Knights and Ladies

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Zen and the Art of Un-Framing Questions

May we legitimately project man-like attributes up on to God?

Before answering that question, I'd like to suggest that there are assumptions made by the time that question is asked. The biggest one is that God is gender-neutral, and so any talking about God as masculine is projecting something foreign up on to him.

The qualitarian claim is not that we may legitimately project man-like attributes up on to God. It is that God has projected God-like attributes down on to men. Those are different claims.

A feminist theologian said to a master, "I think it is important that we keep an open mind and avoid confining God to traditional categories of gender."

The master said, "Of course. Why let God reveal himself as masculine when you can confine him to your canons of political correctness?"

I can't shake a vision of an articulate qualitarian giving disturbing answers to someone's questions and sounding like an annoying imitation of a Zen master:

Interlocutor:
What would you say to, "A woman's place is in the House--and in the Senate!"?

Articulate Qualitarian:
Well, if we're talking about disrespectful, misogysnistic... Wait a minute... Let me respond to the intention behind your question.

Do you know the Bible story about the Woman at the Well?

Interlocutor:
Yes! It's one of my favorite stories.

Articulate Qualitarian:
Do you know its cultural context?

Interlocutor:
Not really.

Articulate Qualitarian:
Most Bible stories--including this one--speak for themselves. A few of them are much richer if you know cultural details that make certain things significant.

Every recorded interaction between Jesus and women, Jesus broke rules. To start off, a rabbi wasn't supposed to talk with women. But Jesus really broke the rules here.

When a lone woman came out and he asked for water, she was shocked enough to ask why he did so. And there's something to her being alone.

Drawing water was a communal women's task. The women of the village would come and draw water together; there was a reason why this woman was alone: no one would be caught dead with her. Everyone knew that she was the village slut.

Her life was dominated by shame. When Jesus said, "...never thirst again," she heard an escape from shamefully drawing water alone, and she asked Jesus to help her hide from it. When he said to call her husband, she gave an evasive and ambiguous reply. He gave a very blunt response: "You are right in saying you have no husband, for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband."

Yowch.

Instead of helping her run from her shame, Jesus pulled her through it, and she came out the other side, running without any shame, calling, "Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did!"

There's much more, but I want to delve into one specific detail: there was something abnormal about her drawing water alone. Drawing water was women's work. Women's work was backbreaking toil--as was men's work--but it was not done in isolation. It was something done in the company of other people.

It's not just that one culture. There are old European paintings that show a group of women, bent over their washboards, talking and talking. Maybe I'm just romanticizing because I haven't felt how rough washboards are to fingers. But I have a growing doubt that labor-saving devices are all they're cracked up to be. Vacuum cleaners were introduced as a way to lessen the work in the twice-annual task of beating rugs. Somehow each phenomenal new labor-saving technology seems to leave housewives with even more drudgery.

I have sympathy for feminists who say that women are better off doing professional work in community than doing housework in solitary confinement. I think feminists are probably right that the Leave It to Beaver arrangement causes women to be lonely and depressed. (I'm not sure that "Turn the clock back, all the way back, to 1954!" represents the best achievement conservatives can claim.)

The traditional arrangement is not Mom, Dad, two kids, and nothing more. Across quite a lot of cultures and quite a lot of history, the usual pattern has kept extended families together (seeing Grandma didn't involve interstate travel), and made those extended families part of an integrated community. From what I've read, women are happier in intentional communities like Reba Place.

Interlocutor:
Do you support the enfranchisement of women?

Articulate Qualitarian:
Let me visit the dict.org website. Webster's 1913 says:

      Enfranchisement \En*fran"chise*ment\, n.
         1. Releasing from slavery or custody. --Shak.
  
         2. Admission to the freedom of a corporation or body politic;
            investiture with the privileges of free citizens.

         Enfranchisement of copyhold (Eng. Law), the conversion of a
            copyhold estate into a freehold. --Mozley & W.

WordNet seems less helpful; it doesn't really mention the sense you want.

      enfranchisement
           1: freedom from political subjugation or servitude
           2: the act of certifying [syn: certification] [ant: disenfranchisement]

If I were preaching on your question, I might do a Greek-style exegesis and say that your choice of languages fuses the egalitarian request to grant XYZ with the insinuation that their opponents' practice is equivalent to slavery. Wow.

I think you're using loaded language. Would you be willing to restate your question in less loaded terms?

Interlocutor:
Ok, I'll ask a different way, but will you promise not to answer with a word-study?

Articulate Qualitarian:
Ok, I won't answer with a word-study unless you ask.

Interlocutor:
Do you believe that women have the same long list of rights as men?

Articulate Qualitarian:
Hmm... I'm trying to think about how to answer this without being misleading...

Interlocutor:
Please answer me literally.

Articulate Qualitarian:
I'm afraid I'm going to have to say, "No."

Interlocutor:
But you at least believe that women have some rights, correct?

Articulate Qualitarian:
No.

Interlocutor:
What?!?

Articulate Qualitarian:
I said I wouldn't give a word-study...

Is it OK if I give a comparable study of a concept?

Interlocutor:
[Quietly counts to ten and takes a deep breath:] Ok.

Articulate Qualitarian:
I don't believe that women have any rights. I don't believe that men have any rights, either. The Bible doesn't use rights like we do. It answers plenty of questions we try to solve with rights: it says we shouldn't murder, steal, and so on. But the older Biblical way of doing this said, "Don't do this," or "Be like Christ," or something like that.

Then this really odd moral framework based on rights came along, and all of a sudden there wasn't a universal law against unjustified killing, but an entitlement not to be killed. At first it seemed not to make much difference. But now more and more of our moral reasoning is in terms of 'rights', which increasingly say, not "Don't do this," or "You must do that," but "Here's the long list of entitlements that the universe owes me." And that has meant some truly strange things.

In the context of the concrete issues that qualitarians discuss with egalitarians, the Biblical concept of seeking the good of all is quietly remade into seeking the enfranchisement of all, and so it seems that the big question is whether women get the same rights as men--quite apart from the kind of situation where language comparing your opponents' behavior to slavery is considered polite.

Interlocutor:
Couldn't we listen to, say, Eastern Philosophy?

Articulate Qualitarian:
There's a lot of interesting stuff in Eastern philosophy. The contrast between Confucian and Taoist concepts of virtue, for instance, is interesting and worth exploring, especially in this nexus. I'm really drawing a blank as to how one could get a rights-based framework from Asian philosophy. And I'm not sure African mindsets would be much more of a help, for instance. Even if you read one Kwaanza pamphlet, it's hard to see how individual rights could come from the seven African values. The value of Ujima, or collective work and responsibility, speaks even less of individual rights than, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

Interlocutor:
Ok, let me change the subject slightly. Would you acknowledge that Paul was a progressive?

Articulate Qualitarian:
Hmm... reminds me of a C.S. Lewis book in which Lewis quotes a medieval author. The author is talking about some important Greek philosopher and says, "Now when we come to a difficulty or ambiguity, we should always ascribe the views most worthy of a man of his stature."

Lewis's big complaint was that this kind of respect always reads into an author the biases and assumptions of the reader's age. It honors the author enough to think he believed what we call important, but not enough that the author can disagree with our assumptions and be able to correct us.

When we ask if Paul is a progressive, there are two basic options. Either we say that Paul was not a progressive, and relegate him to our understanding of a misogynist, or we generously overlook a passage here and there and generously include him as one of our progressives.

It seems that neither response allows Paul to be an authority who knows something we don't.

On second thought, maybe it's a good thing there aren't too many articulate qualitarians.

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