What liberalism and feminism get wrong

Introduction. Liberalism and feminism are dominant ideologies of the day. In Sexual Personae (1991), Camille Paglia, an art critic and a philosopher of culture, lays out an interesting critique of the two. Her core argument? They both misunderstand the society-nature dynamic👇

According to liberalism, progress means decreasing the social constraints that traditional cultures imposed on individuals; feminism makes men the face of these constraints. Paglia writes that all liberal projects of the last 2 centuries including feminism are "heir to Rousseau."

Rousseau parted with a fundamental Christian precept: original sin. Man wasn't the sinner, his society was. Rousseau believed in man's "innate goodness" and in society's tendency to corrupt him. Rousseau's most famous sentence: : Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Rousseau's ideas have now become the "dominant ethic" of the day. For him, vices like "aggression, violence, and crime come from social deprivation—a poor neighborhood, a bad home." But Paglia says that Rousseau pins aggression on the wrong source: it comes from "nature" itself.

Paglia: "Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check. When social controls weaken, man’s innate cruelty bursts forth. The rapist is created not by bad social influences but by a failure of social conditioning." Hobbes was right; the starting point is war.

Man cannot be remade from scratch; nor can societies. This is why the French Revolution - the first "Rousseauist experiment" - concluded not "in political paradise but in the hell of the Reign of Terror. " Neither nature nor man's natural state are utopian.

Paglia: "Freedom is the most overrated modern idea, originating in the Romantic rebellion against bourgeois society. But only in society can one be an individual." Natural constraints are more unconditional and harsher than social constraints. Nature is deaf to all pleas.

Paglia: "Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions." At one hand, liberalism denounces all "social orders as oppressive." However, it also "expects government to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority."

Paglia writes: " In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother." Feminism wants the tyrant father to deal with its grievances (speech regulation on social media) while being a lawless all-permissive mother otherwise.

Bottom line. Rousseau's central claim is wrong - man was not born free, and it's incorrect to characterize society as chains. Man was born midst indifferent nature trying to stamp him out - society is his warm cradle. Social norms aren't chains as much as they're anchoring ropes.