To_Mandalay
2d ago
I know it's ackshually dulia but if you don't assume Catholic doctrine is true, from an anthropological perspective Mary clearly occupies the role of a goddess in the religion.
To_Mandalay
2d ago
Children and especially babies require an immense amount of attention
Children really require much less attention than WEIRDos think they do. Historically you could mostly ignore your babies between feedings. And once they becomes ambulatory you can just let them do whatever pretty much except when they have to do work around the house or in the fields. They'll probably be fine, horrifying as most moderns find the prospect. High child mortality was due to illness which pre-modern mothering was powerless to prevent, no matter how attentive or caring, not due to kids wandering off and getting eaten by bears.
This is still the case in a lot of undeveloped countries, or at least it was a few decades ago. I've talked to people who grew up in Latin America in the 70s but essentially lived pre-modern peasant existences and described parenting as being very hands-off.
Like what does a modern "neglectful" mother do? She probably lets her kid eat whatever, doesn't take him to the doctor, doesn't buy him new clothes, lets him go wherever he wants with whoever he wants whenever he wants. None of these were factors in the pre-modern world (everybody was eating the same thing, nobody was going to the doctor for yearly checkups, everybody wore the same clothes all the time) except for the last one which would only result in death at the margins.
To_Mandalay
2d ago
...Is to obviously discard any information that could be contrary to your assertion.
What information? Do you disagree with the statement that the general opinion of pre-modern thinkers was that women were inferior to men? Can you find any such figures who disagreed? Maybe you can, I'm sure there were a handful, but they're going to be vastly outnumbered by those who held the contrary position. Mary is a goddess*. She is inimitable. The fact that according to Christian mythology she was once a mortal woman is irrelevant to the role she actually occupies in existing religious practice. She should be compared to her fellow divinities, not mortal men, and she is certainly inferior to God the Father and to her own son. Having warrior and scholar goddesses didn't stop the Greeks from pacing such onerous restrictions on their women that it surprised their own contemporaries. The divine and human spheres are different, and the reverence of female divinities says little more about the role of women in actual existing human society than the frequency of incest in stories of the gods says something about the acceptability of incest between actual flesh and blood human beings.
It's the only way the species can continue. I ... I can't think of anything more prestigious.
Necessary doesn't equal prestigious. Actually it often indicates the opposite, since the mundane and commonplace is rarely exalted.
*Yes I know it's not latria it's dulia etc. etc.
To_Mandalay
3d ago
Horses are better than humans at running but the number of people throughout history who would disagree with the statement "horses are inferior to human beings" is very small.
To_Mandalay
2d ago
Men and women are both created in the image of God.
Maybe, but to what extent? Augustine believed the woman was not as much the Image of God as the man. Aristotle said without much qualification that woman was inferior to man.
Women historically had been protected or privileged over men in things likely to result in death like drowning on a sinking ship
This actually isn't really true. Someone linked the wikipedia page for "women and children first" which makes clear this is not some ancient code of conduct but a rather recent 19th century phenomenon, observed only sporadically. Men tended to fare better in shipwrecks, the Titanic being the glaring exception, because they were better swimmers.
or serving in combat.
The idea that being exempted from combat is a privilege is itself a pretty modern one. For a very long time bearing arms was one of, if not the highest honor. Free men could bear arms, not slaves or women. Probably the oldest conception of what it means to "be a man" is to be a great warrior who can kill a lot of people.
"Where's all that 'male privilege' when it's time to get drafted?" is a complaint that belongs to the post-modern and especially post-industrial era where warfare has been stripped of all the glory and honor that historically attended it, and been reduced to merely an unpleasant duty not dissimilar from digging ditches or pulling wagons.
Occasional woman through history who have fought as soldiers or warriors, whether disguised as men or otherwise, tend to draw praise or at least neutral curiosity, while men who took on the role of a woman with regards to child-rearing or other tasks assigned to the female sphere were viewed as worthy of derision at best.
To_Mandalay
2d ago
Healthy women have deep-seated, base, mammalian urges to reproduce and nourish healthy offspring. It is hardwired in them to feel pleasure through these behaviors. The bond a mother has with her children and how they give great meaning to her life is a story in every culture in existence.
A significant minority of women likely do not have this instinct or have it in a much weakened form. Through human and pre-human history women really haven't had that much of a choice on whether they bear children or not, so selection for enjoying motherhood is probably not as strong as you might think.
Women are forsaking these genetic behaviors for what reason? For whose benefit?
Cuz they don't feel like it, I guess? Really nobody is forcing women not to have kids. It's not a matter of it being too expensive or anything. You can be flat broke in a western country and your kids will have an infinitely more comfortable existence than those of the peasant woman in 1312 who popped out twelve children. If women really want to have kids, they can, it's not hard.
To_Mandalay
2d ago
If that were true, we would expect traditional societies to be more willing to allow women to suffer and die in place of men, because they have less value.
Not necessarily. Women are valuable because they can give you sons.
"Female infanticide" is it's own phenomenon deserving of a name but not "male infanticide." The wiki article only gives the examples of India, China, and Pakistan, but gender-skewed infanticide was also not uncommon in pre-modern Europe. Not a lot of men in history were going "awwww man, another son?" when their wife popped out the latest kid.
To_Mandalay
3d ago
Is your argument that modern society values motherhood more?
No.
Complementarianism, may be expressed more now, I suspect for much of existence it went without saying, but was no less true.
I don't think so, I think for most of history it has been the standard belief of most men that women are an inferior order.
To_Mandalay
2d ago
Mary is a goddess, it's not really comparable.
To_Mandalay
2d ago
Inferior in the great chain of being, in absolute worth, closer, in the mind of a pre-modern, to the Imago Dei
To_Mandalay
3d ago
Counterpoint: Say something about someone's mom who is from a traditionalist culture and if you survive the reaction you should reevaluate women not being valued. Mothers and matriarchal figures are highly respected.
Of course women have value in traditional societies. More than livestock. But less than men.
To_Mandalay
12d ago
Of course there was no mass immigration in 1500. Mass immigration didn't happen because there was a "do mass immigration" button just sitting there that nobody bothered to press until 1960, it happened because A) travel became unprecedentedly easy in the 19th - 20th centuries B) for a variety of reasons the politics of the west in the 20th century made western states fairly accepting of that influx.
The nuanced view is that Christianity ultimately is at the root of post-enlightenment left and liberal politics, which I think is pretty unambiguously true (and that's a good thing, thank you Christianity).
To_Mandalay
12d ago
You are not "steelmanning" the anti-Christian reactionary argument, which would be something like, "Christianity's inherently egalitarian and destructive elements were held in check by the natural ethnocentrism and aristocratic spirit of Europeans, but eventually the poisonous seed flowered, and resulted in democracy, socialism, egalitarianism, etc." The question to ask would not be "were Christian Europeans Based™?" but "Were Christian Europeans more or less Based™" than they would have been in a counterfactual where Europe was never Christianized.
To_Mandalay
26d ago
Jews died of typhus and starvation en masse near the end of the war, in the same way that 200-400k Germans died of starvation in the final months of the war and the months that followed.
This doesn't work. Most of the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust died in 1942 - '43, well before supply lines began to collapse and starvation set in. The Nazis recorded that by this time, the General Government had been cleared of Jews.
Jewish population figures were actually accurate prior to WWII
There is absolutely no grounds for assuming the governments of Eastern Europe overcounted Jewish population to the extent that would be necessary to explain the complete disappearance of eastern European Jewry post-1945. Revisionists can say that the numbers are "uncertain" or "unreliable" but it isn't true. These are not population estimates of some ill-recorded migration 2000 years ago, this is Europe in the 20th century. The degree of uncertainty required simply does not exist.
Well that’s the thing, in my opinion even the most virulent 20th century European racist would not gas family after family of downtrodden Jews.
Says who? Do you doubt Bolshevik atrocities also?
This is inexplicable when you consider (1) there were no camp whistleblowers, not even a friend or family member of a camp member who was confided in, which is improbable
This is not true. Rumors of what was going in the east were everywhere in Germany. There is a book called The German War by Nicholas Stargardt which has a long chapter going into depth on what the Germans knew about the Final Solution as it unfolded.
(2) the elderly camp guards put on trial in Germany who have entered the “honest old people” phase of dementia more often than not assert that the holocaust didn’t happen.
This is also not true. I've never heard of a old Nazi in Germany denying the Holocaust happened. Moreoever, plenty of Nazis admitted to it when they had no actual motive to admit to it. Adolf Eichmann spoke openly about the physical extermination of the Jews while he was a free man in Argentina. Why do you think he did that?
To_Mandalay
12d ago
I doubt there are very many people who were angry about Trump disrespecting the troops and are now actively pro-Hezbollah.
To_Mandalay
11d ago
They have been holding 'LGBTQ+ for Hamas' rallies since October 8th.
Very few if any leftists have expressed support for Hamas' political, religious, and social program while also being pro LGBT+ which would actually be contradictory. A portion of them will express support for Hamas insofar as they fight the IDF without supporting their social program, which is a consistent position. A greater part of them will refuse to say either way, because they view calls to condemn Hamas as bad-faith attempts at distraction (the standard line being "I'll condemn Hamas when my government sends them billions of dollars").
Entirely from the correctness or incorrectness of the political views themselves, there's no real contradiction between "I support LGBT+/feminism/whatever" and "I am against Israel's actions in Gaza."
This sort of interpretation tends to strip Jesus' preaching of anything particularly novel or interesting. "Well when he said turn the other cheek he didn't mean you should let your enemies kill you, he just meant, you know, don't go off half-cocked, control your anger," "Well when he said 'it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye...' he didn't mean it's bad to be rich, he just meant don't love money too much." This is all stuff any Greek Pagan would have happily nodded along with. What was so hard or so shocking about the path Jesus offered?
I think Jesus' message probably was radically ascetic and self-denying. The story of Lazarus and the Rich Man is also interesting in this regard. It's from a different author than Matthew's gospel, so it's not necessarily going to agree on everything, but in the story, the rich man never actually appears to do anything wrong. You could kind of argue his sin was not being more charitable to Lazarus, but the text never actually says this. And when the rich man is being tormented in Hades and asks Abraham for a cup of water, Abraham tells him no, because "remember that during your lifetime you received your good things and Lazarus in like manner evil things, but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony." That's it. In other words, the rich man went to Hell just for being rich. It had little to do with his or Lazarus' deeds in life, but with a cosmic imbalance that had to be corrected. The story is kind of a didactic one even if it isn't literally a parable so it doesn't necessarily mean Luke thought every rich person was going to Hell and I'm sure he didn't think every poor person would have a share in the kingdom but the overall view of earthly wealth is very dim.
This is somewhat supported by what is known of the early church, it's self-imposed poverty and the lack of any violent resistance to persecution. People being what they are, this didn't last long and pretty soon theologians and church fathers were spinning all sorts of justification for why you can actually
To_Mandalay
26d ago
calling that evacuation is a typical SS thing
To wit, there are surviving Nazi documents where "shooting" or "execution" is literally crossed out in red pen and replaced with "resettlement" or "evacuation." Other documents say comical things like "the local Jews were resettled to a large pit outside of town."
According to the modern scholarship which is in dispute, which has no primary documents or primary evidence of the deaths at this time, and which does no archaeology to determine deaths.
Contemporary Nazi documentation records that Poland had been almost entirely cleared of Jews by the end of 1943. The destruction of the Jews in the USSR is also copiously recorded in contemporary documents. These are the Jews in question; Jews that died in Dachau or Buchenwald towards the end of the war are a tiny fraction of the total that must be explained.
You misread what I wrote. If you find pre-WWII population estimates of Jewry in Europe, published pre-WWII, as for instance in a Jewish encyclopedia, the numbers are lower than today’s estimates of pre-WWII Jewry in Europe. IIRC, by millions.
This is not true. The Polish government recorded more than 3,000,000 Jews in Poland alone in the mid-1930s. At the end of the war, there were not even 100,000. No other population in Europe suffered in anywhere near a similar proportion. There are numerous revisionist excuses for this collapse (Polish overcounting, emigration to Israel and the United States, deportation into the USSR) but none of them work. We can go into further detail there if you want, but you have to be absurdly charitable to the revisionist case at every turn for the numbers to even begin to come out the way deniers want them to.
With hundreds of thousands of participants, we should certainly find letters which speak to the organized and systemic campaign of killing Jewish women and children. Can you find these letters for me?
Within the actual 'death camps' (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, later Auschwitz) there was only a very small staff assigned to conduct the extermination at each camp, hundreds at the most, including Jewish prisoners forced to work as auxiliaries. It doesn't take that many armed men to murder unarmed civilians in the thousands.
Stuff still leaked though:
Here's one letter from the book (page number is from the epub; here's a link to a free download if you want to read it yourself.
“On the ‘Aryan’ side of the city, the German captain in the garrison, Wilm Hosenfeld, wrote home on 23 July, the second day of the deportations from Warsaw, telling his wife that the ‘ghetto with its half-million Jews is to be emptied’ on Himmler’s orders: ‘History has no real parallel. Perhaps, cavemen ate each other, but to simply butcher a nation, men, women, children, in the twentieth century, and that it should be us, who are waging a crusade against Bolshevism, that is such a dreadful blood-guilt to make you want to sink into the ground with shame.” (page 302)
Here's one, cited in Saul Friedländer's Years of Extermination (page 400):
Wilhelm Cornides, a Wehrmacht noncommissioned officer, was stationed in Galicia in the summer of 1942. According to his diary entry of August 31, while he was waiting for a train at the railway station in Rava Ruska, another train entered the station: It carried Jews in some thirtyeight cattle cars. Cornides asked a policeman where the Jews came from. “ ‘Those are probably the last ones from Lvov,’ the policeman answered. ‘That has been going on now for five weeks uninterruptedly. In Jaroslav, they let only eight remain, no one knows why.’ I asked: ‘How far are they going?’ Then he replied, ‘To Belzec.’ ‘And then?’ ‘Poison.’ I asked: ‘Gas?’ He shrugged his shoulders. Then he said only: ‘At the beginning, they always shot them, I believe.’ ”
A consul of neutral Sweden in Stettin, Karl Inge Vendel, learned about the exterminations in 1943 from his contacts with dissident figures in the German regime:
“In a city, all the Jews were assembled for what was officially announced as ‘delousing.’ At the entrance they were forced to take off their clothes; the delousing procedure, however, consisted of gassing and, afterward, all of them would be stuffed into a mass grave. The source from which I obtained all this information on the conditions in the General Government is such that not the slightest shade of disbelief exists concerning the truthfulness of my informant’s descriptions.”
(Years of Extermination, page 460)
In 1942, OK Ostrow reported in its war diary that:
the Jews in Treblinka are not adequately buried and as a result an unbearable smell of cadavers pollutes the air.
The mass shootings of Jewish civilians in the east, since they took place over a broad expanse of territory rather than in a few discrete locations, did directly involve thousands to tens of thousands of people, and thus produced many more letters and personal accounts:
On June 18, 1942, Wehrmacht private HK wrote home from BrestLitowsk: “In Bereza- Kartuska, where I stopped for lunch, 1,300 Jews had just been shot on the previous day. They had been brought to a pit outside of the town. Men, women and children had to undress completely and were then liquidated with a shot in the back of the neck. The clothes were disinfected and used again. I am convinced that if the war goes on much longer, the Jews will be turned into sausage and served to Russian war prisoners and to the Jewish specialized workers. . . .”
(Years of Extermination, page 426)
The Italians knew what was going on:
In early 1943 Ciano was appointed ambassador to the Vatican and the Duce himself took over foreign affairs. A few days beforehand Mussolini and Ciano had seen the cable sent on January 3 by the Italian ambassador in Berlin, Dino Alfieri: “Regarding the fate of [deported German Jews], like that of Polish, Russian, Dutch and even French Jews, there cannot be much doubt. . . . Even the SS talk about the mass executions. . . . A person who was there recalled with horror some scenes of executions by machine guns of nude women and children lined up at the mouth of a common ditch. About the tales of torture running the gamut I will limit myself to the one told to my colleague by an SS official who confi ded that he hurled babies of six months against a wall, shattering them, to give an example to his men, tired and shaken by an execution that was particularly horrible because of the number of victims.”
Here's another:
On July 6 Pvt. Franzl also recorded the events at Tarnopol, for the enjoyment of his parents in Vienna. The discovery of the mutilated corpses of Volksdeutsche and Ukrainians led to vengeance against the local Jews: They were forced to carry the corpses from the cellars and line them up by newly dug graves; afterward the Jews were beaten to death with truncheons and spades. “Up to now,” Franzl went on, “we have sent approximately 1,000 Jews to the other world, but this is by far too little for what they have done.” After asking his parents to spread the news, Franzl ended his letter with a promise: “If there are doubts, we will bring photos. Then, no more doubts.”74 (Years of Extermination, page 214)
I don't know if Franzl ever took any pictures, but
Then there are the Einsatzgruppen reports themselves, which helpfully catalogue the murdered by "men, women, and children."
We don’t generally consider confessions made under torture to be reliable, such as the Nuremberg testimony.
This is mostly a meme. Few of the Nuremberg defendants were tortured. None of the defendants in later trials, such as Kurt Franz or Franz Stangl, commandants of Sobibor and Treblinka, were tortured. Nor did they have any incentive to lie, since they received the maximum penalty of life imprisonment under German law. None of this accounts for Nazis who admitted to the exterminations outside a courtroom setting.
I'll ask again:
Adolf Eichmann spoke openly about the physical extermination of the Jews while he was a free man in Argentina. Why do you think he did that?
To_Mandalay
12d ago
He did not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets, but to fulfill them. The novelty of Jesus's teaching is entirely in the nature of Grace, not specific ethical teachings.
If that's the case, he wasted a lot of time delivering ethical teaching. I tend to think Jesus believed 'works' were a lot more essential to salvation than most Protestants (even most Catholics) would like.
Wait a second, why do twelve disciples have swords three years into Jesus's ministry if Jesus actually teaches unconditional pacifism like the literal words suggest?
They didn't. Jesus told them to go buy some swords earlier that same week, explicitly so that he could fulfill the prophecy that he would be 'counted among the transgressors,' and then forbids them from using the swords when he's arrested. There's not a single place in the New Testament where violence against one's enemies is encouraged or even sanctioned. Divine violence on the other hand is all over the NT, you might even say it's the whole point, but that's a very different matter.*
*I would say the pacifism of the early Christians is inexplicable without the apparently ubiquitous belief that Jesus was going to come back very soon to establish the kingdom and destroy Rome and the nations; in other words, earthly Christians didn't need to do any killing because God was about to do it for them. When this didn't pan out naturally doctrine had to evolve.
To_Mandalay
12d ago
It goes back to Celsus:
They say to each of their hearers:—Believe, first of all, that he whom I introduce to thee is the son of God, although he was shamefully bound, and disgracefully punished, and very recently was most contumeliously treated before the eyes of all men. Believe it even the more, on that account. If these bring forward this person, and others, again, a different individual, while the common and ready cry of all parties is, ‘Believe, if thou wilt be saved, or else begone,’ what shall those do who are in earnest about their salvation? Shall they cast the dice, in order to divine whither they may betake themselves, and whom they shall join?
They declare the wisdom that is among men to be foolishness with God. The reason of this has been stated long ago: their desire to win over by means of this saying the most ignorant, servile, or uninstructed of mankind. These sorcerers flee away with headlong speed from the more polished class of persons, because they are not suitable subjects for their impositions, while they seek to decoy those who are more rustic.
To_Mandalay
12d ago
Three 19th century American Presidents were Irish, but they were Protestant Irish.
That's not really 'Irish,' though. Scots-English Yeomanry from Ulster vs Celtic peasantry from County Cork.
To_Mandalay
1mo ago
The "genetic pacification" hypothesis is such an article of faith among HBD-inclined internet RWers, that I expected it to be, if not accepted by the mainstream, at least a niche topic popular with hereditarian autodidacts, a la Ashkenazi IQ or something like that. So I was surprised to find that it appears to be based solely on this single paper, and that this single paper sucks.
The proposition that there was a huge sea-change in public, ecclesiastical, and official attitudes towards the death penalty in the high middle ages is supported by reference to a single work (La peine de mort by Carbasse), and two or three quotes from prominent theologians. Maybe it's true but the authors haven't done a very good job establishing that.
Later the authors acknowledge that A) they don't know how many of these condemned men procreated before their executions, B) they don't know how many were executed for non-violent offenses, C) they don't know how many murderers escaped detection. They just kind of say 'well our model is imperfect' and keep moving. The authors don't even attempt to quantify any of the aforementioned problems, despite the fact that any one could completely collapse the thesis if the numbers were wrong. Maybe the data for quantification doesn't exist, but in that case the authors shouldn't pretend this papers is anything but idle speculation.
The murder rate dropped all over Western Europe over the time period in question, but the 'execution rate' the authors use of 0.5 - 1% of the male population every generation appears to be based solely on England and Flanders. Was it the same in Germany and France, where the homicide rate also dropped precipitously? The Scandinavian countries? Did they even check? Does the data exist?
a comparable proportion [to those executed, died] through extrajudicial executions, i.e., deaths of offenders at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial.
The above appears to be a case of "I made it the fuck up," or at least the authors don't cite anything to back it up. Nevertheless, it's the justification for boosting the 0.5 - 1% of violent men removed per generation to 1 - 2%, which naturally is better for their conclusion.
They also assume that the heritability of violence was the same in the Middle Ages as it is today. I doubt it, though there's no way to know since no one was doing heritability estimates in 1300. But again, this is necessary for their argument to go through.
Then there's this bizarre section
Eisner’s control theory is vulnerable to another line of criticism. In societies of Western European origin since the mid-20th century, external and internal controls on behavior have weakened, while “bad boys” have become more positively portrayed in popular culture. This cultural change seems to have caused a modest rise in violence among young men of European background, but nothing comparable to what existed a millennium ago (Eisner, 2001; Spierenburg, 2008, pp. 3–4). If strong external and internal controls had alone caused the pacification of social relations, what is to prevent a return to the earlier, less peaceful state once they have been relaxed? This prospect is evoked by Muchembled (2008, p. 8) in his history of violence in European societies. It also comes up repeatedly in works of modern fiction from Lord of the Flies to A Clockwork Orange, whose characters revert to barbarism when freed from the restraints of civilization. In reality, this reversion to barbarism has not happened.
The argument seems to be "We think 'bad boys' are cool now, but murder rates haven't exploded! Could this be because the murder genes were bred out of us????" Sure, why not?
All of the above is besides the point, since we have much firmer historical evidence from much more recent times that very high homicide rates among large populations can collapse quickly enough to rule out genetic explanations. The 19th century Mediterranean littoral, in particular, suffered from homicide rates equal to those of the most crime-ridden American cities today. Southern Italy had homicide rates of 30/100k, Corsica about the same, in Greece this was even higher, up to 50-60/100k. Spain had a homicide rate of about 10/100k in the mid-19th century. By the early 1900s, Mediterranean homicide rates had fallen several times over, down to the 1-3/100k range. Anglo-American homicide rates in the American west were also several times higher than those back east, despite the same genetic stock. I don't have the sources on any of these on hand, but I can go find them if anyone wants. The whole idea of 'genetic pacification,' is entirely superfluous, when there is good evidence that environmental factors are sufficient to produce manyfold reductions in murder rates in much shorter periods of time than the entirety of the middle ages.
This kind of stuff is why, despite being too dumb and lazy (for genetic reasons, surely) to understand the dense statistics that underpin much of the HBD cinematic universe*, I'm pretty skeptical of the whole thing.
*This paper being an exception, where it's so bad it's obvious even to me.
To_Mandalay
27d ago
You'd think if out of 80 million dead in ww2, 6 million were jews, you'd get like 5-8% of time dedicated to it... just proportionately?
Some 40% of WWII dead were Chinese. Do Churchill, De Gaulle, and Eisenhower devote 40%. of their writing to Chinese war dead?
Eisenhower does actually mention a holocaust in crusade in europe. Specifically a "Bomber's Holocaust", carried out by the allies against the germans. But nothing about a mass extermination of jews, only that when released from the work camps they and all the other prisoners were starving from lack of food, largely because German logistics had collapsed.
Then the answer is no, you haven't examined any of the evidence for the Holocaust one way or the other beyond memes.
To claim that modern society has devalued motherhood and femininity, or made them low status, is completely backwards. Motherhood and femininity in general have been devalued for as long as patriarchy has existed, so pretty much the whole of human history. I can't think of any human cultures, let alone any of the big-name European and near-eastern ones that the modern west is descended from, which have not considered the female sphere and female pursuits to be intrinsically lesser than that of men.* The "oh, women aren't inferior to men, they just have different strengths/they're made for different roles" line you hear from conservatives nowadays (what Christians call 'complementarianism') is itself an anti-modernist rearguard action. For the great majority of the history of western civilization, philosophers, theologians, and intellectuals, whether Pagan, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or atheist, have been happy to state that actually, women are just strictly inferior to men. It's the reason you occasionally get figures like Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great who are praised for being essentially men in women's bodies, but you never get men praised for being essentially women in men's bodies.
What happened in more resent centuries isn't that motherhood and womanhood were devalued. Motherhood and womanhood were devalued way back in the primordial past, and only recently have women been allowed to escape such devalued roles at scale.
You can't make motherhood 'prestigious' because motherhood has never been prestigious. Closest thing would just be banning women from doing actually prestigious things.
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