I repeated the quote near the end of our seven hours together, outside the Austin pizza place where Kitsch had unironically ordered a gluten-free pie ("I feel like shit when I eat a ton of bread," he explains) and a couple witbiers ("Wheat is my favorite").
~ For MSI, via Hopkins: Muriel Spark with some politics and power.
~ Alan Jacobs is one of two living people (who I am not friends with) that I'd dream of having to a dinner party. I love this: "Embrace the Pain: Living with the Repugnant Cultural Other." That reminds me: Some day we must begin to throw dinner parties again. These days it's really only brunch, and that is too rare.
~ Al-Qaeda's Chick Lit
~ A Minister for Loneliness
~ On Frankenstein--great piece--I forgot that Muriel Spark wrote about Mary Shelley.
~ "Scandinavian Women Do Not Have It All." I've been thinking about this a lot lately--it seems like Shulamith Firestone was on to something: Sexual inequality seems to be impossible to eliminate without outsourcing reproduction.
6 comments:
Wasn't this Plato's discovery somewhat before Firestone's? You can't have female guardians without the community of women and children.
Ha--"somewhat before."
Yes, but she goes further--even the work of reproduction itself--like bearing the child--introduces inequality and should be outsourced through technology. I guess that was beyond even Plato's imagination.
Yes, I think he went as far as he could go technologically. But the principle is already there- you can’t have true equality unless you can find a way to radically outsource childrearing. The problem of gestation is of a piece once you've grasped the larger issue. I point this out to my students when we read The Republic, and they grasp the point immediately, and get very upset and try mightily to argue their way out of the dilemma with things like, "But if father just contributed equally..."
Interesting--so you think that the issue is child rearing, not child-bearing that's the important point? I think that it is child-bearing that makes it unlikely that the father can contribute equally--for instance, breastfeeding makes it easier for a mother to placate a kid generally than a father. Then you fall into certain habits of care that are gendered, etc.
I mean, formula solves some of this. But that's a countercultural choice these days.
I think childbearing may only be a species of the larger childrearing problem. Raising children directs your attention away from the public good and to your private good, regardless of whether it's done by men or women. In the Republic, for example, why can't we just divide up childcare between mothers and fathers and avoid the whole community of women and children? Because guardianship requires one's full and constant attention. Dividing up the childcare would mean that both men and women will be too distracted by private cares to be guardians, instead of women alone. Hence, outsourcing of all childcare beyond what is minimally required by lack of substitute technology (birth and nursing) to professional nurses (who, incidentally, will include men, according to Socrates). That the female guardians have to be pregnant and give birth does handicap them slightly relative to the men, but if it could be avoided with technology, I think that would fit easily into the scheme of the Republic given how committed Socrates is to minimizing all procreation-related burdens for guardians. The Noble Lie itself teaches citizens that they are born from an artificial womb - the earth - so I think all the philosophical groundwork for Firestone's argument is already there.
Yeah, so the difference between Plato and Firestone is in their end--for Plato it is in the unity of the city; for Firestone it is in the elimination of inequality between men and women (presumably so they can pursue their own ends rather than just the common good).
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