{"id":156749,"date":"2024-08-03T21:23:05","date_gmt":"2024-08-04T05:23:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=156749"},"modified":"2024-08-10T16:11:14","modified_gmt":"2024-08-11T00:11:14","slug":"156749","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=156749","title":{"rendered":"Feminism vs Tradition"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his work in progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia<\/a>, Rony Guldmann writes:<\/p>\n

\n* For liberals\u2019 concern with \u201csubstantive\u201d equality inevitably draws them into the ambit of leftism, at which point they become no less willing to deploy state power to meddle with a wide array of social practices. Given that the \u201cvarious maldistributions \u201dwhich concern liberals are only another name for what leftists call \u201csocial powers,\u201d what get sold as limited correctives to isolated \u201ckinks in the system\u201d always harbor the seeds of leftist totalitarianism. Liberals claim to demand only a \u201clevel playing field.\u201d But since there will always be another hither to undetected \u201cmaldistribution\u201d waiting to be \u201cdiscovered\u201d by the anointed, liberalism must inevitably devolve into leftism, which is why conservatives often speak of \u201cleft-liberalism\u201d or employ \u201cliberalism\u201d and \u201cthe left\u201d interchangeably. <\/p>\n

* Alan Kors writes that \u201c[d]espite the talk of \u2018celebrating\u2019 diversity, colleges and universities do not, in fact, mean the celebration, deep study, and appreciation of evangelical, fundamentalist, Protestant culture; nor of traditionalist Catholic culture; nor of the gender roles of Orthodox Jewish or of Shiite Islamic culture; nor of black American Pentacostal culture; nor of assimilation; nor of the white, rural South. These are not \u2018multicultural.\u2019\u201d86Just like diversity, \u201csensitivity\u201d is a facially universalistic ideal that is unobjectionable in the abstract. But Kors observes that universities\u2019 solicitude for diverse group identities does not extend to those who reject the dominant dispensation. Campus speech codes protect the sensibilities of left-wing students, but they allow these same students to label conservative blacks \u201cUncle Toms\u201d and label anti-feminist women \u201cmall chicks.\u201d Students who believe homosexuality is sinful can be charged with harassing their gay and lesbian cohorts. But pro-choice students who surround a silent pro-life vigil and chant \u201cRacist, sexist, antigay born-again bigots go away\u201d are seen as engaged in protected speech. Liberals ask us to put ourselves in the shoes of the less fortunate, so Kors proposes the following thought-experiment:<\/p>\n

“Imagine secular, skeptical, or leftist faculty and students confronted by a religious harassment code that prohibited \u201cdenigration\u201d of evangelical or Catholic beliefs, or that made the classroom or campus a space where evangelical or Catholic students must be protected against feeling \u201cintimidated,\u201d offended,\u201d or, by their own subjective experience, victims of a \u201chostile environment. Imagine a university of patriotic \u201cloyalty oaths\u201d where leftists were deemed responsible for the tens of millions of victims of communism, and where free minds were prohibited from creating a hostile environment for patriots, or from offending that \u201cminority\u201d of individuals who are descended from Korean or Vietnam War veterans. Imagine, as well, that for every \u201ccase\u201d that became public, there were scores or hundreds of cases in which the \u201coffender\u201d or \u201cvictimizer,\u201d desperate to preserve a job or gain a degree, accepted a confidential plea bargain that included a semester\u2019s or a year\u2019s reeducation in \u201creligious sensitivity\u201d or \u201cpatriotic sensitivity\u201d seminars run by the university\u2019s \u201cEvangelical Center, \u201cPatriotic Center,\u201d or \u201cOffice of Religious and Patriotic Compliance.”<\/p>\n

If an \u201cOffice of Religious and Patriotic Compliance\u201d sounds sinister and totalitarian, we might instead envision a new regime of diversity training that encourages incoming college freshmen to examine their conservaphobic prejudices and overcome these to the extent possible in a conservaphobic culture. The goal would not be political indoctrination. This conservative-friendly diversity training wouldn\u2019t call on liberal students to become conservative any more than standard diversity training calls on straight students to become gay. They need only explore their latent fears and biases in order to create a more tolerant atmosphere for all students. But liberals will not accept even this moderate solution. And this demonstrates to conservatives that they are unwilling to play by the same rules to which they hold others.<\/p>\n

* radical feminists can treat the \u201csocial construction of gender\u201d as established fact, and need not contend with the neuroscientists across campus who study the biological hard-wiring of sex differences. These scientists are not members of \u201cthe relevant discipline.\u201d …unlike liberal academics, Christian fundamentalists do not have the privilege of exalting their own echo chambers as respected academic disciplines. Fundamentalists who ignore what scientists say about the evolution of human beings in general are disdained as anti-intellectual. But feminists who ignore what scientists say about the evolution of sex differences in particular are just being professional. Unlike fundamentalists, feminists have been culturally credentialed to disguise their hero-systems as disciplinary rigor. Having embraced the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, they have been credentialed as \u201cthe knowing, the knowledgeable, the reflexive and insightful,\u201d and so they are allowed to invent their own intellectual rules.<\/p>\n

* progressives have \u201cundermined manliness, feminized your culture, elevated fretful safety and excessive caution into virtues instead of weaknesses.\u201d106Following Lakoff, liberals will diagnose the conservative invocation of manliness as yet another symptom of Strict Father morality, for which strict gender differentiation and masculine strength are how one defends \u201cMoral Order\u201d against a threatening world. The Strict Father model, says Lakoff, \u201ctakes as background the view that life is difficult and that the world is fundamentally dangerous.\u201d And as liberals see it, this background view is really a pretext for conservative authoritarianism, which is sold to the public as a solution to dangers that liberals in their fretful safety and excessive caution refuse to confront. By contrast, conservatives see manliness as an anti-authoritarian impulse, a force that disrupts rather than upholds established convention. Harvey Mansfield writes that whereas rational control \u201cwants our lives to be bound by rules,\u201d manliness \u201cis dissatisfied with whatever is merely legal or conventional.\u201d Whilst rational control \u201cwants peace, discounts risk, and prefers role models to heroes,\u201d manliness \u201cfavors war, likes risk, and admires heroes,\u201d Manliness \u201cseeks and welcomes drama and prefers times of war, conflict, and risk.\u201d It \u201ctends to be insistent and intolerant,\u201d just as it is \u201csteadfast…taking a stand, not surrendering, not allowing oneself to be determined by one\u2019s context, not being adaptive or flexible.\u201d Manliness must \u201cmust prove itself and do so before an audience.\u201d It seeks \u201cto be theatrical, welcomes drama, and wants your attention.\u201d By contrast, rational control \u201cprefers routine and doesn\u2019t like getting excited\u201d and therefore aims to keep manliness \u201cunemployed by means of measures that encourage or compel behavior intended to be lacking in drama.\u201d Manliness so conceived is the very antithesis of the buffered distance, a visceral rejection of its \u201cordering impulses.\u201d It is most fundamentally a protest against the rationalizing forces of the modern world, against the peculiarly courtly rationality, which is what has made us \u201cadaptive and flexible.\u201d The liberal culture is unmanly because it is hostile, not only to actual contests of swords, but also to the entire range of virtues and identities which these once embodied\u2014which is what the conservative celebration of manliness aims to resuscitate. Rather than pursuing the \u201cnew form of invulnerability\u201d promised by the buffered distance, manliness embraces the vulnerability of the pre-modern dispensation, our exposure to the \u201canti-structure\u201d that relativizes and destabilizes the conventional social world, revealing the precariousness of all merely human designs. As relative pre-moderns, conservatives are attuned to anti-structure\u2014the inherent flux and fragility of all mortal things\u2014as liberals are not, and this is why they think themselves more manly. This conception of manliness is part of what animates conservatives\u2019 embrace of the free market, whose association with conservatism is not as obvious as it seems… These elements include the chaos, unpredictability, and insecurity of the pre-modern condition of porous selves opened out to anti-structure. These are what enable manliness and the anarchic will of free men. And it is these discounted values that imbue untrammeled laissez-faire with its existential resonance for conservatives. Laissez-faire symbolizes the anti-structure denied by the disciplines and repressions of the buffered identity, affirming our submersion in forces we do not control, our openness to powers that transcend our will and upset our designs. Liberals reject this openness as the relic of a barbarian past of less fortunate peoples, which they in their superior enlightenment have overcome.. Cold War conservatives looked upon the Soviet Union and the welfare state as \u201cthe ultimate symbols of cold Enlightenment rationalism,\u201d by contrast with which the free market stood as \u201cthe embodiment of the romantic counter-Enlightenment.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Feminism is a struggle, not by all women against male patriarchs, but by an elite minority of powerful women against a majority of women who never felt compromised by traditional gender roles.<\/p>\n

* Feminists now dismiss traditional gender roles as arbitrary. But it was feminists who first engineered these perceptions by enforcing a regime of coerced androgyny. The feminization of men, writes Graglia, was among \u201cthe seeds from which women\u2019s discontent grew and which blossomed into the women\u2019s movement.\u201d Absent the support and encouragement of a masculine man, women naturally became disenchanted with a traditional female role\u2014feminism\u2019s ultimate objective. Their dissatisfaction here wasn\u2019t just there waiting to be named by those who courageously spoke truth to power. Rather, it had to be created in order to socially vindicate the self-image of an elite minority of women. To this end, feminists have waged a largely victorious \u201cwar against the housewife,\u201d employing any means necessary to denigrate her character, intelligence, and social status.<\/p>\n

* While feminism claims to have liberated women from antiquated sexual ideologies that formerly subordinated them to patriarchy, it has in the process instituted a new sexual ideology that subordinates them to feminism itself, reconfiguring gender relations in order to socially vindicate feminist identities and discredit others. Women could never have been drawn into the feminist fold were they not first deracinated of their femininity, which is what feminism pursued. By cultivating a dissatisfaction it could then promise to relieve, feminism turned itself into a self-fulfilling prophesy, concealing all the manipulations by which it finally earned the grudging assent of women.<\/p>\n

* what purports to be autonomous self-determination is in fact one historically constructed understanding of human agency among others. The \u201cinner base area\u201d of the buffered identity isn\u2019t something that was lying there all along, albeit concealed underneath various collectivizing illusions, but the product of specific social forces which have conditioned the human organism into its present self-reflexivity. The buffered identity is an imposition for whose sake our \u201cdefault\u201d human dispositions must be tamed and disciplined. This affect show we see feminism. The subtraction account casts feminism as a revolt against the historical repression of female agency. But the mutation counter-narrative locates feminism as among the forces that created female agency (as understood by feminism). For feminism is merely another extension of modern liberalism\u2019s disciplinary agenda. It was feminism that molded women into the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, repressing the \u201clax and disorganized folkways\u201d of traditional femininity, integrating them into the extended chains of social interdependence presupposed by the buffered distance and symbolized by the careerwoman. Feminism claims to upholds respect for women\u2019s personhood. But as John Gray notes, personhood is not the essence of humanity, but merely one of its masks. Persons \u201care only humans who have donned the mask that has been handed down in Europe over the past few generations, and taken it for their face.\u201d<\/p>\n

* gender feminists\u2019 motivation is powerfully enhanced by the \u201cfaith that they are privy to revolutionary insights into the nature of knowledge and society.\u201d This \u201cinspires them with a missionary fervor unmatched by any other group in the contemporary academy.\u201d110\u201cAn exhilarating feeling of momentousness,\u201d she notes, \u201croutinely surfaces at gender feminist gatherings,\u201d as feminist theorists invoke Copernicus and Darwin to symbolize the importance of their own discoveries, basking in the \u201cexhilaration of feeling themselves in the vanguard of a new consciousness.\u201d Feminists are seeking to express, not merely a set of doctrines one might or might not accept, but, more fundamentally, a consciousness one might or might not attain. They understand themselves, not only as liberated from traditional expectations and stereotypes, but furthermore as special participants in a privileged epistemic and spiritual dispensation that affords them a special lucidity unavailable to women who stubbornly resist feminism. <\/p>\n

* Indian practices \u201crelated to food, sex, clothing, and gender relations were almost always judged to be moral issues, not social conventions.\u201d Unlike their American counterparts, Indian children did not assign any special status to harm-tracking morality or distinguish it from mutable social convention. For them, \u201cthe social order is a moral order.\u201d These children \u201cwere not figuring out morality for themselves, based on the bedrock certainty that harm is bad.\u201d Instead, they showed that \u201calmost any practice could be loaded up with moral force.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his work in progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia, Rony Guldmann writes: * For liberals\u2019 concern with \u201csubstantive\u201d equality inevitably draws them into the ambit of leftism, at which point they become … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-156749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sex"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t