Tag Archives: Equality

Where the Boys Are

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On this website and elsewhere, I have often written that one possible outcome of modern feminism will be renewed attempts to separate the sexes. As of this moment, that prediction seems to be coming true. Separate kindergartens (“in single-gender… classrooms at one elementary school in Western Michigan.”). Separate schools. Separate playgrounds (“Separate Playgrounds up at More Schools”—The Denver Post, 31.5.2008). Separate parking places. Separate taxis. Separate railway- and underground carriages. Separate rows of seats on aircraft. Separate elevators  (“Office Workers Face Sex-Segregated Elevators,” Schmooze, January 2012). Separate floors in hotels (in Tokyo). Separate swimming pools and sports facilities. Separate streets (in the orthodox neighborhoods of Jerusalem, just a few miles from where I live). Soon, perhaps separate queues at shopping centers and entertainment facilities such as theaters, movie houses, and the like.

All these, and many more, either exist already or have been seriously proposed. In a handful of cases, the objective is to protect men against their own lecherous instincts. But mostly it is to defend poor defenseless females of all ages against those wicked, but unfortunately strong and powerful, creatures known as males. Males whose only aim in life is to touch them and fondle them and rape them if they can possibly get away with it.

As the old unlamented apartheid regime of South Africa had it, “separate but equal.” In the process, moves towards gender integration that took decades, sometimes centuries, to accomplish are being reversed one by one. Often the outcome is a regression to earlier arrangements. An excellent example is the recent trend towards what is called “Women only co-working spaces.” No doubt those who came up with the idea see themselves as daring innovators. In fact all they are doing is to put back the clock to the last two decades or so of the nineteenth century. As the first really large corporations made their appearance in the U.S and Europe, management looked for personnel who could do routine, physically not too demanding, work such as bookkeeping, correspondence, filing, and general administration. The normal solution was to recruit the daughters of the lower middle classes and have them work from the time they left school—generally at the age of sixteen or so—until they got married five or six years later. To assure worried parents that their daughters’ morals would not be corrupted, which God forbid, the women in question were concentrated in halls of their own. There they came under the supervision of somewhat older female employees and males were not allowed to enter. Contemporary photographs often show row after row of neatly dressed women sitting behind their desks; hence what one author has called, The White Blouse Revolution.

Unfortunately for feminists, the renewed move towards separate facilities for women is unlikely to empower women. Instead, if I am allowed to venture another prediction, it will result in men and women looking on those facilities, and the women who inhabit them, as second rate. The fact that, in every known society, whatever men do is regarded as the most important has been well documented by female researchers among others. So has the fact that, whenever women enter a field or profession, that field or profession will start going downhill in terms of both prestige and income.

There is a certain logic behind this. Integration or separation, now as ever the worst thing people of both sexes can say about a man is that he is like a woman; the best thing people of both sexes can say about a woman, that (as long as she does not grow a beard and speaks in a bass voice) she is like a man. In the words of the famous nineteen-fifties-vintage singer, Connie Francis:

Where the boys are, someone waits for me
A smilin’ face, a warm embrace, two arms to hold me tenderly

They think they have to go it alone and admitting they don’t have the answer viagra generic sildenafil will permanently mar their reputation. Action of mechanism: Kamagra tablets are manufactured with a chemical or viagra online prescription neurological reaction monitored from the brain that trigger the dilation of the blood vessels, which allow the erectile chambers to become flooded with blood to get firm erection during the sexual encounters. Many people lead normal lives in spite of buy sildenafil uk them. The main difference between the two is that the Kamagra Oral Jelly buying viagra in usa can be purchase from online pharmacies to treat your erectile dysfunction problems and should be used for this purpose alone. Where the boys are, my true love will be
He’s walkin’ down some street in town and I know he’s lookin’ there for me

In the crowd of a million people I’ll find my valentine
And then I’ll climb to the highest steeple and tell the world he’s mine

Till he holds me I’ll wait impatiently
Where the boys are, where the boys are
Where the boys are, someone waits for me
Till he holds me I’ll wait impatiently
Where the boys are, where the boys are
Where the boys are, someone waits for me.

Or in those of the Bible: Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

All in All: Magnificent

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W. Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1918.

Walter Scheidel is an Austrian historian who teaches history at Stanford University, California. His original specialty was ancient Greek and Roman economic and social history; this led to such works as Quantifying the Source of Slaves in the Early Roman Empire (1997) and Human Mobility in Roman Italy (2004-5). In this volume, representing Book 69 of The Princeton Economic History of the Western World, he aims much higher. The series’ title notwithstanding, he extends his reach so to devote at least some space to almost all periods and all continents. To be sure, the availability or lack of it of source material has caused some of those periods and some of those continents to be covered more thoroughly than others. Still within its special point of view, The Great Leveler comes as close to universal history as any work any single author can reasonably be expected to produce.

The way Scheidel sees it, the history of human economic inequality has run as follows. Starting some 30-40,000 years ago, some graves indicate that, even at that time, in at least some societies, some individuals owned or commanded resources—such as foodstuffs, ornamental objects, and weapons—others did not. Confirmation comes from a number of very simple near-present day societies spread through Africa, Asia, and Latin America some of whose members used to enjoy preferential access to food; and who, as a result, grew taller and stronger and were able to have and raise more offspring than others.

When agriculture started taking the place of gathering, hunting, gardening and herding about twelve thousand years ago, the gap between haves and have nots grew drmatically. In this, a particularly large role was played by the idea of property, the ability to transform it into a source of unearned income, and the possibility of leaving it to one’s heirs. As a general rule, the larger and more powerful a community the more conducive it was to the creation of such gaps. And the closer the gini coefficient, to the extent that modern scholars can calculate it, moved towards the magic—magic, because in practice it could never be attained—number 1. Beginning at least as far back as the earliest known settled civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China, wealth came to depend on political power and political power, on wealth. Which explains why, from Egypt’s Pharaohs to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the very richest men—very rarely, women—have always been those who managed to combine the two in their own person.

So far, nothing that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing a quarter millennium ago, and Thomas Piketty, whose work was published just a few years before Scheidel’s, could not have agreed with. Where Scheidel really breaks new ground is by asking, not how inequality originated and what its effects were—though that question, too, takes up a great many pages in his book—but which factors have delayed it and, on occasion, put it into reverse gear. From the beginning, four such factors are identified. The first is mobilization warfare, AKA total warfare, of the kind that pits not just armies but entire societies against each other and, should the contest be prolonged, may well result in a large percentage of both sides’ populations being killed, taken prisoner, or, in antiquity as well as under Stalin, exiled. The second is attempts, the most important of which were those made first in the Soviet Union and then in China between 1917 and 1979, to “compress” (an excellent metaphor Scheidel often uses) economic inequality by finishing off the richest individuals and groups in a given society and distributing their assets and their rights among a much larger number of people.

The third is state collapse, anarchy, and the waning of civilizations. Of the kind, to mention the best-known example first, that took place in late antiquity and finally put an end to it. Other examples are the disappearance of the Minoan civilization around 1100 BCE, that of the T’ang Empire around 900 CE and that of the Maya civilization from 1200 CE on. Today something similar may be observed, albeit on a much smaller scale, in several present Asian and African states (Afghanistan, the Sudan, Somalia, Zaire, and others) in particular, The fourth is natural disasters as exemplified by the plague that swept away perhaps ten percent of the population of the Roman Empire round 180 CE and the Black Death which killed an ever larger proportion in fourteenth century. They are what the author, using another successful metaphor, calls the horses of the apocalypse.
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To what extent have the attempts, whether manmade or natural, to rein in the horses and reduce inequality been successful? Always taking the long view, and basing himself on a truly enormous scholarly apparatus, Scheidel argues that the answer is, not very. To pick but a few examples, the two World Wars of the twentieth century did cause inequality to be compressed. Especially in the countries that waged them, they continued to make their effects felt for years after the ended in 1945. However, by the late 1970s the impetus was spent; many measures (in particular, near-confiscatory taxation) began to be abolished, or mitigated, or simply circumvented. “Stand on your own feet” (the slogan of Margaret Thatcher) and “let’s get government off our back” (that of Ronald Reagan) rang around the world.

Both the Soviet and the Chinese attempts by taking the lives of tens of millions succeeded in leading to gini coefficients as low as 0.2-03. Doing so they turned the great majority of their citizens into beggars who lived not far from the subsistence level, causing them to be abandoned after a few decades. The same applies, albeit in a much attenuated form, to the welfare states that, in the West between about starting about, began to choke off growth and led to inflation. Whatever may have happened in the past, today anarchical conditions of the kind Hobbes wrote about seldom last for more than a few decades, after which a dictatorship of some kind is likely to emerge and start increasing inequality once again by rewarding its supporters and penalizing or exterminating everyone else. Finally, one of the greatest and most durable recorded example of levelling was not manmade but a result of the Black Death. Starting in 1348, it killed about one third of Europe’s entire population before it abated. Only a century and a half later were its effects completely overcome; today, however, given the progress that has taken place in medicine, the possibility that such a disaster could recur seems unlikely. As Charles de Gaulle once put it, an all-out nuclear war might well leave behind a world in which there are neither powers, nor laws, nor cities, nor cultures, nor cradles, nor tombs; short of that, however, the prospects of suppressing inequality appear, let us say, dim. 

Swhat are we—meaning, humanity as a whole—to do? For Piketty the most important answer is to impose a universal wealth tax. Needless to say, Scheidel is aware of that possibility. Utopian as it may be, he does include it in a long list of other kinds of progressive taxes other scholars have suggested. Nor is he in principle averse to some of them, as well as various subsidies to the less well to do, being instituted in some places and under some circumstances. What he does warn against, and emphatically so, is following the Soviet and Chinese, and Cambodian (“The Killing Fields,” for those who have forgotten), and Zimbabwean, examples by going too far too fast. “All of us,” Scheidel says, “would do well to remember that, with the rarest of exceptions, [greater equality] was only ever brought forth in sorrow.” Hence his advice: “Be careful what you wish for.”

Within the limits imposed by the book’s size—it is over 500 pages long—Scheidel is nothing but thorough. Reading it, one sometimes gets the impression that there is not a period, not a country and not an upheaval so small and so unimportant that he does not have at least something to say about the development of inequality in it. He covers the oldest known societies as well as the newest ones. The mighty U.S draws his attention—given it size and its role as the hub of the capitalists system, how could it fail to do so?—and so does the central Italian city of Prato during the Renaissance. Throughout all this, politics, economics, social affairs, and technology are all woven into his account, often in ways that can only be called masterful. Even religion is included, at least to the extent that it involves wealth. All this is done neither in the thunderous prose of many other would-be reformers nor in the breezy tones of a gadfly; but in a serious and dignified way which reminds one that the author’s roots are, after all, in academia.

In the face of such excellence, there are just two problems that seemed to me at all serious. The first is that the book is organized “horseman” by “horseman.” Though probably inevitable, that arrangement often leads to chronological somersaults even inside individual chapters and sometimes makes the text harder to follow than, perhaps, it could have been made. The second is the enormous mass of detail, which, at places, I found tedious and even intimidating.

All in all: magnificent.

Should Sex Change Operations Also Be Banned?

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To this day, following thousands upon thousands of years of human history, no one knows whether God (or the gods, but in the present context that does not matter) “really” exists. Witness Immanuel Kant, no less. Raised in a Pietist household, for years he tried to prove the existence of God. Only to conclude that the question could not be settled either way and was, therefore, a matter of pure belief. However, that has not prevented billions of people, probably the majority of those who have ever lived, from believing that He does; nor from using their belief, real or pretended, as a basis on which to expand their own political and military power by rewarding those who agreed with them and persecuting those who did not. As Mao Zedong might very well have said, often religion grew out of the barrel of a gun. As I myself like to say, a religion is a sect that has acquired cannon. In quite some places around the world that remains true to the present day.

Similarly, after thousands upon thousands of years of history no one knows whether homosexuality is or isn’t “natural” to humankind. In the Christian West at any rate, following the book of Leviticus, it was long considered a deadly sin. As a result, those who practiced it were often subject to some of the cruelest available punishments from being burnt at the stake down. If this is no longer the case today, then that is not because modern science, breaking with Kant, has finally discovered “the truth” about the matter. But simply because a greater number of people are prepared to support, or at any rate tolerate, homosexuality than are not. As Napoleon said, victory goes to the big battalions. Particularly in modern democratic countries where most issues are ultimately settled by counting noses either during elections or with the aid of public opinion surveys. And particularly if, like the early Christians, using means fair or foul they succeed in getting the media on their side.

And why am I writing about this? Because, reflecting the situation in many other countries as well, currently in Israel a great debate—if “debate” is the right term to describe a rather ugly process whereby both sides do what they can to shut up the other—is going on. The person who triggered it is Netanyahu’s new minister of education, Rafi Peretz. Peretz is a practicing Jew as well as a rabbi who takes his religion seriously. No sooner was he appointed to his post then he suggested that gays might want to undergo conversion treatment and benefit from it. How dare he! What chutzpa!

He provides effective and best cheap levitra generic recommended for you ED treatment is available in different forms of consumption like tablets, jellies, and soft tablets. The particular filters are generic viagra germany as follows: Culligan WSH-C125, one of the best tips to cure aging effects is through managing stress. You will find, soon after all, cruises to be taken, many old friends to be visited, and plenty sildenafil online purchase of beaches to be walked hand-in-hand at sunset/sunrise. Kamagra is one of the best medicines available generic super viagra in the market but only few of them 1- In order to ensure yourself that the quality and quantity; both are critical from the pregnancy point of view. The response to Peretz was immediate and strong. Any number of psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, educationalists and other learned worms crawled out of the woodworks and hurried to the printed page, the microphone, and the TV camera. So, of course, did leaders and activists of the Gay Liberation Movement; aware that their power depends largely on numbers, they do what they can to prevent people from deserting them. Peretz was a racist. He was a bigot. He was a “dark” figure emerging out of the equally “dark” middle ages. He was unfit to hold any public post, let alone one in which he was in charge of educating hundreds of thousands of young people. He should be denounced. He should be fired. He should be ostracized. He should, if the appropriate legal paragraph could be found (thankfully, as of the present, it could not) be put on trial and convicted and punished.

As to conversion treatment, it was carried out by quacks as if there were no quacks in other fields where consults are involved, from housing agents to e(con)omics. It was useless (as if no other forms of psychological treatment were). It was unscientific (as if any kind of psychological treatment is or can be “scientific”). It might make those who tried it develop all kinds of psychological problems (as if it were not psychological problems that made people turn to the treatment in the first place). The  practice should be prohibited (as, in quite a few countries and states, it is), and those who engage in it, if they did so on a professional basis, disqualified.

All this, in the name of choice, equality, openness, toleration, and similar concepts held sacred by the politically correct crowd both in Israel and a great many other countries. All this, at least partly in order to prevent people from developing doubts and ceasing to support the Gay Rights Movement. And all this makes me ask: If this kind of conversion, voluntarily undertaken of course, is banned, shouldn’t the same apply to the much more problematic, much more dangerous, sex change operations as well?

The Flop

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Is “me too” really a sign that women have finally gathered what it takes to avenge themselves on those bad, bad, bad men who always want one thing only? Or is it just a rather underhand reaction to feminism’s utter failure to change the way the world works? For an answer, consider the following.

1. Physique

Contrary to the hopes of feminists such as Anne Fausto-Sterling (Myths of Gender, 1992) and Collette Dowling (The Frailty Myth, 2000), women have not closed the physical gap between them and men. At best attempts to close it, such as have made by several armed forces around the world, merely provided another proof of what all normal people have always known, namely that doing so is impossible. At worst the outcome was injuries, including such as turned women into cripples or else left them unable to have children. Either way, women continue to depend on men for protection. Had it not been for men who, for reasons of their own, are ready to protect women against other men, the entire feminist movement would have been not merely impossible but inconceivable.

The myth that working women can simply ignore their periods and work as men do is no closer to the truth now than it was when feminists first invented it. Countless women have gone on record saying that they had taken leave from work during the days in question; thanks to feminism, though, many of them were unable to tell their bosses about the real cause of their trouble. Nor have some radical feminist fantasies about virgin births and dispensing with men as sperm-donors been realized.

2. Career

Partly, but not only, as a result of these factors, the division of labor, meaning men’s work versus women’s work, has remained practically as gendered as it was a century ago. For example, even in an “egalitarian” country such as Sweden almost all commercial pilots, divers, miners, and foresters are men. And almost all flight attendants—a term specifically invented to obfuscate the facts—cashiers, secretaries, minders of little children and—are women.

Partly because they tend to do work that is physically light, clean and safe, partly because of the problems associated with motherhood, women still do not get paid as much as men are. By some calculations, assuming present trends continue, the point where that will happen is still decades and perhaps even centuries away. Often the more senior and remunerative the position men and women occupy, the more true this is. Since women tend to spend fewer years in the working force, the same applies to pensions.

Another way of putting this is that, today as ever, the higher one climbs the slippery pole of power and fame the fewer women one meets. Just some six percent of heads of state are female. As Margaret Mead used to say, the world is run by men and strong women (among whom, no doubt, she counted herself). Furthermore, not one female head of state got to where she is by running for office on a feminist platform. Not Angela Merkel. Not Theresa May. Much less the late Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, and Margaret Thatcher, all of whom spent a lifetime to avoid having the epithet “feminist” applied to them. Hillary Clinton, the female candidate for the US presidency perceived as being the most pro-feminist of all, was trounced by a man to who is not only a declared male chauvinist but a sexual harasser and predator as well.

Mission impossible: Finding even one important movie in which a woman over 50 plays the main role. Apparently neither men nor women are interested in watching one such.

The age-old situation whereby the entry of too many women into any occupation, institution, and organization causes the social prestige, and consequently the economic rewards, that go with that occupation, institution and organization to decline still persists. And vice versa, of course.

3. Relationships

The age-old situation whereby most household work is done by women, either such who do it for themselves and their families or such who rely on relatives or hire others in their places, remains unchanged.

Today as ever, the more successful a man the more attractive he becomes to women; however, except for female models, actresses, and the like, the opposite does not apply. Why? Because, as Gloria Steinem once pointed out, indeed, often the more successful a woman the more like a man she becomes.

Hypergamy, the age-old tradition whereby most women hope to gain an advantage by trying to marry men who are older than themselves and belong to a higher class, persists. That is why, contrary to the hopes of Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch (1970), and long before her Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) women have not stopped desperately trying to make themselves more attractive to men. As by adapting themselves to fashion, wearing makeup, buying and wearing jewelry and accessories, undergoing cosmetic surgery, going on a diet, trying to learn how to have orgasms or pretending to have them, and much more. Women, in other words, often are not only seen as sex objects but see themselves as such. Which in turn is one reason why the fight against pornography, put on by such feminists as the late Andrea Dworkin, has led nowhere.

Women go on imitating men in many things, including dress. However, the opposite rarely occurs. Whereas a great many women wear pants, practically nowhere do men wear skirts (when they do, as in Scotland, they are called kilts). Women take on (filch?) men’s names until they, the names, become first gender-neutral and then female only; but the opposite does not apply. These processes prove that penis envy, meaning the desire of women to be and do anything men are and do, is at least as strong among present-day women, feminists specifically included, as it was when one of Freud’s female students, Henriette Lampl de Groot, came up with the idea.

For good or ill, the famous “double standard” still persists. Accused of promiscuity, Catherine the Great of Russia once said that she had fewer lovers in a lifetime than man of her male colleagues did in a year. To this day, a man who has many female sexual partners is often admired and envied; a woman who does the same is put down as a slut—not just by men but by many women too.

Feminism and Its Discontents*

Feminism remains overwhelmingly a middle class ideology. After more than five decades, it still has not been able to make considerable inroads among upper- and lower class women. The former do not need it and are reluctant to share their privileges with their less fortunate “sisters.” The latter don’t have the time for it.

Since 1975 or so the gap in life expectancy between men and women, which had been growing for decades, has been closing again. This in spite of the fact that, in practically all countries, perinatal death has continued to decline. The reason? Because so many women, misled by feminists, have begun to work outside the home, thus subjecting themselves to the same stresses as those affecting men.

Survey after survey in various countries has found that women are no happier today than they were forty years ago; also, that relative to men their happiness has been on the decline.

Women have not ceased complaining; isn’t the whole of feminism one long complaint? Freud’s question, “was will das Weib,” what does the woman want, remains as relevant as it was when he asked it almost ninety years ago.

For many people, including some women, feminism has become a swearword.

Conclusion

Feminism has failed. So much so, indeed, that very few people can even remember that, back in the 1970s, there were such things as environmental feminism, left-wing socialist feminism, utopian feminism (which advocated female-only communities) and so many other kinds as to boggle the mind.

To repeat my question, could it be that “me too,” as one of the few survivors, far from being a sign that things are getting better, is a desperate rearguard reaction to the fact that feminism has been a flop?

  • Compliments to Marie Jo Buhle.

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Neither Heaven Nor Hell (II)

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Part II

Reminder: Last week I started a three-post series about what the future of humanity might look like. I did so by trying to provide answers to ten critical questions. The first three, discussed last week, were 1. Will War Be Abolished? 2. Will We Run Out of Resources? 3. Will Poverty Disappear?

Follow the next three questions and my answers to them.

4. Will gender equality come to pass? To many people, the “liberation” of women is one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest, social change since the beginning of history. This has been taken to the point where some students talk of “the disappearing male.”

I disagree. First, as the fact that sport remains segregated shows all too clearly, the physical gap between men and women remains as large as ever; as a result, by and large only men can defend women against other men. The dreams of some feminists about “convergence” remain just that—dreams. And not even beautiful ones, I should add.

Second, there is no indication whatsoever that women are becoming less needful of protection from all the bad things men are allegedly doing to them (see on this my post, of 11.8.2016, Frauenparkplaetze). To the contrary: hardly a day passes without some others being added to the list. Judging by this criterion, if anything women seem to be getting further away from equality, not closer to it. Just as I was writing this column on 11 September I read that the British police was considering treating “misogyny” as a hate crime. A visitor from Mars, observing what is going on, might quickly conclude that the females of the species resemble the retarded, or the handicapped, or children, or even animals, more than they do adult men capable of looking after themselves.

Third, women continue to conceive, bear, deliver, nurse, and, in the vast majority of cases, rear children whereas men either do not do so at all or only to a much smaller extent. As a result, the former can spare so much less energy and time for their careers. To the extent that mothers have careers, normally they do so by shifting the burden of child-raising to some other woman; meaning that, while some women do indeed get ahead, the rest do the same work they have always done—for strangers.

Fourth, in most of today’s “advanced” countries, working women make about two thirds as much as men do. As best we can calculate, that figure has not changed much since at least the time of ancient Rome. Nor is it likely to change anytime soon. Fifth, some studies have argued that gender segregation at the workplace is as common today as it was a hundred years ago; or how else explain the fact that over 90 percent of those killed at work are men? Sixth, following Margaret Mead (Male and Female, 1948), today as ever in every known society it is what men do which is considered important. Not least by women who keep imitating whatever they do; see on this my post of 16 June, “PE? PE!”

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5. Are we, as a species, becoming more intelligent? Some students, using the results of pen- and paper tests which seem to have improved from 1930 on, think so. This is known as the Flynn Effect. Against this view, several arguments might be adduced. First, it is by no means clear what the effect in question, if it does indeed exist, means; possibly all it shows is that those who participated in the tests, which were held almost exclusively in developed countries, are becoming used to think in terms of pen and paper intelligence tests.

Second, the effect, again supposing that it exists, only applies to group and populations. In other words, there is no indication that it makes the most intelligent among us more intelligent still. This is proved by the fact that, starting as long ago as ancient Greece, our ability to produce superb work in such fields as history, philosophy, literature, drama, painting, and sculpture has not improved one iota. Nor is there any reason to think that Einstein was more intelligent than Aristotle. Surprisingly though it may sound, in some ways this inability to go further than our ancestors did even pertains to the field technology. So far, no one has succeeded in emulating some aspects involved in the construction of the Egyptian temples.

Third take a look at almost any book, movie, TV show, radio show, newspaper or advertisement. Doing so will confirm that our ability and readiness to believe every kind of nonsense has remained unchanged at least since the time when Lucian around 150 CE wrote “A True Story” about men impregnating other men who carried the fetuses in their calves. He, at any rate, was speaking tongue in cheek.

6. Is life becoming better? In some ways, the answer is yes. As I wrote last week, “absolute” poverty is disappearing. Even in the most godforsaken places living standards are rising, albeit often unevenly and often by fits and starts. Life expectancy is increasing (though only at the cost of greater mortality; Japan, a wealthy country which leads the list of long-lived people, has a much higher mortality rate than poor underdeveloped Egypt does). As the growing list of treatable diseases and injuries shows, health is improving. Though only at the cost of all of us over sixties turning into ambulant medicine chests; of far more people suffering, or dying, from age-related diseases such as Alzheimer and cancer; and of being made to worry about one’s health day in, day out. “See your doctor,” is the motto of modern society.

It is also true that, starting with Thomas Jefferson and the American Declaration of Independence, more and more governments, communities and individuals have been paying at least lip service to the idea that the purpose of all social arrangements, big and small, is to enable each and every one of us to seek his or her own happiness in this world.

However, proving that we moderns lead better lives and happier lives than, say, the ancient Egyptians—let alone our ape-like ancestors—did would be difficult indeed. Or else how to account for the vast number of psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, social workers, and gurus of every kind, let alone the enormous spread of happiness pills consumed with or without a legal permit?

Furthermore, currently two factors are threatening whatever humanity may have achieved in this field. First, freedom, without which happiness is surely impossible, is even now being put in jeopardy by technological developments fully capable of registering and remembering everything, forever. Also, of locating the relevant information and sending it instantaneously to whoever is authorized, and often unauthorized, to make use of it. Second, if a happy world depends on anything then it is the eradication of injustice and oppression and the spread of clemency, kindness, and love. As we shall see next week, however, there is no indication that this is in fact taking place.

“Have I played my part well? In that case, applaud” (the Emperor Augustus).

Frauenparkplaetze

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1358I am writing this from Potsdam, the German city (population, 200,000) near Berlin where my wife and I spend part of every summer. Wherever we go, we see designated Frauenparkplaetze, i.e. parking spaces for women. Potsdam and Germany are not by any means the only places that are blessed with them. That is why it pleases me to say a word about them today.

First, who is and is not entitled to use the Plaetze in question is by no means clear. Women driving on their own? Surely. But how about women drivers with male passengers (like myself) in the car? Wouldn’t a situation whereby I get the kind of protection originally designed for women be morally flawed as well as counterproductive? And how about male drivers with female passengers in the car? Are they permitted to use the spaces in question? And don’t old people (again, like myself) deserve protection just as much as women do? No one knows; no one cares. As befits an idiotic regulation which has long turned into a joke and which only a few half-crazed feminists, seeing “discrimination” at every step, give one penny for.

Second, the location of the Plaetze. One often sees, right beside them, spaces for behinderte (cripples). No accident, that, because both categories tend to be located in well-lit areas near elevators or staircases. Are we to conclude that women, by virtue of their sex, are cripples and deserve to be treated as such? Apparently so.

Third, the rationale. The declared reason for having Frauenparkplaetze is because parking lots and building are favored by male rapists eager “to carry out their nefarious schemes,” as the Hebrew phrase, which is used almost solely in that context, puts it so very nicely. Women, so the common view, have weak bodies and, as we shall see in a moment, weak minds as well. Ergo they cannot protect themselves but need to have special measures implemented in their favor.

What applies to female drivers and passengers seems to apply to every other field too. Women need to be protected against male violence at home (never mind that, statistically, in every country where the question has been researched, female-on-male domestic violence was found to be just as frequent as male-on-female violence; see on this the work of the late Murray Straus). Women need to be protected against rape. Women need to be protected against sexual abuse. Women need to be protected against sexual harassment. Including, it seems, being greeted with the words “hey, beautiful” instead of some more conventional way. Women need to be protected against “gazing” “staring,”, and “leering.”

But that is only the beginning. Delicate souls that they are, women need to be protected against “’objectification” and “verbal abuse.” Women need to be protected against cunning pimps who first promise them the earth and then enslave them. Women need to be protected against photographers who promise to turn them into models but do not deliver. Women need to be protected against having their naked pics published on the Net (I hereby formally grant permission to anybody who has a pic of mine to do so; I shall even be happy to provide him or her with one).

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Women need to be protected against “economic terrorism.” Women need to be protected against wicked, but charismatic and clever, men who first promise them marriage and then disappear with their, the women’s, money, or turn out to be married already, or both. Women need to be protected against male physicians, psychologists, gurus, university professors, teachers, coaches, and masseurs, all of whom, which God forbid, first cause them to become “dependent” on themselves and then try to “exploit them by having sex with them.

Women need to be protected against their own preference for convicted male criminals (as shown by the fact that such criminals tend to have more offspring than average, mostly because they have more partners). Women need to be protected against the possible consequences of their taste in dress and comportment (they are, it seems, too dumb to understand those consequences on their own). So stupid are some women that they only understand that they have been “raped” years after the event, and often after some lawyer tells them they can make money by suing. Once they do, they have to be protected from confronting their alleged attackers in court and also from having their own names revealed. Women need to be protected against “offensive” speech, including, no doubt, this essay. So numerous are the things women must be protected against that I found it impossible to put them in any kind of logical order. In short, women are seen—and, what is much worse, see themselves—as complete idiots incapable of looking after themselves.

However, there is a catch. Men are physically stronger than women. As the fact that they commit most violent crimes shows, men also tend to be considerably more aggressive and more assertive on the average. By some accounts, this is likely to remain the case not only in our world but even in one where our place is taken by computers. That is why, when the chips are down, only men can protect women against other men; also why, throughout history, countless men have died to protect women whereas the opposite has rarely ever been the case. The more protection women demand and receive, the more dependent on their protectors and the less equal and free they become.

Starting with Frauenparkplaetze, the need for protection on one hand and equality on the other run at cross purposes. The resulting inability of women to decide what they want most—protection or equality—is the main reason why, whatever the common wisdom may say, they will never be equal with men.

Not, should humanity survive that long, in a million years hence.

Dreams

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My wife is planning some changes in our house. Not just minor ones, but of the kind that will require demolishing half of it and will make it temporarily unlivable—the more so because, unlike modern American homes, it is made not of wood and cardboard but of reinforced concrete. Preparing for the builders, she has decided to deal with the accumulated rubbish of three decades. Collecting it, sorting it, putting it into plastic bags, and making me schlep it out to the place it belongs. It is the kind of work she likes and with which I, addicted to writing as I am, nilly-willy go along.

Her efforts were rewarded. On the way she stumbled on an essay I produced when I was fourteen years old. This was the spring of 1960. Just before I graduated from the eighth and final class of “Yahalom” (Diamond) elementary school which I then attended in my hometown of Ramat Gan, not far from Tel Aviv. Consisting of 400 words, it is written with the aid of one of those fountain pens I have always favored, in Hebrew, and in longhand. Apparently it was composed in one go, off the cuff, without errors or corrections. Proof, that, of a kind of self-confidence which, fifty-six years later, I no longer have; nowadays correcting often takes as long as, or longer than, writing, as it does in this case too. The essay must have been preserved by my mother, now dead.

The topic, apparently set by the teacher, was: “A Historical Age in Which I Would Like to Live.” I started my essay by making the rather philosophical observation that there was no good without evil and no evil without good. That, I said, applied to every field, historical periods included. History could be divided into three parts: ancient, medieval, and modern. Antiquity had been a time of “enormous achievements,” including writing, agriculture, and many kinds of art. The middle ages had witnessed a “general collapse” in all these fields, including art, trade, science, and culture. However, in 1492 progress resumed. Once again, the outcome was “enormous achievements” such as democracy. Again growing philosophical, I gave it as my young opinion that “every age has its advantages and disadvantages, but all have this in common that the advantages were greater than the disadvantages.”

“If there is a period in which I would like to live apart from what we call our own,” I went on, it is “the remote future.” In that future –

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The world will reach an ideal state. All states will cease to exist, or at any rate abolish their frontiers and tariff-walls. All places on earth will be linked by scientific, cultural, commercial, and artistic ties. Armed forces, which today number millions of people, will completely disappear. Wars having come to an end, they will no longer be needed. As people come to obey the law without having to be coerced, even police forces will become more or less superfluous. In this future, remote though it is, class differences will disappear. The only way people for people to climb the social ladder will be by means of personal talent and knowledge. And even that ladder will not be material, as is the case today, but spiritual. Science, in its many forms, will govern the world. Everyone will recognize its power and will provide it with the wherewithal to make further progress. It will provide us with everything. Free us from our dependence on the weather and the earth’s orbit around the sun; [and] enable us to contact alien civilizations (supposing such civilizations exist or will exist) from which we shall be able to learn more than we could ever do on our own. Generally speaking, life will be ideal, similar to that envisaged by the prophets of our people.

I would like to live in that world because of the absolute equality and freedom on which it will be based. And also because of the material and spiritual wealth it will provide… Who knows? Perhaps this age will come one day.

I distinctly remember where I got my ideas about alien civilizations. It was Arthur C. Clark, Prelude to Space (1951), which had been translated into Hebrew and which I read several times. Looking back, I find that parts of it were truly prophetic, others pure rubbish. The words about the prophets of our people must have come from the Old Testament classes we took and to which I still owe most of such knowledge of it I possess.

As to the rest, I have no idea. Clearly, though, I was already taking a strong interest in what was to become my lifelong occupation: to wit, history in all its tremendous variety. Was my essay simply an expression of childish innocence? Did it reflect the “go-go” 1960s which, ere the Vietnam War took the fun out of them, may well have been the most optimistic, most hopeful, period in the whole of human history? Was it an outgrowth of what, now that I think about it, must have been excellent teaching indeed? Or all of these?

My teacher, bless her, whose name I can no longer recall, did not think any of these things. Near the end of the essay she wrote: “interesting and intelligent—but, ‘much to my regret,’ [apostrophes in the original] beside the point.”

Just Published! Equality: The Impossible Quest

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Martin van Creveld, Equality: The Impossible Quest, Castalia House, 2015.

Reviewed by Vox Day.

81h5u+UVSQL._SL1500_All over the Western world gaps between rich and poor are widening—or the headlines say. Nobody has done more to spread this view than the French economic historian Thomas Piketty whose best-selling volume, Capital in the Twentieth Century, not only documents the process but represents one long call for reducing the gaps so as to create a more equal society. But what is equality? Who invented the idea, when, where, and why? How did it develop, grow, mature, and interact with other ideas? How was it implemented, and at what cost? Are we getting closer to it? What is the promise? What is the threat?

There is equality before God and equality here on earth. There is natural equality and the kind of equality that society creates. Some people, incidentally, want to extend equality to animals and plants as well. There is equality of body and there is equality of mind. There is economic equality and there is equality before the law. There is civic equality and there is political equality and there is equality of opportunity and there is equality in front of death. There is equality among individuals and there is equality among groups, nations, and races. In Aldous Huxley’s celebrated book, Brave New World, this truth is held to be self-evident that men (and women, though Huxley does not say so) are equal in respect to their bodies’ physico-chemical makeup but in no other way. The list goes on and on.

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Equality: The Impossible Quest considers all these problems and then some. It begins by considering our primate relatives as well as various historical societies that never heard of equality. Next, it traces the development of the idea and its implementation in various societies throughout history. This include ancient Greek equality as realized in Athens and Sparta, monastic equality in both East and West, social revolts aimed at establishing equality, utopian equality, liberal equality of the American and French Revolutionary varieties, socialist, communist and kibbutz equalities, Nazi equality, the equality of women and minorities, and biological equality through medical and genetic science. The last chapter deals with the greatest equalizer of all, death.

This survey of the history of equality demonstrates that the vast majority of human societies have not only survived, but thrived without equality. And it appears that despite its popular appeal, if carried too far, equality will present a threat to justice, liberty, and even truth. More problematic still is the observable fact that the various versions of equality tend to be contradictory. For every form of equality achieved, another must often be sacrificed. That is why the attempt to establish it on a lasting basis has, in every previous instance, proven ephemeral.

Equality, especially absolute equality of the form Plato, Rousseau, and their modern successors are seeking, is a dream. When one takes into account the costs it involves, the contradictions to which it inevitably leads, and the tremendous quantities of blood that have been shed in its name, it is hard to conclude that the dream of equality is a beautiful one.

Martin van Creveld’s history of equality is an intellectual tour de force that is more education than polemic. Throughout the book, the author’s natural sympathies toward the basic concept of equality are readily apparent, but his scholastic rigor and integrity are too strong to be influenced by them. Which is why, in the end, the reader finds himself more than ready to respect, and more importantly, to accept, van Creveld’s reluctant conclusion. However desirable it may appear to us, however much it may appeal to us, we have little choice but to understand that Man’s quest for equality is an impossible one that is doomed to failure by virtue of its own inherent contradictions.