patriarchy

The left has been hijacked by unwitting servants of the neo-liberal agenda.

I was talking to a friend the other day explaining how I always considered myself left wing, but now apparently I wasn’t. I explained why and she declared that the left has been hijacked.

And it struck me: she is right, it totally has. Remember when the left was about worker’s rights? It was about preventing the rich giving themselves privileges whilst denying ordinary people both rights and access to resources. It was, in large part, about protecting people and the environment from the rapacious appetites of the elite rich. In short, the left was about ensuring that everyone had a level of human dignity and the ability to raise a healthy, happy and educated family.

So what is the left now? – I tell you it is no longer about these things. I know this because I am being told that am I no longer left wing, but alt right wing. I tell you why I find this strange, for many years I have written, spoken publicly and protested against: TPP trade agreements; GMO’s; Fracking; homelessness; and the destruction of the environment. I am, and have been involved in environmental groups for over a decade. I have been a union branch committee member for nearly 10 years, I have gone on strike while colleagues kept working. I have gone on union marches. But I am informed, by other supposedly left wing people, that I am now right wing. Even though I continue to do all these things. It gets worse, not only am I being told I am right wing, but I have also recently been categorised with Incels. Why? To be honest, I don’t fully understand the logic, but it seems it has lot to do with not agreeing that there is a “Patriarchy”, and accepting the whole gamit of complaints and grievances based around this concept.

It seems now that you are not left wing if you fight for worker’s rights, you must largely forget that and fight now for trans-rights, for same-sex marriage rights, you must denounce the Patriarchy and acknowledge it as the source of all humanity's problems. This is NOT what the left wing used to be about.

Thus the left wing has been highjacked. And I argue that it has been highjacked by – perhaps unwitting – servants of everything the left wing used to stand against. The left has been highjacked by agents of the neo-liberal system.

We do not see in our papers headlines decrying the excesses of the rich, we do see headlines about global warming – but only because it can no longer be ignored. But where is people’s energy going? It is going into false battles about same-sex marriage, about supposed Patriarchy – which sets women against men - causing much damage and pain. Meanwhile – hidden behind this smoke screen - the rich get richer, the earth dies, common people bicker and argue about Patriarchy and marriage rights while everything burns around us. And all the while the press declares this as progress, and trumpets changes in laws about marriage, and discriminating for women (and against men) as signs of progress. The world is being destroyed, families are being destroyed, debt is growing, congestion is growing, the environment is being destroyed, and men are being pushed out of work, becoming more and more sidelined in society. Families are falling apart and people becoming more frustrated, more angry and more violent. Yet amongst all this discord it is declared that there are signs of social progress. What a bloody mess! And who can we turn to now? The union movement has almost been crushed by neo-liberal forces, or sold out to growth, and it too has been directing resources into the new ‘left’ agenda.

Where do we turn? It seems the neo-liberals have finally won at last. I guess we will all go down fighting and bickering about the various ways men have oppressed women though-out history, and still do today, as the rich appropriate the remaining resources on the planet then party as they watch it, and all us, die.

I have found that I and people I know are increasingly working longer and longer hours. And this with ever increasing demands on the job, as the demands for perfection increase, and the support to achieve it decreases. Especially the large organisations in which we are working appear as despotic, in that one has no say over what happens or what might happen, but instead is faced with a stream of orders and new demands being delivered constantly, yet randomly, through the impersonal medium of email. There is no discussing with this new invisible master - often the sender is not even a person with whom you can engage in conversation, but some impersonal departmental (i.e do-not-reply) email address. Then one finds that travel to anywhere is time consuming, and extremely stressful, as conditions are crowded and arrival on time is far less than certain - whether it be by train or car. With people arriving home late, exhausted we must prepare meals, often reply to a few still-unanswered work emails. All of which leaves us little spare time - and in such a state of mental exhaustion that we could not enjoy it anyway. Necessarily our weekends are often consumed with the other chores of life, maintaining houses, shopping, and preparing food and clothing for the next hectic week. This sad condition of modern people led me to reflect as to how we got into this state, and what has changed to make modern life so difficult. I wondered how we used to cope, and I recall as a child how the weekends were quiet, the shops were closed after midday Saturday, and there was hardly any traffic. Now, the busiest traffic times are on weekends, as is the busiest trading. And a major reason, I think is the fact that now both partners work, there is no-one with time to do shopping in the day, prepare meals for 6.00 pm (we often eat much later, even if we feed the children earlier, either my wife or I may find it is 9.00 pm before we have time for dinner). So why is modern life so crazy?

Chesterton, it appears, is someone who also reflected on and addressed many of our modern problems - that fact that he did this 100 years ago seems to make little difference to the relevance of what he had to say in his book What is Wrong with the World. Not suprisingly the issue of gender roles is one he addresses at length. But what is surprising, and in a sense enlightening, is that he argues that the traditional roles of men and women were not established to trap women, but rather to free them from the madness of industrial society. According to Chesterton, the gender arrangements in early industralism insulated women from the commercial pressures of having to be competitive at work - which Chesterton argues makes one a 'monomaniac'; necessarily too-focussed on work and its demands for specialisation to become a complete person. The traditional arrangements, Chesterton argues, were to keep some part of humanity free from these inhuman demands. To allow at least one half of humanity to be whole people, to allow them to develop as complete, to become good at many useful things rather than an expert at mostly one thing. To allow them to focus on and contemplate the broader issues and tasks that are so necessary to a sane and on-going human existence. This half of humanity, to be spared from the inhumanity of industrialism was, women. He explains this division was made because the natural role of women in relation to birth and child-rearing, but they need not be child-rearers to benefit from these freedoms. I guess with the freedom also came the ability to pursue study and careers if they wished - certainly many women did - C.S Lewis's mother was a Mathematics university graduate in the 1800's and Dr Maria Montessori a science graduate not long after that, and I am sure there were many others. Clearly they could also have careers if they chose; Florence Nightingale is an example here. Maybe this education and these roles were harder to get, but when you consider that they were up against people - mostly men - whose livelihood depended on them succeeding and devoting their all in the narrow specialisations demanded for most jobs, then it is perhaps no surprise that such positions were hotly contested and no more so by those who had the most to lose or gain from them i.e men who desperately needed a way to earn a living.

So then we come to the criticism of this 'patriarchal system' we are presented with the image of the despotic man, who because he is the breadwinner (and perhaps also because he himself is fully aware of his suffering from the absence of any real freedom, having to subject himself to the demands of an employer for the working week) demands that he has more rights and privileges in the household. Now there are at least two ways to see this: one as though the system is wrong and two, as though the man is wrong. The modern argument seems to commonly be that the system is wrong - that we should grant women equal power and opportunity. But this comes with two great risks. The first is that women lose their protection from the commercial world and are now subjected to the same evil forces of competition that men are. Secondly, there is an assumption that some, perhaps many, will not succumb to the same demand of special rights and privileges as men were accused of doing: becoming equal despots with the worst of men. Such a situation is rife for conflict with each party demanding special privileges and rights (i.e rights to disregard the rights of others) as a result of their sacrifices and as due their power and authority. And this is leaving aside all the problems that arise when humanity loses its generalist and all the benefits that came with this - more on this later perhaps.

The other view is that there is nothing wrong with the general family system, but rather there is something wrong with some individual men. Good men, endowed with such authority and whatever power comes from being the breadwinner, should endure the associated suffering with tolerance and kindness and not seek to be overbearing but rather be generous and as kindly as possible under the circumstances. Development of such magnanimity requires a good raising of boys to understand their roles, responsibilities and passing on the ideal of a 'good man' as having these attributes.

Unfortunately, with women and men now desperately caught in the worldly competitive fray that sucks nearly all their energy, thought and time, it is unlikely that many men, or women, will be taught and developed in such a way. So it seems we all degenerate into dog-eat-dog competitiveness and bickering over who has what rights and privileges. The situation is complicated by the fact that despite modern developments in the workplace, the old role expectations are still in place. Even though you may say that men can help with the housework, and perhaps even be stay-at-home dads, men still feel the expectation that if it comes to the crunch, they are the ones who must provide an income, so they carry the stress and burden of having to be on top of their game, as well as doing new chores that traditionally men did not. Even if ostensibly a man is a stay-at-home-dad if anything happens to their wife's position they must return to work, and that with the added difficulty of having been out of the workplace for a period. On the women's side, they appear to still feel the traditional obligation to maintain certain standards around the household, on top of their new duties. So on both sides there persist these stresses that are likely to lead to senses of injustice and the potential break out of arguments.

On top of this are all the additional modern stressors I mentioned above. Traditionally men had to give their all to their jobs for 8 - 10 hours a day maybe 5 and a half days a week. But at least back then the work stopped after hours. And married men didn't need to also shop for food, cook their own meals, clean the house, etc (just as many married women did not need to work in commercial ventures). Now the demands of work are increasingly, all day everyday, with many people working 60 hours or more, and that is not counting time spent answering emails after hours or contemplating work problems during the night or on weekends. Add to this the enormous amounts of time many spend travelling - another modern phenomena - and a significant stress for men and women.

I am sorry but I do not have any solutions to these problems, I can merely state the situation as it appears to me. But I can summarise this situation as being a kind of dilemma whereby we need to find a way to retain in people that magnanimity that I mentioned above - that the sense of sacrifice men probably mostly felt by being locked into mindless or demanding jobs, from which there was, and perhaps for many still is, no realistic escape - that this should be seen as a sacrifice of love and an opportunity for generosity of spirit. And it seems, given the modern situation of women, that many women perhaps also could take this view of the demands that they see as placed on them. Perhaps women have traditionally done this on the whole, but if so the need now for such an attitude is as a great as ever.

If you are interested in a summary of Chesterton's writings, there is one in The Guardian

Feminists may say that the prevailing attitude of men has always been that women’s place is in the home. Well the truth is that until the industrial revolution, everyone’s place was in the home. Home was where families worked – together. Men did not go off to work in offices and factories until there were factories and offices to go to. For most of western history they worked on the farm or in the shop with their wives and children. It was only the industrial revolution that rendered families and communities asunder, culminating in the stereo-typical 1950’s housewife – at home, isolated and alone – in a way, and on a scale, never seen before in human history. This article asserts that neo-liberal values may rule more men but that they are not natural male values and that Christianity, for instance, although dominated by male figures, endorsed values opposite to liberalism. Comments welcome. Editor, Candobetter.net.

What if the values often associated with ‘patriarchal systems’ are not really male values at all? I hypothesise that understanding the negative aspects of our society - associated by some people with patriarchy - may require looking at the problem from quite a different angle. Firstly, let us identify what traits are associated with patriarchy. For this I have drawn upon 'The Heroine's Journey' by Maureen Murdoch. In examining this text I have noticed that the attributes Murdoch associates with patriarchal society are strikingly similar to what many may associate with 'materialism'. The sorts of terms in Murdoch's book associated with patriarchal values include: 'compete', 'jockey for power', 'workaholic', 'control by the stronger', 'power', 'quantifiable', 'success' (in a career sense). Now I doubt that this is a definitive list, but I believe it captures many of the elements of so-called patriarchy as raised in feminist and other literature. I argue that these are not innately male traits at all, but rather, if anything, a more generic human tendency. However, I suspect that like materialism these values were in the past kept in check – although very imperfectly – by various alternative value systems.

Formal religions often offered such alternative value systems. Christianity, for example, promoted a value set which included: humility rather than pride; service to others rather than selfishness; and generosity to the poor and disadvantaged. Such a value set required the strong to defend the weak (rather than seeking to exploit them) and even though the churches themselves may have acted with the worst Machiavellian tendencies, they did at least espouse these Christian values and as such kept them alive as respectable to aspire to. Buddhism is another example of religion offering alternative values against, for example, feudal values.
In fact, these ancient religions also had a name for the types of behaviours described as ‘patriarchal’ in Murdoch’s book (by the way, this is no criticism of Murdoch’s book, I am just drawing on it as a basis for this analysis). The Christian religion identified many of these behaviours (and some others as well) as: egotism, selfishness, ruthlessness, worldly success and prominence and, perhaps uniquely, it warned against the lust for power (as well as sensual lusts). These behaviours were collectively called ‘worldliness’ and everyone – male and female – was warned against them.

In fact, perhaps an emerging word that encompasses many, but not all, of the behaviours of Christian worldliness is 'neo-liberalism'. George Monbiot in his article 'The Zombie Doctrine' describes the neo-liberal ideology as follows:

'Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations'

'a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency'

'What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

Others use similar terms for the ‘nameless’ forces at work, Halffman and Radder in a 2015 Minerva article refer to processes of neo-liberalism in universities as ‘The Wolf’.

Jesus once said, ‘by their fruits will you know them’. Jesus’ words suggest we should not take priests based on their own descriptions of themselves, or their teachings, but rather judge them by their actions and outcomes. The modern priests are the economists and ‘big business’ advocates (i.e the system’s sycophants). Regardless of their promises and claims, we should, as Monbiot does, judge them by their deeds and outcomes, which are loneliness, misery, ill-health and environmental destruction. By its fruits it seems we can clearly identify the true nature of neo-liberalism.

But do you really think that all men fit the classic paternalistic mould? Are there are no men out there who are unselfish? No men who seek the same intrinsic rewards that are now typically associated with women and women’s work? Are there no men who do not aspire to be leaders of companies, famous, powerful and/or wealthy? Because if there are no such men, then who are those men who drive our buses, teach our children, work our ambulances, put out our fires (at risk of their lives)? Surely these vast numbers of everyday men outnumber the relatively few CEO’s and Silicon Valley sociopaths? Just because there are more men than women in our power structures does not mean that these mostly negative and destructive traits are intrinsically male.

So how did the traits of seeking worldly success, power, status and money come to be associated with men and ‘male rule’ in the form of paternalism? I think that it is just that due to history and circumstance large numbers of men were amongst its first victims. But in our modern age it seems that increasingly more women are being drawn into its web. Feminists may retort that the prevailing attitude of men has always been that women’s place is in the home. Well the truth is that until the industrial revolution, everyone’s place was in the home. Home was where families worked – together. Men did not go off to work in offices and factories until there were factories and offices to go to. For most of western history they worked on the farm or in the shop with their wives and children. It was only the industrial revolution that rendered families and communities asunder, culminating in the stereo-typical 1950’s housewife – at home, isolated and alone – in a way, and on a scale, never seen before in human history. And what about Indigenous cultures where home was nature – could anyone say Indigenous women were any more confined than men? What about the objectification of women? Abhorrent I agree, and perhaps always present in the world, thus the Christian warnings about these issues. But not on the scale of what we see today. But this is the nature of the spirit of worldliness; neo-liberalism; The Wolf – whatever you want to call it – everything on the earth is to be exploited: people, nature, planet. It is all for sale. Every vice or weakness is to be exploited to its maximum potential. Until the whole of humanity is debased in an orgy of consumerism, of seeking sensual satisfaction where-ever it can be found, and other humans are only valued as far as they are able to be used to produce these satisfactions. That is where neo-liberalism is taking us. And in the process one of its effects is to make us desperately unhappy. Another is to create conflict where-ever conflict is possible: between young and old, between male and female, between the powerful and the powerless. It will keep us blaming one group or another, while it as the true cause remains hidden and un-named. That is the nature of this particular beast, and as Monbiot points out, like a zombie it lives through us.