Honor

Honor's a word you don't here very often anymore. It's primarily used as a noun for ceremony or a verb for death rites or...ceremony. Very rarely do you hear of honor in the possessive sense - that a person is honorable or not. It's no longer a social system that reveals how much you can trust someone given their reputation as honorable or dishonorable.

In the days seemingly passed for our culture, honor was tied to your gender. Honorable men were strong, honest, forthright, et cetera, while honorable women were chaste both in regards to their virginity and interpersonal courtesy. I find that the explicit usage of these concepts has been killed off over the past century by a trident.

• We've grown far more commercial and plutocratic. No one cares how honorable you are if you have money or goods they desire. The common thought assumes the viced are in prison.
• We hate having to answer for the consequences of our actions, especially the bad ones. 
• The feminists did it. Feminists threw out both main tiers of female honor by being promiscuous loudmouths. Granted, neither has proven very successful.

The word was killed, but not the concept. 

The practices of honor are still strong today, for women especially. Women who are direct and commanding are shunned and called 'bitches' (I've had plenty of managers this way) so women usually give commands through asking. I've always found the practice annoying, but it appears more tolerable to...other women. In another aspect, women who are promiscuous, augment their appearance in revealing ways, or mutilate themselves with cosmetic surgeries are known as 'sluts and whores.' There even seems to be an equivalence between these two terms when the previous was once a title more honorable than the latter. The dishonorable women become tools of others and rarely gain high respect and love. The consequence is similar for dishonorable men.

Those who do not distinguish themselves as direct and honest fail to get promotions and advancement into leadership positions at the same rate of those that do. Those who are confident and outspoken to the point of arrogance are hated primarily by those they defeat are insulted as a long list of words from jerks to asses. If they're admirably useful but without the trappings of honor, they are advanced to ever more useful, servile positions. It's this type of nigh-dehumanization I find worse punishment than social demotions, albeit easier to ignore in an environment that ignores the words. Indeed I do think the lack of explicit honor (dis)possession is starting to impact the practices that will eventually spin the institution apart.
  

If we're not specifically teaching children, they're only going to pick up practices through unknowing eyes. Honor will be greatly diminished for them and even more so for their grandchildren until the institution spins itself out. I've got two predictions as to where this leads, both assume cyclical history:

• THE END OF THE EMPIRE! My first thought was that we'll get more and more honorless until the vehicles of our civilization fail. One is the economy: without competitive men innovating and driving the material side forward, we'll lose wealth and influence until we lose power and sputter out. The second is motherhood and its derivative: community. If women stop 'preferring the mommy track' and instead go for economics in any broad way, we're done.
• THE END OF AN ERA! When I thought about it more, I figured this'll result in the coming of another 'republican motherhood'-style reorganization of honor and practice. This assumes a cyclical and similar tides of honor systems. Simply put, the first followed the formation of the country and awkwardly resulted in abolitionism and radical Republicanism. The second started at the end of the 19th century and resulted in women voting, centralization to the state, and Prohibition. The third started in the 60's and resulted, again awkwardly, in the end of the Soviet Union. Each of these seemed to upset the workings of society but in the end amounted to vehicles for policy changes that were coming anyway.

Check back tomorrow for the conclusion of this post.

Mother's Day Series Pt2 - Gender Roles

This is the second installment of the Mothers' Day series on women and sexism.

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            The feminists’ brief story of history goes something like this:

“SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME, males have been oppressive! They have stolen wymmins’ right to equality! To currency! Wymmin have been forced to tend the home and the children in a nuclear family setting! They have been reduced to the lowest of the low! We must rectify this brutal social injustice and eliminate gender roles!”

Needless to say this is quite wrong. Western European-style ‘gender roles’ developed over hundreds of years after the latifundia period when farms organized into estates and were governed politically. The lord or manorial boss would usually assign jobs without reference to gender, but for war-making and childbearing. When it came to being a soldier, a man’s (in the male sense) superior strength and bone density far better bore thick metal armor. This clean organization went back to the first Western soldiers who, for example, wielded tree trunks as excessively long pikes (up to 30’) in Alexander the Great’s armies. Soldiers marched and bore insanely heavy weapons and armor through an advanced age beyond the onset of osteoporosis in many women (also note how that says nothing of a brutally consistent-performance environment conflicting with menstruation). For pregnant women and those who had just given birth, local administrators would designate them less strenuous tasks indoors or in herb gardens, etc. We thus see the beginning of a split.

            This split continued to develop in the 13^th and 14^th centuries as kingdoms took on more aspects of private property and what the Germans call landflucht (‘flight from the land’): urbanization. There was an astounding increase in production and wealth that enabled people to have more children. If you’re having more children, your wife is more pregnant, more often, and taking on more and more tasks that are less physically strenuous as that’s the physiologically sensible and seven-centuries-plus established way of doing things. The established pattern had women tending equal economic responsibilities except for times of war when they took on more and childbearing when they took on less. For five hundred more years, people organized themselves like that (give or take a few, tiny, and radical sects) until the economy changed.

            Very few people ever took note of (and bothered to write down) how comfortable people were with these developing roles. Such comfort worked its way into official policy as the few vocal supporters of expected norms got said norms declared as law. Nobody cared that much as there was no reason to care…until the economy changed.

            Industrialization meant static employment that was physically demanding and remote from the home. Corporate life became and is far more militarized than self-employed or homestead existences. Employment for a wage, a new concept at the time, became a man’s realm for these reasons. As more and more of life became interfaced with industry, it strained the increasingly only politically-ascribed family framework. 

           People started making decisions around the late 19^th century that conflicted with policies made a hundred years before. We thus got feminism as a political vehicle to change those policies. It increased in strength as the societal strain increased in intensity. Early feminists were very effective in changing those policies until, after less than half a century’s work, the strain has been almost entirely alleviated…but the politics continue.
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My take:

            No, there shouldn’t be politically ascribed gender roles. That much is easy to say. What’s harder is proposing there shouldn’t be policies that enforce a lack of gender roles. Let people decide for themselves and let the market punish them if they’ve made bad decisions.

            If, for example, an employer does not hire a group of people based on some characteristic like their sex, that employer is pushing away skilled workers that would make him quite a bit of money. Those workers would then be inevitably employed by his competitor who in turn has a market advantage over the sexist. Eventually the sexist would be put out of business. It’s not as if this isn’t happening: do you really think the government is so effective that it bars all discrimination just because it says it does? Don’t make me laugh: the market has cleaned up discrimination, not the government’s impotent and blithe policy gestures.

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For further information:

-Thomas Sowell (I have a feeling this blog will have a LOT of the Great One) interview clip on gender differences.

-Carol Platt Leibau's "Prude: How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls"

Mothers' Day Series Pt1 - Feminist Vocabulary

As it’s Mother’s Day, I think it apropos to discuss women and sexism. It's additionally prompted by a friend’s concern over my use of the ‘he’ pronoun in place of ‘the Progressive’ for my ‘Wisdom of the Ages’ post.  It’s vital I avoid that kind of confusion as much as possible. I'll be posting this as a series for a few more days culminating with a post on honor later this week. If there's anything you think I should discuss, be sure to let me know via a comment section.

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The inclusivity gesture of using 'he/she' or 'they' in place of 'he' is silly. The English language originated among Catholics that devoted a large portion of worship toward Mary, a woman, and unsurprisingly found women noteworthy and special. There’s thus a feminine pronoun, ‘she,’ to honor that devotion. There’s no male equivalent to ‘she.’

The feminists want to believe that ‘he’ is a male-specific pronoun and using it to refer to both sexes discounts women and is evil. ‘He’ is in fact sexually generic like the word “Progressive” or “Conservative” or “Dog” or “Driver” or “Cleaner” or “Idiot.” Just because the present English curricula have been politicized by feminists does not mean the language is not filled with sexually generic nouns and is somehow radically changed by changing the definition of the ‘he’ personal pronoun. The language itself remains intact but for a bunch of confusion around pronouns and the inclusion of this evil symbol in spoken English: /.

Indeed the feminist language crusaders have spread beyond simply changing pronouns to working against the word ‘man’ itself. I’ve heard those desiring to be ‘inclusive’ use words like ‘Congressperson’ and ‘committeewoman.’ These make little sense on two levels:

1.      ‘Man’ refers to all people, not just those of the male sex. The language itself is kind of dismissive of males when referring to us as just “men” as if “meh, just somebody.” A woman, on the other hand, is a person with a womb: a special characteristic that grants her distinction. I think you see this in Anglophonic cultures: men are rather expendable draftees while women are given lifeboats first.

2.      As a womb has little to do with being on a committee and being an individual does, proper titles use the word ‘man:’ Congressman, Committeeman, etc.

The use of the word “person” refers to your appearance and those things in your bodily possession (‘to search one’s person’) and not you as an individual. While it’s unintentional, those who use ‘congressperson’ may stumble on an old Latin use of the word ‘person’ for characters in a drama wearing masks. This would imply that your office is merely your ‘mask’ that can be taken off and handed along; that it is not a title of nobility or a vestment of power in a man himself.

Maybe it’s thus better to use ‘Congressperson,’ I don’t know. Until I think about that further, I’ll defer the decision and continue to use Congressman and the sexually generic pronouns in the place of the ridiculous ‘he/she’ or ‘(s)he. Keep in mind that this is my sign of respect and upholding for women as basely superior to the rest of us, not  participation in some sexist conspiracy.
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For further reading:

-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Chapter 16: "How American Democracy has Modified the English Language"