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 Ask
Spengler
Women as priests?
Women never forgive anything!
Dear Spengler,
Recently I became the chief executive officer of the world's largest
religious denomination. Some people want me to allow women to become priests,
something we have not allowed in our 2,000-year history. Should I permit this?
Ruminating in Rome
Dear Ruminating,
I believe in gender equality. Spengler's "Universal Law of Gender Parity"
states that in every corner of the world and in every epoch of history, the men
and women of every culture deserve each other (see
Ask Spengler, February 24, 2004). The First Corollary to the Universal
Law of Gender Parity adds that any injury one gender inflicts upon the other
will be repaid in full. Whenever men intimidate women, for example, women
revenge themselves upon their sons. That explains (for example) why covert
homosexuality abounds in putatively macho cultures.
Nonetheless, ordaining female priests at this moment in history would be
ill-advised. A priest's most important function is to forgive sins. Women never
forgive anything. Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) explained why in her "Ballad of
Unfortunate Mammals":
Love is sharper than stones or sticks;
Lone as the sea, and deeper blue;
Loud in the night as a clock that ticks;
Longer-lived than the Wandering Jew.
Show me a love was done and through,
Tell me a kiss escaped its debt!
Son, to your death you'll pay your due -
Women and elephants never forget.
Parker, to be sure, writes of erotic love, but love of God is a stronger
passion still. As Solomon instructs in the Song of Songs, "Love is strong as
death; jealousy is cruel as the grave; the coals thereof are coals of fire,
which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can
all the floods drown it."
According to the tradition of your faith, Solomon sang of love between God and
his congregation, rather than erotic love. But the erotic imagery of the Song
of Songs suggests a point made well by Michael Wyschogrod: "The truth is that
human love is neither eros nor agape [the selfless love
translated as 'charity' in I Corinthians 13]. Both are caricatures because
reality is a combination of the two, which are not different kinds of love but
aspects of human love with a constantly changing composition of elements ...
All this is not to deny that there are loves in which agape predominates
and those in which eros does. But none is exclusively one or the other
because man is created in the image of God as a being constituted by need who
gives and also asks to be given in return." [1]
He who watches over Israel neither slumbers, nor does he sleep, says Scripture,
but women who watch over their men neither forget, nor do they forgive. Henrik
Ibsen's Solveig, who waits a lifetime for the return of the errant Peer Gynt,
is a misogynist's fantasy.
Western culture does not oppress women by mutilating their genitals or keeping
them under house arrest, but it does turn them into sexual objects. By the
First Corollary of Spengler's Law of Gender Parity, Western women retaliate for
objectification by making men miserable, but in a very specific way, that is,
by making men feel inadequate. That, of course, is the opposite of forgiveness,
whose object is to make the forgiven person feel adequate.
The man on the street mutters to himself, "I will never understand women!" That
only goes to show how thick men can be. There is no mystery in the feminine
mystique. The feminine point of view amounts to what we otherwise call
paranoia. No one displays more sensitivity or depends more on intuition than
paranoids, who construct a world view in the absence of or despite the relevant
facts. Paranoia, to be precise, assigns meaning to utterly random events. Why
did that fellow on the far side of the restaurant fold his newspaper? Was that
a signal? Why is the newscaster wearing a green tie? Does he know something?
Why are you reading this essay? Are you out to get me?
In fact, the common stereotype of male-female conversation mirrors reality. The
four words most frequently uttered by men are: "What did I do?" Women assign
significance to things that men consider random occurrences. Women ask, "Why
didn't he call today? Did I say something wrong? Why did he seem so distracted
at dinner? Is there something wrong with the relationship?" They ask men, "Why
did you wear aftershave today? Are you seeing someone? Whom were you talking to
when I called?" Like paranoids, women have conversations with themselves, and
find men at fault. When men ask, "What did I do?" women reply, "If you don't
know, then I won't tell you." "Do I look fat?" For the record, "No" is the
correct answer to the last question only when it is uttered before the
questioner pronounces the word "fat".
Sexual objectification, in short, makes women paranoid. Whether this is a
cultural quirk subject to eventual remedy or a characteristic of humankind
since the Fall is a different matter. Adolescent girls suffer the most. The
therapists talk of "low self-esteem", but this amounts to uncertainty as to
what features of a developing form will attract the opposite sex. If a woman
succeeds in manipulating a man on the strength of her value as a sexual object,
she never can be sure that another woman will not (or has not already done) the
same thing with greater success. The most attractive woman in the world is a
miserable creature, as Giuseppe Verdi's Princess Eboli lamented, because her
physical presence will overwhelm any other perception of her in the eyes of
men. When age eventually destroys her beauty, she will be left with nothing at
all.
Chemical imbalances in the brain doubtless explain paranoia in many cases, but
so can adverse circumstances. Some forms of paranoia represent an attempt to
gain power over a world in which the paranoid has no real power at all.
Political paranoia, eg, conspiracy theories, flourish among the powerless. By
the same token, sexual objectification leaves women without direct power in a
man's world.
Imagine a prisoner in a windowless cell, who does not know of what crime he may
be guilty, or who his accusers might be. Every variation in routine, every
utterance or grimace of his warders will loom great in significance. Franz
Kafka created just such a world in The Castle and The Trial,
made all the more poignant by the conscious adoption of a biblical narrative
style, as Franz Rosenzweig observed. But Kafka's employment of biblical
narrative is ironic. In the Bible everything is significant; in Kafka's
everything may be insignificant. Thus Kafka portrays the paranoid's world all
the more forcefully.
Flesh-and-blood women cannot forgive men because they cannot be sure of them.
Doubt never attenuates where men are concerned, such that true forgiveness
remains outside the capacity of women. Although the incapacity to forgive
derives from relations between the genders, the habits of mind women learn from
adolescence are so strong that their capacity to forgive in other context
remains in doubt. Many women, to be sure, raise themselves above the vicious
cycle of sexual objectification. But why take chances? For the time being,
stick to the status quo.
Spengler
Dear Spengler,
As the head of the world's only hyperpower, I am committed to democracy in the
Muslim world. I have said many times that democracy is the antidote to
terrorism. Yesterday the Islamist candidates swept the municipal elections in
Saudi Arabia, and I am worried that Hamas will win the July 17 national
elections in Palestine and that Hezbollah will dominate Lebanon. Should I
forget about democracy?
Perplexed on the Potomac
Dear Perplexed,
Let them elect anyone they want, but make clear that you will deal harshly
with hostile governments. Perhaps you worry too much about whether people like
you. You should focus on your successes, for example, the fact that terrorists
have not staged a major attack on your country since September 11, 2001. I am
not privy to such matters, but I do not believe this is true because your
country's intelligence services have successfully infiltrated the terrorist
organizations. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times argued in dead seriousness
that the terrorists did not attack your country because all of them went to
fight in Iraq. That would be the silliest thing Friedman ever wrote, that is,
if Friedman had not written so many other silly things.
You forestalled further terrorist attacks on the US simply by invading Iraq and
overthrowing its government. Terrorists cannot work effectively without
supporters inside governments to provide them with weapons, passports,
intelligence, safe haven, and so forth. Middle Eastern governments are not
quite governments in the Western sense. They resemble hotels that rent rooms to
paying customers of varying persuasions. One has to hold the hotel manager
accountable for what goes in inside the rooms.
An entire government might not support terrorism, but terrorist sympathizers
are ensconced within the military and intelligence services of most Middle
Eastern states. One never knows just who these sympathizers might be; your
spies do not know and are not likely to find out. Whether Saddam Hussein
personally supported al-Qaeda is irrelevant. He indulged enough nasty creatures
in his intelligence menagerie such that al-Qaeda obtained resources from Iraq
where necessary. The same is true of other governments.
The old maxim applies, "Beat your children every day. If you do not know what
they did wrong, they do." Your critics complain that you acted in the absence
of precise intelligence. Just the opposite is true. In the absence of precise
intelligence, the optimal course of action is to overthrow a suspect
government. Any government will do. Syria or Iran might have done as well as
Iraq. As long as the governments of the Muslim world believe that you will tear
them limb from limb if they support terrorism, they will behave.
Spengler
Note: 1. Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith (Jason Aronson:
New Jersey, 1963), p 63.
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