Teaching a Wife about Submission

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how women think, submission

FM writes,

Stingray– back in February, you wrote this in response to a Rollo blog post. I was wondering if you still felt this way about opening up the topic of submission with a wife. The general context was a man asking if he should “teach” is wife about submission. Any more comments you have on this topic would be welcome, as many men are trying to get this topic started with their wives–it is all very awkward! Thanks for your thoughts.

You write: “one way to start turning around a LTR is to educate wives about the necessity of primate females giving bananas and grooming the males. Make her see that she *has* to submit to making him sandwiches, and she *has* to submit to giving him back rubs (I believe I am direct quoting another commenter with the bold).
Unless she is extremely religious and was raised that way; NO. You are making the familiar mistake in assuming men and women think the same way. We decidedly do NOT.
If you try to explain this idea of having to submit to most women they will simply look at you with disgust and begin the shaming language, “Oppressor!” Submission is synonymous with doormat today.
You can’t explain it to her. You have to make her feel it; inspire it from her (over a period of time you might be able to explain it to some women after you’ve demonstrated the behavior). Telling a woman she has to submit to an inferior man is like telling a man he has to have sex with a 400 pound woman.”

Women tend to understand situations and even terms in how they make us feel.  This is why things like Dread game, submission and whatnot are usually so viscerally appalling to a lot of women.  They read the word dread and they feel it first, then infer the meaning through what they feel.  They are going to feel real and intense dread and then believe that this is what Rollo are any other writer is talking about inducing in his wife.  Wherein reality, this real dread that the women are feeling is usually only talked about being used by men in extreme circumstances.  Solipsism makes this differentiation difficult to suss out.

So, if you talk to your wife about submission, without first making her feel it in a positive manner, she is going to feel what she thinks of as submission first and then apply it to what you are saying.  As most women think of the word submission as a man wanting a doormat, a slave, and to oppress her, this is what she will feel you want her to become.  This is why I say you must make her feel it first.  If you are going to make her feel it in a positive way, you have to become the superior man (another one of those words that is going to make her feel badly.  Don’t use it).  Once this state is firmly in place, then you might be able to broach this subject with her.  A man knows his wife best and the decision of whether this is best and how to do it are yours.  For those women who might do well hearing from other women, I highly suggest the Red Pill Women subreddit.  For those religious women, I can’t recommend Elspeth highly enough, as well as the links from her commenters and her sidebar (and to humbly add, they may like it here as well). ((Edited to add: Personally, I do not recommend trying to openly teach about submission until she can feel what it is you mean by it, not what society has taught her to feel about it.))

For the men, keep learning.  Rollo did a podcast over this past weekend that I thought was tremendous for men to learn from.  It’s long and the interviewers were crass.  Don’t let this deter you.  Near the end he talks of becoming.  Of no longer having to Game your wife, because it is fully internalized.  It’s a matter of course.   And it’s not in some kind of oppressive way.  It is in this becoming whom he wants to be and has chosen to be that is the best place for him to be able to love and care for his family.  This is something I very much agree with.

You asked if I still believe this and I very much do.  I think a lot of men, even men who have learned or are learning the red pill, still fall into the very dangerous trap in thinking that men and women think the same.  Even though, they have read and on some level understand this is not true, the extent to how very differently we think and process information is still not understood.  When she feels it, only then will she be able to put some kind of words to it.  Understand, that she may not want to.  Also understand she may not need to.  Lead her to where the family needs to go.

**FM, my apologies for this coming late.

Women in the Workplace – and at Home ~ G. K. Chesterton

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G. K. Chesterton, women

Originally published in The Illustrated London News, 18th December, 1926.

The recent controversy about the professional position of married women was part of a much larger controversy, which is not limited to professional women or even to women. It involves a distinction that controversialists on both sides commonly forget. As it is conducted, it turns largely on the query about whether family life is what is called a “whole-time job” or a “half-time job.” But there is also another distinction between a whole job and a half job, or a hundredth part of a job. It has nothing to do with the time that is occupied, but only with the ground that is covered. An industrial expert once actually boasted that it took twenty men to make a pin; and I hope he sat down on the pin. But the man making the twentieth part of the pin did not only work for the twentieth part of an hour. He might perfectly well be working for twelve hours – indeed, he might have been working for twenty-four hours for all the happy industrial expert generally cared. He might work for the whole of a lifetime, but he never made the whole of a pin.

Now, there are lingering still in the world a number of lunatics, among whom I have the honour to count myself, who think it a good thing to preserve as many whole jobs as possible. We congratulate ourselves, in our crazy fashion, whenever we find anybody personally and completely doing anything. We rejoice when we find remaining in the world any cases in which the individual can see the beginning and the end of his own work. We are well aware that this is often incompatible with modern scientific civilization, and the fact has sometimes moved us to say what we think about modern scientific civilization. But anyhow, whether we are right or wrong, that is an important distinction not always remembered; and that is the important distinction that ought to be most remembered, and is least remembered, in this modern debate about the occupation of women.

Probably there must be a certain number of people doing work which they do not complete. Perhaps there must be some people doing work which they do not comprehend. But we do not want to multiply those people indefinitely, and then cover it all by shouting about emancipation and equality. It may be emancipation to allow a woman to make part of a pin, if she really wants to make part of a pin. It may be equality if she is really filled with a furious jealousy of her husband, who has the privilege of making part of a pin. But we question whether it is really a more human achievement to make part of a pin than to make the whole of a pinafore. And we even go further, and question whether it is more human to make the whole of a pinafore than to look after the whole of a child. The point about the “half-time job” of motherhood is that it is at least one of the jobs that can be regarded as a whole, and almost as an end in itself. A human being is in some sense an end in himself. Anything that makes him happy or high-minded is, under God, a thing directed to an ultimate end. It is not, like nearly all the trades and professions, merely a machinery and a means to an end. And it is a thing which can, by the constitution of human nature, be pursued with positive and unpurchased enthusiasm. Whether or no it is a half-time job, it need not be a half-hearted job.

Now, as a matter of fact, there are not so many jobs which normal and ordinary people can pursue with enthusiasm for their own sakes. The position is generally falsified by quoting the exceptional cases of specialists who achieve success. There may be a woman who is so very fond of swimming the Channel that she can go on doing it until she breaks a record. There may be, for that matter, a woman who is so fond of discovering the North Pole that she goes on doing it long after it has been discovered. Such sensational successes naturally bulk big in the newspapers, because they are sensational cases. But they are not the question of whether women are more free in professional or domestic life. To answer that question, we must assume all the sailors on the Channel boats to be women, all the fishermen in the herring fleet to be women, all the whalers in the North Sea to be women, and then consider whether the worst paid and hardest worked of all those workers were really having a happier or a harder life. It will be at once apparent that the vast majority of them must be under orders; and that perhaps a considerable minority of them would be under orders which they did not entirely understand. There could not be a community in which the average woman was in command of a ship. But there can be a community in which the average woman is in command of a house.

To take a hundred women out of a hundred houses and give them a hundred ships would be obviously impossible, unless all the ships were canoes. And that would be carrying to rather fanatical lengths the individualist ideal of people paddling their own canoe. To take the hundred women out of the hundred houses and put them on ten ships, or more probably on two ships, is obviously to increase vastly the number of servants and diminish the number of mistresses. The only ship I remember that was so manned (or perhaps we should say womanned) was the ship in the Bab Ballad commanded by Lieutenant Bellaye: [Note: The lieutenant is the hero of Gilbert’s “The Bumboat Woman’s Story”. He is so loved that numbers of young women disguised as sailors stow away on his ship.] even there it might be said that the young ladies who sailed with him had ultimately rather a domestic than a professional ideal. But that naval commander was not very professional himself, and it will be remembered, excused his sailors from most of their duties and amused himself by firing off his one big gun.

I fear that the experience of most subordinate women in shops and factories is a little more strenuous. I have taken an extremely elementary and crude example, but I am not the first rhetorician who has found it convenient to discuss the State under the bright and original similitude of a ship. But the principle does apply quite as much to a shop as to a ship. It applies with especial exactitude to the modern shop, which is almost larger than the modern ship. A shop or a factory must consist of a very large majority of servants; and one of the few human institutions in which there need be no such enormous majority of servants is the human household. I still think, therefore, that for the lady interested in ships the most supreme and symbolical moment is the moment when her ships come home. And I think there are some sort of symbolical ships that had much better come home and stay there.

I know all about the necessary modifications and compromises produced by the accidental conditions of to-day. I am not unreasonable about them. But what we are discussing is not the suggestion that the ideal should be modified. It is the suggestion that the ideal should be abolished. It is the suggestion that a new test or method of judgment should be applied to the affair, which is not the test of whether the thing is a whole job, in the sense of a self-sufficing and satisfactory job, but of whether it is what is called a half-time job – that is, a thing to be measured by the mechanical calculation of modern employment.

There have been household gods and household saints and household fairies. I am not sure that there have yet been any factory gods or factory saints or factory fairies. I may be wrong, as I am no commercial expert, but I have not heard of them as yet. And we think that the reason lies in the distinction which I made at the beginning of these remarks. The imagination and the religious instinct and the human sense of humour have free play when people are dealing with something which, however small, is rounded and complete like a cosmos.

The place where babies are born, where men die, where the drama of mortal life is acted, is not an office or a shop or a bureau. It is something much smaller in size and much larger in scope. And while nobody would be such a fool as to pretend that it is the only place where people should work, or even the only place where women should work, it has a character of unity and universality that is not found in any of the fragmentary experiences of the division of labour.

For more of G. K. Chesterton’s works, see here.

Raising a Woman ~ Part 2

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fathers, mothers, raising girls

Outward appearance and having some basic living skills are important, but are relatively  easy to teach our girls.  They are skills that are fairly easy to demonstrate.  What must also be taught is inward refection and how this will color her relationships with others.

1. Teach her personal responsibility.

All children need to learn this, obviously, but girls today are often given a pass in this regard.  They become a parent’s little princess to be coddled and sheltered from their own actions.  In an effort to teach girls to be strong, independent and empowered our cultured has forgotten to teach that our actions have consequences.  A girl needs to learn that real strength comes from the ability not to put her back up and give someone a piece of her mind, but from being able to analyze a given situation and realize the consequences of her actions in reacting to it.  When your girls make a mistake, she must face the ramifications.  Sheltering her from them is not helping her or doing her any favors.  If she punches her brother and he hits her back (probably harder than she hit him), she needs to learn that that’s a natural reaction.  Not that he did something wrong.  If she does poorly on a test, it’s not that big bad teacher.  She needs to study more.  If she treats her courter with disrespect and disdain, then she can expect the same treatment in return or worse, indifference.  Girls should not be sheltered from the realities of the world.  It does them a great disservice.

2. Teach her about her innate nature.

Girls should be taught about their solipsism, hypergamy, and their proclivity to rationalize.

Hypergamy – While outright defining and identifying this might be difficult (and unnecessary) while a girl is young parents can definitely influence these impulses.  I think a girls father is going to be the one to do this.  Girls work to impress and win their fathers attention and pride just like a girl will want to do this with men when she is ready (or not ready).  A girls father can teach her what she should be focusing this impulse on and her mother can mirror the proper use of this impulse for her.  A girl will learn that a good, confident, dominant, and simple man (simple in terms of his possessions, job, etc) can fulfill all of her needs and make her incredibly happy.  Or conversely, the parents can teach her that only money and possessions can fulfill this need and eventually she will wonder why she feels as if something is missing and why she is so unhappy.  Hypergamy can very much be influenced by parents teaching how it should be channeled.  While the nice house and car might still be a temptation for her, it will feel small in comparison to finding a true leader to be her husband.

Solipsism – Beginning to teach what this is can start very young.  It is evident that young girls tend to personalize everything.  When this happens, it is easy to point out that not everything that is being said is about her in particular.  She can start to think about what situations actually apply to her and which do not.  Little girls can also begin to watch how their mother uses her own solipsism to care for the family.  Mothers are innately concerned for their own.  This is a good thing in that it can be a counter balance to her husbands innate desire to go out into the world and explore, influence and conquer.  While her husband will be the counter balance to the mother’s proclivity to think only of home.  This balance is an important thing for any child to witness.

Rationalizations – Mothers are going to be much better than fathers at identifying this, mostly because we recognize it from ourselves.  Little girls are surprisingly good at rationalizing their behavior or spinning their words to get what they want.  Parents should identify this and simply make their girls state the real reason for doing or asking for what they want.  “Daddy, may I please have a cookie because I am cranky and that will help me to behave.  It’s the only thing that will make me happy!”  No.  Tell me why you really want a cookie and we’ll see.  And, no.  You are not going to get away with being cranky and get a cookie to pull yourself out of that. Pull yourself out and then we’ll see.  “Mommy, I think we should all go to the gym today because I know how much you like working out!”  Thank you, sweetheart, but if you want to go play with the kids at the gym, just say so, please.

Don’t accuse them of lying (unless it is a blatant lie).  Many times, girls actually believe what they are saying because whatever they choose to say could be an actual reason for what they want.  It just might not be the reason.  Try to make them voice the reason so that this becomes the habit.  As they get older it will be harder (hopefully) for them to believe rationalizations over their true reasons.  I do not call out every single rationalization my girls make because I think if it is done too much it can hinder a woman’s ability to apply feminine wiles.  But it will help her choose what she says and how she says it in different situations.  The goal is not to teach her to think like a man so man so much as it is to have her identify this problem and rectify it so as to be respectful to those around her and to identify the truth of things for herself.

3.  Teach her that her emotions do not equate to the truth.

Women are emotion based creatures. We just are.  That does not mean that we should be allowed to hide behind our emotions and use them to manipulate others or the world around us.  Teach your girls about criticism early.  Criticism, when done well, is a good thing.  Without accepting it, we cannot learn.  During school and debates/conversations that we have around the kitchen table, we criticize our children or people they may have learned about in school or elsewhere.  Their history lessons come up quite often and we will discuss the people they are learning about.  We will ask their opinions on different matters and then explain why we think they were wrong or right.  Sometimes, hearing they are wrong, upsets them.  We use this time to teach them that while the criticism might hurt, how much more would it hurt later in life if we didn’t properly teach them just because their feelings were hurt?  What might they miss out on?  I also try to point out that just because they might feel hurt, that doesn’t mean that is what I an trying to do.  It is my job to teach them and that means that I cannot always be “nice”.  That, in fact, it would be incredibly wrong of me not to teach them the truth (of whatever it is we are talking about) just because they didn’t like what I had to say.  I then ask, would it be right of me to let you think something is true when it’s not, just because you didn’t like how it felt?  They are getting this and they are learning.  Our dinner conversations are amazing partly because of this.  They can take an idea counter to theirs without much difficulty and think it through.  This also begins to teaches them not to hide behind their feelings which does no one any good.

Girls should be able to look at the following and laugh at it’s ridiculousness (H/t Free Northerner)

4.  Teach her the gifts that she can bring to her marriage.

I think girls should be taught from a young age that they need to make a decision about marriage.  Do they wish to marry or not?  If they do, there are things that wives need to know.  To expand on a couple of ideas, girls need to learn to respect their men.  This starts in watching how her mother relates to her father.  She will watch you intently.  But also, both parents should talk about it’s importance to help solidify the idea in her mind.  It will mean more to her when she practices this on her father and he corrects her wrongs and praises her rights.  But Mom can be play a big part in guiding her in when to do and say (and not say) certain things.  Mom can help her to learn to love serving the men in her life and find the joy in helping out in every way she can.  In my experience, girls beam when they have the chance to help and serve their fathers.

Also, girls need to learn and understand the gift of their virginity.  This is hard to understand because many of the explanations for it’s importance are lacking today.  Religion tells us to wait because it’s right.  Well, why is it right?  Our parents tell us to wait because we should value our bodies.  Okay, but Susie isn’t a virgin and she’s doing great.  Also, look at all the attention she is getting!  What’s the big deal?  Women just can’t really relate to these reasons because we can’t feel it.  We cannot feel the disgust at the thought of marry a high N girl many men feel because we know that there is a double standard.  We just don’t understand it.  We need to help our girls feel it.  I have posted this before and I find it quite helpful.  It’s a comment from Carlotta at Alpha Game:

I showed them some jewelery that I was saving for them to wear on special occasions when they are older. I then told them that they had to wait to wear it, but every single other person I could find would get to wear it, break it, steal a piece and throw it in the mud…but eventually they would get the diamond necklace.

Neither wanted it.

“Good, that is how a good man will feel about a women who has let every Tom, Dick and Harry feel up her goods around town.”

This evokes a feeling in a girl that will help her to understand.  However, since this comment has been made, Danny has come up with an analogy that can really help send home the idea of a high N girl that girls and women can much better relate to (while I absolutely love the key/lock analogy, it elicits little feeling beyond anger (and how clever it is)).  Used bubble gum.

marrying or committing to a slut is like finding a piece of chewed bubble gum on a park bench and deciding that it’d be a good idea to put it in your mouth.

This is visceral.  This we can feel and therefore, better understand.  Once she can feel this, explain that her virginity is a gift to her husband.  Something that she can give to him.  It is more concrete and therefore makes more sense to a girl than being told it is just the right thing to do.   It may or may not give her the countenance she needs but it will give her a much better understanding of one of the reasons to wait.

Girls need to learn to look inward and digest what they see.  Our innate nature is not wrong, but some of it will need to be fostered and some of it will need to be controlled.  Girls and women can do this, when taught how.  Start them young.

We Creators and Creatures

An excerpt from The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton

This creature was truly different from all other creatures; because he was a creator as well as a creature. Nothing in that sense could be made in any other image but the image of man. But the truth is so true that, even in the absence of any religious belief, it must be assumed in the form of some moral or metaphysical principle. In the next chapter we shall see how this principle applies to all the historical hypotheses and evolutionary ethics now in fashion; to the origins of tribal government or mythological belief. But the clearest and most convenient example to start with is this popular one of what the cave-man really did in his cave. It means that somehow or other a new thing had appeared in the cavernous night of nature, a mind that is like a mirror. It is like a mirror because it is truly a thing of reflection. It is like a mirror because in it alone all the other shapes can be seen like shining shadows in a vision. Above all, it is like a mirror because it is the only thing of its kind. Other things may resemble it or resemble each other in various ways; other things may excel it or excel each other in various ways; just as in the furniture of a room a table may be round like a mirror or a cupboard may be larger than a mirror.  But the mirror is the only thing that can contain them all. Man is the microcosm; man is the measure of all things; man is the image of God.  These are the only real lessons to be learnt in the cave, and it is time to leave it for the open road.

It will be well in this place, however, to sum up once and for all what is meant by saying that man is at once the exception to everything and the mirror and the measure of all things. But to see man as he is, it is necessary once more to keep close to that simplicity that can clear itself of accumulated clouds of sophistry.The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage.  He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself. Alone among the animals he feels the need of averting his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being; of hiding them as in the presence of some higher possibility which creates the mystery of shame. Whether we praise these things as natural to man or abuse them as artificial in nature, they remain in the same sense unique. This is realised by the whole popular instinct called religion, until disturbed by pedants, especially the laborious pedants of the Simple Life. The most sophistical of all sophists are gymnosophists

Chesterton, G. K. The Everlasting Man. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993.

Marcus Aurelius ~ Meditations Book II

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Marcus Aurelius

5.  Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and feeling of affection, and freedom, and justice; and to give thyself relief from all other thoughts. And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last, laying aside all carelessness and passionate aversion from the commands of reason, and all hypocrisy, and self-love, and discontent with the portion which has been given to thee. Thou seest how few the things are, the which if a man lays hold of, he is able to live a life which flows in quiet, and is like the existence of the gods; for the gods on their part will require nothing more from him who observes these things.

The “Radical” Homeschoolers

Tags

Homeschooling

As I know I have a few readers who homeschool (and I suspect even more lurkers who do) I wanted to share this article with you.  It’s very good and explains quite well why some people really do not like what homeschoolers do and what they represent.  One such person is Robin West (whose article against homeschooling is found on page seven here).  This article has been throughly debunked several times and Kevin Williamson briefly does the same.

Here is Williamson quoting West on one of her more ignorant claims:

West offers a caricature of homeschooling families far removed from reality: “The husbands and wives in these families feel themselves to be under a religious compulsion to have large families, a homebound and submissive wife and mother who is responsible for the schooling of the children, and only one breadwinner.  These families are not living in romantic, rural, self sufficient farmhouses; there are in trailer parks, 1,000 square-foot homes, houses owned by relatives, and some, on tarps in fields or parking lots. Their lack of job skills, passed from one generation to the next, depresses the community’s overall economic health and their state’s tax base.

One must wonder how many homeschooling families she bothered to visit to come up with these observation.

Anyway, the rest of Mr. Williamson’s article is very good and worth a read if you have any interest in homeschooling and, as there are more “red pills” out there than the realities of men and women, I thought many readers might enjoy this.

Reclaiming the Ability to Think

Tags

intelligence, The Great Books, thinking, women

The lack of the ability to think is one of my biggest problems with feminism.  It claims to empower women, yet this empowerment is followed through with emphasis on following one’s feelings.  Yet, too often, these feelings are based on falsehoods and we do not posses the skills to even realize it.  While emphasizing feelings the teaching of how to think has been nearly eradicated from our schools and it is doing much harm to men and women.

I am not free from this either.  It has become painfully clear in the past couple years  my inability to think through a problem and then logically be able to address it.  I remember getting looks from Maritus and others like the tilting of the head that a dog might do when trying to understand what his master is saying.  I spoke from feelings that made absolutely no sense and it was incredibly difficult to make any progress.  I have been trying to remedy this and have made some progress.  Homeschooling my children has helped a great deal as I am being exposed to things that I never have before.  Reading around the sphere and a couple political blogs has helped a lot as well.  However, if this is something I wish to get serious about it is time to go back to the great thinkers, those timeless thinkers who have been inspiring men for generations.  So I would like to leave you with the following passage from The Great Conversation.  This is Book I of the Great Books of the Western World (which I am still reading.  I let it get away from me for too long).  There are some wonderful passages in this essay with regards to thinking and the lack of it in modern times (and this essay was written in 1954, it’s only gotten exceedingly worse).  It’s not that people aren’t capable of it, it’s that we are no longer taught how.

As the business of earning a living has become easier and simpler, it has also become less interesting and significant; all personal problems have become more perplexing.  This fact, plus the fact of the disappearance of any education adequate to deal with it, has led to the development of all kinds of cults, through which the baffled worker seeks some meaning for his life [Please note: he he is using the assembly line as an example here.] and to the extension on an unprecedented scale of the most trivial recreations, through which he may hope to forget that his human problems are unresolved.

Adam Smith stated the case long ago: ‘A man without the proper use of the intellectual faculties of a man, is, if possible, more contemptible than even a coward, and seems to be mutilated and deformed in a still more essential part of the character of human nature.’  He points out that this is the condition of ‘the great body of the people,’ who, by the division of labor are confined in their employment ‘to a few very simple operations’ in which the worker ‘has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur.’  The result, according to Smith, is that ‘the torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.

Maybe it is unfair of me to apply this line of thinking to women.  Adam Smith was talking about men and might have only given women an afterthought when he said “the great body of people”.  However, women have been fighting to prove they are as intelligent as men and are currently going to university at a higher percentage than men.  If they wish to prove their actual intelligence, this idea of wallowing in emotions must die.  Emotions do serve a purpose and an important one, I think, for women.  However, we have completely failed in proving our ability to think beyond what we feel. For all of our higher education and accomplishments, for all of the empowerment and womanly strength, those things are utterly nullified by our collective inability to stand off to the side and ask “What if?”  What if what I am feeling is wrong?  What if women and our society are, in fact, better off when we are not promiscuous?  What if my children and my family are better served and will have a better life if I give up a nice car and a career to care for them?  What if men were more masculine and we not only accept that but thoroughly encourage it?

There are a thousand “what if’s” that require so much more than emotion to discover the truth of the answer.  We are capable of it, so why is it not encouraged?  As women have perceived themselves to be making so much forward motion, they have ended up generations behind.

Footnote:

Hutchins, Robert M. The Great Conversation. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952

To Have an Education

Tags

citizens, liberal education, men, women

We recently purchased the Great Books of the Western World for ourselves and for our children.  I have slowly been reading the first book which is entitled The Great Conversation – The Substance of a Liberal Education by Robert M. Hutchins.  This book is . . . . stellar (I feel like a dolt because I simply do not have the words to describe it).  I wish I could quote you the whole book, but I will leave you snippets of it over the next several days to think on.  Mr. Hutchins is discussing here the importance of the Great Books . . . .

The books contain not merely the tradition, but also the great exponents of the tradition.  Their writings are models of the fine and liberal arts.  They hold before us what  Whitehead called ‘the habitual vision of greatness.’  These books have endured because men in every era have been lifted beyond themselves by the inspiration of their  example.  Sir Richard Livingstone said: ‘We are all tied down, all our days and for the greater part of our days, to the commonplace.  That is where contact with the great thinkers, great literature helps.  In their company we are still in the ordinary world, but it is the ordinary world transfigured and seen through the eyes of wisdom and genius.  And some of their vision becomes our own.’

Until very recently these books have been central in education in the West.  They were the principal instrument of liberal education, the education of men acquired as an end in itself, for no other purpose than that it would help them to be men, to lead human lives, and better lives than they would otherwise be able to lead.

The aim of liberal education is human excellence, both private and public (for man is a political animal).  Its object is the excellence of a man as man and man as citizen.  It regards man as an end, not as a means; it regards the ends of life, and not the means to it.  For this reason it is the education of free men.  Other types of education or training treat men as means to some other end, or are at best concerned with the means of life, with earning a living, and not with its ends.

Hutchins, Robert M. The Great Conversation. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952