The discussion over my article Why We Must Discriminate continues. I am accused of "utter nonsense" in saying that the work lives of women interfere with family life and the stability of marriage. By the way, if you find the text of these pages too small to read, go to View in the task bar and then Text Size. Click on the larger size.
Alexis de Tocqueville was a social prophet of the highest order. We ignore his acute descriptions of American society at our peril. Here is Tocqueville on women in America: Thus the Americans do not think that man and woman have either the duty or the right to perform the same offices, but they show an equal regard for both their respective parts; and though their lot is different, they consider both of them as beings of equal value. They do not give to the courage of woman the same form or the same direction as to that of man; but they never doubt her courage: and if they hold that man and his partner ought not always to exercise their intellect and understanding in the same manner, they at least believe the understanding of the one to be as sound as that of the other, and her intellect to be as clear. Thus, then, whilst they have allowed the social inferiority of woman to subsist, they have done all they could to raise her morally and intellectually to the level of man; and in this respect they appear to me to have excellently understood the true principle of democratic improvement. As for myself, I do not hesitate to avow that, although the women of the United States are confined within the narrow circle of domestic life, and their situation is in some respects one of extreme dependence, I have nowhere seen…
I have never lived in the Kingdom of Domestic Perfection, but I've caught glimpses of it. Peering through its gleaming gates, I've seen its highways and well-lit interiors. Perhaps you already live there and know all about it. Then I don’t need to tell you that the skies are a consistent blue and it almost never rains. Except when rain is forecast. In the Kingdom, people are strong and industrious. Even in the car or at a desk, they are as healthy and vital as oxen at the plough. If intelligence is the steady application of the mental forces toward a tangible goal, they are highly intelligent. In Perfection, the stream of consciousness is no longer a stream. It’s more like the regulated flow from an engineered dam. And, people are grateful for that. No child is born without a reason. No life is continued without a reason. No love is given and no love received without a reason. Everyone is perfectly equal, as in 1 + 1 = 2 and 15 = 15. The men and women differ only in anatomical respects. The women enjoy football and the men cook. They cook dinner with like aeronautical engineers preparing for a test flight. The children are equal to adults in all essential ways, although it’s true they have physical inadequacies for a few short years. Before long, they make their own food and cure themselves when sick. They are content…
Psychologists have worked hard to prove sadness is pathological. They have redefined the black mood and demonized melancholy. They have packaged pessimism as depression and intensity as disorder.
The attempt to rid the world of sadness is totalitarian in nature. There is no happiness, no humanity even, without sorrow and despair.
Every human being finds a satisfactory answer to the riddle of life, or withers inside. In a world that has turned its back on truth and meaning, this answer is missing. For many, sadness is health. Sadness is resistance. Sadness is the subconscious refusal to surrender.
To take this sadness away by classifying it as disease is to remove the last traces of humanity. A machine never aches. A stone never weeps. The war against sadness calls for its counterpart: the war for sadness, the war for pain, the war for ten million tears, felt one by one.
In an interview in the New York Times today, the photographer Lillian Bassman makes an interesting, politically-incorrect admission. When Bassman was young and newly married, she did not want children. Her husband did. So Bassman went to a psychotherapist. Within six weeks, her desire for children was awakened. She had a son and daughter.
An unmarried woman who chooses another life is not necessarily unhealthy if she does not want children. But, a married woman who lacks all interest in reproducing is psychologically abnormal. Unfortunately, in our world, this lack of interest is considered perfectly healthy, an assumption that keeps women from seeking help. Maternal desire is not always innate – and there is nothing shameful about it not being innate. But, it can be acquired.
Bassman became famous for her artsy erotic images of women in lingerie ads. Gina Bellafonte, the reporter, says Bassman was “advantaged” in her work with women because they felt more comfortable with a female photographer.
If human beings had no need for variety - and for alternating stillness and activity - there would be no need for domesticity. We could live like horses in penned pastures. Day after day, the same grass, the same sky. We could live like well-oiled furnaces, humming and churning without skipping notes. We could be as static as rocks, as un-various as concrete, as free from melancholy and joy as the sand on the beach. As soon as he gets over the shock of his arrival, an infant looks about him. He looks about and wants more. More of something. He will never be satisfied with the same thing over and over. Even his moments of stillness contain the search for variety. Our domestic lives would be formulaic and simple if we were formulaic and simple. The housewife would have nothing to do. She too could join the mechanical flow.
This drawing by the artist Kidist Paulos Asrat is a beautiful rendering of a bird who sings of love all summer long. He does not mourn. He hopes. He does not cry. He woos.
How did we reach the point where we both sanction suicide among the old and yet go to extraordinary lengths to extend their lives? We got here by losing sight of what life is. Roughly 60,000 Americans in their eighties now have open-heart surgery every year, according to a recent study, as reported in yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer. And, more than a thousand in their nineties do. Those surgeries cost Medicare $40,000 to $60,000 each. Medicare will be bankrupt in seven years. And, the number of people in their eighties and nineties is rapidly increasing. Americans appear to believe death is okay if you're dying of hopelessness and despair. Death isn't okay if you're dying from ordinary physical decline.
No advanced civilization has been sustained without barbers. The more the better. There are few things more beautiful or emblematic of strength and order than a man’s neck, freshly-shaven. Some societies have found long hair in men attractive and masculine. These societies have disappeared, as well they should have.
The barber closest to where I live is a nice, but messy person. He sweeps all the day’s hair into a hole in his floor. The hair rains down into the basement, where he leaves it accumulating in a massive hill of human locks. I once took my son down to the basement so that he could use the restroom. We both almost fainted in disgust. The hill was illuminated with the ghostly light shining from the hole above.
For this reason, and out of thrift, I have long been my husband’s barber. I have cut his hair for about fifteen years. I have a few rules. One, I don’t talk sports. Most men enjoy mulling over the latest scores while getting their heads shorn. Tough luck.
I also reserve the right to break out in laughter. There’s a reason why there are barbers. It does take some skill and training. Worse comes to worse, my husband can wear a baseball cap for a few days. Don’t misunderstand me. I take the job seriously. What woman wants her husband to appear with unintentional corn rows?
“Thanks,” my husband said recently after a hair cut. “It needs to be done.” He was quoting Richard Nixon. In his famous conversaton with John Dean, Nixon spoke of the need to use the FBI and IRS against political enemies.
“Oh, what an exciting prospect,” said Dean.
“Thanks,” said Nixon. “It needs to be done.”
Artists give up everything - money, security, normalcy - for their art. Why do they do it? Lech is an Abstract Expressionist painter and a friend of mine. He once explained to me the reason why he has devoted his entire life to art. "I love the smell of paint," he said. "I can never get enough of it."
Bessie Huey was a fixture of the working-class Pennsylvania neighborhood where my husband spent his childhood. Bessie used to show up now and then at my husband's house, which was filled with children, boarders, relatives, cats, and dogs. Boo, hoo. Boo, hoo, Bessie would cry. I saw you all sitting around the table last night and it was so beautiful. It was so beautiful it made me cry. Bessie once called the police to her home with a report of domestic violence. She claimed her husband, who weighed 90 pounds and was incapacitated by illness, was beating her. Bessie was a large woman, about 200 pounds, and strong. No report was ever filed. Bessie, who favored tent-like dresses on her ample frame, appeared to idolize both domestic health and domestic un-health. Bessie was an eccentric. Healthy neighborhoods include eccentrics. It's the sterile, unbalanced place that does not. My husband grew up in a normal place, with children playing in the streets, mothers at home, couples yelling at each other instead of divorcing, and taverns filled with men at night. It was a normal place, not a perfect one. A big reason why it was normal was that it had a healthy economy. There were plenty of factories and plenty of jobs. That town is gone. Much of America is gone. It's disappeared because Americans have decided they don't need an industrial economy. America has given away its factories to the world. The whole stunning transformation of the…
Does a child need both a mother and father in his life? Many people today say, 'Not quite.' I was trying yesterday to explain to a friend who is a passionate supporter of same-sex marriage why the answer is yes, but the reasons are so abstract as to be almost unreachable. Many common sense truths, what C.S. Lewis called the Tao of living, are like that. They lie partly beyond our ken. Then I came across this excellent quote by Felix Adler, author of an early 20th century book, Marriage and Divorce. He said: "The child needs father and mother; but it does not need them only as some think, alternately, now the father's influence and then the mother's or in some things the father's influence and in other things the mother's. The child needs the father's masculine influence and the mother's feminine influence always together, the two streams uniting to pour their fructifying influence through the child's life into the life of humanity."
In this entry, Rose, a “conservative lesbian,” responds to the charge in the previous post that she is self-glorifying and guilty of idealizing woman love. Among her most interesting comments is this: “Eccentrics need a stable society in which to be eccentrics.”
Rose writes, initially quoting the female commenter Kidist Asrat Paulos:
“In a way, she is saying that there is no non-romantic, Platonic (or otherwise) relationship possible between women. She doesn’t say this explicitly, but I have a feeling she believes this.”
I, in fact, do not believe this, and rather agree with what Heather Elizabeth Peterson writes in “Romantic Friendship: Not Just a Code Word for Gay” and “The Misguided Search for ‘Homoeroticism’ A Plea for Research on Friendship.” As you’ve stated, the sexualization of our culture has helped destroy the possibility of nonsexual closeness. A modern Wordsworth would hide the extent of his love for his sister for fear of accusations (as I have read about William and Dorothy) that his regard was incestuous.
The following is a critique of the widely prevalent notion that the ideal life for a woman is one of “balance,” the judicious mixing of career and home. I call this the “Balance Myth,” one of the central ideas of mainstream feminism.
On the face of it, “third-wave feminism,” as it is known, seems reasonable, an appealing counterpart to middle class virtue. In fact, it normalizes the radical tenets of feminism. Thanks to the Balance Myth, the casual neglect of children, marriage and home are now mainstream phenomena. This seemingly harmless idea wears a soft and pleasing exterior. But, it offends exactly what it purports to uphold: the intelligence of women and their innate desire for meaningful work.
This article in today's New York Times states an amazing fact. Apparently, female artistic directors and literary agents have a tendency to discriminate against female playwrights. Are women naturally more competitive with other women? If so, the more women in positions of influence the harder time women trying to break in will have. In other words, the idea that women will be kinder to women is false. Or do women agents, sick and tired of the feminist claptrap that lands on their desks, secretly wish to purge the field of all women? Whatever the answer, the solution is this: Feel sorry for women. Here's another question: Is it possible for artistic endeavour to survive in a world where people are charting its progress?
James M. writes:
Your piece on clouds reminded me of a passage from one of my favorite obscure books: V. M. Yeates’ Winged Victory, a semi-autobiographical novel about RAF pilots during the Great War.
It climbed well, and in a minute reached the cloud layer, which was at fifteen-hundred feet. After a few preliminary obscurings he was involved in the grey deleting mist. The world had gone; dissolved into intangible chaos. Nothing had form except the aeroplane and himself and perhaps that queer circular ghost of a rainbow that sat in the blankness in front. Every motion had ceased, for all the roaring of the engine. Nevertheless, he knew by experience that in this no-world it was necessary to keep the pitot at eighty or more, and the joystick and rudder central, or bad sensations as of dizzying flopping would follow. The mist grew darker. He put his head in the office and flew by his instruments. He kept the speed right but he could feel that all was not well, without being able to tell what might be wrong. The mist brightened. He came suddenly into sunshine. A cloudless blue sky arched over a gleaming floor of ivory rocks. It was all around him in the twinkling of an eye, and the grey chaos away in another universe, a million years or a few feet distant. The two sphere were as close together and as far apart as life and death. He saw that he was flying with unintentional bank.
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Kristor writes in response to my comment about the need for praise:
I wouldn’t worry too much about getting attached to compliments. Let them register. After all, their ultimate effect in a basically duteous person will be to raise the bar you set yourself to hurdle every day. Am I right? Plus you’ll never give yourself credit for them anyway, never leave them on the plus side of your personal balance sheet. Right? You’ll say, “Oh, it wasn’t me; all I did was interfere with the Lord less than usual.”
What counts, what makes the difference, indeed all the difference in the world, is the direction of one’s ultimate orientation. For those who are oriented horizontally, along the plane of the mundane, the world’s effects will affect them by pushing them about therein, to no ultimate relief. For those whose orientation is even a little bit angled up toward Christ’s pure orthogonal to the mundane, the world’s effects will affect them by pushing them about in the world and pushing them up a bit on their diagonal. The closer we approximate to Christ’s orthogony to the world, the more profound this effect, and the more delightful it will be. At the apotheosis, we will see that every worldly experience is radiant with uncreate light; we will enjoy creation as God does.
A purely worldly person, if such there be, refers everything to the world, and is entirely entrapped. Such perhaps is the fate of say Richard Dawkins; it is the Hell C.S. Lewis describes in The Great Divorce, a shadow world of deficient actuality. But almost no one I think is purely worldly; almost all of us want to get out of this shadow world, and into the high bright solid light at the top of the mountain, where our world is no longer obscured, but able at last to be fully itself.
I can’t figure out whether Numenius thinks we should be on the peak looking at the boat, or vice versa. Either way, one would be far from the hurry, noise and commerce of the shore. Having spent a lot of time in both situations – wave-tossed and perched on high scarps – I can say with confidence that both are fit places to open and cleanse the doors of perception.
Laura writes:
Yes, Numenius was unclear. I think whatever he meant it involved extreme isolation.
On the subject of compliments, I come from a long Irish tradition of treating them with embarrassment or sarcasm. According to this worldview, which is genetically transmitted, it is presumptuous to see any truth in them. They must be doled out and received sparingly for fear of creating an even minimally self-supporting ego. For instance, if someone tells you have made a great meal or they like what you are wearing, you just sort of shrug your shoulders and grimace. That means, “Gee, thanks!”
I think there are some who are purely worldy in their waking hours. Only at night, in their sleep, do they escape what you call “the shadow world of deficient actuality.”
Clouds are cheap. Wherever you are, they entertain and enshadow, magnifying to immense proportions the proposition that life is ever-varying shades of grey. Boredom is just a state of mind when there are clouds in the sky. The plumes, puffs, phantasms and pillows parade across the local heavens. Few days are completely bereft of clouds in May and June, at least where I live. Brides keep planning their weddings as if thousands of June weddings hadn't been obscured and dampened by banks of Cumulonimbus. This is cloud-denial, a common psychological disease. Cloud deniers always act surprised when spring is cloudy. They have a fixed, illusory image of a cloud-free spring that only the right psychotropic medication could cure. Cumulus clouds are to June what snow is to January. They form in the lower atmosphere and sometimes extend in massive vaporous monuments upward into the stratosphere. Cumulus mediocris look like shredded cotton balls. Cumulus humilis are more reminiscent of clotted cream. Cumulus congestus create muscular heros, suggestive of so many shapes it is not surprising Zeus was believed to create the image of his wife, Hera, out of a cloud. The cloud was violated and Centaurus thus conceived. Each Cumulus cloud is "the visible summit of a towering transparent column of air - like a bright white toupee on a huge invisible man." So says Gavin Pretor-Pinney in his wonderful book, The Cloudspotters Guide: The Sciene, History and Culture of Clouds. Clouds satisfy both the scientist and…