Dachshund wrote:or little two -sentence broadsides. By the later, I mean the volley of unsubstantiated and unjustifiable "pot shots" decrying the innate immorality, etc; of patriarchal government/society or announcing the "fact", for instance, that human progress in the West over the past century (and to date) is largely a direct consequence of our having granted of EQUAL political, economic and social rights to women.
You may disagree with the assertion that there is a correlation between progress in the West and equal voting rights, and that there is a causal relationship between the two. But at face value, until evidence has been produced, it is not any different from your assertions, in the OP of the other topic, that the opposite is the case. Your main point in the OP of the other topic was simply to state your opinion that western civilization is in decline and that this is caused by female suffrage. Since, in that OP, you presented no evidence to support that opinion, if you wish other people to provide substance/evidence for the opinions that they put forward, you should also be prepared to do the same for your own.
Steve,
OK , message received ,and, I agree 100%. If I am making a proposal on a public forum- in
particular, a provocative and controversial one, then I am
absolutely obliged to back up any claims I make along the way with the very best evidence I can find in support of what I am saying.
So, let me get down to down to the business of providing some evidence to back up my claims. My claim, in brief, being that the granting of woman's suffrage in the West - ( and I am using the example of the United States , as it is undoubtedly the most powerful and arguably most refined and sophisticated product of modern Western civilization ) in 1920 was the original means through which the feminist movements that began some 50 years later, was given real political "clout" and that the feminist/women's liberation movement has played, and continues to play a major role in the current process of civilizational decline in the West. I
totally reject your assertion that there is any kind of correlation or direct causal relationship between social/cultural
progress ( i.e.civilizational advance) in the West and the passage of women's suffrage.
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.
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.
He foresaw, for instance, the inevitable rise of a pervasive socialist utopianism in Western societies, 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. 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.
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. 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.
EVIDENCE THAT THE UNDERMINING OF MARRIAGE BY FEMINISM WILL CAUSE CIVILIZATIONAL DECLINE
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.
He found that although the societies he studied lived in different geographical locations and belonged to different racial stocks, the history of their marriage customs was the same. Without exception, when restrictions on sexuality were lifted, especially female sexuality, every society destroyed itself from within and was later conquered from without. Whenever strict heterosexual monogamy was practiced in a society, Unwin discovered that the society attained its greatest cultural energy, especially in the arts, sciences and technology. However, when people rebelled against thesexual prohibitions placed upon them and demanded greater sexual opportunities there was a consequent loss of creative energy, which resulted in cultural decline and the eventual destruction of the civilization.
Remarkably, he dis not find any exception whatsoever to this trend.
Unwin concluded that the fundamental fabric that holds a society together was sexual in nature. When lifelong, heterosexual monogamous relationship (i.e. marriage) is practiced, the emphasis is placed on the care and nurturance of the family and energy is expended to protect, plan, build up and manage the individual family unit. This extended to the entire society and generated a strong society focused on preserving the strength of the family.
Though when controls on sexual opportunity were loosened the social energy always dissipated as individuals focused more on short term sexual gratification than long term future social good. As old-fashioned as it now sounds in the modern West, heterosexual lifetime pair bonding is the only condition that supports the stable, healthy growth of the human family and the advancement of cultural progress.
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. 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. The term husband means house - bond, in which the male becomes the band that holds the domestic home together. It is a "band" or a bond in a patriarchal society that women cannot abandon unless culturally they will be outcast and/or economically destitute. Unfortunately in the West today these harsh (but culturally advantageous and productive) realities no longer exist because women are insulated from their poor choices by a gynocentric welfare state funded predominantly with revenue from the tax dollars of beta males !
Let me conclude with the following quotation from Nietzsche which, I think, nicely summarises the truth of the nature of women very nicely, and ,how any wise man should ideally endeavour to manage his relationship/s with them...
"To blunder over the fundamental problem of "man and woman" to deny here the most abysmal antagonism and the necessity of an eternally hostile tension, perhaps to dream of equal rights, equal education, equal claims and duties: this is a typical sign of shallow-mindedness, and a thinker who has proved himself to be shallow on this dangerous point - shallow of instinct ! - may be regarded as suspect in general, more as betrayed, as found out: he will probably be too "short" for the fundamental questions of life, those of life in the future too, incapable of any depth.
On the other hand, a man who has depth, in his spirit as well as his desires, and also that depth of benevolence which is capable of hardness and severity and is easily confused with them, can think of woman only in an oriental way - he must conceive of woman as a possession, as property with lock and key, as something predestined for service and attaining her fulfillment in service - in this matter he must take his stand on the tremendous intelligence of Asia, on Asia's superiority of instinct, as the Greeks formerly dis: they were Asia's best heirs and pupils and as is well known from Homer to the "Golden Age" of Pericles, with the increase in their culture and amplitude of of their power, also became step by step more strict with women, in short, more Oriental, How necessary, how logical, how humanly desirable even , this was, let each ponder for himself".
Regards
Dachshund