Tom’s Big Picture

De Toqueville’s opinion of American women and their virtues, as compared to the decadence of Europe at the time.

As a counterbalance to my anti-feminist post of last week, I thought it appropriate to feature one of my favorite Kipling poems, “The Female of the Species”. The tragedy of feminism is that it actually disenfranchises women of their natural role, of their much more important work in the home, in the church and the community. How can the Proverbs 31 woman “consider a field” and buy it if she’s stuck in a cubicle grinding out corporate spreadsheets?

The particular theme of this poem is the natural willingness of a woman to kill for her children- the crowning beauty and grace of all creation, the epitome of love and gentleness, turned instantly into a cold-blooded killer when her babies are threatened. A beautiful paradox illustrated by the master pen of Kipling. This, folks, is real female empowerment.

The Female of the Species

1911

When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

When Nag the basking cobra hears the careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can.
But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.
‘Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

Man’s timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,
For the Woman that God gave him isn’t his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husband, each confirms the other’s tale –
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.

Man, a bear in most relations-worm and savage otherwise, –
Man propounds negotiations, Man accepts the compromise.
Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact
To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.

Fear, or foolishness, impels him, ere he lay the wicked low,
To concede some form of trial even to his fiercest foe.
Mirth obscene diverts his anger — Doubt and Pity oft perplex
Him in dealing with an issue — to the scandal of The Sex!

But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same;
And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity — must not swerve for fact or jest.
These be purely male diversions — not in these her honour dwells.
She the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else.

She can bring no more to living than the powers that make her great
As the Mother of the Infant and the Mistress of the Mate.
And when Babe and Man are lacking and she strides unclaimed to claim
Her right as femme (and baron), her equipment is the same.

She is wedded to convictions — in default of grosser ties;
Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him who denies! –
He will meet no suave discussion, but the instant, white-hot, wild,
Wakened female of the species warring as for spouse and child.

Unprovoked and awful charges — even so the she-bear fights,
Speech that drips, corrodes, and poisons — even so the cobra bites,
Scientific vivisection of one nerve till it is raw
And the victim writhes in anguish — like the Jesuit with the squaw!

So it cames that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer
With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her
Where, at war with Life and Conscience, he uplifts his erring hands
To some God of Abstract Justice — which no woman understands.

And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him
Must command but may not govern — shall enthral but not enslave him.
And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail,
That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male.

Since I’ve become a parent, one of my favorite stores to visit is Pottery Barn Kids.  While the merchandise is largely Chinese-made (but so is Ethan Allen these days!), the aesthetic of the children’s rooms, toys and furniture reminds me of a more innocent time for children, made all the more relevant when you consider the prevalence of slutty clothes for 3rd graders in every Wal-mart and JC Penney’s.

Now, PBK is NOT cheap, esp. when you consider you’re buying for kids.  When visiting their store in Houston, you can’t help but notice all of the pretty moms with pretty kids looking around the store.  What interests me the most are the toys they have for little girls: of course, the standard dollhouses and stuffed animals, but most interesting are the little pink ironing boards, pink play irons, pink dishwashers, pink kitchen appliances and pink refrigerators.  Not only are they pink, they are done in a 1950’s aesthetic, harkening back to the days before feminism:

These toys are pretty much exclusively on the “little girl” side of the fully sex-segregated store.  The “little boy” side has toys like airplanes, antique cars, fighting dinosaurs, and huge castles with working catapults. 

Think of how enraging this must be to the ardent feminist.  For fifty years, they have worked to deconstruct gender rules, to rebel against the order of nature, and convince women that their natural roles in the home are inherently oppressive and exploitive.

And now, in 2007, upper crust mommies are buying their little girls toys that demonstrate gender roles to them that are entirely inconsistent with the feminist worldview, in an aesthetic (retro 1950’s style) that is patently offensive to the feminist narrative. 

The feminists said that the 1950’s housewife, largely liberated from the labor of her mother by labor saving devices like the dishwasher, confident in her status as the heart of the home, was actually being exploited by her husband and society at large.  What the housewife really needed, according to the feminists, was to go to work in a cubicle somewhere in Corporate America, where she could find true fulfillment in a spreadsheet instead of in the lives of her children.

And this is why feminism is dead: it is a lie.  Most corporate jobs are not glamorous, they are tedious, boring, and dehumanizing; they cannot compare to motherhood.  It took women a generation to figure out the lie (I think they figured it out pretty quick myself, but were guilted into staying in the workforce longer by the relatively few hardcore feminist enforcers).

But now the damage has been done.  The increase in the labor pool lowered wages for male breadwinners, and globalism and outsourcing has further weakened the ability of most families to survive on one income.  Women were convinced by a lie to join the workforce, and now many, even if they realize the lie, cannot now escape, thus doubling the guilt of the feminists in their deception.  Having harmed women by convincing them of the non-existent “fulfillment” of a career, they closed the exits and women cannot go back.

Thus, in a roundabout twist, the “stay at home” mom is now a status symbol, an indication (except in cases of uncommon frugality) that the male breadwinner has sufficient income to provide a middle class lifestyle on one salary; this is especially true in cities where the cost of living is higher.  And the mommies are as uniformly pretty as their husbands are in earning power.

And why do these mommies buy their little girls gender-specific anti-feminist toys at Pottery Barn Kids?  Simple: they are training them for their future role as a middle class stay at home mommy, and inoculating them against the downward social mobility associated with the feminist outlook on life. 

Just another lesson in the undeniability of God and Nature in human affairs.  Everything will eventually seek its own level- and as a wise man once said, a woman’s primary role ever was and ever will be as mothers and “keepers of home”.

Some of you will have seen this already:

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2769639

Observations:

A. Beautiful family. And knowing the media, you know they were trying very hard to find a bad example to feature in this report. It speaks a lot about the people involved that this family was the “worst” the media was able to find.

B. I assume the pastor featured was not the pastor of this family- and the report I believe makes that pretty clear. Dan Scott, the local pastor interviewed, is clearly in “damage contol” mode- as in, “how can I reassure these nice media people that we Christians aren’t weirdos like this family?” And, under pressure, he spills his worldview, referencing “overpopulation” and “limited resources” for reasons not to have lots of children.

Now, in fairness, Scott is merely parroting the received wisdom of our age- but there’s not an “overpopulation” problem with this couple’s children. In contrast, the Western world is going to have a serious underpopulation problem in the next 100 years. Children like these don’t result in “limited resources”, but rather are priceless human capital who will add to the total resources available to the rest of humanity.

Scott, you’ll be interested to know, is pastor of a megachurch in Nashville, and his humanist educational background probably betrays the source of his bias:

Pastor Scott holds a BA in Sociology/History, a Masters of Arts in Humanities, a Master of Arts in Psychology and a post graduate certificate in Trauma and Abuse. Pastor Scott is fluent in Spanish and French and is dedicated to racial reconciliation.

Something tells me Scott would not support politically incorrect solutions to true overpopulation, like mandatory birth control for welfare recipients, but is nevertheless very eager to distance himself from a family populating the world with beautiful, well-adjusted children on their own dime.

C. Depending on which of the offered definitions you take, “quiver full” does not necessarily mean absolutely no birth control (I’ve read somewhere that a quiver in OT times held five arrows, but of course because of high infant mortality they would have had many more than that to ensure 5 survived). The point is to have at least 5 or 6 kids. That’s achievable- what worries me about an absolutist worldview is rolling 1/30 odds for Down Syndrome (and other developmental issues that increase exponentially with maternal age) at age 45. Unless a parent is financially independent enough to provide for a special needs child for life (even past the parent’s death), it would seem irresponsible to intentionally take such a large risk that, if such an outcome occurred, would ultimately put a burden on the taxpayer- not to mention the time and resources that would be taken from the other children. I’m not advocating abortion of course, but I just mean using non-abortive birth control to manage the risk after a certain age. A reasonable inflection point before the risk starts accelerating seems to be age 39 or so. Statistics below:

I’m sure very few people will take this middle position- it seems as if we are wired up for ideology.

And if people must choose an ideology, then the full-on “Quiver Full” philosophy is infinitely preferable for our people to the Culture of Death and its below-replacement birth rates we have now.

I recently helped my wife transition our family’s digital photos and movies from ad-hoc directories spread across several computers into a unified library on her Mac’s excellent iPhoto software. While I still find the Apple operating system a bit awkward (it’s prettier, more stable, easier-to-use and more secure than Windows for the average user, but it doesn’t offer any really breakthrough additional functionality and taxes me with my Windows-optimized computer instincts), the real treat of owning a Mac is Apple’s software. It’s well-designed and it works. Particularly interesting was the scrolling function when looking at the entire library. As you scroll down chronologically, the software superimposes the month and year over your screen. I was a bit taken aback as I started scrolling down- we have so many photos over only six short years of time as a couple. At last count, I think there are 12.8 gigabytes worth of photo and video (we take short video snapshots with our digital camera that I edit into an annual DVD as an alternative to the awkward omnipresence of a video camera, whose footage is never watched).

I think it works out to about 3000 total photos. They are stored digitally, will never degrade, and will look as good 500 years from now as they do today.

If I did my best, I might be able to find 50-100 photos total of any of my grandparents (3 of whom are passed away). The tiny bit of video is on 20-year-old degrading VHS tapes that badly need to be archived. In essence, I have a few pictures, a bit of video, fading memories. That’s it.

For every child born today, it will be far different. When my second child is a great-grandmother, maybe 50 years after I have passed away, she will have a perfect digital copy of video taken moments after her birth- and perfect archives of her father and mother. How they talked. What they looked like. Their mannerisms and the silly things said to them when they were a child.

But the implications are far more significant than just emotional connections to dead relatives that can be recalled upon command. Perhaps a bit of historical context on this subject:

In medieval England, one of the goals of the aristocracy was to preserve the unity of family wealth over time. Many of them left wills that essentially said “my oldest son inherits all of my wealth; he may do anything he wishes with the income generated from it, but may not deplete one penny of principal or sell one acre of land.” Over time, land and money became tied up in a few hands as the “dead hand” of the past restricted the living from doing what they wished with their estates. The law eventually recognized this problem and created a legal principle called the “rule against perpetuities”. The rule essentially states that for a contract or will to be valid it must be provable that it will terminate within 21 years after the death of someone alive at the time of its origination. So for example, an older British patriarch could only tie up property for the maximum of the lifetime of any one person alive at the time of his death plus twenty one years. Still a lot of time, but it freed up a lot of land and removed the oppressive regulations of long-dead ancestors.

The efforts of these aristocrats to control the future dealings of their heirs illustrate the natural desire of any father or mother to influence what comes after them. Many of them wrote long, detailed letters concerning life to their children, for example the very popular (in the 1800’s) writings of Lord Chesterton to his son or Robert E. Lee’s affectionate letters to his children, first published in the early 1900’s.

I believe our opportunity for such influence is many times that of our ancestors. Thanks to digital technology, our photos and videos will survive indefinitely, and our descendents can have the opportunity to feel like they really know us. Feeling like they know us as people, they are more apt to take our ideas seriously, even those passed down in written form.

Recently I listened to Vision Forum’s Entrepreneurial Bootcamp CD’s (as an aside, they were excellent, with more practical business content than the typical secular “think positive” business cow pattie seminar; I don’t think I ever understood the whole venture capital build-it-to-sell-it process until I heard one of the guys speak, as I’m more naturally interested in building cash cows to have and to hold than capturing market share as bait for a potential buyout). One of the more, shall we say, “intense” speakers shared that he had a 200-year plan for his family- actually written out! Now that may sound really strange, but he remarked that in his lifetime since he wrote the plan, 20% of 200 years will have passed.

To our hyper-individualistic culture this sounds insane- the typical parent is just looking to get the kid out of the house and self-supporting. But to most people in healthy cultures (including our own before not too long ago), long-range planning is a desirable goal. One of the reasons the Japanese outperform us in many areas is their extreme long-term perspective- Sony and Toyota are reported to have business plans looking up to 500 years into the future! Meanwhile, GM is studying how to save $1 on a piece of plastic to boost earnings next quarter.

So we shouldn’t be shocked or ridicule someone with a long-range plan, but rather consider how such a plan, enabled by the priceless technological gifts of our time, fits into OUR vision for OUR family. I also think we have to start thinking tribally, in terms of our extended future kinship network, not only our immediate nuclear family.

These thoughts are very much in-process, but I will briefly summarize some of the opportunities available:

1. A longer lifespan will enable more long-term-oriented thinking for our families, and more impact on grandchildren. One of the challenges affecting any successful parent is a statistical demographic reality called regression to the mean. Even if a husband and wife are both above-average in ability, the children of such a union will tend to regress back towards the population mean (or IQ=100 for European peoples); the parental IQ is the best indicator of the highly heritable trait of general intelligence (i.e. smarter parents have smarter kids), but like height or any other inherited trait, extreme values tend to get smoothed back down to the average. If you’re smarter than average for your population group, your children will tend to, on average, regress down to the mean (this is a statistically probabilistic statement- it is certainly possible to have all children be smarter, in fact, if you have enough children, it becomes likely that at least one will be smarter). Likewise, those below the average will have children who regress back up to it. Thankfully, IQ is not nearly as important as moral and spiritual development (though, as The Bell Curve demonstrates, they do correlate together in a rather Calvinistic way), but if we want to have an extended kinship network with a visible leader (as committees are the worst way to govern anything), especially when we’re talking about running a continuing family business, we want this person to be at least as talented as the previous generation. The Italians have a word for this concept, called virtu’, that combines the traits of high intelligence, high moral standards and an action-oriented mindset. We want a leader for our extended family or business who is smart (practically smart, not primarily a self-absorbed geeky intelligence), highly moral (as fairness is the only way to ensure the long-term unity and stability of the extended family unit) and a man of action. In other words, someone with the essential virtu’. The only solution to finding this leader is to cast a wide net by having lots of children and grandchildren. The long lifespans afforded by current medicine (which is worlds better than it was even twenty years ago at helping us maintain a higher quality of life) can enable us to not only have more a of multigenerational impact on our grandchildren, but also to see the track record of performance of our children and grandchildren over a longer period of time, which can give greater peace of mind when the time comes to pass the baton to a new leader of the extended family.

2. We are entering a new era of fathers taking responsibility for leadership of their families; could this be formalized? I’ve considered the idea of a “Family Constitution”, some sort of internal document delineating reasonable objective standards of behavior that define who we are, to minimize the “drift” of future generations. Of course it would be unenforceable, but so are Biblical standards of behavior in our times- but no one would say the Bible has no impact.

3. On issues that we care about (say a certain perspective on history, or a theological opinion not compatible with the spirit of our age), we could make simple videos explaining our position to our children and grandchildren. Imagine how difficult it would be for the Supreme Court to twist the opinions of the Founding Fathers if there had been C-SPAN at the Constitutional Convention! In the same way, a video can provide concrete evidence of your opinion, not watered down or compromised in any way. This can help your descendants resist any future liberalizing influences.

These are just a few fairly random thoughts at this point. But the possibilities are endless, for good and evil, with the technological revolution we are experiencing.