Amos's River of Justice

Tag: Aristotle

  • The Epistle of James 1:2

    The Epistle of James 1:2

    This entry is part 4 of 10 in the series The Epistle of James
    Deem it nothing but an occasion for joy, my brothers, whenever (on each occasion when ) you encounter trying assaults of evil in their various forms (The Epistle of James 1:2, translated by Adamson, p. 52).

    James includes verses 2 through 4 in this section but this article will only discuss his commentary on verse 2. I think it’s important to include the citations and notes relevant to his arguments. If I include all three verses in this article it will be too long. I’ll discuss Jame 3-4 in the next article.

    Peirasmos

    According to Adamson, the dominant ideas of the Epistle are the duty and the reward of endurance under peirasmos, a ‘certain and not distant victory’. The words and example of Jesus inspire this approach. He cites Luke 6:22.

    (more…)

  • Anglo-Saxon Philosophy Lost Its Way

    Anglo-Saxon Philosophy Lost Its Way
    An engraved image showing a 9th century map of the kingdoms of Anglo Saxon Dark Age Britain
    taken from a Victorian book dated 1882 that is no longer in copyright iStock.com/TonyBaggett

    In the video summarized below, Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Professor Wen Yang claim that Western Philosophy has deviated from the right path. A more blunt way of saying it is Anglo-Saxon philosophy lost its way.

    I don’t disagree that the West needs guidance. I appreciate Professor Sachs’s speech and I think the Eastern cultures represented by Professor Wen Yang have a lot to offer the West. But I also think it’s important that we don’t end up in someone else’s dream of a traditional society by making choices we don’t understand. I am summarizing this video because these ideas need further discussion.

    I also want to point out that the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is loaded with meaning. During World War II, the Axis Powers, which included Nazi Germany, the Kingdom of Italy, and the Empire of Japan, used this term for Great Britain and the United States. The relationships and differences implied by this identification will be discussed in future articles.

    Aristotle or Confucius

    The video goes back and forth between Professor Jeffrey Sachs and Professor Wen Yang, a researcher at the China Institute, Fudan University. Professor Yang agrees with the speech by Professor Sachs for the most part. He says it is particularly relevant today as we witness the catastrophes taking place in the world. But he disagrees with Sachs in one important way. Sachs cites Aristotle’s works on politics and ethics as a starting place for a sound political philosophy. Professor Yang, on the other hand, thinks we need to go back another 200 years in time. This would bring us to the time of Confucius.

    Professor Yang thinks Confucius is more relevant because he dealt with large territorial states, while Aristotle dealt with small city-states. Confucius is also important to Wen Yang’s arguments because both Confucius and Aristotle had the benefits of the Axial Age.

    Machiavelli’s focus on power

    The video begins by pointing out a strange fact; apparently, there is nothing worth mentioning in Western politics or philosophy between the time of Aristotle and the time of Machiavelli.

    It is Sachs who brings up Machiavelli’s handbook for political science. He stresses that, in contrast to the West’s traditional roots, the focus of this handbook was how to hold on to power.

    In turn, Professor Wen Yang wonders how it is possible that Machiavelli’s treatise, when it finally appeared, was able to change the course of Western political philosophy. He believes that the core of the problem was the innate deficiencies of Western civilization. And these began very early. The problem with the West is that it did not experience the Axial Age.

    Professor Yang on the importance of the Axial Age

    The Axial Age is a theory developed by German philosopher, Karl Jaspers. Jaspers proposed that in a relatively short span of years, various cultures experienced a state of spiritualization or self-awareness. This experience gave rise to several religions. These religions include Confucianism and Taoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Unfortunately, when the current form of Western culture arose in Northern Europe around the year 1000, it was a ‘newborn’ culture which had not experienced its own period of transcendence. Nor did it share the knowledge of older cultures. This was partly due to the fact that it had little contact with them.

    According to Wen Yang, the West remained a primitive society, without moral and ethical judgement, and men remained individual and insatiable. He believes that’s why Machiavelli’s writings were adopted as a political philosophy. Such ideas would not have gained wide acceptance in a mature civilization that had experienced an Axial Age.

    Professor Sachs on Thomas Hobbes’s view of human nature

    Jeffrey Sachs doesn’t respond directly to this description of the problem. The video juxtaposes his speech, which was made independently, with that of Professor Yang. When we return to Sachs, he cites Thomas Hobbes’s work, Leviathan, written in 1640. (This was the period when Western science was taking shape.) Hobbes’s model of human nature was one of unbounded desire. In Hobbes’s view, it was impossible for humans to develop virtue. For that reason, institutions were needed to keep a grip on harsh reality. He believed that in order for people to not kill each other they need an ‘overarching power’, or a Leviathan. There was nothing in Hobbes’s philosophy about cultivating the good. It was all about controlling the bad.

    Guanzi’s solution to human reality: four pillars of a civilized state

    Wen Yang says there were similar opinions about human nature in China, but the results were not the same. He cites Guanzi in China, who lived more than 2,000 years before Hobbes. Guanzi wrote that there are four pillars to a civilized state: a sense of propriety, righteousness, honesty, and humility. In Wen Yang’s opinion, ‘It would seem that such a level of self-awareness and ethical self-regulation was not attainable in the West, not in Hobbes’s time and not now.’

    Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees: the world view of the British Empire

    Sachs speech continues. Theories of empire were added to the West’s philosophical and political development. This began with Bernard Mandeville and his Fable of the Bees. It furthered a world view which led to the British Empire, with its traffic in slavery and all kinds of evil deeds.

    Confucius: education leads people in a virtuous direction

    By comparison, Confucius had placed great importance on education to shape and lead people in a virtuous direction. To illustrate the difference, Yang tells us that Xunzi had similar insights to Hobbes in the third century BCE. He also saw the negative potential of human nature. He believed that if people were driven by nature and guided by impulses they would be trapped in struggles. So he suggested a system in which intellectuals will bear the responsibility of safeguarding a just society.

    Adam Smith: market forces will tame human nature

    Professor Sachs continues by describing the thought of Adam Smith in 1776. Smith agreed with Hobbes and Mandeville concerning human nature, but he thought market forces would tame those troublesome traits. Smith was obviously unaware that Xunzi had predicted long before Smith’s time that contentions, or ‘competition’, would lead to poverty.

    Two world views, two civilizations

    According to Wen Yang, the difference between Smith and Xunzi represents a difference in world views. When Xunzi used the word ‘people’, he meant the world in its entirety, not a small group of individuals. Smith and Mandeville on the other hand, envisioned a small political entity acquiring political power for overseas conquest. Wen Yang tells us that the only way the world can know peace and prosperity is if all the world’s countries choose to cooperate.

    Professor Sachs seems to agree on the timeframe and philosophies that were responsible for this difference. He says Anglo-Saxon philosophy broke free of more than 1,800 years of Western tradition, which had been based on Aristotle and Christianity. As a result we got the British Empire, which was focused on power. Next, Sachs traces steps in this downward spiral.

    The West forsakes the poor: John Locke, Thomas Malthus and Charles Darwin

    The poor became the enemy because they were a drag on society. John Locke, in particular, wanted harsh treatment for the poor so they would not be a burden on society. Then came Thomas Malthus in 1798. He said that all the various ‘hives’ in the world are in competition with each other for survival because there are more people than can be supported. Trying to help the poor will inevitably fail because it will increase the number of poor people.

    Then, Charles Darwin and Natural Selection took the stage. Other philosophers after Darwin developed his theories into the idea of a struggle across nations. They imagined that whole peoples were in a struggle with each other for survival. This became known as Social Darwinism.

    According to Wen Yang, this phase is the root of the current problem. The British Empire brought extinction wherever it went, and, unfortunately, the US Empire is an extension of the British Imperial Establishment. The main difference is that the United States has the ability to end human existence in a split second. The Anglo-Saxon empires have proceeded exactly as Social Darwinism would predict.

    Crimes against humanity

    Sachs: This progression gave rise to the worst crimes in history. Nazism is a philosophy based on Social Darwinist pseudo-science. It was based on the idea that either the German people will survive or the Slavic people will survive. As a result, World War II was a war for extermination. Even though that war ended, the West is still in the same mindset, so the crimes continue.

    Wen Yang: Noam Chomsky says that 50 to 55 million people around the world have died since World War II as a result of Western colonialism and neoliberalism. Most of these deaths were caused by the United States and justified under the name of freedom and democracy.

    Is there a remedy?

    Yang returns to 300 BC and the ideas of Mencius. Mencius was a Confucian philosopher who said there are four essences of human nature that are common to all: a heart for compassion, a sense of shame and guilt, a faculty of reverence and a judgement of right and wrong. Suppressing these essences was a precondition of Western liberal capitalism. Philosophical writings in the West fulfilled this precondition. They glorified selfishness and greed in the name of freedom.

    The question now is, what can be done? Yang and Sachs offer similar advice. According to Sachs, there are roots of Western culture that we can use to find the ethical path of virtue in politics which was lost by the Anglo-Saxons. He says what we need is for the world to return to the common ethical principles of virtue. These principles were lost mainly as the result of the rise of the British Empire. Later, the British Empire taught United States everything it knows.

    As a comparison with Professor Sachs, Professor Wen Yang believes the current problems can’t be explained by saying the West lost its way. He seems to believe that the West never had a way. Because the West never experienced transcendence, it is regressing back to the level that existed before the Axial Age.

    If that’s as far as you got in the video, you would say we are doomed. But surprisingly Yang thinks we are at a crossroads. This implies that we can still choose. He ends by asking, ‘Are we going to choose a society based on virtues, or are we going to condone a rat race to the bottom, and assured destruction?‘

  • Harvey on Class Nation and Nationalism

    This article presents the views of Professor David Harvey on class, nation and nationalism. Harvey’s recent video, published by Politics in Motion, touches on an important element of the Pinker-Mearsheimer debate about the Enlightenment. I review the relevant points here.

    Introduction of the argument with relevant ideas from of the Mearsheimer-Pinker debate

    In part two of John Mearsheimer’s case against the effectiveness of Enlightenment, he says that because people are social animals, they belong to tribes. We still belong to tribes. Today tribes are called ‘nations’. Because human beings are tribal, their identity is bound up with the tribe or nation. Their interests, their ways of looking at the world, and their views of justice are affected by this identification. And because people belong to different tribes, they often can’t reach political and moral consensus.

    David Harvey’s relation to the argument

    Mearsheimer was refuting the position of Steven Pinker, who argued that people are first and foremost individuals. Pinker thinks that because people are individuals, they ought to be able to use reason to reach a consensus. Here, David Harvey focuses on the idea of nations and nationalism in relation to capital. But his arguments have much to say about the social nature of human beings. This offers perspective on individualism versus the collective tendencies of human beings. It also urges caution in the exploration of nationalism. Harvey’s approach also requires us to rethink our understanding of environmentalism.

    Nation, nationalism, capitalism, and the nation-state

    How we are to understand the concept of the nation and the role of nationalism? Related to this is the question of what nationalism might do to our theoretical descriptions of how capitalism works. For example, what happens when we put the word ‘nation’ in front of the word ‘state’? We normally assume the nation-state has a different character from the bourgeois state.

    It is also important to mention that there is some confusion as to what the argument might be about. For example, Marx in the Communist Manifesto, said the nation doesn’t matter when it comes to thinking about terms of class. The workers have no country, therefore, they wage class struggle. Talking about class struggle is different from talking about the nation. This problem was taken up after Marx’s time.

    At that time there was an argument about how to understand the nation and the right of self-determination of populations. In 1915, Stalin wrote one of the original treatises on the role of the nation-state in politics. So did Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, and others. The debate continues in Marxist circles. Harvey’s plan in this and subsequent videos is to discuss how and why the nation-state came about and also what its origins might be. He also wants to talk about its consequences.

    Origins and consequences of the nation-state

    In the early 1920s, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States from 1913 to 1021, said the following.

    Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.

    This is Wilson’s description of how relations between nations are connected together. Harvey says we need foundation concepts in order to discuss Wilson’s speech and this subject in general. And and these concepts don’t exist in the Marxist literature. Therefore Harvey uses concepts from another domain which has always been historically important. He derives three concepts from his own professional association as a geographer.

    • Questions of the environment: We must distinguish between raw nature (untouched and unmodified by human hands) and the modified environment. We need to discuss the relationship between capital circulation and the environment, what capital absorbs from the environment, and what capital does to the environment, for example, building cities and new environments.
    • Space and space-time: As he has pointed out previously, capital itself is concerned with production of space and new temporalities. Capital accelerates everything. Marx called this the annihilation of space through time. This is a dynamic place for looking at how spacial temporality is transformed. Once spacial temporality is transformed, we have to adapt to it. Capital is constantly transforming the space-time coordinates of its actions and at the same time reshaping the environment and space-time through its actions.
    • Place: Place is not a favorite concept amongst Marxists. However, capital makes places. Capital is born in places and has a certain importance in terms of who we are and what we think about.
    Aristotle’s influence on Marx

    First, Marx was a classical scholar and a great admirer of Aristotle. Aristotle said human beings are political beings, or social beings. In Marx’s language of capital, we are political animals. This means we are always about forming collectives of some kind. Those collective forms of action are sometimes very extensive. As political animals, we have to think of the way in which capital is politicized and socialized in terms of its forms of circulation. (This aligns with Mearsheimer’s argument.)

    Second, when Aristotle talked about the meaning of market exchange and started to analyze the nature of the market, he noticed that it rests on the ideas of equivalence and equality. These ideas are also stressed in Marxism. So the political definition of equality and equivalence becomes fundamental to any society based on commodity exchange. However, Aristotle was not able to develop a labor theory of value. This is due to the fact that in Greek society, all the work was done by slaves. Wage labor was one of the preconditions of Marx’s theory of value.

    Finally, there was a concept that Marx did not take up from Aristotle, but which was foundational for how Aristotle thought. This is the concept of place. Aristotle said place is the priority or feature of all things. (Mearsheimer seems to have echoed Aristotle.)

    Place, space and the environment: a geographer’s view

    Harvey wonders if geography is about place, space and the environment, should we look at those things separately, or as a totality? He answers that he prefers to think back to the totality. A particular place exists in a certain spacial and temporal field, and has certain environmental qualities, both natural and humanly constructed. Therefore, the production of place is as important as the production of space, space-time and environmental transformations.

    Since the field of geography is about the relations between space, place and the environment, we have to start to analyze the spacial moment, the environmental moment and the place movement. Since Harvey has previously talked about the environment and spacial temporality, he will concentrate here on the notion of place.

    What Aristotle means when he says place is the priority or feature of all things is that all of us have a place of our origin. And that place, where we were born, how we are raised, plays a defining role in who we are. Therefore, we don’t have to start off with the abstractions of space-time and the question of whether or not the environment is human-made. We should start with the concreteness of the fact that we were born into a particular place. We have a certain set of experiences that shape us for much of our lives.

    The dialectical view of place

    When we say place is the first of all things, we mean that is where we begin upon our search to understand the world. That search will redefine not only who we are particularly, but how the world around us is made. It will also redefine what it is made of and how its transformations come back to transform us further. In other words, we take a dialectical view in which we say we change the world in order to change ourselves. One of the ways in which we change the world is by building different places. The concept of place becomes foundational in this way of thinking.

    We see that this concept is very distinctive when we reflect on the nature of what place is about, how place works and all the environmental and cultural elements that are attached to it. Harvey contends for example, that in a place like the United States you could probably look at the postal zone someone comes from and have a pretty good idea of what sort of person they are. He has observed that when American students meet each other in Europe they ask each other where they are from. Place enters into the personality and the understandings of the world. We develop these understandings from our upbringing and other surrounding influences. So when Aristotle says place is the first of all things, he means that where we begin and how we experience that place is very critical.

    Born in Gaza

    The Documentary Born in Gaza was filmed shortly after the 2014 Gaza War. It examines how violence has transformed the lives of 10 Palestinian children who survived that war. At the time of filming, these children still didn’t understand how or why people did those things to them, or what it meant. It’s likely that those kids became the back bone of Hamas today. ‘That kind of treatment can ‘form the cadre for a different kind of political world’. Harvey says we should take this carefully into account because it is shaping future generations and laying the foundation of many things that will happen later.

    So, when we say place is the first of all things, we mean it’s very likely that if you were born in Gaza and experienced these things, you would probably end up joining a political movement. Then the political animal would start to come out and lead to the formation of something like Hamas.

    A word of caution

    So, place is an important starting point. However, there is a problem with this starting point. This has to do with the fact that Aristotle is stating something very significant.

    When Aristotle says place is the first of all things, what he’s doing is stating something that is very significant, but it is taken up in other things…the notion of place played a very important role in a lot of philosophical thinking.

    Professor David Harvey

    One of the people who took up Aristotle’s notion of place was the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was tolerant of Nazism, and he associated himself with it philosophically. This was true even after the end of the second world war. In fact, he never disavowed it. For this reason, Harvey Heidegger is a problematic figure. Heidegger is someone you may not want to listen to, in Harvey’s opinion.

    However, he acknowledges Heidegger had a ‘distinctive’ notion of place. For example, Heidegger said that ‘Place is the locale of the truth of being‘. In this, he was close to Aristotle, but he took it deeper. He was saying there is a certain truth that attaches to the notion of place, and that truth is essential to being or becoming.

    If you go on to interrogate where Heidegger was coming from, you will find that some of his passages are anti-capitalist. Harvey quotes a rather long passage about how distances in time and space are shrinking. (Marx would phrase it as ‘annihilation of space through time’.)

    I’ve decided not to include Heidegger’s passage in this review. I’ve come across certain concepts and beliefs in the course of writing this blog that I consider dangerous. In this case, I take Harvey very seriously when he says we may not want to listen to Heidegger. We can’t be sure where certain harmful influences come from–whether from logical argument or from the general tone and atmosphere. It’s impossible to know which attributes have won people to this way of thinking in the past. So I chose not to include it here. I’m aware that this omission will cause many readers to go directly to the video to find out what he said. Of course they are free to do so, but at least I haven’t had to spend my time typing it.)

    Heidegger’s similarities and differences with progressivism

    According to Harvey, the passage in question is interesting in the way it talks about logical space and time in a Newtonian way. Also, it seems Heidegger was a great enemy of cosmopolitanism and market exchange. Many of his writings are anti-capitalist. But again, there is that note of caution. ‘There is something different in Heidegger’.

    What Heidegger is doing is an ultimate critique. It’s very Marxist in its own way, but Heidegger is a very conservative figure. The theory of place has been dominated by Heideggerian thinking, and includes questions of dwelling, how we appropriate the world and work with the things around us. Due to this influence we do it in such a way as to appropriate the world to the self. We start to internalize much of what we find in the place we are in.

    This is the kind of work which is these days coming back into left thinking. This is particularly the case with the effort to better understand indigenous culture and places. ‘There is the sense of feeling, the sensitivity to environmental variation, the closeness of things, which we can appropriate, how we understand them at the same time as those things can be very distant in mere physicality.’

    Heidegger’s dwelling vs Lefebvre’s inhabiting

    The idea of place is foundational for how we think about how people dwell. Dwelling was one of Heidegger’s main concepts. It was a critical feature for him. He did not use the term alienation, but he suggested that we can be alienated from nature, from space-time, from each other. Marx would understand it as general alienation from commercial culture, market related structures and capital accumulation. He would agree that this world, which is being built by capital, is a world full of alienation. And part of alienation is set up by an attempt to recuperate the realness and sensitivity that comes from dwelling.

    But, what Heidegger does is claim that places are sacrosanct, that they are places of memory and encounters. This has been taken up on the left by Lefebvre, who studied Heidegger before his Nazi sympathies became well-known. Lefebvre has changed Heidegger’s term, dwelling into inhabiting. ‘We are who we are by virtue of the kinds of places we inhabit.’ And he is not talking about ‘planting yourself on top of things’, but about trying to wrestle with the reality of environmental conditions, space-time relations, etc., and trying to incorporate them in our collective sense of self. It is that which develops the concept of nation and nationhood.

    According to Harvey the result is a form of environmentalism close to what Nazism was about. He thinks it has an ecological feeling, like Nazi youth camps in the forest. This isn’t as strange as it seems. Some writings of that time depicted Germany as one of the first ecological states in the sense of a close assemblage between the natural world and submission of one’s self to the conditions of life in that world.

    The significance of Marx in this context

    This is rather ‘bothersome’ in Harvey’s view. But he thinks it explains something significant about Marx. Marx understood there were nations and they needed to be talked about. He took up the idea of national self-determination and was particularly concerned with the case of Poland’s fight for independence. In fact, Marx was supportive of it, as he thought it might be a first step to socialism. In other words, Poland’s struggle was progressive.

    On the other hand, Marx was not supportive of Czechoslovakian independence. The Polish people fought for independence from Tzarist rule. But in Czechoslovakia, the ruling class was trying to pull the people back into serfdom. This sort of judgement is characteristic of the Marxist approach.

    Brexit and Scottish independence: a Marxist illustration

    Harvey illustrates his own experience with this type of judgement with two recent events. One was Brexit, which he opposed, and the other was Scottish independence, which he supported.

    After Jacques Delors’s term as president of the European Commission, The EU became more right-wing and reactionary. On this basis, Harvey would have supported Brexit. However, it turned out that the people behind the Brexit movement were reactionary right-wingers who were anti-immigrant and anti regulatory. So he didn’t support Brexit.

    By contrast, in the case of Scottish independence the people were working against neoliberal governance in London. This government was robbing Scotland of North Sea oil and other depredations. Scottish independence called for a progressive welfare state where Scotland could control its own resources. In addition, it included everyone who lived in Scotland, not only people with Scottish heritage. By comparison, Heidegger would have limited it to those who could prove Scottish heritage.

    Conclusion

    Probably Harvey’s most important clarification or addition in regard to John Mearsheimer’s debate points is his conclusion that you can’t immediately say whether national identity is good or bad. It depends on whether people use it for positive or negative reasons. The main difficulty for analysis is that there is no real foundation for a theory of place. That is, aside from a better understanding of how places form and what they are about. Therefore, Harvey concludes that a theory of place is crucial. And this theory can’t be divorced from its context in space-time and environmental conditions.

    There is a power in place-making

    So, we have begun to recognize a certain power in place-making, and how the way places are made has a big impact on how culture forms. We should tale note that the world is made up of places. However, when you are talking about space-time, you are talking about an abstraction. It makes more sense if you talk about space-time in particular. For example the space-time coordinates of places in the world. For example the coordinates which make Lisbon like Lisbon and Barcelona like Barcelona. This would include a consideration of how much the politics of those places really matters. In addition, cases like the Scottish referendum illustrate the use the notion of place as a political lever to engage in certain kinds of action. Harvey provides another example, the experience of the Paris Commune.

    The Paris Commune

    Surveys were done with the people who had been part of the Paris Commune. Many of them said they were there because they were loyal to Paris. When the painter Courbet was put on trial, he gave as his reason for being in the commune that he loved Paris. Paris was a significant feature of political organization.

    It is important to ask what is going on in terms of class struggle and what is going on in terms of national struggle. Can we distinguish between national interests and class interests? What’s the relations and between class and nation? In what sense are class interests and national interests related to each other? What is the national interest about and how does it work? These questions will be addressed in Professor Harvey’s next video.

  • Plato’s War on Women

    The foundation of the ancient Greeks’ project for civilization was to turn the female sex into a subject population.  But there were unintended consequences. This article argues that there is a connection between Plato’s war on women and the end of monarchy.

    Philo

    We have evidence that the Greeks were toying with the idea of subjecting women before Plato, but it was Plato who influenced Philo, the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher born in 25 BC who used allegory to harmonize Jewish scripture, mainly the Torah, with Greek philosophy.   If we were to judge Plato by today’s standards for hate speech we would conclude that he was a hater of women.  However we don’t judge Plato or any other misogynist by that standard.  One reason the world accepts Plato’s animosity toward women is that Philo enshrined it in the Bible’s creation story.

    Aristotle

    This story led some religious leaders to conclude that nothing is due women for their role in reproduction because they are merely repaying their debt to God.  This seems to have been the goal of Plato’s student Aristotle who added his own special touch by denying women credit for their part in the creation of life.  (This points to the importance of childbearing in the status of women.)  The suspicion that certain influential men claimed God as a partisan gendered being with the sole aim of ruling will be disturbing for many readers, but for those of us who want to defend biblical religion there is an escape from that conclusion.

    The Bible

    There are three ways to read the story of the Fall of Man.  It can be read as a model for the way society should work; as a description of the way things are; or as warning or a prediction about a human tendency.  The second and third possibilities are more revealing than Plato could have imagined. That is, revealing of patriarchal intention. These possibilities are never used to interpret the Fall of Man, although they are used to interpret other biblical stories.  The Tower of Babel for example is interpreted as an explanation for different languages and a warning against hubris.  Likewise, it is ironic how well the story of the Fall of Man describes human behavior, regardless how we choose to interpret it.

    Customs that Guard Against the Subjection of Women

    It’s likely that human societies have always had some degree of patriarchal authority.  However ancient cultures purposely remedied the disadvantages of women.  For example, according to the biblical creation story, inequality between men and women is established in marriage. In ancient times this protection was accomplished through customs involving the extended family.

    Bride Wealth

    The fundamental understanding of ancient cultures was the value of children (and their mother) to the marriage and to the extended family.  This value was acknowledged in various ways.  One was the custom of bride wealth.   Another was the dowry. (Hardship can lead to a breakdown in this custom. In some parts of the world today the dowry is used to justify abuse against women).

    Matrilineal Kinship

    Another custom that has been shown to benefit women and their children is matrilineal kinship.  This is a system in which lineage and inheritance are traced through women.

    The structure of matrilineal kinship systems implies that, relative to patrilineal kinship systems, women have greater support from their own kin groups and husbands have less authority over their wives.  ((Sara Lowes, Matrililneal Kinship and Spousal Cooperation: Evidence from the Matrilineal Belt, Stanford University and CIFAR, 25 February 2020)).

    Sara Lowes tested the hypothesis that matrilineal kinship systems reduce spousal cooperation and found that men and women from matrilineal ethnic groups cooperate less with their spouses in a lab experiment.  However she also found that matrilineal kinship has important benefits for the well-being of women and children.  The children of matrilineal women are healthier and better educated, and matrilineal women experience less domestic violence and greater autonomy.

    Matrilineal kinship is not only a remedy for the inequality of women in marriage (Lowes didn’t measure for the effect of bride wealth or bride price), I believe it was the original system for royal succession in Egypt.  I base this on the tendency of pharaohs to marry their sisters.  Marriage to sisters was not a natural part of matrilineal succession.  It was a way for an ambitious pharaoh to escape the limits of matrilineal succession, which makes it impossible to form dynasties.  The only way around this obstacle would have been for the son of a pharaoh to wed an heiress.  However even this would have gone against custom, if not law.   Furthermore, succession by the offspring of a sister (the daughter of the former pharaoh) probably broke the law as well.  Normally the son of a pharaoh’s daughter would not have been eligible to succeed him.

    This patriarchal strategy can be demonstrated in other countries besides Egypt.  The Achaean invader Menelaus married Helen, a kidnapped heiress, because without her he had no right to be king.  That’s why Helen’s rescue by Paris led to the Trojan War ((J. F. del Giorgio, The Oldest Europeans, A. J. Place, Caracas, Venezuela, 2006)).

    Finally, Patrilineal systems inevitably lead to a narrowing of the gene pool for succession.  This narrowing of the gene pool has played out in the lineage of European kings.  This breakdown in the system of royal succession points to a departure from ancient custom and law.

    Plato’s Anti-Democratic Focus

    Plato did not only weaken the monarchal ideal. His writings are anti-democratic. Patriarchy weakens participation by women.

  • Reproductive Rights & Female Status

    The dialogue about women has not been flattering lately. Officially, it’s centered around reproductive rights, but in between the lines the brutal tactics convey something else. Most recently we’ve been confronted with callous hospital policy. One hospital risks a mother’s death from complications of pregnancy. The other keeps a dead woman on life support against her wishes. Supposedly the abortion debate is about protecting life, however these extreme cases represent a clear statement of low female status. How did it come to this?

    Status is the value of one person in relation to another. There is evidence that female status was high at one time. The belief in the gigantic size of the Amazons was probably based on a misunderstanding—they were depicted that way to indicate high status. By contrast, pictures of Hindu gods with their consorts, indicate low status for females.

    From Moor's Hindu Pantheon
    Vishnu & Lakshmi on Sesha or Ananta

    Unfortunately, because hospital policy is premised on the absolute equality of a woman’s life with the life of her fetus, women in the United States would have to be drawn no taller than a man’s ankle. This doesn’t seem consistent with our ideals, but we don’t realize what it means when the issue of status is built into the world’s three main religions. The Bible wastes no time in ranking the first two humans in relation to each other.

    We don’t know what factors were behind the high status of the Amazons. However, there is evidence in the custom of bride wealth that it had something to do with the female role in procreation. Defenders of patriarchy claim that this changed after the discovery of the male’s part in conception. However, that’s not supported by the evidence. In any case, the male part is minuscule compared to the female part, and this was recognized in the custom of bridewealth.

    The value of the female role in procreation can be framed in the form of a cost analysis. Costs to the female include physical hazards as well as the time required for each pregnancy—9 months, not counting 2 or more years of breast feeding. Costs to males are non-existent.

    Consider also what bridewealth says about the value of females to their families. Bridewealth was a form of compensation to the bride’s family, especially to her mother, for the loss of her companionship and help. it was also compensation to the bride’s parents for the loss of her offspring. If not for the payment of bridewealth, her children would keep their name and remain with them.

    It was not the discovery of the male role in procreation that began the loss of female status. It was a philosophical attack on the relative contribution of the female. We know that Aristotle asserted the superior contribution of the male in the creation of life, and much later, Aquinas concurred. They claimed the father was the active agent and that the man’s sperm and the physical motion of intercourse ‘organized’ the lifeless matter in the menstrual blood. Further, both Aristotle and Aquinas said the ‘sensitive soul’ was entirely produced by the male. The semen is an instrumental cause, while the soul of the male parent is the principal cause.

    Aquinas added to Aristotle’s scheme by saying that the human soul was directly created by God. Nevertheless, he didn’t alter the superiority of the male’s contribution over the female’s. Theologians in the Middle Ages thought the spiritual soul was not present until after the first few weeks.

    Later, Thomas Fieinus (1567-1631) argued that the soul is present from conception. The development of the fetus consists of successively emergent functions attributable to a single original principle brought to life by the motion of intercourse. Following Fieinus, Paulo Zacchia (1584-1659) argued that the soul which organizes the development of the ‘conceptus’ is internal to it.

    Finally, an 1879 article, Aquinas on Human Ensoulment, Abortion and the Value of Life, argued that the principle of formative development is ‘immanent’

    With the development of embryology, you might think the female role would be vindicated, but that was never in the cards. On the contrary, the fetus is now said to be a separate individual whose right to life rivals the mother’s.

    But what about the physical costs of each pregnancy? They can’t explain that away, can they? You will recall that in Eve’s case, marriage was a punishment, and according to Christianity, there is no value attributed to the female for her role in procreation. At best, it might redeem her from her wretched state! The strange thing is that we see the practice of bride wealth, or rather bride service, in the Old Testament. Jacob worked 7 years for each of his wives. Jacob and Adam seem to represent two entirely different cultures.

    We can’t improve things for women if we don’t understand the problem. The female role in procreation was the basis of female status, but the protections and privileges associated with it have been systematically removed.

    The President is currently talking about higher wages for certain groups of people. This would be an improvement, but the lower wage paid to women is a special case. It is a conscious statement of lower status. On the other hand, if you think that your becoming a priest will improve the status of women, you don’t understand your own religion. And the abortion debate? It’s simply the effort to close the last loophole available to the world’s perennial subject class. In the process, its extreme nature masks the attack on female status. Those who are fighting Roe v. Wade may not realize how this draws women into the debate who would never consider an abortion for themselves.

  • Western Patriarchy

    This was written for the Wikipedia article.  Much of it was deleted in a dispute.  

    Patriarchy is a social system in which the father or eldest male is head of the household, having authority over women and children. Patriarchy also refers to a system of government by males, and to the dominance of men in social or cultural systems. It may also include title being traced through the male line. (Webster’s New World College Dictionary)

    Within feminist theory, patriarchy refers to the structure of modern cultural and political systems, which are ruled by men. Such systems are said to be detrimental to the rights of women. However, it has been noted that patriarchal systems of government do not benefit all men of all classes.

    While the term patriarchy generally refers to institutions, the term is sometimes used less effectively in describing societal attitudes. It has been argued, “Institutions are very persistent and may last, with little change, into a period in which attitudes have altered considerably since the institutions were devised.” Gordon Rattray Taylor used the words “patrist” and “matrist” to describe attitudes (as opposed to institutions), and noted that the outlook of the dominant social group seems to swing between the two extremes. however, the patrist assertion that the patriarchal system of authority was the original and universal system of social organization inevitably leads to the establishment of corresponding institutions.(Taylor, Gordon Rattray. Theories of Matriarchy and Patriarchy. Sex in History )

    History

    Aristotle

    In the third century BC, Aristotle taught that the city-state developed out of the patriarchal family, although he thought the two were different in kind as well as in scale (Lock, John, “Two Treatises of Government, with a supplement Patriarcha by Robert Filmer, edited with an introduction by Thomas I. Cook, New York. Hafner Press, 1947). He wrote that the highest form of human community is the political community. In the Politics, Aristotle attempts to illustrate the nature of the hierarchies that exist in the political community and its subordinate communities. He argues for an origin of male rule. In Chapter Thirteen he states that men and women have different kinds of virtue, “just as those who are natural subjects differ (from those who rule by nature.)” Other types of community, such as the household, are subordinate and inferior to the polis. Aristotle proposed that the household is subordinate to the political community because the aim of life in the household is the mere preservation of life, or the satisfaction of life’s daily needs, whereas the aim of membership in the political community is to live well. He also proposed that the household is inferior to the political community in the character of its rule. In the household, the man rules by virtue of his age and sex, monarchically at best and tyrannically at worst, while in the polis, citizens choose their rulers on the basis of merit. (Stauffer, Dana Jalbert Aristotle’s Account of the Subjection of Women

    Socrates

    Both Plato and Aristotle seem to have followed the lead of Socrates, who denied that citizens had the basic virtue necessary to nurture a good society and equated virtue with knowledge unattainable by ordinary people. During Athens’ struggle with undemocratic Sparta, Socrates favored Sparta (Linder, Doug, The Trial of Socrates).

    Plato

    Plato never mentioned Socrates’ sedition against Athens, but the cosmology of the Timaeus includes the idea that a man who lives well will live a happy and congenial life on his consort star. Failing this his second birth will be as a woman. (41E-42D, on the Creation of Souls).

    The Athenians and the Egyptians Compared

    Other ancient societies contemporary with Aristotle, as well as many Athenians, did not share these views of women, family organization, or political and economic structure (del Giorgio, J.F. The Oldest Europeans. Guadeamus, Caracas, Venezuela, 2003). Egypt left no philosophical record, but Herodotus left a record of his shock at the contrast between the roles of Egyptian women and the women of Athens. He observed that they attended market and were employed in trade. In ancient Egypt a middle-class woman might sit on a local tribunal, engage in real estate transactions, and inherit or bequeath property. Women also secured loans, and witnessed legal documents. Greek influence spread, however, with the conquests of Alexander the Great, who was educated by Aristotle (Bristow, John Temple. “What Paul Really said about Women: an Apostle’s liberating views on equality in marriage, leadership, and love”, Harper Collins, New York, 1991). Eventually, when Alexander wanted to unite his two empires in equality, Aristotle was adamant that all non-Greeks should be enslaved.

    Aristotle and the Jews

    About 200 BC the Jewish Philosopher Aristobulus of Panaeas claimed that Jewish revelation and Aristotelian philosophy were identical. Before another 200 years had passed it was said that Aristotle derived his doctrine directly from Judaism. In the 12th century Aristotlianism was harmonized with Judaism by the Talmudist, philosopher and astronomer, Maimonides. Subsequent rabbinical thought includes such pronouncements as “Eve was not created simultaneously with Adam because God foreknew that later she would be a source of complaint. (Gen. R. xvii), and “Nine curses together with death befell Eve in consequence of her disobedience” (Pirke R. E. Xiv.; Ab. R.N. ii. 42). While Maimonides dared to contradict Aristotle’s ideas in matters of faith, it wasn’t long before the Islamic Philosopher Averroes, endorsed them without reserve. Aristotle in Jewish Legend

    The Christians

    For the last 1800 years Christian leaders have placed great emphasis on the creation of Eve, believing that the story was historical fact, rather than androcentric myth. Combined with the account of the Fall in Genesis, Chapter 3, it has been used as evidence of insurmountable character defects, not just for Eve but for all women. In the 2nd century Tertullian, the son of a centurion and a pagan until middle life, told women believers, “Do you not know that you are Eve?…Because of the death which you brought upon us, even the Son of God had to die” (De cultu feminarum, libri duo I, 1).

    In the 4th Century, the basic attitude was one of puzzlement over the seemingly incongruous fact of woman’s existence. Augustine of Hippo said he could not see how a woman could be any help for a man if the work of childbearing is excluded. However, it was only with Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century that Aristotle’s teachings emerged in the official teachings of Roman Catholicism. Aristotle’s assertion that women are misbegotten males can be found in the Summa Theologica, I 92 I ad 1. The influence of combining Aristotle’s theory with Biblical interpretations can’t be overestimated.

    Christine de Pizan on the Christian Canon

    In about 1404 Christine de Pizan wrote “Le livre de la cite des dames”, a systematic feminist treatise arguing against the misogyny in classical works and the Christian Canon. After the advent of printing, the discourse became known as “the Querelle des femmes” and continued for the next 400 years.

    Sir Robert Filmer and the Divine Right of Kings

    From the time of Martin Luther, Protestantism regularly used the commandment in Exodus 20:12 to justify the duties owed to all superiors. ‘Honor thy father,’ became a euphemism for the duty to obey the king. But it was primarily as a secular doctrine that Aristotle’s appeal took on political meaning. Although many 16th and 17th century theorists agreed with Aristotle’s views concerning the place of women in society, none of them tried to prove political obligation on the basis of the patriarchal family until sometime after 1680. The patriarchal political theory is associated primarily with Sir Robert Filmer. Sometime before 1653, Filmer completed a work entitled Patriarcha. In it he defended the divine right of kings as having title inherited from Adam, the first man of the human race, according to Judeo-Christian tradition.

    John Locke on Filmer

    In 1688 John Locke called Filmer’s all-powerful prince “…this strange kind of domineering phantom called the ‘fatherhood’ which, whoever could catch, presently got empire and unlimited, absolute power.” Locke asserted that if ‘honor thy father’, places everyone in subjection to political authority, then it couldn’t mean the duty owed to natural fathers, since they are subjects. By Filmer’s doctrine fathers have no power since power belongs solely to the prince. Locke also observed that those who propose political rights based on this commandment invariably omit the word ‘mother’ which is present in the Biblical verse. (His editor, however, made a note of Locke’s inconsistency in attributing natural law to the governance of relations between a father and his children, while stating that the law governing relations between a man and his wife is based on legality, or on Eve’s punishment after the Fall. Two Treatises of Government).

    Aristotle’s view, by Locke’s time elevated to an anthropological doctrine, was not weakened by this argument, and subsequent writers continued to give credence to Filmer’s views.

    Nineteenth Century Feminism

    In the 19th Century, Sarah Grimké dared to question the divine origin of the scriptures. Later, Elizabeth Caddy Stanton used Grimke’s criticism of Biblical sources to establish a basis for feminist thought. She published The Woman’s Bible, which proposed a feminist reading of the Old and New Testament. This tendency was enlarged by Feminist theory which denounced the patriarchal Judeo-Christian tradition. (Castro, Ginette. American Feminism: a contemporary history. New York University Press. 1990)

    Theosophy, Evolution and Racism: Patriarchy at its Worst

    In Europe, from about 1770, the rationalist Enlightenment and the desire for mystery had brought about a resurgence of a synthesis of Gnosticism, neoplatonism and kabbalistic theosophy. This particular version arose first in the utilitarian and industrial countries of America and England, with the theosophy of Madame Helena Blavatsky. This had a profound impact in Germany where it fit into the lebenzreform movement. It is likely that Adolf Hitler was influenced by Blavatsky through the writings of Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels.

    List sought a chauvinistic mystique for the defense of Germandom against the liberal, socialist and Jewish political forces in the late Wilhelmine Era. His blueprint involved ruthless subjection of non-Aryans in a hierarchical state; qualification of candidates for education or positions in public service, as well as in professions and commerce, based on racial purity. All non-Aryans were to be slaves. His political principles included racial and marital laws, and a patriarchal society where only male heads had full majority and where only Ario-Germans had freedom and citizenship. Each family was to have a genealogical record, proving Aryan lineage. he proposed a new feudalism where only the first-born inherits. These ideas were published as early as 1911 and were similar to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935.

    Darwinist writers, who wrote of blond, blue-eyed Aryans, were influential in the writings of von Liebenfels. Von Liebenfels had illiberal, pan-German and monarchical sentiments. He believed the lower classes were inferior races and must be exterminated along with the weak. Socialism, democracy and feminism were his most important targets. Women were a special problem in his view because they were more prone to bestial lust. He advocated brood mothers in eugenic convents, sterilization and other practices that later influenced the Third Reich, apparent in Himmler’s anticipation of polygamy for his Schutzstaffel (SS), care of unmarried mothers in SS homes, and musings on the education and marriage of chosen women (Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan cults and their influence on Nazi ideology: the Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890-1935, New York University Press. 1992).

    Romantics and Marxists

    By 1673, Francois Poullain de la Barre, “On the Equality of the Two Sexes”, had turned feminism into a systematic Enlightenment philosophy (as opposed to the previous Renaissance feminism).(Feminism) However, in 1861, Johann Jakob Bachofen, a German romantic and writer of the counter-Enlightenment said that matriarchy preceded patriarchy, and is superior to patriarchy on moral grounds. Bachofen influenced Karl Marx and Frederick Engles. Marxist analysis has been a basis for subsequent feminist thought. (Stjepan Gabriel Meštrović, Durkheim and postmodern culture. A. de Gruyter, New York. 1992) From the beginning, socialist feminists in France, for example, were challenged by the republic, which “oppressed them as workers and women; by Marxism, which ignores gender; and by the misogyny of their socialist brothers. This struggle continues within all parties of the left (History of Feminism).

  • Patriarchy

    This was written for the Wikipedia article.  Much of that article was deleted in a dispute.  

    What is Patriarchy?

    Patriarchy is a social system in which the father or eldest male is head of the household, having authority over women and children. Patriarchy also refers to a system of government by males, and to the dominance of men in social or cultural systems. It may also include tracing title through the male line (Webster’s New World College Dictionary). Feminist theory considers rule by men to be detrimental to the rights of women. However, patriarchal systems of government do not benefit all men of all classes.

    Patriarchal Institutions versus Patriarchal Attitudes

    The term patriarchy generally refers to institutions but the term is sometimes used for societal attitudes. It has been argued that “Institutions are very persistent and may last, with little change, into a period in which attitudes have altered considerably since the institutions were devised.” Gordon Rattray Taylor used the words “patrist” and “matrist” to describe these attitudes. He noted that the outlook of the dominant social group seems to swing between the two extremes. However, the patrist assertion that the patriarchal system of authority was the original and universal system of social organization leads to the establishment of corresponding institutions (Taylor, Gordon Rattray. Theories of Matriarchy and Patriarchy. Sex in History ).

    History of Western Patriarchy

    Aristotle

    Patriarchy
    Antique illustration of Aristotle Credit: ilbusca

    In the third century BC, Aristotle taught that the city-state developed out of the patriarchal family. However, he thought the family and the state were different in kind as well as in scale.[mfn]Lock, John, “Two Treatises of Government, with a supplement Patriarcha by Robert Filmer, edited with an introduction by Thomas I. Cook, New York. Hafner Press, 1947[/mfn] He wrote that the highest form of human community is the political community.

    The Politics

    In The Politics, Aristotle attempts to illustrate the nature of the hierarchies that exist in the political community and its subordinate communities. He then argues for an origin of male rule. In Chapter Thirteen he states that men and women have different kinds of virtue, “just as those who are natural subjects differ (from those who rule by nature.)” Other types of community, such as the household, are subordinate and inferior to the polis.

    Aristotle proposed that the household is subordinate to the political community because the aim of life in the household is the mere preservation of life, or the satisfaction of life’s daily needs, whereas the aim of membership in the political community is to live well. He also proposed that the household is inferior to the political community in the character of its rule. In the household, the man rules by virtue of his age and sex, monarchically at best and tyrannically at worst. In the polis, citizens choose their rulers on the basis of merit. (Stauffer, Dana Jalbert Aristotle’s Account of the Subjection of Women

    Socrates

    Patriarchy
    Illustration of a bust of the Greek philosopher Socrates after Visconti. credit: Gwengoat

    Both Plato and Aristotle seem to have followed the lead of Socrates. Socrates denied that citizens had the basic virtue necessary to nurture a good society. He equated virtue with knowledge unattainable by ordinary people. During Athens’ struggle with undemocratic Sparta, Socrates favored Sparta (Linder, Doug, The Trial of Socrates).

    Plato

    Patriarchy
    Plato (Greek philosopher, 428/427 BC – 348/347 BC). Lithograph after an antique bust by Joseph Brodtmann (German-swiss engraver and publisher, 1787-1862), published c. 1830. Credit: ZU_09

    Plato never mentioned Socrates’ sedition against Athens. However, the cosmology of the Timaeus includes the idea that a man who lives well will live a happy and congenial life on his consort star. Failing this a man’s second birth will be as a woman. (41E-42D, on the Creation of Souls).

    The Athenians and the Egyptians Compared

    Other ancient societies contemporary with Aristotle, as well as many Athenians, did not share these views of women, family organization, or political and economic structure.[mfn]del Giorgio, J.F. The Oldest Europeans. Guadeamus, Caracas, Venezuela, 2003[/mfn] Egypt left no philosophical record. Herodotus, on the other hand, left a record of his shock at the contrast between the roles of Egyptian women and the women of Athens. He observed that Egyptian women attended market and were employed in trade. In ancient Egypt a middle-class woman might sit on a local tribunal, engage in real estate transactions, and inherit or bequeath property. Women also secured loans, and witnessed legal documents.

    This changed, however. Greek influence spread with the conquests of Alexander the Great, who was educated by Aristotle.[mfn]Bristow, John Temple. “What Paul Really said about Women: an Apostle’s liberating views on equality in marriage, leadership, and love”, Harper Collins, New York, 1991[/mfn] Eventually, when Alexander wanted to unite his two empires in equality, Aristotle was adamant that all non-Greeks should be enslaved.

    Aristotle and the Jews

    About 200 BC the Jewish Philosopher Aristobulus of Panaeas claimed that Jewish revelation and Aristotelian philosophy were identical. Within 200 years, it was assumed that Aristotle derived his doctrine directly from Judaism. In the 12th century the Talmudist philosopher and astronomer, Maimonides harmonized Aristotlianism with Judaism. Subsequent rabbinical thought includes such pronouncements as “Eve was not created simultaneously with Adam because God foreknew that later she would be a source of complaint (Gen. R. xvii). “Nine curses together with death befell Eve in consequence of her disobedience” (Pirke R. E. Xiv.; Ab. R.N. ii. 42). While Maimonides dared to contradict Aristotle’s ideas in matters of faith, it wasn’t long before the Islamic Philosopher Averroes, endorsed them without reserve. Aristotle in Jewish Legend

    Adam and Eve: Patriarchy in Christianity

    For the last 1800 years Christian leaders have placed great emphasis on the creation of Eve, believing that the story was historical fact, rather than androcentric myth. This has been used as evidence of insurmountable character defects, not just for Eve but for all women. In the 2nd century Tertullian, the son of a centurion and a pagan until middle life, told women believers, “Do you not know that you are Eve?…Because of the death which you brought upon us, even the Son of God had to die” (De cultu feminarum, libri duo I, 1).

    In the 4th Century, the basic attitude was one of puzzlement over the fact of woman’s existence. Augustine of Hippo said he could not see how a woman could be any help for a man if the work of childbearing is excluded. However, it was only with Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century that Aristotle’s teachings emerged in the official teachings of Roman Catholicism. In the Summa Theologica, Aristotle asserted that women are misbegotten males (I 92 I ad 1). The influence of combining Aristotle’s theory with Biblical interpretations can’t be overestimated.

    Christine de Pizan on the Christian Canon

    In about 1404 Christine de Pizan wrote “Le livre de la cite des dames”. This was a systematic feminist treatise arguing against the misogyny in classical works and the Christian Canon. After the advent of printing, the discourse became known as “the Querelle des femmes” and continued for the next 400 years.

    Sir Robert Filmer and the Divine Right of Kings

    From the time of Martin Luther, Protestantism regularly used the commandment in Exodus 20:12 to justify the duties owed to all superiors. ‘Honor thy father,’ became a euphemism for the duty to obey the king. But Aristotle’s appeal took on political meaning primarily as a secular doctrine. Although many 16th and 17th century theorists agreed with Aristotle’s views concerning the place of women in society, none of them tried to prove political obligation on the basis of the patriarchal family until sometime after 1680. Sir Robert Filmer is primarily responsible for the patriarchal political theory. Sometime before 1653, Filmer completed a work entitled Patriarcha. In it he defended the divine right of kings as having title inherited from Adam, the first man of the human race. He based this theory on the Judeo-Christian tradition.

    John Locke on Filmer

    In 1688 John Locke called Filmer’s all-powerful prince “…this strange kind of domineering phantom called the ‘fatherhood’ which, whoever could catch, presently got empire and unlimited, absolute power.” Locke asserted that if ‘honor thy father’, places everyone in subjection to political authority, then it couldn’t mean the duty owed to natural fathers, since they are subjects. By Filmer’s doctrine fathers have no power since power belongs solely to the prince. Locke also observed that those who propose political rights based on this commandment invariably omit the word ‘mother’ which is present in the Biblical verse. (His editor, however, made a note of Locke’s inconsistency in attributing natural law to the governance of relations between a father and his children, while stating that the law governing relations between a man and his wife is based on legality, or on Eve’s punishment after the Fall. Two Treatises of Government).

    Aristotle’s view was not weakened by this argument. It had been elevated to an anthropological doctrine.

    Nineteenth Century Feminism

    In the 19th Century, Sarah Grimké dared to question the divine origin of the scriptures. Later, Elizabeth Caddy Stanton used Grimke’s criticism of Biblical sources to establish a basis for feminist thought. She published The Woman’s Bible, which proposed a feminist reading of the Old and New Testament. Subsequently, feminist theory denounced the patriarchal Judeo-Christian tradition. [mfn]Castro, Ginette. American Feminism: a contemporary history. New York University Press. 1990[/mfn]

    Patriarchy
    “Elizabeth Cady Stanton (November 12, 1815 – October 26, 1902) was an American social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early woman’s movement. Illustration was published in 1882″Credit: denisk0

    Theosophy, Evolution and Racism: Patriarchy at its Worst

    In Europe, from about 1770, the rationalist Enlightenment and the desire for mystery had brought about a resurgence of a synthesis of Gnosticism, neoplatonism and kabbalistic theosophy. This particular version arose first in the utilitarian and industrial countries of America and England with the theosophy of Madame Helena Blavatsky. This had a profound impact in Germany where it fit into the lebenzreform movement. Blavatsky probably influenced Adolf Hitler through the writings of Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels.

    Guido von List

    List sought a chauvinistic mystique for the defense of Germandom against the liberal, socialist and Jewish political forces in the late Wilhelmine Era. His blueprint involved ruthless subjection of non-Aryans in a hierarchical state; qualification of candidates for education or positions in public service, as well as in professions and commerce, based on racial purity. All non-Aryans were to be slaves. His political principles included racial and marital laws, and a patriarchal society where only male heads had full majority and where only Ario-Germans had freedom and citizenship. Each family was to have a genealogical record, proving Aryan lineage. he proposed a new feudalism where only the first-born inherits. These ideas were published as early as 1911. They were similar to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935.

    Lanz von Liebenfels

    Darwinist writers, who wrote of blond, blue-eyed Aryans, were influential in the writings of von Liebenfels. Von Liebenfels had illiberal, pan-German and monarchical sentiments. He believed the lower classes were inferior races. It followed that they must be exterminated along with the weak. Socialism, democracy and feminism were his most important targets. Women were a special problem in his view because they were more prone to bestial lust. He advocated brood mothers in eugenic convents, sterilization and other practices that later influenced the Third Reich, apparent in Himmler’s anticipation of polygamy for his Schutzstaffel (SS), care of unmarried mothers in SS homes, and musings on the education and marriage of chosen women.[mfn]Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan cults and their influence on Nazi ideology: the Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890-1935, New York University Press. 1992[/mfn]

    Romantics and Marxists

    By 1673, Francois Poullain de la Barre, “On the Equality of the Two Sexes”, had turned feminism into a systematic Enlightenment philosophy (as opposed to the previous Renaissance feminism). However, in 1861, Johann Jakob Bachofen, a German romantic and writer of the counter-Enlightenment said that matriarchy preceded patriarchy, and is superior to patriarchy on moral grounds. Bachofen influenced Karl Marx and Frederick Engles. Marxist analysis has been a basis for subsequent feminist thought.[mfn]Stjepan Gabriel Meštrović, Durkheim and postmodern culture. A. de Gruyter, New York. 1992[/mfn]  From the beginning, socialist feminists in France, for example, were challenged by the republic, which “oppressed them as workers and women; by Marxism, which ignores gender; and by the misogyny of their socialist brothers. This struggle continues within all parties of the left (History of Feminism).

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