Conservatives claim a contrasting intellectual and moral clarity on such matters. They affirm an exclusive male/female binary biologically. They declare that this biological divide entails distinctions between men and women not just in body but in thought and feeling. Moreover, these differences then naturally have ramifications for the proper ordering of households, society, and politics.

Yet the Right doesn’t seem to have sex and sexuality entirely ironed out. The Old Right seemed committed to the family values and traditional gender roles of Leave It to Beaver. It took its bearings from Christianity, combining the truths that God made all humans alike in His image with their natural distinctions as male and female. By contrast, men of the New Right seem more enamored with the bad boys. These include the flagitious intellectuals (Bronze Age Pervert), the provocative jackasses (Steven Crowder), and the sexually debauched (Hugh Hefner). Some even retain a willingness to engage with the likes of Andrew Tate, whose moral evils have expanded into criminal accusations.

While some seek Biblical foundations for their views, the New Right’s intellectual energy flows more from a return to ancient pagan (and more modern Nietzschean) notions of virtue and vice. It sees contemporary views of equality as making men effeminate and Christian virtues like humility as inhibiting a masculine expression of thumos. The male education inherent in the concept of the gentleman must be replaced with a revived noble savage, whose virtue of conquest extends from the battlefield to the boardroom to the bedroom. Among its most strident apologists, the New Right says political and public life is inherently masculine. By these lights, women both are degraded themselves but, more importantly, degrading to men and to society, when “liberated.”

This footsie with (if not embrace by) such characters and ideas comes in reaction to the successes of the contemporary Left. Progressives have won the gender wars, the argument goes. This victory has created not only gender confusion and distortion but also an anti-male bias. In response, real men need to fight against these corrupting forces with any and all means. Sure, we will hear (vague, brief) admissions regarding their faults. They are no Ward Cleaver. But we mustn’t be too hard on them. For when these men get attacked as “toxic” and “misogynist,” the true target is men, period.

These ConservaBros would do well to read Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost. The Bard hilariously mocks their (and some Old Right) views of women. In the process, he concludes with a view of the sexes more insightful and affirming of men and women than our current conversations.

Shakespeare set the play in Navarre, the northeast part of today’s Spain. Ferdinand rules this city-state as king. At the play’s opening, he brings together three lords with whom he plans to form a “little academe” through which they will be “still and contemplative in living art” (I.i.13–14). He offers a traditionally masculine goal for this intellectual pursuit: greatness that will elicit glory and, through that glory, a kind of immortality. This glory will not spring from the most traditional of forums—the battlefield. Instead, it will be realized in the reputation they and their city will garner for intellectual greatness. It seems he wants Navarre to become the new Athens; he and his lords, the new philosophers.

Ferdinand does seem to have battle on the brain. He speaks in militaristic language about their project. He declares the men must “war against your own affections/And the huge army of the world’s desires” (I.i.9–10). They are warriors engaged in conquering. But instead of other peoples, they will establish an empire over their own souls. Ferdinand’s reasoning assumes the loftiness and moral good of the mind juxtaposed to the baseness and evil of the body and the desires. Two of the lords confirm this perspective. One named Longeville, for instance, says that for him, “the mind shall banquet though the body pine” (I.i.25). Another, Dumaine, chimes in next that, “The grosser manner of these world’s delights/He throws upon the gross world’s baser slaves” (I.i.29–30). Following the body and desires place one in bondage to vice. Focus on the mind leads to liberation and virtue.

To win this battle, over the next three years, the men must live off a meager diet of one meal a day and a complete fast one day a week. They must sleep no more than three hours a night. Finally, they are “not to see a woman in that term” (I.i.37).

This last rule points the audience toward the men’s view of the other sex. To achieve this victory and glory, the men must abstain from women’s company. Women, then, both lack what these men seek and contain what they wish to avoid. Women lack reason, at least to the degree necessary to engage with these men and to contribute to their intellectual pursuits. Instead, women seem only good for mating bodies, not matching wits. Here they possess what the men wish to avoid. For they appeal only to the men’s base desires, tempting them toward enslavement to passion. In making this rule, the men imply that the female sex not only dissuades men from the good; women also fall prey to the very ills the men seek to conquer. Their lesser rationality means their own bodies and desires must rule them. They are slaves and base ones at that.

We see a similar, distorted manliness and its view of women in the soldier Armado, who is no lord and certainly no intellectual. The others keep him around for sport due to his dimmer wits. However, Armado is a soldier. He has the forum of the battlefield and sees his military role as part of his masculinity. He confesses to another character, though, that, “I am in love” (I.ii.56). He chides himself for it, observing that, “it is base for a soldier to love” (I.ii.56–57). He wishes his manly, military might could conquer this enemy, saying, “If drawing my sword against the humor of affection would deliver me from the reprobate thought of it, I would take desire prisoner” (I.ii.58–60).

What is wrong for a soldier with love? Armado sees love as unmanning him. Love will reorder his soul and how he then acts. Armado articulates this fear when he laments that he will exchange his sword for a pen (“rust, rapier”), manly feats for effeminate poetry (“I shall turn sonnet. … [W]rite, pen.”). The masculine virtue of courage will be gone. Women, again, stand as the means of de-masculinization. Armado loves a woman and through the love she has caused, he has experienced the emasculating of his thumos. He even compares himself to Sampson and how that Biblical paragon of manly strength was overthrown by love for a lady.

The preceding perspectives treated women as base. At another point, though, some of these same men put them on a pedestal. Later, Ferdinand and his lords fall hard in love. Berowne, who had objected to the prohibition from the start, makes an argument that they needed women and the love of them for a proper education all along. Loving a woman “gives to every power a double power/Above their functions and their offices” (IV.iii.305–306). One better perceives the true, the good, and the beautiful when in love. More than mere perceiving, the man in loving gains delight, itself an impetus to deeper learning.

What kind of being could elicit such heights of mind and heart in a man? It seems only a goddess. Having made assumptions about women that reduced them to less than men, these same lords then speak of them in worshipful terms. Ferdinand writes of the woman he loves that she is a “queen of queens” and her virtues so great that, “No thought can think, nor tongue of mortal tell” (IV.iii.37–38). Longeville composes a sonnet for his love in which he calls her “a goddess” (IV.iii.61). He even attributes salvific qualities to her, saying of breaking his “earthly vow” to abstain from women that, “Thy grace, being gained, cures all disgrace in me” (IV.iii.62–63). Berowne affirms that indeed his friends are deifying these women, commenting on Longeville’s sonnet as a work, “which makes flesh a deity/A green goose a goddess” (IV.iii.70–71). The women are elevated in this view though still passive, contributing by being seen and loved by men.

Shakespeare mocks both sets of views. He does so by introducing women to the audience and to the men so sure in their ideas about them. In Act II, the Princess of France arrives with her female entourage. She comes to do business for her father, the King of France, in negotiating with Ferdinand. Forced to participate in these talks, Ferdinand and his lords must partially break their oath through some interaction with these women. In these encounters, they quickly fall in love.

These women are not how the play’s men pictured women in general. They show themselves more than a match for the men intellectually. The women exhibit keen perception of their male counterparts, both in their virtues and vices, giving a much more accurate appraisal than the men do of them. They do not match wits with the men in various scenes; they run circles around them in their intellectual and verbal abilities.

In fact, Shakespeare gave the play’s most perceptive moral and political insights to the French Princess. While not disdaining physical beauty, she finds intellectual and moral virtue more precious. She also critiques the desire for glory, arguing that “Glory grows guilty of detested crimes,/When, for fame’s sake, for praise, an outward part/We bend to that the working of the heart” (IV.i.31–33). Love of glory breeds pride and pride itself all other vices enlisted to maintain that pride. She sees such ills as wrong for any but especially for one like herself, a political ruler.

Thus, this Princess’s very mission repudiates the various male perceptions of women. She exercises political rule in carrying out her duty on behalf ultimately not of her father but of her country. In negotiating, she must engage intellectually and keep rein on her passions, not as a passive goddess to be adored but a serious stateswoman to be respected. The wisdom she shows in these scenes cannot be separated from her public role. Shakespeare shows her as a qualified stateswoman.

The women, though great, exhibit human vices, too. They argue with each other as they debate how to respond to the men’s newfound love for them. They insult and even speak in bawdy and catty ways. At one point, the women fall to insulting. In addition to sexual innuendo about each other’s activities, one calls another “a light wench,” another a “mouse,” and still a third has jesting references made to her skin color (V.ii.19–28). Contra the pedestal placed underneath them, these women are far from perfections of piety, goddesses of purity.

In these scenes, Shakespeare pokes fun at the way men view women and, therefore, view themselves. Some on the New Right could learn much from the Bard’s skewering. Ferdinand and his band’s original view of women is not as different from some of the current bad boys as might at first appear. The former’s sexual abstinence and the latter’s sexual indulgence spring from a common assumption: that women are substantially less intellectual and political in ability and motivation than men. It betrays a kind of Gnosticism that morally divides mind from desire and body, then sexualizes the manifestation of those distinctions.

Some of the Old Right could learn from the play as well. They can tend toward placing women on a moral pedestal, as paragons of the modest virtues. This view also often plays, though often unintentionally, into downgrading women’s intellectual abilities and relegating their political contributions to indirect effects in governing the home. It also demands a female moral perfection impossible to human beings and a power over men that somehow must be both passive and dominant in its formative capacities. Yet, as noted before, the Old Right still takes its cues more decidedly from Christian gentlemanliness than a revival of pagan boorishness. It still must think seriously about how to apply human equality in God’s image in relation to every application of sex distinctions. While Shakespeare pokes fun even at manifestations of this view, he ultimately shares its Biblical underpinnings, not the pagan notions of elements in the New Right.

Shakespeare’s critique of both perspectives does not deny kernels of truth in them. He thus affirms true sexual difference. But, as Christianity teaches, all humans, male and female, share in the common possession of reason, affection, and a physical body. Like the original American Suffragettes, Shakespeare shows it is not just women’s common humanity but their distinct perspectives and abilities that call for full political participation. Women and men do have diverging tendencies in the interaction of the mind, heart, and body as well as the relationship between hearth and political community. But we should not try to over-realize prescriptions on these truths lest we fail to account for the fullness of human nature. And if the sexes really are so different, then the fullest realization of humanness and the best manifestation of home life and political rule cannot directly involve only one sex.

The play ends not with the men and women marrying, as one might think a Shakespearean comedy would. Instead, the women require the men to wait a year before they will consider an offer of matrimony. They require the men to act to prove and improve themselves during this time. These women become the means for the men to achieve the virtues they sought through the women’s absence. In each one’s marriage, intellectual and moral education will then be a joint enterprise. And in the marriage of Ferdinand and the Princess, political rule will occur together, as they share each one’s wisdom with the other toward a better, more whole statesmanship.

This future shows the relationship between the sexes to be one of true partnership. This partnership affirms our common humanity, sexual differences, and the consequent need for each other at home and in politics. We could learn much from this picture, thereby avoiding gender distortions from whatever side.

The post Learning from Shakespearean Women appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Despite these warnings, we have failed as a political community to consider this problem—much less genuinely address it. We rightly bemoan the downfall of marriages and the broken families they entail, but we must also care about the friendlessness rampant among us because it damages the lives of our people and corrodes our polity. John Adams recognized our political duty to address this problem: He believed “the divine science of politics is the science of social happiness.” Similarly, Cicero observed that “life can never be anything but joyless which is without the consolation and companionship of friends.”

The present friendlessness has distinctly modern causes. Social media, long work hours, and COVID-19 lockdowns amplify our feelings of isolation. Moreover, we do not understand the core political nature and import of friendship. To recognize this, we can draw on the wisdom of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who provides a poignant discussion of friendship in his Nicomachean Ethics.

Aristotle highlights the importance of friendship to the individual. Similar to Cicero, he states, “without friends, no one would choose to live, even if he possessed all other good.” The fact that, for Aristotle, politics is the governing science, the one that orders the other sciences in the context of political community toward human happiness, makes something this fundamental politically salient. Additionally, Aristotle argues that friendship is important because our citizenship, rightly understood, includes an element of friendship. Thus, politics’ purpose as the science of social happiness, as well as the issue of citizenship itself, makes friendship an important political matter.  

For Use, For Pleasure, Or For Virtue?

Aristotle helps explain why friends matter so much within his division of friendship. He categorizes friendships based on either use, pleasure, or virtue. 

Aristotle sees use-based friendship as the lowest kind of friendship. People can attain a level of general civility and basic, mutual aid with this friendship, but it is the form of friendship most susceptible to selfishness and instability—unraveling the second the use no longer attains. It can thereby teach bad habits for friendship and inculcate perpetual, calculating disloyalty. Such a friendship is better than nothing, however, as it at least presents some degree of a hedge against misfortune and poverty, as well as fulfilling some element of our social nature. In addition, the low can give rise to the high, morally speaking; by bringing people together for mutual needs, those same persons can begin to develop better forms of friendship.

Friendships of pleasure present more beneficial opportunities, though this depends on the source of pleasure. For example, pleasure in the basest of objects does little good and much ill. This point proves especially true in our own day, obsessed as we are with pleasure, especially in the use of our and others’ bodies. The extreme sexualization of our culture is the main manifestation of this point. One might think here of our hook-up culture, in which people use each other for physical pleasure. Pornography might be seen, too, as a false form of friendship for pleasure, with the viewer seeking sexual gratification and the viewed possibly seeking monetary or other forms of gain. Better options exist for common satisfaction. True beauty can form bonds, with the friends gaining pleasure in mutually appreciating an excellent film, a lovely painting, or a perfectly executed play in football. 

Beyond specific forms of pleasure, Aristotle makes a more fundamental point about human nature. He argues that humans are largely driven by pleasure, which is a part of happiness. As he puts it, “nature appears to avoid most of all what is painful and to aim at what is pleasant.” This involves friendship, too. Lacking friendship means lacking the many varieties of pleasure it brings. But we must seek better foundations of pleasure for friendship, not deny that basic human good.

Finally, Aristotle sees friendships based on virtue as the highest kind of friendship. For Aristotle, virtue consists of a disposition toward the good that results in right action. This good disposition and consequent deeds divide into a series of characteristics, such as courage, justice, prudence, and liberality. Friendships based on virtue accentuate those goods by giving common companionship in them. “Iron sharpens iron,” the Bible says in Proverbs 27:17. So too do virtuous friends encourage and make better each other. In the wider view, virtue-based friendship benefits nations as a whole; the more friendships based on virtue a country contains, the more likely that the country will produce persons of noble character. Subsequently, these persons will practice the virtues in our communities and for those communities’ good.

Citizenship and Friendship

These categories of friendship have political implications. Aristotle believes that citizenship itself is a form of friendship. He notes that “like-mindedness seems to resemble friendship” because it consists of something two or more people hold in common and from which they either derive use, pleasure, or in which they see the good. Thus, we need good friendships not just because we need to care about our citizens’ happiness. We need strong friendships because our citizenship makes up one form of those bonds. Our like-mindedness politically involves shared principles, history, geography, language, and other factors. In this sense, as Aristotle observes, “friendship holds cities together.” If anyone wonders why our partisan divides run so deep, the answer partly resides in seeing fellow citizens as foes, not comrades. 

Our understanding of patriotism relates to the forms of friendship previously described. A patriotism based on “use” has some merit, though it will be fickle, always asking what the country can do for us. 

A patriotism of “pleasure” might love America for the wrong reasons, taking pleasure in its worst moments or redefining it against its principles. Rather than loving our commitment to liberty and equality, some might see those things we have sought to overcome, like slavery, racism, and other ills, as the real goods. That’s a pretty fringe position, though. More people, instead, go the opposite route, attacking America’s principles as inherently unjust, building bonds with each other in antagonism to our common history and citizenship. These become friendships of mutual hatred, partisanships whose pleasure derives from canceling enemies. 

Friendships of virtue, however, avoid all of these problems for patriotism. These friendships will promote the country’s best qualities and not its vices. Aristotle notes that while these friendships involve use and pleasure, they are ordered correctly. These friendships will find use and pleasure in America based on her best qualities, such as the manifestations of justice and truth in the country’s founding and throughout its history. 

Our common love of ordered liberty, of equality before the law, and of the Americans who articulated and acted upon these points, already maintains political friendship among us. More important, these friendships will work toward higher realizations of these qualities, while seeking to purify what vices remain. They are the friends that can sing of America as in the text that concludes the second verse of “America the Beautiful”: “God mend thine every flaw / Confirm thy soul in self-control / Thy liberty in law!” 

Lawmakers, however, face challenges in cultivating any friendships, much less the best kind. This challenge comes to the fore in Aristotle’s other dividing line for friendships: equality and inequality. Equality seems essential to friendship, since holding something in common is a kind of equality. Yet, not all regime types affirm equality between citizens. This presents a problem for citizenship and is the reason Aristotle combines his discussion of friendship with one on political regimes. One must address the issue of equality to adequately consider friendship from a political perspective.  

Later in Book Eight, Aristotle reiterates the division between the proper rule of one, few, and many (kingship, aristocracy, and timocracy or polity), and their distortions (tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy). We hope that citizens can be friends with each other and with their rulers. But that may work in different ways, or face different challenges, depending on the type of government.

Friendship and the Question of “Who Rules?”

Kingship is founded most decidedly on inequality, which makes likeness, and therefore holding things in common, difficult. Even friendship between citizens faces obstacles in this regime since hierarchy becomes a norm regulating all areas of the social order. 

Aristocracy, too, is founded on inequality, though the distinction falls between the two large groups of nobles and commoners rather than a monarchy’s greater subdivisions of its subjects. This aristocratic set-up can accentuate the skirmishes between citizens, creating permanent class warfare. But it does create one basis for friendship—more citizens within each class who hold something in common. 

Aristotle sees these inequalities as addressable. To make distinct portions of society friends despite their inequalities, one must proportion and distinguish what each class receives. Some might have more needs than others. Thus, political friendship may involve the provision of a social safety net. Some might merit more honor. Political offices or even awards could address that. The task of the legislator is great in finding a way that these distinct groups can receive what they each deserve and still hold their citizenship in common. But the task, while hard, is possible to achieve. They can be friends despite their differences. Their differences can feed friendship, showing mutual needs that can build into mutual pleasures and, hopefully, mutual virtues. 

Polity or timocracy, finally, is based on equality. Friendship seems easiest and most natural in this regime. Our citizenship is based on our common humanity and America’s claim that all men are created equal. But polities still face problems with friendship — over who should rule or how they can strain or break bonds between persons. 

One may chaff under the commands of a friend or refuse to share with him or her in the exercise of that rule, acting in a despotic fashion. We often see examples of friendships that dissolve into fighting when these persons go into business together or form some other venture where they have to share command. In particular, citizens in a popular regime might fall prey to such destructive forces. As much as some might want their rule to resemble domination, popular governments must seek political ground in partnership. Political rule, Aristotle says, consists of ruling or being ruled in part or in turn. That sharing must form a basis for politics among equal citizens. Thus, we must consider not just that we disagree but how we do so. Friendships can involve a debate about justice. But they must remain between those who see a common bond between them. 

Community and Genuine Friendships

Other forms of friendships also present thorny questions for a politics aiming to cultivate this necessary good. In particular, popular governments like America must consider where friendships undermine or aid their principles of equality and liberty. Slavery, for example, bears a resemblance to tyranny. It inculcates the demerits of such a regime in the souls of those who act as masters and as slaves, proving antagonistic to the American regime itself. The relationship between parents and children, on the contrary, appears more like that between monarch and subject. Since they are temporary and pointed toward cultivating free and equal citizens upon maturation, this relationship proves necessary even to a political community founded on equality. Thus, civic education begins in the home and the home should receive adequate protection and support from the laws. 

Moreover, Aristotle compares marriage to aristocracy. At first blush, this designation would mean either the man or the woman rules alone according to who possesses the most virtue. Aristotle’s marital aristocracy, however, divides tasks between husband and wife based on whose virtue best suits him or her for the job. Granted, Aristotle begins with the husband, who then leaves the tasks for which he is deficient to his wife. Yet much equality remains in this version of aristocracy’s allocation of merit. This perspective receives support from the fact that Aristotle elsewhere compares the rule between spouses as “political” in the rule-sharing sense previously discussed. The fact that so many do not get married, and others divorced when they do, presents political problems grounded in the issue of friendship. 

The growing friendlessness in American society is a contemporary tragedy for individuals. Yet it proves a political one as well. Our public policy must facilitate and promote friendship both at the level of citizen and in private relationships. 

At the private level, this entails a robust re-founding of community. We must encourage the civil associations that Tocqueville celebrated in Americans of the 1830s. Cultivating the mediating “little platoons” found in gatherings of religious groups, book clubs, and hunting associations all can do much good on this project. They can help articulate meaning, worth, and dignity for the individuals involved. Perhaps the way our tax code aids charitable organizations can be expanded to other forms of association, giving a financial incentive to start organizations that will facilitate common bonds. 

At the political level, we must rebuild small towns and neighborhoods. They must become hubs of political activity so citizens can see, talk to, and develop relationships with each other. The internet presents a barrier to this needed change. We measure our community too much by the number of Twitter likes and Facebook “friends,” creating for ourselves a desert of true companionship. Instead, we should move away from our keyboards and toward cultivating real interactions with real human beings. Reinvigorating federalism would move us in this direction as well, as we find more concrete ways to exercise citizenship and the bonds it entails locally. 

Finally, we must work to aid the quality of friendships. Can our education system move away from its focus on creating workers and cultivating humans and citizens? It should do so not only because true education seeks to elevate the soul, not just give skills for employment. That emphasis also would form more lasting, healthier grounds for friendship. Such friendships would help us to know ourselves and others in light of what is good, true, and beautiful.

Aristotle’s ancient perspective still applies to our modern context of friendlessness. Accomplishing this goal will be a generational task, but we must urgently work toward it. What country would want to live otherwise?

The post America the Friendless appeared first on Law & Liberty.

The contemporary West, once the center of Christendom, has failed to adhere to this mandate. The average fertility rate needed merely to keep population levels steady is 2.1 children per woman. In 2021, the fertility rate among European women was 1.61. America used to defy these low rates but joined its European compatriots beginning in 2007, a product, at least in part, of the Great Recession. We now regularly receive dire reports about the fertility rate among American women as well. With low fertility rates come the threat of depopulation, a shrinking workforce, less proactive communities, and decreases in productivity as well as economic dynamism.

On that front, we received a small amount of good news recently. 2021 marked the first year since 2014 that the number of births in the United States increased. The fertility rate went up from 1.64 to 1.66 children per woman, despite fears the pandemic would drive numbers down further.

That still means fertility rates remain at a historical low, well short of mere replacement levels. Perhaps this slight uptick portends a broader and deeper rebound in Americans having children. Unfortunately, however, there is more reason to doubt this seemingly positive development. The opposite trend seems too longstanding, and thus, too fixed on the path of decline. We need to ask what options America possesses to reverse this general trend. What political options exist to spur childbirth in our culture and the economy? In essence, can public policy make America fertile again?

Montesquieu, the 17th-century French political thinker, provides an under-studied but worthwhile discussion of this subject. The American Founders leaned heavily on his seminal treatise The Spirit of the Laws for our systems of federalism and separation of powers. Yet, that same work dedicated an entire section to the issue of how a country’s laws related to the size of its population.

Montesquieu doesn’t paint a rosy picture for America. He begins with the particular difficulties involved in human reproduction. It comes from our reason combined with our freedom. Montesquieu points to “the way of thinking, character, passions, fantasies, caprices, the idea of preserving one’s beauty, the encumbrance of pregnancy, that of a too numerous family, disturb propagation in a thousand ways.” Animals reproduce from instinct. Humans can decide to try and avoid pregnancy. Their reason and passions give them various excuses to avoid reproducing.

But problems particular to time and place can dissuade further the desire to have children. Thus, Montesquieu admits that “Regulations concerning the number of inhabitants depend greatly on circumstances.” He then mentions differences in circumstances. Some population decreases, for instance, come from the combination of “internal vice and a bad government.” This internal origin presents a much harder problem to address than, say, an invader’s acts of destruction. Such acts are obvious and how to address them, namely by military victory, is clear. But regarding internal reasons for population decline, Montesquieu goes on to say that “Men there have perished from an imperceptible and habitual illness.” They suffer from bad habits whose culpability in depopulation we struggle to pinpoint. Such a situation describes our own.

First, we do too much to discourage marriage. Our government regularly has penalized marriage in filing taxes, especially for low-income earners. Our cities build and zone housing to make it hard, if not impossible, for larger families to reside there. Moreover, our culture’s long-running sexual revolution also discourages wedlock by normalizing cohabitation as well as sex outside of marriage. One could argue marriage inhibits population, tying men to reproducing with one female partner. Montesquieu, however, writes that “public continence is joined naturally to the propagation of the species.” In general, marriage comes about “wherever there is a place for two persons to live comfortably.” Marriage both arises from comfort and creates comfort in living, especially for raising children.

Marriage creates comfort because rearing human beings takes much longer and more effort than rearing animals. Because humans possess reason as well as passions, they must receive instruction, not just nourishment, in order to learn both to “sustain their lives” and to “govern themselves.” Thus, while female animals may alone take on the nourishment of young, the greater requirements for human offspring dissuade single mothers from having additional children.

Marriages, moreover, should see the wife as joining the husband’s family. Doing so, Montesquieu argues, makes the family a sort of “property” for the man, one that drives him to have male offspring in order to maintain the family line. The same proves true for last names. Sharing a name creates pride in its status and interest in its continuance. Thus, Montesquieu also supports the intimidating proposition that men should ask the father for his daughter’s hand in marriage. He argues that fathers, not the other potential option—the state—should have a say over getting the children married, since they will look out best for the benefit of their families. This attitude of family as property, legally supported, “contributes much to the propagation of the human species.”

On each count, we have failed to cultivate conditions for childbearing. About 40% of births in our country come to unmarried persons. People now delay marriage, averaging the age of 34 before tying the knot. An increasing percentage of persons do not marry at all. Moreover, views of gender equality have limited the number of women who take their husband’s name or require their father’s consent. Connected to this decline in marriage—and subsequently, childbirth—are the proliferation of vices related to sexuality. Montesquieu saw this connection in Rome, where the population gained a disdain for marriage and indulged in sexual debauchery that marriage would inhibit. With this came a drop in the population. Sadly, Americans should relate. Alongside illegitimacy, low birth rates, and delayed or denied marriage, our own time is marked by public sexualization, especially found in pornography.

Second, our laws do too little to help, and often hurt, families economically. Montesquieu said that to protect population growth, policies must avoid economic despotism over family property: Those who live under a “harsh government” do not want to reproduce. The harshness comes from governments “who regard their fields less as the foundation of their sustenance than as a pretext for harassments.” Here, we see that property rights and the family contain an important connection. Those whose fields receive protection by the laws can flourish and then desire to add to their families. Those harassed can hardly care for themselves, so why would they consider adding mouths to feed?

America does have some helpful policies, such as the child tax credit many families receive each April. But they hardly account for the costs of rearing children. Economically, many families today must have two breadwinners, leaving no option for one to stay home if that family so desires (and much data shows more women wish they could stay home than do). Our work conditions do not accommodate family life, either. They fail to offer the necessary flexibility needed to balance work and home. Add in the way our statutes can penalize marriage, and you have families squeezed from two sides, both by private business and public law. Incentivizing childbearing on both fronts, rather than discouraging it, would certainly help.

But we must acknowledge that such incentives are no silver bullet, for, in addition to the economics, we must add the cultural expectations that both affected and are affected by monetary concerns. Montesquieu observes that among “nascent peoples” having many children seems a comfort. Yet, he notes “The contrary occurs when the nation is formed.” Expectations of comfort and leisure turn children from an aid to a burden. We see in our own culture the rise of secularism and feminism giving voice to this view of children. Christianity encouraged larger families due to the creation mandate, a duty to God, His world, and His church. Traditional views of sex and family gave great dignity and honor to women who sought the vocation of homemaker.

Secularism and current iterations of feminism contradict both, seeing children as inhibitors to self-realization or roadblocks to gender equality. On this note, we must mention the legal regime of abortion that has cost more than 60 million children since 1973’s declaration of a Constitutional right to end a pregnancy. Though the Supreme Court recently overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, legal abortion will remain in many states and continue to be defended on grounds that peg children as drags on economic output and personal fulfillment.

The countries Montesquieu speaks of—with condemnation—that kill their young, in or out of the womb, are usually ones suffering from overpopulation. We find ourselves depopulating, yet a society that still refuses to conceive or to bear whom we do conceive. Kids seemingly do not help the economic output of their parents. Culturally, they do not appear to help our ease and comfort in life. Thus, our public opinions, laws, and markets do too much to undermine incentives to create them.

Third, our country has succumbed to centralization and its attendant problems of size. Our corporations are big. Our government is big. We have centralized at the cost of local communities. Montesquieu sees a population lesson for Rome on this score as well. The size of the political community matters. Families flourish in the context of vibrant neighborhoods which provide support, economic, spiritual, and emotional, that larger political and economic set-ups cannot. Montesquieu says the areas swallowed up by the Roman Empire had bursting populations before joining Rome. They suffered rampant depopulation afterward. When later, medieval communities grew in population, they offered a de-centralized model of feudalism. These systems, whatever their vices, offer the virtues of a connected, intergenerational community. They keep the family from suffering envelopment and seeming irrelevance before massive governments or businesses or markets.

Montesquieu turns to other policies that might help reverse our culture of childlessness. They involve reversing much of the problems just discussed. Regarding Rome, the laws sought to encourage marriage by giving those married special privileges. Married persons got the first choice of seats at the theatre, for instance. Other perks came with not just marriage, but from the number of children born in that marriage. For example, those with the most children received the first choice, “both in the pursuit of honors and in the exercise of these same honors.” These included both honors as vain as what one could wear in public to the nobler of holding and exercising public office. The laws even went so far as to actively punish those not married, giving them disadvantages similar to those privileges just described. Unmarried persons could not inherit from anyone else, childless couples only half. They prohibited the marriage of couples who were too old to bear children, for “the law did not want useless marriages.”

Here we run into difficulty. Would Americans stomach such methods for the sake of increasing population? Even if so, they would not pass constitutional muster, infringing on fundamental liberties rightly dear to our polity.

Along these lines, Americans have the child tax credit, yet, imagine if an amendment was added to the Constitution ranking giving electoral advantage to candidates married with children? Or businesses giving primacy in goods and services to persons based on marriage and children? Such policies risk reducing marriage only to procreation, ignoring many other goods to individuals and to society the institution offers. They thereby pose the danger of regulating unmarried persons and infertile couples to second-class status in the republic. Our views of human equality would balk at many such policies. Rome balked, too. So long as Rome had a culture open to children, methods like the above only aided childbearing. As its culture fell, Roman leaders avoided the laws, undermined them, then repealed them.

Yet we must understand that we encourage what we honor and we discourage what we disapprove. Encouraging the birth of more children while respecting all persons regardless of familial status will demand the careful balancing that attends all true statesmanship. It likely requires encouraging and rewarding numerous goods that people contribute to society. We should not neglect to acknowledge, support, and praise those benefits other than creating and raising children. But we must include family among those goods we encourage, and are justified in prioritizing that encouragement if familial goods, as they currently do, suffer neglect or inhibition more than other societal benefits. We must ask what policies we can stomach—nay, embrace—on this front.

Christianity, again, might play a vital role in this needed balance. For it embraces the inherent dignity of all persons and sees many goods that one can contribute to one’s political community and one’s church. But it also recognizes the special importance of making and raising children, citizens of political communities established by God and worshippers in religious institutions founded by the same. The family was, is, and should be the norm for most persons’ lives. Consistent with religious liberty, a statesman would be wise to encourage this view of human beings.

Perhaps we will learn something from the new economics emerging out of the pandemic, wherein remote work and its flexibility provide some incentives upon which policies can build. Perhaps we will make hard choices that seek to change how we see children socially and economically. Ultimately, Montesquieu gives us options to consider and warnings to heed regarding just how hard it is for public policy to change culture and economics. Regardless, we face a daunting but necessary task. After all, God commanded us to be fruitful and multiply. Can the contemporary West learn ancient obedience again?

The post Montesquieu’s Warning About Our Childlessness appeared first on Law & Liberty.

It also presents a coherent and sustained political teaching. This teaching speaks to a contemporary debate, one initiated by a group of scholars and writers who understand themselves as Post-Liberals. Among their most famous articulators are Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen and Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule. These men, and like-minded persons, divide the world into ancient and modern times. They see a vast distinction between ancient and modern men, with the latter sorely lacking in virtue, especially virtue of the aristocratic sort. America itself seems severely—if not hopelessly—flawed due to its more democratic modernity. Fords’ film asks us to consider how ancient and modern virtues (as well as vices) and how the aristocratic and democratic souls operate in America in particular and the West in general.

The film opens with an old stagecoach racing across Monument Valley, the western space made iconic by Ford. The coach contains Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday and his teenage daughter, played by Henry Fonda and Shirley Temple.  He has taken command of Fort Apache, a lonely outpost with its own community in the form of a cavalry regiment as well as the families attached to it.

Thursday exemplifies both an aristocratic and ancient spirit. Aristocratic in that he sees the world in hierarchical terms. Rank, with its barriers and distinct sets of rules, seems at least just, perhaps even natural for the officer. All men do not seem created equal. The military certainly does not keep them so. And as an ancient soul, Thursday thirsts for glory and all its attendant honors. He recognizes the battlefield as the greatest context for displaying the virtues that will attain this glory and honor—namely courage and wisdom.

Yet at the beginning of the film, Thursday exudes anger and frustration. His pride has been wounded. Every bumpy moment of the stagecoach trip reminds him of that wound. Accomplished in the American Civil War, Thursday feels slighted, dishonored by the assignment to command the regiment at Fort Apache. The Fort is remotely located and little known. It presents a far cry from the time Thursday mentions he spent in Europe, from the Eastern elites whose acceptance he desires, or the newspapers whose praise he covets.

Arriving there, Thursday encounters a community with a distinctly different ethos. The regiment, while not ignoring honor or rank, has a perspective decidedly functional and democratic. It feels as much like an extended family as it does a military unit. They hold regular dances and other social events. They dress functionally for the desert conditions and their appointed tasks around and outside the fort. They show respect for the chain of command but interact casually with each other across the ranks. Moreover, the men at Fort Apache seem uninterested in glory the way Thursday understands it. Rather, they wish to live in peace to the extent this is possible.

The absence of Thursday’s longings does not mean the regiment possesses self-centered cowards. Instead, the soldiers exude a dignity found in doing their work well, contented with the ensuing results. They seem to have internalized the advice of Solomon in Ecclesiastes, to find contentment in the regular allotments of life—family, work, and food. Their women, moreover, provide an oasis of culture and a backbone to the moral compass of the outpost. They are the epitome of Western female virtue—strong as steel in the most feminine of ways.

Tensions ensue between the new commander and his new command. Thursday enforces a much higher level of discipline on the men and the officers, including stricter rules for level of dress (he at one point upbraids his officers on their uniforms, saying, “We’re not cowboys at this post—or freighters with a load of alfalfa.” He demands stricter adherence to military law, especially in the class distinctions it creates between officers and non-commissioned soldiers. This point takes on a personal element, as Thursday’s daughter falls in love with a young officer whose father, unfortunately, is a mere sergeant-major in the regiment.

Here the conventional robs the natural of its right. The father, though only a sergeant-major, is the picture of the good man and the good soldier. We find out that he served with the Irish Brigade in the Civil War and received the Congressional Medal of Honor, making him Thursday’s equal—really, his superior—in virtue. Only holding on tenaciously to what amounts to an arbitrary class distinction allows Thursday’s hubris to deny any legitimacy to the potential union.

The action driving the plot centers upon the American Indian leader, Cochise, who has left the American reservation with his Apache tribe and now threatens the peace and safety of the entire area. This point, too, elicits tension between Thursday and his command. Captain Kirby York, played by John Wayne, knows the American Indians well.

Showing a democratic spirit, Captain York respects them as equals. This equality extends to the Apaches as human beings and as soldiers. He sees justice in their leaving the reservation. The reservation was run by a scoundrel, a government agent named Silas Meacham. However harshly one assesses Owen Thursday’s vices, they pale in comparison to the evil found in this man. He has no moral compass except the desire to make a profit. He sees the American Indians as mere savages, children in intellect and will and thus hopeless and helpless. Meacham thus sells weapons and whiskey to the Apaches while on the reservation. Predictably, the young men become drunkards, dissipated, and violent at the same time. The Apaches leave the reservation in an act of desperation. Ironically, their placement on the reservation was meant to civilize them. Instead, they lose their virtues. They must leave to try to regain what they lost at the hands of Meacham and the “civilizing” American government.

Thursday holds no such respect. He does see the corruption in Meacham. While frustrated by his regiment’s democratic and functional tendencies, he finds Meacham’s corruption downright contemptuous. But Thursday shares something of Meacham’s assessment of Cochise and of American Indians in general. They are not his equals as a human, a white American, or a soldier. His aristocratic spirit goes from the personal to the civilizational, if not racial. When Thursday finally meets Cochise, he will call him a being “without honor.” To him, American Indians are worthy of contempt as a people, not to be compared with Western humanity or military prowess.

To be fair, Thursday does possess some admirable qualities. He genuinely loves his daughter, even if his own ambitions often get in the way of showing her proper affection and looking out for her best interests. His demands for proper dress and attention to etiquette are far from wrong for a military unit. Even on the battlefield, Thursday’s first military move succeeds in bating a group of American Indians into a trap, springing it on them with a picturesque cavalry charge.

The men of Fort Apache, moreover, are no angels. Several of the sergeants succumb to Meacham’s whiskey at the moment they were tasked with destroying it. They are capable of debauchery every bit as low as the American Indians. We eventually hear that, indeed, Thursday’s particular implementation of discipline had improved the regiment.

The tensions come to a head, however, when Thursday lures the Apaches back into the area, then wages a military campaign to forcibly subdue them and return them to the reservation. In a culminating moment of arrogant folly, Thursday orders the full regiment to charge headlong into a valley, thinking he will overrun the Apaches as they move across the desert. Captain Kirby calls the move suicide, saying the Apaches are tricking Thursday into a disastrous attack on a fortified area.

This objection, one in a long line during the campaign, angers Thursday enough to relieve Kirby of his command and to promise a court-martial for him after the military engagement ends. Here the aristocratic element comes out in full force. Thursday simply can’t imagine that Cochise could operate on a level of military cunning and skill that Kirby attributes to him.

Instead, Kirby proves sadly correct. The Apaches did spring a trap. The regiment charges bravely. But it is obliterated: first by Apache sharpshooters entrenched in the hills overlooking the valley, and second by the tribe’s own charge to finish off what remains of the men. Thursday refuses to leave the battle. He chooses to stay and die with his men even when no chance remains. Some may read this move as an act of cowardice, not wishing to face the opprobrium sure to come when Thursday’s actions receive an assessment from the Eastern military elites from whom he sought vindication. Yet, one also can read it as a point of honor. He cannot attain glory now for his wisdom, but he can face the results of his decisions in the same way as the men he led to the slaughter. As an old aristocrat, Thursday does feel honor-bound to accept responsibility for his actions, however deadly the cost.

The film ends with a strange twist. Kirby, unsurprisingly, now leads the regiment. They continue to chase Cochise. But we find out that Owen Thursday now is a hero. The story of the regiment’s charge has become the stuff of legend, not a tale of foolish hubris. Kirby seems to have reported the events of the previous campaign in a manner that cast Thursday and the regiment in this light. This is not the last time Ford will make this move of having a legend overtake the genuine facts. The more famous instance comes later, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, where, upon having a long-standing myth busted, the newspaperman in the film says, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Why would Kirby create this legend? Why would he lie about Thursday and the campaign? It cannot be the love he held for the man. It cannot be respect, either, given the list of mistakes Thursday made and the vices that led to them. Instead, it seems Kirby did it for the men slaughtered. Remember that Kirby and the men’s democratic tendencies did not seek glory as Thursday saw it. Thursday sought glory for himself. But these soldiers did hold to an ennobling dignity, a collective one that attached to their vocation as soldiers in the United States Cavalry. Kirby does not want them remembered as lives wasted by foolishness. He wants them remembered, equally, as fine soldiers who did their duty well.

Kirby ends with a paean to the cavalryman that seems to support this reading. He says that the dead:

. . . keep on living as long as the regiment lives. The pay is thirteen dollars a month; their diet: beans and hay. Maybe horsemeat before this campaign is over. Fight over cards or rotgut whiskey, but share the last drop in their canteens. The faces may change . . . the names . . . but they’re there: they’re the regiment . . . the regular army . . . now and fifty years from now.

In this tale, we can renew our great respect for the soldiers who tamed the West. But we can learn more still.

Fort Apache shows that the ancient and modern, the aristocratic and democratic tendencies continue in every period of history, including our own, with the film illuminating the virtues and vices that accompany each. In the end, the film sides with the quiet, sure, sturdy dignity of modern democratic man.

In taking this side, it also shows that the gap between the two kinds of men might be less than Post-Liberals assure us. The virtue of courage and living by high-minded ideals are not relics of a nobler past. If anything, this film shows that ancient souls possess their own vices that endanger and demean. The film then shows contemporary virtues that stand up to the ancient ones. Modern, democratic man is capable of great feats of bravery. His courage does stem from a desire for honor, one committed to excellence and grounded in a common dignity. Thus, may we eschew the ancient, aristocratic vices of Owen Thursday. But may we also see the full honor, even glory, in the men who lived and died in Fort Apache.

The post The Democratic Virtues of <em>Fort Apache</em> appeared first on Law & Liberty.

A recent Quinnipiac poll asked Americans to guess their response if a similar situation presented itself to us. Thirty-eight percent said they would flee while 55 percent answered that they would stay and fight.

That little more than half of our country would remain to defend America from foreign invasion is cause for grave concern. President Kennedy famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” He knew a president needed to say it because not everyone sought to serve their political community. But he also knew that because people could be persuaded so to do, the commander-in-chief saying it mattered.

To fight for one’s country requires the virtue of patriotism. Patriotism is love, a love directed toward one’s political community. From that love springs words and deeds seeking the country’s good, even to the pain and loss of the patriot. This point distinguishes patriotism from some articulations of nationalism. Far from a virtue to be cultivated, nationalism can morph into subrational tribalism that refuses to let the particular concept of citizenship be tempered by the universal one of humanity; and to misunderstand this connection threatens to confuse might with right, blood, and soil with true justice.

Ukraine has learned that it has many patriots in its midst. Do we? We should ask how we may cultivate this virtue in our citizens as well. To cultivate, we must understand it better, especially in our American context.

Patriotism faces several potential competitors. For one, it faces competition from the self. We love ourselves and thus tend to seek our own good first and foremost. This good takes several forms. We desire our own health and safety contra the many threats of disease and violence. Humans pursue their own wealth, desiring not mere existence but a comfortable and ideally thrilling and fulfilling life. Finally, we look for fame, approval, and praise from others. The condition of our country can play into each factor. We want our country’s safety, its opulence, and its renown if we feel we partake of those national goods. Yet, what about when the country appears to prosper and certain individuals or groups do not? What if—to exacerbate the issue—such prosperity appears to come partly from its deleterious effect on particular persons or groups? Thus, we often see politicians talk about economic growth wrongly leaving certain citizens behind (most recently, we saw debates over the health risks COVID-19 presented for some persons as opposed to others).

Second, patriotism faces competition from family. The worry about this competition goes back to ancient times. Plato’s communism of wives and children in The Republic stemmed from concerns about family loyalty undermining dedication to the political community. As with the self, we feel a natural affection for our kin. In fact, one could say that love of family comes from a similar principle, for our family is an extension of ourselves. The good or even safety of parents, siblings, and children often benefits from a country’s flourishing. As with the self, however, its good may at times conflict with that of the nation. Moreover, the family comprises a potential rival institution to the state. A family contains its own leadership structure, principles, and history. While the political context does much to form these familial particulars, there are no guarantees that family values will match political priorities. Indeed, 19th-century America used this link between hearth and statehouse to justify outlawing polygamy.

Finally, we see competition from religion. This problem is more modern than ancient. The gods we worshiped were the gods of the city in many ancient polities. Christianity (and Islam), however, make universal claims to the truth of their doctrines and exclusivity to the existence of their deity. These claims cannot help but touch politics. If a universal God exists, then we owe Him ultimate obedience. This truth forever subverts the frequent move to deify human rulers. It also requires we seek not to contradict His laws to the degree we can discern them. These realities create the potential for a split between the laws of a country and “thus saith the LORD.” It also creates in the church (in our instance) another rival institution with its own rulers and rules. Piety always threatens to trump patriotism.

In America, our patriotism bears an interesting relationship to all three potential competitors. Our Founding principles include the inalienable right to life. Putting such a premium on life could undermine calls to defend America when foes threaten her. Similar concerns present themselves for family and for faith. Americans place a high value on family. Loyalty to and care for one’s own household is held up as a virtue in itself. We also have a history as a nation of mostly Christians, importing the potential friction between God’s laws and our own statutes.

That all said, we may direct all three in conformity to the virtue of patriotism. Working backward, our Declaration of Independence grounds its claims about justice and good government in the “laws of nature and of nature’s God.” We don’t treat our own laws as inherently sacred nor our rulers as divine. Instead, the natural laws instituted by our Creator form the standard by which we judge ourselves. Such a standard has comprised the best means for our own reform when we have erred, as seen in abolishing slavery and protecting the civil rights of black Americans.

Moreover, the self and the family’s good is congruent with American patriotism. The family needs the state and the state needs the family. Only through families can true patriotism and thus good citizenship be cultivated generation to generation. Only in the political community can the family receive the support and refinement it needs to truly flourish. Thus, we cannot reduce ourselves to familial enclaves nor to Plato’s all-encompassing, family destroying communism. Therefore, our patriotism seeks America’s good in part because our family’s good is so closely linked to hers. When we must seek America’s good at the expense of our own family, we do so only when our own kind runs afoul of justice and thus undermine the very conditions for familial flourishing the political community provides.

The concept of justice provides further clarity towards understanding how patriotism relates to self and family. In the age of COVID-19, we must still know that there are things worth dying for. Family certainly makes the list. But one’s country only makes the cut if there’s a sincere, deeply-planted sense of gratitude for her past, admiration of her present, and hope for her future. We see good in her through the commitment to equal rights and to liberty. We see good in her by the great deeds of past Americans whom we should seek to emulate. At the same time, we feel gratitude for how America provides the context to live out these goods. This combination of good and gratitude justifies sacrifice. It explains to us why the love that is our patriotism should be prepared to give all to a country that gave us, and our families, so much.

But we must not lose sight of our fellow citizens either. We must see our community as more than self and family. Citizenship is a bond and one that we should cherish. Rightly understood, it is a kind of friendship. Friendships involve holding common enjoyments and, at its best, friendships involve a common adherence to the good. In America, we can see our citizenship as unity in that good. It’s a unity in the equal rights of human beings; it’s a friendship dedicated to liberty seeking excellence—which is another way of saying the pursuit of happiness.

We have lost this art of citizenship as friendship. We must educate ourselves anew in the principles that bind us. We must dedicate ourselves to knowing our neighbor, respecting our American brothers and sisters both as humans and as fellow citizens. And, finally, we must act politically, exercising the arts of persuasion and discourse essential to citizen friends in a republic. Here, the love of patriotism becomes a virtue because it unites with a rational commitment to the good in the context of community.

The fact that 38 percent of our citizens would flee in an invasion is evidence we need to cultivate more authentic, genuine patriotism. We must be willing to stand and fight when called. We need more of that love that committed the Founders to stake their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for the sake of America. As it has elicited the cry of “Glory to Ukraine” abroad, so patriotism must elicit a “God bless America” here.

The post The Need for Genuine Patriotism appeared first on Law & Liberty.