Against Feminism and the Modern World

Last week Cassandra posted an article praising Ace of Spades for his embrace of the label "feminist." There follows at Cassandra's place a long discussion, involving several of you, which seems to take as read the idea that some form of feminism is compatible with conservatism, and indeed a necessary condition for a just society. I'm disinclined to agree with either proposition.

That is not to say that I think that a just society ought to treat women badly: that would be nonsense. I hope that my respect for all of you, and the women you know I value in my private life, will convince you to take this criticism of feminism as a criticism of a bad strain of ideas, and not an attack on women as a whole. (See "Feminism as Analog to Christianity," below.) I simply believe that the feminist movement is not the way to a just society, neither for women nor anyone else, because it is rooted on some principles that are incompatible with right principles of justice, with our ideas about the market, and with our ideas about the role of the state. The problem is that conservative thinkers are apparently unable to deploy a criticism of the movement that does not seem to be a criticism of women, which has severely damaged them. Yet conceding the ideas means losing the overall debate about the structure of a just society.

Some of the conservative problems may arise because many conservatives don't really like women, but I do. Furthermore, you will find that I am criticizing not just feminism but the entire modern political project.

I recently told Tex that you should always ask a "conservative" what he means to conserve, and a "progressive" what he takes for progress. In my first two sections, I will explain some general principles that I think need to be conserved at all costs. In the later sections, we will talk about feminism more precisely.

I. Just What Is Meant By Equality?

The proposition that Ace offered is based on what he thinks "low-information females" take feminism to be:

1. Women are equal to men; and
2. Women's values and beliefs are just as important as men's; and
3. Women have, or ought to have, ambitions equal to men.

Now, it seems to me likely that a great number of low-information female voters probably believe that's about the extent of what "feminism" is, and that anyone calling himself, or herself, a "non-feminist" is against such things. Which of course we're not; virtually nobody is.

Now recently we have had several relevant discussions about the difficulty of defining terms. One of the terms that we really need to define in order to have this debate is "equality." This isn't just about feminism: Hannah Arendt, the late-20th century philosopher, raised the point more explicitly about what it meant to be Jewish in Europe.

Equality of condition, though it is certainly a basic requirement for justice, is nevertheless among the greatest and most uncertain ventures of modern mankind. Though more equal conditions are, the less explanation there is for the differences that actually exist between people; and thus all the more unequal do individuals and groups become. This perplexing consequence came fully to light as soon as equality was no longer seen in terms of an omnipotent being like God or an unavoidable common destiny like death. Whenever equality becomes a mundane fact in itself, without any guage by which it may be measured or explained, then there is one chance in a hundred that it will be recognized simply as a working principle of a political organization in which otherwise unequal people have equal rights; there are ninety-nine chances that it will be mistaken for an innate quality of every individual, who is ‘normal’ if he is like everybody else and ‘abnormal’ if he happens to be different. This perversion of equality from a political into a social concept is all the more dangerous when a society leaves but little space for special groups and individuals, for then their differences become all the more conspicuous.”

(Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism.)

Now what Arendt is saying here is difficult to get at first pass. She starts off by saying that "equality of condition" is "a basic requirement for justice." But what does she mean by "equality of condition"? It isn't that conditions be equal for everyone -- that's just what she says isn't achievable, and gives rise to dangerous trends (such as thinking the poor to be inferior, or the rich to be sneak-thieves). What she means by it is a very limited form of political equality, without any regard at all for what people do with it, or how they end up: "otherwise unequal people have equal rights."

Yet we still have some definitions to make, because we need to ask what it means to "have equal rights." What is a right? (These are little questions, small matters, aren't they? What is 'equality'? What are 'rights'? But on these little things the whole world turns.) Now there are several answers to that question that people have proposed, some of which are better than others. My own (which I take to be Jefferson's, but also Robert the Bruce's, and the idea behind Magna Carta) is that rights are pre-political conditions for the formation of a polity: that is, they are the things that a group of people agreed to as conditions for accepting a government, the defense of which is the purpose of the government, and the abrogation of which makes the government illegitimate and fit for overthrow. But that is not the only answer we could give.

Another discussion we have had recently concerns Rousseau's project. Now Rousseau was a very bad man, as he himself was first to admit. He clearly despised himself, and in part because he knew he didn't live up to his own ideas. His ideas, though, have been very persuasive to many people, and form the root of a very broad current of modern thought. In part this is because he did a very wise thing, and expressed his ideas not in the form of an argument -- not as I am doing here! Arguments like this are a waste of everyone's time -- but in a novel. The novel is called Emile, or On Education, and it is one of the most influential books ever written.

Rousseau makes the argument that our rights arise from what it takes to perfect a human being. Now this has roots in an older, better idea: the idea of Aristotle and Ibn Rushd and St. Thomas Aquinas that there are certain natural rights, which is to say that our natures makes certain things necessary, and therefore we must find a way to have those things. Such things include food and shelter, but also sex of a procreative nature (because we must, as a species, produce the next generation) and a social structure stable enough to raise children (because children must be educated in order to assume their roles in society). That last aspect is Rousseau's staring point: what would it take not merely to raise a child to assume a role in society, but to raise a human being to be morally perfect? Whatever that is, since the end is so high -- the moral perfection of the individual -- it must be a kind of natural right. If you deny them any aspect of it, you and not they are responsible for their failure to achieve this perfection.

There are three things that make this a deadly idea. The first is that it is beautiful. The idea that humans are basically good, and that if only we raise them right they will grow up to be wonderful and perfect creatures, is the hope of every parent. It is also entirely untrue. Many evils are bred in the bone. Many children raised right turn out to be wicked. Some of them do terrible things that their parents never taught them to do. Nevertheless, this is what we wish were true. It is what we hope for our child. It is something we already try to achieve. And thus, it was persuasive.

The second is that it puts the emphasis on perfection. Now all things are subject to the law of diminishing returns. Even if perfection were in fact achievable (which it is not), and if it were merely a question of providing enough resources to the child in the right ways at the right times (which it is not), perfection requires a level of expense that no society can ever meet. The child needs shelter -- but not a shack! The child needs education -- and the very best sort. The child needs health care -- complete and thorough. The child needs... well, whatever it takes to ensure that the child is denied nothing that might stand between that child and perfection. And it has a right to these things, you see, because if we deny them to the child we are taking on any sins it may someday create. We are responsible, because we selfishly denied the resources the child needed to actualize his or her own moral perfection.

The third thing, then, is that the idea puts the responsibility for immorality on everyone except the actor. This surely sounds familiar, and well it should. In fact you see several of our greatest problems as a society rising from this source: the idea of "positive rights," that is, that you have a "right" to be given things at someone else's expense; and the idea that you aren't really responsible for the things you do wrong. These are attractive ideas for many people (perhaps especially for Rousseau! For he was a very bad man, as he himself knew).

So let us return to the original question. What does it mean to have equality, or "equality of condition"? Well it could mean that the rights that the government was structured to protect are extended to you as to everyone else. "Equality of condition" does not mean material condition, and it certainly does not mean that you are as good or as wise or as fat as everyone else. It means no more, on Arendt's terms, than that the government structured to protect freedom of religion and ensure a trial by jury protects your freedom of religion and ensures you get a trial by jury. That is the medieval view, out of which grew Jefferson's view, and mine.

But there is room to go all the way up: "equal rights" could mean that we defend a material right to whatever you need to achieve your own moral perfection, a perfection for which you are not responsible, and whose absence indicates chiefly that you need more material resources to be directed to you (from, necessarily, someone else).

So it will not do to endorse "equality" in a "low-information" way. You have to fight, and you have to fight every time, over the precise meaning of these terms. You have to make sure people understand what is at stake. Getting it wrong here means losing the whole argument, and indeed the whole society.

So one thing I wish to conserve is the idea of what it means to have rights, and a notion of equality that is limited to having equal rights on these terms. That is the first general principle.

II. Against Universality

Another problem with "equality" as a standard is that it implies that everyone should be subject to all and only the same rules. This is very basic to the modern political project. Kant thought that the moral law was self-legislated, but purely rational; and therefore, as reason is the same for all people, it would turn out to be the same not only for any human being, but for any rational agent of any kind. Hegel thought that universality was a basic necessity for any rule to be just. This is a terrible mistake.

Equality can rightly only mean equality of rights, where rights are viewed in the particular way described above. It cannot mean equality of anything else. One thing it cannot mean, for example, is equality of duties. A parent has responsibilities that are unique to that role. They took them on freely (with the obvious exception of pregnancy by rape, which we can break out as a special instance deserving a separate discussion). They are bound by these duties for two reasons: because they chose them, and because they have an obligation to their blood. Someone cared for them as an infant, or else they would not be here to choose and act themselves. It would be immoral to refuse to do for your child what was done for you: that minimum, at least, is owed as a debt from grandparent to parent to child.

This is a general principle that we have lost sight of as a society. Aristotle said that justice means treating relevantly similar cases similarly. Note how different that principle is from the "equality!" that we hear in our own time. First of all, there is the discussion of what is relevant. Take any two individuals and any problem, and ask how the cases are relevantly different. You will come up with a very long list! The only relevant similarity may be the problem (which, by hypothesis, we assumed to be the same -- in actual fact there will be differences in the problem, too).

So what does this principle of justice require? First, that the cases be handled "similarly" rather than "exactly the same way." If a true universal was in play, we would expect exactitude: "For all x, if x then y." But that is not what Aristotle is suggesting. What he is suggesting is that the cases be handled in a way that is not entirely out of proportion, not that they should be done in exactly the same way regardless of circumstance.

And circumstance is the second condition. If "relevantly similar" is a basic condition for justice, then a refusal to consider relevant differences means that you are insisting on injustice.

There are a huge number of relevant differences in any two people. Justice cannot therefore be a set of rules. It must involve practical wisdom, applied to each case as the unique problem that it represents. There can be no universals in justice. What we are looking for is similarities and differences, and each of these need to be taken seriously in order to come to a just result.

The problem with universals is that they destroy this human, and humane, capacity to talk about people as the individual people that they are. They reduce you to a mathematical figure, an x that goes with a y. That application of cold logic to human beings and human institutions lies behind the destruction of so much that we hold dear. Some of you may be following along in this lecture series on Hegel that I suggested to Cassandra. If you aren't, do no more than listen to the episode from Valentine's Day (that is episode 12, from 02-14). You will recognize that Hegel's mode of thought, as presented by this very modern and insightful professor, underlie the destruction of marriage and the family in our society. It is this very modern approach to thinking about these human institutions that is destroying them. The argument is logical, and it is universal, and it is deadly. Human beings require more practical wisdom -- what Aristotle and the Greeks called phronesis, the application of wisdom to particular facts in order to achieve justice.

So another thing I wish to conserve is phronesis. That is my second general principle.

III. On Markets and Freedom

With those general principles in mind, let's talk about something that is really modern: economics. Markets are old, but economics in a real sense did not exist before Adam Smith. Much of what we call the conservative movement is built around a love of these economic ideas, which have produced a prosperity unheard-of in human history. Though I have offered criticisms of existing economic theory elsewhere, which I trust you will keep in mind, here that is not my purpose.

Rather, I want to talk about freedom as it arises from and relates to markets. Now one reason to love markets is that they are exercises of freedom. It is possible both to overstate and to understate this principle. If you want to overstate it, you will ignore the fact that we are usually engaged in the market out of necessity: we have to eat, we have to pay our rent, we have to buy the things we need to survive. Thus, you can criticize the market as an institution of freedom because participation in it is not a fully free choice. It is forced upon you by your nature that you must find a way to be useful to others in order to survive.

But it is also possible to understate the freedom that the market makes possible -- indeed, I just did it. By focusing too much on the fact that you must participate in the market, you lose sight of the wonderful things that the market makes possible. For one thing, you can buy a Harley Davidson motorcycle. These would not exist if it were not for markets. The freedom of the roads is a function of the market that made the Harley possible, and which also created the wealth that was used to make the roads on which a Harley can glide. If you can find a way to make yourself useful enough to your fellow man, you will become free in ways that no human being ever was in decades before. Meanwhile, people striving to make themselves useful produce new forms of music and art, food and drink, clothing and thought, so that the array of choices is ever improving.

Now all of this is based on free choice. If you are willing and able to pay the price, you may transact for anything you wish. Nor is the price fixed: you can offer a different price, and if the seller is willing, transact a bargain.

So one of the criticisms I want to deploy against feminism is a market-based criticism. Ace's formula can't be adopted without debate, but the alternative formula being offered has a more cleanly-defined standard for equality and for freedom. Equality is economic equality (equal pay for equal work given equal years of experience -- about which 'equality' we will say more directly): freedom is freedom to leave the market.

Now that is a nice freedom! We just said that participation was necessary arising from our natural needs -- so in order to have that freedom, you have to arrange to be taken-care-of by someone else. Now that is an economic transaction, viewed in a certain way: you are providing some service (say, the raising of children and the keeping of house) to some other party who will provide for your economic needs in return.

On this reading, what is really being sought is not the freedom to leave the market. It is, rather, a demand that a certain kind of transaction should be treated as respectable. A kind of feminism would criticize this: it would say the woman is being 'kept,' or something similar, and that this must needs be a despicable condition to which no woman ought subject herself. Another kind would endorse it, as respect for the free choice of the woman ought to be at the basis of respect for women in general.

But it should be clear that neither is the correct reading. What is happening here is not chiefly or properly an economic transaction at all. It is the taking-on of an unequal duty: the very one I suggested before as an example, the duty of parenthood. This has nothing to do with economics, which again did not exist before Adam Smith. It has priority. The respect due to the parent is not anything like 'do not show disrespect for an economic choice that I am free to make,' but rather the positive and genuine respect due to someone who is doing their duty. This is the moral sphere, not the economic sphere. Of course it ought to be treated with respect, and the very highest respect. It is not merely an exercise of freedom, but the fulfillment of duty.

Now, there is a reply to this, which is to say that nothing escapes the laws of economics. What right do you have to take on a duty that you cannot support? If you cannot support a child -- either through your own economic activity, or through a blood alliance with someone who both can and will -- how dare you have one? On the other hand, from this perspective, if you can and will ensure that the means are there to support the child, how dare anyone question your free choice?

A lack of questioning your free choice is not adequate, though: a greater respect is due to the doer of duty than that. We have to recognize the overlapping but independent spheres in order to see the behavior in its proper moral light. It is right, on market terms, insofar as the economics have been worked out so that the child can be supported by the parents. But it is right, on moral terms, in a far stronger way. It is the answering of duty, and duty is among the highest calls that we know.

That is the answer to the question of "the freedom to leave the market," but what about the demand for economic equality? That also raises interesting problems.

Take a person who wishes to buy not a Harley but a Yamaha motorcycle. There are reasons to do this: for one thing, Yamahas are at least as well-made, possibly better-made in some cases, and yet they are cheaper due to the popularity of the Harley brand. But let us say you are motivated simply by patriotism. You're an American, and you want to own an American-made bike. Is there anything wrong with that? Possible answers are yes and no.

If the answer is yes, it is because we are once again overlapping the moral and the economic spheres. You may say that patriotism is not a worthy value: that patriotism is really just another name for nationalism, the destroyer of worlds. Or you may say that patriotism is fine, but not American patriotism, because remember Dresden and Hiroshima and slavery and the murder of the Native Americans.

But if the answer is no, we are defending the principle of free choice. It is none of my business why the guy bought the one bike or the other: the money was his, and his reasons are his, and he can do whatever he likes. This freedom is something that many conservatives, and all libertarians, want to conserve.

Yet now look at the question if we ask about what a worker is worth. Take two workers, A and B. An employer is willing to pay A $20 an hour for A's labor, but only $15 an hour for B. Assume (A,B) have spent the same number of years in similar jobs, and have roughly similar outcomes in sales or whatever other means of performance are relevant. One of (A,B) is male, and one female. Is this transaction right or wrong?

Under the feminist critique, it is wrong if B is the female (especially if the employer is male, but even if it is a female, and especially if the reason is that the employer prefers to have male employees). It is less problematic if B is male. But the real problem is, to what degree is it any of our business?

What justifies us in telling the employer that he or she must employ A and B at the same rate? It isn't economic theory. The economic theory of value is that the value of something is nothing other than what the buyer and seller agree upon. If the employer offers B $15/hour, and B accepts, that's B's market value. It's not fair or unfair, it is settled by the only standard economics has to offer.

So we must be looking into the moral sphere, which is the sphere of rights and duties. Is there a duty to pay A and B the same rate? Where would such a duty be located? (Remember, one of A and B is female and one male, but it's not determined which one.)

One place we might locate such a duty is in their dignity as human beings. But if we introduce human dignity to the market, we've got a whole set of problems with the marketplace. The marketplace is about exchanges of valuable things, in which I offer you a good or a service that is worth something to you. What is my dignity worth to you? If the answer is "nothing," you're not usually obligated to pay. (If the answer is more than nothing, let me know and I'll help you set up recurring payments at whatever rate you think my dignity is worth.)

In other words, what we've come to view as "equality" here is not the equality of rights from the first section. It has something important to do with equality of outcomes. But we have no basis for this: there's nothing in our moral or philosophical standards that justifies favoring equality of outcomes in the market. Furthermore, there is nothing in our general principle on equality that justifies it, because that principle has nothing to do with unequal outcomes. It has only to do with ensuring equal rights.

Elise wrote in the debate at Cassandra's place that "I think when I get around to starting the New Federalist Party, my slogan in going to be, 'Almost everything is none of my business.'" But here is one thing that we normally would take to be none of our business, which we are making explicitly 'our business.' It is unclear just why we are doing so in this market-related matter, because doing so is a violation of our usual principles as pertain to the market.

IV. Strains of Feminism

In addition to the market critique, there is a problem that arises from feminism's internal divisions. Tex was talking recently about how she is reading a lot of discussions about the sad state, or crumbling, of feminism. Surely we have all been reading long enough to know that this seems to be the perpetual state of the movement. The apparent crumbling does not represent an actual crumbling. What is at stake is that the movement is genuinely diverse, and its internal tensions are real (indeed they are healthy).

The acceptance of a "low-information" version of feminism as a label for yourself, though, doesn't solve anything. There are strains of feminism that really deserve a wholehearted rejection. I'm sure all of you can name a few, but I want to talk about one in particular. This is the Marxist-influenced feminism, which has taken an interesting idea and used it in a particularly bad way.

You're familiar with the word "deconstruction," which characterizes so much post-modern thought. The idea originates with another French philosopher, Derrida, and the concept works like this: wherever you find a hierarchy, or an ordering of one thing as better than or more-important-than another, you should reverse the hierarchy and see what happens.

As a way of critiquing our received standards and beliefs, it's an interesting approach. Sometimes it reveals genuine insights, although one must always be careful to be sure that one understands why the hierarchy was built in the first place. This is like Chesterton's example of the fence in the middle of town -- you can't take it down until you can explain why our ancestors thought it was important to build it: it didn't happen by accident, and we need to know the reason in order to evaluate whether we still need it or not. If you do know, though, you can evaluate the reason perhaps better in light of the mental experiment of what it might be like if things were otherwise.

The Marxists took the thought experiment for a practical program. Marxism is built on the idea of revolution. Overturning hierarchies is thus its real business. The idea that you ought to overturn hierarchies mentally is appealing to them, but only as a first step toward overturning them practically. But overturning practical structures, which have proven their worth over centuries, is a practice that should be undertaken only carefully and on Chesterton's standard: it should not be the reflexive position.

I know a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in Women's Studies who has decided to write her dissertation against "dualism." Now she doesn't mean what you or I mean by the word, which is that there might be an immaterial soul or a mind in addition to the material body and brain.
She means that any sort of thought that divides things and orders them is wrong. If you divide things into male/female, good/bad/, right/wrong, up/down, you're engaged in the kind of thinking that gives rise to oppression because you think your hierarchy justifies boosting the one and suppressing the other. But of course she is doing the same thing: by saying this is wrong, she is dividing it from what is right. She is led by the logic of Derrida's ideas, and Rousseau's, to an impossible place. If you accept the "low-information" version of the movement, in the eyes of the "low-information" voters you are endorsing the whole structure. But the structure is leaning dangerously.

I am only sketching this argument, but the point is this: at least most, and possibly all, of this movement is based on untenable currents in philosophy that deserve to be rejected outright. Because the movement is wrapped up with the dignity of women, however, women feel inclined to defend it. What we need is another way to defend the dignity of women, one that does not stand on bad philosophy.

V. Feminism as an analogue to Christianity

The real root of this embrace of "feminism" by conservatives thus is not conservative principle, but seems to be something like patriotism among women for women. That's not bad -- no more than patriotism generally -- and I don't mean to criticize it. I cannot be guilty of patriotism toward women, but I can certainly be an ally of their nation.

Consider what Cassandra says here:

The horrified objections of many male conservatives, who nearly fell over themselves trying to convince Governor Palin that she reeeeeally didn't know what she was talking about (or that she should accept their definitions), managed to irritate even women like myself who don't particularly identify with feminists/feminism except in the vague general sense Ace describes.

That's the problem we're facing here. On the one hand, feminism has a lot to criticize. On the other hand, it sounds to women like men are criticizing women, and that naturally provokes a defense.

I want to raise an analogy to Christianity, which is even more all-embracing than feminism. (In theory, it is all-embracing, even for non-Christians.) Christians seem to be pretty good at criticizing themselves internally, but they tend to reject criticisms of "Christianity" as a whole that come from outside. Almost no Christians have a problem rejecting Fred Phelps' so-called church, but if someone tried to paint the whole of the faith as defined by Phelps' nonsense, that outsider would receive a well-deserved rebuttal.

The problem we all face, though, is that we do need to find a way to field the criticisms of feminism as a whole. This ought not to be, and if done properly should not be seen to be, a criticism of women. Women like Tex's mother are outstanding, deserving celebration whether or not we want to apply a given label to them. (Do we know if it is a label she chose for herself?) There needs to be a principled criticism available to us.

If we can't do that, we're in trouble. Maybe it's possible to criticize the movement from within it, but I doubt it. I am inclined to criticize the movement from very far outside it: for my problem isn't with the internal structures of the movement so much as with its foundations. It is the whole modernist project that has gone wrong, with its embrace of universality and French philosophy. In rejecting that, I'm rejecting not just the roots and branches of feminism, but the darkened earth from which it grew.

That kind of wholehearted rejection must be done from outside. So I cannot join Ace, or anyone else, in thinking of myself as a feminist. In love and respect for women, however, I declare myself devoted. I gladly accept the duties that follow from that declaration. I see no reason why it should not be possible to fulfill those duties and live out that love without embracing the label or what it represents.