Yesterday I raised the outrageous suggestion that maybe it ain't men that are the problem, but women. Of course this is nonsense; everybody knows that women are helpless victims -- Lady de Courcy and Lady Arabella excluded -- since the dawn of time and the invention of patriarchy by a clique of men within the inner ring of Stonehenge. Or something.
But now I just started a biography, Jane Austen: A Life, by Claire Tomalin and I have to admit I was wrong. It is not all women; it is rich women.
You see, back in Jane Austen's time, the normal thing for gentry women to do was to suckle their babies for about three months, and then send their babies out to some woman in the village to raise the baby for the next couple years. Only when the baby was properly civilized was it returned to the maternal nest.
So Charles Dickens was not making it up! Little kiddies were subject to the most frightful and routine abuse in the good old days -- at least from our modern and enlightened perspective with its proper and necessary substitution of scientific peer review for the old ways of wives tales.
Actually, I would say that, down the ages, rich women have routinely handed off the raising of their children to the servants: nurses, governesses, etc. And this has caused not a little sorrow to their children.
Now comes the New York Times with its celebration of 100 years of communism. You see, communism liberated women, but only in part. It got them out of the home but didn't really allow them to rise to executive positions on the collective farm and the factory.
In other words, communism didn't really raise women to the level demanded by the feminist revolution and make them into Simone de Beauvoir's "Independent Woman," with her career and all.
And they talk about male privilege!
The reason that men work, girls, is that, down the ages, that was the only way they could get laid. If men, in the last 200 years, have sought careers, it is because that was the way to get laid with high-status babes. Settled science: hypergamy.
Also, of course, upper-class men work these days because the poor do not. The whole point of being rich is to differentiate yourself from the poor. Back in the good old days the poor worked their tails off, at least that is what we are told. So it was shameful for a rich man to work. But now the poor don't have to work, what with welfare and disability and all, and so now all rich people are busy, busy, busy morning to night. Those that don't have a proper job work their tails off in the family charitable foundation.
Before I get back to women, a word from my old liberal boss. He was frustrated by the folks working for him, especially the programmers, because they were always going off on tangents, such as rewriting subroutines that already worked to make them more elegant.
Of course, this was never true about me. Oh no.
Now it is my view that the job of women on this earth is to bear children and raise them to adulthood, to "keep them alive," as my daughter says. Everything else is tangents.
The job of men is to make themselves useful, as in keeping women safe so they can bear children and keep them alive. Everything else is tangents.
Since our age, thanks to the Great Enrichment, is the richest age ever, you would expect more people than ever before going off on tangents. You would expect to see women schucking off the kids on day-care and government child-custodial facilities so they can go out and have a career. You would expect to see men filling their lives up with meaningless hobbies and all-night video game sessions.
And you would expect a lot of people to be opting out of the whole mating and raising the next generation thing. Because they can.
In my view, following my reductive Three Peoples theory, this is a particular problem for People of the Creative Self. In fact I believe that the cult of creativity is precisely a tangent, a distraction, from the real job of creation, which is creating children. It is just the sort of thing you would expect well-to-do women and well-to-do men to do to differentiate themselves from the common herd and its daily grind of wiving and thriving. The clue, I think is in Charles Taylor's notion of "expressive individualism," or George Simmel's "qualitative individualism" in which individuals would want to differentiate themselves from other individuals.
Of course, it may be that in the future well-to-do and high-status women will want to differentiate themselves from the common herd that goes out to work as assistant director of diversity and inclusion at Amazon's HR department and drops the kiddies off at school. I suspect that the home school movement and similar cultural developments are signaling this.
Here is another thing. If you are a well-to-do woman, educated, liberated, and independent, why would you want your little kiddie rolling in the mire, getting polluted by the lower-class culture of the child-minder and the government teacher?
But then there is the bigger question: how should we raise our children, given that we still do not know the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, despite the best efforts of prophets, divines, ideologues, and our modern social justice warriors?
But now I just started a biography, Jane Austen: A Life, by Claire Tomalin and I have to admit I was wrong. It is not all women; it is rich women.
You see, back in Jane Austen's time, the normal thing for gentry women to do was to suckle their babies for about three months, and then send their babies out to some woman in the village to raise the baby for the next couple years. Only when the baby was properly civilized was it returned to the maternal nest.
So Charles Dickens was not making it up! Little kiddies were subject to the most frightful and routine abuse in the good old days -- at least from our modern and enlightened perspective with its proper and necessary substitution of scientific peer review for the old ways of wives tales.
Actually, I would say that, down the ages, rich women have routinely handed off the raising of their children to the servants: nurses, governesses, etc. And this has caused not a little sorrow to their children.
Now comes the New York Times with its celebration of 100 years of communism. You see, communism liberated women, but only in part. It got them out of the home but didn't really allow them to rise to executive positions on the collective farm and the factory.
In other words, communism didn't really raise women to the level demanded by the feminist revolution and make them into Simone de Beauvoir's "Independent Woman," with her career and all.
And they talk about male privilege!
The reason that men work, girls, is that, down the ages, that was the only way they could get laid. If men, in the last 200 years, have sought careers, it is because that was the way to get laid with high-status babes. Settled science: hypergamy.
Also, of course, upper-class men work these days because the poor do not. The whole point of being rich is to differentiate yourself from the poor. Back in the good old days the poor worked their tails off, at least that is what we are told. So it was shameful for a rich man to work. But now the poor don't have to work, what with welfare and disability and all, and so now all rich people are busy, busy, busy morning to night. Those that don't have a proper job work their tails off in the family charitable foundation.
Before I get back to women, a word from my old liberal boss. He was frustrated by the folks working for him, especially the programmers, because they were always going off on tangents, such as rewriting subroutines that already worked to make them more elegant.
Of course, this was never true about me. Oh no.
Now it is my view that the job of women on this earth is to bear children and raise them to adulthood, to "keep them alive," as my daughter says. Everything else is tangents.
The job of men is to make themselves useful, as in keeping women safe so they can bear children and keep them alive. Everything else is tangents.
Since our age, thanks to the Great Enrichment, is the richest age ever, you would expect more people than ever before going off on tangents. You would expect to see women schucking off the kids on day-care and government child-custodial facilities so they can go out and have a career. You would expect to see men filling their lives up with meaningless hobbies and all-night video game sessions.
And you would expect a lot of people to be opting out of the whole mating and raising the next generation thing. Because they can.
In my view, following my reductive Three Peoples theory, this is a particular problem for People of the Creative Self. In fact I believe that the cult of creativity is precisely a tangent, a distraction, from the real job of creation, which is creating children. It is just the sort of thing you would expect well-to-do women and well-to-do men to do to differentiate themselves from the common herd and its daily grind of wiving and thriving. The clue, I think is in Charles Taylor's notion of "expressive individualism," or George Simmel's "qualitative individualism" in which individuals would want to differentiate themselves from other individuals.
Of course, it may be that in the future well-to-do and high-status women will want to differentiate themselves from the common herd that goes out to work as assistant director of diversity and inclusion at Amazon's HR department and drops the kiddies off at school. I suspect that the home school movement and similar cultural developments are signaling this.
Here is another thing. If you are a well-to-do woman, educated, liberated, and independent, why would you want your little kiddie rolling in the mire, getting polluted by the lower-class culture of the child-minder and the government teacher?
But then there is the bigger question: how should we raise our children, given that we still do not know the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, despite the best efforts of prophets, divines, ideologues, and our modern social justice warriors?
No comments:
Post a Comment