Old Wars, Old Wounds
A look back at some of the battles of yesteryear.
I discussed two major themes this week: free markets and feminism. For my Friday “From the Archives” I thought I’d post an old piece on each. First, my Public Discourse review of Carrie Gress’ The End of Woman, in which I myself respond to antifeminist arguments, and even dip into the Mary Wollstonecraft debate. I’ll just drop in a quote to whet your appetite:
Anti-feminists like Gress seem determined to see the differences between men and women as categorical in ways that are deeply defining of every individual’s potential and life purpose. Some hard problems follow from that inflexible view. I would suggest that it is not possible to hold simultaneously 1) an ancient classical view of virtue, 2) a robust sexual complementarianism, and 3) the view that the sexes are morally equal. If women are simply less rational than men, it might make sense to relegate them to a subsidiary social role with a restricted range of activities and liberties (just as children are so restricted). But if that were the case, we would have to acknowledge (at least if we understand virtue in a broadly Aristotelian sense) that women are morally inferior to men. They can’t manifest human excellence to the same extent, which justifies their more restricted range of liberties and opportunities. If, on the other hand, women are men’s moral equals, and are equally capable of cultivating virtue, then it seems obtuse to assume that their desire to be treated as rational persons and full-fledged citizens is driven by envy or a hatred of maternity. Perhaps women desire political rights, advanced education, or a broad range of opportunities simply because these advantages befit rational beings.
Because it is of the utmost importance to Gress to view sexual difference as deeply defining of human nature, women end up being effectively “assigned” to be not-men, intentionally building our lives around the things that most distinguish us from males. This does seem very similar to what de Beauvoir meant when she described women as “the second sex.” Men can simply pursue rational excellence as such, while women are expected to prioritize sexual distinctiveness over the unfolding of their own particular potentialities.
Pivoting abruptly to markets, I took a little memory-lane walk and found this piece from August 10, 2017. This was my first-ever story for America magazine, the left-of-center Catholic publication where I’ve now been a masthead contributor for more than seven years. (This is still ongoing! I just sent them back a revised copy of my piece on Fulton Sheen, in advance of his September beatification.) It was rather an important one in my life as a writer.
In the spring of 2017 I was in a bad place as a writer. My family’s financial situation was very far from great. Staring around 2013 I’d been building earning power as a freelancer, up to 2015, when I was a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow, starting to feel like life might be going somewhere. Then of course, the conservative world exploded. My earning power tanked and I found myself throwing all sorts of things against walls, just trying to make something stick.
Crazy times make for crazy projects. I was thinking a lot about creative destruction, what with the New Right’s fixation on labor and the sad plight of the out-of-work blue-collar American man. I’d spent some time reading papal labor encyclicals a few years before, and it seemed to me that the populists had a few things wrong. Among other things, they were in many ways trying to reclaim the rather unhappy situation that the popes in the labor encyclicals were trying to mitigate, but I’ll leave that argument for another time.)
In my desperate, outside-the-box musings, I had this wacky thought that I could take arguments was honing, defend them using points pulled from Catholic Social Teaching, and try to sell this to a left-leaning Catholic publication. I knew it was a little crazy, and unlikely to work. But crazy was all I had at that time. What the heck. I don’t remember how I pitched it; I can’t find the email anymore. I just sent the idea off into the void, heard nothing back for a few weeks, figured it was a bust and forgot about it. Then out of the blue, a two-line response. “We’re interested in this, when could you deliver?”
That was a very strange moment. It took me several seconds even to make sense of the email. What? America wants that? Really?
It was a funny piece to write, because in a sense I was trying to cloak a deeply unsympathetic message in sympathetic-sounding rhetoric. But they liked my draft. Indeed, they liked the piece so much, they told me they’d decided to put it in the print edition (though it was originally accepted just for web publication). That meant more money! Great!
Several months after this piece ran, I got a big envelope in the mail. It had won a prize at the Catholic Media Awards. I had taken first place! The category: “Best Treatment of a Social Justice Issue.”
Those were certainly interesting times. The kind you never, ever want to live again.
Not too long after that they made me a masthead contributor, and it’s actually been quite interesting being a bit of a minority voice in that environment. But I’ll leave things here for now. Enjoy “Can Catholic social teaching help solve the labor crisis?”