I’m sure, given how vast the world is, that someone out there has formulated a non-coercive form of Naziism, paradoxical as it may sound, and perhaps somewhere there’s even a non-coercive form of Naziism that makes no false empirical claims. But we would rightly say we are not going to give such eccentrics much weight — or bend over backwards to speak open-mindedly of “diverse Naziisms” — before judging Naziism in general a bad thing.
Likewise, feminism in virtually all of its formulations considers many outcomes of voluntary and market activity “unjust.” Furthermore, feminism reaches such conclusions for reasons not so unlike those that Naziism does: because, despite the fact that we can bend over backwards finding something admirable in feminism, it is at base a partisan, bigoted, tribalist philosophy that is amorphous precisely because its real underlying motivation is “whatever seems to help our side, women.”
Just as one does not act surprised when “white power” skinheads embrace one policy rule today and a seemingly contradictory one tomorrow — all with the advancement of their own group, just or unjust, as their real political lodestar — no one is surprised that feminists lie in wait hoping for chances to use law, or mere guilt-tripping, or bad philosophy, or relativism as tactically required to advance their self-serving agenda (with the results routinely being anti-libertarian ones, whether it’s the explicit embrace of legislation or the mere assertion that voluntary, market-based interactions are unjust, with the listeners [most of whom are statists] left to draw their own inevitable conclusions, likely leading to laws, lawsuits, or simply more groundless guilt-tripping claims about what social patterns “ought” to have resulted despite market-expressed preferences of the participants).
Let’s please stop pretending feminists’ aims are noble or even morally-universalist in the bare-minimum sense that we normally expect from modern creeds (as opposed to anti-modern or ancient — and frankly particularist — ones). It’s a pseudo-philosophy for juvenile, self-serving savages, but, again, chivalry (the frequent partner of feminism) discourages saying so openly when the fairer sex might be offended, one of intellectual history’s great and tragic ironies.
•••
And speaking of self-serving savages, might evolutionary psychology have far more to teach us about natural and thus possible and thus likely gender roles (not all the same thing, of course) than feminism with its artificially egalitarian premises? If one wanted to study fish and deer, one would not for a moment feel aided by a philosophy that warned, in a scolding voice, that one must begin by assuming — assuming! — that fish and deer are “equals” (In what sense? We don’t yet know — they just damn well better look “equal” when all is said and done, buster!).
Obviously, fish-deer equivalency theory would be a prima facie impediment to rational, empirical inquiry, and we should at the very least begin by setting it aside, if not necessarily condemning it outright, since it keeps leading otherwise well-meaning and open-minded investigators to conclude that if there are more fish than deer in the river and more deer than fish in the forest, it “must” be the result of some injustice — possibly to be rectified by law but, if not, then through massive fish-deer relocation efforts on the part of guilt-wracked volunteers. Well, to hell with all that, and with feminism.
If feminism is an a priori moral claim, it is fundamentally and quite radically at odds with libertarian, market-based thinking. If it is an empirical claim about the equivalency of the genders, well, the market will test that claim, won’t it? And if it is some incoherent hodgepodge of the two, its time on this Earth and its time distorting and damaging philosophical dialogue has already gone on quite long enough. Perhaps it has already impeded the creation of the far happier and smoother gender relations that would otherwise have been built on the foundations of (for example) evolutionary psychology and traditionalist insights about gender “complementarity.” It is not libertarians’ place to say qua libertarians.
A wide-open empirical question — such as whether tradition or avant-gardism produces greater happiness — should surely not be incorporated into the basic moral rules of a society, and certainly not into a philosophy such as libertarianism, which has as its greatest strength a willingness to keep groundrules minimal — while society (possibly over the course of centuries) works out the answer (or diverse answers) to most big social questions.
If you think you’ve already solved the gender-relations question, good for you, but that doesn’t rightly make it part of society’s legal groundrules or the basic premises of libertarian thinking any more than the latest results of psych studies aimed at seeing whether kids are made happier by Mozart or Britney Spears.
P.S. But if you disagree and must say so, you can always catch me tonight circa 10 at Jen Dziura’s “Man-Pageant” thirtieth birthday party at Madame X — which, as it happens, will be feminist Jen’s rather Weimar-like foray into male-model stage show-organizing. I am not one of the models, I should make clear.
10 comments:
Feh.
There’s almost no response to make here that doesn’t dignify this post more than it deserves, but:
Naziism is in the *first instance* a doctrine about the use of state power and the organization of politics. The idea of a rights-respecting, peaceful Naziism is the idea of a square circle, plain and simple.
There’s nothing incoherent in the idea of a feminist outcome reached peacefully, or indeed in the idea of a feminism that is a method of evaluating and critiquing choices that should nonetheless be made freely. As with, say, religion or aesthetic views or cultural conservatism, feminism *could* function as a peaceful standard of evaluation, a description of morally desired states of affairs that one wishes to argue for and see pursued voluntarily.
The month of feminism is… not toddseavey.com at its strongest.
It is frustrating to alternately defend Todd’s concept of rights, liberty and coercion and criticize his illogical, sometimes incomprehensible statements about feminism. I have to agree with the commenter above on every point.
No, Jacob, in fact, there are numerous offshoots of the skinhead and white supremacist movements that draw heavily upon Nazi ideology _without_ being philosophies of state power — but we nonetheless reject them as morally suspect for their flagrant self-serving tribalism, rightly viewing their ultimate aims if they _were_ in a position to wield state power with suspicion — which is not to say feminists want death camps, of course, merely that they are partisans and as such not easily assimilable to the core premises of an individualist, market-based philosophy, as some have recently contended.
As noted when all this began, we can shoehorn monarchism into looking like a subset of anarchism, but that’s not the obvious thing to do, nor is treating feminism as if it’s something other than a collectivist ideology.
ToddSeavey.com at its finest.
OK, let’s work at the level of the individual claim rather than an overall belief system.
I believe that it is an undesirable cultural state of affairs that married women take their husband’s last names while none do the reverse; and that if the woman keeps her last name the children almost inevitably take the father’s. I think that this custom is explicable and understandable as a social-evolutionary or ev-psych outcome, but that it is not compatible with my best sense of fairness or equality. I think that it symbolically subordinates one person to another in a way that is undesirable, and that offends a similar part of my brain to the part that’s offended by coercive political subordination, though it is not an example of such subordination.
I do not favor, indeed actively oppose, the Quebec solution of effectively prohibiting women from taking their names. But I favor, and argue in favor of, cultural change in this regard. It is not my place “qua libertarian” to argue for this view, any more than it is your place “qua libertarian” to argue for gender-complementarity, but that doesn’t make either feminism or complementarity views that are analogous to Naziism, or *incompatible* with libertarianism.
What is the name for the intellectual category into which this belief on my part falls?
And if the name is “feminist,” then I can’t help but think that feminism, while orthogonal to ‘political libertarianism’ in Rawls-speak, is a central part of some of the comprehensive worldviews that will make up the libertarian overlapping consensus– and that that’s an attractive fact, and that it’s a part of my own. And, from within my comprehensive worldview though not “qua libertarian,” I’ll venture that gender-complementarity looks mighty tribalistic and collectivist the second it becomes a normative doctrine and not a purely explanatory one.
Except the traditionalists don’t need the state, and the feminists usually do. But, as always, I’m merely arguing for letting the chips fall where they may…under a regime of property rights — and by necessity, until bioengineering is far more advanced, biology.
(I’ll move on to a new entry in a moment, though.)
Well, Todd, I think that your argument is really that
feminism should not be considered as fundamental
an organizing principle as libertarianism, but I don’t
see it as being precluded. The statement that any
*ism that anyone wants to use to organize a society
is like Naziism seems like a simple search-and-replace
here (like traditionalism getting in the way of feminist
insights, to turn one *ism embedded in your argument
around – I’d also argue that “traditionalism” is an even
bigger grab bag of “pick and choose,” since no one
wants to live as in the 14th century).
Or to really challenge you, maybe put atheism as the
*ism. I think you have already called yourself
an atheist; however, you hope to convert others your
way through opinion and not law. Isn’t this an example
of an *ism that you would not use as the basis of
organizing a libertarian society, but cannot be
dismissed merely on the basis of that?
OK, one last comment here before moving on, since I think the layers of analogy have now gotten too complicated for people to keep track of the original underlying argument, but the immediately-relevant point is that atheism is not something that simply means “advancing the welfare of the group of people who are atheists by diverse means.”
One could imagine a more statism-inclined philosophy like that — it may actually exist — and it should perhaps be called instead “militant secularism” or something, the belief that no legal rule (generally speaking) is higher/prior/more sacrosanct than promoting non-belief and punishing belief, but I do not think that atheism itself generally has this legalistic tendency and that feminism generally does.
If I favored using the law to repress religion, I would strongly encourage everyone to call me fascistic — and on that even-handed note, I will move on…
“which is not to say feminists want death camps, of course, merely that they are partisans and as such not easily assimilable to the core premises of an individualist, market-based philosophy, as some have recently contended.”
And that is the root of the ridiculousness of your analogy (and offensiveness). The problem with Nazism is the death camps. Not the fact that Hitler and feminists both wear pants.
Tim: Isn’t this an example
of an *ism that you would not use as the basis of
organizing a libertarian society, but cannot be
dismissed merely on the basis of that?
Correct me if I’m wrong but I think libertarianism is antithetical to any idea that a society(as opposed to its government) should be organized at all. Organization of any system of objects(humans, in the case of society) cannot be done without force or coercion to some degree.
Now I’ll admit that I’ve never consciously read feminist ideas, but assuming he could get into more detail about their coercive nature it seems to me that Todd has a pretty sound argument here.
[...] The clear thinking Mr. Levy bothers to respond to a Todd Seavey post comparing feminists to Nazis (or something): I believe that it is an undesirable cultural state of affairs that married women take their husband’s last names while none do the reverse; and that if the woman keeps her last name the children almost inevitably take the father’s. I think that this custom is explicable and understandable as a social-evolutionary or ev-psych outcome, but that it is not compatible with my best sense of fairness or equality. I think that it symbolically subordinates one person to another in a way that is undesirable, and that offends a similar part of my brain to the part that’s offended by coercive political subordination, though it is not an example of such subordination. [...]
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