Caustic Ramblings

I noticed an interesting comment on the Ecosophia monthly Open Post a few weeks back. It touches on a topic that I think very often gets dodged or ignored in the collapse-sphere, perhaps with the exception of Jim Kunstler's blog; he certainly has the stones to bring up topics that make most modern people very uncomfortable. I too might ruffle a few feathers with what I have to say here. Anyway, I procrastinated a bit on writing up something about it, but I figured I'd do so sooner or later. Anyway here's the comment:

FWIW, I think that modern feminism has a limited shelf life for the following reasons:
(1) Much of “womens’ liberation” is an artifact of modernity, and will not survive its passing. The main reason women can use men like wallets and sperm banks, then discard them when they are through with them, is that such women are actually “married” to the State, via modern welfare systems. When modern welfare states go away, so will the above life strategy.
(2) Radical feminist women (and Wokesters in general) are not having children at replacement rates. The only people who are reproducing at or above replacement levels, are more traditional (and usually deeply religious) groups of people. Since “the future belongs to those who show up for it,” I expect that more traditional sex roles will be re-established for that reason alone, if no other.

I strongly agree with this analysis. IMO, it's much more coherent than the usual Mainstream Right's responses to feminism, which usually amounts to pegging feminism as some kind of Marxist conspiracy that cropped up in academia starting in the late 1960s and then spread like a cancer onto the whole society, devouring of the Holy American Dream one savory morsel at a time. In fact, feminism is one among many of the productive of the industrial age. By "feminism" I mean in the most general sense, gynocentric identity politics and its various ideological iterations and activistic incarnations. Since there are in fact many different "feminisms," from this point on I will speak of the general doctrine of "gender equality" rather than continuing to invoke the rather vague label "feminism."

But first, I'd like to point out MG's response to this comment above:

Martin, to my mind it’s a mistake to treat things as this kind of either/or binary. There wasn’t just one set of traditional sex roles — check out the history of women’s legal status sometime, and you’ll find (for example) that the Protestant Reformation saw a dramatic decline in women’s legal status, with women being deprived of legal rights they’d had for centuries. When the welfare state implodes, no question, things will change — but that doesn’t necessarily amount to a lurch straight back to Victorian attitudes, you know.

Now, I don't think any and all criticism of postmodern sexual mores must automatically harken back to Victorian takes on this issue, but yes, I do agree that there is no one monolithic doctrine or practice of traditional sex roles. That indeed is a valid observation to make. Though this is not the first time I've seen "Victorian" used as a Strawman-mascot for traditional sexual mores across all pre-industrial cultures. When used in this manner, I think "Victorian" serves as a quick and convenient deflection from genuine criticism of the so-called "Sexual Revolution" and its aftermath. I believe the points Martin made in his original comment certainly qualify as genuine criticism. In reality, it seems there is a whole wide world between the extremes of severe prudishness / sexual repression and "anything goes" hyper-individualistic licentiousness, and most of that generous terrain I'd say squarely falls within the realm of traditional family arrangements and sexual practices.

I'll explain further. Again, I'll agree that there is no one monolithic doctrine or practice of traditional sex roles among the world's great cultures, BUT there is most certainly a common set of patterns we can easily observe among all cultures that have developed into notable civilizations. (Greece/Rome, China, Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, the Maya, among many others) They all valued marriage and stable family structures. NONE of them extolled the "virtues" of women or men running around and sleeping with a cornucopia of different partners. Few-to-none of them even tolerated the idea of sex before marriage. None of them promoted sterile/childless lifestyles as something positive or desirable for the average person. None of them ever advanced the idea that men and women are the same or that they should all work in the same occupations. NONE of these cultures championed women spending their most fertile years spending all day working outside of the household (maybe unless they were slaves or courtesans/prostitutes). No, those traits are those of our own modern industrial western culture. Some of these are also the sexual traits of a dying civilization (see: the fall of Rome). To defend the current/modern version of those attributes "just because!" is to engage in the sort of apologetics that involves lots of usage of the special pleading fallacy, or even the slippery slope argument like idea that any scaling back of modern gender egalitarianism means backsliding into the fields of that horrific Victorian strawman.

But back to the main theme of this post. The idea that men and women should be engaged in the same occupations is one that can only find fertile ground when we have machines and energy slaves doing most of our "back-breaking" work. The social classes today which most strongly promote "gender egalitarianism" are those comprised of people who mostly work in climate-controlled offices. We could say that office jobs are androgynous; which means they privilege neither the nature of men or women. If one's work-existence is limited to the office then they might indeed start believing that men and women can easily do all the same kinds of tasks. But take away the machines and their energy slaves and this delusion suddenly collapses like house of sand! Once we find ourselves back to those grueling pre-industrial conditions, then the sexual mores of olde' will be back with a vengeance. Men will be back to doing brawny jobs and women will go back to taking care of the household and other tasks that don't require a ton of muscle or life-threatening actions each day. But in general, men AND women will be working with their hands most of their waking hours. Both will be too busy and tired to be worrying about any sort of decadent or boutique identity politics; nor will there be any social media platforms left as an arena to spend one's waking hours fighting about these soon-to-be inconsequential abstractions. And no aspect of this impending future need involve any Victorian* neuroses. Neither does the future absence of a welfare state to subsidize the collapse of the family mean a return to Victorianism. But it does means that modern gender ideologies will cease to exist as anything the state (what remains of it) can or will enforce on the general populace.

Now, one more response in that threat I found to be interesting; one that ties into some of the points I made above:

It’s interesting when a couple makes a real attempt to live sustainably ‘off the grid’ (to a greater or lesser degree) they tend to go back to what some would term traditional gender roles. As you say, once you take away the safety net, and also machine labour, it is pretty simple that men are better/capable at some things and women are better at others, and thats where things tend to fall. Either sex has authority in their domain, and the other one helps out in ways they can.

What industrial society has done is to denigrate traditional womens ‘work’ and raised mens work to be overly important, so that a woman can only be ‘successful’ if she competes with men in the traditionally masculine fields. This is more to the benefit of the industrial system than individual women (or men).

Historically, mens task were actually less important day to day than womens. Mens tasks are traditionally high impact but only occur/succeed every now and then, like hunting, building the home, or defending the family.

Womens tasks were the care, maintenance and functioning of the family and without them the whole thing collapses.

Of course, these are generalisations and not locked binaries, and everyone has elements of male/female within them to a greater or lesser degree.

It would be interesting to follow up same sex couples living this way to see if the same thing happens depending on personal preference.

It's my view that the effort to confuse men's and women's work goes back to when Corporate America started admitting women into the workplace (and away from their families!!) en masse, and how they immediately framed this as a "women's empowerment" issue. No, in fact companies did this specifically to depress wages across the board. It's the old "scab labor" trick from the Robber Baron era. Only this time around, big business caught onto the idea that they could rebrand their labor-degrading practices as "social justice" causes. Ditto with illegal aliens doing manual labor jobs and any criticism of this practice is suddenly "racism." It's amazing how much the masses have bought into these lies and how easily they are fooled by these gimmicks time and time again. Though fortunately, more and more of us having been waking up to the truth on these matters.

I'll end this with the simple acknowledgement that this issue is super-sensitive and not easy to discuss around casual company. A "psychology of previous investment" (JHK term) has set in and now tens of millions of women (and many men) defend as a sacred cow the idea that the mass of women should spend their most fertile years being a cubicle serf. Supporting one's husband is now a high (cultural) crime, whereas being a slave to a corporate boss who doesn't give two flicks about the female employee in question is somehow ok. To me this attitude reeks as a type of Stockholm Syndrome plus lots of cognitive dissonance. But maybe that's just me.

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*It is in my view, that Victorianism could be seen as a modern-age culture movement. Its "mores" are more a cartoon caricature of the traditional family and its values than an authentic expression of how traditional families manifested in the older agrarian nobility the Victorians fancied themselves as emulating. In a nutshell, Victorianism was cultural movement that came about as a modern industrial merchant-class (middle class) attempt to crudely approximate older aristocratic culture norms from previous eras. In essence, a very upright LARP. We could say this movement was something akin to the Hellenistic-era moralists like the Stoics trying to combat the decaying culture of their own era.

This is a bit of a follow-up on my last post, in addition to a very-related discussion with violetcabra I was having the other day about the Devotional Method of spirituality and its excesses that became so commonplace during the previous two millennia.

The Devotional Method of the Piscean Age (roughly, 250 BCE - 1900 CE) uses the same basic sales pitch, i.e. "chant this magic word/phrase, and/or do this prayer over and over and you'll be saved!!"

This is basically a semantic hack that has been very effective in bringing spirituality and spiritual life to the unwashed masses; people who are generally too busy/overworked/distracted, and/or lacking in intellectual horsepower to use more intense, mind-oriented, and time-consuming methods of accruing wisdom and merit. To some degree I consider this a genius innovation, but since were are mere fallible humans after all, the leaders of devotional sects often take their pet approach too far and end up crowding out other methods of spiritual practice, and in much worse cases, using violence and coercion to snuff them out of existence with untold amounts of fanatical vigor. One of the most potent ego trips is that of a religious or spiritual leader having mobs of unthinking followers on their knees and treating them as if they are a god incarnate.

We are now in Aquarius -- even if it's just the opening act of Aquarius -- and thus we are afforded the opportunity to look back on Pisces with a more objective and detached set of eyes. And perhaps we could now chalk up the single-minded insistence that simple verbal formulae can cause salvation, as being 'the Great Snake Oil' of the Piscean Age. Ultimately, I would say that this one-size-fits-all spiritual prescription is the product of the aforementioned ego trip of each prophetic figure who founds their own religious group based on the "devotion uber alles" premise, a premise that has been mirrored to at least some degree across all the major traditions of the Piscean Age, where it's in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, the more devotional sects of Hinduism (think, 'Hare Krishna!'), and in the Pure Land sects of Mahayana Buddhism.

In summary, I see the "say this magic word/phrase over and over again and you get into heaven, guaranteed!" as a comforting lie at best, and a surefire means of brainwashing the credulous and perpetually-fearful and turning them into mindless followers of an opportunistic, power-hungry religious demagogue (or conclave of them), at worst.

Having said all of that, I do believe prayers and mantra recitation can be a very helpful tool in purifying one's soul and raising one's consciousness level. It's just in the Age of Pisces, this approach has been taken to the extreme, and usually at the detriment of other approaches to spirituality. As JMG likes to say all the time, "the opposite of one bad idea is most often another bad idea." And thus, the solution now in Aquarius is not to shun or avoid devotional practices (no, I think that would be quite stupid and short-sighted), but rather to re-frame Devotion in its proper context among all the other methods of spiritual attainment (see my last post), and keep the good/helpful aspects of Devotion and jettison the neurotic excesses of it that we saw run so rampant during the past 2000 years or so. In short, we could see Devotion as an effective method of taming the worldly ego and reminding us ultra-fallible humans that we are indeed ultra-fallible beings and that there are powers/forces/beings out there much greater and wiser than us, and thus it would be in our best interest to adopt a humble and respectful attitude toward our cosmic parental figures. And by this simple logic, we shall learn to differentiate 'Healthy Veneration' from Devotional Fanaticism.

Perhaps Devotion in the Age of Aquarius will be the simple act of each individual venerating the deities on their own terms.

JMG on the distinction between these two approaches to religion:

"Very broadly speaking, there are two categories of religions, which we can call natural religions and prophetic religions. (Prophetic religions like to call this latter category "revealed religions.") A natural religion grows out of the religious experience of a people over time. A prophetic religion is invented by an individual (the prophet) who rejects the religious experience of his people and insists that people should follow his rules instead. Natural religions are pretty much always polytheist. Prophetic religions are more often monotheist, though of course there are exceptions. Clear so far?...

My take, for what it's worth, is that prophetic religions are always contaminated by the ego of the prophet, who says in effect, "My religious experience is better than your religious experience, and my god is better than your god."

Monotheism is the extreme expression of that ego trip: "There's only one god and he's mine, mine, mine!" It's one of the distinctive features of prophetic religions that they insist that a scripture written by the prophet or his disciples takes precedence over everyone else's ongoing experience of deities. Thus it doesn't matter, to believers in a prophetic religion, what the god does or doesn't say; what matters is what the prophet said about the god. (And of course "Our scripture is better than your scripture" is another dimension of the ego trip.)

The gods of monotheist religions seem to be far more tolerant than most of their worshipers. I know a lot of people, for example, who combine reverence for Christ with reverence for other gods and goddesses, and their experience is that Christ doesn't mind this at all -- however many fits his self-proclaimed spokespersons might throw over such a thing. Thus it seems likely to me that Christ, for example, is one god out of many, who had the misfortune of having some of his followers go zooming off on an ego trip of the sort just described."

One little caveat/clarification I feel the need to add to the very insightful remarks above; that the Natural Religions of great civilizations and high cultures usually ended up including a plethora of different philosophical theories and approaches, such as Panentheism, Monism, Pantheism, ect., not just "Hard Polytheism."

John Michael Greer answering a question (from this week's Magic Monday) on what exactly the Age of Aquarius is:

The sign Aquarius is ruled by Uranus, the planet of individuality, eccentricity, high weirdness, revolution, radical change, and mass death. Unity and harmony (as well as madness, mass hysteria, and totalitarianism) are correspondences of Neptune, the ruler of Pisces, the age that ended in 1879. So people who expect the age of Aquarius to bring us another round of Piscean values are barking up the wrong stump. As the age of Aquarius deepens around us, we can expect less unity and harmony (as well as less madness, mass hysteria and totalitarianism), and more people veering off in weird directions without worrying about what other people think. Oh, and lots of localized disasters, political revolutions, and other sudden changes.

Yeah, not at all what people still stick in Pisces mode imagine it to be.