Monday, June 11, 2018

Feminism And Western Civilization

A former friend of mine wrote in late 1990s that women had become "hateful, arrogant dykes."

I have an idea as to how that happened.

The form of feminism at the time taught that the Western civilization's cultural legacy was racist and patriarchal. They decided that anyone who took part in any aspect of it was an idiot, and that they, as the only people around them who did not, were the only people in the world who were not idiots. Their attitude was not a function of their character. It was a direct function of their beliefs. If you think that the whole world is composed of idiots and that only the people who believe what you believe are not idiots, then you are going to be hateful and arrogant as a function of these beliefs.

Their contempt was directed especially at women who were attractive and women who liked men. They thought that all these women were weak and stupid, and that they were the only smart and strong women in the world. I have seen similar conduct on the part of Nazis and skinheads, who think that they are the only real men in the world and that everyone else is a sissy or a racial inferior.

Wrong beliefs are refuted by reality. Right now, the biggest reality serving to refute these beliefs is the influx of women from Eastern Europe. These women are at least as smart and as strong as any American feminist, and they have better ideas on how to conduct themselves. So we see now in the White House a beautiful, strong-willed woman from Slovenia who can hold her own in any argument with any American feminist.

The more such women come to America, the more there is real-world refutation of wrongful things that have come from feminism.

Is everything that has been part of Western cultural legacy racist or patriarchial? The Western cultural legacy has included many women, and not stupid or weak ones either. I have translated two such influences - Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetayeva. The West has had many great minds, and I have not seen feminists produce work comparable to that of the Western classics. Their influence has been less transformative and more destructive. They were effective at deconstructing various Western beliefs; but their own beliefs have not been an improvement on most of them.

So this stupidity has begotten another stupidity from the other side. It is the strident misogyny that has been going around, claiming that women are stupid and evil and that when they are given freedom they turn into Catherine McKinnon. That is completely wrong as well. There is nothing stupid or evil about my mother or my daughter, and I would punch in the face any man who says such things about them.

What are we seeing happening here? What we are seeing here is a massive intellectual error: Rejecting the legacy of an entire civilization because some influences in it have been pricks. What people who do such a thing perform is failing to avail themselves of useful knowledge. A civilization does not rise to the leadership of the world by being stupid. It rises to the leadership of the world by having valuable ideas; and these can be useful even to feminists themselves.

Of course the Western civilization has seen many different directions. The Western civilisation means everything from Thomas Hobbes to William Blake, and these two would have gotten into a fistfight. I have seen a Western Buddhist writing that the Western philosophy is contradictory. There is a very good reason for that. The Western philosophy owes to many influences that come from many different places. It is contradictory because it comes from contradictory sources. And there are things to be learned from many of these sources for just about anything that a person may seek to do.

So we have Shakespeare writing The Taming Of The Shrew, but we also have Shakespeare writing Othello. We have Nietzsche writing that women should raise great men instead of attempting to become great themselves, and we have John Stuart Mill writing brilliant and passionate work in support of women's rights. As for myself, I support women's rights, and I have been involved in a fight against domestic violence. But in no way do I support destructive, hateful, and arrogant influences such as what we have seen above.

There are differences between men and women, and there are differences among men and women. I was seen in my childhood as a girlie-boy, but women in my adult life have found me to be masculine. I have closely known women who were completely different from one another, as well as men who were completely different from one another. But my daughter has always been very feminine even though neither I nor her mother were instructing her in that direction. I once read a feminist woman talking about how her three-year-old son thought that he was a dinosaur and wanted to chew off her foot, and how she realised at that point that there are clearly natural differences between women and men.

Should all men be coerced in the same way, and all women in another? I do not believe that they should be. However neither is it correct to disown an entire cultural legacy or to have contempt for anyone who takes part in any aspect of it. The correct solution is to present great works, and it is also to produce great works. And that will result in the civilization growing and in people in it - both men and women - growing in knowledge and wisdom.

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