Counter-Currents
Camille Paglia & the Consciousness-Light Day of Western Man
Ricardo Duchesne
3,871 words
Camille Paglia infuriated feminists when she observed in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) that males – as biological beings – are responsible for the development of civilized life and most of the world’s cultural creativity. What no one has wanted to say is that the implicit argument throughout Sexual Personae is that only white males have possessed the Apollonian rationality that “has taken us to the stars.”
Paglia says “males,” but whenever she writes about male achievement she always refers to the creativity of “western life and thought.” Behind this discrepancy – between Paglia’s declaratory statements and actual argumentation – lies a lack of differentiation between the generic civilizations created by males around the world (who never fully affirmed their masculine otherness against the unconscious power of the Great Mother) and the ancient Greek civilization created by Indo-European males (who fully crystallized and detached their masculine consciousness from the “feminine” unconscious).
Consciousness, as such, is masculine, but consciousness of consciousness is a trait singular to European males, and the roots of this trait lie in the hyper-patriarchal world of Indo-European pastoralists. That there was a fundamental difference between the societies created by Aryans with their dominant masculine sky gods, and the generic civilizations of the East with their “harmonious balance” between their agricultural and maternal fertility goddesses and their sky gods, was long suspected but subsequently suppressed by academics after the Second World War. We can refer here in passing to the most renowned Catholic historian, Christopher Dawson, who observed in a book, The Age of Gods, published in 1928, that the Indo-Europeans who conquered Old Europe (fully permeated by fertility goddesses and matrilineal inheritance) were progenitors of “a new type of society – that of the nomadic pastoral tribe – based on the combination of the life of the hunter with that of the shepherd . . . a culture . . . possessing a higher degree of mobility and a greater aptitude for war,” “patriarchal and aristocratic,” in which “the masculine element everywhere predominates” and in which the leading males are “concerned not so much with the Earth as with . . . the powers of Heaven – the Sky, the Sun, and the Storm – that take the first place in his worship.”
Neumann on the “Hero Myth” and the Origins of Consciousness
Paglia went along with the academic unwillingness to differentiate Indo-European societies from generic Eastern civilizations. She drew from Erich Neumann the idea that the development of civilization entails the detachment of the male ego from the unconscious world of fertility goddesses, and that this process of masculinization results in the development of consciousness. In using the term “ego consciousness,” Neumann had in mind Carl Jung’s identification of the component of the psyche that is responsible for decision-making. Being ego-conscious means that one is aware of one’s identity as a separate being in charge of one’s thoughts, capable of distinguishing the inner and the outer world, in contrast to that part of the personality that is driven by unconscious primal forces.
Neumann constructed a highly complicated account of the evolution of ego-consciousness in his fascinating book, The Origins and History of Consciousness, originally published in German in 1949. He demarcated a number of stages in the evolution of consciousness, beginning with the Uroboros stage, “when the ego is contained in the unconscious,” followed by the intermediary stages of the World Creation, the Great Mother, the Separation of the World Parents, and then a sequence of stages coming after the Birth of the Hero, which is the stage when the ego initiates its detachment from the unconscious world of totemism and from the fertility mysteries of the Great Mother. While there is a lot more to Neumann, it might be correct to say – at least insofar as we are interested in connecting his ideas to Paglia’s focus on the Great Mother – that in all stages prior to the Birth of the Hero, the male ego barely exists, men are under the tutelage of mysterious forces they barely comprehend, they don’t have a mind of their own, and they can barely distinguish themselves from the external world of objects and the group to which they belong, but instead project their inner psychic contents to natural objects, overwhelmed by the fertility powers of nature, fearful and childlike.
Before their self-emancipation from the Great Mother, males are dependent on the fullness and abundance of the good mother, the nutrient earth, and the comforts of being attached to nature. Their ego consciousness, in the words of Neumann, is “undeveloped and still embedded in nature.” With their maturation and eventual emancipation, males make themselves “the responsible center of the cosmos.” Civilizations are created by great male individuals – the chiefs, medicine men, or divine kings – who announce that on them “depends the rising of the sun, the fertility of the crops.” As men emancipate themselves from fertility goddesses, they go on to create their own male divinities, patriarchal, sky-gods standing above the earth.
Neumann knows that one does not find everywhere in the world’s cultures “all the stages of conscious development,” and that the rise of ego-consciousness is strictly a phenomenon brought about by men trying to demonstrate their maleness by making their ego the headquarters of decision-making. He knows, too, that the emancipation of the ego reached its highest levels in the West and that the “correlation of consciousness with masculinity culminates in the development of [Western] science.” Yet he does not consider the possibility that different cultures and civilizations may have achieved different levels of masculinization and emancipation of the ego. He does not think through the fact that the West reached higher levels of ego emancipation because it reached higher levels of masculinization, and higher levels of separation from the Great Mother. He does note that even after the birth of the hero and the rise of civilizations, men “may still submit to the great chthonic fertility goddess . . . because of the Great Mother’s dominance in the masculine unconscious.” But overall his view is that “it is no accident that all human culture, and not Western civilization alone, is masculine in character.”
What if the heroic myth took on a more intensive form, expressing higher levels of masculinization and ego development, in the Indo-European world? The “birth of the hero” is central to Neumann’s argument about the birth of consciousness. This is a myth about how young men discover themselves through the formation of warrior bands operating outside their matrilineal conditions. In joining these bands, a young man subjects himself to trials of endurance that test his virility, the stability of his ego, and their capacity to overcome fear, hunger, and pain, “to master one’s unconscious impulses and childish fears.” Neumann writes of the “hero myth” as a cross-cultural phenomenon. He does not consider whether some cultures may have been more obsessed with heroism, or whether in some cultures there were more opportunities for individual heroism, and thus for the “marking off of the ego from the anonymous collective.”
He writes generically about how the ego, which is inherently masculine, increases in strength as it marks itself off from the collective unconscious of the Great Mother. He writes about how men become aware of their “individuality,” which is male in essence, through the performance of actions initiated by them, against the enveloping world of unconscious longing for motherly safety, fighting against tiredness, learning “to overcome the body and the inertia of the unconscious,” and fortifying the male ego against the demands of the body, which are inevitably experienced “as feminine.” Through initiation and self-chosen deeds, males “are reborn as children of the spirit rather than of the mother; they are sons of heaven, not just sons of the earth.” The hero becomes the “higher man,” which leads to a correlation between heaven and masculinity, and to patriarchal gods.
Paglia mentions Neumann a few times in the opening chapters of Sexual Personae, but in reference to his better-known book, The Great Mother (1951). She acknowledges the influence of Neumann in an article published in 2006. This article is descriptive. A critical assessment of Neumann’s scholarship is beyond my competence. One must be heavily steeped in the psychology of Carl Jung. I will say that in the degree to which Neumann accepts the universality of the myth of the hero, he draws no differences between Indo-European myths and the “hero myth” of other cultures. He commingles multiple stories, preferring to focus on their common archetypal meaning. While Neumann uses the word “psychological stages” in the subtitle, there are no clear historical references and demarcations in regards to these stages. While he is aware of the continued existence of “stationary cultures . . . where . . . the earliest stages of man’s psychology predominate,” in stark contrast to the full development of ego consciousness in the West, he does not consider the implications this dramatic contrast in the development of consciousness may have for a theory that speaks about human consciousness rather than Western consciousness. Paglia, too, writes generally about “earth-cult” and “sky-cult” cultures.
Hyper-Masculinization Process of the Indo-Europeans
I believe that only Indo-Europeans witnessed a complete differentiation and crystallization of the masculine ego consciousness. By “Indo-European” I mean a pastoral people from the Pontic-Caspian steppes who initiated the most mobile, patriarchal, and heroic way of life in prehistoric times. They were the first people to ride horses and rely heavily on wheeled vehicles in the fourth millennium. They were responsible for the “secondary-products” revolution – which is about making the most of animal husbandry, making dairy products, eating meat, harnessing animals for transportation, engaging in large-scale herding, and inventing chariots – in the second millennium. They were the only true aristocratic people in history in that all the leading men were equal in nobility and never acted submissive in their relations with the paramount chief or king. They were grouped into war bands that were freely constituted associations operating in partial autonomy from tribal and matrilineal ties. These bands could be initiated by any powerful individual on the merits of one’s martial abilities. The relation between the chief and his followers was personal and contractual: The followers would volunteer to be bound to the leader by oaths of loyalty in which they would promise to assist him while the leader would promise to reward them from successful raids.
These “groups of comrades” were singularly dedicated to “wolf-like” living by hunting and raiding, and to the performance of heroic deeds. They were driven not only by economic needs but by a deep-seated psychological need to demonstrate they were no longer fearful boys in a state of motherly dependence, or weak men consumed by the feminine fear of death. Their noble status was proven through manly struggle and the risking of one’s life in a battle to the death for individual glory. Although band members belonged to a cohesive and loyal group of like-minded individuals, they were not swallowed up anonymously within the group. They developed “individualizing chiefdoms” in which the status of the chiefs was linked to the pursuit of heroic deeds in warfare and the accumulation of prestige goods in exchange networks, in contrast to the group-oriented chiefdoms of the East, where the elite males were effeminate in their subservience to despotic and fertility-oriented rulers and in which wealth was accumulated primarily through a collective agrarian economy. The self-discovery of the ego by males was limited or stalled in Eastern despotic chiefdoms. Man acquires full dignity, honor, and self-determination only in a state of aristocratic egalitarianism.
Paglia’s Masculine-Apollonian Culture of Western Civilization
Paglia does not write about Indo-Europeans, though she is aware that ancient Greek civilization was more heavily infused with masculine sky gods and was far more creative than any other ancient culture. She does observe that Eastern cultures “retained the ancient meanings of femaleness long after the west renounced them”; she notes as well that “the last major western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete,” and that a Mycenaean “warrior culture” with a “sky cult” replaced Minoan culture and lay the foundations for ancient classical Greece. (It should be noted here that Mycenae was founded by Indo-European invaders who superimposed themselves on natives who venerated the earth and goddesses of fertility). She also observes that “compliance” with nature was the norm in the East, as opposed to Western “confrontation”; and she notes, too, that the “sky-cult and earth-cult were harmonized” in Egypt, whereas in Greece there was a split, with the sky gods in a position of dominance.
Despite these acute observations, and her almost singular attribution of cultural “greatness” to Western civilization, Paglia’s declaratory statements are always about the biological differences between males and females as such. “All the genres of philosophy, science, high art, athletics, and politics were invented by men.” She knows that “everything great in western civilization has come from a struggle against our origins” in nature, against the “mother-cult,” and she knows that only Western man refused to reconcile with nature, however impossible it is to escape nature. But her intellectual struggle was directly against the feminist refusal to accept biological differences between the sexes, so she framed her thesis statement in gender terms, rather than in ethnic terms, along with her own sympathies for multiculturalism. In our current times, when academics are dedicated to the replacement of white culture with diversity, we must be up front in stating that the incipient argument in Paglia is about the uniquely Apollonian will-to-power of white males.
The Great Mother
Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae emanates an incandescent, luminous Western masculine light. Neumann says that consciousness “is masculine even in women, just as the unconscious is feminine in men.” “Woman feels at home in her unconscious and out of her element in consciousness.” Paglia is a rare woman who feels at home in her consciousness. She attributes the immense creativity of the West to the “Apollonian mind” of males as such. This mind has the “delusional certitude” that it can push back and defeat the primordial darkness of daemonic nature “by naming and classifying,” by using “the cold light of intellect.” In all tribal cultures, women were identified with nature, “femaleness was honored as an immanent principle of fertility.” Civilized life, urbanity and commerce was made possible through the suppression of the violent, unconscious, subterranean hostility, and repetitive cycles of nature. “All cultural achievement is a projection,” she writes, and only men “are anatomically destined to be projectors.” Men are genetically
condemned to a perpetual pattern of linearity, focus, aim, directness . . . Without aim, urination and ejaculation end in infantile soiling of self or surroundings . . . Men are in a constant state of sexual anxiety, living on the pins and needles of their hormones. In sex as in life they are driven beyond – beyond the self, beyond the body . . . They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content . . . They must quest, pursue, court, or seize . . . Women have conceptualized less in history not because men have kept them from doing so but because women do not need to conceptualize in order to exist.
Female anatomy is closer to nature, absorbed by the cycles of nature. Women do “not dream of transcendental or historical escape from natural cycle, since she is that cycle.”
Women’s body is a sea acted upon by the month’s lunar wave-motion. Sluggish and dormant, her fatty tissues are gorged with water, then suddenly cleansed at hormonal high tide . . . Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of women’s sexuality. Every pregnant woman has a body and self taken over by a chthonian force beyond her control.
But Paglia’s thesis is that we can never escape the power of nature. Men were able to liberate their consciousness from the chthonian darkness of primal times, and create civilized life through their rationalism, but the energy of nature, the “chaos of the libido,” remains. However “spectacular” the “glory of male civilization” has been (“which has lifted women with it”), and however much nature has been conceptualized and managed by males, and the primal sexual drives socialized into conventional marriages, we are delusional to think that nature can be nurtured out of existence. “Nature has a master agenda we can only dimly know.” We can never transcend the power of nature, the chthonian drama of female sexuality, and the lifelong anxiety males have fighting off “effeminacy day by day” in their quest to prove they are good at being men.
Paglia’s argument is that artistic creativity has been spurred on by this struggle between the Apollonian personality of “the west’s absolutist ego structure” and the Dionysian fusion of male and female, between the orderly world of scientific classifications and the primal forces of sexual nature. Although “there is neither person, thought, thing, nor art in the brutal chthonian,” and although it was the West’s Apollonian “individuation” that produced “the west’s greatness,” this greatness was not a product of peaceful and calmed ratiocination; the “mechanistic male drive in western culture” has always come along with “phallic aggression” and sexual anxiety. Paglia celebrates “woman’s ancient mystery and glamour.” She admires the permanent sexual power women will always have over men.
Apollo: God of the Sun and Light
Notwithstanding Greek and Roman classicism, “clarity, order, proportion, balance,” and the fact that the sky-cult “kept nature in her place,” the pagans did not try to suppress sexual nature; they sought to give it form and promote female beauty. “Apollonian high glamour,” under the influence of the Egyptians, was aimed at fighting off the impersonal facelessness of primitive sex and the formlessness of the fecund female body. Christianity tried to defeat this pagan beautification of female sexuality, but it failed; and while “Western civilization has profited enormously from the sublimation Christianity forced on sex,” paganism survived in Western art, “in the thousand forms of sex, art, and now the modern media.” This has been a spur to Western creativity along with the never-to-be defeated power of nature’s chaos. The greatness of Western civilization has entailed a constant struggle of Apollonian man against nature and the permanence of the unconscious.
Paglia says that Egypt “forged the formalistic Apollonian line . . . invented glamour, beauty as power and power as beauty.” “The masculine art form of construction begins in Egypt.” “The ideal human figure in Egypt is a pillar . . . The body is an obelisk, square, phallic, sky-pointing, an Apollonian line defying time and organic change.” “Egyptian art is . . . based on the incised edge . . . Its hardness of surface repels the eye. This masculine hardness is an abolition of female interiority.” But once this Apollonian idea entered Europe through Greece, she believes it remained “the principal distinction between western and eastern culture.” As much as she eulogizes Egypt’s invention of elegance, she readily admits that “Egyptian culture flourished relatively unchanged for three thousand years . . . Stagnancy, a stultifying lack of individualism” were the norm. Why?
Her answer seems to be that “in Greece Apollo and Dionysus were at odds, but in Egypt they were reconciled. Egyptian art was a fusion of the conceptual with the chthonian, the form-making of consciousness and the shadowy flux of procreative nature.” “Chthonian mysteries are the secret of Egypt’s perennial fascination. The gross and barbaric proliferated.” I can’t judge Paglia’s assessment of Egypt’s Apollonian contribution in the arts. The Egyptian contributions to mathematics and geometry, I can say, was practical and elementary, without a single contribution to philosophy, political theory, literature, music, law, and theoretical science. Basically, Egypt’s contribution consisted in being one of the first civilizations to use plows, intense irrigation works, writing, pottery, glassmaking, and metalworking.
The passages I have cited from Paglia come from the first three chapters of Sexual Personae: “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art,” “The Birth of the Western Eye,” and “Apollo and Dionysus.” I read these chapters some years ago without really appreciating how they could be integrated into a discussion of Western uniqueness. I have yet to read the rest of the book’s study of major Western works in poetry and literature. In her direct declarations about “western greatness” and her choice of literature, Sexual Personae is inescapably about the Western male and the Western female, Western form and Western chaos, Western civilization and Western daemonic nature, rather than about these words without the word “Western,” as everyone else thinks.
Crisis of Western Consciousness
We have reached a “critical point,” Paglia observes, in the reassertion of paganism to a degree beyond the periodic Dionysian discharges of the Renaissance and Romantic eras, “with the rebirth of the gods in the massive idolatries of popular cultures, with the eruptions of sex and violence into every corner of the ubiquitous mass media.” Neumann, in a rather different way – possibly because he was writing in the late 1940s, before the Dionysian exuberance of the 1960s – believes that the “crisis of the West” was due to the excessive inflation of the ego at the cost of a more harmonious integration of the conscious side of the personality with the unconscious side. He agrees with Paglia, using Jungian terminology, that the “connection of the conscious system with the emotionally toned substrata of the unconscious alone makes creativity possible.” The higher emancipation of the Western male ego did not mean that the unconscious world of archetypes lost its power over consciousness. The unconscious has always been a driving force lurking behind the emancipating ego. The difference is that Western man became more aware of his ego, his own self-determined thoughts, feelings, and actions. It is not that he got rid of the unconscious. The archetypes continue to inhabit his mind, exercising their influence indirectly through the collective unconscious.
At the same time, without the emancipation of the ego, Carl Jung would not have been able to discover that each of us is born with personal memories as well as memories about the collective experiences of one’s ancestors, shared archetypes that are particular to a culture or a people, as well as universal archetypes that concern the historical memory of humanity. The crisis Neumann has in mind concerns the “overaccentuation of consciousness, ego, and reason” in the West. He believes that “the differentiating and emotion-repressing trend of Western development” is now having “a sterilizing effect [that is hampering] the widening of consciousness.” The ego and the unconscious are split in Western man, rather than being in healthy contact, forming a psychic wholeness. The atomized individuals of the West don’t have a connection to a shared unconscious, based on traditions and shared archetypes, but are instead units of a mass society, individuals forming a pseudo-unity through a national state in charge of mass propaganda; and while they may surrender their egos to this mass, surrendering the self in an orgy of mass participations, this re-collectivization is nihilistic and destructive. Neumann was thinking of National Socialism.
We should be thinking about how the coupling of modernity with race-mixing and multiculturalism have weakened the unconscious and primordial aspects of our Indo-European heritage, the very heroic figures who began the emancipation of the ego. Current Jungians want a globalized generic species that integrates in a harmonious way the ego of modernity with universal archetypes that belong to the historical memory of humanity. We should be talking about how race-mixing threatens with extinction the racially differentiated archetypes Jung recognized in the respective psyches of European cultures.
This article was reprinted from the Council of European Canadians Website.
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42 comments
males – as biological beings – are responsible for the development of civilized life and most of the world’s cultural creativity.
I don’t see how this is any less obnoxious for the fact that a woman said it.
Indeed, I don’t see any reason for anyone to say this unless the point is to lay the foundation for repressive policies that disadvantage women.
Even if you assume that males are superior in every which way whatsoever, it remains the case that intensive mothering is required for helpless human infants with disproportionately large heads to survive to reproductive age. Like it or not, men and women are partners in civilization, and we are not going to settle for less than an equal share in the benefits and privileges thereof.
Moreover, if our contributions as caretakers are sneered at and devalued, it should come as no surprise that we demand access to traditionally male roles.
You are literally “missing the forest by concentrating on the trees” here.
Paglia has stated several times “If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”. What goes unsaid, is that without the need to attract women, secure women , provide for women and provide for the children of women; men would also still be living in grass huts.
If men build civilizations, then women are the reason. Each sex plays an important role.
This isn’t a denigration of women. It’s pointing out the truth about the sexual roles of human beings.
“Intensive mothering” =/= high civilization or creativity. No one around here is sneering the contribution of women to society as caretakers. You need to outgrow such knee-jerk feminist indignation.
If women ruled the world we’d all be living in caves with nice curtains. Not totally being sarcastic but I don’t see women doing much to maintain civilization other than blame [white] men for all their problems.
And, likewise, white men shouldn’t blame others for theirs.
If women ruled the world we’d all be living in caves with nice curtains.
A totally speculative and unfalsifiable claim.
“Intensive mothering” =/= high civilization or creativity.
I never said it did. I am saying it is a necessary condition for civilization, therefore it is false that men alone “are responsible for the development of civilized life.”
This isn’t a denigration of women.
Oh yes, you’re not denigrating me; you’re just saying I’m less human than you insofar as you alone are responsible for all that separates humanity from lower life forms.
Spare me.
Now that women enjoy the privilege of education, you will never revive the old dichotomies that equate women with the physical and men with the spiritual. My own homeschooled sons would find the notion that that they have become curious and creative in spite of my influence rather than because of it to be quite preposterous.
Lexi, No one stated women were less than human. I stated that men and women are very different and without each other both sexes would be living in squalor.
I did state that men build civilizations for women.
If facts about human sexual roles and civilization bother you, than there is nothing left to discuss.
“I never said it did. I am saying it is a necessary condition for civilization, therefore it is false that men alone “are responsible for the development of civilized life.””
Other conditions are also necessary for the development of civilization, such as the existence of the sun. That does not make the sun the co-creator of civilization.
There will always be female outliers, like Paglia. However, by encouraging and defending women’s independent pursuit of “power, wealth and status” you are destroying what you have rightly called a necessary condition for civilization– “intensive motherhood.” No professional woman can intensively mother their child. Do you see the problem?
Additionally, as you apparently haven’t read Paglia, you seem to be talking past those of us who have. If you’re going to be outraged, let that outrage be informed. If you don’t wish to read the whole of Sexual Personae, several noteworthy chapters were listed in the essay above. Depending on the age of your homeschooled sons, the entire work would make for them an excellent education. As would Paglia’s Break, Blow, Burn, but in a narrower sense.
Other conditions are also necessary for the development of civilization, such as the existence of the sun. That does not make the sun the co-creator of civilization.
Of course, the sun is a material object rather than a sentient being capable of asserting its rights. It is very telling that you compare human women with such. In that light, I will certainly not be taking any advice from you concerning how to raise and educate my sons.
However, by encouraging and defending women’s independent pursuit of “power, wealth and status”
So long as you indicate your refusal to accord motherhood the honor it deserves, I will indeed go on defending women’s independent pursuit of status, wealth, and power. Women should dedicate their lives to raising a family only with a man who deserves it, which sadly excludes the majority of of pro-White men. Or perhaps it’s just a very loud, obnoxious minority.
I find it curious that you demand exclusive privileges for men based on the mere fact of being the same sex. I’m certain I have more in common with Socrates than my mechanic, yet only he shares in the credit for the development of Western philosophy.
Another question for you, from a purely pragmatic point of view: Given that half of the White race is female, do you think that this obnoxious chest-thumping helps or hurts the cause of White solidarity?
“Of course, the sun is a material object rather than a sentient being capable of asserting its rights. It is very telling that you compare human women with such.”
No, I didn’t compare women as women to material objects, only the role of “intensive mothering” in the creation of civilization. Regardless, I could think of instances in which I would compare men to material objects. It was an analogy, one that’s offensive to you only because you’ve been conditioned to react this way. Do you really think Socrates would behave as you have? You emote first, reason later, and display no honest engagement with the ideas presented by Paglia or Duchesne.
“So long as you indicate your refusal to accord motherhood the honor it deserves, I will indeed go on defending women’s independent pursuit of status, wealth, and power.”
You’re cutting off the nose to spite the face. You want to destroy motherhood in response to a perceived sleight or lack of credit, which we both seem to agree would hamper civilization. That is not a rational response. In the most stereotypical sense, it’s a very womanly response.
“I find it curious that you demand exclusive privileges for men based on the mere fact of being the same sex. I’m certain I have more in common with Socrates than my mechanic, yet only he shares in the credit for the development of Western philosophy.”
I’m not an egalitarian, but you also haven’t seen me “demand exclusive privileges for men,” certainly not based on the fact that I am one. Also, I don’t think your mechanic “shares in the credit for the development of philosophy.” That’s not what Paglia suggests, either. You seem fraught with anxiety about your own status.
“Another question for you, from a purely pragmatic point of view: Given that half of the White race is female, do you think that this obnoxious chest-thumping helps or hurts the cause of White solidarity?”
If I’ve been chest-thumping, I suppose Phyllis Schlafly sidelined as He-Man. God help us.
Men build civilizations isn’t this just common sense why are you triggered ?
Thank you for saying that. Until white women begin to acknowledge this, their contributions to dissident politics will be nil. (See Lexi’s comments above for proof.)
You evidently believe that White women are privileged. Let me ask you, which of your privileges would you allow men to take away from you, or threaten to ake away from you, before you would feel justified in raising an objection?
“…Like it or not, men and women are partners in civilization, and we are not going to settle for less than an equal share in the benefits and privileges thereof…”
We men don’t deny that you women are “partners in civilization” and that you are entitled to “an equal share in the benefits and privileges thereof”. What we do say is that when it comes to creating civilization that has always been the work of men, and that is not likely to change, so much so, that if men didn’t exist (an impossible premise of course) there would not exist any civilization at all. That may hurt the feminist ego, but that is the truth. Women have other talents, and those lie in the spheres of relations, marriage and motherhood, without which mankind wouldn’t even exist in the first place. If you want “equality” it would be complementary equality and not identical equality.
Women have other talents, and those lie in the spheres of relations, marriage and motherhood, without which mankind wouldn’t even exist in the first place. If you want “equality” it would be complementary equality and not identical equality.
So here we get to the crux of the matter. If I am not misunderstanding you, you are saying that women should be categorically excluded, possibly in favor of inferior men to herself, from professional employment. I appreciate your forthrightness.
In other words, you would disregard women’s now well-established record of success in, just for example, law and medicine, direct evidence of our abilities, in favor of mythical abstractions about who really “built civilization.” I’m sorry, but it sounds to me like you are just grasping at straws to justify your desire to hoard all the power, wealth, and status for men only, regardless of their accomplishments.
I am not without sympathy with your view that motherhood is women’s highest calling, but if you want women to embrace motherhood, male triumphalism such as that on display in this article is certainly not the way to go about it. This article reduces human motherhood to that of any mammal that feeds and warms her young. This is wildly inaccurate as well as deeply insulting.
What this article says is not inconsistent with your view that women are capable of reaching high levels in many professions, so long as it is understood that men were the ones who built civilization, and the ones who achieve the highest.
And correct me if I’m wrong, but if we value intelligence, that is all the more reason to redomesticate women so that we can breed more intelligent people for future generations. And therefore, encouraging women to go into the professions on the basis that they are just as intelligent as men is self-contradictory because they cannot have babies and be devoted mothers at the same time. And there can be no response that they can have success in extra-familial pursuits and be productive mothers because this is simply not borne out by what we see today where large amounts graduate women fail to have children: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1549297/Third-of-graduate-women-will-be-childless.html
Professor Duchesne, I have had the honor and pleasure of interacting with numerous exceptional men in my life, and the overwhelming majority of them have treated me with great respect and collegiality. Not a single one has ever felt compelled to convince me that “men built civilization” or that “men achieve the highest.” Not a single one. Why do you feel the need to do so?
One of the unfortunate things about being a dissident woman is seeing a side of men that is not particularly flattering.
To Civilization Builder:
If you want to make an argument that women shouldn’t be allowed access to the professions on account of the fact that our reproductive and caretaking labor is necessary to prevent dysgenic fertility, be my guest.
However, you cannot have it both ways. Motherhood is either a pillar of civilization or it is not. If it is, then any attempt to claim sole credit for civilization on your part is out of line. If it is not, you have no legitimate interest in “redomesticating” us.
In any event, we are always told that we are over the hill and unfit for childbearing at 35, still plenty young enough to have a professional career if we so desire.
Good.
Motherhood should be viewed as the female pillar of civilization (their essential and greatest contribution).
Right. Although they should be kept out of politics and government. And I genuinely believe that since men and women have different brains we should try to maintain all-male organizations and all-female organizations wherever possible, and not mix them.
This is why it’s better to focus on Warriorship than muh civilization.
White Judeo-Christian cucks will never get it.
“One of the unfortunate things about being a dissident woman is seeing a side of men that is not particularly flattering”
No it’s not flattering, in fact it’s barbaric and primal, But it is what women want apparently.
Don’t lie and say you don’t want a man to assert his dominance over you.
You wouldn’t have argued this much if it weren’t to fulfill some emotional need you have whatever it is only you know.
Women are(besides a slim minority), inferior to men Intellectually. It’s funny how you bring up that only now women could receive an education, as if we had been pulling wool over your eyes.
Get real, just because women didn’t attend university does not mean that they were uneducated.
It seems like you have been indoctrinated and need to reevaluate your core beliefs, because they are trash and hold little to no weight.
The day is soon coming where ethnically European men, and the Muslim and Mexican men(white women so joyfully voted to come to our countries post haste), are going to come together and stop this insanity of women leading, working and voting. We will then have you women back in the home where we can honor you, provide and protect you.
We will become good fathers to our daughters and protect thier virtue.
The woman question is just as big a deal as the Jewish question, the former we are learning how to answer, the latter is an enigma and requires much thought before any action.
I cant believe that you are trying to argue this ! literally everything that has ever been invented has been invented by men, all the greatest philosophers and great works of art men ! Every road every building ever built men ! Every war ever fought men ! Women’s contributions to law ?? You mean family court and the Duluth model way to go ladies !!
Nice article. Without doubt European culture is unique.
Young white men should go to art school, drama school or music school. They should get out of the sterile suburbs and learn how to embrace urban chaos (without losing Apollonian order). They should learn how to feed the god inside themselves. As Pound said, culture is left over after you forgot what you tried to learn. Culture is learned instinct.
I wish more people would talk about this. I am still trying to wrap my head around this stuff.
I too believe that there is something unique about he western male. (And I have read Neumann as well). But it is hard to put a finger on it. Duchesne may have the best approach I have yet found.
The consequences are quite staggering, so it pays to keep searching. Worst case, it could mean that when the white race goes extinct, that this will be the end of reason as well. Talk about butchering the hen that lays golden eggs…
Paglia is relentlessly anti-WASP and believes all kinds of nonsense about the Third Reich. She considers the pinnacle of scholarly learning to be the “rabbinic”. Neumann was a Jew who, as noted in the article of Paglia’s linked in this essay, researched eighteenth-century Hasidism and cabalism, and wrote a dissertation on Johann Arnold Kanne, who was influenced by Jewish mysticism. In the same essay, Paglia also writes Neumann’s “first published book was Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1949), which interpreted the “scapegoating” of the Nazi era as a projection of repressed cultural and psychological forces”.
In other words, junk science and marking Neumann as an authority on Jewish consciousness, not Aryan. Laurent Guyenot’s new essay at Unz, ‘The Crucifixion of the Goddess’ is far more convincing in indicating the real psychosis of such anti-feminine consciousness when he writes, “It can be argued that the worship of the great motherly Goddess fostered the sense of the universal brotherhood of men, in a way that no male divinity could do. Perhaps that is why Yahweh hated Asherah so much.”
In other words, junk science and marking Neumann as an authority on Jewish consciousness, not Aryan.
It’s all very predictable. The misogynists have been unable to justify their desired backlash against women based on empirical observations of women’s behavior, so they resort to unfalsifiable counterfactuals (“If women ruled the world, we’d be living in caves” etc.) and equally unfalsifiable psychobabble about our motivations (“driven by unconscious impulses.”) The misogynists want to change the subject from empirical questions about women’s behavior vis a vis men to mythical questions about our nature.
But we know how white women vote compared to white men. I would argue that women are much more susceptible to media manipulation and social shaming. They also tend to be the bigger virtue signalers. Jews know this and target white women relentlessly with propaganda. I assume that everyone here values women and the many important roles they play in furthering our people. However, women have a psychological vulnerability that is not as prevalent in men and our enemies exploit it ruthlessly. It is understandable that some may resent this vulnerability, but the resentment is misplaced, imo. Women are what they are. The anger should be directed at our real foes. Is it misandry to acknowledge that men are more prone to these violent outbursts that only serve to hurt white nationalism?
But we know how white women vote compared to white men.
And one could argue that your excessive loyalty to the Republican party has enabled their ongoing abuse of White voters. If you had voted more like working class White women, you may have been able to control the party rather than being used and taken for granted by it.
However, women have a psychological vulnerability that is not as prevalent in men and our enemies exploit it ruthlessly.
They shouldn’t be in a position to exploit it.
And in any event, men also have psychological vulnerabilities they can exploit, namely your greedy demand for cheap labor and your greater willingness to support wars for Israel that deplete the blood and treasure of the nation.
The balance for women’s weaknesses is men’s vote; the balance for men’s weaknesses is women’s vote.
Mainstream conservative liberalism is controlled opposition so to speak, and the sooner it dies the better. I have no loyalty to the Republican party, but Republican voters are probably the most likely to support a national populist reformation. Regardless, white women tend to be weaker on immigration policy than white men.
True. Men must ultimately take the brunt of the responsibility since hard power is our realm. But in democracies, soft power centers exert more control than a lot of people realize. The question is, are men or women more easily swayed by the ones who hold soft power?
The white men who demand cheap labor are a tiny minority compared to the greater bulk of white men who are in favor of immigration restriction. They just have more influence. While wars for Israel are a problem in and of themselves, they don’t necessarily have anything directly to do with immigration policy or white birth rates. That is, it would theoretically be possible to be both a white nationalist country and a military stooge for Israel.
Okay. I’ve never held white men to be blameless. However, women are more liberal than men. When the nurturing nature of women is used for the benefit of our people, that can be a very good thing. But this nurturing nature can be exploited and used to serve our enemies.
A Jew, but if you take Carl Jung’s ideas seriously, he can’t be dismissed; one of his best students; as Jung says in the Preface of The Origins and History of Consciousness, “The author has placed the concepts of analytical psychology…on a firm evolutionary basis, and erected upon this a comprehensive structure in which the empirical forms of thought find their rightful place.”
Neumann, who really admired Jung, was very upset when he learned about Jung’s view that “The Aryan unconscious has a greater potential than the Jewish unconscious” and “The Jew, who is something of a nomad, has never yet created a cultural form of his own and as far as we can see never will”.
After writing this article, I came across Bolton’s great article at CC, which prompted me to change the last short paragraph, https://counter-currents.com/2015/12/wotan-as-archetype-the-carl-jung-essay/
Thank you for the reply and links, Prof Duchesne. You may find Guyénot’s essay to which I referred originally here: http://www.unz.com/article/the-crucifixion-of-the-goddess/ Dr Guyénot is a most original thinker, and I admire him enormously.
When you write of Neumann, “A Jew, but … as Jung says in the Preface of The Origins and History of Consciousness”, I’m afraid that’s not very convincing. The Origins and History of Consciousness was written in 1949 and the very first line of Bolton’s article reads “In the denazification atmosphere following World War II Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology, found himself accused of having ‘Nazi’ sympathies.” In such a time, who can know how free he felt to say other than he did.
As for Paglia, while she otherwise has many brilliant insights into the ancient world, she tries too hard to infuse the Old Testament anti-feminine Yahweh into the Greek pantheon. In this she is no doubt unwittingly influenced by the Bibliolatry of the dread WASPs! And, her philosemitism leads her not only to conflate modern Aryan achievements with ancient Hebrew ones, but also to conflate the merits of the latter with the contemporary Jewish pop culture icons of her typical Baby Boomer veneration, i.e. Bob Dylan, Susan Sontag, etc. (So much for genuinely taking the long view.)
The Greeks, however, gave no notice of the Hebrews, with reason. On this matter, I can recommend Russell Gmirkin’s revolutionary scholarship that dates the writing of the Pentateuch to 270 BC. His Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch is no longer available at archive.org, but I can direct you to a synopsis of his work here: https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/response-stephanie-anthonioz-review-russell-e-gmirkin-plato-and-creation-hebrew-bible Also the hyper-individualism that you’ve asserted is the outcome of such anti-feminine diety worship, is not really in the spirit of the West. It is more the spiritual kin of tikkun olam of Kevin MacDonald’s A People Who Shall Dwell Alone.
On this point, I would direct you to another of Kerry Bolton’s works, that of his book Yockey: A Fascist Odyssey, in which he writes, “Both in the pagan Classical world and the Christian Western Medieval world, craftsmen and artisans regarded their calling as emanating from Divinity. One modern economist who nicely captures the spirit of the Medieval era, writing of Nuremberg, states that Medieval man saw himself not as an isolated unit but as ‘part of a larger organism’. Bliss writes that to the Nuremberger (or Medieval man), ‘competition is the death of trade, the subverter of freedom, above all the destroyer of quality.”
I know that medieval man saw himself as part of a larger organism by modern standards, but if we compare European medieval man to man in other non-European cultures we can detect the concept of individualism; see Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual 1050-1200. I believe that an aristocratic form of individual heroism was visible before this period, in pre-Christian pagan times.
Individualism is not altogether a modern phenomenon; here is a handy quotation from Alan Macfarlane: “the majority of ordinary people in England from at least the 13C were rampant individualists, highly mobile both geographically and socially, economically ‘rational’, market-oriented, ego-centred in kinship and social life”.
He is exaggerating but nevertheless voicing a substantial reality that should not be underestimated; and remember he is talking about peasants land owners, not merchants.
We can go back to Thucydides describing Athens: The Athenians were “addicted to innovation” and “adventurous beyond their power,” “daring spirits”, “an enterprise unattempted was always looked upon as a success sacrificed”.
And the famous Funeral Oration of Pericles as recorded by Thucydides: “If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences…if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition. The freedom we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes…”
“Paglia is relentlessly anti-WASP”
Not really. She likes to assert her Catholic background against WASP-centric academics (and only a real WASP wouldn’t relish a fight), but what interests her is what she calls the North American Literary Tradition (NA because it includes Canadians like McLuhan and Frye), which resulted from the confrontation in America of English Puritanism and Continental Romanticism. See the essay of that name in Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex, and Education, which I reviewed here: https://counter-currents.com/2019/01/the-native-american-nietzsche/
“She likes to assert her Catholic background against WASP-centric academics ….”
I disagree. I find her anti-WASPism forms the basis of her embrace of multi-culturalism, that includes championing Black, Jewish, and Gay causes in particular.
How can someone like Paglia, who thinks that women are ruled by unconscious impulses, support the liberation of women? Women can never participate in society as fully accountable, rational beings. The feminists, by her logic, are at war with nature, but Paglia is a feminist.
So what if she rejects “third-wave” feminism; she supports, I would gather, women’s suffrage, free love and (so called) reproductive rights. If women are irrational creatures ruled by their emotions then they cannot participate in public decision making. Their fathers have to guide them until they are married.
How can someone like Paglia, who thinks that women are ruled by unconscious impulses, support the liberation of women?
At least you are consistent, unlike Paglia. Consistently wrong, but consistent nonetheless.
Wrong about what?
Your argument rests on the assumption that we know the world only through the conscious and rational mind, and what lies beyond that – emotion, sixth sense, mystical experiences, etc. – is somehow invalid. No serious person has ever proposed that.
What is the best way to incorporate the non-rational in our decision making process, that’s a legitimate question.
Why do some women imagine that building a civilization is some kind of a stroll in a Garden of Eden where men enjoy chilled booze on reclining sofas with virgins fanning them? Men have had to turn themselves into ashes to tame the flora and fauna. It’s been an extremely bloody job.
And there wouldn’t have been any civilization had they liberally thrown wombs in that vicious struggle.
Sperm is expendable while an egg needs protection and time because it is precious and finite.
A woman is a living guarantee that a particular racial seed will continue. Her womb nourishes a generation. And if, today, upon being reminded that motherhood is the summit of womanhood, she deems it a jeer or a denigration of her ‘role in the society’ (whatever that means) then the rot is way too deep. And those men does not deserve any respect who put a womb in jeopardy by wrapping her in a police or Army uniform in the name of ‘equality’.
You don’t advance a culture by moulding her into a Chyna.
“consciousness of consciousness is a trait singular to European males”
An interesting proposition. To prove or disprove it, one should look to the Vedic and Buddhist traditions, which certainly have a great deal to say about consciousness of consciousness. Now, both traditions are Indo-European in origin, more specifically Indo-Aryan. But over the centuries they disperse outwards to non-IE peoples. The question then would be if consciousness of consciousness is retained in these traditions or not.
From what I know of Tibetan Buddhism, the answer would be yes. All four schools of Tibetan Buddhism have an elaborate and refined psychology which accounts for consciousness of consciousness and then some. I don’t know as much about Japanese or Chinese Buddhism. The notion would certainly be there at the beginning, when the tradition was brought from India, but one would have to examine whether and to what extent it survives, thrives, changes, or perishes. Consciousness of consciousness also seems to survive in the Indian Advaita tradition. See for example the works of Nisargadatta Maharaj, who is not of pure Aryan stock by any stretch of the imagination, but has much to say on consciousness of consciousness. I would imagine that Ramana Maharshi also has something to say about it.
In this essay, part four, I address the degree to which non-Europeans (in the Axial Age) were conscious of their consciousness: https://counter-currents.com/2019/07/the-european-idea-of-progress-supersedes-the-axial-age-part-iv/
Read the “Axial India” section, as it addresses some of the points you raise.
In this essay I borrowed the term “consciousness of consciousness” from Merlin Donald, though this term is not original to him; it is there in Julian Jaynes, in a deeper way (as I wrote in another essay). Donald thinks that possibly only ancient Chinese philosophers exhibited consciousness of consciousness, but I can’t see this in China, as I explained in two essays comparing Chinese and Western thinking, which you can find at CC.
Professor Duchesne, you use present tense in the above sentence, does that mean that you believe other races today still don’t have consciousness of consciousness? If they do, how did they acquire it? If they don’t, how come many of them appear to have it? Or is it your personal experience that high IQ Chinese or Japanese individuals are somehow still unconscious of their consciousness?
Also, if modern science and philosophy are results of the consciousness of consciousness, which has its roots in steppe aristocracies, how is it possible that medieval nobility, who were the direct link between steppe societies and modern Europe, showed practically no interest in these fields? In fact, one gets the impression that European aristocrats at all times shared the Oriental man’s disdain for compulsive thinking and the constant tinkering with the “objective” world. What is the explanation for that?
Finally, I would like to note that our perception that steppe cultures had a more confrontational approach to nature may just be a result of our lack of information. After a century of wars and political upheavals archeologic activity is picking up in the region, from Hungary to the Great Wall of China, and the first results have started to come in. To give you an example, there is evidence that the floodplains of the Carpathian basin, previously thought to be entirely natural, were carefully managed through massive irrigation systems, which were carbon-dated back to the first decades of the 10th century. (Hungarians arrived in the area from the East in 895 A.D.) Obviously there’s a lot that we simply don’t know at the moment, including the unknown unkowns, but it’s very likely that our view of the steppe societies will be very different 20 years from now.
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