but a setting apart of men and women into opposing political classes is what Greer spent much of her life promoting as a Western feminist (the essay itself breathes the very air of Greer as a white woman demonising white men). So here we have an instance of that failure to universalise; Greer applies a socially dissolving attitude to the mainstream, but laments its appearance within Aboriginal communities.

Greer then complains that governments are enabling Aboriginal women to live independently of their men:

The fact that government welfare payments are often made to women...means that more and more women can live independently of men, and are doing so.

...When hunter-gatherer societies begin to break down, it is invariably the gatherers, the women, who combine to hold them together, but in doing so they further marginalise their menfolk, including their own sons.

Again, Greer fails to universalise this position. In 2010, just two years later, she argued that economic independence for Western women was a good thing because it enabled them to divorce their husbands:

As women's economic independence increased, their tolerance of infidelity, cruelty, neglect and emotional and physical abuse on the part of their spouses dwindled steadily. Divorce rates throughout the developed world rose in unison.

She wrote of Western women who chose to divorce and live as single mothers:

Women who face this fate with equanimity have my unstinting admiration. They are choosing a tough but honourable life over a servile and dishonourable one.

But when it comes to Aborigines, she sympathises instead with the men who lose their most cherished possessions and who are humiliated by the loss of family structure:

According to anthropologists RM and CH Berndt, traditionally "the most cherished possessions of men were women, children and their sacred heritage," in that order...The Aboriginal man's wife was not simply a woman he met by chance and fancied, but a kinswoman...it is the level of avoidance which signifies just how fundamental, how absolutely shattering this loss and humiliation must be.

Why this inconsistency? Why claim that financial independence for Aboriginal women has terrible consequences because the men lose their most cherished possession - their women (imagine if Western women were described positively as being a possession of the men) - and are therefore deeply humiliated; whereas financial independence for Western women is a good because it allows them to leave, en masse, men who are simply assumed to be cruel abusers?

One possible reason is that if you are serious about wanting a society to continue into the future and to reproduce itself you will focus on maintaining family structure and on upholding a common good between men and women. Therefore, Greer is a traditionalist when it comes to Aborigines (who she wants to see continue on), but a liberal when it comes to the mainstream.

Which brings me to the key part of Greer's argument. She explains the rage of Aboriginal men as being due to them losing "what makes any life worth living". So, what are these essential human goods? They are the traditional ones, not the liberal ones. She writes that Aboriginal men have lost "all the important things" such as "their families, their social networks, their culture, their religion, their languages and their self-esteem".

Remember, Germaine Greer rose to fame for writing The Female Eunuch in which she proposed abolishing the family and instead placing children on communal farms where parents might occasionally visit, but anonymously, with a child not even knowing that a woman was its "womb-mother". 

For Aborigines, though, the important things that make life worth living include family, religion, culture and self-esteem. How many leftists uphold these things for Western man?

Again, she complains that Aborigines have come to live in "polyglot assemblages", i.e. mixed in with other Aboriginal tribes. This is by modern standards a minor experience of ethnic diversity, which is considered a great good for Westerners, but a catastrophic denial of the things that make life worth living for Aborigines.

Similarly, when Greer discusses the violence of Aboriginal men toward Aboriginal women she is not concerned, as feminist women usually are, to blame the patriarchy and to insist on abolishing masculinity. Instead, she is alarmed that this violence might harm the racial self-preservation of Aborigines:

What is now undeniable is that violence towards women and children across the same spectrum has reached the level of race suicide.

So here you have, as blatant as it is possible to be, the failure to universalise moral goods. The goods for Aborigines include racial self-preservation, ethnic exclusivity, family, culture, religion, self-esteem and the promotion of harmony between men and women. For Westerners, though, the goods are female autonomy, even as expressed in divorce and in an ongoing feminist revolution, diversity and the beating down of national self-esteem (Greer characterises white men throughout her essay as rapists).

What I would like to emphasise is how Greer frames her position. She is enraged that Aborigines might lose the things that make life worth living, the things that are important in life. These are the traditional goods that are expressed within traditional communities. Greer does not even begin to think that these traditional goods that make life worth living might ever be found within the Australian mainstream and so unsurprisingly she asserts that the path forward for Australia is a nationwide adoption of Aboriginality "as if by an act of transubstantiation". 

That she is not alone in thinking this way is suggested by the success of the reframing of Australian identity along Aboriginal lines over the past decade. 

What traditionalists might draw from this is clear. We should highlight the failure of liberal moderns to universalise their moral claims; we should also highlight Greer describing traditional goods as being "what makes any life worth living"; but, unlike Greer, we should seek to uphold these goods within our own communities, rather than attempting to transmogrify into something we are not.