The history of silly things men say
about women (and women say in response) is a wonderful example of errors coming into the world in opposing pairs, and the Gospel threading the needle between them.
Reading Rosemary Agonito’s History of Ideas on Woman, one can trace
the seesaw of opposing stupidities. (Though Agonito herself never recognizes the
point of balance and social health which Jesus represented, around which these
maelstroms of heresy have swirled ever since.)
The whole book demonstrates, in a
back-handed way, the sexual sanity of the Christian tradition, and how the West
(and the world) has lost that sanity when it has forsaken Christ. One gets a taste of that sanity when sensible
Christian thinkers like Aquinas and Locke are anthologized. (Agonisto never notices that sanity, often
repeating her assumption that Christian tradition has it in for women, without
noticing how her own texts contradict her.)
But here I will concentrate on two opposing philosophers: the
misogynist, Arthur Schopenhauer, and the Enlightenment feminist, John Stuart
Mill.
I am shocked, frankly, as the sheer stupidity of many of the "geniuses" in this book, and the opposite stupidity of Schopenhauer and Mill in particular. (Despite stiff competition from the likes of Engels and Freud.)
I am shocked, frankly, as the sheer stupidity of many of the "geniuses" in this book, and the opposite stupidity of Schopenhauer and Mill in particular. (Despite stiff competition from the likes of Engels and Freud.)
Schopenhauer on the Frailty, Frivolity, and
Ugliness of Women
I did not expect to like
Schopenhauer’s attack on women or find it intellectually persuasive. It may be unfair to blame a man for the
tyrants who later cherry-pick your work, but “Hitler’s favorite philosopher” cannot be an easy distinction for Schopenhauer to live down.
But frankly, Schopenhauer lives down to it in this
piece.
Let’s give a first run of six paragraphs to get
a feel for the philosopher’s approach to the other sex, and to his style of
reasoning in general:
“One need only look at a woman’s shape to discover that she is not intended for either too much mental or too much physical work. She pays the debt of life not by what she does but by what she suffers—by the pains of child-bearing, care for the child, and by subjection to man, to whom she should be a patient and cheerful companion. The greatest sorrows and joys or great exhibition of strength are not assigned to her; her life should flow more quietly, more gently, and less obtrusively than man’s, without her being essentially happier or unhappier.
“Women are directly
adapted to act as the nurses and educators of our early childhood, for the
simple reason that they themselves are childish, foolish, and short-sighted—in
a word, are big children all their lives, something intermediate between the
child and the man, who is a man in the strict sense of the word . . .
“With girls, Nature has had in view what is called in a
dramatic sense a “striking effect,” for she endows them for a few years with a
richness of beauty and a, fullness of charm at the expense of the rest of their
lives; so that they may during these years ensnare the fantasy of a man to such
a degree as to make him rush into taking the honorable care of them, in some
kind of form, for a lifetime—a step which would not seem sufficiently justified
if he only considered the matter. Accordingly, Nature has furnished woman, as
she has the rest of her creatures, with the weapons and implements necessary
for the protection of her existence and for just the length of time that they
will be of service to her; so that Nature has proceeded here with her usual
economy. Just as the female ant after coition loses her wings, which then
become superfluous, nay, dangerous for breeding purposes, so for the most part does
a woman lose her beauty after giving birth to one or two children; and probably
for the same reasons.”
“. . . Love, conquests, and all that these include, such as dressing, dancing, and so on, they give their serious attention.”
“This is why women remain children all their lives, for
they always see only what is near at hand, cling to the present, take the
appearance of a thing for reality, and prefer trifling matters to the most
important . . .
“It is because women’s reasoning powers are weaker that they show more sympathy for the unfortunate than men, and consequently take a kindlier interest in them . . .
If you’re keeping score, we have now learned that women are (1) not
built to work or (2) think hard; (3) or achieve much but have babies; (4) whom
they can raise, being like babies themselves “all their lives,” not mature
human beings. Also (5) after a few
charming years (Schopenhauer preferred girls of about 16 when he was 40, though
the feeling was not always mutual), (6) their looks go quickly south, (7) so
Nature has equipped women to catch an honorable fool of a man quickly, then
make him support these (increasingly ugly) human leaches for the rest of their
lives.
My own love life has not been a complete success. But the faces of women I have known, as
friends and friends of family, come to mind – women full of grace, kindness,
generosity, in many cases wit and accomplishment. I am glad Arthur Schopenhauer’s kind no
longer has the power to beat women down – and suppression would not end with women (did not, with Hitler), you
know the type.
As you may guess, Schopenhauer had a poor relationship with
his mother (a novelist). After his
father died, like Hamlet’s mother, she seemed to recover her spirits and a lively social
life too quickly for her son’s tastes.
(“Frailty, thy name is woman!”)
Schopenhauer could, however, write, a talent he no doubt
inherited from his mother (though they disparaged one another’s work). So we soon learn what Nature has furnished women in the form of weapons:
“So that it will be found that the fundamental fault in the character of women is that they have no “sense of justice” . . . Nature has not destined them, as the weaker sex, to be dependent on strength but on cunning; this is why they are instinctively crafty, and have an ineradicable tendency to lie. For as lions are furnished with claws and teeth, elephants with tusks, boars with fangs, bulls with horns, and the cuttlefish with its dark, inky fluid, so Nature has provided woman for her protection and defense with the faculty of dissimulation, and all the power which Nature has given to man in the form of bodily strength and reason has been conferred on woman in this form . . . falseness, faithlessness, treachery, ungratefulness, and so on. In a court of justice women are more often found guilty of perjury than men. It is indeed to be generally questioned whether they should be allowed to take an oath at all. From time to time there are repeated cases everywhere of ladies, who want for nothing, secretly pocketing and taking away things from shop counters.”
I have to admit I rather admire this sentence:
“For as lions are furnished with claws and teeth, elephants with tusks, boars with fangs, bulls with horns, and the cuttlefish with its dark, inky fluid, so Nature has provided woman for her protection and defense with the faculty of dissimulation, and all the power which Nature has given to man in the form of bodily strength and reason has been conferred on woman in this form.”
And it seems to be true that women shop-lift more often than men. It is also true that men shoot up schools more often.
“Because women in truth exist entirely for the propagation of the race, and their destiny ends here, they live more for the species than for the individual, and in their hearts take the affairs of the species more seriously than those of the individual . . . “
What women is this man talking about? Nature may use our urges to preserve the species, male and female. But while I’ve met lots of women who doted upon their grandchildren (like me, thankfully), their children, or even their dogs or cats, I’ve never met one who doted on “the species.” (“Although we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they’re rather stupid.”) Here Schopenhauer is writing, as Chesterton put it, like a dreary second-rate poet, not like an open-eyed observer of men and women.
“It is unbearable to see how proudly and disdainfully a lady of rank will, for the most part, behave towards one who is in a lower rank (not employed in her service) when she speaks to her.”
Hillary Clinton’s secret service detail has reportedly made such observations. Philosophy should be based on something more than anecdotal observations, though.
“It is only the man
whose intellect is clouded by his sexual instinct that could give that stunted,
narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race the name of the fair sex; for the entire beauty
of the sex is based on this instinct.”
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Romeo here is dissing how other
people look?
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How morosely Schopenhauer echoes what Zhuang Zi said thousands of years before him with
so much more style and humor, about how the fish swam away when the famous beauty
approached, and the birds took flight.
Of course our experience of beauty is tied to the sexual instinct. Of course sex makes us aware of beauty –
indeed, as Nick Lane argues, sex fills the world with beauty and wonder – which
would mean much less to us were we to lack a sexual appetite. (As our hunger for food no doubt awakens us
to the beauty of a tomato or a trout breaking the water.)
I
suppose beauty itself may be a delusion cooked up by our appetites. But I would rather think it is God sharing a
secret with us, the “It is Good!” of the original creation. In that case, “There she was just a-walking
down the street singing do-wa-diddy-dum-diddy-do” echoes God’s signature on
creation. Schopenhauer’s morbid
reductionism is nihilistic in a more sentimental and less rational way than any
of the songs on the Pop 40 charts.
 |
What gives us the idea that these creatures are
attractive? Gee, I can't figure it out.
|
“One would be more
justified in calling them the unaesthetic sex
than the beautiful. Neither for music, nor for poetry, nor for fine art have
they any real or true sense and susceptibility, and it is mere mockery on their
part, in their desire to please, if they affect any such thing.”
“Nothing different can be expected of women if it is borne in mind that the most eminent of the whole sex have never accomplished anything in the fine arts that is really great, genuine, and original, or given to the world any kind of work of permanent value. This is most striking in regard to painting, the technique of which is as much within their reach as within ours; this is why they pursue it so industriously. Still, they have not a single great painting to show, for the simple reason that they lack that objectivity of mind which is precisely what is so directly necessary in painting . . . And Huarte, in his book which has been famous for three hundred years, Examen de ingenios para las scienzias, contends that women do not possess the higher capacities. Individual and partial exceptions do not alter the matter; women are and remain, taken altogether, the most thorough and incurable philistines . . . “
The weird thing is, men, who are the artists, persist in thinking women beautiful. Since men unlike women are capable of being objective, maybe that means our objective conclusions are correct?
I’m not sure if an angel can detect the beauty in a woman’s form, but I’m pretty sure there’s something wrong with Schopenhauer’s argument (and his soul, that the angel surely could detect a light year away).
But Schopenhauer does observe something accurately, even if from the wrong side around:
“The difference between the positive and negative poles, according to polarity, is not merely qualitative but also quantitative. And it was in this light that the ancients and people of the East regarded woman; they recognized her true position better than we, with our old French ideas of gallantry and absurd veneration, that highest product of Christian–Teutonic stupidity. These ideas have only served to make them arrogant and imperious, to such an extent as to remind one at times of the holy apes in Benares . . . “
In his crude way, Schopenhauer gets his hand upon a truth here (which continues to elude the editor of this book): that it was the Gospel which raised women. And it is the death of the Gospel that lowers us all.
“Accordingly, it would be a very desirable thing if this Number Two of the human race in Europe were assigned her natural position, and the lady-grievance got rid of, which is not only ridiculed by the whole of Asia, but would have been equally ridiculed by Greece and Rome. The result of this would be that the condition of our social, civil, and political affairs would be incalculably improved. The Salic law would be unnecessary; it would be a superfluous truism. The European lady, strictly speaking, is a creature who should not exist at all; but there ought to be housekeepers, and young girls who hope to become such; and they should be brought up not to be arrogant, but to be domesticated and submissive. It is exactly because there are ladies in Europe that women of a lower standing, that is to say, the greater majority of the sex, are much more unhappy than they are in the East.”
Were “eastern” women in the 19th Century far happier than European women?
We are given so statistics or even anecdotes by which to learn how happy “women of the East” were. Schopenhauer has clearly heard reports, and has even read a book or two (see below). He no doubt knows that in China, the feet of young girls were then broken at about the age of six so they would stay home and waddle in a sexually attractive manner, and not too far. He probably knows that in Japan, girls were given no education, though apparently he does not know that there is a massive sex trade (however monks seemed to prefer boys at times), and women were returned to brothels by the police should they escape. (Until the evil Salvation Army broke things up.) Schopenhauer himself shortly touches on evils done to women in India, though with a bear pretense of sympathy, as we shall see.
“The laws of marriage prevailing in Europe consider the woman as the equivalent of the man . . . “
Schopenhauer sees and decries what feminists, including as we shall read Mill, refuse to see: the positive impact of the Gospel on women.
“In London alone there
are 80,000 prostitutes. Then what are these women who have come too quickly to
this most terrible end but human sacrifices on the altar of monogamy? The women
here referred to and who are placed in this wretched position are the
inevitable counterbalance to the European lady, with her pretensions and
arrogance. Hence polygamy is a real benefit to the female sex, taking it as a whole.”
Schopenhauer’s reasoning here is odd
as it is tendentious. He seems to assume that
prostitution was absent from polygamous societies, though the Bible mentions
numerous prostitutes in polygamous ancient Israel, and it was also common in
India and China.
Why
should polygamy help women? True, the
need for extra wives might absorb the surplus population of women (if too many
men were fighting and dying in wars, or being made captive.) But what if the king marries 1000 women, or
rich businessmen marry three or four each?
What polygamy does is create a market for the sorts of places I saw in
Taiwan like Snake Alley, where lower-class men went for quick sexual
outlets. Young women were ground up like
hamburger in those "assembly line" brothels.
Schopenhauer seems to have forgotten that boys and girls come into the world in equal numbers. If one man takes two brides, all else being equal, that will leave another with none. And given wealth disparities, polygamy inevitably means poor men will go without brides, and will remain a seething militant mass on the boundaries of society.
Schopenhauer seems to have forgotten that boys and girls come into the world in equal numbers. If one man takes two brides, all else being equal, that will leave another with none. And given wealth disparities, polygamy inevitably means poor men will go without brides, and will remain a seething militant mass on the boundaries of society.
Schopenhauer
should read Wild Swans, which tells
what being a concubine even to a general was like, for Chinese women.
“And, on the other
hand, there is no reason why a man whose wife suffers from chronic illness, or remains
barren, or has gradually become too old for him, should not take a second. Many
people become converts to Mormonism for the precise reasons that they condemn
the unnatural institution of monogamy.”
He’s
probably right about why some men convert to polygamous sects like Mormonism,
or, say, Charles Manson’s merry commune, or that of Jim Jones. (Or go to work as Congressmen.)
“ . . . Among all
nations, and in all ages, down to the Lutheran Reformation, concubinage was
allowed, nay, that it was an institution, in a certain measure even recognised
by law and associated with no dishonor. And
it held this position until the Lutheran Reformation . . . “
Again
Schopenhauer puts his grubby finger on a historical truth. A famous philosopher can only give Christianity credit when he thinks he's giving it blame.
“As each man needs many women, nothing is more just than to let him, nay, make it incumbent upon him to provide for many women. By this means woman will be brought back to her proper and natural place as a subordinate being, and the lady, that monster of European civilization and Christian–Teutonic stupidity, with her ridiculous claim to respect and veneration, will no longer exist; there will still be women, but no unhappy women, of whom Europe is at present full. The Mormons’ standpoint is right.”
This paragraph, while reflective of a truly ugly soul, is almost beautiful in its back-handed compliment to the truth.
Now Schopenhauer changes his mind and admits that the goal and effect of polygamy is not to make women happy, but to make them subordinate. He’s right about that.
But if each man “needs many women” (as lovers), what does one do with the fact that sexes come into this world in even quantities? The solution which Mohammed hit upon was perpetual warfare promising the cannon-fodder sex orgies in heaven, leaving the flesh-and-blood women for himself and his fellow leaders. So it makes a certain kind of twisted sense that one of Schopenhauer’s disciples started a war that left so many widows.
That Christianity changed things for women, is an historical fact. That it made them unhappy – well again, what is shocking in this piece of “philosophy” is how scanty the facts on which it relies are. Are Christian women happy? Are girls married off at 9 who stay in the house or put veils on their faces happy? Why don’t we talk to the women and find out!
Schopenhauer never bothers to ask them.
Mind you, I can well believe that some European women were indeed unhappy, like Schopenhauer’s mother. Just as, in quantum physics, it seems the observer can influence that which is observed, so the presence of Arthur Schopenhauer no doubt made the faces of at least some European women fall. I mean, look at that face!
“In India no woman is ever independent, but each one stands under the
control of her father or her husband, or brother or son, in accordance with the
law of Manu. It is certainly a revolting
idea that widows should sacrifice themselves on their husband’s dead body; but
it is also revolting that the money which the husband has earned by working
diligently for all his life, in the hope that he was working for his children,
should be wasted on her paramours.”
“In almost every nation, both of the new and old world, and even among the Hottentots, property is inherited by the male descendants alone; it is only in Europe that one has departed from this. That the property which men have with difficulty acquired by long-continued struggling and hard work should afterwards come into the hands of women, who, in their want of reason, either squander it within a short time or otherwise waste it, is an injustice as great as it is common, and it should be prevented by limiting the right of women to inherit.”
“Take that,
Mom!”
So much for
objective philosophy. Schopenhauer here is clearly consumed with rage at his own mother.
We have seen
what the Law of Manu says about women. Notice the cultural relativism
Schopenhauer engages in here: in India, girls may be married at 12 to men many
times as old, stay at home, never be educated, then be burnt on his funeral
pyre at his death so they can serve their masters and gods in another
life. But Europe is just as bad, or
worse, because look at my Mom, whom I hate.
Odd, given Mrs. Schopenhauer’s experience, that Mill assumes in his later essay just the opposite – that European women had no right to inheritance. It appears that Schopenhauer was right about the fact (at least sometimes), Mill about the right.
“Women need a guardian always; therefore they should not have the guardianship of their children under any circumstances whatever . . . “
“Aristotle explains in the Politics the great disadvantages which the Spartans brought upon themselves by granting too much to their women, by allowing them the right of inheritance and dowry, and a great amount of freedom; and how this contributed greatly to the fall of Sparta . . . That woman is by nature intended to obey is shown by the fact that every woman who is placed in the unnatural position of absolute independence at once attaches herself to some kind of man, by whom she is controlled and governed; this is because she requires a master. If she, is young, the man is a lover; if she is old, a priest.”
In the end, while he masks his
thoughts in culture and references to human history, Arthur is little more than
a hurt boy lashing out, and trying to justify his rage at his own mother, but doing little to
disguise it. (No wonder Adolf liked
him!)
And contradicting himself. If women are equal in marriage, as he claims,
how is it that to obtain a husband is to obtain a master?
And if there is something inherently
vile about seeking a mate, why does Schopenhauer insist that men should seek
several?
So Arthur Schopenhauer blames
Christianity for giving women far too much freedom.
Turn the next page in your skeptical manual (as Chesterton put it), and John Stuart Mill blames the same faith for taking it all away. (And our editor seems to agree with every word. Without ever asking for any evidence.)
Turn the next page in your skeptical manual (as Chesterton put it), and John Stuart Mill blames the same faith for taking it all away. (And our editor seems to agree with every word. Without ever asking for any evidence.)
John Stuart Mill on the Slavery of Women
I didn’t expect much from Schopenhauer, but I
did from Mill. People I respect praised
him. I thought of him as an honest and
no doubt formidable skeptic in the Enlightenment tradition, a man who had done
much to increase the sum of liberty in the world.
“The existing social relations between the two sexes – the legal
subordination of one sex to the other – is wrong in itself . . . it
ought to be replaced by a principal of perfect equality, admitting no power or
privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.”
We begin with Mill’s premise that the
“existing relations” between men and women was simply “subordination” of one to
the other. The odd thing is, Mill never
places the slightest boundary around this claim anywhere in the 23 pages which
Agonisto reproduces. Which women are
subordinated to which men, in what ways, and where? Mill never the cat out of the bag.
Mill spends much time in this essay
explaining his assumptions about liberty, arguing that if anyone desires to take
liberty away from some other class of people, they should be given the burden of proving that there is some good reason for taking that liberty. What Mill never
does in this essay is defend or even explain his casual assumption that women are wholly and have always been subordinated to men. (Though later authors like Darwin and Engels cite facts which seem to call that assumption into question.) So however brilliant his argument may be,
given that it is based on such unclear and undefended premises, it must remain of little value in the eyes of
readers who wish to know the facts before deciding what to do about them.
Schopenhauer was driven to distraction
by the extravagance with which he perceived his mother and sister acting after
his father’s death. Hamlet made the same
complaint about his mother 250 years earlier, not to mention the Wife of
Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Think
how that latter lady would have laughed at the delusions (from her perspective)
Mill engages in:
“Women are wholly under
the rule of men, having no share at all in public concerns . . . ” (229)
Never mind the Wife of Bath, who ruled herself. This was an even odder thing to
write thirty years into the 63-year reign of Queen Victoria, who ruled the entire empire.
“From the very earliest twilight of human
society, every woman (owing to the value attached to her by men, combined with
her inferiority in muscular strength), was found in a state of bondage to some
man. Laws and systems of polity always
begin by recognizing the relations they find already existing between
individuals.” (230)
While most legislators build on
previous bodies of law or the existing condition, as Mill says, many rulers are
also creative, and some deliberately set out to transform the prior state of
society by means of new laws. That is
certainly the case following great religious reforms, in Geneva, and political
revolutions in Philadelphia, Paris, or Moscow.
Is it really true that every woman is always found in a state of “bondage” to men? Mill engages in broad historical generalizations, and most readers probably simply nod their heads and say, “Yes, I suppose that is true.” Bucan he have never heard of matriarchal societies? Herodotus already described both the legendary Amazons and tribes in which relations were more-or-less equal, in the 5th Century BC. (Engels will talk of them a few chapters later, in the simplistic style which he and Marx favored.) Archeologists find graves among little family hunting bands in North America where men and women were buried with, apparently, roughly equal honors. In other tribes women are treated like slaves and proper objects of forcible sexual exploitation. (Falsifying one of Engels' too-broad generalizations.)
Is it really true that every woman is always found in a state of “bondage” to men? Mill engages in broad historical generalizations, and most readers probably simply nod their heads and say, “Yes, I suppose that is true.” Bucan he have never heard of matriarchal societies? Herodotus already described both the legendary Amazons and tribes in which relations were more-or-less equal, in the 5th Century BC. (Engels will talk of them a few chapters later, in the simplistic style which he and Marx favored.) Archeologists find graves among little family hunting bands in North America where men and women were buried with, apparently, roughly equal honors. In other tribes women are treated like slaves and proper objects of forcible sexual exploitation. (Falsifying one of Engels' too-broad generalizations.)
“In early times, the
great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well as the whole of the
female.”
Mill never tries to support such sweeping
claims in what Agonito calls a “penetrating analysis of the historical
subjugation of women.” I assume this means
Agonito doesn’t know much about history, either.
Even in ancient Athens, which had won
great victories over its enemies, high estimates put the number of slaves at up to half the population – not “the great majority.” Most of the ancient world still consisted of
hunters and gatherers, among whom slavery was far less economic – you can set a
hundred slaves to till your soil, but if you give a slave a horse to join you
on a buffalo hunt, that may be the last you see of slave or horse. (Indeed, Engels makes this very point a few
essays along, in different terms.) It is
patently untrue that the majority of men in the ancient world were slaves,
still less the “great majority.”
Aside from failing to offer
evidence for his contentions, Mill has also failed to define “slave.”
Since he hasn’t defined “slave,” and
since he hasn’t offered a word of support for his contention that “the whole”
of the female gender belonged to that category – even Eskimo women waiting for
their husbands to return from the ice with a seal, even Queens Cleopatra, Elizabeth,
Victoria, Catherine, Jezebaal and Wu Zetian – one is astonished that such a
flood of unsupported hyperbole has been taken seriously by so many feminists.
“By degrees such
thinkers did arise, and (the general progress of society assisting) the slavery
of the male sex has, in all the countries of Christian Europe at least (though
in one of them, only within the last few years) been at length abolished, and that
of the female sex has been gradually changed into a milder form of dependence .
. . it is the primitive state of slavery lasting on, through successive
mitigations and modifications occasioned by the same causes which have softened
the general manners, and brought all human relations more under the control of
justice and the influence of humanity.”
What force is mitigating and modifying human mores, bending the arc of history towards justice? Mill does not properly name that
influence in respect, as Schopenhauer does in hatred.
The impulse that reformed the West is
revealed by what happened when the Nazis and the Marxists wholly cast it off a
century later. It can also be seen by
the liberation that springs both from the hands of Jesus himself in the
gospels, and from the work of missionaries throughout the 19th
Century on every inhabited continent – but Mill seems to know little of that or
any history.
Mill and Schopenhauer do agree at
least on this much: that the plight of women has improved in Europe, and that
it is worse in other civilizations (though Schopenhauer defines “worse” as
“better.”)
Mill’s description of the relationship
between husbands and wives is disturbing in an equal and opposite way to that of Schopenhauer:
“Every one of the
subjects lives under the very eye, and almost, it may be said, in the hands, of
one of the masters, in closer intimacy with him than with any of her fellow
subjects, with no means of combining against him, no power of even locally
over-mastering him, and, on the other hand, with the strongest motives for
seeking his favor and avoiding to give him offense. In struggles for political emancipation,
everybody knows how often its champions are bought off with bribes, or daunted
by terrors. In the case of women, each
individual of the subject-class is in a chronic state of bribery and
intimidation combined.” (233)
What grotesque experience of family
life had these two equal and opposite nincompoops suffered?
Mill himself is married by this
time. Does he use bribery and
intimidation to get his way with his wife?
Is he a tyrant? If so, maybe he should
reform himself, instead of telling the world it should reform. If not, by what right does he casually assume
that he alone is righteous, and all other men are such utter louts?
And when were women in the Christian West so utterly under the control of men? At the very least, since the “subject”
woman is cooking his meals, she can poison her husband, or cut his throat as
the genuinely oppressed black woman in Color Purple considered doing. Or she can try to stab him to death in the
night. She doesn’t need to “combine”
with anyone in a plot to do in someone that intimate: and come to think of it,
women usually outlive their husbands anyways.
And often they seem to mourn, for some reason.
And often they seem to mourn, for some reason.
But rational domestic considerations do not impede
Mill in is rush towards unsupported, sweeping generalizations:
“All the moralities tell
them that it is the duty of the women, and all the current sentimentalists that
it is their nature, to live for others; to make complete abnegation of
themselves, and to have no life but in their affections. And by their affections are meant the only
ones they are allowed to have – those to the men to whom they are connected, or
to the children who constitute an additional and indefeasible tie between them
and a man. When we put together three
things – first, the natural attraction between opposite sexes, second, the
wife’s entire dependence on the husband, every privilege or pleasure he has
being his gift or depending entirely on his will . . . “
Aside from the fact that Mill never
supports his sweeping generalizations with evidence, this is such manifest
nonsense (if you read carefully and take what he is actually say seriously) that one has to ask what the feminist movement smokes to abide it.
Women never have female friends? That is what he is actually saying. In what world is that? Did he never so much as read the novels of Jane Austen?
All moralities teach women that they
must “have no life” except in affection to their husbands and children?
Is that what Jesus taught Martha when
he told her not to worry about dinner and let Mary join his theological
discussion group? Where were her husband
and children in that story? When Jesus
commissioned a Samaritan woman as evangelist to her village, gently creating an
identity for her independent of the series of men in her life? Or when he responded to a woman who praised
the breasts of the woman who raised him by saying, “No, there are greater issues for women to think about that mere reproduction and support of
children?“
Mill does make a few good points about society in general, admittedly. People are no longer simply
born into their station in society, he says, but can now choose their paths in
life. Don’t try to force women into
matrimony: offer a good deal as a suitor, respect and freedom and equality for
your wife. But whenever he delves into the realm of
history (on which his shallow Enlightenment view of social reform depends), he seems to prefer cant over truth:
“Historians and
philosophers have been led to adopt (women's) elevation or debasement as on the
whole the surest test and most correct measure of the civilization of a people
or an age.”
This is what is called a "deepism:" a saying that sounds profound, but proves empty if you look closely.
All agree that women were severely
restricted in ancient Athens, far more than in Sparta, her competitor and
sometime ally. Yet Athens remains a
byword for civilization, the chief source of the Hellenic World. (Hellen herself was hardly a free agent.)
Women could occasionally lead armies
in Shang China, a savage civilization in which dogs, horses, camels and people
could be buried alive in the tomb of a high-status woman like Fu Hao. Confucius heightened and humanized Chinese
civilization, yet under Confucianism, women returned indoors. During one of China’s greatest empires, the
Song, with its gorgeous paintings, poetry and artistic lifestyle, the practice
of binding the feet of young women began to take hold.
So civilization can thrive and even reach new heights alongside
the extreme and renewed oppression of women. That
fact may be unfortunate, but it is clearly a fact.
Mill needs, however, such vacuous and
poorly-evidenced historical premises to support arguments like the
following, which haunt us to this day:
“I deny that anyone
knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been
seen in their present relation to one another .
. . What is now called the
nature of women is an eminently artificial thing – the result of forced
repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.”
Here we witness the seed of the modern conceit that gender is infinitely fluid and only defined by the individual.
True, every culture does both suppress and stimulate certain human traits, and every actual state of relations between the sexes is to some extent artificial. But is it really likely that among the tens of thousands of societies that have existed in history, all these sometimes interrelating and often independent people groups express exactly nothing of what human beings are by nature? This seems a far-fetched conclusion. And again, notice that it is reached without offering any anthropological evidence at all.
True, every culture does both suppress and stimulate certain human traits, and every actual state of relations between the sexes is to some extent artificial. But is it really likely that among the tens of thousands of societies that have existed in history, all these sometimes interrelating and often independent people groups express exactly nothing of what human beings are by nature? This seems a far-fetched conclusion. And again, notice that it is reached without offering any anthropological evidence at all.
Mill does get in a good line
on this point:
“Men, with that
inability to recognize their own work which distinguishes the unanalytic mind,
indolently believe that the tree grows of itself in the way they have made it
grow, and it would die if one half of it were not kept in a vapor bath and the
other half in the snow.”
But this is Nation of Islam-style social reasoning. So the nature of women is so
suppressed by the powerful males that we don’t even know what it might be? Living with women all our lives, as mothers,
sisters, aunts, wives, daughters, gives us no clue whatsoever what these
creatures are like – unlike our dogs, presumably, who cannot disguise their true nature – because we are unconsciously or consciously suppressing true femininity, whatever that may be?
Since we can have no clue what women are
really like, we can’t make good generalizations about them, any more than bad ones:
“Women, it is said, seldomer fall under the
penal law – contribute a much smaller number of offenders to the criminal
calendar, than men. I doubt not that the
same thing could be said, with the same truth, of Negro slaves. Those who are under the control of others
cannot often commit crimes, unless at the commands and for the purposes of
their masters. I do not know of a more
singular instance of the blindness with which the world, including the herd of
studious men, ignore and pass over all the influence of social circumstances,
than their silly depreciation of the intellectual, and silly panegyrics on the
moral nature of women.” (243)
Get the idea? Women don’t mug people in the streets so
often, because they are enslaved to men, and the men won’t let them!
Odd that (per Schopenhauer) men do
allow women to shop-lift.
In a later chapter of the same volume,
Charles Darwin points out that among ape species, it is normal for males to do
the fighting, and to stand between the tribe and any dangers that appear. Such observations about animals begin, just
in this volume, with Aristotle. But no
doubt the apes are sexist, too, and so too the work habits of monkeys, bees and ants
tell us absolutely nothing about the biological nature of those species, either.
Notice that Mill again doesn’t offer any
actual evidence about the alleged failure of black slaves to commit crimes, just “I would suppose.” His failure to offer evidence on that point is
of a piece with the whole article. Centuries
after Francis Bacon offered his arguments for empirical reasoning, couldn’t we
do better than throwing out all these naked assertions, like hayseed onto
fallow ground, and call it philosophy?
Are American women still slaves, in
2018, now that most college students are female? Presumably not. So why is it that now, 80% of violent crimes
are committed by men, and 90% of murders?
Does the fact that men earn slightly more than women, the most common
complaint, somehow keep women under wraps and even now prevent them from demonstrating
their true violent nature?
Of course this observation is also
dangerous to modern feminism. Because
the other horn of the dilemma is the gender differences Schopenhauer appealed
to: men may commit more violent crime, but they also invent more, create more
masterpieces, put their lives on the line to protect their mates and children,
take entrepreneurial risks, and so on.
So we are required to keep two thoughts in our minds, but keep them
separate, somehow: (1) That men are evil tyrants who enslave women always and
everywhere; (2) that women, poor darlings, may actually be just as violent as
men, but we can’t know that because they’ve been suppressed!
Mill casually assumes that the
evidential force of thousands of years of human history in thousands of
societies is exactly nill. We don’t have
any idea how men and women differ, never mind biology, never mind experience,
because women are so totally dominated that human nature is crushed into dust.
Darwin was hardly the first person to
notice that males and females differ in nature. Indeed Aristotle is quoted on this subject
in this collection alone. Nor does it
seem implausible that Nature, having formed one half of humanity to care for
little ones, would also infuse nurturing sentiments into that half, while
putting a more aggressive spirit into those whose role would be to catch meat
and defend the tribe.
Modern feminists of course do not welcome such thoughts, but I am surprised to find these sediments mixed into this
stream of thought from its very source, 150 years upstream.
“All the selfish
propensities, the self-worship, the unjust self-preference, which exist among
mankind, have their source and root in, and derive their principal nourishment
from, the present condition of the relationship between men and women. Think what it is to be a boy, to grow up to
manhood in the belief that without any merit or any exertion of his own, though
he may be the most frivolous and empty or the most ignorant and stolid of
mankind, by the mere fact of being born a male he is by right the superior of
all and every one of an entire half of the human race . . . “ (245)
Here we have a creation myth and myth of a Fall written to explain evil in society. I find it less credible than the story of Adam and Eve.
Many years ago, in Jesus and the Religions of Man (2000), I identified radical feminism as a form of what I called “social dualism,” along with Marxism, Racism, and the Tai Ping Rebellion. All such stories invent their own creation myths and tales of a Fall. The claim that some entity in society -- White Man, Capitalists, the Manchus -- is causing all our troubles, and if we can only put an end to that entity, paradise will dawn and everyone will live happily ever after.
Many years ago, in Jesus and the Religions of Man (2000), I identified radical feminism as a form of what I called “social dualism,” along with Marxism, Racism, and the Tai Ping Rebellion. All such stories invent their own creation myths and tales of a Fall. The claim that some entity in society -- White Man, Capitalists, the Manchus -- is causing all our troubles, and if we can only put an end to that entity, paradise will dawn and everyone will live happily ever after.
I am shocked to find so eminent and
reportedly cool-minded a thinker as John Stuart Mill infested with a feminist
form of social dualism to such an extreme degree.
All selfish propensities and
self-worship among mankind derives from the fact that boys are brought up to
think they are superior to all women?
Mill offers this sweeping claim, proposing to explain almost all that
troubles every society on earth, blaming the man as the Bible is said to blame
the woman for all our problems. Yet again, he
offers exactly no evidence to support the claim upon which everything else is
based.
The Genesis account is
actually far more nuanced than this. The
serpent tempts the woman to “be as gods, knowing good and evil,” but then the
woman tempts her husband, and both willingly fall. And then the rest of the Old Testament, let
me repeat this because Agonito tells only that one story, is chock full of
heroic women who do hear from God, and speak to him, and lead armies and
nations and save families. (Thirty-seven
heroines by my count.) But maybe God is
being patronizing by showing women in such a generous light?
Men, at least, are tricksy, precious, as if to deceive even the elect:
“As much obedience is
required from boys to their mother as to their father: they are not permitted
to dominate over their sisters . . . “
But don’t let such surface appearances disguise what’s really going on deep down!
“How early the youth
thinks himself superior to this mother, owing her perhaps forbearance, but no
real respect; and how sublime and sultan-like a sense of superiority he feels,
above all, over the woman whom he honors by permitting to a partnership of his
life. Is it imagined that all this does
not pervert the whole manner of existence of man, both as an individual and as
a social being? . . . The relation between husband and wife is very like that
between a lord and vassal, except that the wife is held to more unlimited
obedience than the vassal was.” (246)
It has been said, “What is asserted
without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” And the wonder of Mill’s demagogic
simplifications, even more than those of Schopenhauer, which rest on an already threadbare empirical basis, is that in all this long piece, he never offers the faintest
hint of evidence – still less the kind of systematic social evidence that alone
could provide sufficient support for such sweeping claims.
Yet like that of Schopenhauer, such
demagoguery, called “philosophy,” swept millions of willing believers before
it. Rosemary Agonito praises this
essay without caution or restraint.
Did Mill act like a sultan towards his
own wife? Does Dr. Agonito’s husband,
whom she thanks in the acknowledgements to this book, act like a
self-worshipping potentate when they sit down to eat?
If so, why don’t these thinkers first
take the log out of their own eyes, before offering to remove slivers from the
eyes of their readers?
If not, why do they insist, like a
female cultist I met in Taipei, that their own home is the New Jerusalem, while
every other family, every other man at least, is corrupt and alone responsible
for social corruption? As children of
their own societies, how did they manage to avoid the universal corrosion?
And so the devil sent errors into the
world in opposing pairs, so that fools would believe the lie of their choosing,
growing in self-righteousness and fury as they contemplated the evil of their
opposite numbers. So that men would blame women, and men blame women, and society as a whole would grow more foolish as the years passed.
You’d think after all these years that
the devil would come up with a new line, though.
"Don't look at me! Look at the woman! She gave me the apple!”
“Look at the man!”
“Look at the snake!”
Even while our most brilliant thinkers recapitulate the errors which the biblical "myth" of Adam and Eve ascribes to our ancient ancestors, the Gospel of Jesus remains the heart of true sanity, about sex as about so much else.
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