The Folly Of Feminism

JUDGING BY her article in The New York Times Magazine about the rough time women are having in the Noughties columnist Maureen Dowd is fixin’ to publish one of those tiresomely superficial books that pretends to capture the zeitgeist while actually telling us nothing except that media people in New York persist in thinking that they are central to the culture.

Under subheads like “Courtship” “Money” “Power Dynamics” “Movies” and “Beauty” Dowd tries to figure out what went wrong with the feminist program of the 1970s to which she and her peers subscribed. How come girls are returning to courtship, frills and furbelows, and men are picking up the tab at dinner? How come that women give up so much more on the career track and successful women are so often childless?

Of course, Dowd cannot really give an answer to all this, for it would mean shining the light of truth on the whole modern project, and that she cannot even begin to permit.

The answer is suggested in the complaints of a boss I worked for years ago. He would complain that the software engineers working for him were forever going off on tangents. We had all the time in the world for building cute tools and elegant software embellishments. When, he would wonder, would we focus on getting the job done, on time and on budget?

Work is hard, and humans will do anything to escape the pain of work. That is why we have an inexhaustible appetite for diversions, hobbies, addictions, and pleasures. All this activity is an excuse to avoid getting down to work. The central work of adult humans is the same as adults throughout the animal kingdom, to bring forth a new generation and rear it to adulthood.

Leaving aside the social superstructure of culture and custom, this task means that women must spend a great part of their life energy in nurturing and raising children. Men must spend a great deal of their life energy in providing resources for that task, particularly during the critical period when women are weighed down by pregnancy and by young children.

In today’s society we enjoy a remarkable privilege. We are able to separate sex from childbearing. Thus modern women have the opportunity to control their fertility; they can choose when to have children. In the excitement of this new freedom women have rushed out and jumped over the fence to romp in the greener grass that seemed to grow in the man’s world of career, power, and status that women seemed to be excluded from because of the yoke of childbearing and the baleful culture of the patriarchy.

Women are discovering that the grass is not greener in the man’s world. And they are discovering that their lust to escape domesticity was not a noble yearning for freedom but just an excuse to go off on tangents and neglect the real work that needed to be done.

The real work of humans is children. Everything else is a tangent.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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