“If you use their words, you will end up thinking their thoughts”
February 25, 2014 § 47 Comments
1992:
A couple of possibilities:
1. Suppose there really are innate differences between men and women, so that most men are now and always will be better suited for the traditional male role and most women for the traditional female role. Now suppose a society abolished the traditional female role and provided that the functions formerly performed by wives and mothers would be carried out by functionally rational hierarchical organizations of the sort men tend to act through. (For example, childcare would be provided by daycare centers rather than by Mom, who would be a fulltime paid worker like everyone else.) Then it would make sense to say that the society is unfair to women because of their sex, because the roles established by the society don’t give most women the opportunity to make use of their special capacities. (Compare Plato’s _Republic_, in which male and female Guardians had the same role — war, government and philosophy — but the men were usually better at it; contrast the matrilineal societies Loren Petrich recently mentioned, in which women are more prominent than in most societies because there is very little need for the activities belonging to the public sphere.)
2. Suppose most men and most women would be happiest in a society that had appropriately-defined sex roles, but some would not. Then a society with no sex roles would be unfair to the majority with respect to sex roles, because it would sacrifice the interests of the majority in favor of that of a minority.
1994:
Feminism is simply another strand of the subjectivism which characterises all modern philosophies and which was so roundly condemned in the Encyclical Humani Generis by Pope Pius XII in August 1950. It is of the character of all modern philosophy to deny that we can know natures and to assert that there are only collections of individuals which are similar. The only unity it will allow is a nominal one [nominalism]. In its efforts to force the populace to accept its so called “inclusive” language, feminism seeks to demonstrate that there is no such thing as the nature of man: there are only men; there are only women.
…
In the same way is feminism a false philosophy and its terminology a false terminology. And it is important that we should make a point of declining to use this false terminology because of the false presuppositions contained in it. The aphorism that Cardinal Mindszenty used against the Communists is appropriate here: “If you use their words, you will end up thinking their thoughts.” Therefore the correct answer to make to those who accuse us of being “sexist” or “paternalistic” or of “practising sex discrimination” is to say to them that their expressions are meaningless to anyone except those who accept their theories and that they contain no valid criticisms.
Zippy Catholic 
The first link is interesting, but I felt like I was sorting through a pile of scrap parts to find the pieces I need to examine to see if they’re in working condition.
The second link was fantastic.
Thanks for sharing each of them
Chad:
That’s a pretty good description of what Usenet was like in general, hah!
Did you remove the “Like” button ZIppy? Pity, because this post deserves it. Both good links, with the second especially noteworthy.
Or we could make up our own names for the same things, since names don’t matter …
*like*
Yes, this is *like-worthy*. How many I wonder, will follow the thought through to it’s logical confusion? To speak in fluent Protestantism on your staunchly Catholic blog:
I felt convicted.
LOL. I meant logical “conclusion”.
[That’s a pretty funny felix typo. –Z]
I had two things in mind when I posted these, though other thoughts are appropriate too:
1) The complaint that nobody, nobody, nobody on the Internet ever taught young men about the lies of feminism before Internet PUA came along is just flat out false. Jim Kalb’s stuff has been on the Internet since most of the gripers were in diapers: since the days of Usenet before web servers and web browsers even existed, as the first citation shows.
The reason all these young Christian men are enraptured by Roissy isn’t because nobody else has been around to teach them. The reason they are mesmerized by Roissy is because he promises them that they can get laid in the modern ocean of narcissistic sluts. They are attracted to Roissy not because he knows anything that traditionalist conservatives don’t, but because he provides them with a form of hopeful pornography.
They need to own their own shit, as I sometimes say. There is no excuse for “Christian” PUA fascination: None. At. All. And not a one among them will graduate to Christian manhood until they own this.
2) The second piece from 1994 makes the point I’ve been making about language eloquently. If you want a virtuous opposition to feminism you aren’t going to adopt the language of disgusting perverts. “If you use their words, you will end up thinking their thoughts” is a better way to put it for the masses than “lex orandi, lex credendi”, which as a Catholic has been one of my go-to ways of communicating the problem to fellow Catholic trads for a long time.
“The reason all these young Christian men are enraptured by Roissy isn’t because nobody else has been around to teach them. The reason they are mesmerized by Roissy is because he promises them that they can get laid in the modern ocean of narcissistic sluts. They are attracted to Roissy not because he knows anything that traditionalist conservatives don’t, but because he provides them with a form of hopeful pornography.”
No, I imagine they’re attracted to Roissy because he has the balls to take on the folks who purged the Jim Kalbs and others like him from our churches and other leading institutions.
Those who sat, and sit, idly and cowardly by, let alone those determined to train their guns anywhere put on the purgers themselves are understandably less attractive.
“If you want a virtuous opposition to feminism you aren’t going to adopt the language of disgusting perverts.”
I want someone with the balls to take on the lies. If your church can’t get it up, I’ll found someone else. Maybe after the lies are taken down, your nice, gentle, effeminate church will have some fresh air to to do its lovely work.
“If you want a virtuous opposition to feminism you aren’t going to adopt the language of disgusting perverts.”
Agree whole-heartedly. It is your church that has adopted such (feminist and gay pride) language. So much so that it falls to a pervert to take the very biblical and traditional doctrine and use it to advantage against the church itself!
He teaches headship. Men try headship, it works, the authority of the church afraid to preach it is thereby undermined.
Do you deny it?
Desiderius:
Then a middle-aged bureaucrat pervert sitting poolside, leering at the teenage girls while bravely blogging away on his laptop, is your Charles Martel. Obviously.
The very language you use is revealing.
A man with balls can be inspired to take up courage; or alternatively to fight against others with balls seeking to do harm.
A eunuch is useless on both counts.
“Then a middle-aged bureaucrat pervert sitting poolside, leering at the teenage girls while bravely blogging away on his laptop, is your Charles Martel. Obviously.”
Yep, almost as pathetic as the current president. Yet in both cases they somehow beat the traditional alternatives.
That tradition can only put off a good look in the mirror for so long…
Zippy,
Well put.
The claim that ‘no one else is teaching masculinity’ is to salve their conscience.
The claim ‘the entire church and all pastors are feminist’ is to avoid legitimate authority
The claim ‘no one else is opposing feminism’ is to falsely claim moral authority.
Watch how they respond to actual objections and arguments- deferring to the ‘authority’ of PUAs; making blanket claims that no church at all anywhere is opposed to feminism or the culture; and personal attacks, typical narcissism.
Desiderius,
You wrote,
“[Roissy] teaches headship. ”
This is at best a grievous error on your part. It is probably simply a lie.
Roissy teaches explicitly to avoid marriage.
Roissy teaches explicitly that having children is ‘to be avoided
Roissy teaches explicitly that being responsible for a woman’s well-being is to be avoided.
Roissy teaches explicitly to actively commit fornication.
Not marrying, refusing to have children, not having responsibilities, and being a fornicator = the opposite of headship
AD:
The other thing that has always been odd about these encounters is that Game-porn supporters frequently launch verbal attacks on the very liberals (right and left, inside the Church and outside) I’ve been criticizing for decades, and then sit back smugly as if they’ve successfully launched an attack on my views.
Not to mention an obsession with balls. I am amazed all you anti-gamers can stand such formidable intellectual TRUTH(!!!) that is conveyed by taunting about balls. It’s a wonder you are all still standing.
Maybe it is a pornographic interest. Because its founding principles are a strong sexual dimorphism and a power differential that favors men, AND it is detached from morality. But I can’t really envision those principles in a moral context. Yeah, maybe that’s what “marriage” is meant to be. But that isn’t what “marriage” is as far as I’ve seen. So how does one meet those principles without “game” or “masculine wiles” or “applied charisma” as Roissy called it recently? Just work hard, develop a career, be religious, earn the respect of established men? Nope. That doesn’t obtain today, even in religious contexts.
“The claim that ‘no one else is teaching masculinity’ is to salve their conscience.”
What weighs on my conscience is the possibility that I am ungraciously attempting to bully good men out of an internecine war they were bullied into by the very modernism we all aim to combat. As you perceptively noted, bullying is not my natural idiom.
The claim is a simple truth claim, and is unrelated to that concern.
The local Jesuit University is undergoing an unprecedented building boom funded by debt taken on by thousands of young people, mostly women, and supplemented by further debt posterity is being forced to take on. Simple taxation without representation.
The teaching on masculinity you advocate is functionally anathema in any of the buildings so funded, despite the Jesuit name upon them. These are the facts.
Keep whistling past that graveyard.
“The other thing that has always been odd about these encounters is that Game-porn supporters frequently launch verbal attacks on the very liberals (right and left, inside the Church and outside) I’ve been criticizing for decades, and then sit back smugly as if they’ve successfully launched an attack on my views.”
And what has that critique (that i wholeheartedly endorse) availed you? Why do you imagine it has fallen on so many deaf ears? Never reached those ears in the first place? On these matters, none of us have anything to be smug about, nor would smugness reflect well upon us if we did.
A different question, none rhetorical: If the Arabs take it upon themselves to take advantage of Turkish advances into Christendom to foment civil war within Islam, should I not be skeptical of those who advise Christendom opening up a new front in Arabia?
Desiderius:
That’s obvious: because it isn’t sold to nerds as a system for getting sexual attention from sluts.
Patrick,
You wrote,
“Just work hard, develop a career, be religious, earn the respect of established men?”
‘Just’?
Why do we develop our character?
For its own sake
Why do we love God?
Because we should.
Why do act honorably?
For its own sake.
If you work on the 7 virtues you do so because it makes you a better man. Hell, without the virtues you are still a child, anyway.
Or do you really believe that being courageous, just, temperate, prudent, faithful, hopeful, and charitable is only valuable if it gets you laid a lot? Do you honestly believe that those traits *can’t* and *won’t* be attractive to a woman of value? That those traits aren’t valuable to men and women alike for their own sake?
Sounds like you wouldn’t recognize a diamond if you found it. And perhaps you are hanging out with the wrong sorts of women.
Patrick,
I wrote,
“Sounds like you wouldn’t recognize a diamond if you found it.”
This was uncharitable. I apologize and hope you will believe that I do not actually think this.
Nah, that one didn’t cut very deep at all. I do wonder though why marriage isn’t sold to nerds, i.e. average joes, as a way to get sex and prestige. It’s the most obvious selling point, and it’s the way marriage took hold at the beginning of civilization–exclusive sexual access to a woman and authority over a family (her and whatever legitimate children he sires with her). Except those are both almost incidental to marriage as an observed social reality today.
As a kid I always wanted to marry, but I’ve been on the fence about it for some time now. Even in good marriages the men at best seem to basically just break even. One long time married man told me to have a successful marriage you have to work four times harder than you do to have a successful career, and this guy only had two kids. The legal situation is a husband has no objective authority. It’s up to her to decide the degree of her submissiveness. And in a marriage men don’t get sex whenever they want it and they struggle with the same temptations bachelors struggle with. My life isn’t all that enjoyable as a bachelor, but that’s largely because I decided to put work into building a career in case I decided to marry so I’m making sacrifices for that that I wouldn’t need to make otherwise. I could spend more time in the woods and my life would improve.
I’m curious what the pope’s synod on the family in October will produce. From the chatter about it so far it looks like it’s going to add an ecclesial layer of legitimacy to divorce and remarriage for the 80 percent of divorces filed by women.
I don’t know. I need to think about it all some more.
Patrick,
I know some of my responses have been a bit flip, but I do recognize the difficult landscape and choices you and other young men have in your present and future, and my prayers are with you as you do that.
By use of the word “meme” I concede there are such things as memes.
“Lex orandi, lex credendi” is merely empirical, and in fact is an operational definition of determining someone’s beliefs. You wouldn’t want to discern doctrine from gossip in the pews, for example.
Patrick:
I don’t think that Christian vocations (of which marriage is the most common) can be sold on the basis of “what you get out of it”. If someone chooses to be a priest on the basis of steady pay and a secure retirement he is probably going to be personally disappointed and a bad priest. Husband is not really different as vocations go, and never has been as far as I can tell. It isn’t that men get nothing out of the vocation of husband and father; they certainly do, though there is a lot of variance. It is that anyone who enters into a Christian vocation on the basis of what he expects to get out of it is probably making a terrible mistake.
PEG had an good reflection on that the other day: http://pegobry.tumblr.com/post/77793273540/of-the-nature-of-vocation-and-its-current-modern
I think we have in some senses promised that marriage is the gateway to happiness in this world, leading to all sorts of evils, including frivorces over being unhaapppy.
Right now, chastity is being sold to young people as a gift to one’s future spouse. Which is a beautiful concept, but I cringe a bit as the thought occurs that what if it turns out your future spouse wasn’t worthy of such a gift? They don’t say that if you’re chaste as a young person you will have a happy marriage later, but it is sort of implied…
A specific vocation in the theological sense is ‘an invitation from God to serve him in a special state in life’ and is really limited to Holy Orders and Holy Matrimony (both associated with sacraments). Happiness is not a requirement for marriage *nor a goal* [we don’t get married because we are happy nor is happiness a reason to get married] happiness is the ‘side-effect’ of a sacramental marriage lived out – if you aren’t happy in marriage that means that you are succumbing to sin and strife, which are not to be compounded with more sin (divorce).
[This is not about things that are serious enough to cause a separation, like physical abuse or abandonment]
While this attitude towards marriage is still taught by the Church and held in many areas the Modernist West rejects it for a hedonistic model where the only goal in life is atomized happiness
Similarly the modernized West has conflated infatuation (an emotion arising from specific attraction) and lust (intense physical desire also arising from specific attraction, as well as other things) with love (an act of the will) so that we hear the nonsensical ‘I fell out of love with my spouse’ – what is really meant is ‘I have decided to not love my spouse any more’.
Fuzziness on terms! The two great banes of the Americanized Church are fuzzy definitions and a rejection of legitimate authority
Brilliant title. Can I ask, is it a quotation from somewhere? I can’t find it attributed online.
Bilbao:
It is a quote lifted from the second linked essay in the OP.
(It is attributed to Cardinal Mindszenty).
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Aquinas Dad wrote (so long ago now): “Do you honestly believe that those traits *can’t* and *won’t* be attractive to a woman of value? That those traits aren’t valuable to men and women alike for their own sake?”
As I understand it, many who write about marriage and sex today might agree with the insinuation of the second question–the virtues are valuable, and desirable. As regards the first question, they would answer that sexual attraction is not about even very desirable virtues, or, at best, the virtues add to a deeper level of sexual attraction in the selection of a good mate.
Sexual attraction in or out of marriage depends, they would argue, on the sorts of traits that Donal Graeme speaks of (PSALM or LAMPS). So, for example, the attempt to address a sexless marriage is going to involve some manner of personal transformation to bring attraction back into play. This presupposes that sexual connection is desirable in a marriage, a good thing for the spouses and the bond they share.
To the extent that the controversy is over the pedagogical value of Game, I’d say (again) that Game’s pedagogical value and disvalue is equivalent to the pedagogical value/disvalue of slutty behavior.
Thank you, Zippy. Actually my comment was on the nature of attraction and whether those fine virtues that AD mentioned actually cause it. I don’t believe that they do. I guess the behavior in question would not be “slutty” but *attractive*. Further, I suppose, there would be the question about the “responsive desire” in a woman that sexologists speak of. Men would need to become competent in sexual initiation, and that is probably a learned skill.
Johannes:
In my view all this talk about what gives people the tingles is a symptom of hypersexualized modernity. Traditionally the answer to what a woman could do to turn on a man sexually was “show up and be willing”. Traditionally the answer to the question of what a man could do to turn on a woman sexually was “who cares?”
I think everyone would be happier if we went back to that standard.
AD’s position has merit, but only when understood in light of other aspects of masculinity. A nerdling of strong character and work ethic and similar virtues is never going to attract women like badboy rockbanddrummer or Harley McBadboy because of a paucity of raw masculine virtues in other areas, and unfortunately those are the ones most likely to cause the raw sexual attraction for him.
The ideal man, for most women, would be a man of strong character, who has a bit of a dangerous side to him, is in control of himself and would never even think of submitting to women outside of women who are in a formal hierarchy like a business management chain over him. But he’d also be physically fit, good dresser, have prospects, etc. The closer men get to that ideal, the better off they’ll be.
Most churches, even most tradcons, defang masculinity in many ways, and the main pedagogical value in game for Christians is in observing useful things that the church’s culture rejects (not out of alignment with transcendental morality, but out of compromise with current social mores). The cult of the “nice guy” Christian beta boy is aligned with feminism and the belief that men must never use patriarchal things in ways that force a woman to obey real male authority in their relationships. In a secular way, there are things that game teaches Christian men that can be applied to rediscover what would have been common sense to men in past times.
Of course we have to filter what we take away from game, but then when reasoning about God’s will from observing creation we have to do the same thing due to all of the “natural things” that are evil and not of God.
And again, the filter applied to Game’s usefulness to men should be substantially the same as the filter applied to sluttiness’ usefulness to women. Supporting Game for nerdy men is equivalent to supporting slutty behavior for fat women.
It is probably true that young women can learn some of what makes men ‘tick’ from fellow sluts, in the quest to optimize their sexual “success”.
And yet again, the only reason we are talking about this is because of the hypersexualization of modernity.
No, a large part of the reason we are talking about this is because of a program that broke a large swath of men to such an extent that even in a society with a healthier level of sexualization, women would probably not find them attractive.
Mike T:
In a sexually healthier society, what makes women feel all tingly would be irrelevant.
As usual, the proposal is to fight modernity or mitigate the effects of modernity by capitulating to it.
Zippy, are you married?
Lint:
Stay on topic.
Obsessing over what turns women on is cloying and effeminate, and, ironically, turns women off.
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