…And Furthermore

This continues the previous post.

Patriarchy is written into human DNA. As long as there are X and Y chromosomes, and their presence results in physiological differences, nothing on this earth can change masculine dominance. It exists when it is denied. It can surely be done wrong in culture, but it cannot be removed.

By the same token, matriarchy is also wired into human society. These are not competing systems, but parallel. There would be no human life on earth without both of these. All you can do is make life miserable by trying to ignore or hinder their essential natures. Instead of taking umbrage at how God decided things should be in this world, it works a lot better to understand how each of these two powerful forces of nature operate.

A primary failure of the West that it does not balance the two. As just one example, the doctrine of a man’s castle-home is contrary to Biblical Law. In the Bible, the woman owns and controls the living facility. The castle is hers; the man focuses on defending the family, not the facilities. Yet, even in saying that, the Western mind will twist it into something contrary to human nature itself. It’s not that men can’t have forts, but that the fundamental design of living quarters is not a man’s forte. Housing architects and residential planners should all be female.

The whole business of human government requires a division of labor between men and women. There are some things men do better, and some women do better. It’s not that women are confined by men to certain roles, and whatever the men don’t want to bother with is their problem. It’s that wise heart-led men know better than to proceed without feminine support and counsel. A woman’s place of honor is no mere pedestal; feminist polity is matriarchy overreacting to masculine folly. Western Civilization is larded with false dichotomies.

For similar reasons, a genuine patriarchal government always keeps the door open to meritocracy. They need not be mutually exclusive. Doing this well prevents mere ambition from taking over. At the same time, nepotism is not a sin; like everything else, it has its place. Indeed, belittling and making nepotism illegal hardly prevents something so utterly natural. Just because you can put a label on something to disparage it doesn’t mean you understand what’s going on. There will always be some human activity that simply cannot be improved.

There will always be people who govern best by knowing when, and to whom, they should pass the buck. These have historically been the greatest rulers in human history. At the same time, this never works well in war. Any combat leader who isn’t the first to face enemy fire is the leader who sacrifices his troops for his own petty personal comforts. The reason someone like King David lived so long while leading in that fashion is because God protected him. A critical element in that protection was that readiness to lead from the front. In peace, he was the first to pass the buck. He failed most as king when he failed to distinguish between recognizing a particular issue as a matter of administration or war.

Whenever Americans work alongside other nations and cultures on anything at all in this world, Americans are notorious for two things. One is the utterly hidebound worship of rules and regulations as written. Two is the frequent failures that relate to keeping the rules when they don’t matter and ignoring them when they do. A related issue is the consistent deception about why certain rules exist. Nobody in their right minds will trust Americans for anything that really matters because they consistently lie to each other while pretending to worship honesty. A genuine and honest American really stands out in foreign countries.

The single greatest moral flaw of the West can be narrowed down to the assumption that human behavior can be made efficient. This is false even if you completely ignore the Fall. The very concept of efficiency is an abomination to God, so one of the greatest heresies is the idea that God does things that are reasonable. Faith in God is inherently unreasonable and extravagant, because God is not bound by human reason and He has always been extravagant. But you notice how many folks are disappointed because they reasoned that God should do or give some particular thing that made sense to them. They assume God is conserving resources, because otherwise they are logically forced to accuse Him of lying. The real issue is that Westerners refuse to bow the knee with enough extravagance and self-sacrifice.

Reason, when it stands alone, is the Devil in disguise.