Uncategorized

On Gentleness

Pore through history and you'll find no record of it. Energy, initiative, will, ideas, conflict – these seem to be the decisive factors in human affairs. Gentleness is an inconspicuous and private thing. It’s hard to describe exactly what you've received when you've been its beneficiary. One wouldn’t want to live in a world governed by gentleness, but to live in a world short of it would be like living in a city without trees. Gentleness is especially feminine. A woman who has never expressed at least some of her powers of tenderness has not fully lived. It’s as if she had never walked. Gentleness, which I myself have by no means mastered, is both inborn and acquired. It can be unlearned and erased. If one lives in a culture that prizes only assertiveness and energy, one may lose the essential thing. Gentleness is low-wattage. With a surge of power, its filaments break. Some people go to therapists in search of lost gentleness, either the ability to receive or to give it. Gentleness is not simply soothing. It’s mental thing as well, a form of understanding and higher awareness with its own golden mean. Properly attuned, its objective is the buried truth. Improperly attuned, it becomes bothersome, meddling, sentimental, and indulgent. Behind the achievements of civilization – the masterpieces, the monuments, the battles, the great works of thought – the hidden influence of the right sort of gentleness lives. It's unrecorded. It's received public acclaim…

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June 16, 2009
Feminism / Traditionalism

Virginity for Sale

Mark Richardson, at Oz Conservative, has interesting commentary on a feminist's reaction to a Roumanian woman who auctioned her virginity on the Internet for $20,000. To a feminist, a woman's chastity could not conceivably be more significant than a man's.

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June 10, 2009
Feminism / Women and Work

Girlie Brown

  The American Philosophical Society, Oxford University Press and Smith College seem far removed from the mass appeal of Cosmopolitan, the trashy women’s magazine that glorifies sex, career and the unremittingly plunging neckline. But, in a world in which discriminating taste is non-discriminating, whatever is popular must be good. Oxford, you see, is the publisher of Jennifer Scanlon's recently-released Bad Girls Go Everywhere, the biography of Cosmo’s former editor, the jet-setting Helen Gurley Brown, famous for saying "Good girls go to heaven; bad girls go everywhere." The philosophical society provided research funding to Scanlon, a professor at Bowdoin College. She did her historical digging among the treasured Helen Gurley Brown Papers at Smith.  These estimable archives must include at least some of Cosmo’s vast stores of semi-pornographic cover photos, as well as precious manuscripts of Sex and the Single Girl, Brown’s best-selling 1962 book that helped single women adjust to a life of promiscuity and raw ambition, paving the way for Carrie Bradshaw. In the book, Brown called the housewife and mother a “parasite, a dependent, a scrounger, a sponger … a bum.”   Brown grew up poor in Arkansas, a fact which apparently excuses naked ambition and greed. For a time, it seemed the young girl was destined to a life of what Scanlon calls “gender conformity.”  Instead, she discovered the stupendously fulfilling vistas of the workaholic office drudge and passed on her enthusiasm for being single and carefree. Scanlon includes interesting insights into the period of Brown’s ascendancy, a time…

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June 10, 2009
Important Warnings

A Personal Question

  Have you donated blood lately? If you have, then you know the world has moved one degree closer to full-bore insanity. In addition to asking extensive questions about your medical history, your sexual history, your drug use, and your recent travels, the American Red Cross now asks a real mind bender: What is your biological gender?  The question comes after you have already identified yourself as male or female. That's right.  Say you are a 280-pound, six-foot hulk with a gravely baritone, stubble beard, 76ers sweatshirt and size-14 sneakers. Or, perhaps you are a 115-pound church volunteer in a floral dress and white high-heeled sandals. The Red Cross will not be so bold as to make any assumptions. You will have to tell them you whether you are, in fact, a man or a woman. Even though you have already told them that you are a man or that you are a woman. Under federal regulations, blood donations are not accepted from homosexual men who are sexually active. The only conceivable reason why this question has been added is to further identify homosexual men, despite the many other questions regarding sexual experience, such as, "Have you ever had sex with a man who has had sex with another man?" But, one has to wonder whether its inclusion isn't deliberate indoctrination, part of the ongoing effort to normalize the infinitesimally tiny underclass of sexual misfits known, incomprehensibly,  as the "transgendered." This is an offense to donors. This is an offense to common sense and decency. Volunteers give of…

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June 5, 2009
Uncategorized

The Anti-Neighborhood

  Perhaps you live in a normal neighborhood. Maybe you reside in a peaceful corner of America where people still make eye contact, wave hello and share meals during a crisis. If you do, cherish what you have. I was talking to an elderly woman in her mid-eighties not long ago, a person who has lived in the same house in a pleasant suburban neighborhood for more than 50 years. “You must know lots of people on your street,” I said. She is a gracious and uncomplaining person. But, she looked at me and said, “I don’t know them at all. If I fell down in the driveway, they wouldn’t come and help me up.” Life is not a bed of roses, it’s true, and people have important things to do. But, something inside me rebels at the thought of an old person ignored. I can’t adjust to the idea. I like to think that if there were a few women at home, this would not have been true for this widow. Neighborhoods thrive on trust, common habits and time. A non-neighborhood is a place where people may still possess common habits and trust but lack the time to forge connections. The anti-neighborhood is different. There, people have lost the social instincts. Autism becomes collective. When people receive a basic level of social stimulation from television, it cuts into the desire for simple interactions. But, after a while, it can rob them of all…

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June 3, 2009
Uncategorized

The Vital Death

  When the Vitalist stage of social decline sets in, money is no longer the ultimate status symbol. Energy is. To the most dynamic goes the prize. Illness and dying are notoriously non-energetic conditions. Hence the growing intolerance for what was once considered fairly normal - the slow and painful death. Suicide becomes "an end-of-life decision." Here's the sad story of Rona Zelniker, who joined the growing ranks of suicides last March. When she was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 60, she prepared for her self-termination with the can-do energy and efficiency of someone embarking on a trip or new job. According to the account in The Philadelphia Inquirer, she cleaned out her condo,  put it up for sale, and bought a biodegradable plastic urn for her ashes, which she placed on the kitchen counter. Her son asked for a bereavement leave from his job - before she died. It seemed that Zelniker was completely undone by the prospect of a difficult and prolonged illness, as if she had never mentally prepared for the possibility. Apparently, one can lead a full and energetic life for six decades, but escape some of the brute facts of existence.  Guy Waterman, the famous White Mountain climber and author, was 67 in 2000. He was so defeated by the possibility of not being able to climb anymore that he ascended Mount Lafayette in February and deliberately froze to death. Here was a man steeled for the worst travails on the trail, but not the simple inevitability of age and his own physical decline. Zelniker's children spoke favorably of her decision, critical only…

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June 2, 2009
Feminism / Work and Domesticity

Legal Feminism

  On my recent ballot for Common Pleas Court judges in Pennsylvania, eight out of the fourteen candidates were women. If the trend in law education continues, women could be a majority of lawyers in the coming years. About 47 percent of law school students are currently female, but women have been gaining steadily in undergraduate enrollment and graduation over men. Of course, overall women lawyers do not accrue the same power and success as men. That’s for a funny reason. They just happen to be women, not neutered automatons. They just happen to bear and raise children and to enjoy caring for their husbands. Still, feminist legal organizations remain at a fever pitch about the under-achievement of women lawyers. At an “unprecedented and historic summit” earlier this month in Texas, 150 top women legal leaders adopted the "Austin Manifesto," calling for the elimination of "the barriers that have thwarted the advancement of women in the legal profession for the past several decades."   They are demanding that 30 percent of equity law partners, tenured law professors and general counsel be women by 2015 and 10 percent of equity partners be minority women by 2020. They also intend to strong-arm the profession to "restructure the compensations systems to reward the full range of contributions by attorneys." That's code for over-compensating those who work less. With more women in top positions, we are sure to get more of the sort of legal crusading typified by Sonia…

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June 2, 2009
Crusoe / Traditionalism

The Coming Storm

  Over at  Lawrence Auster's View from the Right, in an interesting thread on whether traditionalists should withdraw to safe territory or fight it out at home, commenter Vivek G., in advocating the latter option, talks like a true Crusoe:  And we need to begin wherever we are. There can be informal co-operation amongst various traditionalist movements even across national boundaries, but that may just be desirable, not a must. If we fail in this, we have to fall back on the John Galt option. Since the necessary homework is more or less the same for both of these options, it can be advantageous to try the take-over option before the other.  I concede that this may sound fascist to Liberals, Muslims, and Commies; but what can one do if this is the only option? And Liberals, Muslims, and Commies call anything and everything they dislike, fascism. But I firmly believe that our society has as much right to survive, if not more, as Liberal, Muslim or Commie societies have. And if they threaten our survival, we must take adequate measures. We have been blind until now to their taking us over. Now it is time for us to be strong enough to take over them. I couldn't agree more. Don't wait for others to join you. Start now, on your own island. 

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June 2, 2009
Crusoe

Crusoe-ing

   You are far from civilization. It’s pointless to ask why or how you got here. Like Crusoe, you must survive. Perhaps you have a few fellow shipwrecks along with you, your family or chosen friends. If not, the island is yours alone. You rescued some supplies from the ship before it broke apart on the shoals. You have these saving vestiges of the civilized world.  An axe, some saws and knives; a musket and ammunition; a hogshead of stale bread – these things and a few more. A lifetime stretches before you. Never have you felt so puny. Never have you examined the horizon or viewed the waves upon a beach with such hostility and incomprehension. Take a walk. Pummel the sand. Pull your hair and weep. Then put aside your rebellion.  You are alive.  Assuming that a bare subsistence can be had from this island, what is it you most need? Make a list. 1.  Your sanity.  The area of a circle is pi times the radius squared. The fourth president of the United States was James Madison. The longest river in the world is the Nile. You see. Your mind works. This is not genius. This is sense. One thought proceeds from another. There is a cosmos within, orderly and rational, at your beck and call. 2.  Your hands.  They seemed as quaint as spinning wheels and covered wagons. Now you know the truth. You can plant barley, skin a goat,…

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June 1, 2009
Thought and Its Nature

The Idle Thought

  The mind longs to roam. We try in vain to keep it running toward a fixed destination. The path across a meadow, a trail through the woods, the rocky descent down a steep ravine: these beckon and it yearns to follow. It wants to remember. To wonder. To wander.   When we speak of freedom of thought, we usually mean the freedom to think certain things, the freedom, say, to argue the claims of the weak against those of the powerful. But, there is another freedom of thought, scarce in a world of political liberties. That is the freedom to think at all. The act of reflection has lost its rightful place. The stream of consciousness is no longer a stream. No law or program, no frantic pace of living or economic imperatives stopped its flow. At bottom,  respect for ideas is not itself an idea. Nor does it spring from idea. At the crux of things intellectual is something profoundly different from idea. What is it?  

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May 29, 2009
Work and Domesticity

Vital Statistics

  When President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law earlier this year, he once again fueled the myth that women sufffer from widespread pay discrimination. In truth, there is no serious wage discrimination against women and there is ample reason to believe that the end of customary employment discrimination in favor of men has forced many women into the workforce, led to dramatic declines in fertility and suppressed the wages of men. Women have been far and away the primary beneficiaries of any gains in real wages over the last 25 years. From 1979 to 2006, real wages of men declined by two percent, while they increased by 24 percent for women. (See chart on median incomes here.) The differences are the most dramatic at lower income levels, with male high school graduates experiencing drops of 15 percent and comparable women's wages rising by four percent. Wages for college graduates rose by 17 percent for men and 32 percent for women, as women became more numerous in higher paying jobs. Economists dispute how much the stagnation of male wages at the lower end has influenced - and been influenced by - employment gains by women. It is interesting to note that employment of married women of high-earning husbands has increased more dramatically than employment of women at lower education levels, where men's wages have declined.  

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May 29, 2009
American politics

The Envied Michelle

Time Magazine's latest admiring article on Michelle Obama highlights the wistfulness of American women in an era of triumphant egalitarianism. Michelle is enviable not just because she has all the clothes and servants she wants, but because after years of career, she is now that rarest of all things: a housewife. According to the authors, Nancy Gibbs and Michael Sherer: After working hard for 20 years, she gets to take a sabbatical, spend as much time as she wants with her kids, do as many high-impact public events as she chooses and, when it's all over, have the rest of her life to write the next chapter. "I don't even know what that is yet," she says, but she'll have choices then, as she has now, that most working mothers only dream of. Of course, it is ludicrous to say Michelle is taking a "sabbatical."  Being First Lady is a job - a difficult and exalted job. Predictably, feminists have complained that she has sacrificed too much of herself for her husband's career. Apparently even having a president for husband does not warrant giving up one's job in public relations. How long before we have a First Lady who leaves the White House with a brief case every day?

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May 28, 2009
Work and Domesticity

Sense and Non-Sense

  A recently-released survey of American employees showed that 41 percent believe it's better if the "man earns the money and the woman takes care of the home and children." This figure, downplayed by writers of the report as evidence of weak support for traditional roles, is strikingly high given the constant veneration of career women in the press and the historically high numbers of women in the workforce. Many more people than is generally acknowledged lack confidence in the current model for family life.     Surveys that examine the effects of the cultural revolution of the last 100 years rarely take into account the full significance of the changes, and often blatantly downplay them. This report by the Families and Work Institute, funded in part by IBM, is no exception, presenting with rosy optimism figures that confirm the popularity of the dual-income model. A majority of the respondents, for instance, said that a mother who is employed outside the home can have "just as good a relationship" with her children as a woman at home, implying that the most important thing about the parent-child bond is the personal satisfaction it gives to parents.   The report confirms the growing feminism of men, but concludes that men still endorse traditional sex roles in higher numbers than women. While 80 percent of the women who responded said working women can have just as good a relationship with their children as mothers at home, only 67 percent of men did. A staggering 25 percent of women…

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May 27, 2009
Feminism

Are Men More Feminist than Women?

  Feminism is not a “women’s movement.” Women have been its most outspoken and visible proponents, but men have enthusiastically embraced its central ideas and worked to fulfill them. Men may even be the greater feminists today. Feminism has meant a loss of status, of political power and of earning potential for men, but these are things they have willingly conceded for other benefits. Women have succeeded in ways they never could have imagined in convincing men that the central project of a woman’s life is easy and relatively unimportant.  One of the principle ideas of the feminist interpretation of history is that men are innately threatened by women in positions of power.  Recent history shows this is not true. Many men complain about the arrogance and machismo of powerful women, or the stupidity of affirmative action, while at the same time accepting and furthering the culture of feminism. Some do so out of respect for women, or what they consider to be respect, and a desire to atone for the sins of their fathers. The past is entirely disgraceful, and the life of the traditional woman a veritable hell. The thousands of years in which women devoted themselves to home, children and community were one long period of barbarity. Ready sex without marriage is hard to turn down. Obviously, many men approve of the sexual freedom feminism has granted. The ancient dream of a chaste bride lives on, but is now rarely fulfilled.  It’s still a private dream, but there…

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May 26, 2009
Uncategorized

Radical Compassion

 

It is not so absurd to say, as another television star once did, that Oprah Winfrey is “one of the most important political figures of our time.”  Here is an immensely powerful woman who is in the deadly serious business of remaking America, one heart at a time.  Read on for the second part of a four-part essay on the Oprah-ization of America.

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May 20, 2009
Famous Couples

Adam and Eve

 

Should God create another Eve, and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee Would never from my heart. No, no! I feel
The link of nature draw me: flesh of flesh,
Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.
Paradise Lost (Book IX, 908-916)

All famous couples are better understood in light of the famous first couple. We carry within us knowledge of Paradise, as if the bowers draped with vine in which Adam and Eve consorted were our former home. We bring the expectations Paradise has aroused into this lesser world.

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May 19, 2009
Uncategorized

Is Domesticity Dull?

People say the domestic life is narrow and stultifying, a prison for the intellect. Feminists have long made this claim. I guess you could say that’s true, but only if you think human history is boring, the laws of nature are boring, love is boring, birth is boring, children are boring, personality is boring, the mind is boring, morality is boring, death is boring, male and female are boring, sex is boring, illness is boring, kisses are boring, prayers are boring, literature is boring, philosophy is boring, poetry is boring, God is boring, the seasons are boring, music is boring, trees are boring, sunlight is boring, the stars are boring, snow is boring, dew is boring. If all this is true, the home is not what it appears: a fount of ideas and truths, a university and a museum, a laboratory for the curious, a gallery of all that is human. If the home is boring, life itself is a desert.  

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May 18, 2009
Uncategorized

More on Dust

Kristor writes about the foregoing entry:

With respect to dust, I am with Democritus. If anything made of dust is to be alive to its world, then in some way the dust of which it is made must do likewise. Not in the same way, of course; things are alike, but not wholly alike, or they wouldn’t be discrete.

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May 15, 2009