Mother's Day Series Pt2 - Gender Roles

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

----------------------------------------------------------------------

            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.
-------------------------------------------------

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.

-------------------------------------------------

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.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.
-----------------------------------------------------
For further reading:

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

The 'Wisdom of the Ages'

This is part of a larger area I've been studying in the past few months (origins of political conflict) and is a definite work in progress. Consider it a few errant notes for your consideration.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Twenty minutes of internet searching found the most reliable statistical analyses and guesswork concluding that there are between 6.85 and 10.5 billion Bibles in usable print. We can estimate that the Qur’an, Hadith, and Bhagavad Gita number in a significant fraction thereof. The Bible’s oldest book, that of Job, is a scribed story told between 2,000 and 1,400 B.C. The Gita was written around 150 B.C. and the Qur’an between 610 and 632 A.D. The great works of philosophy and politics are similarly ancient with Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Gautama Buddha, Zhuangzi, and Confucius all teaching 2,300 years ago and earlier. It has been said that the succeeding works in each established line have merely been commentaries on the original discourses. Why is it that we study and follow such old ideas?

 That question is laughable to some but highly relevant to others and one’s response is based on how one views history. The Progressive, as per his name, tends to see history as the story of progress to the ‘deimos’ or ‘divinely-appointed time:’ the here and now. The people in such a high story grow fundamentally better as the species goes on. A Progressive thinks knowledge and morality compound over time, especially when technology jumps to a more advanced level. With this understanding, the above books and authors should be rejected as outmoded, old fashioned, and to blame for the world’s problems.

As they never lived in an era of modern technology, we are far more suited to make judgments about the human existence as we know more of the secrets thereof. The ancients made assessments of humanity based only on the tiny number of people they came across in person; even then their interactions were distorted by manners and tiny vocabularies. How could they know that much about people when they never encountered a mass sociological study or networked with hundreds on the internet? Their conclusions should not be trusted, either, given their origination in mileu of sexism, racism, homophobia, class biases, castes, etc. The Progressive thus says we should flush out references to such ancient ideas from not only our educational systems, but our ‘society,’ as their makers were far more morally tainted and intellectually deficient than we are today. We can then proceed with ‘modern’ understandings of justice and fairness until we’ve built utopia! The small, nitpicked problem with this perspective is that it’s dead wrong in every way.

Most people view history as ‘didactic,’ as a teaching resource, with its characters combating flaws in their static human nature. People 2,300 or 4,000 or 16,000 years ago were just not that different from us. Their examples and experiences can tell us how to see and confront problems involving the same flaws in ourselves. Their thoughts on the deepest questions of life help us to see from new eyes. This description, though, is not entirely incompatible with the Progressive’s view.

Knowledge would thus compound over time and those who contain more of it –meaning those who are more educated- are the most advanced morally. They should thus lead and organize the rest of us in a sort of technocratic aristocracy. It’s spooky that the Progressive’s thinking stops here and all of their policies (from Obamacare to environmentalism to labor) follow the goals set by the academic elite, the methods acceptable to the academic elite, and direct enrichment/empowerment/employment of the academic elite. One can make a very detailed historical critique of this mentality and show well how immoral and stupid the ‘rule of the virtuous’ has been. The Progressive rejects it because, in his view, the educated have learned from those experiences and won’t screw it up this time (when they do, men like Obama and Carter blame the public for not being as subtle and sophisticated as them). The Progressive would have to check his ego if he had taken his thinking one more step, as most people do.

That step is considering the implications static human nature has on individuals’ experience. It is to say that, as human nature remains the same, a person’s experience also remains the same. Naturally this is not an economic judgment because not everyone acquires the skills to thatch a roof, churn butter, build a computer, or genetically modify a pear tree. It does imply that everyone, everywhere, pan-temporally is confronted with the same metaphysical questions and the same interpersonal situations. Everyone that has ever been has had the same capacity to answer the Book of Job’s question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” because they all operated entirely on relativism.

What you find to be “good” and “bad,” positive and negative is entirely based on what you have encountered and personalized in your experience. For example I’m currently out of milk. I have to drive my car for five minutes to the store and spend some insignificant fraction of my wealth to purchase a pasteurized, refrigerated, attractively-packaged gallon of 2%. I can’t help but see this as a burden. I’m behaviorally comparing my situation to my childhood, when my mother always kept milk in the refrigerator and I had no idea where it came from. In short I don’t have magic milk and I see that as a tolerably bad thing. Similarly, someone who had to raise their own cow and milk it themselves -having had someone else do it earlier in their lives- would see their situation in the same light of tolerably bad. Despite major differences in the quality and speed of access to the product, our attitude and the experience we take away is pretty much the same. Even if my milk had always been delivered for me, I’d still have to wait for it to get there, etc., and I’d be even more particular about the burden of pouring and tasting my milk. Perhaps I’d be turn my attention to its quality, whether it was grown with “hormones(!),” what the attitude (happy or sad) the cow had, etc.

Here are more examples of this equivalence (be sure to think from the appropriate cultural perspective):

-‘Safety-net’ advocates said a century ago that a federal government spending 4-7% of the national income can’t effectively help the poor. Today, ‘Occupy’ moonbats say with the same ferociousness that a federal government spending 53% of the national income can’t effectively help the poor.

-George Takei says that North Carolina’s decision to not pay gays for coupling is a “shame.” I’m sure that was the attitude of passive onlookers as their town’s stableboy was hanged for being in some way queer.

-The complacent attitude about Michelle’s vacations: “Well she is first lady” with a shrug. The attitude of those who carried Xerxes’ throne on their backs: “Well he is a god” without, of course, a shrug.

-Disapproval/defense of abortion today, disapproval/defense of drowning ‘unfit’ babies yesterday.

-Present disapproval of what we call 'public nudity,' the Puritans’ disapproval of women rolling up their sleeves for work.

-I’ll add more as complaints roll across my Facebook home page.

                I don’t mean to make the situations equal, I mean to equate the attitudes about different situations. From our own perspectives we view things as more severe/reasonable differently than others, especially our ancestors. A person’s attitudes about scope and scale are completely relative their past experiences alone, not the past experiences of the species. One may spend his whole life in the attempt to internalize the conditions of a single place at a single point in history, but no one can presume to speak for the broad experience of humanity. This is where the Progressive fails in his ideological hopes to remake the world. He overestimates his personal experience and actually believes his professors’ egotistical tangents about him being “elite.” This makes him quite a bit more unwise than the rest of us as he would reject potential gains from the 'wisdom of the ages.'
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Further reading on this subject:
-Thomas Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions" 
-Steve Pinker's "The Blank Slate" 
-Ralph Emerson's "History"