Anonymous writes:

Yet you argue morally....I am confused, very confused. 

 This is is response to my raising concerns about the political project to reform individuals morally behind Raymond Hain's defence of the new urbanist walkable community.

Okay, it's just a sloppy argument made by some wandering troll. But let's take it seriously. Why would it be that some kinds of moral arguments are oppressive and others not? Because that is the problem that is confusing poor old anonymous. How dare I criticize someone else for pushing an oppressive moral agenda when I argue morally. If I make an argument that people should do X or that they should not do Y, isn't that just the same as some like Hain saying:

... we must promote building patterns that will help these various small-scale human communities to flourish and make virtuous action possible.

 Is the difference in the "we"? No. If Joe runs around with a gun robbing banks then it is up to the rest of us to put some major moral oppression on Joe. We do it through the agency of the police but it is our determination that makes it. This can be overdone of course.

But the particularly dangerous kind of moral oppression, in my view, is the stuff done with the purported goal of encouraging other people's happiness. I say purported, because projects like the new urbanism have far broader goals than they reveal. This is nothing less than a remaking of the culture.

And it's not a rare or unusual thing. Everywhere you look, you can find people with projects that would focus all the tools available to the state into remaking our culture in the name of happiness or to avert some supposedly crushing disaster that will befall us if we don't act right now.

"Save yourself from this corrupt generation"

It is often said, because it is true, that ancient writers didn't think about facts the same way we do. To our way of thinking, an accurate biography of Alexander the Great or Jesus will describe the things he said and did correctly and in the order these things actually happened. Ancients were more interested that we get the correct impression of the person. If Alexander was a great man, then he must have done great things as a child too and it is no obstacle to their mind that they don't actually have evidence of these things.

And while I understand that, I'm still a modern in these things. When I read the Bible, there is no writer I trust less on the facts than the author of Luke-Acts. For Luke it is very important that the church grow out of Jerusalem. And he doesn't let the fact that neither he nor anyone else has evidence of this get in the way.

But even though Luke-Acts guy is unreliable on chronological and geographic facts, he is rock solid on some stuff. Like this:

Save yourself from this corrupt generation.

You can take that one to the bank.

Womanly virtues Friday ...

... is a little late this week. This was also intended to be a second part to Thursday's post, which seems to be gone forever. Oh well. Like everything else here, it is written "live" as it were so I'll have to try and respond to something that no longer exists.

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.
                 From The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx

A professor of mine used to say that if Marx had paid more attention to what he was writing in those two sentences, he would have seen why Marxism had to fail.

I think if we pay attention we might also grasp why feminism had to produce exactly the sort of slutty dress we see in young women today. In moments of revolution, people lose all grasp on who and what they are because they have swept away all the roles and expressions that used to serve to give them a sense of who and what they were. With all that gone, they have no choice but to fall back on what are little better than historical caricatures.

At the local La Senza they have a display out front under a sign that says, "What's hot now." And what is hot now? There is a merry widow, baby-doll inspired stuff, push up bras and low-cut panties, which is to say lingerie inspired by the 19th century, lingerie inspired by the 1950s, lingerie inspired by the1960s and lingerie inspired by the 1970s. Anxiously conjuring spirits from the past indeed.

But why dress like sluts? Why not tomboys or female jocks? Or like nerdy intellectuals? Or why not dress in men's clothes? Or why not be like classical goddesses? Well, the short answer is that all those things were tried and the options are all still available but girls prefer slutwear in a big way. After fighting this for a while, feminists have now caved and are also embracing slutwear in a desperate attemmpt to seem relevant.

Why? Why? Tell them that it's human nature
If it's any consolation, I'm just as appalled  that I'm quoting a Michael Jackson song as you are. And just waving at human nature is a circular thing anyway. Why do people always behave this way? Because it's human nature. How do we know it's human nature? Because people always behave this way.

A better way of getting at it might be to quote the old saw, Human nature doesn't change." But that isn't quite right either. A more precise way of saying that is that even if human nature does change, it changes very, very slowly. Glaciers move at break-neck speed compared to evolution. If a time machine dumped you back two thousand years ago and the locals didn't kill you, you could figure out the language and the customs and become a citizen of wherever you were.

So, however we explain girl culture in 1951 and girl culture in 2011, we have to accept that girls themselves have not changed. The needs and drives are the same in both cases. If we think of it in terms of the cultural significance of "purity" we have to recognize that the girls of 1951 were no more or less pure than the girls of 2011. The cultural attitude has changed. Girls today don't seem interested in being thought pure but that is just the culture on the surface, today's girl is just as pure as her historical counterparts. And whatever the surface culture was telling us, the typical 17 year old girl of 1951 was just as impure as her counterpart today.

But I can't actually prove any of this for just the reasons I note above: it's circular. The only proof that the same things will keep happening again and again every time people attempt to make a revolutionary change is that the same things keep happening again and again every time people attempt to make a revolutionary change.

As Wittgenstein put it, the most you can do in situations like this is to keep assembling reminders. "See, this is what always happens and it's happening again." Or, "See, this thing that strikes you as odd or unprecedented, is actually pretty ordinary in human history."

And I think that is the thing about slutwear: it's an ordinary and common thing. It is not and should not be alarming because it is what girls will do if no one stops them and it is what they will always do given the chance. It is a positive sign more than anything else. If we needed confirmation that girls and women really are emancipated in our culture, we need look no further than at how girls dress.

We may not like it much (not surprisingly, the people who seem most upset about slutwear are men who are getting to be just a little too old to be pursuing such women and women who are getting to be just a little too old to compete with them). But even if we were right to criticize these girls who dress like sluts, freedom is freedom and that includes the freedom to fall on your face. Saying, "You're free but you have to use that freedom to do the sorts of things that I think are best for you", is fraudulent.

For what it's worth, young women are just rediscovering what it means to be a woman. The way girls and boys dress now is a function of all the old rules being thrown out and people having to rediscover how to do it. And, like it or not, to be a woman is to be a public sexual being in a way that is not true of men. That is the one constant of female dress in every era and culture. The bikini and the burka are two very different ways to deal with this fundamental fact but they are two different ways to deal with the same fundamental fact and there is nothing anyone can do to change that.

Thursday post seems to be gone

Update: A very kind person who follows via an E-mail feed was good enough to send me a copy of the Thursday Post. It will be back up in a couple of minutes.

The Thursday Manly post seems to be gone. Everything else has been restored but that one has just vanished. And it's gone from Google cache too.

That will teach me for being vain. I was rather proud of that post.

Blogger has been down

I suspect the poor Blogger guys just had one of their worst Friday's ever.

Many thanks to you guys whoever you are.

Friday's post will be up sometime over the weekend.

Manly Thor's Day Special

The desire to join a small and exclusive club
I hadn't expected that writing about self-love would lead to a discussion of purity. It makes perfect sense now that I am here of course. To really love yourself in a good way, you have to believe that you are clean or capable of being made clean. So there is a sense in which purity seems like just the ticket.

Except that it isn't anymore. As I've said—and I don't think there is any room for dispute here—our culture has rejected purity as a moral virtue.

And it must be acknowledged that there were some very good reasons for doing so. For starters, purity is a double standard and sexist one to boot. Only women were expected to be pure. Men could sow their wild oats and then be "redeemed by the love of a good woman". Men might strive for purity and perhaps it was better if they did but they paid no serious price for failing to do so. The slightest blemish on a woman, however, condemned her forever.

Still, the shocking thing about the rejection of purity, is how quickly it went. In the mid 1960s the idea still dominates although it is clearly under attack. By the mid 1970s, it is defeated. How did that happen?

Well, mostly I think because it had become a taboo. Taboo morality, as Alasdair MacIntyre argues, is a morality based on rules that everyone shares and acknowledges but the way of life that made these rules meaningful is long gone. A gentleman always walks on the outside of the sidewalk. Why? Well, originally so he could deflect runaway horses but my father in law still walked on the of the sidewalk until his death a little more than a year ago.

I use the example of my father in law because there is something unquestionably beautiful and admirable about what men like him did. And to replace that morality with one where men act like selfish jerks simply because the old morality no longer holds would be worse than to keep following a  series of formal rules that no longer make sense. And that, I think, is the thing that MacIntyre misses. Taboo morality is not some weird contemptible fluke to be mocked and discarded. It is a beautiful and very human thing.

At its best, we see this attitude in some kinds of prayerful rituals that are kept on because these were the things done by our ancestors in the faith. With the dead in a dead language.

But purity was not accorded such respect. When it's time to go came, it was dispatched brutally and cruelly. A good example of this is the novels by writers such as John Updike, Phillip Roth and Norman Mailer. Like many in my generation, I find these novels unreadable and always have but I can sort of understand the feeling that went with them. After being raised on the morality of purity, they were tearing into it with all the abandon of (to borrow a metaphor from Raymond Chandler) a gangster with his first machine gun.

They felt justified in this destruction because they felt they had been lied to. And they felt that way because they really had been lied to. They'd been fed a steady diet of the moral superiority of women. A while ago, I mentionned this quote of Fulton Sheen's:

To a great extent the level of any civilization is the level of its womanhood. When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more noble her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.

That is the lie they were rebelling against. After being told from an early age that their desires towards women were base and unjustifiable and that they had to reject these desires to become worthy of a woman, these men started actually having sex with women and discovered to their shock that "A lot of women really like getting ______!" And they went a little crazy about that producing a  whole raft of novels that are now unreadable but that meant a whole lot to them and other men and women of the era.

And hiding there is the key detail. Bear with me a second and go back to my father in law always walking on the outside of the sidewalk. To really work, that morality requires both sides to fall in. The woman has to grasp her part in the dance and willingly dance that part. And thus it was with the morality of purity. A man could only move to the outside of the purity sidewalk if the woman would slide to the inside purity role as he stepped back to go around to the outside.

And that is, I think, the key part of the story (and the one traditional moralists just can't bring themselves to see). The sexual revolution, which might also be called the rebellion against purity, happened because of women. The very fact that John Updike is now so easily disposed of tells us how little he mattered. The same is true of Hugh Hefner. It is the waves of young women who went gaga over pop stars and took to wearing less and less clothing and generally insisted on their right to be impure who made the revolution.

Men took note of what was happening and adjusted their responses as they thought appropriate. No teen-aged boy watching television coverage of Beatles-crazed girls losing it as the boys arrived at JFK in 1964 was ever going to believe Fulton Sheen again. Those girls were sex-crazed animals just like him and it was never going to be the same.

But there is a puzzle here. To have existed as long as it did, the purity taboo had to have been something girls and women really wanted to have. As unfair as it was sometimes, they preferred to be thought of that way. Why did large masses of girls suddenly decide otherwise?

Voyeurs take note

Courtesy of Ann Althouse, comes this fascinating paragraph from the Harvard Crimson:

"So many people I know, including many women who are not trans-identified but whose gender presentation to some degree transgresses the gender norms of their context, have had the experience of being asked if they are in the ‘right bathroom’ or told they are in the ‘wrong’ one..."

That's written in a language that isn't quite English.  If we decode it the gist of it is that on places like the Harvard Campus, the really cool kids believe that anyone who thinks of themself as outside "gender norms" should be able to use the women's washroom. So here is Jill, formerly Bill, but Jill has not had an operation yet and may never. Jill defines herself as trans and that is the only authority Jill needs to earn a right to use the women's washroom.

And I love the phrase " whose gender presentation to some degree transgresses the gender norms of their context". By that standard, could bearded, 250-pound Frank put on some neutral lipstick and claim he he to some degree transgresses the gender norms of his context? I don't see why not.

And if women aren't comfortable with this? Well, as Althouse puts it:

... now, it seems that what the good people are supposed to believe is that only retrograde women are worried about sharing the bathroom with men. 

I'll tell you who has already made note of this: voyeurs. Every woman in the world may as well get used to the idea that in the future to use a public washroom or the change room at the pool will be to run a substantial risk that you will be watched and quite likely recorded on video for some voyeur to"use" for his personal enjoyment and probably to share with friends.

And there is nothing you can do about it.

Well, nothing expect stop using public facilities. And I expect that many upscale businesses would/will respond to such changes by offering women private facilities such as secluded toilets and change rooms.