Tag: Conservative

At the Mercy of Narcissists

I reluctantly read Mary Harrington’s recent article about Lauren Southern and the “tradwife” movement. It’s not a happy tale. I won’t blame you for being unaware of Southern—she was a Canadian “media personality” on the alt-right, working at times with Rebel news and featured on various conservative shows as she pursued activism and controversy. She left the media world and sort of disappeared when she got married at the age of 22, around 2017. Her dreams of being a traditional, stay-at-home wife—the ultimate rejection of feminism—had come true.

But those dreams turned into a nightmare. Her husband, it seems, turned out to be a harsh, cruel, selfish man. The marriage eventually fell apart, and she fled back to Canada with her child, where she had to rebuild a life from the ruins. The article goes into a lot more detail, if you’re interested. Harrington’s angle on the story is that these internet-generated ideologies, whether it be transgenderism or tradwifery, are disconnected from reality. The web, she writes, allows these “viral and overly simplistic ideas [to] replicate with seemingly very little reference to reality, human nature, or the world as it actually is.” As far as that goes, I agree with her. Mary Harrington is always a perceptive writer, but especially on the subject of technology. See here for my review of her book, Feminism Against Progress.

My interest, and the main point I’d like to make, takes a different angle on the sad story of Lauren Southern’s marriage. Simply put, it’s that shared values are not enough to build a loving marriage; for that, you need godly character, or what we might call true virtue. Harrington tells the story: “By the time she met her husband, she’d been condensing conservative values into ‘listicle’ form as a media influencer for some years.” (A listicle is an online article that is really just a slightly-expanded list, usually of the ‘how-to’ kind). The man she met obviously agreed with her “conservative values,” which formed the basis for their shared value commitments and future plans together. But when I was retelling this story to my wife, she immediately spotted a problem: Southern had been publicly arguing for a strongly anti-feminist, pro-traditional lifestyle as a single woman. “That’s sure to attract narcissists,” she said. And why not? Any selfish man would want to find himself a woman who believed it was her duty to submit and obey and smile and keep a happy home.

Narcissists are very good at pretending to be something they are not. It’s easy to espouse agreement about values, but the proof is in the track record of relationships past and present. There are so many things I don’t know about this situation, so I can’t speak with any authority on the specifics, but my sense is that we are living through a time when men and women are having a lot of trouble finding one another, falling in love, and forming stable families. This seems to be the case regardless of political persuasion. On the Left, there is a wholesale breakdown of the family, or even gender, as stable categories. As women trend more progressive as a whole, we are seeing a lot of feminine-driven pathologies crop up across our culture, including the fact that women initiate the majority of divorces. But on the Right—where I would find myself (to some degree) politically—I also see all kinds of problems, some of which are illustrated all too well by this emblematic story.

Without virtue, no healthy relationship can grow. Without character, integrity, and humility, no flourishing marriage can form. Shared values are not nearly enough; shared dislikes and hatreds even less so. Have we lost sight of this basic kind of wisdom in our internet age? Are we so entrenched and caught up in culture wars that we think someone on the same side as us is sure to be a good spouse? There is a profoundly ugly misogyny that does exist and spread in some red-pilled, anti-feminist corners of the web. It’s not as widespread as the cultural left would like to claim; they really cannot tell the difference between a godly conservative man and a moral monster. But it’s widespread enough to be an issue that needs to be addressed.

If the women in these kinds of spaces don’t have wisdom, discernment, and good community around them, they are simply at the mercy of narcissists. What about that good community? As I read the article a part of me was thinking that this terrible state of affairs could have been helped so much by a healthy local church community. Such a church could have stepped in and advised against the marriage beforehand, or supported her once the issues arose. Good elders could have confronted the husband. But it doesn’t sound like such a church was ever a part of their lives. And with our increasingly fragmented, individualistic communities, nothing else was there to take its place.

Here is another lesson that returns to the theme of technology. Online communities can be great in some ways, but they cannot replace the embedded, embodied communities that once formed the fabric of our societies. When the marriage is really a nightmare, a friend at the front door or a place to stay is what you need, not an avatar or emojis on a messaging platform. A healthy local church is the last best remnant of this kind of community.

But for those of us with daughters, there is one more lesson to draw: we must model for them what good men are like and teach them to spot bad men. And then let’s embed our families in thick communities that look out for one another and take care of each other.

To be clear, I am not blaming Lauren Southern for the situation she found herself in. As I said above, I really don’t know the details and it’s not my place to render that kind of judgment. I do think the situation, public as it is, can be instructive for us. The article includes an unexpectedly positive note, telling how Southern found healing as she lived with her child in a small cabin in the woods, connecting with working class people living in trailers nearby. She described it as “unexpectedly healing, and filled with a genuine sense of community.”

The Work in My Hand

Enough for today, the demands of the moment
The thing on my mind is the work in my hand
Wood for the woodstove and water for coffee
Somethin’ I can still understand.

James Taylor, Montana.

The theme of manual work is something I’ve returned to again and again, and I think that is because I reliably come away with a glowing conviction that the particular blindness our society has to the demands and merits of manual work is integrally connected to so many of the things that ail us. There is a thread, so to speak, that connects the philosophical analysis of Western civilization’s malaise and the realities of the proverbial shop floor.

We need amphibians to make sense of this and get the message out, people who can exist in both worlds. For whatever reason, I am such a person. I’ve always had these two parallel interests in my life: the world of things and the world of words, of matter and of books. My earliest work experiences were manual – working for a neighbour who had a small business doing maintenance for grocery stores. We built out of wood, tiled floors, poured cement. For a few weeks I was sent to a rural lumbermill to build wooden crates out of rough planks that would be sold to grocery stores to use as displays for produce. There I had my first introduction to some basics of woodworking: planing planks to a certain thickness (there is no noise quite like it), cutting them to length, using a router and jig to cut out the handles, and a pneumatic nailgun to assemble it all.

What an education. I learned to respect that spinning router bit, seeing how effortlessly it ate through the wood. I learned to handle the wood with a firm hand, for the softer wood sometimes pulled the tool almost out of my grip, while the hard knots and denser sections smoked and resisted and needed to be pushed. I learned not to put my fingers anywhere near the reach of the nails coming out the nailgun, for they had a way of careening off wildly at various angles as they encountered knots and different densities in the wood. My ideas about how to go about the work of building had to be constantly adjusted and reconsidered in light of the immovable realities I kept bumping up against.

And then there was the lunchroom, where I rubbed shoulders with men whose lives were quite different from my own. One of them was a wiry little guy named Mo (perhaps short for Maurice?), all sinew and muscle, with a few missing teeth and an accent so rural and thick I just couldn’t understand a word he said despite my best efforts. I smiled and nodded a lot. Simple, rough, hard-working men, with plenty of common sense and not much time for book learning. But they understood their craft, the materials they handled, and the giant machines they operated. They knew well that one mistake could be the end of limb or life.

Later I completed a diploma in automobile mechanics, worked briefly in a Volvo dealership garage, and later still found myself doing electro-mechanical maintenance in an industrial setting: bolting, wiring, greasing, and troubleshooting large, complex machinery. All through this time I read and read, books of all kinds. I went off to Bible College and dove into philosophy, theology, Biblical studies, cultural studies, and history. I read everything I could get my hands on by Lewis. New worlds opened up to me, and I started to make sense of politics and the history of ideas. I worked part-time for a cabinet maker as I finished my degree in Theology, loading up my iPod with hours and hours of sermons and lectures to stimulate my mind as I sanded, painted, varnished, cut, and edge-banded stacks of wood.

I had no appreciation at the time for the particular contribution these experiences with manual work would make to my view of the world, but it has been dawning on me now for a few years. I realize now that these profound experiences working with the material world fostered a skepticism towards all forms of utopianism and ideology, since I know the world is not as simple as any of those systems make it. One of the writers who has helped me realize this is Matthew B. Crawford, and what follows is some interaction with his book Shop Class as Soulcraft.

Crawford seems to be one of those amphibian types as well. He kept up his interest in motorcycle mechanics even as he completed advanced university studies and took a coveted job at a DC think tank. But a few months later, he left that position and opened up a repair shop specializing in rare and vintage motorcycles. He found the complex troubleshooting of temperamental machinery more intellectually stimulating than the academic work:

“What is required then is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. I quickly realized there was more thinking going on in the bike shop than in my previous job at the think tank.”

He goes on to describe how this kind of work fosters the virtue of attentiveness. In order to “diagnose and fix things that are variable, complex, and not of our own making, and therefore not fully knowable,” one must have “a certain disposition toward the thing you are trying to fix. This disposition is at once cognitive and moral. Getting it right demands that you be attentive in the way of a conversation rather than assertive in the way of a demonstration. I believe the mechanical arts have a special significance in our time because they cultivate not creativity, but the less glamorous virtue of attentiveness.” This is the attentiveness of the natural philosophers, the attentiveness that gives birth to a posture of humility towards the “authority” of things-as-they-are.

“Any discipline that deals with an authoritative, independent reality requires honesty and humility. I believe this is especially so of the stochastic arts [repairing the work of another] that fix things, such as doctoring and wrenching, in which we are not the makers of the things we tend. […] If we fail to respond appropriately to these authoritative realities, we remain idiots. If we succeed, we experience the pleasure that comes with progressively more acute vision, and the growing sense that our actions are fitting or just, as we bring them into conformity with that vision.”

This insight alone illuminates a core difference between the conservative instinct and the progressive one. The conservative sees the world as already having a given shape that we must discern and adapt to. The progressive sees the world as so much raw material, like play-doh, endlessly malleable to fit his or her dreams and visions of how the world should be. As N.S. Lyons has recently argued, quite convincingly, this Conservative-Progressive spectrum is actually quite different from the Right-Left political spectrum, which he boils down to the difference between an egalitarian vision vs a hierarchical one.

Turning to the topic of education, Crawford notes, “When the point of education becomes the production of credentials rather than the cultivation of knowledge, it forfeits the motive recognized by Aristotle: ‘All human beings by nature desire to know.’ Students become intellectually disengaged.”

He fell into this trap of credentialism as he earned his Master’s Degree and began work in a corporate office. He quickly became disillusioned with this new life among the educated class when he compared the pay and rewarding nature of his previous work as an electrician.

“How was it that I, once a proudly self-employed electrician, had ended up among these walking wounded, a ‘knowledge worker’ at a salary of $23,000? I hadn’t gone to graduate school for the sake of a career (rather, I wanted guidance reading some difficult books), but once I had the master’s degree I felt like I belonged to a certain order of society, and was entitled to its forms. Despite the beautiful ties I wore, it turned out to be a more proletarian existence then I had known as a manual worker.” 

Crawford writes with an eloquence and ease that frankly makes me a little envious. He uses language to describe realities that resonate with me intuitively but which I would not have known how to express. This is the mark of a good writer and clear thinker. Aside from this book, I also really enjoyed his Why We Drive. If these kinds of subjects are of interest to you, you won’t be disappointed.