Anyone who simply dismisses this piece as sexist and racist is utterly missing the point, and missing out on, as you said, a damned fine piece of writing. Their loss.
Muslims have been sold the same bill of goods the Church and European kings conspired to sell back in the Middle Ages... that God placed in the hands of special men the power to order other men to come before God, as if they were cattle. The Koran doesn't say that anymore than the Good Book does. Mohammed never said it any more than Jesus. The power to come before God willingly and freely, which both faiths know is God's greatest desire... love freely offered... also means Man shall have the power to choose not to come before God at all. To choose Hell. Give Man that one power to choose, and mullahs become little more than Episcopalian parsons, baptizing children, attending teas, and flattering old ladies.
"Plant that one seed, and then make the common-sense argument that neither Sunni nor Shiite can live very long being the boss of the other, and the people will demand no less.
This concept is already being promoted by Irshad Manji in her book The Trouble with Islam. The Muslims call that concept ijtihad, a process of independent reasoning capable of adapting religion to changed circumstances.
In short, Manji demands that Muslims question authority, as Sand suggested. She’s willing to confront Mullahs and ignore many death threats in order to spread this message.
She’s also a childless Canadian lesbian – which disputes Sand’s baseless comment that “A woman's hatred of fighting runs just as deep as a man's love for it.”
Not coincidentally, many women, like Hiirsi Ali, are also confronting the extremists within Islam, like the Saudi/Wahhabi government.
Hirsi Ali made championing the cause of Muslim women her career and eventually got elected to parliament. When the ambassador of Saudi Arabia called for her to be removed from office because of her polemics against Islam, she just scored even more points with Dutch voters. In a survey of the most-popular Dutch people in 2003, she landed in second place.
She continues the fight, despite opposition and death threats by Dutch extremist groups.
Sometimes, it seems that Muslim women have more fighting spirit than their male counterparts – or at least, they possess a lot more bravery, considering that they’re not carrying the weapons, they’re being threatened by them. They could probably accomplish a lot more with a few Rangers to back them up.
The style is excellent. Much to think about. View of women vis-a-vis men is that of a Transcendental Scientist talking about the Femocrats, but that just proves that what women need is to build a Transcendental Femocracy. Anyway, the story is very interesting. Some of his observations about our decline are very much like Spengler's. The whole philosophy is a kind of Chestertonian populism. Interesting....
If I could think half as well as you write...Wow! I may not always agree with your views. But you have captured the essence of America (or perhaps a bit closer to the mark, the spirit of "an American"). Excellent post!!
I've tried and tried to get across the "build democracy from the ground up" concept so many times in so many agruments and could never find the right way to say it. But it's all right here. The essence of the American spirit perfectly explained.
Dean, have you thought about putting it into .pdf and making it available that way. If you like, I can format it and convert it to .PDF. Would make it accessible to more people, what with all the scrolling your publication calls for. Go ahead and drop me a line at: mythusmage (at) nethere (dot) com. I'll do basic layout and render it into .pdf.
But this: the attitude of the common man, and I consider myself one, as a son of a fireman and a stay-at-home mom, is, "Leave me alone." I might have used more inflammatory language, but Dean is wielding the Hammer of Correction (good work, Dean).
The European imagines himself to be the Good Shepherd, guiding the flock. We advocates of freedon tell them to fuck off, that we prefer to find our own way. There's no compromise between these two views.
As an example of its kind--homespun wisdom proffered through the front porch conversation--is a good example. But it's a bit dated in technique for me.
It worked for Josh Billings in the 19th C., and Mark Twain and Will Rogers in the 20th C. I'm not convinced the form can struggle through the 21st. C. The overly broad generalizations it relies upon as a form don't seem very "nuanced" these days.
"Nuance" didn't win the election. The majority of us voters preferred the black-and-white "simplisme" that wins wars. In this case, the majority was right.
I hesitate to be critical, because clearly a lot of Dean's readers found this piece very moving, and I admire many of the opinions expressed here.
I have a question for Dean, though. Dean, I seem to remember in the past that you found it insulting when it was implied that pro-Bush voters were being duped or manipulated through their emotions. You've said that you have more faith than that in the American people and their ability to think through the issues and come to reasoned conclusions.
By dismissing the idea that this essay is at all sexist and labeling it a fine piece of writing, you seem to be saying that you don't find it at all insulting to a subset of the American people (women) for the author to say that they're less capable of thinking through the issues and coming to reasoned conclusions, or with expressing those conclusions through actions. Why the exception in this case?
By dismissing the idea that this essay is at all sexist and labeling it a fine piece of writing, you seem to be saying that you don't find it at all insulting to a subset of the American people (women) for the author to say that they're less capable of thinking through the issues and coming to reasoned conclusions, or with expressing those conclusions through actions. Why the exception in this case?
Elizabeth, I can't really speak for Dean's thought process, but I do think I can at least take a stab at answering your question.
First, I should just make clear that I'm generally on your side of the aisle, as Dean can assuredly attest.
In any case, I think I can answer your question by essentially saying that it's the wrong question, or at least the wrong angle from which to ask the question. I didn't read Moses as saying that women are "incapable of thinking through the issues and coming to reasoned conclusions", so much as he was saying that the "female condition" (as a subset of the "human condition") results in certain tendencies in thinking which create a very different picture of the world than that seen by men, who are subject to the "male condition".
I find it hard to argue, for example, with his assertion that women tend to be less proactive and more reactive in matters of self-defense, and have a much higher threshold for what is considered a physical threat that must be confronted rather than avoided. This is not to say that women are "incapable" of thinking strategically - which is obvious, given the existence of female generals even against the military's institutional biases against women. I think what he was trying to say, in an admittedly crude way, is that in the aggregate (or statistically speaking, or whatever term you prefer), women will tend to avoid danger and essentially try to wish it away more than men, and that the so-called "pecker-less men" have adopted this "feminine" attitude.
I'm still not sure that necessarily means we should have invaded Iraq, because I'm not sure we had reached a combination of the pragmatic threshold for confrontation of physical danger with a high enough probability of success to offset the additional risk involved, but I think far too many liberals have never even looked at the problem this way; rather, they/we have a near-automatic negative response to the thought of war, and the real-world strategic implications are either secondary or simply dismissed as double-talk.
Regardless, I can certainly see how a woman might be offended at some of what Moses had to say, and in reality, that's probably unavoidable. I don't believe it was intended as a Falwellesque "barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen"-type argument, but rather a straightforward assessment of human behavior, specifically the contrast between masculine and feminine behavior. Not an insult so much as rather harshly-worded constructive criticism. At least that's the way I took it.
I find it hard to argue, for example, with his assertion that women tend to be less proactive and more reactive in matters of self-defense, and have a much higher threshold for what is considered a physical threat that must be confronted rather than avoided. This is not to say that women are "incapable" of thinking strategically - which is obvious, given the existence of female generals even against the military's institutional biases against women. I think what he was trying to say, in an admittedly crude way, is that in the aggregate (or statistically speaking, or whatever term you prefer), women will tend to avoid danger and essentially try to wish it away more than men, and that the so-called "pecker-less men" have adopted this "feminine" attitude.
It's certainly possible that in the aggregate that this is true, although with Condeleeza Rice as SecState I think it's a particulary bad time to attribute this attitude to 'women'. However, even if one grants that this is the typical feminine attitude, I question whether it's necessarily always maladaptive. What the essay's author is saying is that the feminine approach is wait until there's a certain threat ("it's on the doorstep") and then react with lethal force. By contrast, this implies that the male approach is to sense an approaching but not yet certain threat, and quash it with semi-lethal force before it can become a imminent threat. I can see how exclusively pursuing a 'feminine' approach would sometimes lead an entity (person, country) to wait too long, until a threat had grown too strong and close to be effectively defended against. However, I can also see how exclusively pursuing a 'masculine' approach could lead to unnecessary expenditure of effort quashing potential threats which never would have materialized, draining available defenses so that when an unexpected threat pops up there's no force left.
The author appears to believe that the pre-emptive approach is always going to be the right one, without allowing for the possibility that there might be times when a wait-and-see approach would be appropriate. If that's what one thinks, then the observation that the 'male' and 'female' approaches differ isn't just an observation, it's a judgement that a large segment of the electorate is predisposed by biology or peckerlessness to make poor decisions. This seems insulting to a large number of American citizens, because it says, "You didn't just make a poor decision, you made it because there's something intrinsically wrong with you."
The reason I bring this up is that I seem to recall that Dean has been very offended (with good reason) when it's been implied that voters chose to re-elect President Bush because something was intrinsically wrong with them, such as stupidity or credulousness. This appears to me to be the flip side of that coin; the voters who chose to vote for Senator Kerry did it because they literally or figuratively have no balls. They're more emotional, less rational, stomping and pawing and screeching. In other words, they're not rational adults who have made a different decision.
It's pretty insulting, maybe even more so to the peckerless men than the actual women. I can accept with thanks the constructive criticism that a predisposition towards avoiding violence may not always lead to the best strategic approach when faced with a threat. That's a reasonable observation that can lead to a dialog about how to classify potential threats and how to deal with them. Saying, "In security, the man always carries the trump," dismisses the need for such a dialog.
While I do think a lot of fine points are made in this essay...it is the most sexist thing I have read in years.
The idea that a woman without a man is a whimpering coward who spends her every waking hour protecting her children with no social conscience is lunatic at best.
Civilization occurs when women arrive. Talk about cleaning up Dodge. It happened; civilization entered into that society, when women entered the scene, and not a moment before. That is why the Mideast remains a hotbed of violence...though women are there, they are completely silenced and sequestered from society. They have no influence.
Mr. Esmay is correct in comparing Iraq to the old west, but he totally missed out on WHY Dodge got cleaned up. If men didn't have women encouraging them, planting gardens, setting up households and rearing children and organizing the society, there would have been no need to clean it up. It was a tooth and claw, survival of the fittest society that worked as long as no one had any thought for the future...um, and liberal amounts of whiskey ;)
The arrival of women harkened the awareness of a future. That is why Dodge got cleaned up.
Men and their guns run riot without judgment or conscience with no femine influence. A completely female dominated society does not exist within our known history, so I cannot tell you what excesses would be practiced if one existed, but it is not the excesses and influences Mr. Esmay espouses. I will concede however, that it would be extremely aberrated. Prohibition was an example of feminism run amuck. The current weaknesses of the U.S. are not. They are the result of excessive complacency and laziness and an intelligentzia run amuck, composed of both sexes.
Mr. Esmay must get beyond the assumption that a woman is nothing more than a meat body factory. Even when I was married, my concept of motherhood was never so limited as 'protecting bodies' which Mr. Esmay assumes in his essay. My goal as a parent is to produce valuable members of society, which is why when my older son said he wanted to join the military and go to Iraq, I encouraged and supported his decision. It is because I reared him to be a capable, responsible human being and I trust his judgment...something of which Mr. Esmay does not appear capable in his self righteous, pompous essay.
People are deserving of respect, for their individual abilities, from one end of the bell curve to the other. I fully agree with the principles that a democracy allows the average individual much more influence than an aristocracy likes. Hence the great international popularity of American pop culture...that is what it is about - popular demand - what the average person enjoys. A democratic society is not victimized by one end of the bell curve. An aristocratic society is victimized by the high end without regard for the average citizen and a communist society is victimized by the low end.
That is my objection to the elitists/lefties of today, they want the worst of both extremes. They want to pander to the lowest common denominator and themselves live off the production of the masses without contributing anything except their self-importance.
After reading The Red Zone, I was surprised at the similarities Iraq has to the 'Wild West' of our own history. I was not surprised that Mr. Vincent also concluded that the liberation of the women of Iraq will be the influence that civilizes that society. That is why Dodge got cleaned up. It will work in Iraq too. And, democracy is the agent that will bring it about.
However, I can also see how exclusively pursuing a 'masculine' approach could lead to unnecessary expenditure of effort quashing potential threats which never would have materialized, draining available defenses so that when an unexpected threat pops up there's no force left.
The author appears to believe that the pre-emptive approach is always going to be the right one, without allowing for the possibility that there might be times when a wait-and-see approach would be appropriate.
Agreed. The best approach is, as usual, a balance between the theoretical "feminine" and "masculine" approaches. The real difficulty is determining when a period in which the dominance of one approach over the other is preferable; right now, I think we really may have entered a period in which the "masculine" approach is necessary. I'm still not sure, and I'm really not sure that our foreign policy should be quite as "masculine" as the Bush crowd advocates, but I do think the time when we could afford to be totally reactive has passed.
If that's what one thinks, then the observation that the 'male' and 'female' approaches differ isn't just an observation, it's a judgement that a large segment of the electorate is predisposed by biology or peckerlessness to make poor decisions.
That's true, so the question is, does that make the statement inherently invalid? If women (and "peckerless" men) actually are predisposed to making certain decisions with regard to self-defense, and given a set of environmental conditions in which those types of decisions yield unfavorable results ("law of the jungle" conditions), then the statement must be accepted as factual and not dismissed as purely judgmental. If you accept the biological predisposition of women toward reactive or avoidance behavior, then the only question left to answer is, do such conditions currently exist?
If you don't accept the notion of that predisposition, then it's a different story. I can only say, without any systematic empirical evidence at hand, that at first blush it seems to make sense. If you do disagree, I would be interested in hearing what your reasons are.
Thanks for posting this, Dean.
I don't get the racist or sexist reference, though. I didn't detect any of that. Maybe I'm too old, having been raised before the advent of PC.
jan
Dean, do you have any further info on Moses Sand? What is his career history?
Thanks again for the post.
Hangtown Bob
This concept is already being promoted by Irshad Manji in her book The Trouble with Islam. The Muslims call that concept ijtihad, a process of independent reasoning capable of adapting religion to changed circumstances.
In short, Manji demands that Muslims question authority, as Sand suggested. She’s willing to confront Mullahs and ignore many death threats in order to spread this message.
She’s also a childless Canadian lesbian – which disputes Sand’s baseless comment that “A woman's hatred of fighting runs just as deep as a man's love for it.”
Not coincidentally, many women, like Hiirsi Ali, are also confronting the extremists within Islam, like the Saudi/Wahhabi government.
She continues the fight, despite opposition and death threats by Dutch extremist groups.
Sometimes, it seems that Muslim women have more fighting spirit than their male counterparts – or at least, they possess a lot more bravery, considering that they’re not carrying the weapons, they’re being threatened by them. They could probably accomplish a lot more with a few Rangers to back them up.
I've tried and tried to get across the "build democracy from the ground up" concept so many times in so many agruments and could never find the right way to say it. But it's all right here. The essence of the American spirit perfectly explained.
Just...wow.
BRILLIANT AND MOVING, CAPTURING THE AMERICAN SPIRIT AND A MAN'S IDEALS. THE MOTHER, THE WIFE, THE FAMILY... BROUGHT ME TO TEARS.
I like the idea of making it a file and available to people.
Thank you!
But this: the attitude of the common man, and I consider myself one, as a son of a fireman and a stay-at-home mom, is, "Leave me alone." I might have used more inflammatory language, but Dean is wielding the Hammer of Correction (good work, Dean).
The European imagines himself to be the Good Shepherd, guiding the flock. We advocates of freedon tell them to fuck off, that we prefer to find our own way. There's no compromise between these two views.
Bill
It worked for Josh Billings in the 19th C., and Mark Twain and Will Rogers in the 20th C. I'm not convinced the form can struggle through the 21st. C. The overly broad generalizations it relies upon as a form don't seem very "nuanced" these days.
I have a question for Dean, though. Dean, I seem to remember in the past that you found it insulting when it was implied that pro-Bush voters were being duped or manipulated through their emotions. You've said that you have more faith than that in the American people and their ability to think through the issues and come to reasoned conclusions.
By dismissing the idea that this essay is at all sexist and labeling it a fine piece of writing, you seem to be saying that you don't find it at all insulting to a subset of the American people (women) for the author to say that they're less capable of thinking through the issues and coming to reasoned conclusions, or with expressing those conclusions through actions. Why the exception in this case?
Elizabeth, I can't really speak for Dean's thought process, but I do think I can at least take a stab at answering your question.
First, I should just make clear that I'm generally on your side of the aisle, as Dean can assuredly attest.
In any case, I think I can answer your question by essentially saying that it's the wrong question, or at least the wrong angle from which to ask the question. I didn't read Moses as saying that women are "incapable of thinking through the issues and coming to reasoned conclusions", so much as he was saying that the "female condition" (as a subset of the "human condition") results in certain tendencies in thinking which create a very different picture of the world than that seen by men, who are subject to the "male condition".
I find it hard to argue, for example, with his assertion that women tend to be less proactive and more reactive in matters of self-defense, and have a much higher threshold for what is considered a physical threat that must be confronted rather than avoided. This is not to say that women are "incapable" of thinking strategically - which is obvious, given the existence of female generals even against the military's institutional biases against women. I think what he was trying to say, in an admittedly crude way, is that in the aggregate (or statistically speaking, or whatever term you prefer), women will tend to avoid danger and essentially try to wish it away more than men, and that the so-called "pecker-less men" have adopted this "feminine" attitude.
I'm still not sure that necessarily means we should have invaded Iraq, because I'm not sure we had reached a combination of the pragmatic threshold for confrontation of physical danger with a high enough probability of success to offset the additional risk involved, but I think far too many liberals have never even looked at the problem this way; rather, they/we have a near-automatic negative response to the thought of war, and the real-world strategic implications are either secondary or simply dismissed as double-talk.
Regardless, I can certainly see how a woman might be offended at some of what Moses had to say, and in reality, that's probably unavoidable. I don't believe it was intended as a Falwellesque "barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen"-type argument, but rather a straightforward assessment of human behavior, specifically the contrast between masculine and feminine behavior. Not an insult so much as rather harshly-worded constructive criticism. At least that's the way I took it.
It's certainly possible that in the aggregate that this is true, although with Condeleeza Rice as SecState I think it's a particulary bad time to attribute this attitude to 'women'. However, even if one grants that this is the typical feminine attitude, I question whether it's necessarily always maladaptive. What the essay's author is saying is that the feminine approach is wait until there's a certain threat ("it's on the doorstep") and then react with lethal force. By contrast, this implies that the male approach is to sense an approaching but not yet certain threat, and quash it with semi-lethal force before it can become a imminent threat. I can see how exclusively pursuing a 'feminine' approach would sometimes lead an entity (person, country) to wait too long, until a threat had grown too strong and close to be effectively defended against. However, I can also see how exclusively pursuing a 'masculine' approach could lead to unnecessary expenditure of effort quashing potential threats which never would have materialized, draining available defenses so that when an unexpected threat pops up there's no force left.
The author appears to believe that the pre-emptive approach is always going to be the right one, without allowing for the possibility that there might be times when a wait-and-see approach would be appropriate. If that's what one thinks, then the observation that the 'male' and 'female' approaches differ isn't just an observation, it's a judgement that a large segment of the electorate is predisposed by biology or peckerlessness to make poor decisions. This seems insulting to a large number of American citizens, because it says, "You didn't just make a poor decision, you made it because there's something intrinsically wrong with you."
The reason I bring this up is that I seem to recall that Dean has been very offended (with good reason) when it's been implied that voters chose to re-elect President Bush because something was intrinsically wrong with them, such as stupidity or credulousness. This appears to me to be the flip side of that coin; the voters who chose to vote for Senator Kerry did it because they literally or figuratively have no balls. They're more emotional, less rational, stomping and pawing and screeching. In other words, they're not rational adults who have made a different decision.
It's pretty insulting, maybe even more so to the peckerless men than the actual women. I can accept with thanks the constructive criticism that a predisposition towards avoiding violence may not always lead to the best strategic approach when faced with a threat. That's a reasonable observation that can lead to a dialog about how to classify potential threats and how to deal with them. Saying, "In security, the man always carries the trump," dismisses the need for such a dialog.
The idea that a woman without a man is a whimpering coward who spends her every waking hour protecting her children with no social conscience is lunatic at best.
Civilization occurs when women arrive. Talk about cleaning up Dodge. It happened; civilization entered into that society, when women entered the scene, and not a moment before. That is why the Mideast remains a hotbed of violence...though women are there, they are completely silenced and sequestered from society. They have no influence.
Mr. Esmay is correct in comparing Iraq to the old west, but he totally missed out on WHY Dodge got cleaned up. If men didn't have women encouraging them, planting gardens, setting up households and rearing children and organizing the society, there would have been no need to clean it up. It was a tooth and claw, survival of the fittest society that worked as long as no one had any thought for the future...um, and liberal amounts of whiskey ;)
The arrival of women harkened the awareness of a future. That is why Dodge got cleaned up.
Men and their guns run riot without judgment or conscience with no femine influence. A completely female dominated society does not exist within our known history, so I cannot tell you what excesses would be practiced if one existed, but it is not the excesses and influences Mr. Esmay espouses. I will concede however, that it would be extremely aberrated. Prohibition was an example of feminism run amuck. The current weaknesses of the U.S. are not. They are the result of excessive complacency and laziness and an intelligentzia run amuck, composed of both sexes.
Mr. Esmay must get beyond the assumption that a woman is nothing more than a meat body factory. Even when I was married, my concept of motherhood was never so limited as 'protecting bodies' which Mr. Esmay assumes in his essay. My goal as a parent is to produce valuable members of society, which is why when my older son said he wanted to join the military and go to Iraq, I encouraged and supported his decision. It is because I reared him to be a capable, responsible human being and I trust his judgment...something of which Mr. Esmay does not appear capable in his self righteous, pompous essay.
People are deserving of respect, for their individual abilities, from one end of the bell curve to the other. I fully agree with the principles that a democracy allows the average individual much more influence than an aristocracy likes. Hence the great international popularity of American pop culture...that is what it is about - popular demand - what the average person enjoys. A democratic society is not victimized by one end of the bell curve. An aristocratic society is victimized by the high end without regard for the average citizen and a communist society is victimized by the low end.
That is my objection to the elitists/lefties of today, they want the worst of both extremes. They want to pander to the lowest common denominator and themselves live off the production of the masses without contributing anything except their self-importance.
After reading The Red Zone, I was surprised at the similarities Iraq has to the 'Wild West' of our own history. I was not surprised that Mr. Vincent also concluded that the liberation of the women of Iraq will be the influence that civilizes that society. That is why Dodge got cleaned up. It will work in Iraq too. And, democracy is the agent that will bring it about.
Best regards,
gail
The author appears to believe that the pre-emptive approach is always going to be the right one, without allowing for the possibility that there might be times when a wait-and-see approach would be appropriate.
Agreed. The best approach is, as usual, a balance between the theoretical "feminine" and "masculine" approaches. The real difficulty is determining when a period in which the dominance of one approach over the other is preferable; right now, I think we really may have entered a period in which the "masculine" approach is necessary. I'm still not sure, and I'm really not sure that our foreign policy should be quite as "masculine" as the Bush crowd advocates, but I do think the time when we could afford to be totally reactive has passed.
If that's what one thinks, then the observation that the 'male' and 'female' approaches differ isn't just an observation, it's a judgement that a large segment of the electorate is predisposed by biology or peckerlessness to make poor decisions.
That's true, so the question is, does that make the statement inherently invalid? If women (and "peckerless" men) actually are predisposed to making certain decisions with regard to self-defense, and given a set of environmental conditions in which those types of decisions yield unfavorable results ("law of the jungle" conditions), then the statement must be accepted as factual and not dismissed as purely judgmental. If you accept the biological predisposition of women toward reactive or avoidance behavior, then the only question left to answer is, do such conditions currently exist?
If you don't accept the notion of that predisposition, then it's a different story. I can only say, without any systematic empirical evidence at hand, that at first blush it seems to make sense. If you do disagree, I would be interested in hearing what your reasons are.