![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I finished The Feminization of American Culture. GLORY HALLELUJAH, I'm free, free, FREE! It's been ages since I read a book so intensely inimical to me.
For someone so enchanted by "masculine" rigorousness, Douglas is a notably fuzzy thinker. She seesaws between exalting strength and decrying oppression, never realizing that at some point one really must choose whether one wishes to eulogize strength or sympathize with weakness, or, more importantly, realizing that she has chosen. Anti-oppession gestures aside - and I do think these gestures are sincerely meant - Douglas is ultimately on the side of strength.
This is not so much because she loves oppressors as because she viscerally loathes sentimentalism and the feminine, and the liberal theology that she sees as their creature. All these doctrines, in her mind, are weak, inherently out of touch with reality, opposed to the "intellectual rigor and imaginative precision" of the (masculine) Calvinist vision, which to her mind is more realistic.
Indeed, she goes on to argue that liberal theology, and the New Testament sources it draws from, are actually immoral. The "paradoxical anti-morality of the New Testament," she calls it; and expands, explicating a temperance poem, “The wife has been (one assumes) unfairly treated; but, in a curious way, she is pledging to treat her sinful spouse equally unfairly. He has given less than what she has earned, she will pay him with more than he deserves, but the principle is the same.”
Did you catch that? Mercy, Christian charity, generosity, love - all these things that we (and, you know, Jesus) thought were virtues - they're all immoral, because they go behind the strict demands of fairness, and fairness is morality. The highest moral good is tit-for-tat. The Old Testament Calvinists had it right with the image of an implacably wrathful Cthulhu God. Unjust such a God may be, but at least He is glorious and strong, and to Douglas that's the most important thing.
Thus, the fact that it never seems to intrude on her concerns that her beloved, rigorous, "realistic" Calvinists did not recognize - or, more importantly, effectively mobilize against - the evils of slavery. It took those unrealistic, sentimentalist, girl-cootie-covered abolitionists to do that.
For someone so enchanted by "masculine" rigorousness, Douglas is a notably fuzzy thinker. She seesaws between exalting strength and decrying oppression, never realizing that at some point one really must choose whether one wishes to eulogize strength or sympathize with weakness, or, more importantly, realizing that she has chosen. Anti-oppession gestures aside - and I do think these gestures are sincerely meant - Douglas is ultimately on the side of strength.
This is not so much because she loves oppressors as because she viscerally loathes sentimentalism and the feminine, and the liberal theology that she sees as their creature. All these doctrines, in her mind, are weak, inherently out of touch with reality, opposed to the "intellectual rigor and imaginative precision" of the (masculine) Calvinist vision, which to her mind is more realistic.
Indeed, she goes on to argue that liberal theology, and the New Testament sources it draws from, are actually immoral. The "paradoxical anti-morality of the New Testament," she calls it; and expands, explicating a temperance poem, “The wife has been (one assumes) unfairly treated; but, in a curious way, she is pledging to treat her sinful spouse equally unfairly. He has given less than what she has earned, she will pay him with more than he deserves, but the principle is the same.”
Did you catch that? Mercy, Christian charity, generosity, love - all these things that we (and, you know, Jesus) thought were virtues - they're all immoral, because they go behind the strict demands of fairness, and fairness is morality. The highest moral good is tit-for-tat. The Old Testament Calvinists had it right with the image of an implacably wrathful Cthulhu God. Unjust such a God may be, but at least He is glorious and strong, and to Douglas that's the most important thing.
Thus, the fact that it never seems to intrude on her concerns that her beloved, rigorous, "realistic" Calvinists did not recognize - or, more importantly, effectively mobilize against - the evils of slavery. It took those unrealistic, sentimentalist, girl-cootie-covered abolitionists to do that.
