Article - Road to the Middle Class - by Christopher Chantrill

REMEMBER the Sixties? Back then our liberal friends were sneering at “uptight” conservative men in gray flannel suits and celebrating creative people in flowered shirts who “did their own thing.”

Now uptight feminists are sneering at creative conservative women who decide to “do their own thing.”

But things were different then. Back then, the “uptight” conservative patriarchy was oppressing everyone, especially minorities and women, as it had for millennia.

Some people, African Americans in particular, resist the notion that women were ever as oppressed as blacks. All humans on the left are oppressed, of course, but some are more oppressed than others.

It is certainly true that feminism has never really been a movement of the oppressed willing to die for the principle that all men are created equal. It is more accurate to call it a movement of high-born women determined to liberate themselves from the humiliation of getting their hands dirty with domestic trivia—in the way that men have always seemed to have done.

The German sociologist Georg Simmel had understood this a century ago, according to Jerry Z. Muller in The Mind and the Market. It was not centuries of oppression that powered the feminist movement, but “the psychological effects of market developments,” the new technologies that “made for less labor in the household” for those that could afford them. The unaccustomed leisure provoked unease, even frustration, in middle-class women, and in response they sought activity outside the home.

Simmel understood that in the short term the public sphere for women would be defined by the rules “created by men and for men” but that eventually women would transform the public square to suit “a more feminine sensibility.”

The public square has indeed been transformed to suit a more feminine sensibility, but in a curious way. It has been transformed to suit a particular middle-class feminist agenda, rather than a more general feminine sensibility.

But this was what the middle-class feminists wanted. Like many well-born women down the ages, they wanted to farm the care of their children and their homes out to the paid help. What these women wanted, to deal with their guilt, was a society that told everyone that it would be better for leave the home and seek paid employment like men. And they got it.

Then Sarah Palin came along and drove the whole project into the ditch.

Many people still think the feminist project is alive and well. That’s what The Economist’s Lexington columnist thought last week:

[I]f feminism means, at its core, that women should be able to compete equally in the workplace while deciding for themselves how they organize their family life, then Mrs Palin deserves to be treated as a pioneer, not dismissed as a crackpot.

Oh dear. Haven’t we got beyond that kind of binary thinking at The Economist yet? Really, some people today are no better than the Puritans that Max Weber sneered at in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:

Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.

The success of the feminist agenda depended upon rigid control and compartmentalization of women’s fertility. Some have called this a death wish, but is more like an antiseptic sterility. The challenge that Sarah Palin poses to the “nullity” of the center-left culture is the challenge of fecundity. Conservative women do not aspire to the sterile life of the tenured academic sinecure or the strained consciousness of the government-funded “arts community.” They do not select from The Economist’s menu of competing equally in the workplace and/or organizing family life. They open themselves to Life itself, its risks, its joys, its sorrows, its faith, and, above all, its call to loving service.

The world we live in today is designed to make the world safe for cultural liberals and feminists. Resting comfortably upon their government sinecures and the flattery of their media courtiers, these people lash out with fury against anyone objecting to the wonderful world they have built. But theirs is not the only way to live.

The feminist way replaces the organic safety net of family and neighbors with rational, bureaucratic institutions that deliver social services to the needy, but without spirit and without heart. In particular the social services most important to women are sterilized into rigid bureaucracy: schools, health care, and relief of the poor.

The bureaucratic model is a male-oriented and goal-oriented culture. It is the structure of the army and of one-size-fits-all that orders everyone to serve a single goal from the top. It is hardly adapted to the community of women. Women’s culture relates less to fixed goals and more to the detection and satisfaction of particular needs in the welfare of families, the care of children, and the relief of the poor.

The chaps at The Economist assert that in the emergence of Sarah Palin feminism has won. They could not be more wrong. The flap over Sarah Palin points to the emergence of the genuine “feminine sensibility” projected by George Simmel and the exposure of uptight, sterile feminism as a dead end.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

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