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Feminism is a hot topic, a user before mentioned his thoughts on it's origin, and that got me thinking. What is the social driver behind feminism?
Personally, I see it as a response to modern medicine and work safety standards, and the resulting rapidly booming population. Without historic mortality levels, it is no longer necessary for women to devote their lives to maintaining the population. With women free to do as they please, society suddenly finds itself with a lot of free hands that could be working, and so there is a push to remove the social systems that forbid women from traditional labor.
What puzzles me, is through what force does society implement change like this? It's not like we suffered the woes of overpopulation, and responded with feminist cultural change. This seems almost pre-emptive. But the arguments behind the feminist movement (I think) were based around freedom and equality. Was there a secret utilitarian agenda? Did things just coincidentally line up? Does society naturally drift towards freedom when the roadblocks are removed? Am I simply stupid and uneducated? I don't know enough to figure it out, but I feel like it's at least an interesting question. Thoughts?
I tend to see feminism as a logical outgrowth of classical liberalism. Most ideologies since 1789 seem to involve people building off the ideas the French Revolution set loose from the salons to their natural conclusions. Once the Declaration of the Rights of Man became the civic religion, abolitionism was inevitable, as was universal male suffrage, as were nationstates, and then eventually female suffrage and the end of the patriarchy, whatever that means. Plus socialism. The whole thing has just taken centuries to play out. We are still adapting to the adaptations to the adaptations to the adaptations, with no one sure when we will settle into a new equilibrium.
I suspect we have knocked down a few very important Chesterson's fences along the way, and the manosphere will write your ear off on all the ways modern gender roles are making people dysfunctional and unhappy. Naively speaking, if you look at the fertility rates, where things end up in 2100 is a race between memetic feminism and genetic traditionalism. Personally? I'd say we will probably reinvent the social contract in a way no one can yet expect, as the dominoes continue to tumble.
I don't think society works that way. Socialism failed and so did fascism. Abolitionism wasn't inevitable, and it didn't happen because of some document from decades prior.
It's funny; two examples you highlighted are ones where the line of causality is fairly direct. Abolitionism came to the fore as the French constituent assembly debated the status of Free Colored and slaves in Saint-Domingue, with people pointing out that the Code Noir and slavery in general were illogical in light of the Assembly's liberal ideals. They ultimately eliminated the Code Noir and rubber stamped freeing the slaves (though the slaves did basically free themselves, first, the rebellion sparked by news of revolution at home). Then, a few years into the revolution, proto-socialists like the Enrages and Gracchus Babeu argued for the abolition of private property and social ownership of capital. They would ultimately lose the day, and uh, be killed; this drama of socialists emerging from the reeds after a liberal revolution to get smacked down would repeat in 1830 and 1848. There's a reason why Marx thought a liberal revolution was a necessary precondition of a socialist revolution.
Note: I'm saying classical liberalism, the ideology, naturally lead to feminism. The Declaration of the Rights of Man is just a convenient religious text to point to, embodying a larger movement, much like you point to the Book of Matthew to talk about the social phenomenon of Christianity, many of the participants of whom were illiterate and never read it.
If you fully absorb what people like John Locke claimed about moral ontology, the idea of keeping women in a subservient disenfranchised status is unsupportable. As is keeping slaves. But much like the Merovingian kings kept concubines for generations after converting to Christianity, it's taken generations for society to shed its traditions and let the logical consequences of classical liberalism seep in.
The line of causality is fairly direct ... in the first instance what we have are people doing two different things. To establish a line of causality here is like establishing a line of causality between my nightly shower and teeth-brushing. It is to say that my tooth-brushing is caused by my shower, was made inevitable by it, because the shower established the principle of hygiene and it would be formally invalid for me to shower yet also go to be with a dirty mouth. Obviously the real reason why I shower and brush my teeth is to be found elsewhere. And besides, I don't apply the principle of hygiene in many ways. I could meticulously clean out each of my finger and toe nails, I could trim all hair on my body, I could clean the inside of my posterior orifice, pluck my nose, put swabs in my ears ... I'm sure many hygiene purists with OCD do all of these things nightly. And of course if you ask me why I shower and brush my teeth I would say hygiene. But the reality is that this means something other than that I am allegiant to some abstract principle. So too did the old liberals fail to "liberate" women for over a century. The American ones were also slow to recognize the equality of the slave and this slowness curiously varied tightly with one's economic interest in slavery. Only recently have we discovered that liberty also applies to homosexuals and transsexuals. It seems also that despite NAMbLA's best efforts in the 70s the rest of society has still not discovered the formal necessity of pedosexual rights given the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Nor have the furies been any luckier. Neither has it discovered the need for children's rights, or even 17.9 year old's rights -- public schools continue to be blatantly illiberal into the 21st century. Liberals decide what rights are formally valid as freely as they choose. We could easily enslave minorities, declare them 3/5ths human, get rid of women's suffrage, and ban LGBT and call ourselves liberal. We could even restrict none-property owning white men from voting, or simply restrict it to the top 6% of the population IQ wise, as in the early history of the U.S., most states allowed only white male adult property owners to vote (about 6% of the population).. Party idea -- the American Liberal Party. Platform: All men are create equal. Nonwhites are 3/5ths of whites. Only white male property owners should be allowed to vote. Women must wear dresses and cannot vote. Sodomy is illegal. Marriage is between a man and a woman. The right to bear arms shall not be infringed. No immigration from nonwhite countries.
I don't think anyone's behavior is effected by reading John Locke's "moral ontology." We can model political behavior using behavior genetics. Let P_1,t, P_2,t, ... , P_n,t be the phenotypes of the politically relevant at some time t. Then assuming these people are all equals we would roughly expect the culture at time t, C_t = E[P_i,t] ~= (P_1,t + P_2,t + ... + P_n,t)/n. Now from behavior genetics for a quantitative trait like whatever political phenotype is under consideration, P = G + E, so P_i,t = G_i,t + E_i,t, and C_t = E[G_i,t] + E[E_i,t]. So you can see that C_t will change as G_i,t and E_i,t change amongst the politically relevant. During the French Revolution, both G_i,t and E_i,t changed a lot, there was a huge influx of the new bourgeoisie with their economic environment and everything. Now the question is, where do books, documents, principles come into play? To keep it simple I'll avoid introducing a notion of hierarchy, where what superiors think is introduced into the phenotype's environment, drastically shaping it through mechanisms which probably have more to do with wanting stuff and status than they do with the formal consequences of Locke's moral ontology. We'll just assume P_1,t, P_2,t, ... , P_n,t is sovereign, uncoordinated and equal. Any influence of ideas is purely intellectual. We'll even ignore the notion of political formula or noble lie and the competition for followers for now. Just let E_i,t = $_i,t , M_i,t, , T_i,t , and O_i,t for profit motives, ideas, technological environment, and everything else. Now C_t = E[G_i,t] + E[$_i,t] + E[M_i,t] + E[T_i,t] + E[O_i,t]. Is John Locke's moral ontology really the only changing factor among the politically relevant over time, or could their different behaviors over time be the result in changes of their genetic make up, their profit motives, their technological capabilities, and other things? When you add their suppression of HBD to the mix, are they really so influenced by information? How could they be when they censor information they don't like? If E[M_i,t] were so important we should expect affirmative action to be gone by now based on the findings of HBD, but it isn't, because belief in the blank slate never motivated it in the first place, it was genes, profit motive, etc.
But why do you have a nightly shower? Are you so dirty that you must wash every night? Are you engaged in strenuous or muddy labour?
It's not mere hygiene at work, since if you have a conventional office job, you're not exerting yourself physically enough to require constant washing. It's the ideal of hygiene. If you skipped a night without showering, would you miss it? Would you feel, somehow, 'dirty'? Isn't there, in a sense, a moral obligation to keep yourself clean according to how you were raised?
And if it were difficult for you to have that shower every night, if you didn't have access to a bathroom and heated water and convenient disposal of same, and easy to keep dry and warm afterwards, then would you shower every night? Increasing convenience, increasing access to what were once 'luxury' resources, increasing space, means that it becomes easier to copy the rich in their habits, and that builds up expectations thereafter, so that I doubt if you could get away today with building a house or apartment that had no shower.
So "poor people should have access to means of hygiene" does arise out of a particular political philosophy, and ends in you having a nightly shower as well as brushing your teeth, because 'this is just how it is done'.
I run over 3 miles almost daily and lift weights, and even if I don't do that I get greasy if I don't shower. I do it for purely physical reasons.
No, so if you took me from the woods and put me in a house my change in showering behavior would be explained by physical environment.
I think it's pretty clear increases in hygiene are due to changes in physical environment, not John Locke's moral ontology ...
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