Gender, Feminism, and Nihilism

I wanted to continue along yesterday's line of thought into a further discussion of manhood, and of sexual -- not "gender!" -- differences in general. With regard to gender, it is a leftist mind parasite with an interesting etiology. Mansfield points out that this weasel word was actually borrowed from grammar, which is surely no coincidence, given the convergence of feminism and infrahuman literary theories such as deconstruction. What looks like a superficially trivial (but coerced) change in language usage is actually an ontologically profound (but magical) manipulation of reality, i.e., changing sex, a rich essence with both immanent (horizontal) and transcendent (vertical) implications, into gender, an impoverished concept that is ultimately nihilistic to the core.

Sex is real. Gender is pure fantasy, a word game -- and another big reason why the left is ironically referred to as the "reality based community." Because brother, if you're not even sure if you're a boy or a girl -- or you think the differences are arbitrary, or assigned by culture, or self-selected -- then you are one messed up human being. And an even more messed up political party.

As I have mentioned before on numerous occasions, religion is the true humanism, whereas humanism always redounds to subhumanism or animalism. Yesterday I tried to show how the secular left doesn't really believe half of its own nonsense, at least not in any consistent way. For example, if they truly believe that Darwinism is a scientifically proven fact as opposed to flawed and partial theory, it leads in certain inescapable ways to an extreme right wing view (I won't say conservative or classical liberal, since they have entirely different implications) in which men are clearly superior to women in the only ways that matter. Since the leftist has already dispatched any appeals to transcendent truth, all that is left is power, and since men are more powerful than women, this seems the perfect recipe for a kind of Nietzschian fascism in which the strong rule the weak.

If we are reduced to obtaining our values from nature -- from the horizontal world only -- these are the values we will take away. Leftists don't like that brutal world of each against all, and with good reason. But since they also reject transcendent truth, they are essentially left with no choice but magic, including the word magic of "gender." Only religion properly deals with the world as it actually is and how it ought to be.

Again I refer back to Christopher Matthews' moronic question to the Republican candidates as to whether they believe in Darwinism or "creationism." For my part, I would not hesitate to say that so-called creationism -- including all of the inspired commentaries on Genesis -- explains much more about human beings than does Darwinism. Again, if we hew to a strict interpretation of Darwinism, we are left with some of the caricatures I outlined yesterday, of rigid sexual roles determined by millions of years of genetic evolution. Another way of saying it is that religion is actually much more scientific than Darwinism, if we expand science to mean understanding as much of reality as possible with our (capital R) Reason -- with the supernatural light of the intellect, or nous.

One reason doctrinaire Darwnians are so philosophically shallow is that they never trace the metaphysical implications of their own Darwinism, which quickly lead to hopelessly insoluble contradictions. For example, in Darwinism there can be no essences, only change. Nothing is fixed, everything is evolving, so that even the concept of "species" is problematic for Darwinians. Any "species" is just a temporary and random cluster of adaptations to shifting environmental conditions, so they don't really exist in any ontologically real way. They certainly have no value, let alone ultimate value.

And of course, human beings are just another species, which is to say "nothing" -- just a temporary chance collection of random genetic mutations. Human beings are entirely contingent and accidental, and certainly cannot be regarded as some kind of "end point" of evolution. Obviously there can be no such thing as "humanness," for that implies an essence, and essences are strictly forbidden in Darwinism. Whatever humans are today is temporary -- they were something different yesterday and will be something different again tomorrow.

Given such a simplistic view, how could quintessentially human categories such as "manliness" actually exist? For that matter, one naturally wonders how truth could exist, including the truth of Darwinism. In other words, how can a being that is intrinsically transient and therefore relative, built on the shifting sand of unceasing genetic change, ever arrive at the immutable?

In reality, the gulf between humans and animals is not just vast, it is infinite. This is not to suggest that there are not continuities. Of course there are. But Darwinians fraudulently begin from the top-down (something their theory actually doesn't allow them to do) to explain the roots of human traits. In other words, they never start with a primitive animal and show how this or that trait will eventually transform into something "higher." Rather, they presuppose the higher, and try to find some rough analogue of it in a lower beast. In short, Darwinians accept the same intelligible hierarchy of being we all do, but simply deny it. They do not actually explain man's descent from animals, but simply project certain distinctly human traits onto animals, which explains nothing.

In reality, there is much more to our sexual differences than Darwinism can ever explain. Again, if we deconstruct human essence and locate its "parts" in the genetic past, we will be left with nothing more than an aggressive animal that will do anything to survive and reproduce, which really doesn't explain much. In order to understand the essential equilibrium between man and woman, there are at least three orders of being that must be analyzed, only one of which involves the "natural" world of Darwinism.

As Schuon points out, there is first the sexual, biological, psychological and social relationship, which no one would deny. But on top of that is the human and fraternal relationship, and finally "the properly spiritual and or sacred relationship." In the first relationship -- the only one that can be addressed by leftists, feminists, Darwinians, and secularists in general -- "there is obviously inequality, and from this results the social subordination of woman, a subordination already prefigured in her physical constitution and her psychology."

Again, this is where you are left with the narrow scientistic view of human beings. In order to transcend it, you must either evolve into a religious understanding or "make some shit up," which is what the secular left does -- for example, by denying the reality of these profound sexual differences with the word-magic of "gender."

But Schuon points out that this first relationship "is not everything," for in the dimension of essential humanness, "woman is equal to man since like him she belongs to the human species; this is the plane, not of subordination, but of friendship; and it goes without saying that on this level the wife may be superior to her husband since one human being may be superior to another, whatever the sex."

But the operative term is essential humanness, for here we are again talking about a transcendent essence which is both real and permanent -- and nothing which is permanent can be explained by the intrinsic transience of any temporary Darwinian adaptation. Or put it this way: no matter how de facto unequal men and women are as a result of the random and transient changes of Darwinian evolution, they are nevertheless eternally equal because they are human beings. This is a self-evident truth that can only be seen with the higher intellect, not one that could ever be arrived at through the application of Darwinian principles.

Now, a critical point is that in one limited sense, man and woman are more or less complementary, which implies partiality or incompleteness. But this too has a spiritual significance, being, for example, that "man stabilizes woman, [and] woman vivifies man." Elsewhere, Schuon notes that "Man, in his lunar and receptive aspect, 'withers away' without the woman-sun that infuses into the virile genius what it needs in order to blossom; inversely, man-sun confers on woman the light that permits her to realize her identity by prolonging the function of the sun."

But man and woman are not just complementary and therefore partial; rather, they are perfections, but of different archetypes. They are divine manifestations -- not in their "accidental or fallen state, but in [their] primordial and principial perfection." Thus, not only is there a human essence, but there is also a male and female essence, each of the latter representing the perfections of certain divine qualities. Looked at in this way, each sex is intrinsically perfect, something complete, whole, and not subject to fundamental change without rendering it false and ugly. As such, chastity, on its most profound level, is an "upward" escape "from the polarity of the sexes and a reintegration of the unity of the primordial pontifex, of man as such." Only on this higher level does man contain woman within himself, and vice versa

This is why it is such a great abomination for one sex to take on the attributes of the other except as something added to the essence -- and only after one's essence has been realized. One must first be a man before a gentleman -- let alone something from the complementary sex. It is also why "homosexual marriage" represents such a monstrosity -- literally. Nothing could be more nihilisitic, for again, it presupposes that man is just "anything" and therefore nothing. Either we have an essential being -- which includes sex -- or we are nothing. And if we are nothing, it hardly matters if a man marries a man, a woman, or a watermelon.

In the third relationship -- the properly spiritual or sacred -- there is, paradoxically, a kind of "reciprocal superiority": "in love... the woman assumes in regard to her husband a divine function, as does the man in regard to the woman." For on this level, the adoration of the essence of the other is "a search for the Essence or the lost paradise."

Something which is "totally itself" is incapable of change, whereas something transient can only change, with no direction, goal or purpose. The human being is capable of humanness -- of discovering his true vocation -- because he is what he is but not altogether so. If he were simply a Darwinian machine, he would be a something, but a temporary and transient something, which is indistinguishible from nothing. Only humans can become themselves because they are simultaneously what they are and what they ought to be. And a human who fails to transcend himself and become what he ought to be is not even an animal. He is nothing. A gender. Or worse, a gender studies professor.

The ambiguity of the human state is that we are as it were suspended between God -- our essence -- and the human form, which is "made of clay"; we are so to speak a mixture of divinity and dust.... Hell is as it were the revolt of the cipher, of the nothingness that seeks to be all. When a man turns away from his divine Essence, his ego becomes like a stone dragging him downwards, and his Essence turns away from him; what then fills this vacuum is the dark essence, that of formal compression and the fall. -- F. Schuon