I know a lot of Daily Sceptic, Spectator and Telegraph readers never go anywhere near the Guardian. I, however, read it: one has to know what the enemy is up to. Today there is a characteristically celebratory piece about the Garrick vote to admit women as members. It is by one Jemima Olchawski. Instead of just enjoying the result she tries to make an argument, and it is a terrible one. Let us consider her terrible argument. It concerns the difference between men-only clubs and women-only clubs: because she wants to defend the latter, while not defending the former. The important bit is italicised:
Men gathering in influential places to the exclusion of women is profoundly status quo. They’ve been doing it for hundreds of years. When senior politicians and policymakers take lunch together at the Garrick, they are reinforcing power structures that have existed for centuries. There are plenty of women-only spaces that will continue to exclude men, but they do so to resist power, not to hoard it.
This is complete rubbish. Her logic seems to be:
- Men have power.
- There are men-only clubs.
- Therefore, men-only clubs exist to hoard power.
And:
- Women don’t have power.
- They are women-only clubs.
- Therefore, women-only clubs exist to resist power.
What an astonishing assumption. Men have power, do they? What? A priori? And women do not have power, do they? Again, a priori?
The idea that men, by definition, have power, and women, by definition, do not, is, in the modern world, complete rubbish. It is an a priori argument: that is, an argument which ignores all experience and observation. Open your eyes, Ms. Olchawski: (the a posteriori looks large from this angle).
Let us turn the tables on Ms. Olchawski.
What if in modern conditions we now need men-only institutions in order to resist female power? What if — and I hope you are ready for this thought — the so-called ‘patriarchy’ only ever existed because men feared what would happen if they gave women power and allowed women to transform power structures? In other words, is it possible that patriarchal institutions were designed to prevent female morality from becoming determinative of political morality because this would, everyone supposed, be very bad for men and women alike?
I offer this as a hypothetical argument. I dislike being as sure of myself as Ms. Olchawski is.
Consider your own institutions. Are they not now, at a middle-ranking level, dominated by women? Have not the codes of these institutions been fundamentally altered since at least the 1960s? Is it not the case that any men who have come to dominate those institutions have done so because they can effectively negotiate female morality and, even more important, have the patience to deal with the stamina-requiring logistics required by female social codes? Men, historically, have wanted to do everything with a few signatures (or a few strokes of a scimitar) and then have lunch. Women are more tenacious: and their tenacity means that they are making our institutions boring and bureaucratic (and safe) and also a bit morally intrusive and domineering: and this, in turn, means that most men with any spirit prefer to wander off and do something else rather than try to prosper within such a system. We live in a society which now mostly rewards (female) tenacity. Consider the Church of England, the BBC, the universities, the Civil Service. This is why young men look around and see little reason to study or compete in examinations. Young men cannot find women charming enough to marry: the women are combative and unpleasant. Young women cannot find men high in status enough to marry: plus they are too combative and unpleasant to be attractive to the few men high in status enough to consider them. As usual, the hope is the proletariat: or, perhaps, the East.
Nietzsche predicted in the 19th century that women would become boring.
Here is a hypothesis.
In the last few centuries we have taken a great gamble. We have begun a grand experiment. This experiment is not the ‘emancipation’ of women: patronising phrase. Women were emancipated enough, thank you very much. The experiment was to let women restructure our great institutions. The risk was that female codes would not only emasculate and demoralise and marginalise men but also denaturalise and demoralise and stress women: and, in addition, that our institutions would be fundamentally changed because power hoarding would be carried out according to female social codes — caring, sympathy, inclusion, gossip, bitchery, reputation-destruction — while the slightly cooler and more humorous male social codes — sink or swim, competition, fisticuffs, bastardy, magnanimity, toleration of eccentricity — would be eased out. I could be wrong. I have no idea. But the way the world is going makes one wonder.
Note how Ms. Olchawski at no point says, “I could be wrong.”
This is why we need the Daily Sceptic. We all could be wrong. It seems to me to be the first principle of scepticism that we could be wrong: and our age is badly in need of this sort of willingness to consider a counter-argument.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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