Dachshund wrote:The evidence I will be citing in support my case is, I must tell you, limited to evidence from research conducted in anthropology and some historical scholarship. As you and I are both qualified scientists (myself a pharmacist/pharmacologist, yourself an engineer,) we are both fully aware that evidence and data gleaned from research investigations in fields like cultural anthropology and the humanities is inherently rather soft and woolley ( and always best taken with a healthy grain of skeptical /critical "salt"). I mean It is not as hard and reliable as the concrete, objective, empirical data collected by professional research chemists and physicists, for instance, in the structured experiments they construct to test their (scientific) hypotheses. Given the nature of subject matter we are dealing with however,( politics, feminist/gender equity theory, broad-scale patterns of changes in social demographics etc;) it is, I'm afraid, the best that I can do.
The underlying reason for this is that the behaviour and interactions of large numbers of human beings over many years (AKA "History") is an almost unimaginably more complex system than any of the systems studied by such people as physicists or engineers. Consequently, people can offer opinions and cite evidence to support those opinions, but they cannot then justifiably present those opinions as undeniable facts. As I've said, they can test whether they have succeeded in persuading others by the use of such things as opinion polls and elections.
That's why we have debates and votes over such things as the best level of taxation and public spending, but we don't have the same kinds of debates, and we don't take a vote, about things like the universal theory of gravitation or the workings of an internal combustion engine.
This, it seems to me from reading your previous words, is a point that you have not really grasped, at least not previously. Hence your previous assertions that you have somehow proved your own personal worldview to be the correct one.
Dachshund wrote:To begin with, almost exactly 100 years ago, the German philosopher and historian, Oswald Spengler published the first volume of his work "The Decline of the West" (1918). In this book, Spengler argued that the Western world as we have known it in modernity is coming to an end, and we are now witnessing the what he referred to as the final season, the "Winter", of "Faustian"/ Western civilization. To date, many of the predictions Spengler made in "The Decline of the West" have proven to be extraordinary (even uncannily) accurate.
I don't know his work so can't comment in any detail until I look it up, but when I hear phrases like "many of the predictions have proven uncannily correct" in the context of other people who've made such long term predictions, I'm wary. These kinds of predictions are often general enough that we can read into them a number of different things, depending on our personal political leanings. But I'll reserve judgement until I've read more about what he predicted.
Dachshund wrote:He foresaw, for instance, the inevitable rise of a pervasive socialist utopianism in Western societies, ...
...and this is exactly the kind of thing I mean. The proposition that western societies can accurately be described by the term "socialist utopianism" is entirely your own personal opinion. Most people would not share it. Many people would take an almost entirely opposite view. So, presumably, for those people Spengler's predictions were wrong.
Dachshund wrote:...and I think it is fair to say that the current "progressive" liberal orthodoxy in the postmodern West has indeed embraced an intrinsically leftist world-view in the doctrine cultural relativism, and that cultural relativism has clearly established its intellectual descendents in, for example: multiculturalism, persistent attempts at social engineering, the Marxist political narrative of "political correctness", the equalitarian theory of feminism and the so-called "Women's Liberation" movement, etc; very firmly in today's Western societies.
Again, this is simply you setting out your political views, well known on this forum now.
Dachshund wrote: I have focussed my criticism on feminism because I believe that it is (1) innately and profoundly decadent and (2) has therefore, over the past 50 years, been one of the strongest catalysts of Western civilizational decay in general.
Your belief has been noted.
Dachshund wrote:Much of the damage to Western societies wrought by the feminist movement/s has been a consequence of the way they have successfully undermined the traditional institution of marriage as a strict, life-long commitment to heterosexual monogamy in the relationship between a man and a woman focussed on the nurturing of a stable "nuclear" family unit; that unit which has, for millenia, been the fundamental building block of all civilized societies.
As I have already mentioned, it is an incontrovertible fact that since the late 1960s/early 1970s the number of marriages ending in divorce has sky-rocketed and currently stands at a level of about 40% (!). The reason for this is that the vast majority of feminists have been consistent in stridently condemning the cultural imposition of female monogamy in wedlock as a form of patriarchal oppression.
I discussed this in a previous post.
Dachshund wrote:They ultimately succeeded in undermining the notion of marriage and in consequence the past restrictions on female sexuality in the West were swiftly lifted, creating a promiscuous feminized sexual market place that catered ideally to women's innately hypergamous instincts. There was a substantial loosening of sexual restraint among women and pre-marital, post-marital and homosexual relationships began to rapidly proliferate as did rates of cohabitation.
No evidence is presented that, in the absence of restraints on sexual behaviour, women tend to switch partners more than men. The more generally accepted view is that men tend to aspire to promiscuity to a much greater extent than women.
Dachshund wrote:Thirty years before the advent of the "women's liberation" movement, a British anthropologist J.D. Unwin warned that feminism would destroy the West. In his classic work, "Sex and Culture", Unwin published the findings of his research into the patterns that led to the downfall of 80 major tribes and world civilizations (including the Babylonian, Greek, Roman and Anglo-Saxon) across 6000 years of human history...
From the little I've read about it, it seems that J.D. Unwin was attempting to test Freud's theory that suppression of sexual urges results in the energy that would otherwise have gone into the pursuit of sex being channeled into creating things. As far as I can tell from my brief research, he did not conclude from this that women should be disenfranchised and he did not confine his proposed constraints on behaviour to women as you have done. Also, according this review, he appears to have fallen for the old problem of confirmation bias:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... a00210/pdf
...by selecting the societies based on the extent to which they supported the thesis of Freud's that he was attempting to test.
Dachshund wrote:Throughout the history of Western civilization many of its greatest thinkers from Aristotle to Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche have been unanimous in warning the women are morally deficient relative to men due to their relatively more limited capacities for rational and logical thought. All of the above philosophers observed that women are more emotionally labile, fickle, unpredictable, untrustworthy, disloyal, disingenuous, inherently disposed to dissimulation, dissembling and chronic lying, cunning, manipulative and duplicitous; in short they are like naughty , mischievous children who need the firm supervision and guidance of man if they are not to generate, mischief, mayhem, trouble and grief.
Obviously these are not so much "observations" as "opinions". "Observation" applies a certain level of impassive objectivity. Simply applying this long list of pejorative adjectives to women is really no different from saying something like "I personally dislike women". an expression of taste.
I don't know without looking into it, but I would be surprised if these great thinkers applied all of these adjectives as a result of some kind of methodical research. They appear to me to be simply comments that show these people to be products of their time. Labeling somebody a "great thinker" does not mean that we share all of their opinions. Isaac Newton, for example, made some great discoveries in physics but that doesn't mean I believe in alchemy.
I guess in Western culture the ultimate expression of this mythology of the morally weak woman is the story of Eve in the garden of Eden. And perhaps one of its most brutal manifestations was the victimization of women as witches in such things as the Salem witch trials. We could discuss lots of possible theories as to why men make up these stories about women. But whatever the reason, it's certainly true that we do, so I guess it wouldn't be entirely surprising if the great thinkers that you cited expressed some of the mythologies of the societies in which they were embedded.
Thankfully (in my personal opinion), although there may be temporary setbacks, I think these views on women held by you and various historical figures are now largely consigned to history, so long as your ambition to silence open debate (tested by polls) and impose your views isn't realized. And I don't think it will be realized. The fact that in our society men and women increasingly deal with each other on an equal basis means that the conversation about these issues is increasingly open and honest and attitudes generally become healthier.
But I think that the possible reasons for these attitudes towards women are still interesting...
Dachshund wrote:And this is precisely why marriage evolved over the millenia; to make it difficult for women - who possess naturally hypergamous instincts - to "monkey branch" to a higher status male or abandon her partner and provider altogether whenever an exciting new bad boy comes along.
It's interesting to take a quick look at the article from which you (presumably) copied this particular wording:
https://relampagofurioso.com/2016/05/30 ... omens-lib/
In the article, interleaved with the various assertions about the unfaithfulness of women, are snippets of soft porn. I guess the idea is to keep male readers reading, but I think this encapsulates quite well a particular conflicted attitude towards women that we men often seem to take - simultaneous desire and contempt, resulting in misplaced blame. It's perhaps one of the main theories as to why we have historically invented the myths about women briefly discussed above.
The porn illustrates the well known idea that we men "objectify" women. We want sex with a body. Whether or not that body is attached to a mind is often incidental. Women, as a broad generalization, to a much greater extent, have a tendency to want to make an emotional connection with a sexual partner. This seems to reflect the other general difference in social skills. It's sometimes said that "Women talk face to face. Men talk side by side." Women share their problems and discuss their feelings. Men talk about car engines and football as displacement subjects. The theory would be that this evolved from our tribal origins and the roles traditionally played by males and females.
Men know this about women (that they are better at empathizing, discussing emotional and social problems and negotiating solutions to them) and because we don't do it so much we don't entirely trust it. So the act of talking over problems with a group is pejoratively characterized as gossip. This, combined with our strong emphasis on physical things like youthful beauty (the "objectifying" thing) leads to the idea of the old witch verbally casting her evil spells on people.
Men seem (historically in our culture and still in some parts of the world) to have a bit of a schizophrenic attitude towards women. The strong sexual desire for women "as objects" together with the societal prohibitions on sex seems to cause many men to blame women for their own thwarted desires, in an attitude that goes right back to the creation story. In a small number of modern societies this attitude is still widely manifested in such things as complete body and face coverings for women. Ostensibly, this is to protect women from the unwanted attentions of men, but the conflicted attitude is revealed by the fact that women are
punished for breaking this body-covering rule. So the male logic appears to be:
"I desire women. I can't have any woman that I want. The more I see of women, the more pain I feel due to this conflict. Therefore women who do not cover themselves are causing me pain. Therefore I will punish women who do not cover themselves."
I suppose this is what is sometimes referred to as "projection" - blaming the wholly innocent object of one's desires for the existence of those desires.
At least that's the caricature, and a theory about it. Whether it's accurate is open for debate.
That'll do for now.