Time to Reconsider Part III

Part of an ongoing discussion on the wisdom of repealing the 19th Amendment.

I think the starting point of the argument is so alien to modern conceptions, that it needs to be brought to the center of our attention, and examined.

I propose that there are certain duties that adhere to men simply because they are men, and should act the part.

The duty, on a sinking ship, for example, to stand aside and let women and children first board the lifeboats is one such. For men of military age, to serve when drafted I take to be another, as the masculine duty to defend one’s family and clan in the state of nature extends to the city and kingdom and nation in the state of civilization.

A libertarian would say nay, that we have only the duties each man voluntarily affirms himself him to have. What say you?

I submit that men, merely because they are men, have a duty to protect the females and the young.

If infirmity by reason of youth or age, illness or incapacity excuses them from this duty, they are then blameless for not holding to it, but without infirmity, the duty applies.

This raises several questions: Does this duty reach one’s immediate family only, or does it have wider extent, reaching to remote relatives, members of one’s nation, or church, or race, or all humans?

In situations where it conflicts with other duties, where is it to be ranked? For example, if a woman loyal to the Nazi party of Germany, clutching her newborn baby to her Germanic breast, aboard a sinking ship with a man of an enemy nation, is it his duty to give her his seat on the lifeboat? Or is that a case where national loyalty outweighs any alleged duty of chivalry?

But if we accept the notion of duties that are masculine, impose on males merely because of the nature of manhood, then are their duties imposed on females, particularly in their roles as virgin, wife, and mother.

For example, I submit that there are reasons too obvious to mention, making it both immoral and imprudent to mother a child when one has not taken due precautions to care for it; hence immoral and imprudent to engage in the sex act outside of wedlock; hence immoral and imprudent (not to mention uncivil) to allure men with promises of sexual favors falsely or with immodest teasing — albeit that precisely the same behavior is both prudent and necessary when done modesty, that is, within the scope of the mating dance.

I submit also that if the male has a duty to protect the female, that she has a corresponding duty not to inject herself into danger, nor, for example, to serve in the military, except, perhaps, on such non-battlefield roles as would free an able bodied man up to fight.

The duties of wife and mother include obedience to her husband and the divine task of bearing, nursing, and educating the young, so as to shape the character of the next generation, and confirm the continuation of the species.

These duties spring out of the nature of male and female reproduction in an altricial species, and would apply to any bisexual beings found anywhere whose moral character allowed them to recognize and follow duties (which animals cannot).

In addition, the Christian, if he is to be consistent with Christian teaching, holds that there is a duty to be fruitful and multiply, for so heaven’s covenant with Adam and with Noah proclaims. It is an argument for another time to say where and to what extent this duty must influence or override the social institutions, such as monogamy, promoted and practiced by civilized man. For now, let it merely be said that, as a faithful Catholic, I hold artificial contraception, abortion, in-vitro fertilization, divorce, and fornication to be grave moral errors.

Let us now establish the basic nature of politics. I hold it to be self evident that all men are created equal, since all men are created in the image and likeness of God.  All men are born with inalienable rights to life and liberty and property.

That a man’s dependents, his wife and children, are equal to him is less clear: certain the incapacity of small children of either sex excuses them from any duty to defend the household from assault, for example, and their dependence on the father for the property owned by the family make their right to the fruit of their own labor, at least before an age to be apprentices, somewhat theoretical.

This means any slavery, or fealty, or oaths of obedience to military, civic, or religious leaders have their origin in political institutions, not in nature. I also take it as self-evident that, with the sole exception of laws of Moses and the crown of David, governments are instituted among men by men, out of a prudent regard for the laws and customs best suited to securing these rights to themselves.  Again, as being made by fallen man for fallen man, this implies all civic laws and customs to be imperfect, as having costs sometimes difficult to bear, or including unpleasing compromises.

The fundamental civic duty, indeed, the overriding reason why governments are instituted among men, is a shared covenant of self protection. No one naturally has a duty, in the state of nature, to swear fealty to a man who would be king, nor has the man who would be king in the state of nature any right to expect such fealty.

However, wives and children prosper better in civilized condition than in anarchy, and so even wandering tribesmen have a duty to form a regularized custom or law of coordinating military efforts to raid and to protect from raids, and to retaliate against enemies, or to do such bloodthirsty acts as terrify and deter potential enemies as prudence may direct.

This compact against mutual foes among the family and clan and tribe is the core of politics.

When some prudent innovator, watcher or demigod, first instructs mankind in the husbandry of the earth, and ties each household’s fortunes into conserving a plot of fertile ground for seasons enough to sow and reap, then military prudence first instructs men to build walls for their defense, and a certain specialization of  labor makes it prudent to have a common store of weapons and supplies, common drills, and other marks of civilization and discipline. It is from these walled dwelling places, called cities, that we take our word for civilization.

The duties needed to preserve the city, or render civic life glorious, are the source of civic duties.

Hence to see the origin of civic duties, the history of civilization needs must be reviewed, if only in brief. There are four innovations to be considered: civilization, law, liberty, and constitutional government.

Civilization

Some of the sources of civic duties have already been listed: the need for a common rule of discipline in wartime among the men of military age, that is, the militia. This is the rule of death. The weapons and cost of maintaining the walls and carrying the skills of leadership from generation to generation are rightly borne by those they benefit. This is the rule of taxes.

Death and taxes are the root of all politics. Wandering tribesmen can, perhaps, subsist without taxes, because of a lack of sufficient goods to barter, and because all the men serve as warriors, each man arming himself with weapons he procures himself.

The prosperity and security generated by civilized life, however are the trunk that springs from this root. The militia must be honored for their obedience and bravery, for it is by these virtues that the city survives, and likewise the farmers and artisans for their diligence and prudence.

The easiest and most obvious means of passing military skills and learned experience from one generation to the next, is to have the militia, tacitly or explicitly, consent to a king, and to have that king pass his kingship to his sons, and likewise have the warriors pass their military skills to their sons.

That this was done so uniformly in all human history tempts one to call it instinctive. It is certainly the default for fallen man.

Hence all civilized societies have either a rough or a clear division into classes: royalty, aristocracy, commoner.

The different origins and forms of government, in the broadest sense, consist of how the balance between these three groups is arranged, or what rights and duties are mutually recognized, and how protected.

Where the commons have most power, this is called democracy, or mob rule; where the aristocrats, this is called oligarchy, or elitism; where the royalty, this is despotism. In ancient Greece, for example, the central issue of the Peloponnesian War was whether a despotic group of elite should rule each city state, or a despotic group of common people, with the Spartans generally backing the elitist party of each city-state, and the Athenians the populist. (The Assembly of Athens did not include women, serfs, or slaves.)

A Republic is a system where the balance is regularized, as among the ancient Romans, where consuls represent the sovereign power, the senate represents the aristocracy, and commons are represented by tribal assembly. The British monarchy and the American federation, regardless of any difference in names and titles, have a similar system of leadership hedged about with constitutional restrictions, with representatives for the elite and the commons.

In some peoples, boundaries prevent motion between classes, in others, not. In early civilizations, the aristocracy is a warrior class, and in later, landowners and millowners, factory owners, bankers, merchants, and rich men. In some, the aristocrats meet in conclave to select the king, some merely for the duration of a campaign or raiding season, some for so long as their confidence in his leadership lasts, or for a fixed term, or for life, or for the life of himself and his heirs. At times, the king is merely the first baron among barons, or at times, the office is granted, or assumes, absolute powers.

Among fallen men, disputes arise, and laws are made to draw clear boundaries between lots of property and duties owed the city, as well as law to regularize and limit the scope of revenge or retaliation a wronged man deserves.

Law

While we might call any peoples who dwell in walled towns civilized, the true meaning of civilization does not arise unless and until this covenant exists and persists, and the consensus of the ruled  tacitly or explicitly grants it and agrees to it and submits to it. The covenant is that the King stands in the place of the wronged man for all criminal matters, and the offense against the King’s peace excludes private retaliation by the wronged against the wrongdoer, and in return, the punishments will be uniform, regular, proportionate, and just.

(Some hold the invention of writing to be the hallmark of civilization, for doubtless the existence of written law greatly aids the regularization of crimes and punishments, I submit that civilization properly so called predates history, and exists whenever men forswear private vengeance. See the Eumenides of Aeschylus for one poetical account of this, or, for a more historical account, the Book of Judges in the Bible.)

The concept of traditional or legal checks and balances to hedge the sovereign power into a limited form, without preventing the sovereign’s core function to preserve the public peace, is the crucial hallmark separating sophisticated from primitive, Christian from heathen, forms of the art and science of politics.

Among fallen men, the self-sacrifice routinely imposed on warriors, and the hardships of life that fall on all, make it prudent to regularize their various insights into the supernatural world, superstitions, and rituals, so as to divide true prophets from mere fakes and madmen, and bring a spiritual order to the city. Again, different peoples have incorporated civic and religious life differently: in the classical world, the ruling families organized the sacrifices and public festivals. In many societies, the kings were afforded divine honors, or the ruling caste, and the ruling families and priestly families were one and the same. Among the Jews or Zoroastrians, a specialized tribe, Levites or Magi, was set aside, and granted particular immunities and duties related to religious rites. Western societies since then have generally separated priestly from royal duties.

Unlike ruling duties, it would seem, at first blush, that the religious duties can and have been carried on by priestesses and prophetesses by woman as well as men, since no particular difference in the sexes, physical or mental, would seem to bar the gentler sex from acts of sacrifice, prophecy, prayer, or the interpretation of oracles.

Liberty

In the West, under the beneficent influence of Christianity, the philosophy of individualism, that is, the notion that each man in his own person, regardless of his family, regardless of his class or caste, wealth or position, will be judged by the Omnipotent, and held to account for his own sins, but not his fathers’.

Indeed, this concept of judging each man by his own merit is to crucial to the development of higher civilization from primitive civilization, and West from East, Christian from Heathen, that the division is as marked as that which separates barbarian from civilized.

By this conception, the ruling classes or the royalty, or any kind of leadership in civic or religious or economic matters of any kind whatsoever, cannot pretend to be superior in any way aside from rank. A beggar like Francis of Assisi can be a saint no less than Louis of France. Women like Felicity and Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, as can be martyrs or saints no less than men like Peter and Paul, Andrew, Sebastian, Stephen. So can whores like Mary Magdalene and virgins like Mary  — if anything, since Mary is honored above all saints, it is the male half of the race that is not equal in this respect.

It is to be noted that, while pagan Roman women were not allowed to vote or own property, when a college of women in the Christian world gathered, such sacred sisterhoods could own land, abbesses were elected from among the nuns, and commanded considerable power and respect in medieval society.

It is also largely overlooked that, while the slave trade made a comeback in Europe during the so-called Enlightenment, thanks largely to the corruption of Spanish law by long centuries of Mohammedan rule, and the need for cheap workforces in the New World, slavery as a legal institution was almost unknown in Christendom, in the years after the Fall of Rome.

Hence, from this originally religious and visionary revelation from the books of Moses, that man is a created being, all made in the likeness of the same father, comes this notion of individualism.

Individualism implies that the leadership of a society has superior rank, that is, the aristocrats are to be obeyed because of their proven record of military courage and prudence, and because of oaths of fealty traditionally and repeatedly given, and because of the disorders likely to arise if the aristocracy is removed too abruptly or frequently — but not due to an innate or natural or native superiority of one class or clan or caste over another.

It is to be noted that the oriental notion of Brahmins elevated by the wheel of reincarnation to superior status due to their greater moral perfection is alien to this notion and cannot coexist with it.

Constitution

There have been relatively few actual innovations or developments to the art and science of politics since the ancient world.

There is nothing more sophisticated or more insightful abut the nature of justice or judgement, for example, in the Uniform Commercial Code, not found in the Laws of Moses or the Code of Hammurabi. Changes due to changed circumstances are not improvements. An improvement, properly so called, is a logical outgrowth of the prior state of the art, which cannot exist absent that prior state, but which regularizes and makes more perfect what was previously attempted.

Indeed, in the final analysis, there may be only one: that is, the recognition that the sovereign power erected to protect the city from internal tumult and external foes, by having an exclusive claim on the use of retaliation among the people, is subject to an ineluctable temptation to use and abuse that power for his own self-interest, or the interest of his class, or his cupidity or lusts, and to pose as great a danger to the lives and liberty and property of the people as any criminal or conqueror.

Nothing we have established so far favors one form of government over another. The balance of power between royalty, aristocracy, and commons has had different arrangements in different eras, and, as a practical matter, for most of Europe for most generations of the Christian era, truly totalitarian horrors, such as were seen in the Twentieth Century, or under oriental despotisms, were largely unknown.

The United States of America took the innovations and improvements of the British common law and legal tradition, and made the next innovation of a written constitution carefully balanced with a prudential awareness of the inevitability of the corruption of men, their love of partiality and faction, and the uncertainty of their motives.

The Nineteenth Amendment was passed in AD 1919, nearly a century and a half after the independence of the nation. From that day to this, a century.

The argument that the female vote would lead to gentler and less warlike political policies is not one, I hope, anyone will be bold enough to make: the Twentieth Century is notable for two things: world wars against global tyrannies, and the slow and unchallenged loss of all human liberty in the name of various socialist or totalitarian schemes, the spread of welfare, and of softheaded impracticality, an unearthly rosy idealism, and sugary thinking that leads inevitably to a high emotive and hysterical substitution of political thinking for what can only be called bitchiness. The use of social pressure to silence opposition is a stereotypical female means of dealing with opposition, as is anonymous whispering campaigns, passive-aggressive insults, and all such unmanly, craven, and chivalrous means.

Likewise, the inculcation of fearfulness into the people, combined with the feminine desire for a strong and masculine protector, is the overwhelmingly obvious hallmark of modern politics.

Whether this is caused by the female vote or not is open to question. Certainly nothing in Eastern Europe, of the Near East, or in China like a suffragette movement existed before their takeover by socialism.

That is not the argument to make here, on either side of the question. The question, if such a dead issue is to be revisited seriously, is only this: are there innate duties that females, merely by being female, should and must shoulder?

Do these duties conflict with the civic duties of voters, that is, the duty to study the political issues of the day, to participate in civic debate, to serve in the military or posse when called upon, and to pay taxes?

If so, is the conflict of duties too great for reconciliation?

The argument then runs that the duties of virgins, wives and mothers to see to the continuation of the species, to obey their husbands, and to submit to the protection of the menfolk, is so at odds with the need for hostile and jealous protection of individual rights that the two cannot be reconciled. Women who vote must and should be politically active: and, by and large, politically active women tend to become unfit as wives and mothers due to the corruptive and violent nature of the realm of politics.

Ironically, the devotion of a woman to a cause higher than marriage, such as joining Holy Orders, would obviate the whole discussion, and lead perhaps to the conclusion that Nuns should be granted the vote, or old crones, but not nubile women.

None of these arguments propose any particular inequality or inability on the part of women. The argument is solely about the nature of duties and the possible conflict between them.

If experience showed that women as a group could not help but vote for ever more collective and intrusive policy, due to the risk-averse nature of female psychology, would be a different argument, and a judgment call, which may lend weight to the answer on the one hand or the other, but only if it is decided on the more abstract moral grounds of conflict of duty beforehand.

Note that this conflict of duty argument, if worded differently, says that women have a duty to reproduce the race, which conflicts with their political duties, therefore they should not pay taxes.

So, to soothe any ruffled feathers, let us debate proposition that women should be exempted from taxes for the same reason they are exempt from the draft: they have more important things to do.

And, to forestall any misunderstanding, I do not propose here that men have a duty to protect women and children and have no other duties, nor that this protective duty cannot be obviated or excuse by other duties more pressing, nor that a general duty to all men falls on each and every man alike; and likewise, I do not propose that the duty to promulgate the generations, create civilization, mold the character of a nation, and preserve the spirit of life is the sole duty of women, that they have no other duties. I mentioned holy orders; there are other callings to which women are called by heaven beside these two. See the parable of the talents for details.

Would any women out there be willing to leave the voting booth in the hands of their silly and unreasonable husbands, brothers, and sons, merely for immunity from taxation? This would certainly be a boon to female entrepreneurs.

That those who do not pay taxes cannot be trusted with the vote is merely prudent, as the evil effects of allowing demagogues to bribe the poor with largesse from public coffers, are easily to be seen all around us now.

My own opinion, in this as in all things, is cynical and melancholy. Considering how badly the menfolk have run the nation in the last hundred years, I myself am not sure such a bargain would be wise for anyone involved.

This also the oddest time in history to be discussing this. All women who love flag or cross, family or friends, should be rushing out this week to vote to save our Republic, and those who have never voted before should have already registered.