IN THIS thread  at What’s Wrong With the World on the folly of women holding positions of leadership (posted here previously), Kristor reflects on authority, masculinity and human nature. He writes:

It is natural – in both the modern and medieval senses of that word – that leadership should fall to men because when things go to hell in a hand basket, they are the ones who die first. They are the first line of defense for the nomadic band, and by extension for the family. This is why they are endowed with greater physical strength than women, on the one hand, and with the ability to engender thousands of offspring, on the other. The latter capacity makes men fungible, and cheap. Women are expensive – that is to say, they are precious, and to be guarded and protected. It is not the number of men in a population that determines the size of its next generation, but the number of women. Five men and one woman can engender only about 20 young; one man and five women can engender 50 or so. Hence the origin of “king:” “kinning.”

Ceteris paribus, any nomadic band can afford to lose more men than women. Thus if a band faces a grizzly bear, it is only sensible that the men should bear the brunt of the danger – and should be ready to lay down their lives in doing so. Their natural role is to spend their lives in the protection and service of women. So men get to do the fighting, the hunting and exploring, and the dying. Prima facie, it isn’t a particularly attractive job description. Fortunately for men, the order of things has been ordained such that they are naturally inclined to enjoy such activities as hunting, extreme or violent sports, exploration and discovery, strategic and tactical deliberation, competition and struggle, tools, engineering and weapons, explosion, fire and demolition, and – not least – rough-housing, tomfoolery, pranks, hijinks, and pointless feats of derring-do (“Hey, Mom! Dad! Watch this!”). Almost everything that men qua men enjoy derives from the arts and sciences of war. “Man” in the old days meant “Human.” Female men were “weave-men,” whence “woman.” Male men were “weap(on)-men.”

Since in the competition for land and resources that band will most likely prevail that puts its most talented, experienced fighters in charge of its military policy, the natural leadership of men in any social organization is therefore a pretty foregone conclusion, and has been for millions of years. Maggie Thatcher is the exception who proves the rule. Both men and women – but especially the former – are wired to prefer deference to the strategic and tactical direction of men who manifest a good mix of talents in the arts of war, and their derivates. We don’t like to take direction from a dweeby engineer so much as from an engineer who is also an MBA; we prefer a quick and intelligent all-around athlete at quarterback to a stupid behemoth. And women prefer to mate with talented, far-sighted warriors: muscular, athletic, nimble, intelligent, resourceful, thoughtful, skillful, and courageous, that’s the ticket. Odysseus is perhaps the archetypal exemplification of the ideal husband – not the bit about the 20-year absence from home, perhaps, so much as the willingness to be absent for 20 years if that’s what the situation requires of him.

The leadership of the husband in the family then is kingship writ small. Kingship connotes more than paternity. The paterfamilias is called to the family’s offices of Foreign Secretary, Attorney (negotiator and advocate, but also champion), Engineer (husband and farmer), Treasurer (economist and man of business), and chieftain in war. These his outward facing roles are mirrored by his inward facing role of final Judge and Arbiter (“you just wait till your Father gets home!”), and of Lord (the office originally involved seeing to the fair distribution of food). That all these offices devolve most naturally to men is due in the first instance to the fact that all of them are founded at their root on the capacity to wield lethal force, should that become necessaryin extremis. And lethality is the peculiar function of men. Since men as men must be the ones who first risk death first for the sake of their families, it is only fitting and sensible that they should take direction of activities that pose the risk of death.

In dire emergencies, families look to the father for direction. I have seen this again and again, as a boy, as an adolescent, and as myself a father. When things are looking really bad, Dad starts barking orders, and while Mom and the kids do indeed (if they have any brains at all) make free with suggestions and intelligence (which if he is anything but a fool he will take into account), still they will scurry to obey him. When the flood came, and the tornado, everyone just knew that my Dad knew better than my Mom about the physics of the situation, and about the lay of the land; he had known about these things without knowing he knew, because he had spent more time than she in playing war, and in building and destroying things. Men deal with the horses, the fire, the truck, the deadly blades, the power tools: they deal with danger, chaos, havoc. The whole point of manhood, in social terms, lies in the willingness and capacity to cope with danger usefully. When a crazy man or a slavering dog accosted my family, they all shrank back; I leapt forward. It’s automatic.

But of course, without his subjects, a king is just some guy. His kingship then at the most basic level derives from the subjects in their subjection to him. And subjects are not robots; if they were, they would need no kings. True kingship, legitimate kingship, arises from a people’s willing subjection thereto. Anything less is mere tyranny, which is a defect of society, and at its root an act of violence against the nation, rather than in its defense. So a true king loves his people, and attends to them, if he has any sense; for a king who attends only to himself has a fool for a vizier.

None of the foregoing would be relevant, or operant, if we lived in a world where families dwelt in perfect safety. We don’t. But for most Americans, most of the time, we are close. That’s the only way we could have the luxury of experimenting with sex roles. But our bodies and brains are still set up for a dangerous world, with the result that most such experimentation is likely to engender conflicts between our in-built preferences and our practices. E.g., in merely financial terms, and treating the family as a business enterprise like a farm, it shouldn’t matter whether the husband generates more revenue than the wife. But somehow in practice it generally does end up mattering.

                                                     — Comments —

Jake Jacobsen writes:

Or simply: men and women are different, thank God!

Several years ago while we were living in Virginia we were returning home after a late supper on a dark country highway. I leaned down to do something and took my eyes off the empty road for a second, when I looked back up the road was no longer empty eight to ten deer had scattered out and where covering the entire road.

I hit the breaks and cut the car into the grass median trying to keep from hitting a deer which, with our low slung car I felt confident would be a fatal move. While all this was going on I also had to comfort my wife who was screaming and crying. To this day I don’t have any better explanation than “God’s mercy” as to why I didn’t hit those deer.

So is the moral of my story that I’m so amazing, or that my wife is weak? Nope, just different, she is incredibly strong in other ways that complement, that is God’s way.

It just seems to me that what the modern world wants is for men to be women and women men. Which is no more than a recipe to make all and sundry miserable.

Hannon writes:

Thanks for reproducing Kristor’s excellent epistle. I’ve been avidly reading that W4 post and managed to get through the first day of the thread.

I often imagine what could develop if one were to take portions of a thread like that and give it to high school students to take in and report on. Heaven forbid, it might get them to really think about what they have to say before they say it.

Laura writes to Kristor:

You say male authority is natural, in other words created by conditions of life and survival. In the Judeo-Christian view, male authority is foreordained; in the case of Christianity, it is a reflection of the Trinitarian Father. 

It has to be one or the other. Either human nature is intentionally hierarchical, in which case male authority is primary and compelling whether subjects like it or not, or it is accidental, in which case humans can adapt to it as convenient or agreeable because it has no higher meaning.

Kristor writes:

I don’t think these alternatives are mutually exclusive, provided that God exists. Say that he does. Remember then the doctrine of General Revelation: the supremacy of God’s suasive power entails that everything that exists must (by virtue of the mere fact of its existence, if for no other reason) agree at least minimally with the Divine Will, and must therefore agree with Divine Providence. If God is the Creator, then by his eternal creative act – which is what maintains the world in existence from one moment to the next, ordering it and governing it continuously, so that it has integrity as a causal system – he created the conditions of life and survival that condition our natures. He is not wholly responsible for the state of things, because creatures too exert creative power, and destructive power. But God’s creative power is greater than that of any creature, or of any assembly of creatures. In the case of God’s existence, then, our natures as given by evolution just are our natures as given by Providence working in and through creatures – and even through, and in spite of, creaturely error and rebellion – and are therefore authoritative. 

If on the other hand God does not exist, then sheer happenstance is the only thing that has brought us to this point in our evolutionary history. In that case, we have no natures – for in a happenstantial world there can be no such thing – and yes, you are correct that we may then disregard our inheritance ad libitum, and with no particular concern for the outcome. This because, in a world wholly governed by happenstance – that is, in a world not governed by any order whatsoever – “consequence” is an empty category, and so therefore are “good consequence” and “bad consequence.” In that case, our notions of good and bad are simply illusory, and we may disregard them at will. 

But of course no one is really willing to put his life on the line for the proposition that the world is wholly disordered – that it is not, properly speaking, a world at all. Everyone at every moment of his life, even if the moment in question is the one wherein he is committing suicide, implicitly presupposes an orderly world as the proscenium for his existence and action, for otherwise no action could be rational, and no phenomena could be intelligible. So whatever we may say about the existence of God, everything we do (including speech) presupposes an ordered world, and therefore also an Ordainer thereof.

Laura writes:

You say, “our natures as given by evolution are our natures as given by Providence.” So evolution as you refer to it represents the unfolding of God’s creative power rather than Darwinian evolution.

Returning to the issue of male authority, you argue its reasonableness given natural distinctions. Male leadership makes sense and works. But can this argument be meaningful on the social and political level in modern democracies? We no longer face bands of raiding barbarians. We do not live in small feudal nations. We are not governed by monarchies. Can a modern society be patriarchal? If so, can it be patriarchal by virtue of reason alone? 

Maybe you are not really trying to argue for patriarchy, and by patriarchy I mean the sort of generally accepted male leadership in external and domestic affairs that existed in 19th century America, but are just saying, “Look, here is why the general trends that we observe regarding male and female behavior make sense. Don’t fight ’em and let things be.” That’s well and good, but I don’t believe this view has serious potential to influence the general direction of modern feminized societies. 

Evolutionary psychology, as useful as it can be for explaining natural sex differences, cannot form any kind of solid theoretical foundation for a society governed by men. 

If you go back to the time when women obtained previously male political privileges, especially the franchise, one of the most persuasive arguments for the female vote (which would also entail a greater female presence in all spheres of life and arguably changed the dominant conceptions of government’s role) was that uneducated men already had the franchise. How could it be fair for an intelligent, educated woman to be denied the vote while a poor farmhand who could barely read was not? 

There were counterarguments to this that are in keeping with natural sex differences. For instance, some argued that women should not be granted the vote because they do not risk their lives for their country and therefore do not have the same stake in political decisions. They are not soldiers and they will never be as qualified to be soldiers as men. However, some women were always capable of being soldiers and the Army has since been opened to women. So this argument no longer applies. 

Sure, men and women are generally different, but there are exceptions (these exceptions are every bit as natural as the rule) and society should allow for those exceptions, or so our modern thinking goes. Even within families, there may be wives who are more authoritative and better leaders than their husbands. How about a son who is less bright than a daughter? Why shouldn’t she be groomed for some significant role someday over him? So if we try to justify male leadership on the basis of natural distinctions alone, the rule of necessity breaks down given the dramatic differences in abilities within same sex groupings. 

Again, maybe you don’t really mean to argue for patriarchy but are merely admiring natural distinctions. 

That’s fine. But it seems male authority can only have real meaning and survive over time if it is seen as partly unintelligible. There is a spiritual essence that we cannot understand, which is why Genesis is so significant. Why was Adam created first in this symbolic garden? We do not know. But he was, and ever after we live in the wake of that decisive event. I read Genesis as symbolic and legendary but also stating a historic truth, that masculinity is primary. This view does not disregard the reasonableness of male leadership but recognizes reason’s limitations. 

The only functioning patriarchies in the modern world (Mormons, Amish, Orthodox Jews, Muslims) are based on Revelation as well as reason. I am not recommending that we mimic these subcultures or Islam’s form of patriarchy at all. But it is worth noting that male leadership survives in these cultures because men and women do not tie themselves into knots trying to exhaustively understand and explain their differences. They accept that these distinctions are not fully consistent and rational. They relax somewhat and reconcile themselves to their natural roles in life.

Kristor writes:

When I wrote that comment I was thinking through the origin and rationality of patriarchy for the first time. Not that the insights were really new (however new they were to me), or particularly insightful, but it was the first time that I ever bothered to think it through and arrive at what felt like an understanding of the rationale for patriarchy. Before, patriarchy had been to me just a brute fact. What I sought was to understand why it is that I have these feelings that I cannot gainsay about kingship, and about male versus female leadership in a combat situation; and why it is that all surviving human societies have felt the same way. I started with what I knew about from experience, my time as a whitewater guide, which is a pretty good proxy for combat, and a pretty good reproduction of the primitive band of humans. Our trips were 25 passengers and 5 guides, about the size of a hunter-gatherer band. The passengers deferred to the guides, of course. But more pertinent to the question, the guides deferred to certain alpha guides, who had the most experience and ability, and who were without exception men (even though about 20% of the guides in those days were women). 

So anyway I groped my way to an understanding, at least provisionally. So far I find no fault with it, so far as it goes. It does not go so far as providing straightforward guidance about such questions as whether women should have the franchise, hold executive power, etc. Clearly there are some women who are suited to that sort of thing, and it seems to me at first blush that we would be impoverished as a species if we were to prevent such women definitively from the exercise of their talents. Like I said in one of those comments, I’d rather have the women guides I knew at my back in a bad situation, than most of the men I see walking the streets of San Francisco. 

The rationale for patriarchy I have described may not give us straightforward guidance on policy questions in a technologically advanced society, but I think it gives us a good indication. It indicates that our society is likely to work better as a patriarchy than as anything else, even though it is true that we no longer face combat or the dangers of the wilderness on a daily basis. There are two reasons. 

The first is simply that we seem to be wired that way. We say to ourselves that it ought not to matter to the health of the marriage whether the man or the woman makes more money, and acts as the head of the household, but somehow it generally does. This, in just exactly the same way that, while feminists told us that it would be simple to raise boys without toy guns, or to raise girls with trucks, we found out different. Ha! The inarguable reality, evident to every parent, is that boys will be boys, and girls will be girls. In a pinch, index fingers will do just fine for automatic pistols, and a girl can make a pretend family out of a bunch of toy dump trucks. You can’t fool Mother Nature. 

The second is that my experience tells me that we are always closer to extreme danger than we think. It is interesting that Jake Jacobsen’s comment was about driving. Driving is the most dangerous thing we do; it is far more dangerous than hunting in Alaska or Africa, and is right up there with life in a hot combat zone. Is it really coincidence that when even a feminist couple is faced with driving under hazardous conditions – night, fog, rain, snow, back roads, heavy traffic – they both generally prefer that the man should drive? This pattern is ubiquitous, and no one ever talks about it. When “driving” meant driving a team of oxen or horses, the practical advantage of putting a man in charge of the operation was pretty obvious. But an SUV with power steering and power brakes? Yet it begins to make more sense when we recall that most men have spent thousands and thousands of hours as boys and teenagers doing crazy, experimental things with their bodies, with machines and heavy objects (including a lot of stupid dangerous play with cars), because they find that sort of thing fun – and that almost no girls have ever entertained themselves in this way. A man is therefore – as a general rule – far more likely to have a good visceral feel for the physics of the situation when driving than is a woman. His reactions to a bad situation are more likely to be apposite than hers; he is more likely to know what to do without thinking, and so less likely to panic. She is more likely to survive if he is controlling the physical situation. 

And these sorts of considerations are salient also in figuring out whether it makes sense for men or women – as a general rule – to be in command of any large enterprise. Any such enterprise is likely to involve the coordination of physical objects and processes, and men are slightly more likely to have a good visceral feel for that sort of thing than women. This is a generalization from the principle that it is better to put an experienced field hand in charge of a field operation than it is to put a desk jockey in charge. 

So I think evolutionary psychology, or rather more generally the facts of our nature, can indeed form a solid foundation for patriarchy – a solid theoretical foundation, and also a solid practical foundation. Given the state of the cultural discourse today, I don’t think the solid theoretical foundation has a snowball’s chance (ditto for the religious foundation)(our state dogma these days is, after all, nominalist irreligion: reason and faith have no cash value). But the practical foundation does, because societies where women are expected as a general rule to aspire to leadership positions outside the home just aren’t working very well. Thinking Housewife is a catalog of the disease, moral degradation, depravation, ugliness, reproductive failure, and sheer cussed unhappiness that results from following this general rule. More and more the news that Thinking Housewife specializes in broadcasting is going to come to the attention of people at the point where they make the important decisions about their own lives. This, in just the way that news about the side effects of birth control pills – that they prevent women’s immune systems from recognizing which potential mates are more genetically suitable for them – or of abortion – that it short circuits the normal cycle of the breast through pregnancy, delivery and nursing in such a way as to increase the risk of breast cancer – can affect the concrete decisions women make about their lives. 

The argument that it is not fair to deny women the franchise while granting it to uneducated men does not really come at the issue. Fairness is beside the point. It is not the goal of good social order, but rather its unlooked for sequela. The question is not whether a particular social arrangement is fair, but first whether it works, whether it is prudent. Only social arrangements that work can have a shot at being just. Take two societies, both otherwise identical. In one, uneducated men are given the franchise, in the other, not. Which will prevail? The second. So ceteris paribus, giving uneducated people the franchise is nuts. An imprudent society won’t survive to be fair or just. Social life is triage. First, be prudent; then, insofar as is possible under the constraints of prudence, be just; then, fairness, true fairness, cannot but prevail. 

Now despite all the foregoing, I would agree wholeheartedly on two points. First, women ought to be allowed to pursue the goals that seem best to them; they ought not to be definitively prohibited from trying, e.g., to be whitewater guides, any more than they should be forced to marry. But this freedom can make sense, and can in the end be truly rewarding for women, only if people are allowed to discriminate. If a woman is running an enterprise, she ought to be free to hire only men, or only women, or whatever she sees fit. If I were running a kindergarten, I’d want to hire women for the “front line” that actually delivers the product; if I were running a police force, I’d want to hire men for that role. An accountancy? Some wiggle room, there. 

Second, I agree that there has to be a transcendent, ultimately mysterious warrant for any social arrangement, if it is to retain the ultimate respect of its members. After all, a social arrangement may at any moment ask some of its members to give their lives in its behalf. A society that says to its young men, as ours lately does, “We want you to volunteer to face death on our behalf, for no good reason,” is not likely to find many takers. It will likely die. If they are to volunteer their service in war, young men must have reasons – this is the part of moral agency that depends upon the operation of the sort of reasons I have been adducing for patriarchy – and they must find those reasons compelling, must feel that the defense of their people is the right thing to do, and that they ought to do it – this is the part of moral agency that derives from the ultimate, transcendent mystery to which you refer. 

To defend itself, a society must believe that its survival is important; to do this, it must believe itself good; to believe this, it must believe in the first place that there is such a thing as a concrete, objective Good, to which it has approximated. I have compelling rational reasons for thinking that there must indeed be such an absolute Good, mostly boiling down to the fact that in its absence reasoning would not be possible. But because the objectivity of that Good from the perspective of any creature requires that it transcend any such creaturely perspective, it must remain forever ultimately mysterious to every creature – even though its operation as an ordering principle requires that it be by them intelligible, through and through, at least in principle, so that they may apprehend it, and learn to comprehend it, more and more. It must be simply given, the first, indispensable axiom of moral reasoning; and qua fact, it may not be experienced as susceptible to skepticism, if moral reasoning is to gain any traction on lives as lived. Only an utterly transcendent Good could be thus indispensable, unquestionable fact; and the utterly transcendent cannot, even in principle, ever be rationally encompassed by any creature.

So if I adduce practical or prudential or theoretical explanations of, or reasons for patriarchy, they can function as justifications for patriarchal behavior only within the framework of a transcendent moral order that compels our assent, and indeed our allegiance unto death. Only if I have a sense of that objective moral order can I feel that I ought to behave well, or that society ought to be good, and so far as it is indeed good, that it ought therefore to continue, so that it merits my personal sacrifice in its behalf – so that I want to defend it, just as I want to defend myself. Absent that transcendent moral order, no precept can compel. If it does not exist, our moral feelings are simply inexplicable. 

And this goes for all our feelings, all our judgments, even those judgments we make in the most recondite intellectual pursuits, such as mathematics. If there be no transcendent, objective order to things, then not only is moral reasoning impossible, but so are math and logic.

 Laura writes:

Thank you. The last part of your comments is key: 

So if I adduce practical or prudential or theoretical explanations of, or reasons for patriarchy, they can function as justifications for patriarchal behavior only within the framework of a transcendent moral order that compels our assent, and indeed our allegiance unto death. Only if I have a sense of that objective moral order can I feel that I ought to behave well, or that society ought to be good, and so far as it is indeed good, that it ought therefore to continue, so that it merits my personal sacrifice in its behalf – so that I want to defend it, just as I want to defend myself. Absent that transcendent moral order, no precept can compel. If it does not exist, our moral feelings are simply inexplicable. 

And this goes for all our feelings, all our judgments, even those judgments we make in the most recondite intellectual pursuits, such as mathematics. If there be no transcendent, objective order to things, then not only is moral reasoning impossible, but so are math and logic. 

Evolutionary psychology, as much as it can illuminate why men and women behave the way they do, cannot compel or inspire and it is therefore limited in its ability as an intellectual perspective to reverse the direction of feminized societies. There will always be ample reasons to disregard its insights in day-to-day life and in the ordering of society. For one, the argument that we are a technologically advanced society and therefore not subject to the same environmental constraints as earlier societies will always be powerful. 

By the way, to repeat, by patriarchal society I refer to the sort of separate male and female spheres prevalent in 19th and 18th century America, the distinctions that Tocqueville admired and believed were fundamental to American democracy. Women were not prohibited from all leadership roles and they certainly were not denied power, but generally these roles were circumscribed (as were the functions of men). They occupied leadership positions as community activists, not in the political and business realms. 

Contrary to the view that this enlightened patriarchy was especially restrictive of women, it severely limited the freedoms of men, tying them to a level of responsibility and authority that was often cumbersome, and of course granted women enormous freedoms they do not possess now, the freedom of safety under male protection and the freedom from onerous financial responsibilties. While it granted power to certain high-status men, the average man was as limited in his choices as the average woman and arguably more burdened as he had the responsibility of supporting family, though obviously he relied on his wife’s aid in this. Male authority, not tyranny, was a given. The vote and the right to run for office lent it symbolic weight. But this patriarchy was supported by theological presuppositions: that male and female were spiritual essences, that human beings were innately corrupt and thus power was a limited good, and that the soul is immortal and subject to Divine authority. 

Masculinity and femininity are partly mysterious. The Biblical patriarchs were flawed human beings – think of the sly deceptions of Jacob. They did not rule necessarily because they deserved to rule, and I think that is a fundamental idea. While evolutionary psychology explains behavior, it leaves some things in the dark. These are the most beautiful aspects of male and female, ideals which can impel an entire society toward self-sacrifice and interdependence.

Laura continues:

I want to thank Kristor for his excellent contributions. It is difficult for a man to even mention the P-word and so I am in deep admiration of him for discussing it with me. I mean, patriarchy of course. It is far more difficult for a man to use the word than a woman. A woman loses the respect of other women by considering the good in patriarchy. That’s far different from a man losing the respect of women. A man has so much more to lose by seeming to be an enemy of all women. Though there’s no such thing as chivalry in the old-fashioned sense anymore, the modern equivalent of chivalry is deference to feminism. A man seems honorable when he bows to feminine privilege. Few men want to seem like a lout. That’s what a “patriarch” supposedly is.

The word has been stripped of its fatherly connotations, of its associations with love, duty and protection, as I have said before and as Kristor has pointed out in his remarks on kings. It is only natural that patriarchy – remember the Latin root of the word is pater or father – would be considered scandalous in an increasingly fatherless world. (I mean father in the cultural not biological sense.) For the concept to regain any kind of respectability among men, they must recognize that women are not just wives or friends. They are daughters too. For every good that feminism has supposedly granted to mothers, or adult women, it has denied an equally fundamental need or interest of daughters and to the young in general.

Kristor writes (responding to Laura’s comment on masculine and feminine ideals):

No mere theory, however powerful, can motivate action unless it is felt to be also an insight into the desire, the love – Whitehead called it the Eros – that lies at the root of all things, which is their urge toward that being who is the acme of being. Whitehead spent a lot of time thinking about why things behave in an orderly fashion. Why don’t they all fly off the handle? He concluded that everything loves God, because he is so beautiful. Loving God, we want to be near him, want to be like him, want to conform ourselves to him (so that God regulates the world, not by a forceful imposition of his will, but by persuasion – by his prayer, his Word). It’s very simple. It’s the same sort of feeling that makes people who idolize a pop star want to dress like her, and so forth; or that made me want to be just as athletic and competent as the alpha guides I so admired. Only if we feel such a desire toward the realization of some Good, not first for our own sakes, but for the sake of the Good itself, can we feel that we ought to do something. Only if we have a good goal, whose object we love, can the notions of error, or sin, or of falling short or missing the mark, make any sense at all. Only if the Good is a real, concrete entity, whom we love and would serve, can morality be a factor in our lives. 

And, also, the sense of understanding that the insights of theoretical ratiocination may impart – whether in evolutionary psychology, or music, or theology, or logic, or math – cannot occur unless it is preceded by, and presupposes, a conviction of the basic orderliness of things. For formal reasoning to begin and proceed, it must be possible to have a formal system in the first place. And a formal system is not doable unless its object is ordered before we ever begin thinking about it. So if there were not this a priori Order of Things in place from the get go, not only would evolutionary psychology be unable to motivate our action, but it would not be comprehensible to us at all. The attempt to understand presupposes the intelligibility and orderliness of things, and that orderliness and intelligibility cannot become operant in the things of the world unless they are given thereto as a priori absolutes. 

As to Victorian patriarchy and the far more stringent constraints it imposed on men: yeah. You know, as a dyed in the wool egalitarian, I always had trouble with St. Paul’s notions of good family order, wherein wives were to “obey” their husbands. That stuck in my craw. It wasn’t until I was writing that series of comments over at WWWW that I understood the logic of male command: in an emergency, the man is more likely to know what needs to be done, and more likely to be the first to fall – and life is always poised on the thin edge of emergency (however much we like to delude ourselves that we are safe). So his authority is just common sense. And St. Paul’s admonition to wives is properly understood only within the context of an overall notion of marriage that naturally imposes much greater responsibility, and risk, and suffering on the husband. For in the Christian understanding of marriage, the proper relation of the husband to the wife is typified by Christ’s relation to the Church, as its suffering servant. The Bridegroom is called to die for the sake of the Bride; this is why she should wait for him. The knight is likewise to sally forth in defense of his damsel, and the husband in marriage is to be ready always to recapitulate Christ’s ultimate sacrifice. That sacrifice is the archetype of all those Corn King religions of the ancient human past, wherein the role of the King was to die for the sake of the Queen and her city – in Israel, for the Daughter of Zion and her city, Jerusalem. 

And none of this means that men are to tyrannize their wives, or that wives are to knuckle under to that tyranny. It means the opposite. Men can be kings of their families only when their families give their assent to his assumption of that office. Tyranny is illegitimate rule; kingship is legitimate rule, and exists only when the ruler and his people are in sympathy. The true king is the suffering servant of his people, ready always to die for their sake if need be. The role of the husband in the family, then, is to attend to his wife and children, to consume himself in their service, and in support of their truest and best flourishing.

Just yesterday morning I was listening to Catholic Radio on the way to the train, and I heard Father Corapi talking about this very thing. He was insisting that love means desiring the highest and best good for your beloved: that he or she should enter into the joy of heaven. He asked: “Are you treating your wife as a means to your own satisfactions, and judging her according to how well she meets your needs? Or are you ready to give everything – everything – for her sake, and for the sake of her salvation? Is your marriage to her really all about you, or is it about your love for her?” I thought: “What a lousy King I am.”

Laura writes:

If male protection comes with sacrifice and danger, why is patriarchy often considered evil? I think here again we can look to some of the insights of evolutionary psychology. I recommend Steve Moxon’s The Woman Racket, which I wrote about here, for a look at the natural tendency to disregard male sacrifice and longstanding female privilege in patriarchal societies.

Charles writes:

Laura wrote:  “Can modern society return to any semblance of the civilized and benevolent patriarchy that existed in early 19th century America? 

Yes. The foundational level for such a renaissance would be the individual family. Before I started my family I was impressed by those families who were homeschooling their children; i.e., the man was working, the female was staying home to raise the children. I wanted this too. This is a movement that can spread throughout the country again. We need to encourage each other to do this if we can and then stay the course. 

“If so, what shifts in contemporary thinking would be necessary to bring about such a profound change?” 

Here are my first thoughts: 

1. Jobs for men first. This is a battle cry that you started here. Thank you. 

2. Women staying home – if possible – to raise their children, and homeschool as needed. Homeschooling allows the parents to remain their children’s primary peer group. 

3. Women realizing that raising a family has a much larger impact on society and future generations than any other activity they participates, in whether it is church, career, or volunteering. She is not just raising her children, she is also raising her children’s children and beyond. 

4. A new found respect for the tradtional family structure; a new found respect for females who stay at home to raise their children; a new found respect for working fathers. 

5. A radical restructuring of our tax code that will: 1) allow men and women to raise a family on one income and 2) allow single people to save for their future family. 

6. Women must realize that radical feminism is a lie and will never make them happy. 

This is an Excellent Topic.

Hannon writes:

The continuing discourse between you and Kristor is outstanding. A great discussion.

He writes:

“The rationale for patriarchy I have described may not give us straightforward guidance on policy questions in a technologically advanced society, but I think it gives us a good indication.”

In a society or community that is healthy– not fractured or predominated by individual egotism, civic indifference, litigation, feminism and multiculturalism– the idea of “a good indication” would itself be the understanding for a well-functioning order among sensible men and women. We could add on reasoning as needed. I think that is the difference today, that the Good is an afterthought or even rejected outright, while reason gets first priority because it is seen as the only vehicle for parity between groups and individuals who cannot otherwise find common vision or function. “The Good” is heading out to sea.

But such an understanding requires deference to the transcendent,which is precisely what modernism seeks to destroy. Hence the aptness of Kristor’s comments about The Thinking Housewife. Secular life and even many churches are among the leading forces of incessant progressive liberalism. The voices questioning this headlong plunge need to be strong and reasoned, even after the manner of our Funding Fathers protesting the abuses and hegemony of the Crown. This eclectic blog is one such voice and I am thankful for it.

Clark Coleman writes:

I would like to offer narrow comment on one aspect of this thread.

Evolutionary psychology is secondary in importance to pure empirical observation of the differences between the sexes. The leftist/feminist lie that must be countered is the lie that the sexes are the same, except that cultural constraints cause us to raise boys and girls differently and produce differences that are not genetic. This lie can be countered by spiritual claims, but many will seek more scientific and “rational” claims.

The only scientific, rational way to argue against this lie is to observe the differences between boys and girls from the earliest possible ages. The secondary argument, along the same lines, is to observe very early differences in a host of other ways, not just differences between the sexes, e.g. differences in intelligence, brain development, emotional development, etc.; differences between individuals, across ethnic groups, across cultures and nations. In this manner, the “environment is everything, genetics is nothing” lie is undermined in general, making it easier to accept the particular case of differences between the sexes.

Once the differences are established, and shown not to be culturally induced, then many people will no doubt want to explain why the differences exist. Evolutionary psychology is one such attempt at explanation. But if the audience is not convinced that the differences exist, or think the differences are just culturally induced, they will reject all “why” explanations (including evolutionary psychology) as being flimsy conjectures.

The evolutionary psychologists (at least the ones I encounter online) see the leftist/feminist lies and think their domain is the perfect antidote. It is not. It is a secondary matter of some interest for many people, and nothing more.

I note in passing that mapping the human genome might also disprove the lies, and that empirical observation at early ages is perhaps not destined to remain the sole source of rational disproof.

Laura writes:

I’ve always thought that the average kindergarten teacher is one of the best sources of insight into innate sex differences. There is not a kindergarten teacher on the face of earth who denies the extent of the differences, although some believe they can be extinguised with time. 

Speaking of how much can be ascertained by simple observation of children, Leonard Sax, one of the most highly regarded writers on innate sex differences in children, a man who repeats over and over again that boys and girls are fundamentally different, is strangely enough a feminist. 

Jim B. writes:

You ask, “Can modern society return to any semblance of the civilized and benevolent patriarchy that existed in early 19th century America?”

I don’t think it can, but it’s irrelevant – it will inevitably be replaced by societies that are, whether from outside or from inside. For example, there’s this story from the New York Times last week.

The secular Jew in America is an endangered species. Yitta, and her 2,000 descendents, are the future face of American Jewry. The same can be said for similar groups in other faiths. The future belongs to those who show up.

Laura writes:

In the meantime, each of us has choices.

Rita writes:

What a great thread! I’m going to have to read it over a few times as it’s a bit over my head and I’m streeetching to understand everything.

My thoughts: To use the Whitewater example, feminists of today are unknowingly usurping their Alpha guides and the rafts are careening toward the waterfall. When we crash at the bottom, the women survivors will be shaken and scared and looking to the men make things safe and comfortable again. And real men (alpha or beta, 99% of men come through in emergencies) will rise to the occasion like they always do. Sadly I really think it’s going to take a crash like this in our country to bring things back to some sense of order.

Kristor writes:

Charles wrote: “. raising a family has a much larger impact on society and future generations than any other activity . [a mother] is not just raising her children, she is also raising her children’s children and beyond.”

I had never thought of this obvious truth before yesterday when – again listening to Catholic Radio – I heard a woman theologian talking about how the word “home-maker” has gone out of fashion. She was arguing that it ought really to be brought back, or perhaps even better, replaced by another, more accurate term: “culture-maker.”

Lawrence Auster writes:

The paragraph of Kristor’s beginning, “to defend itself a society must believe..,” about how a society must believe in an objective good, and that this good is necessarily mysterious, and that it must not be experienced as susceptible to skepticism if it is to have traction, explains at a more profound level the organizing theme of Henry Bamford Parkes’s Gods and Men: the Origins of Western Culture (1959) which had a big influence on me. Parkes is a historian, not a philosopher, so he doesn’t actually argue for the objective existence of a good which is not susceptible to rational analysis; he only says that men must believe in such a good in order to have a sustained and creative society, and he shows how, over and over, when a society becomes competely rational, it destroys itself.

BCG writes:

Hannon writes,  …” such an understanding requires deference to the transcendent, which is precisely what modernism seeks to destroy.”

Exactly. Or, to put it another way, lacking deference to the transcendent, patriarchy becomes precisely what it is accused by its critics of being: that is to say tyranny. Lacking deference to the transcendent, patriarchy is merely a socially-enforced imposition of the authority of one sex over the other. Deference to the transcendent is at the root of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which is presumably why patriarchy has survived modernity only in a strongly religious context.

Laura writes:

Very well said.