That tone of vehement moral indignation and passionate excitement
I’m ruminating on the dissenting comments about the rhetoric of reason post, and the puzzle of how the slave society justified itself to itself, and the related puzzle of how abolitionists – whose cause seems so self-evident to us now – were seen as raving maniacs and extremists, and from there I arrived at James Fitzjames Stephens’s review of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, which I consider a classic of the genre.
Stephens begins with the opposition of vehement passion and chilly reason:
Mr. Mill’s small volume or long pamphlet on “The Subjection of Women” is intended to prove “that the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes– the legal subordination of one to the other– is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.” The whole volume is written in that tone of vehement moral indignation and passionate excitement, finding vent in sustained eagerness of style and thought, which so much attract some readers to Mr. Mill’s writings, and so much repel from them men of his own way of thinking in many respects, but disposed to take a colder view of human nature, its prospects, and its capacities.
Stephens’s colder view of human nature produces this:
One fundamental and unalterable inequality between men and women is that, whereas the orderly and reasonable satisfaction of passions which in the case of both men and women more or less distinctly and consciously affect every part of human life, is in normal cases essential to the happiness of each, its satisfaction in the case of men is a strong spur to exertion in active professions, whilst in the case of women it physically incapacitates them from everything of the kind. Active life, therefore, must be as abnormal in the case of women as it is normal in the case of men; and to refuse to recognize this fact in social and professional legislation appears to us to be precisely the same absurdity as to refuse to extend the suffrage to the working classes when they have virtually become a great political power, or to ignore the superiority which a conquering race has proved over those whom it has conquered by legislating as if no conquest had taken place.
I think that’s the kind of thing Fairbanks is talking about.
Stephens sounds like James Damore, only perhaps with a somewhat more elevated form of rhetoric.
I love Mill’s work. And it is hardly unreasoning. I found it very reasonable. But I suppose that could come from agreeing with it….your view is passionate, irrational opinion. My view is cold, scientific reason backed by facts.
I know – to me Mill reads as very calm-rational, in a Victorian way (extremely long sentences and paragraphs that go on for pages). Carlyle saw him as way too dry-rational. Stephens’s version is amusingly surprising from that angle.
James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (from the Oxford History of the United States series of books), which I read only a few months ago, goes into the South’s justifications of slavery. Incredibly, one of the claims was that slavery was a kindness to the slaves; they were housed, fed, and employed, and because the ‘Negro race’ was naturally inferior to whites, they would not be able to find employment for themselves. Therefore, the abolitionists were trying to condemn freed slaves to a life of desperate poverty.
That argument was contradicted by another, which was that under slavery, even the lowest white man was superior to the slaves, but freeing the slaves and allowing them to compete in the jobs market would remove that superiority.
Slavery was also defended as a civilising act, raising the blacks from the perceived level of brute animals to a state of partial humanity.
Given all of the above and the many more arguments for slavery put forward by the South, if any of it had been true rather than the disingenuous, racist bullshit it so clearly was, then of course the abolitionists would have been the bad guys.
I heard that from a friend of mine in college; I was shocked. Especially since said friend was reliably liberal. Turns out his great-grandfather owned slaves. Lot of cognitive dissonance, probably.
I read the “argument” entirely the other way. Mill’s view is based on reason and justice, whereas the “men are naturally active, while women are entirely unsuited to active life and pursuits,” reeks of pure emotionalism not tethered to reason, facts, or objective reality.
And yet Stephens saw himself as the one talking reason. Go figure.
Everyone believes himself or herself to be acting rationally. It is the perpetual tragedy of the human condition that we usually are not. That failing is the reason we have established norms of peer review and academic freedom. It’s why we created logic and all its offspring: mathematics, science, rule of law. These systems allow us to compensate for our natural deficiencies. That we yet still often come up short attests to their importance.
Stephens exemplifies the phenomenon of seeing opposition to facts one considers obvious as irrational. He believed himself to be on the side of reason. He wasn’t, and his argument was both unsound and invalid, but that doesn’t mean that we should not strive toward reason. It is by reason that we know that he was wrong. It is by recognizing the unreason of religious belief that we know the folly of faith, and we rightly call out believers for abandoning the norms of civil discourse.
Aside: John Stuart Mill is one of my intellectual heroes.
Meghan Murphy wrote a piece a few months ago that I think may be relevant. She’s reluctantly become something of a free speech absolutist. I’m not there yet, but I think her arguments here are quite good.
https://www.feministcurrent.com/2019/06/25/its-time-for-feminists-and-the-left-to-support-free-speech-before-its-too-late/
From the article Sackbut linked:
That’s the same dynamic of the MRAs – not working for rights for men, but against rights for women. Just another point of male privilege showing.
Meghan’s essay warmed the frozen cockles of my heart.
Behold the seductive allure of expediency. It’s just so easy to simply stand back and let our opponents be unjustly silenced. It takes literally no effort and makes your opponents easier to defeat. And after all, to defend their freedom to speak would come with social, political, and personal costs. No, much better to take the free win.
That’s the thing about free speech: popular speech is protected by its popularity. The only sort of speech that could need legal protection is the deeply unpopular. And so the importance of the principle, like that of free religion, is not intuitively obvious, especially not to those in the dominant position. It has to be thought through. It has to be learned.
I have explained this to people so many times, in almost those exact words. Very few people seem to get that. “But if it hurts people”…”if it’s dangerous”. I point out to them that at one time, abolitionist’s speech was considered dangerous. That throughout most of human history (including now, apparently) feminist speech (and often women’s speech in general) was considered dangerous. That Eugene Debs was jailed during WWI for “dangerous” speech when he spoke against the draft.
People who advocate restrictions on speech often squeal when they find their own speech restricted. That doesn’t mean everything is automatically covered by free speech, of course, since private owners do have a right to determine who may or may not speak on their property, and what they may or may not say. I can restrict the freedom of someone to put a pro-Trump poster in my yard, even though they have free speech.
People who advocate restrictions on speech often squeal when they find their own speech restricted.
That is exactly it! It’s the same sort of perspective blindness that you see from members of the dominant religious group. It’s simply not intuitively conceivable for them that they could be at the other end of the stick. Only once they find themselves there do they understand.