The Economist
Xenophon's Oeconomicus offers a pragmatic alternative way of looking at questions of wealth, property, and human happiness. He is neither an economist nor a philosopher, only a man who, though he valued courage and honor above wealth, understand the true significance of property as the foundation of prosperity and happiness. In these dark times, his common-sense pagan wisdom has much to teach us.
I shall be quoting from the widely available (on Gutenberg.org) translation of H.G. Dakyns, if only because it saves me the trouble of acquiring a translation. Where relevant, I shall correct or clarify the translation by referring to the Greek text, which is also available on Perseus, if that site is up and running again. Let me begin with a few remarks on the author, cribbed largely from the Oxford Classical Dictionary .
Life of Xenophon
Xenophon, son of Gryllus, was born to a wealthy Athenian family in 428/7 BC and died about 354. As a young man he attached himself to Socrates, though it was not to the Platonic metaphysician we know from the later dialogues but to the reactionary sophist who criticized the mores of the Athenian democracy. One of the charges against Socrates was that he corrupted the youth. When we look at some of his prominent disciples and friends--Alcibiades, Critias, Charmides, Meno the Thessalian--it is easy to see why this charge stuck. Alcibiades was a brilliant opportunist who betrayed his city, Critias and Charmides were leaders of a clique of fascist thugs who ruled Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War as "The Thirty," and Meno, according to Xenophon, was perfectly corrupt and dishonest. Some of Socrates' prominent students--including Plato--were anti-democratic and expressed admiration for the Spartans. This was an aristocratic fashion that Socrates did not invent, but he did nothing to discourage it.
Xenophon left Athens in 401, just two years after a democratic restoration that might have made life difficult for a man of aristocratic leanings. He accepted the invitation of Proxenus of Thebes to accompany him on an expedition whose ultimate goal was the elevation of Cyrus, the younger son of the late king Artaxerxes, on the Persian throne. He immortalized his adventures going up the country in the Anabasis. On the expedition, he collaborated with Spartan adventurers and enlisted under the Spartan Thibron. The politics are complicated but the result of his collaboration was a sentence of exile. Upon returning to Greece, he went with his comrades to Sparta, where he as treated with respect and later given an estate. As a friend and admirer of the Spartan king Agesilaus, whom he memorialized in a biographical essay, he found himself on the Spartan side at Mantineia, fighting against Athens. As relations between teh two fading great powers improved, he returned to Athens. His son Gryllus died fighting for Athens and was honored by having one of Aristotle's dialogues--a published work that has not survived--named after him.
Xenophon was an exemplary Greek: a soldier, a traveler, a man of unbounded curiosity who wrote works of history (the Hellenica), biography, and recollections of Socrates as well as treatises on hunting and, in the case of the Oeconomicus , household management. Solid, intelligent, gentlemanly, but never brilliant or eccentric, he gives us a rare glance into the mind of an affluent and intelligent Greek of his day.
One of the many topics that have occupied--rather fruitlessly--the attention of scholars is the different portraits of Socrates drawn by Plato and Xenophon. Plato's Socrates evolves from a dialectical gadfly who drives interlocutors into a corner where they have to confess their ignorance into a comprehensive metaphysician and finally into something like a skeptic. I have always believed that the evolution is more Plato's than his mentor's. Xenophon's Socrates has many traits in commons with Plato's first version in the "aporetic" dialogues (Euthyphro, Laches, etc.), but he is more practical and down-to-earth. Common sense suggests that each writer took from Socrates what most interested him. The question is ultimately as insoluble as which portrait of Jesus is correct, Mark's or John's?
Oeconomicus chapters I-III
I. Socrates and Critobulus enter into a discussion about the management of wealth and the role of the oeconomicus or household manager, whether he be the owner or merely a hired steward. If economy is a skill, they agree, then it is a valuable one. They also agree that the oikos (household) should be regarded as a man's entire property and not just what is in his house. But, once Socrates gets the sucker to admit that a man's enemies are not part of his wealth, he forces him to acknowledge that true wealth is only that which is beneficial to the possessor. Thus ownership of a piece of unproductive land on which we labor in vain only to starve, is not wealth. Similarly money, if squandered on vices that harm us, is not wealth, while enemies--if they provoke us to improve--are. People who are enslaved to passions are not wealthy, no matter how much they may own, because they use their money to their own detriment.
II. Socrates sets out to prove that the poor philosopher is wealthier than the rich Critobulus, who is forced to spend vast amounts on a lavish life style, various charities, and liturgies--that is, committments to pay for public activities such as the staging of tragedies or the fitting out of a ship. Nothing constitutes wealth unless it is possessed by someone who knows how to use it. Along the way, Socrates casually distinguishes between resale value and use. Thus an unmusical person who owns a flute has wealth if he is willing to sell it, but not if he wishes to retain it. This is a significant point, I believe, and quite Greek. While we tend to think of property rights almost exclusively as the right to buy and sell, they were more interested in maintaining possession. Now that the question of expertise has been introduced, Socrates uses his famous irony to provoke the wealthy Critobulus into giving him lessons on oikonomia, wealth-management. In doing so he alludes to his own propensity for grilling supposed experts on their technical knowledge, and the reader knows full well that his procedure is to make the general confess he knows nothing of courage, the pious man nothing of piety, etc. We almost pity Critobulus.
III. Socrates begins by distinguishing beween two kinds of possessors: 1Those who waste their money on worthless display, and 2) Those who are content with owning only what they need and can use. Parallel to this set are those who 1) cannot even lay their hands on their stuff when they need it and those who 2) have everything in its proper place and available for use. As a corollary to this distinction, he sets up two classes of husbands: those whose wives are trained to be good managers and those whose wives are careless spendthrifts. The wives are bad either because their husbands failed to train them properly or because they are simply perverse. This is an important point, because husbands and wives are partners, not masters and slaves. When Critobulus admits that he does not often converse with his wife, Socrates blames him for not educating her. Nothing is more important for household success:
"My belief is that a good wife, being as she is the partner in a common estate, must needs be her husband's counterpoise and counterpart for good; since, if it is through the transactions of the husband, as a rule, that goods of all sorts find their way into the house, yet it is by means of the wife's economy and thrift that the greater part of the expenditure is checked, and on the successful issue or the mishandling of the same depends the increase or impoverishment of a whole estate."
IV Socrates distinguishes between the baser mechanical arts that distort the body and narrow the mind and the nobler arts of farming and the military. He cites the example of the younger Cyrus, whom he had served in his attempt to seize the Persian throne. Cyrus was a well-known Hellenophile but also a model Persian. Xenophon, like Herodotus, admires many features of Persian life, a position that some modern multi-culturalists would say was incompatible with the supposed xenophobia of the Greeks. He repeats teh story that Cyrus claimed never to have sat down to supper without having worked up a sweat, either in agricultural work or in some military exercise. Socrates goes on (V) to praise the life of the farmer as the most conducive to human happiness: It brings plenty, both for everyday use but also the products to be offered in sacrifice to the gods. And, agriculture--unlike mechanic arts that distort the body or business that requires no exercise--demands the exercise that makes the body strong and healthy. He even goes so far as to praise the beauty of the natural world, which Greek writers often take entirely for granted. Farming also requires the kind of cooperation that will be demanded in battle, when the farmer-soldier is called upon to defend his land and those of his neighbors.
In VI-VII, Socrates outlines the argument so far and begins to flesh out the abstractions by describing a man who is kalos kai agathos, which can be translated as handsome and good or as good and brave or a combination of these qualities. It is the Athenian ideal of what used to be known as the gentleman and includes nobility of appearance and conduct, a good family, and bravery in war. Socrates recounts a meeting with this gentleman, Ischomachus, in the portico of Zeus Eleutherios, who has the time to spend on public business and in discourse with his friends because his wife, whom he has trained, is capable of managing affairs at home. Note that the training began with prayer and sacrifice, dedication to a common purpose. It was for this common purpose that the two families joined them in marriage, which joins their funds together as well as their persons. The two purposes of mariage, as he says, are 1) procreation of children to continue the family, and 2) to rear the children to the point that they will be able to reciprocate when the parents are old. The Greeks very firmly believed that it was the child's duty to take care of aged parents, and that is Medea's chief preoccupation, in Euripides' play, when she murders her children. I knew a Chinese lady whose children did well and she made each one of them contribute $100 per month to her, if only as an acknowledgment of their debt.
Husband and wife have a common purpose, but each is framed by divine and natural power to perform a discrete set of tasks: Men are stronger and bolder and to them is assigned hard labor and fighting, while women are born with a greater affection for children and the ability to tend to more sheltered activities. In the many ethical qualities needed in both sets of functions, they are equally endowed.
The woman's job is like that of the Queen bee, who supervises all within the hive and makes sure that the laborers go out and perform their duties. So long as there is an orderly life, to say nothing of civilization, it is woman's job to make man work to deserve her. As my old friend Mel Bradford once observed, when it was the fashion to attack black men for their evil ways, black women, in making themselves sexually available at an early age, were failing in an essential duty.
Oeconomicus VIII-X
After embarrassing his wife by asking for something in the house she could not find, Ischomachus apologizes for having failed to tell her where to put it. There is nothing so useful or so good/fine, he explains as order, taxis, a word often used in military language. The old soldier Xenophon doesnot hesitate then to draw out an allegory of the household as an army in which good order produces good results. If Xenophon seems a bit obsessive on storage, it may be that Greeks of his day had not reached the pitch of organization we have, with closets, shelving, etc. They used mainly chests or left things lying about.
Ischomachus finds his wife wearing high heels and having used pigments to improve her complexion. Somewhat priggishly he chides her by suggesting these arts are dishonest. Now, if his wife is under 30--as she is--his objections are well-taken. Young women don't need to wear make-up, but a wise man should never be unhappy with his wife's efforts to make herself more pleasing to him. The case of a young American woman flaunting her looks in public is entirely different. Athenian women lived rather seccluded lives.
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"The work of the Rockford Institute and Chronicles Magazine is properly aimed at working to attain the good life, but doing so on a family by family approach, rather than trying to impose it politically from the top down. This is the only way that is going to work. There is no salvation through politics. Just electing the right candidates, passing the right laws, adopting the right policies, and getting the right people on the Supreme Court are not going to lead us to the good life."
Just as Xenophon and Socrates teach us in the last chapter of the book, there is something inspiring in some people and not so with others. We should become lovers before we are anything else. Cyrus seems to be such a man as described by Socrates with his love of beauty and health and all that the good earth is capable of providing for those who have hearts large enough, minds keen enough and wills strong enough to seek it. Technique is always secondary to art and the contemplative is always primary. It is the same always and everywhere. To do a few things well is the most efficient means to maintain a household, a magazine, a community or any other human endeavor. Much better than trying to do alot of things without understanding, which always lends itself ultimately to mediocrity and ugliness.
I think Steve Berg (50) and Robert (51) are on to something here.
It seems that some modern 'scholars' appear to be using the well-deserved praise of Cyrus by Xenophon and others to turn Cyrus into some ridiculous 'hero' of multiculturalism and 'cultural tolerance' etc. In pursuing this propaganda, they even erected a monument to him exactly where it does not belong, in Australia. This is an insult to his memory.
JE knows something I do not, which is the Straussian contribution to classical philology. I've read a modest amount of the old man himself, some Bloom, Pangle, Carnes Lord, Benardete, Jaffa, Rosen, and over the years have met many if not most of the leading Straussians. Lord seemed quite normal and seemed to have a good command of Greek, Bloom witty if freakish, Jaffa an extraterrestrial, but in all these years the only Straussian I have met or read who could make a contribution was his adopted daughter. Perhaps I am being too severe, but I do not regard bright ideas or interpretations of literature to constitute scholarship. I don't think, either, that a straightforward approach to a text requires taking sides. The very least we can say of it is that we can understand what common readers took away from the text--irony or no irony intended by the author. And, since I am no longer much interested in a particular author's point of view, whether Xenophon, Aristotle, or Leo Strauss but only in the issues they treat and the light their work can shed on certain problems, it does not ultimately matter much to me if the Straussians or Foucaultians should turn out to be right on this or that. Besides, if they should turn out to be right, the texts themselves would have no utility except as a peg from which to dangle their Pangles.
Lest I be misunderstood, I should have prefaced my quibbles with an expression of gratitude for the fine contributions made to this discussion, especially those of Steve Berg and JE, who have raised the level far above my pedestrian effort to present a few basic points, which is all I have had time to do. I probably have also overinterpreted JE's backhanded defense of Strauss. LS was certainly a learned man, in the sense of being broadly and deeply read, but his learning in classics was like my learning in Italian studies: the erudition of an interested amateur. But, like Strauss, I am intending to continue my ricerche into the Neopaganism of the Renaissance. After reading several dissertations, I am convinced that several generations of experts cannot see what is before them because they think that anyone who cries Lord, Lord is a Christian.
On dimwit classicists, JE could not be more right. The range when I was a student ran from plodding dulllards (I name no names) to groovy flakes like JP Sulllivan, William Arrowsmith, et al. But things have got far worse. Between feminists and lit crits, there is not not much room for the plodding dullards that made classics a refuge from the would-be brilliant. Marxists are among the best of the ideological scholars, because they go chasing after economic details, and there is fine work still being done by ancient historians who either apply more anthropological methods or are at least reviving what the French were doing at the turn of the last century. As an amateur student of Roman history, I have learned an enormous amount from, say, Richard Saller and Susan Treggiari on Roman family life, and Lawrence Richardson's book on Roman topography is my constant reading in the Fall, as I prepare for an annual descent on Rome.
Years ago--about 25--I foolishly did a review essay on the state of women's studies in classics. The Maenads went mad and declared that, because I was no longer teaching in a university, I had no status in the profession. A journal editor got sacked, manifestos were read at professional meetings, hysterical articles were published, psychological daggers hurled at me at the few meetings I attended thereafter, all because I pointed out that Judith Hallet did not understand history or anthropology and Sarah Pomeroy--the deanette of women's studies-did not, apparently, know enough Greek to realize the existence of two-termination adjectives (that is, adjectives without a feminine form.) Jiminetti, as we used to say in high school. I did receive letters of thanks from two of the women's studies scholars I respected, Mary Lefkowitz and Larissa Bonfante, and I later learned a great deal from conversations and letter exchanges with the American women's studies queen, the late Elizabeth Fox Genovese. But we live, alas, in a world were theory and ideology not only take precedence over the stuff of everyday reality: they completely occlude it. Nothing today is more mysterious than the ordinary.
Robert@41: I have not at my command your vast repertoire of germane quotes. A google of a line from #41 directed me to, get this: wikipedia. (First and Last by Hilaire Belloc, The Absence of the Past)
I make no brief for wikipedia -- caveat emptor -- but my point is that people do use it for many different reasons and who knows what could happen if a hook they find in it leads them to question post-modern wisdom. I know many parents who sent their Christian conservative children off to college to have them overwhelmed by the post-modern monolith and lose their moorings. Many freshmen navigate first to Wikipedia to obtain clues and direction for their papers so to JE@48 I can only respond with "who knows". It seems to me we should not surrender all media to the prince of darkness.
Jim,
I don't think we should surrender but retreat, which Marine's always referred to as an attack in the other direction. My daughter told me this morning that she saw her English professor at Mass yesterday and as he passed by her after Mass, he said," Surprising isn't it?"
They have read nothing in the class except modern, anti-western, bilge and even some smut written by authors with organic mental problems. I recognized one of the titles, Book of Dave, or some such non-sense but was happily ignorant of the rest. Now here is a fellow who the polls would indicate is a "religious person who attends services once a week." That is to say, he is supposed to be one of the good guys. Well, what it really demonstrates is the triumph of ignorance and the complete abandonment of any possible seriousness in life in exchange for a job.
One final comment on Belloc's quote. My classic's professor asked his students at the beginning of the year to tear out the introductions and simply read the primary works assigned. He also had the habbit of passing out poems without the name of the author so he did not have to listen to graduate students talk about the poet, instead of the poem. Belloc for instance, is only remembered today, if at all, as an anti-semite, belligerent, drunken, bitter, expatriot of "Old Europe", who is better off forgotten when not absolutely forbidden. Yet, he was probably the best writer of English prose since John Henry Newman. So in order that we might enjoy the kernel, I usuaully attempt to remove the shell. Anybody that knows me, knows that my hobby is attempting to collect all of his works
Oeconomicus VIII-X
After embarrassing his wife by asking for something in the house she could not find, Ischomachus apologizes for having failed to tell her where to put it. There is nothing so useful or so good/fine, he explains as order, taxis, a word often used in military language. The old soldier Xenophon doesnot hesitate then to draw out an allegory of the household as an army in which good order produces good results. If Xenophon seems a bit obsessive on storage, it may be that Greeks of his day had not reached the pitch of organization we have, with closets, shelving, etc. They used mainly chests or left things lying about.
Ischomachus finds his wife wearing high heels and having used pigments to improve her complexion. Somewhat priggishly he chides her by suggesting these arts are dishonest. Now, if his wife is under 30--as she is--his objections are well-taken. Young women don't need to wear make-up, but a wise man should never be unhappy with his wife's efforts to make herself more pleasing to him. The case of a young American woman flaunting her looks in public is entirely different. Athenian women lived rather seccluded lives.
(I should say -- 'incapable of sacramental marriage'.)
[..I can't seem to post, so if this shows up more than once I apologize, and hope for deletion!]
We might continue the hermeneutic discussion elsewhere, fruitfully toward Chronicles' and TJF's programme. Here I meant not so much that a particular interpretation need be taken in contradistinction to the ironic, but rather that non-ironic readings affirm a non-ironic hermeneutic, and the susceptibility of certain texts to non-ironic reading (completely irrespective of authorial intent, of course) renders them potentially closer to the irony-precluding Gospels. Straight-talkers like Xenophon are beautiful and bracing tonics to Enlightenment sophistry, if only because Xenophon honestly looks to the things right in front of his face.
As to the Straussians and Marxists, together: insipid ironists aren't always so easy to pick out as liars; rabid ironists are all obviously liars if both sense-data and intellect really exist, and there is no more rabid group of ironists than the Straussians. Marxists, or at least Marx's followers, are the opposite of ironic; Marx has gripped the world (or at least the west) so tightly because dialectical materialism is, like the Gospels, essentially non-ironic. (This doesn't mean that irony can't compose part of the dialectic, only that the dialectic as such is not ironic. Marx himself is actually very witty, a fact that translations often don't capture.) Most Enlightenment writers just aren't serious, grave as their errors are; this is why a glance at the parallel lines of intellectual and sociopolitical history since the eighteenth century strikes the non-critical modern as peculiarly schizophrenic. Marx is serious; within the academy he, and to a lesser extent his followers are practically the only serious mainstream thinkers. (Nietzsche was serious too, but is no longer 'mainstream' -- again, however profound his real sociopolitical influence was.) He can't be otherwise: the whole point of dialectical materialism is that *everything everyone does really, physically matters*. There was a pretty sophisticated attempt to Enlightenment-ify Marxism in the 70s, led by G. A. Cohen -- 'analytical Marxism', they called it -- but it died, because the Marxists realized that simple philosophical-economic analysis does not participate in the dialectic. (Most things labeled 'analytical' are or soon will be dead.)
Little as I know of women's studies in classics, it does seem that most of the good work has been done within the last quarter-century. The specific difference has been precisely 'looking at everyday reality', and coincides methodologically with a vast and otherwise related advance in legal anthropology, led by Pospisil, among others.
One of the extra-disciplinary benefits of this kind of women's studies -- and I think this profoundly impacts the relevant academics' scholarly motivation, though it does not show up quite so clearly in their published work -- has been the observation that something like liberalism, stretching back at least to the Renaissance, is yet another kind of selfish blindness and loveless stupidity -- though our ideologizing culture often, exactly in its effort to shut our eyes entirely, blinds us to this also. It is also true that this tradition is profoundly misogynist (though too often not for the reasons somewhat desperately proferred). But all errors are profoundly misogynist, because all errors are profoundly barren; and barrenness harms men in operation, but women in both operation and being.
"Incapable of sacramental marriage" implies, a) that sacramental marriage may be something radically different from pre-Christian marriage and that b) non-sacramental marriage is possible between members of the same sex. For that to be true, one would have to redefine marriage as something else than, for example, Greeks, Romans, and Jews imagined it to be. That would require considerable justification.
On the reinvention of Marxism, my friend David Gordon, so recently excoriated on this site for his failure to appreciate Wendell Berry, wrote an interesting analysis.
Finally, once women's studies became profitable, it did not remain the exclusive province of illiterate bra-burners. The study of everyday domestic reality was long overdue, though the French made a pretty good stab over a hundred years ago. One line of research for a young philologist or historian would be to look at how Athenians actually went about their daily business. There have been some good things written about this, of course, but there is still too much "all in the mind" stuff looking at Athenian "ideology" rather than at daily life. Even the study of tragedy would benefit enormously from a more down-to-earth approach, by which I do not mean reading political events and conflicts into the text but an examination of unspoken assumptions.
I should note that my 'incapable of sacramental marriage' remark was intended as a follow-up for a post that it appears never went through. TJF's response to them as a response to his earlier post is of course quite correct.
Short version of unposted question: Self-flaunting young women are substantially self-hating; surely most immodestly-dressed young women are not substantially self-hating?
My wife thinks I'm wrong. Priests, psychologists, and ecclesiastical judges I've heard from either directly or second-hand seem to agree, with 'seventy-five percent of American marriages are annullable' being the eventual result (from incapacity of end-cognizance). But is this really true? I can't believe the anecdotal remarks I've heard; they're too vast and depressing.
"I counselled her to oversee the baking woman as she made the bread; to stand beside the housekeeper as she measured out her stores; to go tours of inspection to see if all things were in order as they should be. For, as it seemed to me, this would at once be walking exercise and supervision. And, as an excellent gymnastic, I recommended her to knead the dough and roll the paste; to shake the coverlets and make the beds; adding, if she trained herself in exercise of this sort she would enjoy her food, grow vigorous in health, and her complexion would in very
truth be lovelier. " [Ischomachus explaining to Socrates counsel that he gave to his wife.]
"Nor are women to be deprived of bodily exercise. But they are not to be encouraged to engage in wrestling or running, but are to exercise themselves in spinning, and weaving, and superintending the cooking if necessary. And they are with their own hand to fetch from the store what we require. And it is no disgrace to apply themselves to the mill. Nor is it a reproach to a wife --- housekeeper and helpmeet -- to occupy herself in cooking, so that it may be platable to her husband." [Clement of Alexandria from Paedagogus, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 2, p. 283 as quoted on p. 142 of Patrick Mitchell's The Scandal of Gender.]
"God made provision from the first by shaping. . .the woman's nature for indoor and the man's for outdoor occupations. Man's body and soul He furnished with a greater capacity for enduring heat and cold, wayfaring and military marches; or to repeat, He laid on his shoulders the outdoor works. . . .While in creating the body of woman with less capacity for these things. . .God would seem to have imposed on her the indoor works; knowing that He had implanted in the woman and imposed upon her the nurture of new-born babies, He endowed her with a larger share of affection for the new-born child than he bestowed upon man." [Ischomachus explaining to Socrates conversation that he had with his wife.]
". . .He honored the man with rule and superiority; the woman on the other hand He armed with desire: and the gift also of procreation of children, He committed in common to both, and withal He furnished also other things apt to conciliate love: neither entrusting all to the man, nor all to the woman; but 'dividing these things also severally to each'; to her entrusting the house, and to him the market; to him the work of feeding, for he tills the ground; to her that of clothing, for loom and distaff are the woman's. For it is God Himself who gave woman-kind skill in woven work." [St. John Crysostom, Homily 34 on 1 Corinthians, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 1, Vol. 12 p. 205, quoted on p. 132 of Patrick Mitchell's The Scandal of Gender.]
I thank JE for the clarification and the suggestion. Here is a round-about way of looking at the question of female immodesty. My wife asked me the other day why Americans eat so much sugar. My reply--which I think I gave in The Politics of Human Nature--was that human beings are programmed to desire that which is necessary and scarce, hence the endless search for meat, fat, salt, and sugar in primitive societies that only becomes pernicious in modern societies where one can eat oneself into the condition of the two thousand pound Mexicans who were in the news a few weeks ago. The same can be said of sex. Men, to begin with, have an urge to spread their genes as broadly as possible, thus they are alert to every signal of sexual availability in females capable of breeding. Women, on the other hand, "know" that they will have to spend 9 months bearing and many years taking care of the consequences and thus pursue a different strategy. Now, it is easy to see what happens to men in a society that has adopted the Playboy Philosophy, but there more interesting question is what has happened to women? One part of the answer must lie in the dawning realization that sex can be divorced from procreation, but, one might argue, many of these women are barely conscious. So, another part of the answer may lie in the devaluation of the female that is so typical of our society. Women who live as women are condemned as housewives, though some try to make up for the lack of a career by imposing endless futile tasks on themselves--driving the kids to soccer games and lessons, joining committees. They remind me a bit of some very wealthy people I have known: Every day they face the horror of voluntarily filling in the void with that other people are compelled to fill in with work.
Thanks to TJF for his interesting conjecture. I wonder about the easy inference from 'drive to spread genes widely' to 'drive to procreate maximally' -- inasmuch as social conditions, allied with peculiarities of the sexual-recombinatory calculus, often complicate the picture virtually unpredictably, with 'maximal procreation' often being superseded 'maximal gene distribution' (kinship-altruism and sex-preferential care for larvae are the simplest examples). Of course a more complex sociobiological picture can indeed be painted, and perhaps E. O. Wilson has done this, but the move from 'gene-spreading' to 'procreation-maximizing' is almost certainly not immediate (presumably in proportion to nervous-system centralization and social complexity).
This may seem nitpicky, but the distinction is crucially important for any 'natural good' ethics to be persuasive. One of the reasons natural-good ethicists like Philippa Foot have received a rather unfriendly reading in both philosophical and scientific circles is that she takes shortcuts of this sort. (William Fitzpatrick wrote a good book on this a few years ago; though it begins stronger than it ends, and I don't know how it has been received.) (Richard Dawkins makes far flimsier inferences, of course, and apparently people listen to him...)
Surely the whole point of passing around the label 'culture of death' is that the divorce of sex from procreation imprints society everywhere? The world is gnostic, and this is the same as saying that sex is dead. I grant both (a) sex and procreation are divorced and (b) women's lives are miserable today, but the link between the two must lie somewhere hidden in the vomit-soup of modern culture. If one could show that link *concretely* (which one needs to do to address (b) adequately), perhaps people would recognize that their misery is caused by (a), and reject it.
This would require detailed, specific treatment of Lots of Parts of Modern Culture -- and nothing more, really, since the abstract predication of 'barrenness' has already been done. Facile and false condemnations of 'devilish 2/4 time' are of course totally useless; I've seen many but not much beyond pious sophisms of this sort. Are there any? (Voegelin took an extremely learned stab at the problem, but his gnostics are too Miltonian, and his 'immanent eschaton' much too rich. Balthasar thinks Valentinus' is rich too, but it's hard to communicate the depth of his emptiness in prose: Satan is not a romantic figure, except insofar as the Romantics hate creation.)
I've made a few posts to show the similarities between Xenophon and traditional Christian teaching on the roles of men and women as provided by the Church Fathers. The modern mind, impressed only by new ideas, thinks the Church Fathers were merely parroting the sexism of the ancients. The modern mind is incapable of discerning truth. Because our education system is intended to develop the modern mind, we will always be out numbered and truth will always be out of favor.
TJF @65:
My wife has never worked outside the home, instead taking care of our home and our daughters. She did this mostly because of the example of her own mother and her grandmothers, none of whom were educated beyond high school or worked outside the home. Likewise, my own mother and my father's mother didn't go to college and my mother didn't work outside the home until my sister and I went to high school. The extra income was needed to pay the Catholic school tuition.
My wife has only one concern: will she have sufficient funds to support herself after I die. She wouldn't be reluctant to get a job, if necessary; however, lacking experience and education, she doesn't think she will be qualified for one that pays very much.
#66 "Surely the whole point of passing around the label ‘culture of death’ is that the divorce of sex from procreation imprints society everywhere? The world is gnostic, and this is the same as saying that sex is dead. I grant both (a) sex and procreation are divorced and (b) women’s lives are miserable today, but the link between the two must lie somewhere hidden in the vomit-soup of modern culture. If one could show that link *concretely* (which one needs to do to address (b) adequately), perhaps people would recognize that their misery is caused by (a), and reject it."
JE's discussion is a little bit over my head, but I'd like to try to respond to the specific question of our gnostic attitudes towards sex, and their particular consequences for women.
The foundation for the Catholic Church's teaching on sexuality, is "What God has joined together, let no man put asunder." The results of splitting apart the dual purposes of sex was discussed brilliantly in Humanae Vitae.
A brief synopsis: First, there is an increase in infidelity, which causes pain, anger, and resentment within families. This has a cyclical effect, and ultimately disrupts the well being of society, and perverts the moral order. Second, we become slaves to our passions. This is especially damaging to young people as they are constantly tempted to things they lack the faculties to resist. Contemporary experience and ancient wisdom reveal that nobody can be truly satisfied when they exist in this kind of servitude. It is far worse than physical slavery. The third result is probably most relevant to the unhappiness of women today. I'll quote the encyclical:
"Another effect that gives us cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equillibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection."
This may be at the heart of why so many women are empty and miserable. Most women seem to have a deep desire for affection and a stable, constant relationship with a man. I sense this is why watching romance comedies and Lifetime Network are so popular with women. They don't seem quite concious of what they are lacking, and they look for it--as the songs says--in all the wrong places. Contrary to what feminists say, a woman is happiest when she is loved and treated with dignity by her husband, has a full household of children, and receives the blessings of Christ and His Church. A proper understanding of sexuality, then, is a source of joy and stability. The misuse of this powerful gift causes great pain on a personal level, and chaos in society. "What God has joined together, let no man put asunder."
I don't why there is a comma before "is" in the sentence "Catholic Church's teaching on sexuality, is..." I have yet to write a single post free from typos. Also, I apologize if I am getting off the topic by not staying grounded in Xenophon's text, but I find JE's question a fascinating one.
I should clarify, that we "become slaves to our passions" because of bad habits over time, and the general lowering of moral standards. Both are made easier by denying what Flannery O'Connor called, "the hard purposes of sex."
Again, my apologies to the reader. I seem to have many commas in places they don't belong. And at least one mistake in grammar. Writing on a computer screen turns my brain into a vegetable. Nonetheless, it is embarassing to make such mistakes in a public setting.
Sociobiology provides valuable analytical tools but it can be applied, as JE suggests, too simplistically. I pretty thoroughly studied the state of research down to about five years ago when it ceased to interest me, but EO Wilson was kind enough to say that I understood the subject and was unflinching in applying the results in my first book. I say this not in self-congratulation but to let it be understood that in simplifying the argument I am not acting out of limited knowledge. Yes, on the one hand there is a kind of genetic calculus acting through hormones and brain development, on the other are the pressures exerted by specific social institutions. The two are not separate since they evolve in response to each other in a gene-culture feedback loop, as Wilson described it. One useful concept, in this connection, is hypertrophy: the tendency to exaggerate a successful trait or strategy beyond the point that it is entirely useful. The great antlers of the Irish elk are usually cited as an example: As attractive as they were to females and useful in clashes with other bucks in mating season, they overburdened the poor creatures trotting through the bogs that swallowed so many of them up. Man, it seems to me, continues these hypertrophic adaptations in a social way. An obvious example is the Turkish harem. True, the Sultan gets to impregnate hundreds of women but he is acting more like a rabbit (this is often called an R strategy) in maximizing reproduction rather than the human K strategy that emphasizes quality and duration of care.
A digression on natural goodness. Philosophers generally accept what they take to be Hume's distinction between "is" and "ought" and the gulf between them that prevents us from leaping from fact to value. Stephen R.L. Clark some years ago did a good job of showing that Hume has been overinterpreted. This is important because a rigid fact/value distinction would seem to be inconsistent with his generally Aristotelian bent (one that he shares with other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers). It seems to me that all I needed to show, in Politics of Human Nature, was that there are natural tendencies in the created order that, if followed, are conducive to human happiness. (My late friend Sam Francis disagreed with me on this, but in those days he was a rigid materialist.) This is what, for example, Bishop Butler tried to do in his famous Analogy. Revelation perfects our understanding of the moral order but it does not entirely overturn it. As Paul observes, we are looking into a distorted mirror here on earth, but we are not looking into complete darkness.
Thus, JE is perfectly correct to object to any crude reduction of moral questions either to sociobiological or other material explanations. On the other hand, we are not angels but animals with a soul and/or mind, which is compelled for the most part to work through our organic body. So the question would seem to be, why, considering our natural propensities, we have chosen a sexual morality that is both evil (in the Christian sense) and apparently self-destructive? To answer that would require at least a book, but I do believe that the separation of sex and procreation was part of the Renaissance misunderstanding of pagan sexual mores. Thus Lorenzo and Poliziano with their cheerful celebrations of Eros. The darker side of this can be seen in all the alchemical and magical remedies to prevent or cure the disease of pregnancy--the majority of recipes, according to some scholars. When this is set beside the parallel attempt to create life in test tubes--one of Paracelsus pet projects--we begin to see the outlines of the world we live in. Yes, they thought they were pagans when in fact they were only anti-Christian hedonists, prating about the soul and Platonic love. In a slightly different context, namely Venice, Browning wondered: "What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?" I don't know if this will persuade JE, but I fear that an old pedant is beginning to lose the attention of his readers. For a more prolonged discussion of this we could set up a separate column or blog. JE is free to send me a message via webmaster. I am, understandably, reluctant to publicize the email, but I will respond.
Finally, thanks to Mr. Cooney for making the issue at hand plain and clear. Should we wrap up Xenophon or consider the second half of the Oeconomicus? In either event, it has been requested that we take up Aeschylus' Oresteia, which I promised years ago, or at least the Agamemnon. As for translations, I don't recommend Lattimore--quite the contrary. Smyth's old Loeb is fairly clear and the text is quite conservative. My dissertation director Douglas Young did a very literal verse translation published by Oklahoma, which I went over with him, largely to suggest verbal clarity and rhythmic patterns. A straightforward prose translation would be better than something ultrapoetical.
"To answer that would require at least a book, but I do believe that the separation of sex and procreation was part of the Renaissance misunderstanding of pagan sexual mores."
Interesting. I was thinking only in the purely literal seperation of sex and procreation manifested in today's widespread acceptence and celebration of contraception; I never considered the intellectual roots of the schism. It seems we've been heading down this road for longer than I previously thought.
Dr. Fleming,
The word "Renaissance" is supposed to reflect the rebirth of the classical world. But, how badly did the Renaissance misunderstand Greek and Roman culture in general. I realize that is probably a long subject, but perhaps you could point out some basic starting points. We seem to be losing our energy with Xenophon, so I'm up for Oresteia or Agamemnon anytime. I read both last spring, but would have enjoyed some guidance. I'm fairly sure I missed alot that was there.
Yes, the Oeconomicus argument has petered out, partly because it has sunk down to the second page and partly because the second half of the work is so practical as to be of marginal relevance to us. As for sex and procreation in the Renaissance, it is not merely ideology, since we can observe two phenomena: 1) a keen interest in contraception and 2) a high rate of homosexuality, especially in Florence.
The Renaissance understanding of the ancient world is a very big topic. Generally speaking, Renaissance humanists were interested in recovering texts, correcting their Latin on classical models, and learning Greek. Petrarch, for all his effort to detach himself from the Medieval world and celebrate the ancients, remained a Medieval man. Poliziano, more than a century later, had much better classical Latin and knew Greek quite well. The development of a historical methodology and philology, however, took a good deal of time, and each age reads into the ancients what it is looking for. Some Renaissance men were looking for an excuse for hedonism and they found it, and ever since pious Christians have turned away from the classics on moral grounds. I haven't thought much about Renaissance Italy since my graduate school days, but this year it is mostly what I am doing.
Then I'll post something on the first scene of the Agamemnon tomorrow at the latest. Whether you or anyone will learn something is one thing. You will certainly get a point of view not commonly taught.
Not that the Romans and Greeks didn't try their mightiest to separate sex and procreation. It just so happened that procreation was more pragmatically useful for them, on the whole, than for Renaissance intellectuals, and to a much greater degree industrialized moderns.
It is a simple economic fact that children today, along with the elderly, are burdensome where previously they had been beneficial. This wasn't so in the ancient world; it is on of modernity's great systemic disgraces, but I don't know quite where the pre-industrial switch began.
Hesiod, the ancient world's most brazen misogynist, declared that all men are miserable because they must either marry a woman or not; if they do, then they will be cursed by femininity, and if they don't, then they will be cursed by a lonely death.
The presupposition is that, even if you utterly hate and/or despise women, at least you must surely want *children*, at least to take care of you in your old age. So even if you can't stand married life and are nothing but a completely selfish archaic Greek, having children is still an irreducible desideratum. Even the graceless and loveless find children *useful*!
Industrialization tends to make children economically worthless, because everything they can do, machines can do better (this is of course a big part of modernity's death-preference). My guess re. Renaissance intellectuals is that their connections with Italian courts separated them from value-generation, which was possible only in a post-Medieval, money-centered economy (allowing the separation of foedus and manor). But perhaps TJF has more to say about Renaissance barrenness-love, not simply as a matter of fact (or as an instance of libido dominandi, which is even in Lucifer's case merely derivative) but as a matter of (nascent?) systemic corruption.
We might say more about children's value in a feudal-manorialist economy, at various levels in such a society, but I'd likely be accused of distributist tendencies...
I don't think an accusation of distributism would bother too many people on this site. There was a study done some years ago that gave evidence that ancient contraceptive techniques were pretty successful. This is a problem in every society that overvalues wealth. But, I would suggest, that the Renaissance both promoted contraception and homosexuality on a practical level and also developed an anti-Christian ideology that culminates in the nightmares that C.S. Lewis intuited both in That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man, nightmares that we are living today.
One way to sense the difference between late Medieval and early Renaissance Italy is to read the amatory poetry of Dante and his friends and then compare it with Lorenzo and Poliziano, who do not so much write about loving this or that girl but something more like "Of all the girls I've ever loved..." A number of things had happened, though it is interesting that several of these neopagan loverboys, Botticelli, Pico della Mirandola, and Politian himself, were driven to repentance and remorse by Savonarola.