Hildegarde

I still don’t have the olives pitted, so this is going to have to be short, but I’d like to point out a number of things.

First, I’m sticking to “in this country” because I am in the middle of a summer of reading through a great deal of American material, almost all of it from before the Civil War, and I can therefore comment on the contents of that material, and the intellectual history of the United States, without having to make a special effort to research it outside of what I’m already doing.  To comment on the situation in England, I would have to go look it up in some detail.  Maybe I’ll get to that next summer.

Second, I was using”New England Transcendalists” as a stand-in for an entire point of view, which I did outline in the post.  The point of view existed before the NETs arose in New England, and among people you would not tend to think of as belonging to the NET. 

But you know, that’s a kind of curious thing.  

The ideas certainly start with Rousseau, but the phenomenon–this cluster of ideas, in whole or in part, as the basis for a social identity–begins with the Romantic movement.   And of course the NETs knew about it, and copied, it, quite deliberately. 

That doesn’t change the fact that they and the other people who bought into this cluser of ideas are the ones who signed on to abolition, women’s rights, and later civil rights before anybody else did in any numbers.

No, of course, the people who think like this are not leaders, and never could be, because they’re far too squishy in too many ways, and far too extreme for the vast bulk of their fellow citizens to stomach. 

But without their extremism–and their persistance–no such movements would ever have gotten off the ground.

Yes, the Northern states abolished slavery early–and the hippies and the proto-hippies pressed for its total abolition, and for the equality of the races right there at their own dinner tables, while the rest of the population decided that what went on in Mississippi was none of their concern.

The Northern states also insisted on enforcing the fugitive slave laws at the same time the NETs and their spiritual cousins were demanding it be resisted.

Quakers are not an exception to this, but an early example of it–they’re proto-hippies in embryo, so to speak, and by now they’re the institutional framework of this entire point of view, along with the Unitarian-Universalists.  

And I don’t know enough about Henry Ward Beecher to comment, but I know enough about Harriet Beecher Stowe to make a guess, because she was quite definitely an example of what I’m talking about, as was Julia Ward Howe.  Scratch their public Christianity and you find the fuzzy universalism that is the defining mark of the hippie in religion–God is just too good to send anybody to Hell for eternity.

Every leader of the women’s rights movement in the United States fit the paradigm, too, and bought into nearly the entire cluster of ideas I mentioned.  And, for that matter, so did Mary Wollstonecraft in England, her husband, William Godwin,.and her daughter, later Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the patron saint of British Romanticism.  

So, for that matter, did Harriet Taylor Mill, who dragged her husband into unconventionality while he kicked and screamed all the way. 

When textbooks write about people like Harriet  Beecher Stowe or Susan B. Anthony, they tend to leave out the stuff that might make them sound odd to students–the forays into spiritualism, the flirting tease in and out of vegetarianism, the anti-traditionalism in religion and custom.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton rewrote the Bible to make it compatible with the equality of women.   Lucy Stone not only refused to change her maiden name, but was convinced that war would cease to exist once women held the reins of government.

The more you start looking into the people in these movements, the more it becomes clear that most of them did in fact share huge hunks of the paradigm I outlined.  It shows up in the oddest places in the histories of people one does not expect to see it in. 

Maybe the reality is this–what is required to embrace and champion truly radical ideas (the equality of the races, the equality of the sexes, whatever) is a habit of mind that leaves one open to certain specific modes of thought.  If you can successfully resist such modes of thought, you’re less capable of conceiving and embracing even the one or two ood ideas those modes give rise to.

Okay, I’m writing sentences that should be shot, again. 

I’d better go do those olives.   Or get Matt to do them.

Let me start out by agreeing with a few of the posts.  There is certainly a lot of moral posturing in the group I’m talking about, and certainly a lot of inauthenticity. 

But the fact remains that these people–not just any goup of moral posturers or any herd of independent minds–were first off the dock on slavery, at least in the US, and the first to champion the political equality of women, among other things.

These are not small things, nor are they in any way negligible, and I think it remains an open question a to whether the ability to think through them–to arrive at the determination that slavery is wrong, and then to commmt do do something about getting it abolished–requires a certain kind of mind that thinks a certain kind of way, and that mind and its way of thinking are also susceptible to all these other specific things.  

Annoying as these people may be, and dangerous as they may be in certain situations, we may need them.

But, yes, back to Nurse Ratchett.  Robert is right, of course.  Nurse Ratchett isn’t confined to tis particular group of people and this particular kind of politics. She occurs in all movements and in most institutions.  I’ve been trying to figure out if she’s always a she, and although I’ll admit that I’ve never met a male who uses this particular approach, I can imagine one.   And the psychiatrist played by William Fichtner in The Chumscrubber is one, so maybe other people have run into the male variety.

I think fewer people are familiar with Nurse Ratchett these days than are familiar with her most recent popular reincarnation–meaning  Delores Umbrage of Harry  Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

I don’t know the actress who plays the part in the movie from anything else, but she’s absolutely rilliant.  If this is a character type you’re not sure of, you might want to see if the movie is on one of your local cable stations.  They’re replaying it a lot these days because the new movie is due in theaters next week.

What characterizes a Nurse Ratchett has been described by many people as a kind of “soft totalitarianism,” and it’s characteristic of certain kinds of “fuzzy science” “professionals.”

I’m using all those scare quotes advisedly.  The thing is, this is as much a management technique as anything, and I’ve seen it used in public meetings and other places where somebody had an agenda they wanted to push through and not a chance of getting it through in a free and open debate. 

It consists of using a very soft voice, a very “encouraging” manner, and driving relentlessly to a single acceptable conclusion.

“You don’t really want to do that, now, do you,dear?”

In the last twenty years or so, a lot of teachers have been taught to deal with students this way, especially elementary and middle school students, a circtumstance that I think could account for at least some school shootings.  

It’s also the basic method behind some of the big anti-drug abuse, anti-alcohol abuse and anti-bullying programs, which is funny, because it is, of course, a particularly brutal brand of bullying in itself.

We’re going to help you make good choices, the programs say–but only one choice is allowed, and if you don’t make it, well, we’ll just “reason” with you until you do.

“You don’t really mean to say that, do you?”

“We all know that alochol is bad for us, don’t we?”

Before I read other people writing about this, I used to think of it as “forced consensus.”  The leader decides what “we” will all “agree” on and then just says we do.  If anybody objects, she just nudges, in a very soft voice, and looks rather sad and disappointed.

And the most effective part of this is that trying to counter it is nearly impossible, because when you do try to counte it, you look like an idiot.  So much of it is played out in tone of voice and manner, that a transcript would often make the conversation look innocent and the dissenter look wild and extreme. 

Really reasoning with someone requires meeting her head on, as an equal, addressing her objections directly and accepting that she might just think you’re wrong. 

This method consists of creating an atmosphere where the assumption is that you could never be wrong, and anybody who disagrees with you does so not because he has honest objections to your position–after all, there are no legitimate objections to your position, that’s been established from off–but because he’s being emotional, or irrational, or immature, or he has psychological problems (his opposition proves it).

I don’t know who came up with the idea that this is a good way to deal with children, but it’s really not, and what you end up with is a lot of seething resentment.  There’s seething resentment among the adult victims of this approach, too, and a strong feeling of helplessness.

Back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, a number of Christian family groups offered training sessions for their members to counter this approach when it was used in public meetings to try to authorize certain kinds of birth control curricula in the public schools.  I don’t know if the training did any good or not.

I tend to think of the Nurse Ratchett/Delores Umbrage approach as a kind of McCarthyism.  We tend to think of the problem with  McCarthy as the fact that people were often accused and punished on the flimsiest evidence, or no evidene at all.

But the simple fact is that almost anybody hauled in front of the Senate or the House committees could get off scot free simply by saying, “oh, yes, you’re right about everything, I was really guilty, I have reformed, I confess, I want to atone,  here are a bunch of names.”

The point of the hearings was too often to get the accused to abandon any claim to integrity, to deconstruct his individual will and make it wholly subject to the will of his accusers.

“In your heart, you know that naughty children deserve to be punished,” Delores Umbrage tells Harry Potter, and that’s what she wants, not his obedience to her rules, not to punish him for his disoedience, but to get him to accept right down to his blood and skin and bone everything she decrees is true.

She wants him to accept it even when she doesn’t believe it herself.

I feel like I’ve been blithering here, and other people do this a lot better than I do.   I’ve tried several times to write a Ratchett/Umbrage character, and I find I can’t do it, at least not from the inside, the way I write most of my characters.  Something in my head just can’t seem to penetrate the thought processes that would m ake it possible to behave like this without being deeply and abidingly ahamed of yourself, and these people are not ashamed of themselves.

And, confronted over the last four years with my own personal Nurse Ratchett, I made all the mistakes honest people make when they try to defend themselves from this kind of bullying.

So maybe I’m not a very good source of information on this.

Okay, so here’s the thing.  

My two sons read this blog–or, to be exact, my younger son reads it, and my older one (who claims never to read blogs, ever) pumps my younger one about it, and then they both argue about it with me.

I figure this has got to be better than endless chatter about videogames, so I let it go. 

At any rate, yesterday the two of them had some very strong complaints, and on reflection I’ve decided they have a point.  I described Zenobia as a Nurse Ratchett, but she isn’t one, and neither are most of the people I was thinking of when  I wrote that post yesterday.  

There are always Nurse Ratchetts hanging around any reform movement, and they often get fairly high in reform organizations, especially after the main point has been one (slavery abolished, women have the vote) and what’s left to do is a sort of maintenance effort. They are, however, parasites on the revolution, not revolutionaries, since their only object is their own personal power.

So I’ll get back to the Nurse Ratchetts some other day.  We have spent a lot of time in this house over the last few months talking about the Nurse Ratchetts, and it’s a subject tat fascinates me.

But the people I was thinking of yesterday are the people my older son says I should call “the hippies,” because that’s what they remind him of.  I think they’re a little too relentlessly earnest to be hippies, but then  I’ve actually meant hippies, and Matt’s only fantasized about them.

I keep telling him Tommy Chong isn’t the best model here, but, you know, what the hell. 

We’ll call the the Serious Hippies, maybe, or just the Zenobias, but what they have in common is not so much a personality type (although they have that, too) as a constellation of positions that’s always the same everywhere and everytime these movements arise.  There is, as far as I can tell, no logical necessity that people who agree with the main point (back to ending slavery, or giving rights to women) should take up these other things, but they do.   And once they do, they treat these things as moral laws with all the seriousness of Thou Shalt Not Kill.

Okay, let me hedge a little here–this constellation of things has been the same since the French  Revolution.  The men who made the American Revolution had no interest in them that I can tell.

But the New England Transcendentalists did, and reading the books I’ve been reading this summer has been like some weird time trip.  It’s the antebellum Northeast that I’m reading about, but it all sounds like a report from a Vermont communal farm in 1973.

There is, first, the assumption that marriage should be abolished–that it is a hindrance to the right relations between men and women, a shackle that causes harm to human relations.  Sometimes this wish to abolish marriage goes along with a wish to establish Free Love, as it did for Victoria Woodhull and Abbie Hoffman, but sometimes it doesn’t.  The NETs were very concerned about being pure and putting the relations between men and women on a spiritual plain, but they still thought it could only happen if they “did something” about the institution of marriage.

There is, next, the assumption that education should be “natural.”  The Progressive Education movement and Maria Montessori actually came up with plans for doing this at the beginning of the twentieth century, but Rousseau had already led the way, and you can see it now in the “unschooling” movement.   Lead a hild to learning, let him absorb it like a sponge without turning it into something hateful by punishments and restrictions, and he’ll–well, he’ll just choose to apply himself to algebra.  After all, learning is natural to the human child.  He’s driven to do it by his very nature.

Then there is the commitment to vegetarianism.  I’m not saying that all vegetarians are Zenobias.   People decide on a vegetarian (or vegan) diet for a lot of different reasons.  But the Zenobias area almost always vegetarian or close to it, and from the beginning their argument in favor of such a diet relied heavily on claims that meat corrupts the human body, that it fills it full of pollutants, that it lowers the energy and obscures the spiritual in the human soul.

What interests me about the vegetarianism is that it arose and persisted in an era when it was actually physically dangerous to practice it.  In 21st century America, or Australia, or Brussels, you can commit to even a vegan diet without worrying about what you’re denying yourself nutritionally.  We know about other ways to get enough protein and there are dietary supplements for the amino acids we miss when we walk away from the prime rib.

But Bronson Alcott knew nothing about any of this, and yet he forced his wife and children to eat a nearly totally vegetarian diet, with the result that they were often ill and that at least one of his children was perpetually “sickly.”  Practically the first thing his daughter Louisa May did when her books became popular and she became the source of income for the household was to fill the place full of meat.

The next thing is the attraction to violence in other people–Zenobias are never violent themselves–almost always coupled with the stated conviction that war is just something stupid and unnecessary that can be abolished.  The NETs sat in awe at the feet of John Brown and his sons just as Leonard  Bernstein and his gets thrilled to the sight of Black Panthers in their midst. Pictures of Che still adorn the t-shirts of college kids on campuses throughout the US.

Then, finally, there is the replacement of standard forms of religion with commitments to the “spiritual,” both in movements for liberal Christianity–the idea that Jesus would never actually send anyone to hell dates from the early nineteenth century, at least as part of the repertoire of the Zenobias–and in an attraction to what they imagine to be “Eastern wisdom,” and to Buddhism especially.

Margaret Fuller, that model for  Zenobia herself, was a passionate student of anything she could find out about Buddhist “spiritualisty,” and the enter NET movement supported what it called ‘natural religion,” which, as far as I can figure out, meant having a direct relationship with a God you sort of made up in your own head by communing with Nature and  The Infinite.

And no, I can’t get any more clear than that.  You’re going to have to go read Ralph Waldo Emerson, and even then I’m not making any promises.

But you must see what I mean here.   There’s no reason whatsoever that supporting the abolition of slavery should make you start communing with the  Infinite or give up eating meat.   There is no logical connection between the first thing and the other two.

And yet these things all occur together among the first proposers of really good, really necessary reform ideas.   Those reform ideas always seem to start with people who hold to these other things as well.

And I have no idea why.  No reform movement succeeds with just these people, of course, and none succeeds while being led by someone who had bought into all of this.  For a reform movement to succeed, you need the support of the general public, and the general public doesn’t have any patience for Zenobia’s constellation of principles.

Hell, one of the most effective ways to stop a reform movement in its tracks is to convnce that same general public that you can’t have the reform without having all the rest of that stuff.  They take one look at it, get appalled, and run for the hills. 

If a reform is ever really going to happen, you need a Lincoln or a Martin Luther King, as Robert noted, a person who isnot a Zenobia at all.

But still.

What is it about this particular constellation of ideas that seems to make the people who hold them more capable than the rest of us of seeing what reforms are really needed and committing themselves to making them happen?

So, here’s the thing.  I am, at the moment, reading The Blithedale Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.  For those of you who haven’t read it or wouldn’t read it or whatever, it’s a novel about a utopian socialist back-to-the-land experimental community in antebellum New England.

For those of you who thought all that started in the 1960s, there were actually several in the northeastern US before the US Civil  War, the most famous of which was called Brook Farm.  Hawthorne himself lived at Brook farm, which was practically a picture-perfect mess of the kind thse communities tend to be.  

You have a bunch of middle class and upper middle class New Englanders of the plain living and high thinking variety, pumped up on Romantic literature flooding in from  England, all desperate to Commune with Nature by throwing off the corrupting influences of artificial civilization. 

Then you have the guy they take on who actually knows how to farm, a process about which our heroes and heroines have no clue.

The  Blithedale Romance is what I think of as a “what it looks like” kind of novel.  There is a basic plot, but the point is mostly to draw a portrait of this place and the people in it, warts and all.   And there are a lot of warts.  There are good reasons why this is considered a minor novel next to something like The  Scarlet Letter, but Hawthorne had no patience for the idiocy he found at Brook Fram, and he isn’t shy about expressing it.

He also has a pretty good eye for pretention, self-importance and snobbery.

But.

Back a few months ago I pointed out that Hawthorne was a good critic of the New  England Transcendentalist movement because he didn’t belong to it, but that it was more than a little ncomfortable to realize that he didn’t belong to it in good part because he wasn’t an abolitionist and he was something of a racist.

And I use the word “racist” here advisedly.   I’m n ot the kind of person who slings it around as an all-purpose accusation, and I do know the difference between actual racism and being, simply, a person of the time in which you live.

But Hawthorne was not just such a person–all of New England would have qualified for that–but a racist in the pure sense, someone who believes that one race is inherently more human than another.

For all their faults, one of the things you have to give the Transcendentalists is the way they approached not only the slavery question–you can of course fault them for their support of John Brown when Brown was behaving like a serial killer–but the issue of race itself.  They not only invited black speakers to address their meetings but black abolitionists to dinner in their own houses, and no matter how difficult they might have found it emotionally, they made an attempt to live by the principles of equaolity they’d inherited and committed themselves to.

Hawthorne had no use for abolition and no use for black people, whom he and his wife consistently referred to as monkeys and apes.  He once complained to a Transcendentalist friend who had had the Hawthornes to dinner to meet a famous black abolitionist that his wife had been forced to dine with animals straight out of the jungle.

It was not a pretty thing. 

Hawthorne felt about women’s suffrage–and women’s rights in general–the way he felt about abolition, although he at least tended to think of white women as actually human.  In The  Blithedale Romance he gives us a character named Zenobia–not her real, but her supposed pen name–who is modeled on Margaret Fuller.

Fuller was an interesting person in some ways.  She was a journalist when women were not often journalists, and a public speaker when women could literally get themselves physically harmed by speaking in front of sexually mixed audiences in public. 

Nowhere near enough has been written about the role of abolition in the American women’s rights movements.  Women who would never have imagined themselves going so far against convention as to speak at public rallies did it in behalf of ending slavery, and the men who ridiculed and threatened them also got gradually used to them as the movement gained steam. 

Fuller was, however, a particular kind of person, and I’ve known dozens of them in my life.  She was not really a first rate mind, and her politics were largely the politics of opposition.  She was desperate for an affirmation of her femininity of the kind that comes when a man agrees to marry you.  In the end, she married an Italian she met on a trip abroad and had a child by him.  There are intimations that the marriage wasn’t happy–and probably couldn’t be, given the circumstances. 

Hawthorne’s Zenobia has all these traits, and a few others. Unlike a lot of other feminist characters in American literature–say, Olive in  Henry  James’s The Bostonians–she’s portrayed as physically beautiful, vigorous and engaging.  Hawthorne doesn’t give the impression that he doubts the woman’s abilities either as a polemnical writer or as a speaker. 

(He does portray her as a God awful novelist, but that’s a different story.)

Zenobia is, however, a master manipulator, self-centered, self-righteous and self-absorbed, willing to wreck the life of anyone around her who gets in her way, and able to do it with no full consciousness that that is what she’s doing.  Like I said, I’ve met dozens of people like this, and certainly enough of them in the various feminisms that have blown through the landscape during the course of my life. 

But.

Zenobia’s big issue, the social reform she wants most to effect and that Hawthorne spends most of the time ridiculing here, is precisely that right to speak in public in front of sexually mixed audiences that I was talking about earlier.

I don’t think there’s anybody reading this blog today who wouldn’t find a restriction on such activity by women to be entirely unacceptable. 

We can read and laugh at the descriptions of our earnest back-to-the-landers discovering that a day at the plow doesn’t inspire poetry and philosophy but rather makes one too tired to even read it, never mind write it–but it’s impossible for me, at least, to laugh at Zenobia when she defends the idea that women should be able to engage in public speaking.  Hawthorne clearly finds his character contemptible and ridiculous for the ideas she holds, but I can’t read his contempt and ridicule without rebelling.

But.

In one way, Hawthorne isn’t wrong.   Much as we’d like our political saints to be all around  Good People, they rarely are.  A great deal of good work has been done, and moral and political proress mae, by people who are objectionable as human beings. 

It’s not just that such people “have their faults,” as it’s common to say.  It’s that many of them are downright dangerous in all the worst ways.  Zenobia is not just ridiculous, or vain  She’s what I think of aa a “soft totalitarian,” the best example of which may be Ken Kesey’s Nurse Ratchett in One Flew Over  The Cuckoo’s Nest.

In fact, she’s quite a lot like what Susan  B. Anthony was like, from what I’ve been able to read of Anthony’s letters and speeches–excpe that, in physical form and relationships to men, Anthony was a little more like Olive in The Bostonians.

So, here’s my question–is there something about the things we need to make ourselves better as a people and a civilization that requires that they be done by people who, on other issues, we’d be better to avoid like the plague? 

Why is it that the push for the right thing–for ending slavery, for treating women like equal adults, you name it–so seldom comes from ordinarily decent people without the megolomania, the self-absorbtion, the sheer adversarial objectionableness of the people who have actually led the movements that resulted in these things?

I think we often talk as if we would be better off if these people all just went away, but the more I look into it, the less I’m sure.

So, yes, the Facebook thing-

I’m sort of with those people who don’t see the point, although it does seem to me that it might come in handy if you have to make a general announcement an want everybody to see, but for some reason can’t or don’t want to call them or e-mail them all individually.

And the way I first went to Facbook started like that.  My high school graduating class was having its 40th reunion, and I  was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to make it, or to make much of it. 

And the thing is,  I wanted to.  I know a lot of you think I had a God awful time in high school, mostly because of Somebody Else’s Music, but SEM is actually a reflection of what happened to me in junior high.  I actually had a kick ass time in high school.

Part of that was certainly the fact that my high school didn’t have much in common with your regular American public school.   There was a cheerleadin team, but I’m not sure what they cheered for–a boys’ school in the vicinity, I think–but nobody paid much attention to them.  

“Popular” in this place didn’t mean athletic, or cute, or any of the rest of it.  Since all the students were girls, it was usually pretty impossible to tell if anyone was dating at all, never mind if the date in question was “cool.”

So “popular” ended up being scholastically accomplished–it was comprised of the people who made the Honor societies (plural) and the people who got the highest SAT scores and the people who were most likely to end up in “name” colleges. 

It was the first place I’d ever been where a girls’ status depended on her brains and ambition, and it existed before there was anything like a feminist movement afoot in the land. 

Sometimes, reading through the comments here about how the English department was full of people who looked down on everybody and thought they were better than everybody else, I get a little frisson of recognition, but it’s not English departments I’m seeing.  

I did, in fact, know a lot of people, growing up, with the attitudes Robert ascribes to his English department, but none of them were in the English department, or involved intellectually in any way at all.

And part of me woners if the widespread distaste of academics for American middle class life might come from this–growing up in a world where just being smart was enough to earn you endless, sneering abuse.

But, like I said, my place was not like this, and I was interested in seeing people, and especially the people I’d been closest to.  Checking in with people you were once close to that you have not seen in forty years is an interesting exercise.

But as I got closer and closer to the time, it became more and more obvious that I wasn’t going to make it, or that if I did it was going to be for no more than a few hours at the end.  

Since some of the people who were organizing this were putting up information and notes on Facebook, I signed on to Facebook in order to see them, and I signed on under my birth name because that’s the name most of these people would remember me as. 

Or rather, they’d remember me by a nickname I hated beyond belief and got stuck with because my cousins also went to this school and wouldn’t call me anything else.  Or allow anyone else to call me anything else.

For what it’s worth, those same cousins still won’t call me anything else, and they go into paroxysms of snit whenever they remember that I didn’t change my name when  I married.

Paroxysms of snit.  That should be the title of something.

Anyway, once I got onto Facebook, all hell broke loose fairly quickly, and it sort of got worse by the day. 

Or maybe worse isn’t the word. More out of control by the day may be more like it.  For one thing, there are a lot of people out there who know a lot more about the names I might be going under than you’d think.   This resulted in my immediately getting “friend requests” for a gazillion people, which, you know was fine.  I’m a sociable sort if I don’t have to sit in a crowded room with people getting liquored up, and I was happy to have them.

Then here were the requests, which had to do with stuff like food fights, which I finally tried out the other day, and have no idea if I responded correctly.  I figure I’ll get back to that when I have a chance.

I did upload some photographs of the cats, nice ones taken by my friends Carol and  Richard when they were over one Sunday, because I’ve sort of decided to use the Facebook page for the happy-face stuff.  

But I also started looking around on Facebook as a sort of general thing, and I came up with some stuff that confuses me.

I understand this as a way to do general announcements, and to find people you haven’t seen in a long time but would like to get back in touch with, or to keep in touch with people you don’t get much of a chance to correspond with or see otherwise.

But the more I looked around, the more I realized that there are a fair number of people who use Facebook to communicate with people they see all the time.  And I do mean all the time.  

Could somebody explain this to me?  Why do you need to send messages through a Fac ebook page when you talk to that someone at least once a week, if not oftener?  There has to be something going on here I don’t get exactly. 

Okay, there’s a lot I don’t get.  I’ve already had to be rescued twice from accidentally subscribing to expensive silliness I had no idea–and still have no idea–how I got myself into.

But certainly there’s got to be something going on here that isn’t just about “communicating,” since some of these people were communicating just fine before Facebook came along.

And what is the difference, exactly, between Facebook and MySpace? 

Okay, I haven’t been to MySpace to check it out.  But it sounds the same when people describe it to me. 

Right.  Anyway.  Here we go again, Jane confronts popular culture and is confused.

But yesterday there was a story in the news about a guy who is suing a Vegas casino because he lost his shirt, which has got to be the ultimate “it’s not MY fault” story in the world.

And tomorrow I’ll get back to morality, the Humanities, and Nathaniel Hawthorne redux, since I’m reading The Blithedale Romance at the moment.

Every once in a while, I end up having these epiphanies about stuff everybody else knows about, but that I’ve never heard of.  I lead a sheltered life.

Anyway, the first of these has to do with country music, and it came to me because the people hired to work my television cable company’s customer service department are possibly the stupidest people on the fact of the planet.

Let’s just leave it, at the moment, that after about a year and a half of screwing me over on a matter that required things like sending registered letters, the company decided to calm me down by giving me a year’s worth of free cable service–and when they did that, they gave me what they called the “Gold Package.”

I think the idea is that, once you’ve had the  Gold Package, you’ll be so addicted to your television you won’t ever want to cancel service again.

They’re wrong, mostly, although I am going to miss the European news channels, not only the BBC World News  Service but another one that seems to be operating out of Paris. 

But the other thing I’m going to miss is, believe it or not, the country music channels. 

Sometime when I wasn’t paying attention–and I was never paying attention, so this could have happened eons ago–country music changed what it was.   There are still the kind of songs most non-country fans think of as “country,” like Dolly Parton’s “Backwoods  Barbie,” but they’re rare–there’s even a song, called “Johnny Cash is Dead and  His  House Burned  Down” about the lack of good old fashioned country music.

It wouldn’t be half as funny if it wasn’t for the fact that it is not, itself, good old fashioned country music.

What else is on there is, well, American popular culture, and it’s not just for Americans any more.   It’s not just for white guys, either.  There are now black guy s on the country circuit, including one of the moment’s biggest superstars, a guy named Darius Rucker.

There’s also this other guy, probably one of the two or three biggest names in the genre at the moment, called  Keith Urban–who’s from Australia. 

But here’s the thing.  If I ever worried about the state of America, what made me worry about it was MTV.  It’s not just that the stuff on the straight rock channels these days is largely rude, crude, and lewd–that can be a good thing if it’s done right–or that all the male artists seem determined to look as decadently grotesque as possible, or that all the women seem to be dancing on poles and talking about their vaginas.

(If you think I’m exaggerating, go see if you can find a video of Lady Gaga’s “Love Game.”)

No, my real problem is that everything on VH-1 and MTV feels artificial and manufactured, as artificial and manufactured as any old Bobby Darin ballad, but less pleasant.  

And it doesn’t shock anybody any more, or at least it doesn’t shock me, because it’s the same old same old.   Yes, you hate your parents and love your drugs, the world is a mess and it’s all somebody’s fault, and you over there are sixteen and really hot so you’re going to talk about screwing.  Big deal.

There’s certainly some stuff on the country stations that feels manufactured–what is it about record executives that makes them all so enamored of crooing?–but there’s incredible variety and what I think is an admirable concentration, by both the artists and the stationss, on real life.

As for the music, there’s the pretty straightforward (but not lewd) pop, as in Taylor  Swift and Kellie Pickler (she of the Pearl Harbor started Vietnam celebrity quiz show gaffe); the good-time party pop (see Kenny Chesney)l and a throwback not to old country music but to the very birth of rock and roll, in a song called “Firecracker” that could have been done by Jerry Lee Lewis. 

There’s also an incredible amount of political stuff, all of it realistically concentrated on blue collar troubles in the present crisis, none of it self-referential, self-satisfied, look-I’m-a-revolutionary crap. 

Which is interesting, because if there’s a really huge difference between  MTV and GAC, it’s definitely in the non-musical programming about the artists.   MTV gives you Cribs, which shows off the houses of very rich people and concetrates, as in my favorite Nickelback song, on “living in hilltop houses driving fifteen cars.”

GAC gives you little profiles of the artists at home, but only if they’re just starting out.  Here’s a band that has a hit this summer, but they’re still not making enough money to do it full time, so here are the tract houses they live in and here’s where the leads singer works in a body shop.

The relentless drumbeat is home, family, church and regular life, and it makes the political songs–my favorite is something called “Shutting Detroit Down”–a punch political songs don’t have when they’re done by, you know, Bono.

It also makes for different politics, which is something for a different entry on this blog, someday. 

Let’s just say that the Dixie Chicks do not know how to pick their spots.

 The kicker in all this, though, is the work of two men, Brad Paisley and Trace Adkins.  Adkins does a fair amount of what is standard for country these days (“You’re Gonna Miss This”), spiced up with some seriously funny stuff like the one about how he’s going to marry for money and the one I really like, called “Honky Tonk  Bedonkadonk” which–well, let’s just say that you can be a lot more entertaining about lewd sex if you’re not that lewd.

What Paisley does is to make fun not only of the usual subjects–he’s got one called “I’m So Much Cooler Online” that should be the anthem of a generation–but also of himself and of the stereotypes about country music prevalent in the culture at large.  There’s “I’m Gonna Miss Her,” which almost made me punch the remote when it started, because I was so sure it was going to be Paisley’s entry in the sad ballad sweepstakes, but which turned out instead to be the story of this guy who lovs his wife, but he really loves his fish, too, so when she threatens to leave him if he goes fishing this morning, well…he goes.

Paisley’s songs are well written and inventive lyrically, but his videos are good enough to knock you on your ass.   The one for “I’m So Much Cooler Online” stars  Jason  Alexander as the son of two quarreling old farts, with the father played by William  Shatner.  “I’m Gonna Miss Her” seems to feature some actual local television reporters doing updates on fishing competitions.  

Then there’s the one, which I’ve only seen as a performance video taken from a live act, called “I’m Still A Guy,” which is a comment not only the whole Metrosexual thing, but the Feminization of Everything thing I was talking about a few months back as it relates to boys in schools.

There’s a lot about love of God and love of country, but none of it is smarmy and none of it is stupid.  My guess is that Mr. Paisley has a very good mind indeed, with an attitude straight out of the Weasley brothers. 

The approach to religion is something I didn’t think I’d ever see in American Protestantism, and I don’t think most of these guys would take somebody like  Pat Robertson or the Reverend Falwell seriously for a minute.  There seems to be an easy acceptance of both religion and personal imperfection–a guy named Billy Crudington wrote a song whose tag line is “God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy.”

I don’t mean to be going on and on about something that isn’t really related to reading, which is where this blog started, but I’ve always thought that the two most significant modern art forms were film and jazz, with jazz defined to include everything that came out of it, from blues and country to pop and rock. 

And for a while, it seemed to me that the music had mostly just died.  What you see on MTV these days is largely forgettable, and the frighten-the-cows thing is so stale it puts me to sleep.   All that seemed to be left of popular music was adolescent posturing and lots of concentration on how much money you could spend, whether it made any sense to spend it or not. 

And I never got to Facebook.  But.  You know.  What the hell.

Okay, I’ll admit it.   There’s really no point to the title of this post except that I was thinking of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, and I really like wombats.

I’ve also got to admit that I’ve never read The Turn of the Screw, largely because it always seemed to me that teachers tended to assign it not because it was the best James, but because it was relatively short, and therefore suitable for students who didn’t really like to read.

I wonder how much of the literature that gets beat up here as awful and boring gets assigned for the same reason–not because it’s the best that could be assigned, but because it’s relatively short and therefore at least theoretically easier to read.  That might explain why so much of what people here think is part of the Canon consists of stuff I managed to get through four years of high school, four years of college, and seven years of grad school without ever having been assigned even once.

That said–I think most of you think of morality differently than I do.  For one thing, I think we need to separate the essential from the secondary. Take the sentence “any moral code that is to prove workable must do something to control the innate aggressiveness of young men, by drafting them into the armed forces and training them to be disciplined soldiers instead of rootless loose cannons.”

Only the first half of that sentence is essential.  The second half is a strategy, not a moral precept, even if it presents itself in society as “it’s immoral for young men not to join the army and do their bit.”

I think that one of the problems with talking about morality and moral codes is that we tend to frame our statements about strategy as if they were moral precepts.  It is, I think, the differences in strategy that make moral codes look vastly different when they very rarely are. 

That’s not to say the strategies are necessarily negligible.  Sometimes they are, and sometimes they’re not.  But questions of strategy rest on different foundations than questions of morality, and mixing the two together only makes everything look arbitrary and muddled.

Thinking of the human capacity for thinking in moral terms as analagous for the human capacity for language explains a lot of things, not the least of them the tendency of people who vigorously deny the existence of morality altogether (everything is relative!) to engage in highly puritanical, often hysterical moral censoriousness under other names.  Cigarettes?  Fossil fuels?  Hate speech?

What’s more, when we’re dealing with something that is an essential question of morality–sexual behavior, for instance–the moral thinking not only comes back with a vengance, but comes back in the very same area we pretended to banish it from.  Sex?  Well, sex is good, everybody gets to decide what to do about sex, that’s none of society’s business, we should all do our own thing–but if you’re over eighteen and have sex with somebody under eighteen, we’ll lock you up for five years, even if she was seventeen at the time and you were nineteen and the only reason the two of you had sex is that she walked into your dorm room stark naked and threw you a condom. 

Hell, we’ll go farther than that.   If you’re a fiteen year old girl and take a naked picture of yourself on your cell phone and then send that picture to everybody you know, we’ll brand you as a sex offender for life, and do the same to everybody you sent the picture to, even people who didn’t want the picture or know it was coming. 

What’s more, we lump everything from the actual rape of a six year old to the consensual sex between a nineteen year old and a seventeen year old as a “sex crime,” and if we catch you doing any of it we will make you register as a “sex offender” and brand you, literally, for life, and warn the public about you in a way that makes it impossible to know what you actually did.  They will assume,  however, that you violently raped somebody, or molested a child, because why else would you have to register at all?

If you look at this stuff, you’ll notice that what it is is an attempt, once again, to control the sexual behavior of young and youngish men.  All the different rules about sex that have come down to us over time, from the burqa to the sex offender registry, exist largely to protect women and children from the sexuality of men. 

In Crete before very modern times–we’re talking right up to WWII here–mothers carefully sequestered their daughters from the men in their own families once the girls reached puberty.  The assmption seemed to be that men would nail anybody or anything if they got the chance, so it was important not to give them the chance. 

We’d call that wrong,  punishing the (prospective) victim instead of the (prospective) perpetrator, and it’s not the kind of rule I’m fond of myself, but it speaks to a deep and abiding conviction in all human societies at all times that sex is a dangerous thing, and that the sexuality of men is violent, volatile, unrustworthy and anarchic.

Controling that sexual behavior is an essential moral question.  Wheter we do it by sequestering women, establihing parietal hours, or running sex offender registers is a matter of strategy.

Nor do I think that it’s all that odd that so many people do not follow the moral rules they’ve been brought up with, even in societies where failing to follow them results in harsh penalities.

Genes are blindly driven to insure their survival and replication at any cost.  Morality addresses individual behavior in order to direct it away from radical selfishness and towards a concern for and recognition of others.

Moral precepts that insist we keep alive men and women who have passed their ability to reproduce are almost certainly reacting to something hardwired–respect for elders is something else that tends to exist almost universally in all societies. 

And the evolutionary advantage in that should be obvious–in a preliterate world, there’s a lot to know and no way to know it but acquiring it painfully and over a long period.  The Elders might not be able to have children, but they’ll enhance the ability of their grandchildren and your children to surrive to reproduce themselves by their knowledge of things like agriculture, hunting, cooking, and building shelters.

Obviously, strategies matter in another way, too–some of them are conducive to the advancement of civilization and technology, others seem to just mire themselves in an eternal present. 

But–just to throw a bombshell at the end here–there’s something else that has existed in all societies everywhere until the twentieth century.

Religion.

A few years ago, I reread a lot of Henry James’s novels–I’m a big James fan, and I still think The Princess Cassamassima is the best tourist-at-the-revolution portrait I’ve seen yet–and I got a little shock in the middle of The Bostonians. 

For those of you who haven’t read James–and that seems to be mostly everybody lately–The Bostonians is the story of the rivalry of two people for the love and loyalty of a very beautiful young girl.  The rivalry has as much to do with the rivals’ philosophies of life as it does with ordinary sexual love.  One of the rivals is a down-at-heels Southern aristocrat with very traditional ideas about the relationships between men and women and the position of women in society.  The other is a high-born Boston woman and ardent suffragist whose bookish, pinched and censorious nature make her a bad political campaigner.  She hopes to turn the young woman into a fiery and effective crusader for women’s rights.

James being James, the Southerner, and the primeval urges for sex and procreation, win in the end, but the scene that always sticks in my mind is of the little band of women’s rights activists spending the Fourth of July at a house on Cape Cod, where they parade with candles and sparklers to celebrate “the Glorious Fourth.”    They’re absolutely ecstatic.  They love everything about the Fourth.  They think it’s the most important day in human history.   And they show no signs of the niggling, pinched, resentful anti-Americanism that characteried a lot of later American radicals.

I trust James for observations like this.   He’s good at them, and he had absolutely no patience with the kind of preening self-satisfied distaste for one’s own society that he found running rampant in radical circles in England, for instance, at the time. 

I find all this interesting, because it means that there are no necessary connections between the two branches of thought–that there is no reason why, if you’re the kind of person who wants significant chane, you must also feel that your own society is so thoroughly and irretrievably corrupt that it must be either worthless, or at least worth less than that of anybody else’s society anywhere.

Never mind.  I really love Henry James.  I think it was The Portrait of a Lady that gave me my first glimpse of what I would later feel to be the best way to live, and that in spite of the fact that Isabel Archer largely makes a mess of it.  Well, no, actually not.  Maybe the thing is that she makes a success of it in spite of having made a choice so catastrophically wrong it should have destroyed her.

I also think it’s interesting that James should have been the person to have focussed so much attention on the tourist-at-the-revoution business, and to have had so little sympathy for people who rejected and denigrated their American (or British, when it came to that) heritage. 

He lived most of his adult life outside the United States, largely because he was uncomfortable here.  He came from what Jonathan Franzen would later call “the high art tradition” with a vengeance.   He was the distinguished son of a distinguished and highly intellectual  Boston family.  He knew his bluestocking feminists at first hand.  He was homosexual at a time when there was not much room for it in New England.  He was naturally and by conviction an elitist in both the good and the bad sense, and this was a country that had just defeated its only even close to aristocratic tradition.  

Still, I’ll take James over any of the other nineteenth century novelists writing in  English.  I think he’s better than Dickens or  Trollopse and certainly better than Hawthorne or Melville, even the Melville of Moby Dick. 

There’s very little overarching philosophy in  James and a lot of careful attention to the details of everyday social ritual, or the lack of it.   His people, and especially his women, are among the most highly realized characters in all of prose fiction. 

He can be difficult to read, and he was not terribly commercially successful when he was alive.  He was one of those writers whom later writers needed to love or hate.  Edith Wharton made him not only her mentor (which he was, for a time), but her ideal.  Hemingway defined  his entire career in opposition to everything he thought James stood for.

I have a tendency to think of “American Literature” in the New England  Renaissance mode, as that body of work that includes both Hawthorne and Melville but also Whitman, literature about plain people in a plain country.   Even the New York of Bartleby the Scrivener–another of my favorite American stories, come to think of it, and the only Melville I think is nearly as good as even mediocre James–but even the New York in that story is a place with not very many people in it and not very much else, either. 

I know I’m not making much sense here.  I’m trying to describe something that is literally visual in my head, rather than verbal, and I don’t seem to be very good at it.  But it’s there in Emily  Dickinson, too, and in Winesburg, Ohio, and in Hemingway’s early stories about Michigan.  

And it’s even there in F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was consciously trying to write about the intricate web of social interactions, but who produced mostly stories about people behaving archly in a largely uninhabited landscape.  

James does something different, and so does his protegee, Edith Wharton. 

If you’ve got access to interlibrary loan or the kind of library that carries esoteric and not very popular books, try getting hold of an essay by George Steiner called “Archives of Eden.”  It’s a very long esay.  It could h ave been pulished on its own as a small paperback without too many complaints.  It’s basically an argument that says that America can never have truly great art because truly great art cannot be produced in a democratic society.   Truly great art, Steiner says, requires elitism to exist at all.

Well, James seems to have managed.  And although he was uncomfortable living in democracy, he had neither hatred nor disdain for it. 

And I’ve got no idea what that’s supposed to mean.

Back to hardwiring and moral codes–especially since Lymaree seems to have misunderstood me–tomorrow.

Let me just note that I have NEVER said that human beings were hardwired for any particular moral code or moral precepts.

I have said instead that:

1) human beings are hardwired for a lot of things, including the ability to think in moral categories and the drive to do so (just as we’re hardwire to be able to form languages and then to do it) AND

2) that by looking into all the things we are hardwired for, it is possible to apply our capacity to formulate moral codes to discover (in our hardwiring about things OTHER THAN moral codes, in our hardwired emotional and behavioral responses to certain stimuli) what those moral codes should be  AND

3) that there’s nothing odd about this.   We’re hardwired for curiosity about the world.  We’re hardwired to be capable of logical thought (if we weren’t, we couldn’t think that wasy).  Put these things together, and we discover lots of things about the world, and eventually invent the sciences.  But the fact that we’re not already hardwired to k now that the earth goes around the sun instead of vice versa doesn’t mean that when we discover that, it’s just a “social construct” that’s all about cultural influences.

4) the facts of morality are out there for us to find–but they’re out there, they’re not something we make up

5) we aren’t hardwired with the facts of morality any more than we’re hardwired to speak French rather than German,  BUT

6) we ARE  hardwired to need to find this information, and to invent it if we can’t find it, and to go looking for it until we come up with something that at least seeems to work.

And, like I said, I’ll get back to that later.

I have to cook.

Okay, let’s start here–human beings are hardwired for language.

That means that there is something about the physical structure of our brains that makes language possible for us.  If our brains were physically different, we would not be able to form languages or learn to speak them.

At the same time, we’re not hardwired to speak any particular language.  We each learn a particular language in a cultural setting, from the nuclear family to the kibbutz and back again.

There are therefore a wide range of languages on earth, at various stages of development, and with many differences.

But none of these languages is, as far as we know, radically different.  Even when we discover a language we cannot translate, because nobody speaks it any more and we have no Rosetta stone to relate it to other languages and it’s not part of one of the language families now existing, we can identify it as a language, because it shares what Chomskey–back in the days when he was actually doing linguistics–called “deep grammar.” 

All languages share a common foundation, and therefore common foundational traits, no matter how different they are on the surface.

Morality–the tendency to erect and attempt to live by what we call moral codes–seems to have this same quality, and a number of evolutionary psychologists are spending their time these days trying to work this out.

If you want to know one of the best books I’ve ever read, it’s Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which spends its time demolishing the entire idea of nurture as the foundation of the human personality.  It’s also a really great example of what a truly educated mind would look like–Pinker knows the science, but he also knows Jane Austen, Hegel and Snoopy.

Well.

All human societies–all human beings not raised feral (and maybe feral children, too, although  I don’t know)–erect and attempt to follow, or at least to explain through,  moral codes.  It’s a universal trait, and it’s almost certainly hardwired, meaning caused by the genetically determined physical structure of the brain.

And it operates on the level of the individual, for the same reason that everything–yes, even instinct and basic human drives–operate on the level of the individual.

There is no other level on which it is possible for biology to operate.

Nature isn’t concerned with keeping “the species” alive.  Nature has no concept of species, or anything else.  Each individual organizsm is busy keeping its own genes alive, and the fact that this means that something we’d call “a species” survives is a side issue.

All biology operates on the level of the individual, and the need to, and ability to, create moral codes certainly looks like something that is biologically encoded in us.

To the extent that this is true, all moral codes, no matter how divergent they may seem on the surface, will share certain foundational similiarities.

And, of course, they do.  Moral laws against murder and theft are universal.  The apparent differences are only apparent–a matter of who the moral group in questions defines as “human” and therefore subject to and protected by such laws. 

The universality of the double sexual standard for women (until the 20th century West) and of the routine assumption of the second-class status of “women’s work” (even in the 20th century West), look to me to be useful to Darwinian survival in an obvious way.

The principle problem in the survival of human beings as human beings is to convince women to have children, and preferably more than one.  And  Lymaree is right on both counts.  There is a genuine biological hunger to have a child–any woman who nears menopause withoutever having been pregnant can testify to just how strong this desire is–but children are also a huge drain on the physical and mental resources of adults, and especially of women.

But that second thing means that many women will be perfectly happy to have just one child, or at least as few as possible, to have them late rather than early if possible, and otherwise to forgo childbearing, at least some of the time, for other, more fun and more remunerative things to do.

A society in which women are automatically barred from reaching the highest levels of status in the public world, but are venerated and respected for having children, is one in which women will have more children than they have in ours. 

What’s more, a society in which women’s public lives are restricted is one in which there is less chance that the child that woman bears will not belong to her own husband.  To the extent that a society restricts the sexual activity of women, men find it possible to insure that their own genes will survive.

What interests me about this whole phenomenon, though, is just how resilient it is to the truly radical changes in technology and environment that have occurred in the last two hundred years.

Robert is right in thinking that the rise of the “knowledge professions” and of labor saving machinery had as much to do with female emancipation as politics or morality, but what’s really interesting to me is this:

In a world where women have full access to education, work and politics, where they can strive for any position, climb any corporate ladder, acquire any advanced degree–women are still paid best for being women.

Take a look at the Fortune list of world’s wealthiest individuals, and you’ll find maybe one or two women (next to a couple of hundred men) who’ve made their pile as inventors, entrepreneurs or corporate executives.  The vast majority of women on these lists fall into two categories:  the wives and daughters of such men, or entertainers.  

Female entertainers are rewarded largely for being “hot,” meaning for being young and sexually available.   They can have all the singing, dancing and acting talent in the world, and they’ll do no better than middling well if they don’t “look right.”   And if they do look right, they can often make quite a lot of money–or marry it–on that alone.  

Even Oprah fits into the category of a woman being paid for being a woman.  She’s our national Mother, and Mothering is what we expect from her.

Note that some of these women can become enormously powerful, especially as iconic Mothers–but that’s been true throughout history, and it doesn’t chane the landscape here.  If you need to keep women in a place where they’ll be driven to have lots of children, then providing them with a role that provies them with wealth and power as long as they don’t leave the reservation makes a lot of snese.

I don’t want to sound as if I think there’s some sort of plot here.  We seem to do this instincitvely, and no amount of hectoring from the New Moral Forces of the age seems capable of making us stop.  The paradigm even works on a stratified class level–the  Hooters waitress makes a whole hell of a lot more money in tips than the waitresses in comparably priced restaurants where the uniforms are more modest, and the few men who have ever decided to take jobs at Hooters find their tips are in the toilet.

The very capacity to think in terms of morality, like the very capacity to form lanuages, is hardwired into human beings. 

And all biology is, at base, i ndividual.

Meaning that sometimes, the responses on this blog fascinate me.

I was talking about hardwiring, and practically everything anybody had to say had to do with social construction, or presumed social construction.

Let’s start with  Robert.  I’m not sure from the ost, but if he’s trying to imly that I was claiming that some moral precepts become “outmoded,” he’s wrong.  In fact, I was claiming exactly the opposite.

To the extent that what we are looking at here is hardwiring, the fact is that the moral precept may remain constant and constantly relevent even if the initial conditions that led to it becoming hardwiring have disappeared.

We can talk all we want about why it was the sexual double standard arose, and its concomittant restriction of the public activities of women, and we can speculate that the advent of DNA and the knowledge professions make it all no longer needed, but if the hardwiring is such that the result of doing away with all this is a birth rate in negative numbers, then our change in moral codes will not (in the long run) lead to progress for anybody.   It will just lead to the death of our society an a world in which the restrictions on women would be much greater than what they might have been if we had kept the basic parameters of the original.

And no, I’m NOT  saying that this is the case.  This is a hypothetical I’m using here.  And, admittedly, mostly because I think it’s the kind of hypothetical that will get people upset.

On the other hand, it’s a hypothetical with a certain real-world kick at the moment.

And I disagree with Lymaree that human societies are infinitely various.  I think the variety is mostly a surface phenomenon.  The underlying codes and assumptions seem to be to be remarkably constant throughout time.

For instance, as satisfying as the supposition may be that the division of labor was about phyiscal strength, or death in childhood, the precept that holds in all literate and most non-literate socieites is not “men will do the heavy labor” but “the jobs men do, whatever they are, will be held in higher esteem than the jobs women do.”

That’s a precept, by the way, that holds true even in the twentieth century West, although it’s modified slightly–here as in all complex socieites–by issues of class.

Although even there, less than you’d think. 

Back in the days when there were still big industrial plants in the US, the men who worked the assembly lines at places like Ford made more money than their wives who taught in the public schools, in spite of the fact that the “prestige” of the woman’s job was supposedly higher.  

Even now, though, a good way to tell if the prestige and remuneration of a profession are going to rise or fall is to figure out if it’s becoming more masculine or more feminine. 

The issue is this:  what can change and make the world better, and what, when changed, only makes the world worse?

The answers to those questions are written in our biology–biology is destiny, in some ways, although not in the exact way the person who first came up with that dictum meant.

The position of women in the 1950s US was better than the position of women is now in Saudi Arabia, or Iran.  The position of women in the twenty-first century US is better than either.  And that’s the good news, as long as that last thing is sustainable.  If it isn’t, then we’ve got a problem.

And it’s a bigger problem than you’d think, and closer to us than you’d think.  There are ordinary, non-Muslim women in many cities in Western Europe now whose lives are more restricted than they would have been in 1950, because they live in neighborhoods where to go out without a veil means to be beaten up or raped by gangs of young men who don’t accept the Western idea that women should have the rights and priveleges of men and who feel completely safe in imposing their own moral codes on the women around them. 

There’s a lot of talk in the US about the cowardice of the governments in these countries, because they often refuse to police this sort of thing or respond to it adequately, but in the end the issue isn’t cowardice but numbers.  Muslim women may be oppressed, beaten down, and subject to something close to slavery and jail, but their birth rates are qunituple those of the Western women around them. 

And demography is destiny, especially in a democracy.

I’m not advocating any particular thing here.  I’m only pointing out that any real investigation of the objective bases of morality would have to look at things like this–at the response of things like birth rates to the structures and assumptions of our socieities–without prejudice, and this is something we adamantly refuse to do.

But the fact that we refuse to do it–and that in refusing to do it we  produce silly “moral philosophy” with little relation to objectivity in any sense–does n ot mean that it can’t be done.