Thinking Christian Comments
Original Post: Independence Day at Yorktown
Tom:
Outstanding post! Happy Fourth of July to you, your family, and friends. May we all take the opportunity to reflect upon and thank God for the blessings He has bestowed upon us as American citizens.
Tom, I find so much wrong with these sentiments that I don't know where to begin. I have never been able to understand why so many Christians are also supporters of the military. Isn't peace what is right? Doesn't standing for peace also take courage? Doesn't refusing to fight also mark a man (or woman) as someone who knows what is right and is willing to sacrifice for it? In this day and age, I think boys and girls in this country and everywhere should be taught how to compromise, negotiate, understand the other, and--that famous Christian moral stance--turn the other cheek.
Rossecorp:
Tom isn’t sharing mere “sentiments” with you. Why the obvious canard? Why do you reduce love to mere kindness and compromise? Love is suffering as well. Love is not only standing up for what is right, but even harder—having the courage to stand up for what is wrong, what is evil. Ask any parent: children who repeatedly disobey MUST be punished for their own good. To not do this is to literally not care for the well-being of one’s children.
With one over-generalizing half-truth you’ve wiped away any basis for fighting FOR the freedom of slave in our Civil War, or FOR freedom AGAINST the tyranny of Nazism, or the cold war against an objectively evil ideology buoying the former Russian empire known as the Soviet Union. Would you like me to provide a whole list? “War never solved anything!” is the foolish call of the terribly misguided. How about solving (at least in those part of the world where war was prosecuted) slavery, fascism, Nazism, communism? Maybe you would like to continue to permit Muslims taking Christians into slavery in Sudan? Maybe you would like to continue to permit the Muslim practice of cliteroctomys? Maybe the starving of an entire country of people (North Korea) with the world held hostage to REAL and open threats of nuclear weapons is something we should try to “understand”? I, as a nuclear engineer, can assure you what Iran is doing with its alleged “peaceful nuclear energy” program is a bunch of crap. I would love for you to spend a week in Ukraine and hear people thank (some through tears of joy) Ronald Regan for standing up to the Soviet Union in the last days of the cold war. Maybe the American Revolutionaries (what we celebrated and gave thanks for yesterday) weren’t fighting against such terrible and obvious injustices, but indeed there were deep injustices perpetrated by an unrepentant King of England. The very fact you can go in e-public to spout your misunderstandings is thanks to the men who died 230-odd years ago for ideals enshrined in the Constitution. They knew very well what they were fighting for: they weren’t cowards—as you so rudely imply.
As terrible as forceful struggle is, without it would have been worse... which is the sin of omission and a great display of lack of charity. You’re literally echoing the sentiment of the latest slew of dictators and misguided peaceniks when they ALL in unison whine “Give peace a chance!” (There are the very words of Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter, Fidel Castro, Kim Il Jung… and now Huga Chavez) ALL used. What’s wrong with that picture? These same guys (except for possibly poor, misguided Mr. Carter) talk the talk, and then lob missiles into the Sea of Japan (read today’s news).
Christians don’t support the military just for its own sake, nor do they support wars per se—that’s a silly straw man… and your absolutizing only one half of a full truth blinds you to it. Yes, there are indeed times to turn the other cheek: but that’s at the level of a slap. Are you seriously suggesting you, or I, or anyone should turn the other cheek at obvious and clear injustices like rape, pedophilia, racism, etc. and negotiate for terms of peace? Peace with these? You want me to “understand” these? The fact is, I DO understand them. The question is, do you? Do you understand there is no negotiating with evil? Do you understand there is no peace acceptable to those who make war part of their very essence? I sense such a deep fear of being challenged on these issues from you. Why?
Holo, you are right: I am afraid. When I read what you and others write, I am afraid of what you will do to our world. I am not naive. I work every day with the people you find so evil, people who have abused children, people who have raped and assaulted and murdered. I see the underside of our culture every day, and I think I do understand it just a little bit. It's much more complicated than you allow. Yes, there's evil, but evil and good co-exist, in the same person, and you can't eradicate one without also doing away with the other. And what about the factors that created such evil? We, our culture, is responsible for those.
I do believe there are times when fighting is necessary. See my post http://mullberries.typepad.com/
p..._the_warri.html
But I don't believe that what we are told by our leaders is the truth; I don't believe we ever really know all of what's going on, so how can we know if any action is just? How can we know if other actions might not be effective? Did you know that our country refused entry to more Jews during WWII? What if we had let them come? More would be alive, and perhaps fewer soldiers would have died.
I don't want to take up all Tom's space answering you. You can email me for further discussion if you wish.
Rossecorp:
My points stand, there will be no offline discussion. You’re speculating without justification against me and other Christians with your broad brushing “I am afraid of what you will do to our world.” You’re doing what Tom correctly points out DL does: attacking caricatures of Christianity. Can you imagine what would happen if you used the same statement against Jews? Hey, guess what… that’s exactly what happened in the later 1920s and throughout the 1930s in Germany before a full-scale assault on Jews began. Oh, and to preempt any foolish attempt to compare Christians to Nazis because the latter very wrongly forced homosexuals to wear pink triangles and shuffled them off to camps: that is no logical argument against someone arguing for the moral evil that homosexuality is when it is acted-upon. Killing abortionists is NOT the answer, but stopping abortion is. Killing or imprisoning or discriminating against homosexuals or alcoholics is wrong, but speaking out against those who promote homosexuality as “normal” is not wrong. Many more analogies follow upon these…
By the way, my clairvoyance just went off the scale: I just finished reading Dennis Prager’s article on the goodness of well-ordered moral violence… we’re “partners in crime,” me and Denny!
H wrote:
Killing or imprisoning or discriminating against homosexuals or alcoholics is wrongBy "discriminating," do you mean "treating differently in a negative way than others," or something else? If you mean "treating differently in a negative way than others," isn't that exactly what our current marriage laws do?
I would go back to what I wrote a while ago about "discriminating." The word is pretty much content-less unless it is specified whether there is a relevant factor involved.
I have never been able to understand why so many Christians are also supporters of the military.
That's because you don't understand either Christianity or the military.
Isn't peace what is right?
Depends upon what you mean by "peace".
Doesn't standing for peace also take courage?
Who said it didn't? The question is what "standing for" entails. Do you think that the U.S. military does not
stand for peace?
Doesn't refusing to fight also mark a man (or woman) as someone who knows what is right and is willing to sacrifice for it?
That depends upon the context.
In this day and age, I think boys and girls in this country and everywhere should be taught how to compromise, negotiate, understand the other, and--that famous Christian moral stance--turn the other cheek.
Again, who said they shouldn't? The question is, what do you do when confronted by someone who refuses to compromise or negotiate - indeed, someone who thinks negotiation with words is weak and despicable, and who's only goals are to see you either dead or subject to his will?
Mike:
Very well said. I wish I had the gift of your brevity...
Good comments, Mike and Holopupenko.
In case Holopupenko's link was ignored:
How, then, can anyone possibly say something as demonstrably false as "violence doesn't solve anything"?
...
Vast numbers of people believe what they want to believe or what they have been brainwashed to believe, not what is true or good. For vast numbers of people, it is simply dogma that all violence is wrong. It is a position arrived at with little thought but with a plethora of naive passion.
It is also often the position of the morally confused. People who believe in moral relativism, who therefore cannot ever determine which side in a conflict is morally right, understandably feel incapable of determining when violence may be moral.
Those who say violence never solves anything have confused themselves in other ways as well. They have elevated peace above goodness. Therefore, in these people's views, it is better for evil to prevail than to use violence to end that evil — since the very use of violence renders the user of it evil.
Folks,
If I may poke my nose under the tent here?
It's not an accident that Thomas Aquinas discusses the just war under the general heading of Charity. Think about that for a while. Thomas does not merely say that some wars are justified or justifiable, as necessary evils. He says that sometimes the use of force is precisely what charity calls for, and that people may sin by neglecting to use the necessary force. If I see someone beating up an old woman, I must, if I can, act to restrain him, or, if need be, to incapacitate him.
The word "anger" denotes both the emotion and a sin, and it's important not to confuse the two. We are given anger, says a Dominican friend of mine, to be our engine for the enforcing of justice. It is closely related to what the Greeks called "thymos," drive, ambition, highspiritedness, aspiration. It hates the ugly and the wrong because it loves the beautiful and true. It is itself not a power of reasoning, but it is a friend to reason ...
And one last comment. I do think there's a profound difference between what I would expect from a man and what I would expect from a woman. That explains the double standard to be found in all cultures, at all times -- I mean the double standard that feminists DON'T like to talk about, the one that subjects a man but not a woman to the severest contempt if he should back down from loyalty out of fear or out of mean self-regard. Such a man ceases to be regarded as a man; he is drummed out of that corps. Accordingly, I think that the wisdom of the ages and of all cultures ought to be heeded in the education of boys. We do want gallant men, don't we? Unless we are content with the slouches and louts that our schools, preaching nonviolence and nonjudgmentalism, produce in such great numbers? You are either going to have men or brutes; you are not going to turn them all into Alan Alda.....
This column is apropos of Dr. Esolen's.
More than 40 years ago the historian Henry Steele Commager asked how it was that the British colonies in North America could have produced such a galaxy of leaders: a generation that made a revolution and established a new and enduring nation. In talent, he argued, the leadership rivaled that of the Athens of Pericles and the England of Elizabeth I, a florescence of wisdom, character, virtue and vision that has not since been equaled. The question has never been--and never will be--satisfactorily answered; each generation is obliged to engage it in its own way.
....
When they were young, these leaders of the revolutionary generation accustomed themselves, under the supervision of demanding adults, to long periods of solitary study. Their English near-contemporary, William Wordsworth, remembered a statue of Isaac Newton in the courtyard of his Cambridge college: "the marbled index of a mind voyaging forever, through strange seas of thought, alone." As young people, they were not often praised or rewarded. The satisfactions of learning, they were taught, were in the learning, and in how that learning--like the unconscious predisposition to emulate certain heroes--might somehow be transmuted into examples and lessons that would influence their own conduct later on. Like Pericles' men of Athens, they would thereafter "be ashamed to fall below a certain standard."
Thank you for that good word, Dr. Esolen!
Tony writes:
I do think there's a profound difference between what I would expect from a man and what I would expect from a woman.I believe that you would expect different things, but allow me broaden the idea out to here: I'm not sure I can imagine any human quality: courage, loyalty, honesty, etc.: that I would expect of a man that I wouldn't expect of a woman. Can you say why you hold women to a lesser standard?
That explains the double standard to be found in all cultures, at all timesAs many around here are fond of saying, is doesnt mean ought.
Fair enough, Paul.
Here's how I respond:
1. The virtues are common to both sexes, but not common in the same way, nor, given our fallen nature, common in the same degree. The more important consideration is the first: they are not common in the same way. Tenderness in a man will not look the same as tenderness in a woman. Courage in a woman will not look the same as courage in a man. Consider the masculine habit of sticking somebody with a jocular or faintly insulting nickname, as a way of establishing camaraderie or cementing a close friendship. No woman calls her friend "Fats" or "Ding" or "Stretch". What we need to avoid is the temptation to see only one form of the particular virtue as normative.
2. The double standard is reasonable in two senses: First, because of the physical and psychological differences between men and women, differences so profound and so ubiquitous that we don't even notice them because we so easily take them for granted, it is not reasonable to expect the same ACTIONS (note, I did not say the same VIRTUES) from both sexes. If my wife sees a man getting beaten up in the street, and if she tries to intrude physically, I may call her courageous, but hardly prudent! She had done better to scream, to run for help, or something of that sort. If I see the same thing, I make a very different decision, based both on courage and prudence. The virtues are the same, but the expected actions differ, necessarily. Oh, I know there will be exceptions, but I've got too keen a memory of being stronger than my mother when I was 11 years old (and I was a late bloomer) to believe that they are anything other than exceptions. And social expectations are based on the generality, not on the exception.
Second, the double standard is a reasonable way for dealing with our fallen nature. In this sense, it is sometimes a means of forbearance or forgiveness. If I know that my friend Bob is prone to bad temper, I take that into account when it comes to what I can expect from Bob. If, however, I also know that Bob can be relied on in a pinch, I take that into account too. The double standards are at their best man's attempts to come to terms with what would be intolerable otherwise. So, since if you have brave women but cowardly men you are going to be overrun, but if you have brave men you are not going to be overrun no matter how cowardly your women are, you forgive women their tendency to consider first their own security and that of their children, and you encourage a certain physical courage in men. Similarly, if you have chaste men but sluttish women you are going to be overrun with illegitimate children, but if you have chaste women (who are largely protected by their chastity from all kinds of chaos that would otherwise threaten them) and lecherous men you will keep most of the chaos in check, you forgive men a measure of their wildness and you encourage chastity in women. This doesn't at all mean that you don't preach courage for both sexes, and chastity, too! After all, cowardice and lechery will land you in hell, no matter what sex you are. But it is a matter of knowing where the weaknesses lie, and the strengths, and forgiving the weaknesses when it is appropriate, and encouraging the strengths.
Tony, thanks for your very considered response to my points. I hope you view my repsonse here similarly.
If a woman expressed some male value in a male way, why would that be a problem, like the faintly insulting nickname? In fact, my girlfriend does this to me, and it only cements our relationship. What is the danger if we
see only one form of the particular virtue as normative.I see no danger.
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The "reasonable" criterion for a double standard is fascinating to me. For me, the crucial point isn't whether a double standard is reasonable, but whether we can't find a white crow, if you get my drift. That is, the double standard doesn't need to be proscriptive: sure, men and women, of course, tend to act differently, but we don't need to enshrine a statistical relationship into a proscriptive one. So, we can recognize that most men, most of the time, act a certain way, and women do differently as well, but if any single man or woman acts like the other, that should pose no problem. So the fact of the difference is not as important as the fact of their potential similarity. What unites us is greater than what divides us.
As far as biological or physiological differences, they surely mean something and have an effect, but, I think software (our cultural conditioning and our mental abilities) can trump hardware.
If my wife sees a man getting beaten up in the street, and if she tries to intrude physically, I may call her courageous, but hardly prudent!I personally know men that would be imprudent if they intruded, and women who would kick nearly anyone's ass if they did. So where does that leave your distinctions?
I would always forgive someone (note I have not said "man" or "woman") if they fail to live up to their best side because of some inherent or recurring foible. But anyone, man or woman, can have the foibles that you would strictly assign to one gender or the other. So where does that leave your distinctions as well? Yes, we can make generalizations about large numbers of men and women, but when it comes down to any one individual, anything can still happen, so we should celbrate if a man is big enough to exhibit a trait that most women show, and vice versa.
How big do you want to be?
Paul,
Does the word "norm" mean anything to you?
No, apparently.
Sorry for the flip reply.
Seriously, I don't believe in norms for norms sake. A statistical norm is not a proscriptive norm. Adhering to a norm is not a good in and of itself.
Paul,
In fact I don't know any woman at all who would be of much help in a real street brawl. But the argument is much bigger than individual concerns. It has to do in general with how we raise boys and girls, and what men and women come to understand is expected of them, AS men and women. Please don't tell me that our society, with its ridiculous divorce rates, its disappearance of responsible fatherhood (with responsible motherhood close on its heels), and its out-of-wedlock birthrate has ANY cause to instruct other ages and other cultures about the proper relations between the sexes. I mean that we have messed things up pretty badly in this area.
Again I return you to social expectations, which necessarily have to do with the general case and not the particular (which reasonable people can deal with ad hoc). My brother's school district decided, for example, to require one semester of home ec of all boys and girls, regardless of preference or aptitude, and one semester of shop of all boys and girls, regardless of preference or aptitude (or, I should add in both cases, the probable social benefit to be derived from it). That was sheer madness, unjust to everybody. Or, for a more serious issue, if your women are chaste but your men are questionable, you will be all right as a society; if you have the roles reversed, you will be inundated with illegitimate children. Make my wife as physically brave as you like; she still is not going to be able to restrain a 12-year-old boy. Make me physically brave, and it won't matter much whether my wife is physically brave or not.
Let us suppose, to open this out to a REALLY thorny issue, that I am a woman who has the capacity to inspire men and boys in prayer and lead them, IN THE ASSEMBLY, to a more Christian life. Should I attempt it? Saint Paul probably knew a few women who might have stood a chance at pulling that off -- a Priscilla here or a Lydia there. Nevertheless Paul is quite clear about the exclusion of women from the role of pastor. Why? Again, my behavior sets up a precedent for everybody else, and has unintended consequences for everybody else. In the case of women preachers, it is not clear to me that the long-run effect is to build up the kingdom of God, even if we set aside the clear NT proscription against them. Just because I can do a thing, and do it well, that does not mean that it is my place to do it, or that the institution I would serve wouldn't be better off WITHOUT me. For example, I may be an excellent preacher and reader of the Word, but if I usurp an authority that is not mine by place, I may undermine the rightful pastor and do everybody harm in the end. That is why Saint Paul insists so strongly on authority and obedience. The same is true, analogously, of the behavior of men and women -- only nowadays we see only what the individual prefers and not what is good for the people as a whole.
Tony wrote:
In fact I don't know any woman at all who would be of much help in a real street brawlThis is the classic "argument from personal ignorance," which is not very persuasive.
Please don't tell me that our society, with its ridiculous divorce rates, its disappearance of responsible fatherhood (with responsible motherhood close on its heels), and its out-of-wedlock birthrate has ANY cause to instruct other ages and other cultures about the proper relations between the sexes.Depends on what you mean by "proper relations between the sexes. That covers a whole lot of ground irrelevant to my point.
Individualists like me would support an individual child deciding for him or herself to take shop or home ec. But aside from an individualized curriculum, do you honestly think that only women should know how to cook, and that only men should know how to weld? What about the many great male chefs, not to mention husbands that cook the family meal (and that means me, too), as well as female welders, etc.?
Could you just let people *be*? Let them make their own choice, to follow their own hearts and their own inner voices and their own nature, without setting up a standard by which any variation must bve judged as insufficient, or lacking, or odd, or whatever. If 99 out of 100 women make a certain true, sincere choice, and that one women makes a different but equally sincere choice, why hold that woman in comparision to the others?
It makes no sense to hold up the statistical tendency for men and women to gravitate in certain directions when we can just let each individual decide.
There is one difference between men and women, however, that no amount of social rules or lack thereof can change, and that is the fact that women bear children (I also think women's desire to raise children is partially driven by biology and evolution). But there is still no need to set up a standard, as if every woman and man has to be the way most of them are. If a woman doesn't want to have children, that's her decision (and I know women like that).
I'm not gonna get into the preacher thing, that's way beyond my atheist's pay grade.
Paul,
"Could you just let people *be*? Let them make their own choice, to follow their own hearts and their own inner voices and their own nature, without setting up a standard by which any variation must bve judged as insufficient, or lacking, or odd, or whatever."
It sounds like you're having trouble just letting Tony be, to follow his own heart.
That's not just a quick zinger comment. It's a serious criticism of an approach toward ethics. You've been saying for months here that ethical decisions are a matter of personal preference. Is this not imposing a personal preference on someone else?
Note what I'm saying here. I'm not saying you're wrong and Tony is right, nor am I saying that Tony is right and you're wrong.* What I'm saying here is that your ethic of relativism is failing you, Paul. You have no grounds to complain about what Tony is doing, because all you have is your personal preference about what people ought to do.
*Tony, please bear with me a moment. This is actually a response to things Paul has written on other threads, and I'm intentionally, for this entry, avoiding the topic about which you and Paul have been writing in this thread.
Now, having said that, let's have a show of hands: how many of us would have trouble telling most men from most women apart from their ability to bear a child?
You see, Paul, there was a strong feminist tide starting around 1970 that tried to deny the differences between the sexes. A generation later it's not working. It's not working because the differences are deep and they're real. The physical differences are so obvious one can tend to overlook them. In a street brawl, as mentioned above, a man has an absolute advantage (with very rare individual exceptions). The psychological differences--documented down to basic brain structure and function--are supported more strongly in psychological research than ever before.
So please don't argue from the obsolete feminist position.
Oh, and I think that your calling Tony on an argument from personal ignorance may be technically correct. But if you're trying to counter by saying that women actually are as effective as men in street brawls, generally speaking, good luck to you.
Seriously, I don't believe in norms for norms sake. A statistical norm is not a proscriptive norm. Adhering to a norm is not a good in and of itself.
But all societies have proscriptive norms - you cannot avoid them. The question is, what should our norm be? Clearly, having proscriptive norms that deviate too far from the "statistical" (i.e., biological) norms is a recipe for disaster, as Tom pointed out. A strain of feminism has been bent for 30+ years on ignoring and/or eradicating the biological differences between men and women.
You seem to be saying that for a given individual, you wouldn't judge them by a particular societal norm. First of all, as Tom pointed out, even you, O relativist of relativists, cannot avoid judging people by some standard. Even aside from the standard you wish Tony to adhere to, you judge people based on standards of politeness, clarity of thought, how they treat others, etc. More to the point of Tony's article, however, societies cannot avoid having expectations for how people ought to behave, and how they ought to order their lives. Either people are expected to work to support themselves and their families, or they aren't. Either men and women are expected to raise the children they produce to maturity, or they aren't. Either 22 year-olds are expected to get a job and move out of their parent's house, or they aren't. Either married couples are expected to be monogamous, or they aren't. The fact that individuals, even many individuals, may not live up to the expectations, is not an argument that the expectations themselves are invalid, or that the society can prosper without them. If too large a fraction of the population doesn't take seriously the expectation that they need to earn a living, you end up with the many living off the efforts of a few; if too many couples produce children but don't take their responsibilities to raise them seriously, you end up with a bunch of antisocial children; if too many couples don't take the expectations of monogamy seriously, you end up with a bunch of children born out of wedlock and a bunch of ruined marriages. Societies aren't anarchies - they depend upon unwritten rules being followed - i.e., they depend upon cultural norms.
Of course there will always be those who don't fit the norms, which will make their lives uncomfortable to some greater or lesser degree. This is inherent in having a norm. It's also inherent in life. The fact that some people don't fit the norms is not a reason for getting rid of the norms. That leads to the many being unhappy, instead of a few.
Tom, you always interpret relative morality to be individualistic, and I've never represented it that way. Under my view of relative morality, the inclucation that a society effects on its people prevents individuals from being able to adopt any moral position willy-nilly, as easily as they decide between chocolate and vanilla.
Furthermore, I acknowledge that I am appealing to Tony on the assumption that he does share some of our society's morality toward individualism (don't confuse that with treating realtive morality individualistically) on the basis that relative morality can make claims of *consistency,* kinda like logical conclusions based on assumptions: *assuming* that Socrates is a man, etc., etc.; *assuming* that one accepts the morality of American society, etc. etc. If Tony rejects this assumption, my comment is meaningless. But if he doesn't reject it, I can appeal to consistency.
My comment was less part of a proof for Tony and much more just trying to appeal to another side of him.
You see, Paul, there was a strong feminist tide starting around 1970 that tried to deny the differences between the sexes.Please show me exactly where I have claimed that there are no differences between men and women, even beyond biological ones. If you can't, you've just set up a straw man.
Here's another way to view my point: Tom writes:
In a street brawl, as mentioned above, a man has an absolute advantage (with very rare individual exceptions).What Tom really is saying that men *in general* have an advantage. You certainly can't say that every single man would always win a street brawl against any single woman. Most men, even a vast majority, I'll grant that for the sake of argument, would probably win. But there are surely some men that would lose against certain women. In that case, one is only trying to enforce a norm for the pure sake of enforcing a norm, or because one just can't handle exceptions to a rule, if one therefore tries to make something proscriptive or essential out of what is only a statistical fact.
Oh, and I think that your calling Tony on an argument from personal ignorance may be technically correct.Yes, good call, I meant it in the technical sense. I prefer less rhetoric and more saying exactly what we mean in these forums. That's why I apologized for my flip response to Mike several comments above. If anyone ever wants to call me out on a rhetorical move I've made, I'll be more than happy to make explicit the logic (that is hopefully) behind it.
Mike, you're making the question whether socieies should have any norms, and that's not what I'm arguing. The question is whether the norms that try to mold men and women separately should be there. I don't see what goal is served, other than to separate the sexes. Men and women are gonna be different to the extent that they are even if society tries to enforce no differences between them. So what's the point in trying to enforce such a norm? What's the problem that would be created if men and women were allowed to distinguish themselves on a grass-roots, bottom-up basis, as opposed to a top-down, socially controlled basis? It seems to me like we'd get to what the *true* differences are between men and women if we allowed each individual to just be different or the same in the way that each individual man or woman wanted to be, and then just add everything up and see how different everyone was in what areas. I'm sure we'd still find vast differences.
Mike, what purpose is served in trying to mold every man and woman to be only like every other man or woman? For what other social distinctions we might make (rich versus poor, black versus white, educated versus non-educated, salaried versus hourly, etc., etc.) must your logic in answering my question above hold as well, and does that lead to any absurdities? If so, then that same logic must be suspect when applied to men and women. (Maybe I'm thinking too far ahead here.)
There's another problem here. Are my opponents saying that they don't want men to be sensitive, or to raise their children, or for women to be courageous or brave? The implications of that are astounding. That means men shouldn't try to read between the lines to understand what others might be thinking or feeling but not actually saying. This is a social skill that will help anyone. It would mean that women, when confronted with the death of a loved one, should just go ahead and break down and slobber and lose control, as opposed to trying to bravely come to grips with a tragedy.
I just don't get defining the differences between men and women that broadly. Stated that broadly, what are being called male values and females values are truly *human* values.
Now, if you want to state those values more narrowly, we have an entirely different conversation. But even then, we have problems. For instance, women, in general, talk more than men. But what conceivable social value or good can be advanced by establishing or keeping some social norm that says that men shouldn't talk so much? What possible harm can come about if some guy, out on the end of the bell curve, talks a lot that wouldn't also happen if a woman does so as well?
Paul,
With reference to your last comment, (especially " Are my opponents saying that they don't want men to be sensitive, or to raise their children, or for women to be courageous or brave?") I just want to say that I am so relieved to see that I am not the only person here whose communications are indecipherable to you.
I want to pick up more on the question of relative ethics, but that's a change of topic, so I've put up a new thread for it; or you can go straight to the discussion.
Paul,
What do you mean by "enforcment" of norms?
Without any context specified by you (which is an important disclaimer), "enforcement of norms" means a system of benefits and penalties that tend to encourage certain behavior or discourage opposite behavior.
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