FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 596 11 August 2014 Feminism’s Undoing

FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 596 11 August 2014 Feminism’s Undoing And so ISIS is drawing European females to rush to the Middle East to marry Jihadi guys fighting for the resurgent Caliphate. Where they will serve their husbands in traditional, domestic roles. So writes Jamie Dettmer in the Daily Beast. A most revealing article. It makes you think! A hundred years ago the British suffragette movement agitated violently for women’s right to vote. The feminist wave has risen ever since. Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Andrea Dworkin & Co. carried further the banner of total equality with men. Feminists have triumphed outright – the male of the species is vanquished. Jolly good but… horribile dictu, could such conquests be reversed? Though the Islamist ladies are still few in number, do they presage something portentous? Could the Caliphettes (Dettmer’s coinage) spell out the suffragettes’ downfall? Is this the astounding sign time can flow backwards? Mad, you will reckon, mad. Or just half-baked science fiction. Yet Alexander Dugin’s provocative book, The Fourth Political Theory, suggests otherwise. The feisty Russian thinker rejects the ‘progressive’ idea that history has only one direction. His argument is not sci-fi but sociology, anthropology and culture. Not all societies conceive time as linear. Some cultures look at it as a cyclical, as a recurrent round or period of events. Buddhism, Hinduism, believers in reincarnations and ancient peoples like the Mayas and the Incas are examples. Besides, within ‘linear time’ religions like Christianity and Islam a cyclical pattern occurs. For the Muslim the lunar year comes round again and again with its daily prayers, special months like Ramadan, Muharram and the like. For the Christian the Church liturgical year of feasts and fasts also gets repeated, marked by sacred days and months, like Advent, the Epiphany, Lent, Easter and so on. A sense of yearly cycle thus structures the very existence of the believer. Reversing time, running history backwards is a trickier proposition. Still, within Hinduism a reincarnated human being owing to his deeds can sink lower or mount higher in the scale of being, becoming a rat or a snake or a saint. (Poet John Milton believed his own epoch was degenerating, men growing smaller, turning into elves and fairies.) But, away from mythology, secular history has a real way to debunk progressive views of time. Dugin’s example is that of Marxism, an impeccably lay and ‘scientific’ modern doctrine. For Marx social and economic history rises through different modes of production – ancient, feudal, capitalist and socialist – to the final, perfect, property-less, egalitarian and classless society, that of communism. Marxist time marches inexorably on, progressive, linear and unstoppable like a terminator robot, towards utopia. Alas, the Soviet Union binned all that. It went from socialism back to capitalism! It follows that time can be reversed – though socialists would say ‘regressed’. Apologists of US-style capitalism like the sleek Japanese-American Francis Fukuyama crowed at socialism’s collapse. Fukuyama arrogantly proclaimed ‘the end of history’. Liberal democracy and the free market had won, he exulted. One system, one ideology, one type of economics, one single anthropology , that of Western secular man, homo aeconomicus, held sway, dominated the planet for good. Rival narratives were kaput. Religion in particular definitely belonged to the quaint scrapyard of the past, like junk in an old curiosity shop. Guess poor Fukuyama never knew that fine phrase, ‘God of Surprises’. And indeed God surprised him and his ilk. The biggest surprise being…Islam! Al-hamdulillah! History does not end but goes on. Worse, for linearly, one-dimension and progressively-minded folks, the lesson is that history can flow backwards. From pseudo-enlightened modernity to pre-modernity. From rationalism, secularised politics, separation of church and state to theological politics or the Caliphate. A staggering situation where religion, faith, spirituality inform and pervade all aspects of life. God, pace Nietzsche, is not dead: God is back! And, in this Islamist version, he looks angry indeed. Not a god whose manifestations the priest can quite relish but…God nonetheless. Will feminism be a casualty of this stunning reversal? Muslim feminists like Fatima Mernissi and Amina Wadud argue for compatibility between Islam and Western ideas of women’s rights. Maybe. However, women drawn to the Caliphate have opposite ideas. Dettmer quotes a Muslima online denying that women are equal to men, because men are the leaders. There is no suggestion that women can fight on the battlefield – they can better fulfil their natural role in minding children, kitchen and similar, un-feminist tasks. Back to the past again – with a vengeance! Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory is a challenging thesis. Whereas reversing history is impossible for Enlightenment-based ideologies, not so for his radical idea of a fourth world vision. He invokes anti-materialist philosophers like Nicolai Berdyaev. In his The End of Our Time Berdyaev predicted a waning of the Western political paradigm, to be replaced by ‘New Middle Ages’, a bracing human civilisation animated by faith and spirituality. Rather problematical, perhaps, like Dugin’s admiration for the nebulous Heideggerian category of Dasein. But the Russian theorist is refreshingly open-minded, even empirical when he argues that ‘There are no stages or epochs, but only pre-concepts and concepts.’ Freeing yourself from antiquated pre-concepts (like liberal democracy and capitalism, haha!) that hold your mind in thrall is the first step. The rest is conceptually wide open. Mind you, Dugin is no reactionary on gender. So he accuses liberalism of being the most ‘male affirming’ theory. Liberals ultimately conceive of emancipated woman as just another man, he says. Reactionary fascism likewise is out. As to traditionalism, represented by my old master Julius Evola, it still asserts the unbearable superiority of the god over the goddess. The Fourth Political theory transcends all the previous theories. The solution then is to reconcile both male and female into Heidegger’s genderless or even androgynous Dasein… Ye gods! Into that murk I will not go! So, is feminism undone? Time – linear, cyclical or regressive – will tell. Revd Frank Julian Gelli