The Folly of Feminism

Nature provides some animals with weapons with which to fight their enemies – horns, claws, teeth, etc. Other animals and plants she provides with alternative defences which dissuade their would-be-predators from attacking, defences such as colours and smells which tell the would-be predator not to waste its time. Sometimes these colours or smells indicate that the life-form is poisonous and inedible. Other life-forms have colour defences that are a bit more sneaky, such as spots which mimic the appearance of eyes to make it seem to the predator that it is being looked at when it is not.

Feminism, one of the most prominent errors of the modern age, is an ideology with a built-in defence that is similar to that of plant and animals with colour defences. The natural enemy of feminism is the traditional social order built upon the patriarchal family. Since feminism is a movement which purports to speak for women, to champion their rights and demand justice for them, however, an attack upon that movement often bears the appearance of an attack on the fairer sex. To attack women runs contrary to the principles of those who believe in, defend, and uphold the traditional order, particularly those principles enshrined in the laudable system of courtly behaviour that we call chivalry.

Yet attack feminism we must. All around us we see the deleterious effects which feminism has had upon our families, communities, and societies. Marriages which are less binding than business contracts and divorces which are easy to come by. Children being raised without the presence, protection, and provision of a father even though their father is living and might desperately wish to be a father to his children. Thousands of unborn human lives being terminated each year in the name of a woman’s “right to choose”. These outrages and countless others have been caused in whole or in part by the feminist movement. (1)

How can we criticize and challenge this movement while being true to the principles of chivalry?

To do so we must be aware that while feminism calls itself “the women’s movement” it is at its core an extremely misogynistic movement. (2)

Now to many that might seem to be strange accusation. The misandry of the feminist movement is plain to see in its use of rhetoric that equates all men with rapists and wife-beaters, in its support for sexual harassment accusations against men for nothing more than complimenting a woman on her looks, and in the countless humiliations that it demands men undergo in the name of “gender sensitivity”. It is not unusual to hear feminism being spoken of as anti-male. We don’t often hear it accused of being anti-female.

Yet the accusation is true.

The institutions that feminism has attacked, such as marriage and the traditional family, exist for the good of both men and women and the attack on these institutions hurts both men and women. Yet if one of the sexes benefits more than the other from these institutions and is hurt more than the other when they are weakened and collapse, surely it is the female sex rather than the male sex. By attacking these institutions, then, feminism hurts women even more than it hurts men.

This is true even without taking into consideration the trauma many women undergo as the result of having an abortion or the heartbreak others face when they find that they can no longer conceive a child because they allowed themselves to be convinced by feminist rhetoric that a career is more important than motherhood and so spent their optimal child-bearing years climbing the corporate ladder.

Feminism is also misogynistic in a deeper, more fundamental way, than in the harmful effects it has on women. Feminism, in its most basic ideas, is a hatred of women qua women, and a desire to replace both women and men with “individuals” whose biological sex is among their secondary, accidental properties rather than their primary, essential, characteristics. The female characteristics which define women as women are particularly hateful to the feminist movement because they stand in the way of its achieving this goal.

Let us consider what those characteristics are and how feminism hates them.

The human species is divided into two sexes, male and female. This division of mankind into man and woman is more basic, more fundamental, more important than any other distinctions, biological or cultural. It is the nature of sex that the two sexes have a complementary relationship with each other. Men are inwardly drawn towards forming a sexual union with women, and vice versa, and it is out of this union of the sexes that the species is propagated. Thus the survival of the family, the community, the society, the nation, the country, the race, and the species all depend upon the union of the sexes.

Human beings are not the only sexual species, and biologically the definition of female that applies across the board, is that the female is the sex which produces the larger gamete. Genetically, we can distinguish the human sexes by a single chromosome pair. The female has a pair of X chromosomes, whereas the male has one X chromosome paired with a Y chromosome. Even without the help of such scientifically precise definitions, however, people know how to distinguish between men and women.

The most important differences between men and women have to do with reproduction. Men have an external sexual organ which is placed inside the complementary female sexual organ in the act of copulation. During this act the male gamete is transferred to the woman’s body where it fertilizes the female gamete. Conception takes place within the woman’s body, the fertilized egg implants itself in the woman’s womb, and she becomes pregnant. She then bears the child for a period of nine months as it grows inside her, drawing its nourishment from her body. Then she gives birth to the baby. The child is born helpless to survive on its own and unable at first to consume solid food. The woman’s mammary glands secrete a milk that nourishes the baby until it can be weaned off of its mother’s milk.

So far these are the plain facts and are, as such, indisputable. There is also an inescapable conclusion to be drawn from these facts – that pregnancy, childbirth, and the raising of children necessarily involve a larger investment on the part of women than on the part of men. There is one other conclusion which logically follows from this:

Since women have a larger biological role in the production and raising of children then men it follows that in the internal inclinations which influence thought patterns and behavior women will have a corresponding bent towards motherhood.

That this is not only a logical conclusion but actual fact, all normal people acknowledge. It is a problem for feminists, however, because it interferes with their vision of an egalitarian society, free of prescribed gender roles. (3) If women are themselves naturally inclined to make choices that prioritize motherhood and childrearing then a society in which women occupy half the seats in parliament, are half of the corporate CEOs, and half of every other position down the ladder, will never be chosen freely by either sex. Thus an important feminist writer said:

No women should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. (4)

This is the conclusion that feminism logically points to. Feminism’s goals cannot be achieved if women choose to become mothers and make the raising of their children their priority. Women’s own nature inclines them towards this choice, therefore feminism, to progress towards its goals, must take that choice away.

Not all feminists were willing to take their doctrine to that natural conclusion. Betty Friedan, for example, the author of The Feminine Mystique, the founder and first president of NOW, and the person who took the interview with Simone de Beauvoir from which the above quotation was taken, famously disagreed and indeed, wrote an entire book in which she expressed her disagreement.(5) Note however that while Friedan was gracious enough to concede that women could be wives and mothers if that was their own choice she continued to rank the pursuit of a career outside the home as more important than motherhood and remained for the rest of her life a leader in the movement which demanded free, accessible, and legal abortion and free daycare, paid for by the taxpayer, to make it easier for women to put such careers first.

To de Beauvoir, motherhood was an unacceptable choice which should be taken away from women. To Friedan, motherhood was an acceptable choice, but an inferior one to a career in the business world. Neither was happy with women as they were naturally – biologically made to bear and raise children and psychologically inclined so to do. In this we see the deep misogynistic nature of feminism.

Opponents of feminism are often accused of making the mistake of treating the social norms of the 1940’s and 1950’s as set-in-stone universals. There is a degree of justice to this accusation. The 1950’s ideal, of the husband/father earning the family’s bread in an office or factory, while the wife/mother stays at home and cleans and cooks while raising the children, was a quite recent development. In the early days of industrial capitalism women frequently had to work in factories out of necessity – one set of wages alone was not sufficient to keep a family sheltered, clothed, and fed. In the early 1900’s, the achievement of the family wage, whereby a husband was able to support a stay at home wife and children on a single paycheck, was considered to be a sign of social progress. Ironically, the earlier women’s movement, which the women’s liberation movement of the 1960’s and subsequent feminists lay claim to being the successors to, campaigned for this wage.

While the 1950’s ideal family is not a universal model for all mankind it does reflect social universals which are based upon the intrinsic nature of men and women. The primary role of women in any society is to bear and raise children and whatever else they do, in the home or out of it, tends to be subservient to this role. Men, on the other hand, are expected to protect their wives and children, to provide for their material needs, and to be the voice of law and authority. These are the core essentials of the male and female roles – the way they look in practice will vary from society to society, and will also change within a society as economic and other factors change. The division of labour between male and female that is appropriate to a hunter-gatherer society will not be appropriate to an advanced agricultural society, nor will the division of labour appropriate to an agrarian society be appropriate to an industrial society. In whatever form the roles for male and female occur, however, the more they conform to the essentials given above, the better off the society will be, and the further from those essentials they get, the worse off the society will be.

In noting that the specifics of what is expected of men and women change while the core essentials – hopefully – remain intact, because the nature upon which they are based does not change, an interesting observation can be made about how the labour expected of men has changed which sheds some interesting light on the nature of feminism.

Modernism has turned work into a necessary evil for most men. While an argument can be made that work has always been a necessary evil and that this fact was recognized in such ancient texts as Genesis 3:17-19, what I mean here is that a mitigating factor has been removed by modernism. That factor is the sense of vocation.

A “vocation” is the sense that one has been called to or assigned one’s labour by God, the universe, and/or nature and that in performing one’s work one is therefore fulfilling the purpose for which one exists. A sense of vocation allows a man to perform his work as a good in and of itself rather than merely as a means towards a good end. Modernism has, for most men, eroded this sense of vocation. The modern age is an age of materialism. The message of materialism is that the physical world, immediately available to the senses, is either all that there is, or all that we can be sure of, and that therefore we must orient our lives entirely towards the physical world, finding the good and happiness, if they are to be found, in the physical world. This message has become ubiquitous throughout the Western world in the modern age and the economic systems that have developed in the Western world in that era – including both capitalism and socialism – developed to reflect that materialism.

This has had devastating consequences for men’s sense of vocation. If the material world is all that exists – or must be practically treated as such – then the end or purpose for work must be contained within the physical world. The result is that work is no longer something which a person is called to do by a higher Being or to fill a higher purpose but something which is performed solely for the end of obtaining the money needed to sustain one’s existence and support one’s family. There are a few exceptions, such as the clergy, where a sense of vocation remains but otherwise, for most men in the modern economy work has become “the old grind”.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and one way in which many have sought to fill the vacuum left by the absence of vocation is with careerism. A career is not just a job but a way of systematically organizing one’s employment over the course of one’s life so as to rise the economic and social ladders and achieve a place of relative wealth and power. A career is a poor substitute for a vocation. It easily becomes an idol and many are the men who have sacrificed the things which make work bearable in the modern economy – marriage, wife, and family – for their careers, only to realize that the rewards of wealth and power are no compensation for these losses.

What modernism has taken away from most men it cannot take away from women. Motherhood is intrinsic to women in such a way that no amount of materialistic dogma can strip that sense of vocation from it. This is why if you wish to find someone on this planet who displays genuine happiness, contentment, satisfaction and fulfillment, your best bet is to look for a woman who has just given birth, and if you wish to find someone who loudly proclaims that they possess those things while all other indicators suggest otherwise, you look for a woman has chosen an ambitious career over motherhood.

Feminism tells women that they need to be independent individuals, who ignore what society traditionally expects of them, who do not allow themselves to be defined by their biology, and who determine for themselves “what it means to be a woman”, recommending that they do the latter by opting for an ambitious career in aggressive competition with men rather than being a mother. It tells women that they should voluntarily abandon a natural, fulfilling vocation in favour of something that is an unsatisfactory substitute for vocation in the lives of most men.

Surely only an intense hatred of women qua women could be behind such a suggestion.

With feminism’s true anti-woman nature exposed, the call can now go forth to those knights-errant in whose chest the flame of chivalry still burns, if indeed any still exist in this cold, materialist, age, to take up arms and rescue the damsels in distress from the misogynistic dragon of feminism. (6) We will now wrap up this essay up by considering two of the many lies with which this subtle serpent hopes to deceive the Eves of our present day to their own destruction and in so doing bring ruin to our societies and civilization.

The first is the lie that traditional sexual morality was unfair to women, that the overthrow of that morality in the sexual revolution has benefitted women, and that women should embrace promiscuity and experimentation. (7)

At first it seems incredible that anyone could actually believe this. Traditional sexual morality declared that sexual intercourse was to be reserved for the marriage bed and was wrong outside of wedlock for male and female alike. These rules could hardly be considered unfair to women. If anything, they were drawn up explicitly to ensure that women are treated fairly. By restricting sexual intercourse to marriage, in which a man and woman have pledged themselves to each other for life, the rules declare that men are not to take advantage of women by sleeping with them if they are not willing and committed to helping raise the children that may result.

This is not where feminism claims to find the unfairness. The traditional code of sexual behaviour included more than just the “no sex outside marriage” rule. There were prescribed roles for men and women – men were to woo women and women were to accept or reject their advances. They were not supposed to accept men’s attentions too quickly, much less be the first to show interest. The importance of pre-marital chastity was more impressed upon women then upon men, women were more harshly judged for breaking the rules than men, and the burden of responsibility for waiting until marriage was made to weigh more upon women then upon men.

This is what feminists call “the double standard”. They have frequently exaggerated it, (8) but more importantly they have missed the whole point. If society traditionally treated female observance of the rules of sexual conduct as being more important than male observance of such rules it was not in order to deny girls a privilege of “having fun” given to boys. It was because the natural consequences of disobeying the rules are harder on women than on men. It is women, not men, who get pregnant. It is therefore, more important for a woman, that the man she allows to potentially impregnate her be bonded to her in a life-time agreement to live and raise their children together, than it is important for a man, that the woman he sleeps with be in such a relationship with him. This does not mean that it is not important for a man at all – it is better for a man to have all his children with his wife than for him to have them with multiple women scattered all over town – just that it is more important for a woman. Whatever the feminists might say about the so-called “double standard” it existed for the benefit of women and not for the benefit of men at the expense of women.

The leaders of the feminist movement insisted that traditional sexual ethics and the “double standard” be done away with. In its place, they supported the sexual revolution and its idea that so long as it is mutually consensual and between adults, all sexual intercourse should be not only legal, but also free from social and moral judgement. Women, the feminists declared, should not only be free to, but should be encouraged, to be sexually aggressive, to initiate relationships, and to have multiple partners outside of marriage. To ensure that their ability to do so is not impeded by practical considerations, the feminist movement demanded cheap and effective birth control, legal and easily attainable abortion, and government daycare centres.

How has all that worked out?

The sexual revolution has damaged society and harmed women in particular. The removal of the stigma from single motherhood has not removed the hardships of single motherhood which the stigma existed to warn women against in the first place. Open female promiscuity has not led to a greater respect for women on the part of men – quite the opposite. Now that cohabiting with unmarried lovers has become socially acceptable women have discovered that live-in boyfriends are far more likely to abuse them than husbands.

One of the most observable results of the sexual revolution is that sex has become a very big business. Prostitution and pornography have been around since the beginning of time but since the sexual revolution the line between them and mainstream commerce seems to have been erased. Simone de Beauvoir had written that women were historically treated as “the second sex.” What she meant by that was that everything was defined from a male perspective, in which men were the default, the norm, and women were “the other”. Men were the subject, women the object. In this brave new world of big business sex which feminism and the sexual revolution have opened up for us, however, women are not so much objects as commodities.

There is a very real sense in which we can say that the exploitation of women did not truly begin until the sexual revolution opened the door for it.

The second feminist lie is the idea that for women to be excluded from any profession is unjust discrimination which denies women their due rights. An inevitable conclusion, if this idea is accepted, is that women should be allowed to serve in the armed forces in combat situations. Indeed, the feminist would even go further and say that it is not so much a matter of women “being allowed” to do so, as that it is their natural right to do so. If it is women’s natural right to fight as combat soldiers, the reasoning continues, the only reason they would be denied this right is to deny them career opportunities which they need to be fully equally with men.

As logical as that line of reasoning is, it not the reason why most societies throughout history have found the idea of sending women into combat repugnant. Women have been assigned by nature the role of growing new lives in their bodies, giving birth to them, then nurturing them with their milk. War, which deals in death and destruction, is the exact opposite of that. To send women out to fight in war is like ordering a doctor to spread illness or hiring a teacher to promote ignorance. Furthermore, to send women out to fight is to deliberately place them in harm’s way, and to do that is to do the opposite of the role nature has assigned men – to protect and provide for their women and children.

Those few of us who still believe in the old order of things and in the principles of chivalry are opposed to the idea of placing women in harm’s way by sending them out to fight in battle. Feminists insist that for women to have equal rights they must be so sent into the midst of gunfire and explosions. It is a sad commentary, on the modern ideal of equality, that it can make people so foolish as to believe that it is the feminists who have the best interests of women at heart.



(1) “To be blunt, feminism ranks as the most radical and potentially corrosive movement of our time—one that, not unlike a virulent computer virus, is steadily erasing all of our accumulated thoughts and knowledge.” This statement was made by the late Dr. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in the entry entitled “feminism” found on pages 306-307 American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2006). Dr. Fox-Genovese was at one time a feminist herself, and the author of an interesting inside critique of feminism, Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). As the subtitle indicates she was unhappy with the strain of liberal individualism which pervaded much of feminism. A few years after that she joined the Roman Catholic Church and became a social and political conservative. Roughly around that time she published a book entitled Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life": How Today's Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women (New York: Nan A. Talese, 1996) which criticized the leadership of the feminist movement for, among other things, speaking only for the interests of white, middle-class, suburban women and interpreting their interests as being those of all women. This was published ten years before she wrote the entry on feminism quoted above, which can be taken as her final word on the subject, as she died the year after it was published.

(2) As Svein Sellanraa has recently put it: “In a word – and this is the central paradox of an ideology that has now become so closely intertwined with womanhood that those who oppose it are often said to be “against women” – feminists hate femininity” http://orthosphere.org/2012/02/19/sluts-and-double-standards/

(3) In the 1960’s and 1970’s, feminists adamantly denied that there were any essential differences between the male and the female mind and personality and that such differences as were observable were the result of social conditioning. One still hears this position today, although studies in how the male and female brain develop differently have made it much less tenable. Different forms of feminism have also emerged which differ from each other on this matter. Carol Gilligan, in In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982) wrote “At a time when efforts are being made to eradicate discrimination between the sexes in the search for social equality and justice, the differences between the sexes are being rediscovered in the social sciences”. (p. 6) In this book, Gilligan argued that psychological theory, especially that of Sigmund Freud and Lawrence Kohlberg, displays a sexual bias which she also finds in literature, religion, and mythology, in defining the male as the norm. Doing so, she argued, makes the female into the deviant, and this is an injustice that can only be rectified by recognizing that men and women look at things differently and that both ways are equally valid. While this might sound at first, like an affirmation of the different innate natures of male and female, which the traditional social order was built upon, it is in fact something quite different, a denial of the universal and the objective in reason and science. Gilligan’s book became a foundational text for “difference feminism”, i.e., the kind of feminism which argues that yes, men and women are different, but that science, reason, literature, the arts, politics, and religion have all been unfairly slanted towards the male, and must now be reconstructed to include and reflect the female. This kind of feminism is quite postmodern in its subjectivity as well as totalitarian in its social engineering and has thus found itself an enemy within the feminist camp, in such feminists as Christina Hoff Sommers, Cathy Young, and Camille Paglia, who believe in classical liberalism, which is based upon the idea that universal and objective truth is available through the pursuit of reason and science. Both versions of feminism are, of course, hostile to the idea that the traditional social order, with distinct roles for men and women, is reflective of innate differences between the sexes, which universal and therefore part of objective truth. It is noteworthy that Gilligan left open the question of the origin of the different voices she was hearing, suggesting, in a kind of anti-Nietzschean way that female voice has added value because of the injustices women have experienced in the past.

(3) Simone de Beauvoir, interview in Saturday Review, June 14, 1975. Simone de Beauvoir was the author of many books including the feminist The Second Sex, first published in 1949. She was an existentialist, atheist, leftist, and the live-in girlfriend and doormat of Jean Paul Sartre.

(4) The Second Stage, (New York: Abacus, 1983). Note the similarity between the title and that of the book mentioned in the preceding footnote. It is probably not a coincidence.

(5) In reality, in the oppressive thought climate of the day, dominated by a rigid left-wing orthodoxy, the strongest challenges to feminism are most likely to come from women, just as the most poignant critiques of liberal immigration policies seem to come from people who are themselves immigrants. An example of such a challenge can be found in F. Carolyn Graglia’s Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism (Dallas: Spence Publishing Company, 1998).

(6) By “traditional sexual morality”, I mean, of course the traditional sexual ethics of the Western world before the sexual revolution, i.e., those derived from the teachings of the Christian faith and classical philosophy.

(7) There is the claim, for example, that before feminism and the sexual revolution, promiscuity was condemned in women while celebrated and cheered among men. This claim is only valid if conversations in the locker rooms of adolescent male athletes are regarded as being indicative of the normative values of a society. Some feminists have claimed that the Western literary canon is full of male characters who are admired for their multiple seductions of women. While there are some characters who seem to fit this description, such as Ian Fleming’s James Bond, this character type seems to be more often used as an example of what not to do than as a role model to follow. This is certainly the case for Lothario in “The Fair Penitent”. Perhaps the most obvious example is of Don Juan. Like Lothario, and Casanova who was a real person, Don Juan’s name has become synonymous with womanizer. It is difficult to argue that he is portrayed as an admirable role model when every version of his story ends with him being dragged down to hell. The most famous version is the opera Don Giovanni with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte set to music by W. A. Mozart. Leporello in his aria, “Madamina, il catalogo è questo” may sound like he is boasting of his master’s conquests, but this is only if you listen to it by itself, out of context. In context, he is trying to convince Donna Elvira that Giovanni is not worthy of her.

The Demon Idol of Equality

The word idol comes from a Greek word meaning “image”. An idol, in the most literal sense, is a physical image of a god used in worship. The word idol is also used to refer to any deity worshipped by man other than the true and living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Who became incarnate as Man in the person of His Son Jesus Christ. This meaning of the word idol is derived from the first, and there is yet another meaning which is derived from the second one. In the third sense of the word, an idol is anything which is given the honour, worship, praise, faith and obedience that is due to God alone, regardless of whether that thing is literally conceived of as a god or not. We sometimes speak of fanatical believers in economic liberalism, for example, as “marketolators”, because the faith they place in the free market often seems to be the kind which would be more appropriately placed in God, although they obviously do not believe the forces of supply and demand to be a living, sentient being that can answer their prayers.

The wickedness of idolatry is a major theme of the Old Testament. The Ten Commandments declare that the Israelites are to have no other god than The LORD and that they are not to make or bow down to idols. The Book of Genesis takes the things worshipped as deities in pagan religions and systematically declares them to be part of the creation of the one true God. In the plagues sent against Pharaoh and Egypt in the Book of Exodus, the God of Israel is revealed to be sovereign over the deities of Egypt. The Israelites are frequently warned against participating in the idolatrous worship of the peoples in the lands surrounding them. Daniel’s friends Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were miraculously saved from the furnace by God when they faithfully refused to bow down to the image Nebuchadnezzar had made of himself. When God’s judgement fell upon Israel it was frequently due to their turning to idols.

Some gruesome practices were associated with literal idol worship, including human sacrifice. Ordinarily this involved the sacrifice of enemies captured in war, which was horrible enough, but in some cases it went a step further. The heathen deity Moloch, worshipped by several people groups in the Near East, demanded that his worshippers sacrifice their own children to him. The Bible contrasts Moloch with the true God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Only once did the Lord demand such a sacrifice, to test the faith and obedience of Abraham, and He prevented Abraham from actually carrying out the sacrifice. In the New Testament, in the light of which the Old Testament must be understood, God gives His own Son to be the final, sufficient, and efficient sacrifice that takes away the sin of the world and propitiates divine wrath.

While all idol worship was forbidden to the Israelites, the worship of Moloch was singled out for specific condemnation in Leviticus. Disregard for these warnings brought quick and severe judgement upon Israel, and the sacrifice of children to Moloch so defiled the spot where it took place that a curse was pronounced upon it (2 Kings 23:10) and its name Tophet, and indeed the name of the valley in which it was located, Hinnom, became symbols of being utterly and absolutely cursed and under God’s wrath.

The most literal kind of idol worship is not very common these days, although idolatry, in the sense of placing ones faith in, worshipping, and serving something other than the true and living God, remains widespread and one of the root causes of other sins. Presbyterian pastor Timothy Keller, in his book Counterfeit Gods, (1) discusses some of the more popular forms of idolatry out there today. One idol that he does not discuss however, is the Moloch of modern times, the contemporary false god who requires that his worshippers sacrifice their children. That idol is a devil indeed – the demon idol of equality.

A tremendous amount of blood has been shed in the worship of this false god since the beginning of the modern age. Equality was one of the counterfeit trinity to whom the French Revolutionaries offered up their libations of blood – fraternity and liberty being the other two. It was in the name of social, political, and economic equality that most revolutions of the 19th Century were carried out. In the 20th Century, attempts to build an egalitarian society brought about such horrors as Lenin’s, Stalin’s and Mao’s state-induced famines, the prison camps of the GULAG, and Pol Pot’s systematic slaughter of the educated, religious, and middle classes of Cambodia.

Now some idols are inherently evil whereas others are things which are good in their proper place but become idols and evil by being made to be more important than they really are. Which kind is equality?

It would be unfair to condemn equality as being inherently evil just because evil, even evil of the sort mentioned above, has been committed in its name. Evil has been done in the name of virtually every good cause that has ever existed. To demonstrate that there is something inherently wrong with equality we would have to demonstrate that the evil committed in its name was a natural and necessary consequence of the idea of equality itself.

That such a relationship exists between equality and certain kinds of evil is a theme that has long existed in traditional folklore. In ancient Greece, for example, the legend of the hero Theseus, tells of how his mother sent him to his father’s kingdom in Athens, and on the way he entered into a number of adventures. In one of those adventures, he encountered the giant Procrustes, who offered hospitality to travelers, but insisted that they be made to fit the bed he had constructed. If they were too short, he stretched them. If they were too tall, he cut something off. Several lessons are contained in this legend, including a warning against the folly of trying to force people to fit a model they do not naturally conform to. That egalitarianism is an attempt to do just that was made clear by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., in his short story “Harrison Bergeron”, a modern day retelling of the Procrustean legend. The story is set in a futuristic version of the United States, where a bureaucracy makes sure all the citizens are fully equal, by handicapping anyone who possesses an advantage which others do not have. (2)

What is recognized in this tradition of story-telling is that people are not naturally equal and that attempts to make them equal against their nature, do violence to them.

This is the opposite, of the sentiment Thomas Jefferson famously expressed in the preamble to the American Declaration of Independence “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” If we reflect upon it, however, it is not difficult to see that reality is better reflected in the tradition warning us against the egalitarian ideal than in Jefferson’s wartime propaganda. It is not at all self-evident that all men are created equal, indeed, it is self-evident that they are not.

Some men are tall others are short, and while it is possible to find two or more men of equal height, it would not be true to say that all men in general are “equal” in terms of height. What is true of height is also true of weight, and of strength, intelligence, beauty, talent, and all other such measurable traits. In none of them is there a general equality and when two people can be found to be equal in any one trait, it is very unlikely that they will be equal in many of the other traits as well.

Now some might come to Jefferson’s defense by saying “that isn’t what he meant, he wasn’t talking about equality with regards to measurable qualities, but equality with regards to intrinsic worth or value and possession of natural rights”. The problem is, that while it is undoubtedly true that Jefferson had some such concept in mind, it is also true that this concept of equality is in no way “self-evident”, but can only be arrived at through revelation, philosophical deduction, or speculation.

As a matter of fact, this concept of equality is not true at all but is a perversion of the concept of justice. To be just to people, to treat them right, is to give them that which is due them. If justice, a virtue which men are supposed to practice, is giving each person their due, it necessarily follows that there are things which people are due, or entitled to. Those things are what we refer to when we speak of somebody’s “rights”. The idea that people have rights is therefore a necessary part of the concept of justice. What is not a necessary part of the concept of justice is the idea that what Person A is entitled to is identical or equal to what Person B is entitled to. Indeed, the idea which equates justice and equality and declares that what one person is entitled to, the next person must be entitled to as well, makes no sense. If two people enter into an enterprise together, in which one person contributes 80% of the investment and his partner contributes 20%, justice requires, not that they split the profits equally, but that they divide them in proportion to their investment. If peoples’ rights, in accordance with justice, can be said to be equal, they are equal only in the sense that no person is any more or any less entitled to what is his own than any other person, not in the sense that any one person is entitled to the same status, wealth, and power as every other person. As Edmund Burke put it “In this partnership [of civil society] all men have equal rights, but not to equal things”.

One form of justice is legal justice, in which a judge settles disputes between two or more parties or hears accusations of criminal wrongdoing and passes judgement on the basis of the evidence. This kind of justice is traditionally depicted as being blind. This is to indicate that in the administration of this kind of justice, only the facts of the case should be considered, and not the rank or wealth of the parties. The idea that justice should be impartial has been around since ancient times and it can also be expressed as an ideal of equality – the ideal that all people be equal in the eyes of the law. It may be best not to express the ancient concept of impartial justice in this way, however. The administration of legal justice is imperfect because it must be administered by human beings who are imperfect. When the ideal of justice is expressed in terms of equality this creates a temptation for people to blame the imperfections in human justice, not on the imperfection of the human heart, but on differences of rank and wealth between people in a society, and to demand that these differences be eliminated.

Attempts to level society in this way, however, can never bring about the perfect justice hoped for, because they misdiagnose the cause of injustice for which there is no human cure. Attempts to create a just society by artificially engineering equality are themselves acts of injustice, often injustice on a large scale. Hence the warnings against the egalitarian ideal in traditional folklore.

The ideal of equality is a favorite tool of revolutionaries. A revolution is an attempt to alter the order of society by force. Revolutionaries may be sincere in their belief that they can bring about a better world, although more often than not they are just interested in seizing power for themselves. If they are sincere, they are deluded, because evil and suffering are part of the human estate which they are powerless to change, which is why revolutions typically produce nothing but massive amounts of violence and misery.

Revolutions typically draw their supporters from the young and naïve. The idea of equality lends itself to fomenting revolutions because it presents as ideal a condition which is completely foreign to human nature and which is therefore tailor made to generate discontent.

Equality is not something like which is good in itself, but which becomes bad when we make an idol out of it. It was itself a perversion of something good, justice, before we ever made it into an idol. After we made it into an idol, it quickly became the new Moloch.

Consider the doctrine of racial equality, which has become official dogma in the Western world in the decades following World War II. In those decades white liberals in Western governments have introduced liberal immigration policies encouraging mass immigration from non-white countries, laws against racial discrimination which are selectively enforced against whites alone, and de jure discrimination policies in favour of non-whites which are euphemistically called “affirmative action”. They also began a major propaganda campaign in the media (news and entertainment) and the public education system designed to teach people that the greatest evil in the world is “racism” and that “racism” is committed solely or primarily by white people. Opposition to all of this was discouraged by quick accusations of “racism” against anyone who dared open their mouth, and in some cases by laws against “hate speech” which are never enforced against violently anti-white language but only against white people.

During that same period the fertility rates of white people groups dropped below the level needed to sustain their populations and have remained that low ever since.

What all of this amounts to is the collective sacrifice of their children on the part of white people. White people are not having the children they should be having to sustain their population. They have introduced policies that artificially handicap what children they do have to benefit other peoples’ children. They are indoctrinating their children with an ideology that renders them helpless against the hatred of other people by instilling in them a sense of collective guilt for the “racism” of their ancestors.

In the name of what god is this sacrifice of the future well-being of the children of an entire race taking place?

It is taking place in the name of racial equality. The anti-racist movement has had “racial equality” as its ideal from the beginning. Just as equality is not the same thing as justice, but is a perversion of the concept, so racial equality is not the same thing as racial justice, the idea that different races should treat each other fairly, justly, and well, but is a perversion of that concept and one which, as we have just seen, is itself the source of a major injustice against future generations of white people. (3)

Another example of how the idol of equality demands the sacrifice of children can be found in the feminist movement. The feminist movement counts as its first wave the suffragist movement which sought the vote for women. The second wave began in the 1960’s as a demand for full social and economic equality between men and women. Second-wave feminism had two wings – a radical wing, which was formed by women who had joined other radical left-wing movements and were unhappy with the way the male radicals treated them, and a more mainstream liberal wing. The demands of the two wings of feminism were often quite different, but one area where they overlapped, was in the demand for legal, unrestricted, and free and easy access to abortion. This has remained a central demand of feminism in all of its subsequent waves, albeit one which the movement has long achieved as the Supreme Courts of the United States and Canada gave in to this demand decades ago.

Abortion is the deliberate termination of pregnancy resulting in death to the unborn fetus. While ethicists debate the personhood of the fetus, by splitting hairs over the definition of “person”, it is undeniable that the fetus is a) living and b) human – it possesses a full set of human chromosomes from the moment the sperm fertilizes the egg. Abortion is therefore the termination of a human life. Since it does not fall into any justifiable category of homicide it clearly belongs in the category of murder. Why is the demand for something this awful so central to the feminist cause?

It is central to the feminist cause, because feminism’s ideal is “equality of the sexes”. This ideal is contrary to human nature, however. Human beings are a sexual species – we are divided into two sexes, and it is through the union of the two sexes that we reproduce. The burden of reproduction does not fall upon both sexes equally, however. Pregnancy occurs within a woman’s body and lasts for nine months. After birth, a human child is helpless to fend for itself and must be looked after for years. The mother’s body is designed to produce milk to nourish the child in its initial state of helplessness before it can be weaned and move on to solid food.

Human societies have traditionally insisted that men share this burden with women, by marrying the women who bear their children and providing for them. Feminism, however, demands a different solution. Feminism demands that women be fully independent of men in a society in which they are fully equal with men politically, socially, and economically. Such a society cannot exist so long as women bear the burden of pregnancy and childbirth as a consequence of sexual activity. Thus the central place abortion has held in feminism’s demands.

Progressives today, treat the victories of the feminist and anti-racist movements in the last six decades as if they were the greatest human achievements of all time, upon which the future happiness of humanity depends. The reality is that both movements, by demanding equality rather than true justice and making equality into an ultimate good, have set up the worst kind of idol possible, the kind which demands the sacrifice of its worshippers’ children.

The Letter of Jeremiah warned the inhabitants of Jersusalem who were about to be taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar into Babylon, against the idols they will find there. These idols should not be feared because they are not true gods, the letter explains, they cannot raise up a king, or send rain upon men, or redress a wrong. The letter ends by saying that these idols “shall be a reproach in the country” and that:

“Better therefore is the just man that hath none idols: for he shall be far from reproach.” (verse 73, Authorized Version)

The idol of equality is our reproach in the modern Western world.

(1) Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters (New York: Dutton Adult, 2009)

(2) The first paragraph reads “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.” The title character has the misfortune to be born with all of these advantages. The short story was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science in October 1961, and was later republished in the Vonnegut anthology Welcome to the Monkey House.

(3) Racial equality is also a nonsensical concept. No two individuals are absolutely equal, i.e., equal in every respect. If two individuals are equal in height, they will be unequal in some other area such as weight. The same thing is true of groups as well, racial and otherwise. In the comparison of groups it is averages which matter and the averages of different groups vary. This does not mean that one group is absolutely superior to any or all others. There are areas in which one group is stronger and another weaker and areas in which it is the other way around. The dogma of racial equality hinders intelligent discussion of this matter. In 1989, J. Philippe Rushton, a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, presented a paper to the American Association for the Advancement of Science entitled “Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits (With Reference to Oriental-White-Black Differences)”. In this paper, and in his later book Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, originally published by Transaction Publishers in 1995, subsequently expanded and republished by the Charles Darwin Research Institute, Rushton argued that racial differences could be explained by the r/k selection theory. He was demonized by the press, denounced by the government of Ontario, and even investigated by the Ontario police. The anger his paper, address, and book generated, was not due to his theory, which was, after all, only an explanatory hypothesis, but rather due to the facts that theory purported to explain, i.e., the existence of racial differences. Lost in the controversy was the simple truth that whether or not his theory was right or wrong, the differences it attempted to explain are real and well-documented, and that vilifying Rushton would do absolutely nothing to change that fact.

The Menace of Multiculturalism

The term culture is derived from the same Latin root as the verb cultivate, which refers to the act of plowing a field so as to prepare it for being sown. We use the word culture to refer to that which metaphorically “cultivates” the mind and character. This is especially true when we use the word culture in a limited sense to refer to literature, philosophy, the fine arts, and serious music. These things are “culture” because they are supposed to develop the intellect. We also speak of the traditions and habits which characterize an entire community – its language, its religion, its particular ways of doing things – as its culture. These too “cultivate” the mind and character. A community’s language is the means by which its members communicate with each other. Its customs are its prescribed ways of behaving in certain situations which facilitate social interaction. It is by learning these things that a person becomes capable of living as a full member of his community.

Culture, therefore, is vitally important to both a community or society and to its individual members. For the community it is necessary both as an adhesive which holds its individual members together and gives them a sense of unity and as a lubricant which eases social interaction so as to minimize friction and make it possible for its members to live together in community. Culture also enables the individual to identify with a group larger than himself and provides him with what he needs to get along as a member of the group.

A community is by definition monocultural, i.e., possessing a single culture shared by all its members. A community is not just a neighborhood, a place where people live in propinquity to each other regardless of whether or how they interact. To be a community, people living together in one location, must also interact in such a way as to form a social unity. The very term community points to a group of people sharing something in common, and one way of defining culture is as that which a community shares, which binds them together as a community. Therefore a community is monocultural.

This does not mean that every member of a community is absolutely identical to each of the others, having all the same mannerisms, all the same habits, attending all the same events, etc.

It does mean, at the very least, that a community has one language in common which is used for communication within the community, regardless of what other tongues individual members of the community might also speak.

What is true of a community is not necessarily true of a society or a polity. Societies and polities are usually large units which include more than one community. A polity is a group of people, living in a particular territory, under the sovereign authority of one law administered and enforced by one government. In ancient Greece cities were sovereign polities (the words polity and political come from the Greek word polis meaning city). Today most polities tend to be countries, i.e., large territories governed from a capital city. A society is what we see when we look at the group of people that make up a polity from a different angle, one which encompasses all forms of social organization and not just political sovereignty.

Sometimes polities and societies are, like communities, monocultural. Greek city-states and the European nation-states which evolved during the Late Medieval – Early Modern period are examples of these. In other instances, polities can be culturally pluralistic. There are different ways in which a polity can be culturally pluralistic.

An empire is one form of a culturally pluralistic polity. The Roman Empire, for example, consisted of all the different people groups of the Mediterranean world who had many different languages, religions, and cultures. Their cultural plurality was tolerated by Rome so long as they submitted to the authority of Roman Law, the Senate and the Caesars. In an empire, many cultures co-exist, but one culture is dominant.

Another way in which different cultural communities can co-exist within the same polity or society, is in a decentralized confederation, with a strong degree of local self-rule. The Swiss Republic is an example of this.

Another form of cultural pluralism, is the kind which has existed in my country Canada, since its confederation in 1867. When Canada came together as a country, there were three major ethnic groups within Canada. These were French Canadians, English Canadians, and native Canadians. French Canada had been won from France by Britain during the Seven Years' War. The king had guaranteed the Canadiens their language, religion (Roman Catholic) and culture in return for their loyalty and allegiances. This angered the leaders of several of Britain’s colonies in North America, particularly the ones which had been formed by the virulently anti-Catholic Puritans. They rebelled against their king, declared their secession from the British Empire, and having won their independence formed the American Republic. Not all members of the 13 colonies agreed with the treasonous actions of their leaders. Those who remained loyal to the king and to Britain, fled north after the American Revolution. These United Empire Loyalists, and the inhabitants of British colonies such as Nova Scotia and New Brunswick which had not joined in the American rebellion, became the English Canadians. Native Canadians were members of tribes which had made treaties with the British Crown.

The common factor that made it possible to unite these groups into one country, was allegiance to the Crown. It was out of loyalty to the Crown that the English Canadians had not joined with the Americans in their revolution, it was the Crown which had guaranteed the culture of French Canadians in return for their allegiance, and the Crown with which native Canadians had signed their treaties. The Fathers of Confederation established the country, as a confederation of provinces and territories, with a parliamentary government under the Crown.

So there are a number of different ways in which a polity can be culturally pluralistic in contrast with a community which is by definition monocultural.

There is another form of cultural pluralism that we hear a lot about today. That is multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism is not just a synonym for cultural pluralism. Whereas other forms of cultural pluralism often “just happen” in the sense that they arise as a consequence of history, multiculturalism is a doctrine with true believers, and an official policy enforced by the state. There is one other major difference between multiculturalism and the kinds of pluralism we looked at above.

The cultural pluralism of the Roman Empire, the Swiss Republic, and the Dominion of Canada was not a threat to the cultural homogeneity of communities within these historical polities. The same cannot be said for multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is an attack upon the cultural homogeneity of these communities.

Multiculturalism is the political doctrine that declares that while political, legal and economic unity are good, cultural unity is bad, and a country should have no cultural unity other than a commitment to plurality, and that all cultures are equal.. It is also the official policy of encouraging large scale immigration from as many different cultures as possible while also encouraging immigrants to keep their original cultures rather than assimilate into the communities to which they are immigrating.

Multiculturalism is a doctrine which contradicts itself in many ways. While it declares all cultures are equal, it does not treat all cultures equally. It encourages immigrant groups to stick together and form culturally homogeneous enclaves, while breaking up the cultural homogeneity of the communities into which the immigrants are moving. People who live in a community which was formerly homogeneous but into which large numbers of immigrants have moved, find that it is more difficult to order meals in the restaurant down the street or buy groceries in the local grocery store because the servers and cashiers have trouble speaking the language of the community. Then they find that their tax bills have gone through the roof because the government is offering these same immigrants government services and education in their own language. If they complain about all of this, they find themselves denounced as “racists”.

In Canada, Pierre Eliot Trudeau declared the country to be “officially multicultural” in 1971. This was not just a government acknowledgement of the historical cultural pluralism mentioned above which has existed in the country since Confederation. When Trudeau had become prime minister he began an aggressive immigration recruitment campaign with the purpose of changing the demographics of the country. This and the new policy of multiculturalism to discourage assimilation, was an attack upon the cultural homogeneity of communities within English and French Canada.

It was also during the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau that the symbol of unity between the different cultural communities within Canada came under attack. They removed “Royal” from the title of as many government institutions as they could get away with and did everything they could to portray our ongoing attachment to the monarchy as something archaic, belonging to the trappings of our “colonial past” which we needed to move beyond in order to fully mature as a country.

This year is the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, the first monarch to open a session of Canadian parliament in person. She has visited our country several times, the latest visit being two years ago. Last year, Prince William and his new bride Kate, visited Canada after their wedding. Later that year, Prime Minister Harper, restored the “Royal” to the titles of two branches of our Armed Forces and ordered all of our consulates to hang the Queen’s picture in a laudable effort to emphasize our country’s royal heritage and ongoing ties to the Crown.

In the commentary surrounding these events, leftists whined and cried about how this was an insult to all the new Canadians who came from outside the British Isles. It did not seem to occur to them that if honouring our royal family and our Queen is an insult to new immigrants then their petulant, left-wing attack upon the monarchy is an insult to all Canadians who were born and grew up as subjects to the Queen. Or if it did occur to them it did not matter. Although all cultures are equal under multiculturalism, some, to borrow a phrase from George Orwell, are more equal than others.

Of course it makes no sense to say that to honour Canada’s traditional monarchy, our Queen and our royal family, the symbols, as we have seen, of unity between the different cultural communities which formed our country, is an insult to new Canadians. These immigrants, after all, left countries over which the Queen did not reign to move to a country over which she does reign. Surely if anyone is insulting the new Canadians it is the leftists themselves, who arrogantly profess to speak for them, by attacking the tradition they chose to move into.

Multiculturalism, then, while professing to be a belief in the equality of all cultures, attacks the cultures of the countries which adopt it and promotes the cultures of new immigrants instead. There is an interesting consequence of this which Western countries which have adopted multiculturalism have had to face in recent years. Sometimes, the culture of the new immigrants is less compatible with pluralism than the culture which is being undermined by multiculturalism.

One of the fundamental elements of culture is religion, and multiculturalism has been adopted in Western countries whose historical, traditional, religion is Christianity. Indeed, multiculturalism could not have arisen anywhere else. This is because multiculturalism is a progressive and liberal doctrine and progressivism and liberalism are secular, Christian, heresies, i.e., Christian teachings which have been twisted and distorted and then secularized. One Christian doctrine is that of the future Kingdom of God on earth. One version of this doctrine is post-millennialism, which teaches that the mission of the Church is to establish this Kingdom prior to the Second Coming of Christ. Progressivism, the idea that through reason, science, and government policy man can gradually eliminate evil and suffering from the earth, is basically a secularized post-millennialism. Another Christian doctrine is that each person is created in the image of God and has worth in the eyes of God. It is because of this doctrine that the Western and especially the English system of rights and freedoms protecting the person from the abuse of power developed. Liberalism, which provides an alternative explanation for these rights and freedoms by positing a hypothetical individualistic state of nature out of which society arose through voluntary contract, is another form of a secular Christian heresy.

Progressivism and liberalism could not have evolved outside of a culture heavily influenced by Christianity. This does not mean that Christians should embrace progressivism and liberalism as manifestations of Christ’s teachings, as some misguided clergy teach, or that we should blame Christianity for the ruin of Western civilization wrought by progressivism and liberalism, as some misguided rightists teach. For the other side of the coin is that while progressivism and liberalism could not have evolved outside of a culture heavily influenced by Christianity, neither could they have evolved within a culture in which the Church had maintained its authority and orthodox Christian faith had not begun to decline. They are not orthodox Christian doctrine but secular Christian heresies.

Just as progressivism and liberalism could not have evolved outside of a Christian culture in which Christianity had gone into decline, neither could multiculturalism have come into existence apart from progressivism and liberalism. Multiculturalism is progressive in that its advocates believe that by declaring all cultures to be equal and societies to have no core culture apart from a commitment to pluralism that the evil of oppression of one cultural group by another can be eliminated (1). It is liberal in that it separates culture from its social and communitarian role and makes it a matter of individual preference.

Multiculturalism is also, far more hostile to Christianity than to any other religion. It demonizes Christians who are brave enough to stand up for orthodox Christian doctrine and morality. It does not so demonize Islam, and in recent years left-wing multiculturalists have been outspoken opponents of what they call “Islamophobia” despite overwhelming evidence that Islam is far more incompatible with their ideas of tolerance and diversity than Christianity.

Herein can be seen one of many dangers multiculturalism poses to the societies which adopt it. When the official doctrine is that all cultures are to be considered equal it is difficult if not impossible to screen out cultural incompatibility in the immigration process. Under multiculturalism, it is the person who points out that somebody from Culture X is more likely to declare a holy war and start blowing up buildings than somebody from Culture Y, who is penalized for being a “bigot”.

The biggest threat to a society which multiculturalism poses, however, is that it undermines communities. “Diversity is our strength” the multiculturalists scream, and in some cases this is true. It is not true of all kinds of diversity however.

A community is a stronger community if it contains teachers, doctors, farmers, policemen, grocers, builders, and people of many other professions, than if it consists only of people from one profession or if everybody tries to do everything for himself. This kind of diversity strengthens the community. It is the kind of diversity St. Paul spoke about when he compared the Church to the body of Christ in the 12th chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians, and said that just as the body is one but is made up of many organs, so the Church is one but is made up of people with different roles and gifts given by the Holy Spirit. This diversity is a diversity within unity, and it is unity that St. Paul stresses in this chapter.

A community would not be a stronger community if the people in one house spoke German, in the next Lithuanian, in the next spoke Mandarin, and in the next spoke Swahili, and there was no language in common. Nor would it be a stronger community if everybody in the community followed a different calendar than everybody else. Problems would arise if what one person understood to be a friendly gesture, his neighbor understood to be an insult to his mother and a challenge to a duel to the death. This kind of diversity is not a strength and it is fatal to a sense of community. It too is illustrated in the Bible – in what happened at the Tower of Babel when God confused the tongues of the builders.

It is beneficial for a country to have strong communities. There is less crime and a greater sense of trust between neighbors in a small, largely homogeneous, village than in a large, very heterogeneous, city. In the former, people can leave their homes and cars unlocked, never in the latter. The less a country has to rely upon its laws, the police, courts and prisons, the better.

Multiculturalism, by making culture a matter of individual preference, and embracing diversity at the expense of unity, prevents culture from serving its social function, of uniting and strengthening communities. It is truly a menace.




(1) In reality, multiculturalism is more likely to generate hostility between different cultural groups.