Last night's YPU prize debate on gender roles (Resolved: Conform to traditional gender roles) was, with a few exceptions, no fun. None of the men wore dresses! Only one of the men wore a burqa! Not one of the speakers in the negative spoke in favor of a completely androgynous society; everyone stayed somewhere between gender-neutral and "separate but equal." If their objection to gender roles is that they confine and oppress women, then the only solution should be to get rid of gender altogether. Any gender role, no matter how enlightened, is going to constrain some woman somewhere from doing something she would otherwise do; otherwise, it's just a bundle of characteristics, not a category.
The four speeches that didn't fall into this fallacy were the most interesting of the night: Leah, who said that we should accept gender roles as being as psychologically ingrained as other evolutionary stuff like "fight or flight," but that the way to handle this is not to conform to gender roles but to play with them [Can we play with gender roles without conforming to them? Is there a difference between rejection and subversion? —CSB]; Geoff, who said that conformity is antithetical to art, therefore art demands we disregard gender roles [Conforming to gender roles is like conforming to an artistic form, i.e. novel, sonnet, etc.! Conforming to a gender role is a creative, even artistic act! —CSB]; and Noah, who said that it's never a question of "Should I conform to role X?" but "Which of my nineteen different roles should I conform to at this moment?" The roles of male, student, Jew, American, & leftist can coexist within a single person, and he has realize that he can never embody any of these roles fully, certainly not without sacrificing all of the others. Noah also warned that getting rid of roles completely leaves us vulnerable to totalitarianism, which essentially says, "You only have one role (citizen), but you damn well better do it." Other absolutisms substitute other roles; same bad deal.
Then there was Broockman, who was interested in meaning:
I suspect that some say “Conform!” not because they are motivated by justice, but because fearing nihilism they feel a need to imbue their own traditional choices with external meaning by identifying some tradition as something inherently meaningful and right.Looking through my Mary Poppins bag of stock arguments, I found this Eve-ism: "I have sometimes doubted that my life has meaning; I have never doubted that Hamlet has meaning."
. . . Sexual traditionalism proscribes some ex ante grand social solution to what is the most important challenge of any individual’s life.
I too mourn what the aff mourns, but we ought not become trapped as we attempt escape from nihilist nausea by making such statements to others. Rather, let us create meaning with the statement made to the universe by our lives. For, even being reactionary forces one to live at the tempo of others. A teaching from the Jewish tradition reads, “We can only be redeemed to the extent to which we see ourselves.”
Your soul’s answer may to be keep fighting regardless of this futility. But the struggle to the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart only if he knows this truth.
Sartre says, “every man is condemned to freedom.” And I say, embrace it.
Deconstruction — I won't say "postmodernism," because, as Housemate Dara always says, there's no reason postmodernism can't be creative after it's done being destructive — insists that Hamlet really is meaningless. It's like 4'33", which very obviously has no meaning except what the listener brings to it. This seems to be what Broockman is saying about life. I disagree — maybe 4'33" has no meaning inherent in it, but a Bach concerto seems to have meaning that we perceive as well as meaning we impose.
Eve's aphorism is compelling because the statement "There is no essential difference between 4'33" and a Bach concerto; both have no meaning but what the listener projects onto it" is more obviously false than "Life has no meaning but what a man projects onto it." Of course there's a difference between John Cage and Bach! One has stuff in it already! To put it in literary/cinematic rather than musical terms, I am more confident in the meaning of Gilda's "actual-size movie-queen despair," which is obviously tragic, than I am in the meaning of my own problems, which may simply be unfortunate.
Think of existentialism as the belief that life is more like 4'33" and less like a Bach concerto. That may in fact be something Broockman believes. However, it seems weird to say that life can't have inherent meaning if we accept that Hamlet, Gilda, and Bach concerti can, and if we don't accept that those things can, then we're back to equating what it's like to listen to 4'33" and what it's like to listen to Bach.
No comments:
Post a Comment