What do women (and Western liberals) want, cont.

A reader writes:

You posted something about feminism recently. Being acquainted with some of the more demented things uttered by feminists over time (Swedish ones in particular), I wonder one thing, regarding Western feminists. Is Western Feminism simply a reactionary rejection of women’s liberation? After all, what feminists seem to loathe more than anything else, is white men. You know, the cliché about feminists’ indifference to Moslem misogyny, black rapists, etc.

Is feminism, thus, an expression of the rejection of the freedom—that unbearable lightness of being—that Western society has given its women?

My reply:

This is similar to the question, why do Western left-liberals gravitate to Third-World dictators?

On one hand, as you said, the primary motivation of liberals is the hate of the West itself: they don’t really believe in the things they say they believe in, like women’s equality; if they did they would be alarmed at Muslim immigration. So women’s equality must be a means toward some other end, which is to tear down our society. Muslim immigration accomplishes the same, so liberals support that too.

So far so good. We’re on the same page.

But it seems to me there’s another dimension to this. Liberals’ rejection and hate of the West leaves them spiritually without a home, without a father, without authority, without order. But all people need these things. Therefore they look to substitutes. Thus the America-hating Oliver Stone finds his true father in Fidel Castro. Similarly, feminists may find themselves sympathetic to the male patriarchal tyranny of Muslims, or at least unable to oppose it.

Human beings do not want just freedom; nor should they. Human beings have a legitimate and natural need for order. If they reject the traditional order of their own society, or if their own society does not provide sufficient order (which is implied in your description of the radical personal freedom of the contemporary West), they must find some other source of order, or at least gravitate toward symbolic substitutes for the order they have lost or rejected.

Another reader comments:

Yes, and the other dynamic is that people’s politics are shaped by their resentments, and people tend to resent people they know—like white men—rather than people in far-off countries.

Frankly, the left is, despite its purported multiculturalism, extremely parochial. Its whole mental universe is caught up in these incredibly internal and Western obsessions like absolute freedom and equality. I have yet to meet a leftist who takes any foreign country as seriously as I take Japan.

My reply:

This is a key point, and it’s a very disturbing thing to realize: the degree to which people’s politics are motivated not by attraction to a rational good but by irrational resentment. I cannot overstate how important this is as a human motivation, not for all people, but in many many cases. I did one article on this at FrontPage Magazine, relating to the anti-war right, but I barely scratched the surface of the problem.

While the psychology of resentment is general to mankind, it seems to take particularly intense and systematic forms in the West. Ultimately I think this is related to the highly differentiated structure of the Christian world view, as Voegelin shows in The New Science of Politics. Christianity (and Judaism), by differentiating the world into the transcendent and the immanent and thus placing God outside the world, de-divinizes the world; it places man in a situation where he seeks a harmonious relationship with the divine but can never possess it, and is always in danger of falling away from it. This situation is highly unsatisfactory to many people, and so they long for what Voegelin calls a more compact, less differentiated articulation of existence in which the experience of the divine is more immediate. This leads to various forms of gnosticism, giving people the idea that they can fully possess the divine.

I think we can say that a parallel reaction occurs on the political and social level. Just as Christianity is the most highly differentiated and therefore most difficult religion that there has ever been, the Western balance of freedom and order is the most highly differentiated and most difficult political and social system that there has ever been. It demands much more of its citizens than do simpler political systems. Breakdown of a tolerable social and moral order, and mass dissatisfaction and resentment, are almost inevitable. On one hand, the Western demand for radical freedom creates resentment against any order as cruel and oppressive. On the other hand, the already excessive freedom undermines order and leaves people bereft of the order they really want and need. Whether people are resentful of their own society’s supposedly excessive order, or consciously longing for more order, in either case they conceive an abiding dissatisfaction, dislike and resentment against their own society that makes them gravitate to its alien opposites.

The true answer to a failure in the order of one’s society is to seek to restore its true order. But this is not what Western liberals do. Their psychology is not that of a rational mature adult seeking the good, but that of a wounded adolescent, angry at his parents and seeking some way to dis them. Thus all their concern for minorities, their identification with alien cultures, is an irrational childish reaction against their own parents or their own society. They are using those other cultures as a foil against their own society. They have no interest in those other cultures at all.

As I found out from the first chapter of Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim, this Western reaction goes as far back as far as the 16th century. People who were dissatisfied with the West for various reasons upheld savage and Muslim cultures, which were supposedly more humane and tolerant, as a foil against the West. They knew and cared zilch about those savage or Muslim cultures. The same trend continues today.

In short, Western man is seriously screwed up, and a realistic observer would have to say that the odds are against his getting himself straightened out.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 22, 2005 11:43 AM | Send