AN EXCHANGE of e-mails about The Thinking Housewife was sent to me and I promised to respond to it. The exchange between two men is posted below, with some minor editing changes. My response follows.
Fred writes:
Lots of interesting ideas from this right-wing website. It reminds me of how things used to be — some of what used to be was good, some was bad — a lot of the good got thrown out with the bad.
A huge loss was the idea of a one living wage job per household — this was the good reason to discriminate against women joining the workforce. We should have kept that rule, but with modifications.
Also, on another topic, I think that a great deal of the incivility in Congress is simply because men and women are not used to working together at that level. The women came in, and out went the whiskey, the cigars, and the after-hours poker games — all bad habits, except they were the ingredients for collegiality — now it’s all fighting and working 12-hour days and a new harmony has not yet been found…… I have no solution here.
Personally, I have never been able to compete with women at work. I defer to them as ladies, I have never been able to treat them as equal persons. I have a hard enough time competing with men.
I need support and I can’t find it anywhere. After work, I am expected to be able to take care of myself, and I do not know how to do this.
Alan writes:
Thanks for your reflection on this interesting
webpage.
Chesterton notes that every woman is ‘a fascist in the home’ and that “fair play” is the natural domain of men – not women who are innately unfair (in part because they always play “personal favorites” – their children first). Like you, I have long argued that women’s recent “doubling of the workforce” caused “everyone’s” wage to be halved.
Still, there is something that impresses me as fundamentally mistaken in The Thinking Housewife‘s argument.
Perhaps it is this… “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female…” and in light of this revelation the dawn of The Christian Era created an unfathomably huge breach between the messy, “emergent” state of humankind (in which we now find ourselves) and the passivity/resignation of Antiquity when our homo sapiens operated on “automatic pilot,” taking advantage of what Mother Teresa called “the bundle of grace” with which every child is born. I suppose this “bundle of grace” can be thought of as a kind of “outside-the-uterus placenta” providing us with “natural” accessibility to the “things” necessary for survival. In this view, the Earth itself was a kind of teat and all we had to do was suck away at The Providential Planet – which in turn was informed by The Paternal God of Judeo-Christianity.
Similarly, during humankind’s “post-partum stage” (when we were first becoming self-conscious, reflective, symbolically-semantic beings) all “waste products” could simply be “thrown away” since human beings were few in number and “the nest” — at least “post partum” — was large and accommodating. Now, the constellated choices are these.
1.) We can pretend that regression is possible and revert to complete reliance on a paternalistic, providential God.
2.) We can become responsible co-creators, divinely-inspired to undertake miracles of a kind that dwarf those in the Bible. (For example, any single vaccine has prevented immeasurably more human misery than the sum total of Christ’s healing miracles which — in addition to being profound acts of compassion — were templates for “what was to come.”) If we regress, the dominance/submission hierarchies that characterize The Animal Kingdom will automatically re-assert themselves. Dominance/submission is “what happens naturally” in agricultural-and-hunting/gathering societies. (I am continually amazed: among all species of mammal, bird and fish, the male is always the ornate, colorful sex, whereas the female is always drab. To our abiding credit, humankind has already turned this facet of the “natural order” on its head.)
If, on the other hand, we say “no” to regression and “yes” to co-creation — if, in fact, we become Children of God— we must also become “neither male nor female” for only then can mature friendship prevail. Late in the Gospel of John (Chapter 15), Y’eshua says: “No longer do I call you servants (doulous), for the servant (doulos) does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.” For the time being, I will not explore Y’eshua’s mysterious statement in the next chapter of John (16:12): “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”
Rather, I would mention that being a “servant” is to participate in a lower order of Being than friendship. Where there are servants, there are masters. And where there are servants and masters there are dominance/submission hierarchies. Where there is friendship, on the other hand, there is collateral sharing and “horizontally deployed” common effort. This giant step forward — this transcendence of humankind’s zoological lot — is by no means assured. Like most enlightenment “moments” “gender transcendence” seems impossible at the start. Then, when it is achieved, one looks back and sees that nothing could have been easier.
Here’s our current conundrum:
By nature, human males are belligerent. By nature, human females – having evolved a genetic “understanding” of the “survival advantage” in Befana-like fastidiousness — tend to obsess over tidiness and cleanliness. (If you are unfamiliar with La Befana, I recommend it as one of the world’s greatest fairy tales. Former Christian Brother, Tomie de Paola, has written the “definitive” version.) We have now arrived at the disconcerting juncture where we realize that every military victory is pyrrhic. At St. Mike’s, Marshall McLuhan adumbrated this unexpected reversal-of-“nature” by observing: “To the spoils belongs the victor.” On the other side of “the gender coin” contemporary women have ready access to soap and detergent so that they can now accomplish in a twinkling the same essential “survival advantage” formerly afforded by the obsessive-fixations of domesticity.
So now we confront two new – and pivotal – questions: Will men stop thumping their chests to secure their own tribe’s supremacy? And will women surrender their treasured obsessions? (Did you know that cleaning companies make propaganda calls on Saturday morning, knowing this is The Time when husbands and wives will be arguing over housework?) When each gender transcends its naturally-predicated genetic pre-dispositions – still retaining the ability to celebrate these “strengths” when they consciously choose — we will have gone a long way toward becoming “neither male nor female.” Then, and only then, can some measure of “Christ consciousness” manifest on a higher plane than our merely zoological nature. Which is to say such consciousness can now manifest super-naturally – in that “heavenly” place where there is “neither male nor female” – and where, at last, we become what we are: Angel-Beasts.
Laura writes:
Alan is shooting his cannons in a number of directions here, but let me try to summarize. Once human beings transcend sex distinctions, once men stop thumping their chests and women surrender their obsessions, in other words, once men stop being men and women stop being women, they will achieve a heightened state of consciousness. Human nature will be reborn. We will live on a higher plane. That is Alan’s argument in a nutshell.
I have a question. Could Alan please tell me of one society in history that has done what he foresees?
Has there been one society in any time and any place that has successfully abolished natural sex distinctions? Has there been any society that has flourished at a high level with a matriarchal family structure? Has there been any society of culture and learning, as well as law and political freedoms, that was not monogamous and which Alan considers a worthy model? Has there been any exemplary society in which young children were cared for by institutions and strangers? Has there been any society worth emulating in which fatherhood was anomalous in at least half of the population? Has any society been successfully defended by armies composed of men and women? Has any society defended itself against its enemies without men who thump their chests? Has any society lacked for enemies?
As far as I know, what Alan envisions has never occurred. Given that it has never existed, how does Alan know that it can exist?
The effort to abolish traditional sex distinctions does not lead to no sex distinctions, but new distinctions. Matriarchy, serial polygamy, the institutionalization of childhood, weakened armies, declining political freedom, a loss of civility, a dearth of high culture and learning: these are the result of our new distinctions. Is this what Alan means by “messy” and “emergent?” How does Alan know this is leading somewhere better? Where is his proof?
Seriously, I know washing machines and technology have changed the nature of domesticity, but I didn’t know they had changed human nature. I did not know that domesticity was a thing of the past. Fred doesn’t seem to have gotten the news either: I need support and I can’t find it anywhere. After work, I am expected to be able to take care of myself, and I do not know how to do this. Fred is having trouble adjusting to a messy and emergent life.
Alan believes the traditional family is atavistic and infantile. How can anyone surveying the changes of the last 50 years think this is relative progress? In primitive societies, children are raised by networks of women. In advanced societies, they are raised by both men and women in ordered interdependence. Androgny replaces natural hierarchy with artificial hierarchy, the power of the impersonal collective, the State and commercial institutions.
This idea of “co-creation” is something I cannot get. Isn’t it interesting how the evolutionary view, the idea that consciousness sprang from matter, leads to this idea of “co-creation”? How can anything co-create itself? This brave new world of “co-creation” is the dream of the modern gnostic. The gnostic ignores history and denies reality. [Notice Alan’s disdain for the average man and the average woman, whom he reduces to belligerence and petty obsessions.) Those who trusted a providential God and his design for the sexes were not lazy and child-like; they understood reality. They were grown-ups. Through the force of accumulated traditions and habits and circumscribed roles, they overcame their adolescent rebellions.
Alan distorts Paul’s words in Galatians. The Apostle was referring to spiritual realities and the entry into Christ’s kingdom, where one is admitted not according to whether one is Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, but according to one’s faith in Christ. Paul clearly advocated adherence to the natural hierarchy of male and female:
Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord.
For the husband is the head of the wife,
and Christ also is the head of the assembly,
being himself the savior of the body.
But as the assembly is subject to Christ,
so let the wives also be to their own husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives,even as Christ also loved the assembly, and gave himself up for it (Ephesians, 5:21-26)
Alan would say this traditional relationship of wife to husband is that of servant to master, excluding friendship. Paul would say earthly hierarchy is tempered and ordered by transcendent hierarchy and love. Walk through any old cemetery and look at the loving inscriptions on tombstones. Was there no friendship between men and women in the past? Alan forgets his own heritage. He ignores history.
Eric Voegelin described modern gnosticism as the belief that the order of being can be changed in an historical process. This change, the gnostic believes, is possible through human effort, what Alan would call persevering through this “messy” and “emergent” state. The gnostic believes he possesses a formula or knowledge as to how to bring about this earthly salvation, what Alan would call “Christ consciousness.” The gnostic is in rebellion, against God and human nature. He refuses to accept reality and he has no proof that what he envisions is possible. Fred returns to a home without dinner. What good is a higher state of consciousness in a world without hope, imagination and love?
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