Friday, July 1, 2011
The Language We Use
I just finished attending a two day seminar on Woman in the Church and in the World, sponsored by the Siena Symposium for Women, Family, and Culture. The seminar included some wonderful sessions on the problems confronting women, the Marian Dimension of the Church, the family as "domestic Church," the mission of the laity, among others. Among the other participant attendants were MOJ'er Lisa Schiltz and MOJ friend Teresa Collett.
While are many substantive issues I could write about (and perhaps Lisa will blog on one or more of those), one of the things that came up for me is something we also touched on (albeit in a different context) at the recent Law and Religion Roundtable that several of us have written about here on MOJ - the need for care in the language that we employ.
One of the symposium participants leveled the criticism that secular feminists buy into a mindset of male normativity (not her term). That is, they accept a male hierarchy of values and seek to have women embody those values as well or better than do men. (In fact, I don't think that is an accurate characterization of most secular feminist thought, but that is beside the point of my thrust here.) The suggestion is that Catholic thought brings a better approach to the table in its notion of complementarity, which does not demand of women that they try to “be men.”
My concern is not with the notion of complementarity but in how it is discussed. As I listened to a number of comments, rather than promoting a notion that women’s talents and gifts were as important as men’s, some of the language seemed to replace one hierarchy of values with another. Thus, for example, one person spoke of having a child as involving a total lifegiving sacrifice that is fuller than any other possible sacrifice of self humans are capable of. (What does that say, not only to males, but to women without children?) Another made a comment suggesting that there is a preference for the contemplative over the active, suggesting that female receptivity was of a higher value than male action. Complementarity, it seems to me, ought to be about dumping the idea of ranking of male and female gifts/talents, not about replacing one ranking of values with another.
It may be that neither of the comments I gave as examples (nor several others of a similar ilk) were intended to suggest this, but that is how it sounded. Hence my admonition that we all need to be careful in how we discuss these issues if we want to persuade that they offer a better way of thinking about issues.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/07/the-language-we-use.html
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Interesting thoughts. It is sign of how far from reality we have drifted that it seems rather out of place for a married man to be commenting on this.
In his recent book entitled Loneliness, Professor John Cacioppo makes a rather startling remark. It is that evolutionary biologists have settled among themselves on the proposition that within each species, male and famale are actually distinct subspecies. That is certainly supported at the level of molecular biology, but the biologists mean something else: they are focusing on the complementarity of our customs and practices. Males and females have been shaped by evolution to complementarity.
This is an interesting observation, and no less so than when we consider the source. Professor Cacioppo of the U of Chicago is a professor of neuro-psychology and is The leading proponent of "naturalistic morality," which is that proposition that our moral nature owes nothing to (a non-existing) god, but is the product of evolutionary selection. So he asserts that if one discards the commitment to god, one is left with complementarity of the sexes!
This illuatrates admirably one great truth: how subversive the truth is! It sneaks out everywhere, where we least expect it.