Identity and power

Forget any kind of quest for wisdom, justice or beauty; in the post-West, it's all about how you're demographically classified

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In a recent post that was one of my periodic updates on the state of my faith walk, I had occasion to mention the Athens and Jerusalem framework - that is, the respective contributions of philosophy and Judeo-Christian faith, namely, reason and revelation.

Much has been written about this framing. It’s a rather long read, but if one wants an introduction to the concept, I suggest a Leo Strauss essay from the June 1967 issue of Commentary.

The differences between the Jerusalem and Athens approaches to in inquiry into universal shoulds come down to the question of what wisdom is and how one acquires it. Wisdom is important, because it empowers us to think about things that impact our ability to form safe, stable and thriving society, such as justice and beauty.

The Greek philosophers were interested in arriving at universally applicable ideals. A culture far from the Greek city-states ought to be able to draw on Plato’s model of the ideal state with minimal adjustments due to customs and traditions.

Modern secularists often bristle at the characterization of the Jews as a chosen people (more on that in a bit), but I like what C.S. Lewis says about how chosen-ness translates to universal applicability:

And what did God do? First of all He left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong: and all through history there have been people trying (some of them very hard) to obey it. None of them ever quite succeeded. Secondly, He sent the human race what I call good dreams: I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men. Thirdly, He selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was -- that there was only one of Him and that He cared about right conduct. Those people were the Jews, and the Old Testament gives an account of the hammering process.

And, as we know, out of that particular people came

. . . a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world Who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.

Moreover, this man took the discussion of justice to a new level by making it clear that any instance of injustice between two people actually had him as the ultimate offended party. This is a preposterous claim unless that man was . . . well, you know.

In the post-West, we no longer give a diddly what either Athens or Jerusalem have to say about wisdom or justice. Universal applicability? How quaint. Justice has a different flavor depending on the demographic group being discussed.

I’ll give a few examples, but let’s start with the Jews. Why have they been subjected to pogroms and a Holocaust wherever the Diaspora has taken them?

Why has the new prime minister of the UK gone weasely over the previous British commitment to Israel?

. . . now Starmer is leading a shift on Israel policy, and the way in which he is choosing to do so will be a boon to global anti-Semitism. The changes are mostly symbolic, but they illustrate how destructive symbolic actions can be in the realm of foreign affairs.

The first move Starmer’s Britain made was to drop its challenge to the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction over Israeli leaders regarding the issuing of arrest warrants. The ICC is deliberating over whether to seek such warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Initially, the UK was to join Germany in filing an objection. But the Conservatives are now out of power and Labour has decided not to pursue it further.

Starmer’s explanation is risible: “I think you would note that the courts have already received a number of submissions on either side, so they are well seized of the arguments to make their independent determinations.” Really? Britain is satisfied to leave up to others the question of whether the Israeli prime minister can visit Britain without fear of arrest?

Whether or not it affects the outcome of the case, if Sir Keir has an objection to the possible arrest of the leader of an allied democracy, that is the sort of thing he should want to go on record with. Perhaps filing that objection is a mostly symbolic act, but not registering such an objection is symbolic of something else—namely, that the prime minister of Israel is a war criminal if a kangaroo court says so. At the very least, the British public might find it alarming that Sir Keir is so bored by the question of British sovereignty.

The second move has to do with weapons sales to Israel. Strategic leaks and careful public statements have made clear that, at least prior to this weekend’s Hezbollah massacre of children in northern Israel, Foreign Secretary David Lammy was preparing to suspend all licenses to export offensive weapons to Israel.

The UK does not directly provide such weapons, but approves their sales from British manufacturers. These sales make up less than one percent of Israel’s arsenal. Moreover, Lammy said, “it would not be right to have a blanket ban between our country and Israel,” so the UK share of Israel’s weapons would drop to a rounding error.

For those reasons, this is regarded as a symbolic act. It may be, but yet again, the symbolism is important.

Recently the UK made another funding decision regarding the Gaza conflict: It would restore the money it gives to UNRWA, the Hamas-coopted UN agency whose members took part in the October 7 attacks. The message appears to be: We can fund an agency that acts as an adjunct of Hamas but we should discontinue even permitting most weapons sales to Israel.

“Symbolic” is not a synonym for “harmless.” There are plenty of times when an action can be both—a suburban borough in New Jersey, where I used to live, banned fracking in 2013. I assure you there had been no hydraulic fracturing for fossil fuels under the banks of the old Raritan River. No one was harmed by this purely symbolic—if also spectacularly inane—town council vote.

But Israel is indeed harmed by Starmer’s moves. The Labour Party’s leftist base feels toward Israel as the more-progressive Democrats here in the U.S. do: suspicious, contemptuous, and occasionally outright bigoted.

And so it is not the act itself but the rationalization for it. The story being told about Israel is that it cannot be trusted with the weapons of war and that its leaders may be considered unwelcome in the United Kingdom. Starmer would never say that explicitly, of course. But he is legitimizing the lies being told by those seeking to destroy the Jewish state. Israel is the villain of this story, and now Keir Starmer is the villain of his own.

Now, from what I can tell, Starmer’s moves are more attributable to cowardice than personal bigotry, but they encourage the latter in his nation’s populace as a whole.

There’s also the discussion here in post-America about how Kamala Harris choosing Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro as a running mate might be problematic. How would a Jew on the ticket affect voting trends in Michigan, which has a noteworthy Muslim population?

With regard to a power dynamic being inherent in man-woman relations, I like what Daren Jonescu has to say in his recent piece titled “Civilization and Female Modesty”:

Recently, a Korean student recounted her impressions upon reading Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. One point of inquiry that arose in her mind, and which was the reason she wished to speak to me about her experience, was the way the characters within the novel, and seemingly the author herself, treated the various sexual intrigues and flirtations of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. Specifically, she noted that the general tone exhibited towards Scarlett’s irresponsible behavior was one of reproach and severe disapproval, whereas towards Rhett the story seemed to suggest an air of forgiveness and even admiration, in spite of his own various immoderate actions. She wondered whether this difference in judgment, not merely in the novel but in past societies in general, indicated a double standard in the moral expectations and evaluations of men and women. 

I should note that the student who asked me about this is the furthest thing from a feminist, so I knew her question was an expression of genuine perplexity and a search for help in understanding, rather than an ideological talking point. I mention this so as to explain how my lengthy reply to her questions, which I reproduce below with minor modifications, came into being. As one who takes the role of a teacher most seriously, there is one thing I know all too well about our present-day moral morass, which is that you cannot teach a feminist anything about such matters, and only a fool would try. The essential intellectual characteristic of all activists or ideologues is absolute certainty, and their essential moral attitude is self-righteous indignation towards anyone who dares to question their perfect knowledge. You cannot teach a person who denies on principle that he or she has anything to learn. The defining trait of a soul sincerely seeking knowledge is openness, and if there is one thing that never shines from the soul of an activist, it is openness. As a teacher, I am not wont to slam my head against brick walls; with open doors, on the other hand, I will happily enter and talk all day.

He then goes on to reprint his response to the student. Here’s a relevant portion:

To address this topic honestly and seriously, we need to determine whether there are actual differences between men and women that are relevant to the specific issue involved, and would therefore justify the use of two different standards in judging men and women. That is why I have spent so much time digging into the definition of “double standard,” what it implies, and how different standards are legitimately applicable in some situations, as background for replying to your very reasonable and important question about moral judgments.

One of the ways you phrased the issue during our conversation was this: It seems that women are held to a high standard of modesty, and modesty is even seen as the most important virtue for women, while it does not seem to be considered as important for men.

That is true, and I like this way of describing the problem, because I think it gives us a reasonable point of entry into the whole question of double standards regarding sexual morality. And the question, essentially, is whether men and women are different in some relevant way that makes the use of a somewhat different standard reasonable in this area. So now we get to the issue of the day: Scarlett, Rhett, and modesty.

Let’s consider the most basic differences between men and women with regard to sexuality. In fact, let’s go one step further back to the real foundation of this issue, which is the most obvious meaning and purpose of sexuality, namely its simple biological purpose, the propagation of the species. Sexual behavior, long before there was any kind of social custom or moral attitude related to it, was a natural drive of the species related to reproduction. Sexual desire at the most basic level is nature’s way of drawing mammals, including humans, to reproduce, which is necessary for the preservation of the species. We hardly need Plato’s Symposium to tell us that, but in fact Diotima’s teaching does begin there, as you know.

Now let’s bring this general animal fact into the specifically human context. In order for humans to reproduce, there must be desire, and there must be action based on that desire. Due to several recognizable factors – the relative size and strength of males and females, the nature of the material that must be delivered for reproduction to occur, the natural method of delivery, and the fact that reproduction requires the female to be occupied with one pregnancy for many months whereas the man has no such physical limitations – it seems to be an inescapable fact that species propagation prioritizes (and requires) male sexual desire, and male sexual initiative. In this process, we might even say, nature (not society, but nature itself) makes the female a necessary but largely passive factor in the reproductive process, while making the male the more obviously active factor. Indeed, in ancient thinking, including the Pythagorean table of opposites, male and female are aligned in the columns that include active and passive, respectively. This is quite understandable, from a purely biological perspective. Or rather, to be even more direct, from an anatomical perspective. Activity and passivity are built into the very physiology of the sexual act, as the male and female elements of the act itself. There is no avoiding this, and no amount of feminist denial or transgender surgery can overcome it. Males penetrate (active), females are penetrated (passive), and without this interaction the human species would not and could not exist. This is just a fact of our nature, and therefore essentially true, and therefore essentially good, if reality is good.

All this tells us, however, is that the survival and growth of the human species, in a natural context, long before there was any form of social structure or moral picture, required men to be driven by physical desire to seek opportunities for sexual behavior, and thus to be the active force in species propagation. This natural male role is further supported by the natural male tendency (due to hormones, let us say) towards aggressive behavior, which is to say initiative and the imposition of their will. Of course, we are speculating here about life prior to the development of social structures, which means before human history. As soon as humans step out of the purely primitive or animalistic way of life, however, and begin to recognize the need for, and advantages of, some sort of social structure with rules and punishments, one of the obvious problems to solve is how to soften male aggression, including sexual aggression, in order to allow people to live together in communities without constant fear, fighting, and death based on the primitive (pre-social) tendency of the strong to dominate the weak and take everything for themselves, which if unchecked would make civilized co-existence impossible.

Here, then, we have the beginning of moral rules, based on mutual agreement about the needs of peaceful coexistence. And among the moral rules to be developed were those designed to limit the aggressive male behavior aimed at propagating the species. That is, a method was needed to compel men to restrain their desires, rather than simply act on them without restraint. This is where the idea of female modesty becomes an essential instrument of social development. The civilization of men begins, we may say, when they begin to see the relative weakness of women not as an easy source of physical advantage (the law of the jungle), but as a moderating influence, a cause of emotional attachment, and a means of softening their natural aggression by converting it into male protectiveness. I mentioned earlier that no self-respecting man would accept the idea of a biological man (“transgender woman”) beating up a woman in a wrestling or boxing match. This fact is proof of the continuing existence of the softening effect of modesty that I am describing. All men know that “You never hit a woman.” That knowledge, which was universal until our absurd era, comes not from our primitive animal nature, but from our rational nature, which means from the part of us that develops through civilization. It is not a biological rule. It is a moral rule.

So female modesty, with everything it implies for the relations between men and women in societies, became, in a way, the lynchpin that made the whole machinery of civilization work, or the glue that holds people together in functional communities of mutually respectful citizens, and mutually helpful individuals and families. From the point of view of civilization, aggression and initiative (controlled but always present) are necessary parts of what men are, while modesty (which is not only a moral limit but also simultaneously a form of attraction) is a necessary part of what women are.

Of course, I am speaking of these characteristics and necessities on a species level, which is to say I am talking about what was normal and typical in the species, and was always understood to be desirable and necessary for the continuation of healthy societies. There could be exceptions, individuals who did not match those norms, without causing any harm, and these exceptions may even have been great individuals who contributed important benefits to society — but they had to remain exceptions. In general, if the majority of men and women more or less matched, and more importantly respected, the norms for male and female morality related to sexual behavior and modesty, society could be maintained in a rational order.

From a philosophical point of view, there may be limitations in being “purely male” or “purely female.” And since philosophy is always aimed at the most complete vision of the whole, it is possible, or even likely, that a philosophical man must transcend the purely aggressive, assertive elements of maleness to also become capable of a kind of reserved or “modest” attitude towards the truth – to lose his innate stridency about reality, for example. Likewise, a philosophical woman will somewhat transcend the purely modest elements of femaleness to also become more openly desirous in a certain way, more of a “clever hunter” for truth, rather than being limited to the strictly passive role of nurturer or helper.

That is to say, the survival of human civilization probably depends on the interaction of a healthy and well-defined masculinity with a healthy and well-defined femininity; but the most fully developed philosophical soul will have not only the highest (most spiritualized) development of its own sexual nature, but also a clear “minority representation” of the opposing side of human nature within itself as well.

Now, let’s talk about race. And the Very Stable Genius. He was interviewed onstage at a gathering of the National Association of Black Journalists, and he stepped in it big-time.

But first, a question. Why, in 2024, is there a need for such an association? Continuing to emphasize racial distinctions makes sense when we’re making historical inquiries, as I did in my recent post here titled “The Two Great Migrations of the Early 20th Century.”

But is not journalism supposed to be the objective reporting of facts about particular occurrences? If a reporter’s pigmentation becomes a relevant factor, is not objectivity compromised from the get-go?

In any event, there is such an organization, and the VSG brought his unique brand of clumsiness to his interview:

“I didn’t know [Kamala Harris] was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump said while addressing the group’s annual convention.

It got worse:

The Republican also repeated his false claim that immigrants in the country illegally are “taking Black jobs.” When pushed by Scott on what constituted a “Black job,” Trump responded by saying “a Black job is anybody that has a job,” drawing groans from the room.

At one point, he said, “I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.”

Pure VSG. Of course, there’s the inability to be coherent (“a Black job is anybody that has a job”) because a demigod such as himself has no time for grammatical distinctions, such as between a job and a person. But does anybody really doubt that he had in mind a connotation that menial work is where one is more likely to find black people? Then there is the savior-complex touch, with the implication that people of a certain pigmentation ought to have a particular reason to be grateful to him.

Even when he was asked about having dinner with Nick Fuentes, he instinctively went for the defensive posture, calling the reporter who pose the question “nasty.” So much for a substantive explanation why he did in fact host Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago.

Wrecking ball that he is, the VSG has handed the Harris campaign some low-hanging fruit by which it can preen and assume a posture of righteousness.

Don’t look to either the Left or Right, as they are currently configured, for any kind of vision of what a society that works for everyone looks like. Providing such is not on their agenda. Each group within those general groupings has as its aim finding “allies” with whom it can collaborate on the mission of going after demographics perceived as unworthy of inclusion and bringing them to heel and, if necessary, stomping them into the dust.