Friday 14 June 2019

Married relationships - Patriarchy, Feminism or Dyadic (the Mormon experience)

Yesterday I was re-reading this-blog commenter 'Lucinda's excellent 2015 article from the Mormon Blog - Millenial Star. I certainly agree with the substance of what Lucinda says, but I noticed that there was a 'hang-up' in the comments about nomenclature.

For example, disputes about about the 'real meaning of Patriarchy; or (elsewhere) I have seem 'complementary' used as a synonym for 'de facto feminism'. I don't intend to quibble over this - but will make my meaning of these and other terms clear, as we proceed.

My general stance is that there was a long history of Patriarchy in human society, but around about 1800 there was a change in Western human consciousness (or human instincts) concerning the ideal way that men and women ought to relate - particularly in marriage.

This was a part of the Romantic movement in thought - and I regard Joseph Smith and the Latter Day Saints (beginning with the production of the Book of Mormon and the formation of what became the CJCLDS in 1830) as part of this Romantic movement.

My belief is that this Romantic movement in thought ought to have led to a new kind of dyadic (or complementary - in the original sense of that word) relationship between men and women. Mormonism bases this upon the solid metaphysical assumption that men and women are incomplete parts of the 'whole' human being; and that the divine ideal of the complete (i.e. fully divine) Man is a 'celestial' (i.e. dyadic and eternal) marriage of a man and woman.

This divine idea, then, ought to be reflected in our earthly ideals. However this has not yet happened.

In mainstream secular Western culture, we have instead had materialistic feminism; which is an incoherent, Leftist (hence destructive, evil motivated) perversion of the truth of the underlying spiritual ideal. Yes, we had the impulse for a New relation between men and women; but No - not feminism - which foments perpetual resentment and (even pragmatically) simply does not work. So not feminism - then what?  

What of Mormonism? My interpretation is that Mormonism was diverted by adverse circumstances first briefly into polygamy under Joseph Smith (multiple spiritual, not physical, spouses for men and women - intended to bind the Saints into a single extended family); then (under Brigham Young) into several decades of Patriarchal polygyny (plural wives for the senior Mormons) - and from about 1900 the current pattern of an ideal of eternal monogamy.

Current Mormonism is regarded as highly 'Patriarchal' by comparison with current secular norms; especially because only men are priests and there is an ideal of men as leading the household and women being mothers and homemakers. But spiritually there is a strong element of dyadic complementarity to Mormonism, which is evident by comparison with Conservative Evangelicals.

And ultimately this is related to the Evangelical concept of God as a man; while the Mormon God is a Heavenly Father and Mother. But the womens' role in the CJCLDS has always been much more important than in traditionalist mainstream Christian churches; with the Mormon Relief Society a very early feature, and a full range of 'parallel' women's organisations (and significant local, national and international positions of responsibility) within the church.

Thus, the true underlying position of Mormonism is that men and women are complementary 'partners' in their marriage. When this is made into a regulatory generalisation, into official guidance, it comes-out very much like Patriarchy; since on-average this broadly reflects the situation for the majority of men and women.  If we must have 'laws' then these must be 'patriarchal' - because the feminist alternative is much worse.

But in an ideal situation, the dyad of earthly spouses would be able mutually to find their own, perhaps unique, complementary compatibility; based on their own specific natures and dispositions, and the way that an individual marriage evolves over time - with age, with fortune, how many children or their absence, with diseases and disasters etc.

In this sense, all solid and lasting marriages on earth must sometimes be complementary, when circumstances dictate; but for the Romantic view of men and women this is the ideal, not just a regrettable necessity. 

Dyadic marriage, with each man and woman forging a flexible and complementary, permanent and committed, relationship, is - I believe - the proper and truly Romantic ideal for modern men and women; on earth as we hope it shall be in Heaven.

12 comments:

Lucinda said...

"Thus, the true underlying position of Mormonism is that men and women are complementary 'partners' in their marriage. When this is made into a regulatory generalisation, into official guidance, it comes-out very much like Patriarchy; since on-average this broadly reflects the situation for the majority of men and women. If we must have 'laws' then these must be 'patriarchal' - because the feminist alternative is much worse.

"But in an ideal situation, the dyad of earthly spouses would be able mutually to find their own, perhaps unique, complementary compatibility; based on their own specific natures and dispositions, and the way that an individual marriage evolves over time - with age, with fortune, how many children or their absence, with diseases and disasters etc."

Yes, this is what I have come to understand too, as I've worked through various implications from that essay and living as a member of the church.

Faculty X said...

I don't get why there is the attempted re-write of what Jesus said by the Mormons. Their view does not seem more ideal to me.

Family and marriage have been noted to reduce one's spiritual purity or dedication for larger causes for millennia. Even as recently as the early 1900s this would have been commonly understood within a culture of the English or Germans.

Men do most of the work for marriage. In my observations the work is frequently morally compromising (for money or status) and brings one down in spiritual terms.

I think Jesus's words expressed the proper ideal, especially in light of the constant attacks on spiritual development on a man during his time on the Earth plane:

"In the resurrection, people will neither marry nor be given in marriage. Instead, they will be like the angels in heaven."

-Matthew 22:30


There is a time to be more free in developing spiritual purity.

Bruce Charlton said...

@FX - The Mormon revelations were needed exactly because of the persistent confusions and errors of mainstream Christianity, including the passage you cite from Matthew which I regard as a stark falsehood (one of numerous wrongnesses in that Gospel), and (error or not) has been given ridiculous weight and authority for a single verse.

Another error is exactly "Family and marriage have been noted to reduce one's spiritual purity or dedication for larger causes for millennia" - which is used to justify the ideal of celibacy as superior to marriage.

Such errors have left the Christian mainstream churches wide open to the Satanic onslaught of the sexual revolution (and Satanic onslaught is exactly its nature - the primary mechanism of evil over the past half century).

For mainstream Christians, marriage is At Best merely a temporary expedient of earthly mortal life, swept away in eternity - and this trivialisation is where the wedge of evil was inserted.

http://theoreticalmormon.blogspot.com/

Anonymous said...

"In the resurrection, people will neither marry nor be given in marriage. Instead, they will be like the angels in heaven."

Note that those are action verbs, not adjectives. Creedal Christendom has mischaracterized, miscast entirely, the literal meaning.

It says you don't actively marry, or more simply, in English, "_get_ married" in the resurrection. It says nothing about _staying_ married for those who "got" married (and "sealed" is the important LDS aspect) prior to their death or resurrection.

This passage does not contradict LDS doctrine/theology whatsoever, if you understand LDS theology, and parse the passage literally.

-Book slinger.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Books - I don't agree with that interpretation. I have read General Authorities saying that those who are single during mortal life *can* get married after resurrection. I'd say that there is no firm CJCLDS guidance on this one.

But for myself, I am sure that there are new marriages in the resurrection - my understanding is thta things then will be as flexible (in a positive direction) as they can be, but the situation will be different; and some things may be much less likely (or more difficult in some way) than in mortal life.

Anonymous said...

BC, even there, you're misparsing; they may get married "in the next life" (ie, spirit world) , but _prior_ to the resurrection, not "in" the resurrection. Such a sealing would have to take place by proxy, in the temple , while the couple being sealed are in the post-mortal spirit world, prior to their resurrection. This is pretty much common knowledge, so it is often left unsaid when other aspects are being emohasized: sealings and proxy sealings must be done _prior_ to the resurrection of the people whom the proxies represent. the corrolary is: people are resurrected throughout the millennium as the proxy temple work is completed for them.

We are already taught that persons from the spirit world will inform living mortals, in the Millennium, about needed proxy work. This covers unrecorded marriages/children throughout history, and cases where people were worthy of marriage, but through no fault of their own, were unable to.

Perhaps a stumbling block for some is the phrase "the resurrection". There is no one "the" resurrection. There will be a couple mass resurrections, at both the start and the end of the millennium. There was a mass resurrection soon after the Lord's. but there will be billions of people resurrected throughout the millennium, as they progress in the spirit world, and have temple work done.

--

Another parsing of the biblical passage, is the Lord was talking about the _specific instance_ being referred to by the questioner, as to which of the brothers would have the woman as wife post-resurrection, as they all married her in sequence under the Mosaic law as the previous ones died off.. "They" referred to the subsequent husbands, and not the first, as it was commonly known anciently that "Levirate" husbands were just "stand-ins" and she only had one permanent husband.

-Book Slinger.

Bruce Charlton said...

Comment from Lucinda:

"I don’t believe the idea that there is a higher spiritual purity without marriage because there is no relationship with more potential for profound animosity than a marriage relationship. A spouse has the ability to thwart and challenge your deepest desires in a way no other person can. Sure, functional societies can set up norms that can channel men and women to make use of each other, but to learn to actually love a spouse, real love, is only possible for the most spiritually pure.

"The fact of the natural animosity between men and women is one of the most obvious and depressing lessons of life, particularly modern life. And the Christian injunction to love your enemy can have no higher expression than in a Christian marriage.

"The belief that marriage is a lesser path seems to have roots in an idea of automatic sexual felicity in marriage. But this just isn’t what is observed when prosperity and technology free men and women from the harsh constraints of Nature. The easier our lives have become, the harder it has been to hold marriages together."

Bruce Charlton said...

@Books - I don't regard parsing as a good way of understanding - and I regard God's 'plan' as being both simpler and more complex than the kind of scheme you outline.

In one sense God's plan is very simple and can be told as a short narrative, in another sense God's plan for each person is qualitatively unique.

Therefore the general material regarding the fate of Men is best understood from the implications of a few metaphysical assumptions which each person can validate intuitively; on the other hand it requires each person individually to learn the specific relevant details of his own (not someone else's) destiny.

Lucinda said...

When I decided to write the essay on patriarchy, the first challenge I faced was to come up with some working definition of patriarchy that would serve.

I thought there was enough leeway in the way people speak of patriarchy for there to be a motivational shift, keeping most of the historical practice of patriarchy, but allowing for it to flow from the self-interest of all, rather than just the self-interest of men. So my basic outline, that kinda got buried as the essay took shape, was to point to the fact that universal committed fatherhood should be everyone's idea of a perfect society (but especially the moms), and then to examine the practices historically associated with patriarchy and point out that they are compatible with a voluntary society whose citizens, both men and women, possessed wisdom enough to act in their own long-term best interest.

In practical terms, each paragraph in the body was based on answering the question of how a particular aspect associated with patriarchy could be seen to answer the best desires of women, rather than to thwart them.

So I guess that's why the hang-up about what patriarchy means happened. I chose to define it in a particular way that left out male motivations for power and control, and just examined how the common practices could arise out of motherly motivations for the good of her children.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Lucinda - It's extremely difficult to write on this kind of topic because there is insufficient honesty and coherence among so many people. People are not honest about themselves and are very prone to incoherence in asserting what they want.

We ought to be able to acknowledge on the one hand that patriarchy is superior to what has replaced it ('bureaucratic feminism'?); but on the other hand patriarchy has very serious problems if regarded as a general ideal.

It would also be helpful is people realised that patriarchy was extremely difficult for men, as well as for intelligent and creative women. We are so far from being honest about this that it is routinely implied that women being exempted from conscription to be maimed and slaughtered in wars is an instance of male privilege.



Lucinda said...

Well, it was a very educational process for me. My father-in-law had asked me to write something against feminism for a publication he was working on (not Millennialstar). My older brother acted as an editor to me, since I'd never really written anything good before. (My BS was in Mathematics). He kept trying to encourage me to be less nice, to enliven my righteous feminine wrath which, he reassured me doesn't actually bother most worthwhile men who tend to think a woman is angry at 'those other guys', he wanted me to imagine being with a group of women that I actually know, talking about how awful men were and wouldn't it be better if they were more responsible. He hated the feel of apologetics I kept slipping into, and I was never able to get past that. I guess I lack confidence in my ability to be gregarious as well as persuasive with women. I've got more of a follower personality when interacting with women.

The title for most of the time I was writing was "Problematic Patriarchy", but I changed it to "Paradoxical Patriarchy" at a late stage to indicate my assertion that good patriarchy was a benefit to women. I knew I wasn't really addressing the problems of patriarchy. I find it very taxing to keep remembering the animosity between men and women. At one point, I did explore an outline that would have listed the problems for women that feminism is supposed to solve, and then point out how those problems were solved better by patriarchy. But it was just too depressing to read stuff by feminists to generate a list of essential complaints.

That's why it was so great when you pointed out that women thought of exclusion from male activities as a form of shunning. At the time of the essay, even though I could observe that women hated being told they can't do any particular thing, I didn't understand why.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Lucinda - All evil that thrives, in the short-medium term, does so because of the element of good that it takes and distorts. So feminism takes some legitimate problems (eg the humiliation of women by exclusion) and uses them to promote evil - and puts those who oppose it into the (apparent) position of defending the continuation of the specific evils it purports to solve.

Well, this is the rhetorical trick used over the past half century with overwhelming success - and really people have to work it out for themselves. Because a glance at the big picture shows the colossal, unambiguous overall failure of feminism.

But understanding *that* requires people actually to learn from their own experience using common sense - whereas people (en masse) have instead decided to learn from the mass media using bizzare pseudo-rationality.

So, yes, this is an evil world of lies - but in the end we each have sufficient knowledge to know the truth of these things; and by choosing not to do so, we are choosing self-damnation. God can and will ensure that everybody is given (at least once, probably more often) a clear view of realities - but decades of dishonesty, nurtured resentments, denied cowardice etc make it unlikely that these chances will be grasped.

Our punishment, as always, will be to get what we ask for.