On Nature And Natures

I've been writing for the Web since 1997, and over those years have sporadically attracted a fair amount of attention, both positive and negative. In keeping with the old Air Force adage that "if you're taking flak, you’re over the target," I've generally placed more significance on the negative feedback I've received.

Nothing I've written at Liberty's Torch has attracted as much vitriol as this piece.

It's fairly easy to see why. No woman wants to hear that her half of the human race is innately inferior, even if it's second-hand and with only the most indirect expression of approbation. As it happens, the approbation was for the cited writers' fearlessness, not their opinions per se. To make absolutely certain this point is not missed, here are my personal convictions on the subject:

I am adamant that women are the lesser sex; that men are the creators and maintainers of the skeleton and sinews of Western Civilization, without whom women's lives would be Hell on Earth; that men have an obligation to protect and provide for their wives, and that mothers have an obligation to protect and nurture their children; that women's gender-specific strengths pertain to a far smaller range of undertakings than the feminist activists claim; and that attempts to dismiss any of the above will inevitably bring about mass misery, social dissolution, and overall chaos. Put any label on those statements you might care to apply to them, ladies. That's easy enough. Convincing me that any of them is false will be much harder.

You can't say I tried to hide any of that, now can you, ladies? But what matters most about those observations is what I've inferred from them:

• The overwhelming preponderance of happy American women are married and have adopted a traditional wife / mother / homemaker style of life.
• The strongest and least stressed marriages are those in which "traditional" male and female roles obtain.
• The unhappiest women are found among the careerists who have completely renounced marriage and motherhood in favor of work for wages.
• Many unhappily married women, though perhaps not a majority thereof, are unhappy specifically about having to work for wages.
• Far too many men of a "conservative" bent take the above prescriptively: that is, as a command that the only proper place for a woman is in a traditional married woman's role.

I haven't tried to hide any of that, either.

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Ultimately, the whole of the "war between the sexes" reduces to contentions about their natures: in particular, whether they have any such things. In such arguments lie some of the grandest ironies in all of human discourse.

If there is a Nature -- that is, a set of immutable laws that determine the gross facts about how matter and energy behave and interact -- it follows almost tautologically that patterns will arise from Nature's laws that will distinguish groups of entities from one another. Men's practice of conceiving categories whose members possess specific characteristics arises from those patterns. This insight, which is the basis of Aristotle's approach to definition, is the highest single achievement of human philosophy.

Any number of persons have sought to undermine this approach to abstract reasoning. Some have attempted a subjectivist approach in the manner of George Berkeley. Others chisel at the edges: having noted that the categories we define in an Aristotelian fashion exclude certain outliers who nevertheless belong in them, they maintain that such exceptions invalidate the category altogether.

There is an obvious tension between any sort of abstraction and the natural world upon which we wish to use it. Abstractions and the definitions that create them are inherently binary: either you're "in" or you're "out." Nature is not binary, at least, not above the level of the quanta: what she produces varies continuously along innumerable axes, some of which have no self-evident bounds. Thus, rather than cavil at the gray zones around our categories, which reflect that tension, we should accept it, while maintaining that though we must remain wary about the margins around them, our abstractions remain useful nonetheless.

Allow me to skip over about twenty-four centuries of conceptual refinement: Honesty compels us to allow that our categorical notions about the sexes are inherently statistical. They address the distribution of critical characteristics between the sexes, and the variances those distributions display. Those distributions allow for leading and trailing "tails" under which outliers will be found.

Yes, there are six-foot-tall female weightlifters and five-foot-tall male weaklings.
Yes, there are innately aggressive and daring women and innately timid, retiring men.
Yes, there are a few female mathematicians and composers of symphonies...a very few.
But these are exceptions to the larger patterns that characterize the sexes: their natures.

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Once we have acknowledged the statistical character of natures, other allowances automatically follow. She who is an exception will behave exceptionally, and will not be harmed thereby. However, she who is an example of the larger pattern arising from women's nature, but who strains to behave as the exceptions do, is extremely likely to be harmed. At minimum she'll be unhappy, and she'll make those involved with her unhappy in proportion to her importance to them.

There's a lot of such unhappiness about just now. American women have been thoroughly propagandized about "equality," "female strength," and "having it all." The consequences have been dire. Those who succeed in resisting the cant, and making their own choices according to their own needs and desires, are often vilified as "gender traitors:" the most vicious and destructive element of the propaganda.

None of this is to be taken prescriptively. As I wrote here:

It doesn't matter that the path to happiness for most women seems to be that of marriage and traditional wifely and motherly pursuits. Indeed, it wouldn't matter if one could "prove" that that's the only path to female happiness. No good can come from either the de Beauvoirean / Hirshmanesque command to women to "get out there and prepare to become a ruler" or the authoritarian-paternalistic command to "stick to your kids, your home, and your kitchen." There must be free choice.

Some women would best relate to life, men, and society by adopting a traditional "wifestyle;" others, upon whom God has bestowed other gifts and insights, would do best to follow another path. If our experiences since the inception of the "Women's Lib" movement are at all indicative, there are more women of the first sort than of the second, perhaps far more. That doesn't confer authority over such decisions upon anyone.

If freedom means anything, it means the right to pursue happiness according to your own notions and priorities, whether you have two X chromosomes or only one.

The besetting sin of sexual ideologues of both sorts is to deny the nature of Mankind itself: the rational creature animated by volitional consciousness and thus deserving of freedom in all things that neither coerce nor defraud others of his kind. Such ideologues are too anxious to condemn those who defy their prescriptions. As human freedom is a lesser priority to them -- if, indeed, it's a priority at all -- its exclusion from the subject comes naturally.

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Species' natures define the species, in the abstract sense discussed above. When we observe significant changes to a species that substantially invalidate the definition, we declare and define a new species. That's the way of nature-based taxonomy: you don't insist that the creature fit the definition, but shape the definition to describe the creature, as inclusively as possible.

However, while a species's nature persists, it can be quite useful in making predictions and evaluations. Indeed, an evaluation of a creature must proceed from the nature of its species. We don't judge a Newfoundland by the standard appropriate to a Hairless Chihuahua.

BUT... let it be agreed upon at once that every evaluation, no matter how firmly based in an appropriate standard, also reflects the priorities of the evaluator -- and these are always at least partly subjective. They cannot be otherwise, for priorities are always comparative: matters of greater and lesser import. Greater and lesser import to whom? Why, to the evaluator! Who else?

Therefore, when I state that I find women to be the lesser sex -- there it is again, ladies, just in case you missed it the first time -- I'm expressing an evaluation of a species' nature, as I understand it, according to my own priorities. I place a higher value on men's typical attributes than on those typical of women. Others are free to apply their own priorities and to reach different evaluations. Given the highly personal nature of such things, I will not quibble with them.

No doubt the women who wrote en masse to castigate me for daring to have such values would like to see me "re-educated." Ain't gonna happen, chickies. I've got Aristotle in my corner. Who've you got?